Filed under: Alzheimer's, Daily Kos, Feedback, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
Huh. It finally happened, a week after I turned 50. Over 10,000 downloads of Communion of Dreams.
I’ve posted a ‘thank you’ to both UTI and dKos, but I want to extend a personal thanks to all who follow the blog and have helped to spread the word of the novel. As I noted on dKos:
When I set up a website to allow people to download the novel early last year, I thought that I would just make it available until I got around to finding a publisher for the book. But then my life became completely preoccupied with the deteriorating condition of my mother-in-law (see my diaries here tagged “Alzheimer’s”, or go to my blog), and just didn’t have the time/energy for doing the legwork of finding an agent or publisher.
So the book remained available for download. And surprise, surprise, word of it spread. The most I ever did to promote it was to put a link in my .sig file here and a couple of other places where I post. The whole thing took on a bit of a life of its own, to be honest, and watching the numbers of downloads slowly climb helped to bolster my spirits during some very dark and depressing times.
OK, that’s not entirely true – I did start this blog with the goal of promoting the book and documenting the process of finding an agent and then landing a publishing deal. But the part about watching the numbers climb helping me through those difficult times of caring for Martha Sr are certainly true. The same for the feedback I have gotten through this blog. Thanks to one and all for your support, criticism, and friendship.
Huh. 10,000. That’s kinda cool.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Civil Rights, Daily Kos, Government, Politics, Predictions, Society, Terrorism, Travel, Violence
The Washington Times ran an interesting story last week:
Want some torture with your peanuts?
Just when you thought you’ve heard it all…
A senior government official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has expressed great interest in a so-called safety bracelet that would serve as a stun device, similar to that of a police Taser®. According to this promotional video found at the Lamperd Less Lethal, Inc. website, the bracelet would be worn by all airline passengers (video also shown below).
This bracelet would:
• Take the place of an airline boarding pass
• Contain personal information about the traveler
• Be able to monitor the whereabouts of each passenger and his/her luggage
• Shock the wearer on command, completely immobilizing him/her for several minutes
The Electronic ID Bracelet, as it’s referred to, would be worn by every traveler “until they disembark the flight at their destination.” Yes, you read that correctly. Every airline passenger would be tracked by a government-funded GPS, containing personal, private and confidential information, and would shock the customer worse than an electronic dog collar if the passenger got out of line.
“Just when you thought you’ve heard it all… ” indeed.
Now, I’m not a big fan of the Washington Times, so I checked the website mentioned in the article. Where I found this statement:
The bracelets remain inactive until a hijacking situation has been identified. At such time a designated crew member will activate the bracelets making them capable of delivering the punitive measure – but only to those that need to be restrained. We believe that all passengers will welcome deliverance from a hijacking, as will the families, carriers, insurance providers etc. The F-16 on the wingtip is not to reassure the passengers during a hijacking but rather to shoot them down. Besides activation using the grid screen, the steward / stewardess will have a laser activator that can activate any bracelet as needed by simply pointing the laser at the bracelet – that laser dot only needs to be within 10 inches of the bracelet to activate it.
Got that? “This is for your own good”.
Never mind that there are dozens of potential problems I can see how this technology could be abused, inadvertently misused, or accidentally triggered. Never mind that Tasers use a similar type of electro-muscular disruption technology and have been suspect in the deaths of perhaps hundreds. Never mind that it is likely that someone wanting to hijack a jet would figure out a way to disable such a bracelet (it’s activated by a laser pointer? Just wrap something around the bracelet when you move to act.) Consider solely what this does to you: makes you someone else’s pet or slaughter animal.
Airline travel is grim and degrading enough as it is, and most of the airlines are struggling to avoid bankruptcy. If they decide to go forward and implement the use of this kind of technology, a significant percentage of travelers will give up on flying altogether (it’s actually a shame that likely a majority would probably play along, thanks to the conditioning we’ve already received).
I know I sure as hell would give up flying under those conditions.
Sheesh.
Jim Downey
(Via dKos. Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Feedback, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff
Well, I just checked the stats, and according to my calculations we’re closing in on the elusive 10,000 downloads goal. About 110 to go, way I figure.
That’s really cool. I suppose I should go pick up a current edition of the Guide to Literary Agents or something. Rework my contact letter. Select a half-dozen or so agents and contact them, tell them what a great opportunity it would be for them to represent me and Communion of Dreams.
Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll just rework the homepage for Communion a bit, freshen things up in celebration. Because contacting agents has been so effective in the past.
