I like hot stuff. As noted in this post, I grew a bunch of extra-hot Habanero varietals this year, and have made several batches of super-hot sauce. But even I have my limits, and know them. Unlike this twit:
Man, you gotta love dumb jocks.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI. Via MeFi.)
Filed under: Comics, General Musings, MetaFilter, movies, OOTS, Peter Jackson, Tolkien, Twenty Sided
I have what can charitably be called an offbeat sense of humor. Most of my family just think that it is strange. Even some of my friends shake their heads. My wife of twenty years occasionally just nods and says, “That’s nice, dear.”
So, in that spirit, consider yourself well warned. But I came across something via MeFi yesterday that had me in stitches: Shamus Young’s “The DM of the Rings.” As he says in the intro to this unusual comic strip:
Lord of the Rings is more or less the foundation of modern D&D. The latter rose from the former, although the two are now so estranged that to reunite them would be an act of savage madness. Imagine a gaggle of modern hack-n-slash roleplayers who had somehow never been exposed to the original Tolkien mythos, and then imagine taking those players and trying to introduce them to Tolkien via a D&D campaign.
And then he goes on to do just that – run through the entire Peter Jackson movie adaptations of the Lord of the Rings books as though it was some Dungeon Master’s D & D game. Brilliantly using screen captures to illustrate the strip (in 155 episodes), he shows how this would play out.
It’s friggin’ hilarious.
I was never much of a hardcore gamer, just did enough in college and a bit after to be familiar with it, understand the humor behind a strip like OOTS. But I’ve long been a huge fan of Tolkien (even though I am not that much into the fantasy genre generally – odd). To see what Young does in juxtaposing the two shows just how absurd each really is in its own right.
So, check it out. But whether you spend the next several hours going through the storyline, or just scratch your head and wonder about me, don’t say you weren’t given fair warning.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Astronomy, John Lennon, Light pollution, MetaFilter, Music
Via MeFi, news that Yoko Ono has completed a “light tower” in tribute to her late husband. Here’s an excerpt of what Amy Goodman wrote about it:
John Lennon would have turned 67 years old last week had he not been murdered in 1980, at the age of 40, by a mentally disturbed fan. On his birthday, Oct. 9, his widow, peace activist and artist Yoko Ono, realized a dream they shared. In Iceland, she inaugurated the Imagine Peace Tower, a pillar of light emerging from a wishing well, surrounded on the ground by the phrase “Imagine Peace” in 24 languages.
The website for the project has some very cool images of the construction, testing, and final result (here’s my favorite). This type of use of light is becoming increasingly popular (and is more tangible than my own Paint the Moon project from Communion of Dreams). It can be problematic, though, since light pollution is a real problem, and not just for astronomy. Still, I’d rather have things like this than just random searchlights marking where some car dealer is having a sale.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Arthur C. Clarke, Fermi's Paradox, Gene Roddenberry, General Musings, George Lucas, Heinlein, MetaFilter, Paleo-Future, Philip K. Dick, Predictions, Psychic abilities, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Star Trek, Stephen Hawking, tech, Writing stuff
I should pay more attention to the latest trends in SF.
Via MetaFilter, I came across something which I hadn’t heard about previously: Mundane Science Fiction. It’s a movement which can basically be summed up as “keep it real, kid.” There’s a long talk by Geoff Ryman here, which outlines his thoughts on this sub-genre and why it is superior to the more fantastic or escapist Science Fiction as seen in Star Trek, Star Wars, et cetera. It’s a thought-provoking piece, and there is a long discussion of it at the MeFi link that has a lot of interesting perspective, in and amongst the usual randomness and repetition you’ll find on any open forum.
Now, there’s a long tradition of SF writers who did more or less “hard science,” using the best scientific knowledge available and extrapolating out. Some of them were dark and moody, painting dystopian futures which nonetheless carried moral messages and interesting characters. Philip K. Dick did a lot of this, brilliantly. But even such stalwarts as Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke dealt with these limitations and futures upon occasion, though they are perhaps better known for works which might well not be included in a “Mundane” canon.
Recently, there was a review of Communion of Dreams in which I was taken somewhat to task over an unrealistic time-frame for the book. My response:
…but it isn’t what I was doing with CoD. I specify early on that the novel is set in an alternate future for us, which branches off starting in 2000. And I wanted to write about what we could really accomplish if things went . . . differently. Somewhat how I see this is by looking back 50 years, to the hopes and dreams at the very start of the space age, and how things have actually turned out to be both more amazing and yet more pedestrian than the people of that time expected. We’ve got tech that those people never dreamed of . . . and yet we don’t have flying cars, or real space colonies, et cetera.
