Filed under: Astronomy, Carl Sagan, Fermi's Paradox, Preparedness, Science Fiction, SETI, Society, Space
Via TDG, a link to “10 Must-Read ‘First Contact’ Novels” by someone who should know: Mac Tonnies of the SETI.com blog.
Man, I just can’t believe that he didn’t list Communion of Dreams. Huh. But then, Contact by Carl Sagan didn’t make it either . . .
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Emergency, Failure, General Musings, Government, Guns, Health, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Press, Privacy, RKBA, Society, Survival, Terrorism, Violence
If you know me at all, from personal experience or just from my writings, you might be a bit surprised to know that when I was a kid I was considered bookish, uninterested in athletics, a bit nerdy. I distinctly remember being pushed to close whatever book I was quietly reading, and to go outside and play ‘like a real boy’.
Why do I mention this? Well, because I have been following with some interest the whole ‘controversy’ around Lenore Skenazy‘s recent column and subsequent news coverage/website devoted to the concept of “Free Range Kids“. In itself, it is fascinating that Skenazy’s ideas have generated this kind of reaction – challenging the prevailing cultural norms about child-rearing and parental control (under the guise of keeping kids safe). Lots of people are saying that it is about time for us to get away from “helicopter parents” who so over-protect their kids that the kids never get any real life experience. Just look at the comments at BoingBoing, on her website, or just about anywhere else – she gets some criticism, but for the most part people are saying either that “it’s about time” or “what’s the big deal – this is how most of the working class folks get along”.
But beyond that, there is something else that comes through: a basic desire for people to have some freedom back, that the whole “security” mindset may have gone too far, that we have gotten well away from our self-professed ideal of being the “Home of the Brave”. I don’t think that this is the least bit surprising, nor that it would show up in these kinds of discussions, because I think that the issues are very closely interrelated.
Let’s talk about Skenazy’s notions again for a moment. Her basic premise is that while we need as parents (and as a society) to take some reasonable precautions, it is also extremely important that kids be allowed to actually experience life outside the purview of parents and other authorities – to have a little room to learn about things like self reliance, independence, and problem solving. Her example is letting her 9 year old son ride the subway in NYC on his own. What happened? I’ll quote from her site:
When I wrote a column for The New York Sun on “Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Take The Subway Alone,” I figured I’d get a few e-mails pro and con.
Two days later I was on the Today Show, MSNBC, FoxNews and all manner of talk radio with a new title under my smiling face: “America’s Worst Mom?”
Yes, that’s what it took for me to learn just what a hot-button this is — this issue of whether good parents ever let their kids out of their sight. But even as the anchors were having a field day with the story, many of the cameramen and make up people were pulling me aside to say that THEY had been allowed to get around by themselves as kids– and boy were they glad. They relished the memories!
And the next paragraph nicely summarizes what the real problem is, as I see it:
Had the world really become so much more dangerous in just one generation?Yes — in most people’s estimation. But no — not according to the evidence. Over at the think tank STATS.org, where they examine the way the media use statistics, researchers have found that the number of kids getting abducted by strangers actually holds very steady over the years. In 2006, that number was 115, and 40% of them were killed.
Now, why do people have the perception that the world is much more dangerous now, when the statistics don’t support that? Hmm. Think about it for half a moment and the answer is obvious: because that is what we are constantly told by the mainstream media, both in news and in fiction. And I’m not just talking about kids being kidnapped, assaulted, or murdered. If it isn’t the government trying to scare us senseless about some new terrorist threat, it is some TV show preying on your fears with murder or deadly ingredients in your food/water. Think of what sells papers and ad-time, and you’ll understand the motivation. It has always been so. But what has changed in the last generation is the absolute saturation that we get from these sources.
I am the first to acknowledge that the world is, indeed, a dangerous place. When I was barely starting adolescence my dad was murdered, and my mom was killed in a car accident, for crying out loud. Sure, neither of those is as bad as the loss of a child, but still. I do take reasonable precautions in going about my life, from trying to watch my diet to getting exercise to carrying a gun (and other safety tools). I use my seat belt and pay attention while driving. But I also live my life – because I know that no matter what, I’m going to die of something someday, and I would much rather enjoy the life I have than live in fear of losing it.
