Filed under: Brave New World, Emergency, Failure, Heinlein, ISS, NASA, National Geographic, Preparedness, Robert A. Heinlein, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Space X, Survival, tech, Weather | Tags: blogging, Diane Rehm, Everest, health, Heinlein, ISS, jim downey, NASA, predictions, science, Science Fiction, space, SpaceX, stupidity, survival, technology
Following up from Sunday…
“Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can’t help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime: the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough For Love
* * * * * * *
There was a very interesting discussion on the Diane Rehm show the other day with Stuart Firestein, who is the chairman of the Department of Biology at Columbia University as well as a professor of neuroscience. The whole thing is worth a listen, but in particular there were a couple of particular bits I wanted to share. Here’s the first:
So in your brain cells, one of the ways your brain cells communicate with each other is using a kind of electricity, bioelectricity or voltages. And we’re very good at recording electrical signals. I mean, your brain is also a chemical. Like the rest of your body it’s a kind of chemical plant. But part of the chemistry produces electrical responses.
And because our technology is very good at recording electrical responses we’ve spent the last 70 or 80 years looking at the electrical side of the brain and we’ve learned a lot but it steered us in very distinct directions, much — and we wound up ignoring much of the biochemical side of the brain as a result of it. And as it now turns out, seems to be a huge mistake in some of our ideas about learning and memory and how it works.
* * * * * * *
I stared at the body, blinking in disbelief. We were in the shadow of the First Step, so the light was dull. The body lay about 10 metres from where I stood and was angled away from me. It jerked – a horrible movement, like a puppet being pulled savagely by its strings.
We had been on a well-organised and, so far, successful trail towards the summit of Everest, worrying only about ourselves. Now a stranger lay across our path, moaning. Lhakpa shouted down at me and waved me to move on, to follow him up onto the Step. I looked back at the raggedly jerking figure.
* * * * * * *
From about halfway through Chapter 6 in Communion of Dreams:
“But smart how?”
Jon looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Well, there are lots of kinds of intelligence, and I’m not just talking about the reasoning/emotional/spatial/mechanical sorts of distinctions that we sometimes make. More fundamentally, how are they smart? Are they super-geniuses, able to easily figure out problems that stump us? Or maybe they’re very slow, but have been at this a very long time. Perhaps some sort of collective or racial intelligence, while each individual member of their species can barely put two and two together. There are a lot of different ways they can be intelligent.”
* * * * * * *
(Warning – the page from which the following comes contains gruesome images and text.)
Above a certain altitude, no human can ever acclimatize. Known as the Death Zone, only on 14 mountains worldwide can one step beyond the 8000 meter mark and know that no amount of training or conditioning will ever allow you to spend more than 48 hours there. The oxygen level in the Death Zone is only one third of the sea level value, which in simple terms means the body will use up its store of oxygen faster than breathing can replenish it.
In such conditions, odd things happen to human physical and mental states. A National Geographic climber originally on Everest to document Brian Blessed’s (ultimately botched) attempt at summiting, described the unsettling hallucinogenic effects of running out of oxygen in the Death Zone. The insides of his tent seemed to rise above him, taking on cathedral-like dimensions, robbing him of all strength, clouding his judgement. Any stay in the Death Zone without supplementary oxygen is like being slowly choked, all the while having to perform one of the hardest physical feats imaginable.
It makes you stupid.
* * * * * * *
Again, Stuart Firestein:
And in neuroscience, I can give you an example in the mid-1800s, phrenology. This idea that the bumps on your head, everybody has slightly different bumps on their head due to the shape of their skull. And you could tell something about a person’s personality by the bumps on their head. Now, we joke about it now. You can buy these phrenology busts in stores that show you where love is and where compassion is and where violence is and all that. It’s absolutely silly, but for 50 years it existed as a real science. And there are papers from learned scientists on it in the literature.
* * * * * * *
Update at 12:10 p.m. ET. Dragon Has Docked:
Dragon has finished docking with the International Space Station. That makes SpaceX the first private company to dock a cargo spacecraft to the space station.