So, yeah, CoD isn’t realistic in the sense you say – but it was meant to be a glimpse into what might be possible, just maybe, if things were to be tweaked just so.
I’ve mentioned previously that I am a fan of the Paleo-Future blog, because I think that it is insightful to look at how people see the future before them. As with almost any other kind of literature or art, it reflects current expectations and values of the culture which produced it (to a greater or lesser degree – there will always be some variation due to the individual author or artist who created that piece). With Communion, I wanted to capture something of the early optimism of the 1950’s . . . balanced with something of the grim futurism I grew up with in the 70’s (think Soylent Green or Blade Runner).
I will be the first to admit that it is an odd mix. Why? Because I think that eventually, we will triumph over the adversity we face, that we will progress and evolve though that will come at a price. This isn’t just the basis for the setting of the book, it is also the narrative structure.
And to that end, I tried with Communion to keep the science solid, insofar as possible, while sticking with the SF trope of “how does a new invention change or challenge the characters in the story?” [mild spoiler alert] The operative element in Communion isn’t the alien artifact – the operative element is the new understanding of physics attributed to Stephen Hawking, which makes it *possible* for the discovery of the artifact as well as the revelations of what it means. That’s why I named the experimental ship after Hawking – it is a point back to the real prime mover of the whole plot: knowledge. It may not be obvious to the reader at first, but I think that if you consider it, you will see that the whole book revolves around this simple idea: knowledge changes our understanding of who we are.
Curiously, someone might well place Communion within the Mundane SF school, if the definitions were allowed to be a bit expansive. For me, I see it both literally and figuratively as a bridge between that school and the more ‘escapist’ or ‘outlandish’ or ‘unrealistic’ Science Fiction of Star Trek, Star Wars, and so on. I start with about as grim and mundane a future as you might imagine, then open up the possibilities once again to include aliens and psychic abilities, starships and ansibles, and leaving the reader (hopefully) hopeful.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, James Burke, MetaFilter, Science, Society, tech, YouTube
Via MeFi, this link to the YouTube collection of vids of the “Re-Connections” show – a look back at James Burke’s Connections program on the 25th anniversary of their initial broadcast. Non-TV-watching heathen that I am, I didn’t catch this when it was initially broadcast, so I am looking forward to enjoying it this weekend. Thought I’d share, since I had written previously about Burke and his different series.
Perhaps more later.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Carl Sagan, Fermi's Paradox, General Musings, Government, Iraq, MetaFilter, movies, Politics, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Society, Space
So, Arecibo needs money. Not a lot of money. More than I have. But not a lot of money, as such things go.
Yes, the National Science Foundation has told the folks who run the Arecibo Observatory that they need to come up with outside funding to the tune of half their annual budget, or they will be shut down. How much is this? $4 million. From the news report:
But among astronomers, Arecibo is an icon of hard science. Its instruments have netted a decades-long string of discoveries about the structure and evolution of the universe. Its high-powered radar has mapped in exquisite detail the surfaces and interiors of neighboring planets.
And it is the only facility on the planet able to track asteroids with enough precision to tell which ones might plow into Earth — a disaster that could cause as many as a billion deaths and that experts say is preventable with enough warning.
Yet, for want of a few million dollars, the future for Arecibo appears grim.
The National Science Foundation, which has long funded the dish, has told the Cornell University-operated facility that it will have to close if it cannot find outside sources for half of its already reduced $8 million budget in the next three years — an ultimatum that has sent ripples of despair through the scientific community.
Hey, I understand how it is. The cost of gas is up. Economy is looking a little rocky. There’s a lot of competition for science funding. Things are tight all over.
Well, maybe not all over. See, that $4 million – that amounts to about 20 minutes worth of what we’re spending in Iraq, according to the National Priorities Project.
So, I know it’s a tough choice – maintaining the worlds foremost radio telescope for a year or pouring more money into the pocket of KBR for 20 minutes – but I think perhaps we should consider this problem carefully. I mean, we can continue to use a proven facility which can track near-Earth objects that threaten the lives of billions, or we can fund a pointless, hopeless, and futile war for another 1200 seconds.
Yeah, that’s a real tough choice.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi. Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Astronomy, Failure, Feedback, General Musings, Government, MetaFilter, NASA, National Geographic, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech
Pretty much everyone has had the experience of having your computer crash and take out data you hadn’t backed-up properly. Whether it is some kind of hardware failure, or a virus, or a lighting strike, or even a malicious employee/spouse/whomever, at some point we have all lost stuff on a computer we thought was secure. If you’re *really* lucky, you don’t lose much, and you learn the painful lesson about keeping important information properly backed-up on recoverable media. If you’re not really lucky, you learn the hard way that you can lose years of hard work in just an instant, with no recovery possible.