It is simply impossible to live a fully protected life. Just as it is simply impossible to fully protect kids from harm. Furthermore, it is completely counter-productive. In the case of kids, all you are doing is denying them the opportunity to really learn about themselves – the one and only person that they will have to rely on in the future. Kids have to learn to walk on their own. And they have to learn to get up when they fall. Sure, they’ll get hurt. They’ll scrape a knee, maybe get cut, maybe even break a bone. Know what? That’s life. They’ll heal, or learn to deal with it.
That’s harsh, but I am not advocating harshness. I am advocating bravery. Because that is what will come from learning that yes, you will get hurt – but you will recover from it. Yes, life will present problems, but you can learn to overcome them or cope with it. Learning that is liberating, and the sooner someone learns it, the more fully they will enjoy what life they have.
Likewise, in seeking to protect ourselves from threats, we have done nothing but lose our bravery as a nation. And lose our freedoms.
Let the kids range free. And let your own faith in yourself range a little freer, as well.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
It is enlightening, if sometimes dismaying, to discover what sorts of things motivate people. I have found that one of the most reliable ways of doing this is to see what sorts of motivations they perceive in others – what motives they attribute for a given behaviour.
Case in point: our caring for Martha Sr. I had mentioned previously that there was some discord in the family about the distribution of her estate. And what at the time seemed to be a misplaced guilt (that still may be the base motivation, actually) causing this has now manifested as a perception that we cared for her over the last five years out of some financial motivation. Yes, it seems that some thought that we did what we did in order to benefit from a more favorable disbursement of her estate.
*Sigh* This is so wrong that it took me a while to really wrap my head around it.
As I told a friend via email this morning:
Needless to say, this is not why we did what we did – honestly, no amount of money (well, no reasonable amount of money) would be sufficient inducement for me to have cared for someone like that for so long. It was done out of love – for her, and for my wife.
And I’ve been thinking more about it. Why? Because I like to understand my own motivations, and to keep them as honest and clean as possible. I’m an idealist, and try to approach the world that way, knowing full well that the world is not an ideal place and that reality will likely not be kind to my approach. When my motivations are questioned, either directly or by events, I like to step back and reconsider – and will make changes if necessary to insure that my motives are clear.
We were favored by Martha Sr. in her will. Not to a great degree – the value of it was less than I could have earned in the intervening years, had I been working rather than caring for her. And it was considerably less than would have been spent on either hiring full time care-givers, or moving her into a nursing home for that time. But because this additional benefit was there, some made the assumption that this was our motivation for caring for her. And this has caused the discord mentioned above.
So, after discussing the matter with my wife, we’re going to wipe out the benefit, just split up her estate equally and without consideration. It is not worth the grief. We didn’t do what we did for money or property – we did it because it was the right thing to do, and we could. Removing the benefit should resolve in anyone’s mind what our motivation was.
Everyone grieves in their own way. We may have wiped the slate clean, but that doesn’t mean that the grieving process is over. Not by a long shot. There are still sympathy cards on the mantelpiece. There is still a sudden slight panic over where the monitor is when I forget for a moment that Martha Sr is gone. There is guilt over the times we failed in some way, and joy over memories of happy moments Martha Sr had even in those final difficult days. And there is a profound gratitude I feel in having experienced this role of being a care provider.
I think that I am richer for this experience than others who have not been through it. I sometimes wonder whether the tendency to put people in nursing homes is partially done out of a fear of grieving – to create a distance from a loved one who is reaching the end of life, and so to mitigate the pain of loss. If so, those who take that path have indeed curtailed the amount of pain that they would feel, perhaps even cut short the time needed to completely grieve. But they have also cut themselves off from a remarkable human experience.
Jim Downey
Updated, April 13: I cross-posted this to dKos yesterday, where it generated some interest and discussion you wish to also see. You can find that here.
JD
Filed under: Ballistics, Guns, Humor, NPR, Podcast, RKBA, Science Fiction, Society, Titan, Writing stuff
. . . in 2052 Darnell Sidwell finds the alien artifact on Titan.
Yup, the clues in the text are clear – the artifact is first discovered on April Fools Day, though that is never explicitly stated.
