Well, That's Interesting: Military Occupations

My efforts at being 'creative' have been frustrated, a bit - not by anything big, but by a whole lot of little things. Like a pipe in the laundry room bursting. Well, maybe that was sort of big.

Anyway, I've done what I sometimes do when writers block seems to be made of reinforced concrete. I research.

It's great, not having a deadline. Or not so great - and that's another topic.

Back on track.

A 'Galaxy Cadet' story involves military occupations. I could follow the lead of major motion picture studios, and do my research by watching M*A*S*H reruns. Or maybe be very serious and watch Apocalypse Now. Maybe that's unfair. I'm sure that some folks in the entertainment industry are able to do a little fact-checking. And that's yet another topic.

Instead, I did a Google search.

I know, "I read something on the Web" has come to mean "I have not clue and believe anything I hear." True enough, there's a lot of - somewhat alternatively-accurate assertions out there.

And there is a massive amount of reliable sources.

Like ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) - an ancient (by contemporary standards) repository of knowledge.

Here's what I found:

• "Military Career Guide: Employment and Training Opportunities in the Military."
  ERIC
  Available online
  • "Military Career Guide: Employment and Training Opportunities in the Military" (PDF)
    Military Entrance Processing Command (DOD) (November 1989)

The PDF document seems to have been created from a microfiche copy of the original publication. The original's photographs and most of the illustrations are, well, poorly reproduced. The text, though, is quite readable. By a human being. The document's information is stored as a series of graphics - not text.

I've gotten most of what I wanted from it - and figured I'd pass the links along.

Exoplanets, MIT, Mathematics, and Thinking With a Cold

It's almost two months since I've done a post here. There's some excuse - or explanation, at any rate. A busted pipe in the laundry room created something a distraction, for one thing. ("Busted Water Pipe, Day 32: Plumbing Progress and Regress," Through One Dad's Eye (October 18, 2010))

Now, back to the general topic of this blog.

You've heard of writer's block? I've got something more like writer's fog. I've heard that I'm recovering from a cold - and that may be so. I don't feel sick, which is nice. I don't even feel tired. But it's been one of those Mondays where I can't seem to think all that well.

Like I said, I'm recovering from a cold. Or so I've heard.

'Creative' work being off the table, I decided to do a little - wait a minute. "Off the table?" What does that mean? Did 'creative' work fall onto the floor? Maybe I should look there. No. Wait. It's a term from parliamentary procedure. Not 'creative' work. The other thing.

And that's the way it's been today.

Anyway, I decided to do a little research. Like the animated Jackie Chan's Adventure's Uncle: "MORE RESEARCH!" I like that series. Don't watch it much now.

Anyway, I decided to do a little more research.

About exoplanets. There's quite a bit out there: everything from (fairly) hard data; to serious research; to stuff that may or may not have been intended as a practical joke. Don't get me wrong: some of the more solid resources haven't been 'real' academic or government outfits - dedicated, intelligent amateurs - - - and I'm drifting off-topic again.

The again, sometimes an old-school academic institution gets it right.

CalTech had some interesting pages - some of which I eventually found. They'd done a more-than-usually-creative rehash of their website. Sort of like dropping an encyclopedia into a food processor, hitting 'puree,' pouring out the results and telling folks that they've reorganized the information - please browse our new-and-improved website.

It wasn't that bad, actually, although the data I was looking for wasn't - quite - there. Like I said, they'd 'improved' the website.

I had a little better 'luck' at MIT, finding a 19-page paper about exoplanets by Seager and others. It's in PDF format, and starts with:

"We use new interior models of cold planets to investigate the mass-radius relationships of solid exoplanets, considering planets made primarily of iron, silicates, water, and carbon compounds. We find that the mass-radius relationships for cold terrestrial mass planets of all compositions we considered follow a generic functional form that is not a simple power law:..."
(Seager and others, via MIT)

That "simple power law" uses symbols that aren't in all character code sets, ASCII or otherwise, so I'm not quoting more from that paper here.