Gah.
Anyway, chill the champagne, order the cake, let’s get ready to party!
Jim Downey
Filed under: movies, Paleo-Future, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Wired
How would you like to get 235 mpg with your car?
It’s only a concept car, but it seems that a version of VW’s “One Liter Car” is going to be produced by 2010:
According to Britain’s Car magazine, VW has approved a plan to build a limited number of One-Liters in 2010. They’ll probably be built in the company’s prototype shop, which has the capacity to build as many as 1,000 per year. That’s not a lot, but it’s enough to help VW get a lot of attention while showing how much light weight and an efficient engine can achieve.
VW unveiled the slick two-seater concept six years ago at a stockholder’s meeting in Hamburg. To prove it was a real car, Chairman Ferdinand Piech personally drove it from Wolfsburg to Hamburg. At the time, he said the car could see production when the cost of its carbon monocoque dropped from 35,000 Euros (about $55,000) to 5,000 Euros (about $8,000) — something he figured would happen in 2012. With carbon fiber being used in everything from airliners to laptops these days, VW’s apparently decided the cost is competitive enough to build at least a few hundred One-Liters.
VW’s engineers — who spent three years developing the car — made extensive use of magnesium, titanium and aluminum to bring it in at less than one-third the weight of a Toyota Echo. According to Canadian Driver, the front suspension assembly weighs just 18 pounds. The six-speed transmission features a magnesium case, titanium bolts and hollow gears; it weighs a tad more than 50 pounds. The 16-inch wheels are carbon fiber. The magnesium steering wheel weighs a little more than a pound. How much of the concept car’s exotic hardware makes it to the production model remains to be seen.
‘Remains to be seen’, indeed. But that’s OK, because even if it only gets half the promised mileage once a production model is made, that’s still over the 100 mpg threshold, and will push other auto makers to try and compete. Besides, it looks like it should for a car from 2010, with a very paleo-future styling to it. You can bet that some versions of it will be used for making Science Fiction movies/TV in the near future.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, General Musings, Health, Predictions, SCA, Society, Survival, Violence, Writing stuff
The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.
William Faulkner.
I’ve read my share of Faulkner, as appropriate for someone getting through a high school English class in the 1970s. And then I read a lot more in graduate school. Always loved his use of language, but I never really ‘got’ that quote, though it nicely sums up one of the major themes of his writing. Partly, this was just being young. Partly it was because of a conscious effort on my part to forget some of the worst aspects of my own personal history.
Oh, sure, I understood how the past shapes the future. In fact, that was a big part of my interest in both economics (one of my college degrees) and the SCA – knowing history allows you to understand how things develop in the ways they have, and can provide analogs which can be useful to understanding new situations when they arise. (That is discussed explicitly in Communion of Dreams, in relation to the the industrial archaeologist brought onto the research team.) But for me, the past has always been the past: dead, immutable.
Until now.
* * * * * * *
As mentioned previously, we’re in the process of dividing up Martha Sr’s estate. This includes the household items. When someone has lived in one house, and raised a family there, for over 50 years, lots and lots of stuff accumulates. In an effort to be completely fair and above board, we’ve had assessors in to evaluate the furniture and household items, so that each family member involved can be sure that they get their share. This coming weekend my wife and her siblings are going to go through and divvy everything up. Then over the coming weeks stuff will get moved out and we’ll deal with whatever no one wanted. Eventually, only those things which are ours will remain, and my wife and I can proceed to actually getting settled here.
Because when we sold our house and moved in here to care for Martha Sr, we wanted to disrupt her home environment as little as possible. We wedged ourselves into rooms which she didn’t use much, put a lot of stuff into storage. It was a pain, but one we were willing to put up with while we cared for her.
Now, of course, I am looking forward to actually getting settled. As I told a friend recently:
It was frustrating to be shoe-horned in here the last six years, but I was willing to put up with it for Martha Sr’s sake. As I have been recovering from the care-giving, I have been wanting more and more to feel less and less cramped up here – I can only put up with this level of chaos and annoyance for so long.
But of course it is a little different for my wife, who now sees her childhood home being split up, her memories associated with this or that piece of furniture bereft of a physical connection.
* * * * * * *
I never met my father in law. He died before my wife and I got together. But he was something of a local character, and over the years here I have had many people tell me anecdotes about him. Seems most people either loved him or hated him. He evidently carried on a number of long-term feuds.
