Filed under: Augmented Reality, Brave New World, Connections, Humor, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Space, Stephen Hawking | Tags: augmented reality, black holes, blogging, Communion of Dreams, humor, jim downey, physics, predictions, science, Science Fiction, singularity, space, St. Cybi's Well, Stephen Hawking, technology, writing
From Chapter 3 of Communion of Dreams:
Apparent Gravity was the third major application of the theories set forth in Hawking’s Conundrum, the great opus of
Stephen Hawking which was not published until after his death in the earlier part of the century. He hadn’t released the work because evidently even he couldn’t really believe that it made any sense. It was, essentially, both too simple and too complex. And since he had died just shortly before the Fire-flu, with the chaos that brought, there had been a lag in his theory being fully understood and starting to be applied.But it did account for all the established data, including much of the stuff that seemed valid but didn’t fit inside the previous paradigms. Using his theories, scientists and engineers learned that the structure of space itself could be manipulated.
Of course, that is the reality of St. Cybi’s Well, not our own. In our reality, there’s been no fire-flu (at least yet), Stephen Hawking is still alive, and the laws of physics are still the same.
Black holes are in crisis. Well, not them, but the people who think about them, theoretical physicists who try to understand the relationship between the two pillars of modern physics, general relativity and quantum physics. Judging from the current discussions, one of the two must go, at least in their present formulation. On January 22nd, Stephen Hawking posted a paper where he bluntly stated that black holes, in the sense of being objects that can trap light and everything else indefinitely, are no more. And that’s a big deal.
Sometimes I wonder what reality I am actually plugged into, since it seems that I keep getting leaks from the other one.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Brave New World, Connections, Feedback, General Musings, Google, Humor, Kindle, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Travel, Wales | Tags: 1991, Amazon, blogging, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, electronics, feedback, free, Google Earth, humor, Jamie Norris, jim downey, Kindle, predictions, promotion, science, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, Steve Cichon, technology, travel, Typhoon, video, Wales
It’s a view of Wales most of us will never see.
This video was filmed from the cockpit of a Typhoon fighter jet which flies over North Wales before heading to the Lake District.
The man behind the controls is Flight Lieutenant Jamie Norris, the RAF’s Typhoon display pilot and a member of RAF Coningsby, based in Lincolnshire, who calmly talks viewers through his manoeuvres at altitudes of between 250ft and 40,000ft.
There’s an embedded video which is a real delight, too, for anyone who isn’t afraid of heights/motion.
I haven’t flown at low altitude over Wales, so I can’t really speak as to how this compares to the slower velocity of a small plane or helicopter. However, I was struck by just how similar the video is to viewing the same terrain via Google Earth, which I have done a *lot* of in the last couple of months as I write St. Cybi’s Well. The ability to zoom in, rotate orientation, and even change the angle to the horizon allows you very much get the sense of flying through the landscape — it’s a very cool technology.
And speaking of very cool technology, just thought I’d share this little item, which gives a nice bit of perspective: Everything from 1991 Radio Shack ad I now do with my phone. It’s a pretty impressive list, and shows how a whole pile of electronics valued at about $5,000 in today’s money has been replaced by a smartphone that fits in your pocket and costs about $500.
And speaking of 500 … that’s about the total number of world-wide downloads of Communion of Dreams so far in the current promotion. Which in itself is a pretty cool bit of technology. If you haven’t yet gotten your copy of the Kindle edition of the book (which you can read on, yes, smartphones as well as any number of other devices), pop over and get it today!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Connections, Emergency, Failure, General Musings, Government, Humor, Kindle, Marketing, movies, NASA, Nuclear weapons, Phil Plait, Predictions, Preparedness, Promotion, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech, YouTube | Tags: Amazon, asteroid, Bad Astronomy, blogging, Chelyabinsk, Command and Control, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, Dr. Strangelove, Eric Schlosser, free, Herman Kahn., humor, jim downey, Kindle, movies, NASA, nuclear weapons, Phil Plait, predictions, promotion, science, Science Fiction, space, technology, The New Yorker, USSR, video, www youtube
Next Wednesday is the 50th anniversary of the release of the classic film “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” It’s long been one of my favorite movies, even as a kid. Yeah, I was a strange kid. Don’t act like you’re surprised.