That happened at exactly 12:02 p.m. ET, according to NASA.
* * * * * * *
“Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can’t help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime: the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”
Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough For Love
Last weekend four more people died attempting to summit Everest. Partly, this seems to have been due to the traffic on the mountain. Yeah, so many people are now attempting to climb the mountain that there are bottlenecks which occur, which can throw off calculations about how long a climb will take, how much supplemental oxygen is necessary, and whether weather will move in before climbers can reach safety.
In theory, everyone who attempts such a climb should know the odds. One in ten people who attempted the summit have died.
But we live in an age of accepted wonders. We think we’re smart enough to beat the odds.
Jim Downey
(PS: I hope to wrap up the third & final part of this set, get it posted this weekend.)
Filed under: Apollo program, Buzz Aldrin, Charlie Stross, Failure, Government, Man Conquers Space, NASA, Neil Armstrong, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Survival, tech, Travel | Tags: Apollo, Buzz Aldrin, jim downey, Michael Collins, Moon, NASA, Neil Armstrong, predictions, science, Science Fiction, technology, travel, xkcd
As something of a follow-up to yesterday’s post, first a quote:
The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space — each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
That’s the “roll over” text of this xkcd cartoon:
Can you name the nine who are left?*
And related to that, here is an excellent hour-long item you really should check out when you get a chance:
An Audience with Neil Armstrong
It’s in four parts, so you can watch them in chunks. And it really is very good. Armstrong has given very few interviews over the years, and has always been remarkably self-effacing. This is an informal discussion with the man, and it provides some wonderful insight into the whole NASA program in addition to the mindset which led to the Apollo 11 mission.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Charlie Stross, Failure, Feedback, General Musings, New Horizons, Predictions, Publishing, Science Fiction, Singularity, Society, Steampunk, Survival, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: blogging, Charlie Stross, jim downey, literature, predictions, reviews, Science Fiction, space, technology, writing
I’ve mentioned Charlie Stross several times here. As I’ve said previously: smart guy, good writer. I disagree with his belief in mundane science fiction, because I think that it is too limited in imagination. Which leads almost inevitably to this formulation on his blog today (and yes, you should go read the whole thing):
We people of the SF-reading ghetto have stumbled blinking into the future, and our dirty little secret is that we don’t much like it. And so we retreat into the comfort zones of brass goggles and zeppelins (hey, weren’t airships big in the 1910s-1930s? Why, then, are they such a powerful signifier for Victorian-era alternate fictions?), of sexy vampire-run nightclubs and starship-riding knights-errant. Opening the pages of a modern near-future SF novel now invites a neck-chillingly cold draft of wind from the world we’re trying to escape, rather than a warm narcotic vision of a better place and time.
And so I conclude: we will not inspire anyone with grand visions of a viable future through the medium of escapism. If we want to write inspirational literature with grand visions we need to dive into to the literary mainstream (which is finally rediscovering fabulism) and, adding a light admixture of Enlightenment ideology along the way, start writing the equivalent of those earnest and plausible hyper-realistic tales of Progress through cotton-planting on the shores of the Aral sea.
But do you really want us to do that? I don’t think so. In fact, the traditional response of traditional-minded SF readers to the rigorous exercise of extrapolative vision tends to be denial, disorientation, and distaste. So let me pose for you a different question, which has been exercising me for some time: If SF’s core message (to the extent that it ever had one) is obsolete, what do we do next?
Well, I dunno about Charlie, but I plan on writing a couple of prequels to Communion of Dreams, which I understand have touched something of a nerve in people precisely *because* it is hopeful in the face of a harsh reality.
Jim Downey
(PS: sometime today we should break through the level of 500 total sales/loans of CoD so far this month. Which is almost twice the previous month’s tally. Thanks for affirming my vision, folks!)