Besides, anything that gets into mathspeak after the first 55 words isn't something I want to tackle right now.

On the other hand, it's an excellent resource.

So, in case someone at MIT gets the bright idea of handing their website over to a caffeinated intern for "improvement," I dropped a copy of the PDF file into a server I trust:

• "MASS-RADIUS RELATIONSHIPS FOR SOLID EXOPLANETS"
  The Astrophysical Journal, The American Astronomical Society (November 10, 2007)
  S. Seager, Kuchner, C. A. Hier-Majumder, B. Militzer (Received 2006 December 25; accepted 2007 June 21)

Please note: The AJ of the AAS seems to own the copyright to this paper. A bunch of folks who know a whole lot more math than I do created the paper's content. All I'm doing is putting a copy where I'm reasonably sure I can find it, a week or a month from now.

That disclaimer out of the way, the paper is a pretty good discussion of how mass and size (diameter) are related - or should be - for differentiated and undifferentiated planets. In other words, for planets that are pretty much the same material all the way through, and those with onion-like layers, like Earth.

Mostly, it's a fascinating look at what researchers are doing, making sense of what's being learned about planets circling other suns.

From the point of view of this blog, it's also a pretty good resource for working out plausible fictional planets.

Setting, Research, and a Telephone Directory

This post really does get around to the topic of writing. But first:

Minimum Standards and Scraping By

My household's cable got cut while a contractor was removing a couple trees from my back yard. Not his fault, I think. Turns out the cable service provider is under the impression that as long as the cable is (just) under the sod, it's okay. Which works fine, until somebody with a Bobcat comes by.

Live and learn.

The point is that I had quite a lot of time on my hands yesterday afternoon. With the cable cut, I couldn't get online - which meant that my blog writing and research (other way around, actually) was a 'once and future' set of tasks.

So I drove over to my father-in-law's, used his phone to contact our ISP/phone/cable television provider, talked, took a few photos - all of which still left with me with time on my hands.

Fairly Normal: For a Guy Who Reads Dictionaries

Some fifty-something guys, in my position, would get out the golf clubs, or watch a replay of the Super Bowl. I transcribed a telephone directory.

It wasn't a very large directory: I ended up with a spreadsheet that's less than 700 lines, top to bottom.

One of my daughters, at least, has been impressed that I read dictionaries. For fun. I don't do so all that often, but sometimes I enjoy going through the pages, looking for interesting words and noting where they came from.

In the case of the phone directory, it was more work than fun - but I'll admit to enjoying the data-entry process.

Getting to Know Another Way of Life

This wasn't just any phone directory: One of America's naval bases has a telephone directory that's available to the public, with what appears to be a modestly-complete list of offices, desks, schools, and stores. Along with, in many cases, which building they're in.

I'm not entirely clear on where Building 160 is: but I don't need to. I've learned that it's the building to go to with questions about vending machines, recreational vehicles, and cable television.

On a naval base? Isn't that, you know, military?

Yes.

I also know how to call someone with questions about child care for kids age six weeks to five years, and the bowling alley's number.

The assumptions I made, taking data from the directory, have me with the bowling alley and a barracks being in the same building. Which either means that my assumptions are wrong - or some sailors aren't getting much sleep.

Why Would Any Sane Person Deconstruct a Phone Directory?!

I wasn't seeking "to expose deep-seated contradictions in a work by delving below its surface meaning" by tweezing apart that phone directory. (deconstruction, Princeton's WordNet) I figured that, once I mined its data and put it into a spreadsheet, I'd be able to see what sort of activities happened on the base, and - in very general terms - how they were organized.

I found out that there were quite a few schools on the base. That wasn't a surprise: I knew that one of its functions was training, and training happens in schools.

I found out that a sailor stationed there could rent recreational vehicles on the base. That was a bit of a surprise.