One such was with a local builder, who is now the executor of a family trust which owns the property next to us (part of a large tract in our neighborhood which has caused some grief for people here). For various legal reasons (limitations on the trust), this property has always been undeveloped. But now those reasons are being resolved. And it turns out that what we thought for some 50 years is part of our property is actually part of the trust. This includes a substantial strip of our lawn and even a chunk of my garden, about half of the fenced in area I created for my dog, and a substantial number of huge trees. My wife’s family has maintained and used the strip of property for that entire time.
So for the better part of the last year we’ve been involved in some legal wrangling to settle this issue. Because, you know, the matter couldn’t be settled simply, due to the aforementioned feud. And yesterday things came to a bit of a head, as the son of the executor came onto our property to ‘do some maintenance’.
I had words with him.
OK, let’s recap: I, who never met my father-in-law, had a potentially dangerous confrontation with the son of a man who had a feud with my FIL.
Given my current attempts to recover from prolonged and excess stress, this could have gotten stupid very quickly. And I spent a lot of time afterwards carefully considering the situation. And somewhere in there last night I realized that I finally understood just exactly what Faulkner meant. Now I know why border disputes and blood feuds are carried on for generations, pulling people in who otherwise would react in more sane and rational ways. Because, without desire or intent on my part, I am in the middle of exactly one such episode of history intruding on the present.
This is insane.
* * * * * * *
My wife and I discussed the matter at some length last night, once I had stepped back from the adrenaline stew that had me jumped up. Our attorney will seek a restraining order on the other parties to prevent them from doing anything to the disputed strip of property until the matter is resolved in court – to just keep things ‘status quo’. I have asked for specific instructions from our attorney about what I should do in the event that we have a recurrence – ignore it, call the cops, confront them, what?
But beyond that, I have decided that I am going to try and disentangle myself from this historical mess. I just want a resolution to the matter, and of the feud, so I can get on with my life. But I cannot make that resolution – this is a problem for others to sort out; their problem, not mine. Because I finally ‘got’ what Faulkner meant, and understand that unless I disentangle myself I am likely to contribute to a perpetuation of this feud, damaging my own sanity and soul in the process.
Jim Downey
I worked over six hours yesterday. Yeah, I took a few breaks, but still. Something of a milestone.
* * * * * * *
Humans are remarkably adaptive creatures. We can adjust to a wide range of environmental conditions, accommodate significant changes in diet, accept shifts in social structure. Just look around the world and you’ll see what I mean, from variations in culture in response to climate to how people cope with extreme conditions such as war and famine.
There can be a toll to such adaptations, of course, depending on what they are, how long they last, and the particular individual or society.
In caring for Martha Sr I slowly changed my routine and focus to better meet her needs, so most of the changes I went through in that time were barely discernible from day to day. Over the four plus years of intense care giving, however, both my wife and I underwent a very substantial shift in what could be considered our normal life.
I’ve mentioned some of those changes previously – the weight gain, the loss of concentration, the lack of sleep. But I haven’t discussed the operative mechanism behind all those changes: stress. Specifically, the physiological changes in hormonal balance which come with prolonged stress – the so called stress hormones of cortisol and norepinephrine. Most people know these as the ‘fight or flight’ reflex effects: boost in blood pressure and heart rate, heightened sensory awareness, a slight time dilation. It is our body’s way of preparing us to survive a threatening situation. It is a very powerful experience, and can even be a bit addictive – anyone who characterizes themselves as an ‘adrenaline junkie’, who gets a kick out of doing dangerous things or watching scary movies, is talking about just that.
The problem is, those stress hormones come with a price – they exact a toll on the body. For most people, occasional jolts of this stuff isn’t really dangerous, but for someone with a heart condition or an aneurysm waiting blow, such an event can kill. That’s why you see those warning signs on roller coasters.
And consider what happens to someone who slowly ramps up their stress hormone levels over a prolonged period. That’s me. My formerly excellent blood pressure and heart rate is now scary bad, and has been for a while. I’m lucky that I started this in good condition – but think back to this episode last year, and you’ll see what kind of effect the excessive stress hormone levels had. In the final year of care giving, my system became saturated with stress hormones – my ‘fight or flight’ reflex changed from being related to a sudden threat to being an ongoing condition. I adapted.
So now I am in detox. That’s what the last few months have been all about. Slowly adapting back to something resembling normal, at a very basic physiological level. More sleep. More exercise. Better diet. As I’ve discussed recently, I have started to see some real changes. But as a good friend who is also a doctor reminded me recently, it will likely take a year or longer to make this transition, for my endocrine system to settle down. Recently I have taken some additional steps to help this process, in terms of changes to diet and food supplements. But it is a long and winding road I need to walk now.