Filed under: Amazon, Failure, Gardening, Health, Marketing, Music, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, Survival, Violence | Tags: Amazon, David Bowie, Deathworld, direct publishing, gardening, Habaneros, Harry Harrison, health, jim downey, Kindle, literature, music, NPR, Pyrrus, Science Fiction, Thomas Jefferson, tomatoes
This ain’t Pyrrus.
* * * * * * *
About two weeks ago I mentioned this:
Oh, I know the reality of modern publishing well enough to realize that I would still have to do a lot of work to promote the book(s). But being able to hand most of that over to others would be worthwhile. And getting a sufficient amount of money in advance to take off some of the financial pressure of needing to earn money day in and day out would be a big help as well.
* * * * * * *
HATCH: For Jefferson’s to come out into this garden was sort of an affirmation of his vigor in so many different ways. And even at the age of 83, Jefferson read about giant cucumbers in a Cleveland, Ohio newspaper. And he wrote to the governor of Ohio and asked him for seeds of this cucumber, and passed them around to his friends in Charlottesville; grew them in his garden; typically measured how long each one was that came out of his garden. And Jefferson once wrote that although I’m an old man, I am but a young gardener.
* * * * * * *
It was a difficult year. A painful year. And while that pain has lessened over the months, it still causes difficulties for me in terms of limiting my energy and ability to focus on what I need to do.
I’m 53. Be 54 in July. Overall, I’m in much better health than I could be, as my doc reminded me at my recent annual physical. I don’t like to think of myself as being limited in what I can do. Oh, I have no illusions that I’m still 20 or anything, but still I find it frustrating that there is this factor which intrudes on my ability to accomplish things.
* * * * * * *
This ain’t Pyrrus. The gravity isn’t twice Earth normal. All the flora and fauna isn’t dedicated to the notion that it should kill me as quickly as possible, and I don’t have to be in peak physical condition at all times to just have a *chance* to survive each day.
That’s what most people remember about Harry Harrison’s classic novel Deathworld, if they remember anything at all. What is too often forgotten is that the real story was one of adaptation and learning to live with the environment of Pyrrus rather than just battling it in a forever war.
And out of necessity, that is the lessen I am going to attempt with my garden this year. Where for most of the last decade I have put a huge amount of effort into trying to keep the local critters out of my substantial garden, I just don’t have the time or energy for that now.
I’m scaling back the whole garden – yeah, a bunch of hot peppers, but other than that I’m just going to plant a half dozen or so tomato plants. Enough to provide us fresh toms this summer and fall, perhaps with some extra for a couple batches of sauce. But I’m not going to try and set up to can my usual 60 pints of chopped tomatoes and a couple dozen pints of sauce. And I’m not going to put down a double layer of landscape fabric to keep down weeds. Perhaps most importantly, I’m not going to set up a 200′ perimeter deer fence 7′ tall with a 2′ chicken wire base to try and keep out all the critters. I’ll take some other steps to try and keep the individual plants safe, but that’s it.
This is a big change for me. I really enjoyed gardening the way I have for the last few years. But I just don’t have the necessary energy to do it, given the other things I have to see to.
But everyone makes those decisions. You have to change, or you die.
Maybe this place is more like Pyrrus than I thought.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Bruce Schneier, Civil Rights, Constitution, Government, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Terrorism, Travel, Violence | Tags: bruce schneier, kip hawley, politics
It’s time to wake up.
Bruce Schneier and Kip Hawley had a good debate recently in the pages of the Economist over the proposition: “This house believes that changes made to airport security since 9/11 have done more harm than good.”
Both of the primaries in the debate make their points about as solidly as they can be made, in my opinion, and the ensuing back & forth and discussion with other participants was . . . vigorous.
I wasn’t surprised at the result, though the moderator seems to have been. Here’s an excerpt from his final statement:
I thought Kip Hawley would have the tougher role as the opposer, but I have still been surprised at the vehemence and quantity of the views expressed in favour. The debate was American in emphasis, and the tetchiness of the relationship between many Americans and the TSA is perhaps something this Briton hadn’t fully appreciated. In Britain, where airports employ their own security, we lack the monolithic body on which to focus anger about liquids in hand luggage, shoe-removal and the like.