Why did I do this? For my own amusement, mostly. I appreciate a good April Fools joke – one that plays on someone’s expectations and gullibility, one like you’ll frequently catch on NPR that just might be possible. Given the way the discovery plays out in the story, I thought it a good place to start.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Couple of brief notes: downloads of the text of Communion of Dreams are now over 8,300, and almost 100 people have downloaded the first chapter of the mp3 files (with all the different sections of chapters in those files, and no comprehensive download file to track easily, I’m mostly going to keep tally on the first chapter for simplicity.)
We’ll be starting the next round of ballistics testing tomorrow, so my posting schedule might be kind of erratic through the weekend.
Watch out for April Fools!
Jim Downey
Filed under: George Lucas, Humor, Marketing, movies, Press, Promotion, Religion, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Star Wars
You may recall the 2001 effort to get people to register their religion as “Jedi”. Like some of the other silliness at the turn of the century, it was mostly harmless.
Well, it seems that earlier this year a couple of brothers in Wales decided to take it a step further:
Force strong for new Jedi church
Two Star Wars-loving brothers planning a Jedi church hope it will be much nearer than a galaxy far, far away.
Barney and Daniel Jones want fellow devotees to be able to join them close to their home on Anglesey.
Barney, 26 – or Master Jonba Hehol – and Daniel, 21 – Master Morda Hehol – head the UK Church of the Jedi, in honour of the film’s good knights.
And you gotta give the guys credit – they know how to keep their name in the news:
Anglesey Jedi Church announces plans for Moon colony
AN ORDER of Holyhead Jedis has begun steps to colonise the moon.
The UK Church of the Jedi, run by brothers Daniel and Barney Jones, of Holyhead, are setting up a micro nation on the moon.
They have bought a plot of land on the moon and the order plan to have a capital city and appoint worthy Jedi to positions such as Head of Galactic Affairs and Country Ambassador.
Alas, with notoriety also comes occasional tragedy:
Star Wars comes to Holyhead as Darth Vader strikes back in Jedi’s back garden
A Star Wars fan got closer to his idols than he would perhaps have liked when he was attacked in his garden by Darth Vader.
Jedi Master Jonba Hehol – known to family and friends as Barney Jones, 36, of Holyhead – was giving a TV interview in his back garden for a documentary when a man, dressed in a black bin-bag and wearing Darth Vader’s trademark shiny black helmet, leapt over his garden fence.
Wielding a metal crutch – his lightsaber presumably being in for repairs – the Sith Lord proceeded to lay about his opponent, whose Jedi powers proved inadequate for the task of defending himself.
After besting Master Hehol in single combat, Vader, who The Sun reports was under the influence of alcohol, went on to assault the camera crew and a hairdresser.
It’s always something.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi. Cross posted to UTI.)
. . . cross-posting this item from UTI, even though I put it up there this morning and the thing is all over the web now. It’s just too damned funny. The version below is low-res; be sure to go to YouTube and click on the “view this in higher resolution” tab, then expand it to fill your monitor.
Jim D.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
OK, just in case you haven’t seen this over at PZ’s or elsewhere, here’s a hilarious and brilliantly done satire:
It takes some deconstructing, but the consensus is that it is indeed pro-science/skepticism.
UPDATE: Here are the lyrics, and here is a brief bit on the ‘cast’ – kudos to both authors!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Carl Sagan, Fermi's Paradox, movies, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Society, Space, tech, Titan, Travel, UFO, Writing stuff
There’s a good piece by Seth Shostak over at Space.com about the possible motivations an extra-terrestrial race might have for visiting our pale blue dot. (Shostak is one of the principals of the SETI Institute, and knows whereof he speaks when he addresses these kinds of issues.) First, he dismisses the usual SF plot devices of an alien race wanting our turf, our resources, or even our bodies:
Taking our cue from Tinseltown, I note that most cineplex sentients come to Earth either to solve some sort of ugly reproductive crisis or simply to take over the planet. The former doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. You can’t breed with creatures at the zoo, despite the fact that most of the base pairs in the inmates’ DNA are identical to yours (note that this is a biological incompatibility, and not just zoo regulations). The aliens, needless to say, will have a different biochemistry, and probably no DNA at all. Forget, if you can, the breeding experiments.