* * * * * * *
I got up about 3:30 this morning for a potty run. Stepping from our bedroom into the bathroom, I froze: there was a light coming up from the downstairs that shouldn’t have been there. I quietly backed into the bedroom, put on pants and glasses, grabbed my cell phone, a pistol and a powerful flashlight.
I’m no ‘macho guy’ or wanna-be hero. The smart thing to do if you have an intruder in your house is to batten down the hatches where you are, call 911, and let the police deal with it.
But what if you just left a light on by accident?
I was about 90% sure that was what happened. So, carefully, I went to investigate. Checked the house completely. Everything was safe and secure. The cats were confused by what I was doing up so early.
I went back upstairs, hit the head, put away the various items I’d picked up, and crawled back into bed.
And have been awake since.
After an hour or so, I just got up. Because I knew I wasn’t getting back to sleep anytime soon. That’s the problem – the stress hormone receptors in my brain are so adapted to a regular high dose of adrenal squeezin’s that they hungrily lap the stuff up when it comes their way.
* * * * * * *
I worked over six hours yesterday. Yeah, I took a few breaks, but still. Something of a milestone.
Six hours may not sound like a lot. After all, most people are expected to work eight or more hours at a time, with a couple of paltry breaks.
But for me, regaining the ability to focus in, to concentrate and work for that length of time is a real improvement. It shows that I am making progress in detoxifying my system, of readjusting the endocrine balance.
Today is going to be a bit of a bitch, though, thanks to the early-morning jolt of adrenaline. But I know how to handle it, and hopefully it won’t cause too much back sliding. We’ll see.
The road is long and winding, and I must take it where it leads.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Expert systems, General Musings, Music, Predictions, Ray Kurzweil, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Society, Writing stuff
Just now, my good lady wife was through to tell me that she’s off to take a bit of a nap. Both of us are getting over a touch of something (which I had mentioned last weekend), and on a deeper level still recovering from the profound exhaustion of having been care-givers for her mom.
Anyway, as she was preparing to head off, one of our cats insisted on going through the door which leads from my office into my bindery. This is where the cat food is.
“She wants through.”
“She wants owwwwt.”
“Any door leads out, as far as a cat is concerned.”
“Well, that door did once actually lead out, decades ago.”
“She remembers.”
“She can’t remember.”
“Nonetheless, the memory lingers.”
* * * * * * *
Via TDG, a fascinating interview with Douglas Richard Hofstadter last year, now translated into English. I’d read his GEB some 25 years ago, and have more or less kept tabs on his work since. The interview was about his most recent book, and touched on a number of subjects of interest to me, including the nature of consciousness, writing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Singularity. It’s long, but well worth the effort.
In discussing consciousness (which Hofstadter calls ‘the soul’ for reasons he explains), and the survival of shards of a given ‘soul’, the topic of writing and music comes up. Discussing how Chopin’s music has enabled shards of the composer’s soul to persist, Hofstadter makes this comment about his own desire to write:
I am not shooting at immortality through my books, no. Nor do I think Chopin was shooting at immortality through his music. That strikes me as a very selfish goal, and I don’t think Chopin was particularly selfish. I would also say that I think that music comes much closer to capturing the essence of a composer’s soul than do a writer’s ideas capture the writer’s soul. Perhaps some very emotional ideas that I express in my books can get across a bit of the essence of my soul to some readers, but I think that Chopin’s music probably does a lot better job (and the same holds, of course, for many composers).
I personally don’t have any thoughts about “shooting for immortality” when I write. I try to write simply in order to get ideas out there that I believe in and find fascinating, because I’d like to let other people be able share those ideas. But intellectual ideas alone, no matter how fascinating they are, are not enough to transmit a soul across brains. Perhaps, as I say, my autobiographical passages — at least some of them — get tiny shards of my soul across to some people.
Exactly.
* * * * * * *
In April, I wrote this:
I’ve written only briefly about my thoughts on the so-called Singularity – that moment when our technological abilities converge to create a new transcendent artificial intelligence which encompasses humanity in a collective awareness. As envisioned by the Singularity Institute and a number of Science Fiction authors, I think that it is too simple – too utopian. Life is more complex than that. Society develops and copes with change in odd and unpredictable ways, with good and bad and a whole lot in the middle.