And that’s the basic idea behind building a secure storage facility for the bulk of human knowledge, and perhaps even humanity itself, off-planet. The people behind the newly formed Alliance to Rescue Civilization want to do just that:
‘Lunar Ark’ Proposed in Case of Deadly Impact on Earth
The founders of the group Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) agreed that extending the Internet from the Earth to the moon could help avert a technological dark age following “nuclear war, acts of terrorism, plague, or asteroid collisions.” (Read: “Killer Asteroids: A Real But Remote Risk?” [June 19, 2003].)
But the group also advocates creating a moon-based repository of Earth’s life, complete with human-staffed facilities to “preserve backups of scientific and cultural achievements and of the species important to our civilization,” saidARC’s Robert Shapiro, a biochemist at New York University.
“In the event of a global catastrophe, the ARC facilities will be prepared to reintroduce lost technology, art, history, crops, livestock, and, if necessary, even human beings to the Earth,” Shapiro said.
This idea is not new. Not at all – it’s been a staple of SF for decades in one form or another, and is even somewhat cliche. The previous version of Communion of Dreams had the impact of a .3 km meteorite in central China about 2026 as being the primary motivating force to pushing humankind to fully develop space-faring capability as a survival strategy. But the feedback I got from a limited group of readers was that such a second global catastrophe was a little hard to swallow, so I tweaked that in the current version to just be a limited nuclear war in that part of the world. I’m still somewhat ambivalent about this change, and would discuss with an editor whether or not to go back to the previous version.
Anyway, to the best of my knowledge, this is the first real effort to take this kind of precaution in even a preliminary form. It is based on the idea that a viable Moon base in the coming decades would allow for this kind of repository to be constructed almost as an afterthought to the other facilities. By tying it into whatever form of Internet develops in the future, it would be possible to keep it continually updated with minimal effort, meaning that the vast majority of knowledge could be archived for future access. Add in a proper seed bank, frozen embryos, and perhaps advanced storage of DNA/RNA samples, and you’d be able to repopulate & rehabilitate the earth even after a major catastrophe.
Let’s hope that we don’t as a species have to learn the lesson the hard way that it pays to back-up our data, even ourselves.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Faith healing, General Musings, Health, MetaFilter, Psychic abilities, Quantum mechanics, Religion, Science, Society, Star Trek, tech
(*with apologies to Steely Dan)
So, a couple days ago, I was hitting some of my usual haunts, and on MeFi came across a link to something truly amazing: the most advanced personal energy system available today!
Personal energy system? Huh? Some kind of new sports drink? Maybe a reworked diet fad? Or a new way to charge your, uh, personal massagers?
Nope. They’re talking Sympathetic Resonance Technology! Wow! Even the name is impressively scientifical! What is Sympathetic Resonance Technology? I’m glad you asked:
The Q-Link’s fundamental technology can be understood by imagining a tuning fork that vibrates at a certain pitch. Similarly, the Q-Link’s Sympathetic Resonant Technology™ (SRT™) is tuned to optimize the human energy system through resonance. As it interacts with your biofield, it leads to a rebalancing and restoration according to your individual needs.
Oh-oh. Woo alert! Woo alert! How does this supposedly work?
The body creates and sustains its own energy system. That system can be drained and interrupted by rival signals from other electromagnetic systems (e.g. computers, hairdryers etc).
The QLink is encoded with Sympathetic Resonance Technology or SRT™, a pioneering branch of quantum physics. This makes it act as a tuning fork that resonates with the ideal note at which the body’s energy system should hum.
The body responds positively to this ideal note and pitches itself to it so that, in time, the ideal and the actual note become harmonised.
See, it’s a “pioneering branch of quantum physics”, so it must be good, it’s so technological and sciencetific. Cool! But what exactly is you get with this QLink thingee? Let’s ask a geek person who understands all about electronics and stuff:
Here in the sunshine, some of the nation’s cheekiest electronics geeks examined the QLink. We chucked probes at it, and tried to detect any “frequencies” emitted, with no joy. And then we did what any proper dork does when presented with an interesting device: we broke it open. Drilling down, the first thing we came to was the circuit board. This, we noted with some amusement, was not in any sense connected to the copper coil, and therefore is not powered by it.
The eight copper pads do have some intriguing looking circuit board tracks coming out of them, but they too, on close inspection, are connected to absolutely nothing. A gracious term to describe their purpose might be “decorative”. I’m also not clear if I can call something a “circuit board” when there is no “circuit”.