Taking over the planet would only make sense if there were something really special about our world. The best guess of the exoplanet specialists is that the number of Earth-size planets in our galaxy exceeds tens of billions. That doesn’t sound like our hunk of real estate is terribly privileged.
They won’t come here to mine our minerals, either. The entire universe is built of the same stuff, and while the solar system has a higher percentage of heavy elements than found in many stellar realms, it turns out that this is precisely the condition that seems to foster planet formation. In other words, ET’s own solar system will be similarly blessed with these useful materials. So why would they come here and incur multi-light-year transport charges?
Why, indeed? These various issues are ones which are discussed in the course of speculation about the alien artifact discovered in Communion of Dreams. And while I never actually reveal the motivations that aliens might have for having left the artifact on Titan in my novel, I do have thoughts on the subject (which might come out in a future sequel to Communion.)
Be that as it may, Shostak does go on to make a pretty good argument that if indeed there are a large number of technological civilizations out there, that they may just not consider us worth the trouble of contacting/visiting. Again, from the article:
Then again, there’s that last point: they just want to learn more about us. Well, perhaps so. Maybe that’s really what’s interesting about Homo sapiens. Not grabbing our habitat, saving our souls (or our environment), or subverting our industrial output — but assaying our culture. I’m willing to consider that even very advanced beings might find our culture mildly worthy of study.
Keep in mind that if they’re near enough to find us, that implies that there are many, many galactic societies (otherwise the distances between any two of them will be enormous). If there are lots of them, then we’re just another entry in a big book. Once again, not all that special. Kind of like another weird fish found in the Atlantic. I don’t expect mammoth expeditions to be sent our way.
It is a good point. I would counter, however, that we have seen plenty of evidence in our own history of people going to enormous trouble to bother to learn about seemingly trivial things. One only has to look at the difficulties encountered in sea-faring during the time of the great naturalists – people were willing to go to great expense, to risk great hardship and a fair chance of death just to add another entry into the botanical texts or to discover a new species. Even today we mount insanely expensive expeditions into the deep ocean just to expand our knowledge.
We have no evidence of extra-terrestrial life, let alone advance civilizations. Yet I think that you can make a fair case that any space-faring race which may exist must have some degree of curiosity – and that curiosity may alone be reason enough to come check out the new kids on the block, whatever the hurdles or cost.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Arthur C. Clarke, Book Conservation, movies, Podcast, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech, Writing stuff
I have been *really* enjoying the audio version of Communion of Dreams, which I discussed in my last post. And I think you will too, once we work out some additional logistical things on the hosting end (the files are very large, relative to the .pdf files of the text, and necessitate increasing my bandwidth allotment significantly.) With a little luck, we should have that ready to go by this weekend. My friend’s interpretation of the characters is quite interesting – some of them have caught me a bit by surprise, though I cannot object in the slightest to his artistic decisions. And he is very good, really getting into the pacing and mood of the story the further he goes.
In fact, listening to the book, and the need to catch up on book conservation work from the long break last week through this weekend, is responsible for my not posting anything yesterday. And that’s OK, since I would have been tempted to do what just about every other SF blogger on the planet seems to have done: write a tribute to Arthur C. Clarke.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Beyond being one of the best Science Fiction writers of the 20th century, Sir Arthur had an impact on the larger society, changing not only how we see space, but how we actually use it. It is completely understandable that everyone wants to write about him, and how his writing changed their lives (and writing). I did so in some discussion forums. And I have written about him here, and noted on my CoD site just what his influence has been on me as a writer.
But after I heard of his death all I really wanted to do was sit back and enjoy his vast vision. Tuesday night I popped open a beer, popped 2001 into the DVD player, and paid homage to the narrator of Tales from the White Hart.
Then yesterday, as I worked in my bindery, listening to my own story of humanity’s first encounter with an alien artifact, I thought about Clarke. A lot. And in thinking of him, and all that he accomplished, there was a danger, a tendency: to despair, to feel unworthy, to judge my own writing by his measure. Because I fall short, no matter how you look at it.
But that’s not what it’s all about. We all fall short of the best, at least in some areas. That does not negate the good work we do. Even Arthur C. Clarke had his failings. That does not change the fact that the world now is a poorer place for his absence.
Farewell, my old friend and mentor, though we never met.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 