Voters have roundly declared that the frustrations, the delays, the loss of liberty and the increase in fear that characterise their interactions with airport-security procedures vastly outweigh the good these procedures achieve. For some, indeed, the benefits are essentially non-existent: any sensible terrorist can find a work-around or choose a different point of attack, as Bruce Schneier explains. And so the widely expressed hope is that changes made to security in the (near) future will make the whole regime less reactive, more rational, more flexible and more intelligence-driven. The results of this debate suggest that these changes should be made with some urgency: passengers are angry.
As I said, no surprise to me. That’s because the actual problem isn’t with security, it is with liberty. I think that this has been the main problem all along – the governmental response to the 9/11 attacks were understandable, predictable, and almost completely misguided. From Schneier’s closing statement:
The current TSA measures create an even greater harm: loss of liberty. Airports are effectively rights-free zones. Security officers have enormous power over you as a passenger. You have limited rights to refuse a search. Your possessions can be confiscated. You cannot make jokes, or wear clothing, that airport security does not approve of. You cannot travel anonymously. (Remember when we would mock Soviet-style “show me your papers” societies? That we’ve become inured to the very practice is a harm.) And if you’re on a certain secret list, you cannot fly, and you enter a Kafkaesque world where you cannot face your accuser, protest your innocence, clear your name, or even get confirmation from the government that someone, somewhere, has judged you guilty. These police powers would be illegal anywhere but in an airport, and we are all harmed—individually and collectively—by their existence.
And this is *exactly* what was desired by Osama bin Laden all along: to prompt us to react in fear, to incur huge expenses in trying to make ourselves ‘safe’, and to stress the very foundations of our society. Again, from Schneier:
Increased fear is the final harm, and its effects are both emotional and physical. By sowing mistrust, by stripping us of our privacy—and in many cases our dignity—by taking away our rights, by subjecting us to arbitrary and irrational rules, and by constantly reminding us that this is the only thing between us and death by the hands of terrorists, the TSA and its ilk are sowing fear. And by doing so, they are playing directly into the terrorists’ hands.
The goal of terrorism is not to crash planes, or even to kill people; the goal of terrorism is to cause terror. Liquid bombs, PETN, planes as missiles: these are all tactics designed to cause terror by killing innocents. But terrorists can only do so much. They cannot take away our freedoms. They cannot reduce our liberties. They cannot, by themselves, cause that much terror. It’s our reaction to terrorism that determines whether or not their actions are ultimately successful. That we allow governments to do these things to us—to effectively do the terrorists’ job for them—is the greatest harm of all.
Complete safety is an illusion. A fantasy. I know most people don’t want to actually think about that, but the truth is that living is a terminal disease and there’s more than a fair chance you will suffer your share of accidents along the way. Accept that, and you can go through your life trying to minimize those while maximizing your happiness. But if you are obsessed with never being at risk – if you let fear control you – then you will be controlled by others.
I’ve written a lot about terrorism (64 tags), and violence (82), and civil rights (102) over the years, going on and on about how our privacy and even our dignity have been eroded by unthinking fear. I guess I have long since passed the point of being a crank about this in general and the TSA in particular.
But this is important. Essential, I would say, for the life of our Republic. We’ve stumbled. Just as we have stumbled before in the face of a shocking attack. We’ve stumbled in blind panic. We’ve all been through a kind of societal Posttraumatic stress disorder. And the time has come to shake off the fear response, to once again engage the thinking parts of our brains. Only then can we hope to recover not just life, but also liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Jim Downey
*Of course: “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear… And when it is gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear is gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
Filed under: BoingBoing, DARPA, Government, Humor, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, tech, YouTube
Ah, looking around, seeing the different components of the rise of the machines. Here’s a nice bit from BoingBoing:
And then this news item: Police Drone Crashes into Police
Make that “tired and embarrassed.”