M*A*S*H, College, and the Real World

I've enjoyed watching reruns of "M*A*S*H." Because of the show's wide and lasting popularity among American audiences, I've used Frank Burns as an example of a particular sort of mindset in another blog.

But "M*A*S*H" isn't real. It's a moderately well-researched television series - of the 'relevant' sitcom variety. There's an element of truth to many of the show's characters, but I'd no more use it as a reliable reference for military life than I'd watch Star Wars to learn about astrophysics.

I could draw from my own life experiences: but I know better. I'm old enough to have picked up my limp in Vietnam, but my draft classification is 4F - by the time I was in my teens, an x-ray of my left hip joint looked like the last stages of arthritic decay. Which is a topic for yet another of my blogs.

I have no first-hand experience of what life is like on a military base.

I'm certainly not going to trust the sort of impressions I picked up, going to college in America during the seventies and eighties. That was a colorful and strange era in our history - which I strongly suspect will appear in articles on abnormal psychology in centuries to come.

Which is yet again another topic.

So, very little of my own, personal, experience is useful in my research.

Analysis of a phone directory won't give me much of an emotional picture of what it's 'like' to live on an American naval base in the 21st century - but it will, I think, help me build a structure that I can hang more touchy feely information on.

Why Bother?

I've spent about five hours, so far, on this 'phone directory' project. I think it's worth the trouble.

I now know that at least one large American naval base really is like a small town in many ways, with its own 'downtown,' and even a movie theater of sorts.

Nobody would mistake it for a 'real' small town, of course. For example, the analogues to civilian functions seem to be on a smaller scale than what I'd expect in a town of that size that grew naturally.

I also learned that there may be a certain amount of humor in - of all things - the numbers assigned to buildings. This particular base's marina/summer equipment rental facilities are in Building 13.

All This - For Galaxy Cadet?!

I'm doing the research now, because I've been developing background and settings for a story or five about Galaxy Cadet. (March 28, 2010)

I wrote, earlier this year, that I should probably "loosen up" by writing a distinctly non-epic, lightweight story. Being the sort of person I am, my notion of 'loosening up' has now involved analysis of a telephone directory.

It's not as crazy as it sounds: I'll probably be able to use the same research for at least one other setting that's 'back burnered' right now.

Well, That's Interesting: Burges Shale Creatures

Science fiction/speculative fiction writers have played with the idea of space aliens that don't look all that much like us. There are a few approaches, including the intriguing but relatively uninformative 'too strange for the merely human mind to grasp.'

I've been trying to find plausible body plans for people who aren't human: Olaf Stapledon's "Star Maker" was a reasonably good starting place.

Then there are the creatures of the Cambrian. Some of the strangest fossils from this period come the Burgess Shale. We don't know whether critters on Earth these days don't, as a rule, have five eyes because pairs of eyes work better - or whether opabinia regalis isn't the ancestor of more creatures for reasons unrelated to it's strange-looking head.

So far, I've come up with fifteen plausible body plans - most of which are quite familiar, including the one which was used for millions of years by the bipedal dinosaurs.

But I've got the idea that I've missed something. So today I went back online and checked out a few websites that discuss the Burgess Shale. And other Cambrian fossil finds.

"Early Fauna"
Western Carolina University

• 3+ billion years – life forms
  • cyanobacteria (blue green algae) – very early
  • changed atmosphere – generate oxygen

This page seems to be a resource for a class or classes at Western Carolina University. The style is terse, but there are quite adequate illustrations - and a pretty good presentation of the questions raised by these fossils.

More:

"The Burgess Shale Fauna"
Smithsonian / National Museum of Natural History

"Although the Cambrian Explosion is largely associated with animals having hard shells, the soft-bodied biota also diversified during this period. The Middle Cambrian Burgess Shale fauna, discovered by Charles Walcott in 1909, in British Columbia, Canada, provides a rare glimpse of Cambrian soft-bodied animals. This fauna is especially important because the fossil record is biased toward organisms having hard parts. Another famous soft-bodied occurrence is the Chengjiang Fauna, of...."