Here’s Hofstadter’s take from the interview, in responding to a question about Ray Kurzweil‘s notion of achieving effective immortality by ‘uploading’ a personality into a machine hardware:
Well, the problem is that a soul by itself would go crazy; it has to live in a vastly complex world, and it has to cohabit that world with many other souls, commingling with them just as we do here on earth. To be sure, Kurzweil sees those things as no problem, either — we’ll have virtual worlds galore, “up there” in Cyberheaven, and of course there will be souls by the barrelful all running on the same hardware. And Kurzweil sees the new software souls as intermingling in all sorts of unanticipated and unimaginable ways.
Well, to me, this “glorious” new world would be the end of humanity as we know it. If such a vision comes to pass, it certainly would spell the end of human life. Once again, I don’t want to be there if such a vision should ever come to pass. But I doubt that it will come to pass for a very long time. How long? I just don’t know. Centuries, at least. But I don’t know. I’m not a futurologist in the least. But Kurzweil is far more “optimistic” (i.e., depressingly pessimistic, from my perspective) about the pace at which all these world-shaking changes will take place.
Interesting.
* * * * * * *
Lastly, the interview is about the central theme of I am a Strange Loop: that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon which stems from vast and subtle physical mechanisms in the brain. This is also the core ‘meaning’ of GEB, though that was often missed by readers and reviewers who got hung up on the ostensible themes, topics, and playfulness of that book. Hofstadter calls this emergent consciousness a self-referential hallucination, and it reflects much of his interest in cognitive science over the years.
[Mild spoilers ahead.]
In Communion of Dreams I played with this idea and a number of related ones, particularly pertaining to the character of Seth. It is also why I decided that I needed to introduce a whole new technology – based on the superfluid tholin-gel found on Titan, as the basis for the AI systems at the heart of the story. Because the gel is not human-manufactured, but rather something a bit mysterious. Likewise, the use of this material requires another sophisticated computer to ‘boot it up’, and then it itself is responsible for sustaining the energy matrix necessary for continued operation. At the culmination of the story, this ‘self-referential hallucination’ frees itself from its initial containment.
Why did I do this?
Partly in homage to Hofstedter (though you will find no mention of him in the book, as far as I recall). Partly because it plays with other ideas I have about the nature of reality. If we (conscious beings) are an emergent phenomenon, arising from physical activity, then it seems to me that physical things can be impressed with our consciousness. This is why I find his comments about shards of a soul existing beyond the life of the body of the person to be so intriguing.
So I spent some 130,000 words exploring that idea in Communion. Not overtly – not often anyway – but that is part of the subtext of what is going on in that book.
* * * * * * *
“Any door leads out, as far as a cat is concerned.”
“Well, that door did once actually lead out, decades ago.”
“She remembers.”
“She can’t remember.”
“Nonetheless, the memory lingers,” I said, “impressed on the door itself. Maybe the cat understands that at a level we don’t.”
Jim Downey
(Related post at UTI.)
Filed under: General Musings, Government, movies, Nuclear weapons, Predictions, tech, Violence
I’ve written previously about screws-ups with control of nuclear weapons and components thereof. And the recent dismissal of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne also caught my attention, with the explanation that this was due to a failure to properly safeguard the handling of nuclear materials. Now it seems that there was more behind that dismissal than was initially indicated:
US N-weapons parts missing, Pentagon says
The US military cannot locate hundreds of sensitive nuclear missile components, according to several government officials familiar with a Pentagon report on nuclear safeguards.
Robert Gates, US defence secretary, recently fired both the US Air Force chief of staff and air force secretary after an investigation blamed the air force for the inadvertent shipment of nuclear missile nose cones to Taiwan.
According to previously undisclosed details obtained by the FT, the investigation also concluded that the air force could not account for many sensitive components previously included in its nuclear inventory.
One official said the number of missing components was more than 1,000.
You know the ‘warehouse scene’ at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? That’s how I always envision any government-related storage or supply system. And everything I’ve ever heard from friends who have served in the military has done nothing to change my opinion – well, for the better, anyway.
So it comes as little surprise that substantial amounts of “sensitive nuclear missile components” have gone missing. Not that this is particularly comforting, mind. As I’ve said before, I’m one of the people who grew up fully expecting a nuclear war of some variety sometime during my life. And in spite of the ‘detargetting’ bullshit of the ’90s, I still do. That’s bad enough. But it would *really suck* if such a thing were made possible because of the lax clerical policies of our own government.
Jim Downey
Cross posted to UTI.
Communion Of Dreams 