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Emergency, Flu, Government, Pandemic, Publishing, Science Fiction, Survival, tech, Violence, Writing stuff
As we’re closing in on having Communion of Dreams ready to go out in both digital and print form, I’ve been thinking about changes in story-telling formats. And I’ve just seen an exceptional example of just that, even though I’ve never been fond of horror movies/books, and the zombie genre in particular. It’s brilliant, though some of the images are disturbing.
Be sure to start down at “Day 1”. http://www.reddit.com/user/Vidzilla/submitted/
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi.)
A good friend posted this to her Facebook status:
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Recognize that? It’s from Steve Jobs.
Now, I’m not a Jobs fanboy. I’m not that big into Apple products. But at least in this regard, I think that Jobs had the right perspective. Your time here is limited. You are going to die. We all die. Live your life on your terms insofar as possible.
Jobs, by all reports, tried to hang onto life with all of the resources available to a billionaire, including a liver transplant and experimental treatments. I hope that he found the quality of life he had in the last years of his life satisfactory, on his terms.
Not a choice I would make. Nor, it seems, would it be the choice for most doctors:
Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.
The whole article is worth reading.
I don’t mean to be morbid, here at the end of the year. Usually, this is a time set aside for celebration – either for celebrating a good year past, or celebrating the hope of the new year to come. So talking about death may be a bit ‘of a downer’, to use a phrase more popular when I was a young man. But I think it is important to be honest with ourselves that our time is limited, and we should make the most of it on our own terms.
Happy New Year.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Depression, Failure, General Musings, Health, Migraine, Predictions, Survival
“So, how’re you doing?”
It’s the sort of question which comes after all the preliminary stuff, all the catching-up with an old friend who I haven’t seen in a couple of years. Your best friends are like that: able to ask the same question that everyone asks, but have it mean something more.
* * * * * * *
This morning I woke up, not hurting.
This was unexpected. Yesterday had been a long day, and I hurt a lot. The source of the pain was just a minor case of post-nasal drip. No, that didn’t hurt. But it caused me to do a fair amount of coughing. That’s what hurt. Yeah, because of the torn intercostal muscle high on my right side, which feels like a broken rib. The one I’ve had for about 16 months now.
So I expected to hurt. In fact, most of the time I expect to hurt.
Chronic pain is different than short-term pain. Oh, I’ve broken plenty of bones, and know what it means to *really* hurt for days, and then to ache for weeks. For a couple of decades now I’ve had a knee which can cause an immense amount of pain if I subject it to the wrong kind of use, and that pain will remain intense for a week or so. Pain is no stranger in my life. Never has been.
But chronic pain, that’s different, as I’ve come to learn. It almost takes on a physical weight, which you have to carry around. That wears you out, sometimes sooner in the day, sometimes later. It functions like a restraint you have to strain against to accomplish anything. It’s like having a migraine – a full fledged, nausea-inducing, sparkly lights & mild vertigo migraine – and still having to drive over an icy road into the sun.
* * * * * * *
My garden still hasn’t been put to bed for the year. Yeah, it’s really late.
It’s just one manifestation of how this year has gone. Everything has taken longer than I expected, cost more than I thought it would, and didn’t work out quite the way I hoped it to.
Partly this is due to the chronic pain. Partly it is due to mistakes on my part. Partly it is just because of chance. By turns this has made me depressed, disappointed, disgusted. Sometimes even on the brink of despair.
And yet…
* * * * * * *
“So, how’re you doing?”
It’s the sort of question which comes after all the preliminary stuff, all the catching-up with an old friend who I haven’t seen in a couple of years. Your best friends are like that: able to ask the same question that everyone asks, but have it mean something more. I am fortunate enough to have several such close friends.
“It’s been a long year. And not a good one.” I looked at my friend. She nodded. “But I’ve had worse. And I’ve had an idea about a new story I want to tell…”
Jim Downey
Was captivated by this story on TAM this weekend, was delighted to see that someone had done a short video of it:
Nice adaptation.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 