It's one page of a section on the Cambrian era. No illustrations, more useful for outlining what to look for elsewhere.

There are links to pages with text and photos, but they load in pop-up windows that won't display properly if you don't have the kind of browser and system that the Smithsonian thinks you should. (I don't.) For example, one pop-up about Hallucigenia sparsa is cut off in mid-sentence, with the best work-around I found.

Nice artwork, though.


(screen capture from the Smithsonian, used w/o permission)

The top of the pop-up displayed find: but I'd have to go in and try re-coding the source, to see what's at the bottom. That, or either adjust or replace my system.

Related posts:

• "The Coconut Crab: No, It's Not From a Science Fiction Movie"
  (September 25, 2009)
• "Hurdia Victoria: Cambrian Supercritter of the Burgess Shale"
  Apathetic Lemming of the North (March 20, 2009)

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, Kanji, Romanji, and This Writer

I may have to learn Japanese.

Which reminds me of Mark Twain's short story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." If you're familiar with American literature, you may have read it, or at least heard of it. The title, by the way, comes out as "カラベラスの名高いジャンプ蛙郡" when I put it through the Google translator.

When I take "カラベラスの名高いジャンプ蛙郡" and run it back through the same tool, I get "Celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County" - which is better than the experience Mr. Twain had.

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County - or - The Perils of Translation

Intellectual property laws were - somewhat casually enforced - in the 19th century. Someone who thought he knew French, or someone who knew English, took the Jumping Frog story and published it in France.

The story had been a commercial success in America. In France, sales just about flatlined. Twain translated the French version back into English.

And wrote about what he got, in

"THE JUMPING FROG

IN ENGLISH, THEN IN FRENCH, THEN
CLAWED BACK INTO A CIVILIZED
LANGUAGE ONCE MORE BY
PATIENT, UNREMUNERATED TOIL."

I get the distinct impression that Mr. Twain was not a great fan of French culture, but that's not relevant to what this post is about.

The first sentence of Twain's story, in English, as he wrote it:

"In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired after my friend's friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as requested to do, and I hereunto append the result...."

I know: It's longer than some paragraphs are, these days. But this is the Information Age, that was the Gilded Age. People apparently wanted to get their money's worth from a sentence back then.

The same sentence, after being translated back from the French:

"It there was one time here an individual known under the name of Jim Smiley; it was in the winter of '89, possibly well at the spring of '50, I no me recollect not exactly...."

The rest isn't much better. No wonder it bombed in France.

The title of the French version, translated back by Twain, was "THE FROG JUMPING OF THE COUNTY OF CALAVERAS."

In case this post is read by a short-fused francophile, I'm aware that Mr. Twain may have been somewhat unfair in his translation. The first sentence in the French version was:

"--Il y avait, une fois ici un individu connu sous le nom de Jim Smiley: c'etait dans l'hiver de 49, peut-etre bien au printemps de 50, je ne me reappelle pas exactement...."

Which, run through the Google translator, is:

"- There was a time here an individual known by the name of Jim Smiley was in the winter of 49, maybe spring of 50, I do not exactly reappelle....."

Finally, What This Post is About - a Request For Help

I'm working out background for a story I'm setting in Japan. It started out as a spoof of (badly done) 'Manga,' with intentional glitches. There are five main characters, for starters.

I don't want to produce something that reads like that translation of Twain's story, for someone who actually understands Japanese.

The story's starting to get away from me, and seems to be changing into something else, but that's not what this post is about.

What's bothering me right now is a word. Phrase, actually.

The only language where I'd trust my story-telling skills is English. Which is okay, in this case, because my target audience is people who can read English fairly well.

So dialog and just about everything else will be in English. I know: not very authentic. But it worked for Gilbert and Sullivan in "The Mikado," so I'll chance it.

But, for 'authenticity' - and because I think it'll be cool - a few words and phrases will, I hope, be in Japanese. Sort of.