Finally, there is a modern surface mount electronic component soldered to the centre of the device. It looks impressive, but whatever it is, it is connected to absolutely nothing. Close examination with a magnifying glass, and experiments with a multimeter and oscilloscope, revealed that this component on the “circuit board” is a zero-ohm resistor.
…
And that’s it. No microchip. A coil connected to nothing. And a zero-ohm resistor, which costs half a penny, and is connected to nothing. I contacted qlinkworld.co.uk to discuss my findings. They kindly contacted the inventor, who informed me they have always been clear the QLink does not use electronics components “in a conventional electronic way”. And apparently the energy pattern reprogramming work is done by some finely powdered crystal embedded in the resin. Oh, hang on, I get it: it’s a new age crystal pendant.
A QLink pendant will set you back at least a hundred bucks if you order it from the manufacturer, and they have models up to about a thousand bucks, even some little pendants for your pets, because “Animals have energetic systems too!” And of course, there’s one for the golfers out there, to help improve your game!
*sigh*
You know, what really gets to me with this kind of crap is how they’re perfectly happy to use scientific terms in a techno-babble stew which would make Star Trek scriptwriters proud. And yet, you can just bet that if you called them on it, they’d backpeddle pretty damned fast (and do, according to Ben Goldacre of Bad Science). Furthermore, a lot of the people who buy this crap will likewise diss science given half a chance, saying that either science doesn’t ‘have all the answers’, or that their religion somehow supercedes scientific principles.
And meanwhile, the Shamen and the scam artists rake in the money. It’s very depressing.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Constitution, Flu, General Musings, Government, Guns, MetaFilter, NYT, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Religion, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Terrorism, Violence, Writing stuff
[Spoiler alert. This post contains plot and thematic spoilers about my novel, Communion of Dreams. You’ve been warned.]
The authors of Freakonomics have a new post up on their NYT-based blog, titled “If You Were a Terrorist, How Would You Attack?” which I find interesting on several levels. First, is the willingness to broach this subject, and be subject to the criticism which will come their way. Most of that can be seen in the comments, along the lines of “why are you giving terrorists ideas?” But perhaps more importantly is the simple summation of what terrorism is really all about, and why it works. From the post:
One thing that scares people is the thought that they could be a victim of an attack. With that in mind, I’d want to do something that everybody thinks might be directed at them, even if the individual probability of harm is very low. Humans tend to overestimate small probabilities, so the fear generated by an act of terrorism is greatly disproportionate to the actual risk.
Bingo. It isn’t evident at first, but this is actually one of the major plot points of Communion. The religious/environmental nutjobs I have in the book I call “Edenists” are behind a terror plot to release an engineered virus designed to spread panic and “cleanse the Earth”, and the timing of this plot is put into motion by the discovery of the alien artifact, which they consider a ‘sign from God’. Now, my crazies have indeed created a virus which will be deadly to all those who do not ‘convert’, but they are using it in such a way as to first spread panic: by attacking the scientists involved in researching the artifact, with the intent of allowing the world to see the horror of the disease as a precursor to it being spread on Earth. Add in that humankind has only just started to recover from the first pandemic flu some 40 years previously, and that the new flu is based on that original virus (but tweaked just enough to get around the defenses we have), and you can see how this strategy would be very effective.
Anyway, the post by Steven Levitt is interesting, as is the discussion in the comments. I think that he is right: it would be easy to spread fear with simultaneous small-scale shootings around the country, and the ensuing backlash would not only help us lose our constituional rights, but would empower those who wish to impose something like martial law. In fact, all it would take would be about a dozen small attacks at shopping malls the first weekend after Thanksgiving, and you would effectively cripple the US economy. And there are countless other scenarios in popular fiction which would accomplish the same thing.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi.)
Filed under: Faith healing, MetaFilter, Psychic abilities, Religion, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
When I was a kid, I just loved the idea of psychic abilities – just about any variety that I came across in the science fiction I read made me jealous, wanting that power, wondering whether or not there wasn’t some such latent skill in all of us, waiting to be tapped. That’s one of the reasons that I construct a plausible explanation for psychic abilities (and why they haven’t been reliably manifest) in Communion of Dreams – it’s just such a great idea, and so deeply embedded in most human societies, that it almost seems like there has to be something to it.
But wishing for it does not make it so, of course. And I remember when this guy named James Randi first came to my attention, when he showed just what a fraud one of the most popular ‘psychics’ of the 1970s – one Uri Geller – was. Ever since, I’ve been a fan, and when I came across this nice long clip of Randi via MeFi, I had to share:
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Communion Of Dreams 