For example, there's a sort of person in the story who is called a 'well artist' or 'well maker' - "well" in the sense of a well from which you draw water. I think the phrase "ido-ka" expresses that idea.

Remember, I said "Japanese. Sort of." I can't, at this time, read Japanese characters and 'hear' words. I'm pretty sure many or most of my readers won't be able to, either. So I'm using the Latin alphabet to spell out close-enough representations of the few Japanese words and phrases I'll use.

One character will be called 'the great ido-ka,' or 'the great well-artist.' Easy enough, right?

If I really knew Japanese, yes. As it is, not so much.

I'm fairly sure that the word (phrase?) I'm looking for is 凄い.

That comes through the Google translator (the most reliable tool I've found, so far) as meaning:

Great
adjective

1. terrible
2. dreadful
3. terrific
4. amazing
5. great
6. wonderful

adverb

1. to a great extent
2. to a large extent

This is the cluster of meaning that I'm looking for.

Or maybe what I'm looking for is グレート.

My guess is that 凄い is what I want.

Just one problem: I haven't a clue what it sounds like. The Google translator will helpfully tell me what "great" sounds like in English: but I already know that.

I've tried looking up 凄い online - but unsuccessfully.

Another line of inquiry gave me "sugoi" as a word meaning terrible, dreadful, terrific, amazing, great. It's possible that 凄い is what sugoi looks like - but I can't verify that.

Given the rules I've set for myself, I'm stuck with using Romanji. (I think that's the term for Latin alphabet used to express Japanese words and phrases.)

And, one thing I don't have, yet, is a working knowledge of Japanese.

So, I've written this post and intend to solicit help from some folks I know online, who may be able to help me out. Thanks in advance.

The Questions

1. is "凄い" an appropriate word to use in a phrase like "the great ido-ka"?

2. Is "sugoi" the way 凄い is pronounced?
2a. If not, how is 凄い pronounced?

3. I think that the phrase "the great well-artist" would come out in Japanese as "sugoi ido-ka" - if my guesses are right about the meaning of those words. Is this an appropriate or 'normal' way to arrange those elements of the phrase?

Finally, I've decided that I do need to develop a working knowledge of Japanese. But that'll take time - no problem, by itself, but I want to get moving on this story in a matter of weeks, not years.

---

Updated 10:55 p.m. January 11, 2010

I started a discussion thread on BlogCatalog, "Help? How Should 凄いbe Pronounced?," and got one response so far. (Thanks!)

Now, I need to turn in.

---

Updated:

• "Successive Approximation and Creating a Coherent Japanese Phrase"
  (January 15, 2010)

Well, That's Interesting: Ancient Writing Systems

ancientscripts.com
A compendium of world-wide writing systems from prehistory to today

According to the website's about page:

"Back in 1996, I created the original Ancient Scripts web site during the wee hours of the morning. I have been a great enthusiast for writing systems and linguistics in general, but I could only find meager resources on the web about this subject in those early days. So I went to work, taking class material from Linguistics 11 (Writing Systems) at UCB as well as my own research in dusty libraries. Many years later, despite problems with servers and having to earn a living, Ancient Scripts is still running. Thanks for all your support!

"The aim of Ancient Scripts is not to replace texts books or instructional web sites. Instead, it is designed to give an introduction to writing systems, which hopefully will tantalize the reader into searching for more information on the web or in books and publications.

"Here's the disclaimer: I am not a linguist...."
("About Ancient Scripts")

In my opinion, the chief difference between a systematically enthusiastic hobbyist who has devoted a great deal of time and effort to studying a subject, and a certified subject professional, is that the certified professional has a piece of paper that says he or she is competent - and the professional gets paid.

I think people inside the academic establishment can be knowledgeable and competent, understand: but I think the same can be said of people who aren't.

The last site update was October 3, 2008.

I found this website while researching ancient writing systems. It seems to be a pretty good resource.

Now it's time for me to get back to work.