Anyway, Eric Schlosser has a good article in The New Yorker reflecting on how the movie, originally considered a farce, was actually frighteningly accurate. From the article:
A decade after the release of “Strangelove,” the Soviet Union began work on the Perimeter system—-a network of sensors and computers that could allow junior military officials to launch missiles without oversight from the Soviet leadership. Perhaps nobody at the Kremlin had seen the film. Completed in 1985, the system was known as the Dead Hand. Once it was activated, Perimeter would order the launch of long-range missiles at the United States if it detected nuclear detonations on Soviet soil and Soviet leaders couldn’t be reached. Like the Doomsday Machine in “Strangelove,” Perimeter was kept secret from the United States; its existence was not revealed until years after the Cold War ended.
“Detecting nuclear detonations” … hmm, where have I heard that phrase recently? Oh, yeah:
A Sound of Cosmic Thunder: Earth-Impacting Asteroid Heard by Nuke Detectors
On the second day of 2014, a small asteroid blew up high in Earth’s atmosphere. It was relatively harmless—the rock was only a couple of meters across, far too small to hit the ground or do any real damage—and it disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean anyway.
What’s cool is that now we know for sure this is the case: Infrasound detectors designed to listen for nuclear bomb detonations actually heard the explosion from the impact and were able to pinpoint the location of the event to a few hundred kilometers east off the coast of Venezuela.
NASA put together a nice informative video explaining it:
Gee, it sure is a good thing nothing like that has ever hit the territory of the old USSR … er, oops.
And now that I’ve given you a nice dose of fright, let me make it up to you with a reminder that you can download Communion of Dreams (which has it all … game theory, nuclear exchanges, and more than a little of my old strangeness) for free today and tomorrow!
Jim Downey
*The title of one of Herman Kahn‘s books about nuclear war/deterrence, and where I think I was first exposed to the concepts behind game theory. I’ve got Schlosser’s book Command and Control on my to-read list when the Kindle price comes down a bit.
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Bipolar, Connections, Failure, Feedback, Health, Hospice, NPR, Preparedness, Science, Society, Writing stuff | Tags: All Things Considered, Alzheimer's, bipolar, blogging, Dark Playground, health, hospice, humor, jim downey, Morning Edition, NPR, predictions, procrastination, psychology, scarcity, science, Sendhil Mullainathan, St. Cybi's Well, Tim Wilson, Wait But Why, writing
OK, actually more like four. Maybe. Kinda. Sorta.
You’ll see.
* * *
Interesting item on this morning’s Morning Edition, looking at a new book about how scarcity has a psychological impact which pushes people to make poor choices. The transcript isn’t up yet, so here’s just one passage from the interview with co-author Sendhil Mullainathan:
When you have scarcity and it creates a scarcity mindset, it leads you to take certain behaviors which in the short term help you manage scarcity, but in the long term only make matters worse.
Specifically, it’s a coping strategy: by setting aside some long-term problem, you actually have more time to deal with urgent short-term problems. This is a very normal human reaction, and actually even makes evolutionary sense — not getting eaten today is more important than where that glacier up the mountain will be next year.
I still remember a poster my Resident Advisor had up on her wall in college, which distilled this problem nicely. It said (with appropriate humorous graphic): “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s easy to forget that you came here to drain the swamp.”
* * *
I’ve … struggled … with procrastination all my life. Sometimes more successfully than at other times. It can manifest as lethargy. Or writer’s block. Or simple distraction.
And I learned a long, long time ago that that struggle was made worse when I was confronted with other stressors in my life. A bad bipolar cycle. Financial stress. Emotional stress. Simple lack of sufficient sleep. Just look back through my blog posts while we were doing care-giving for Martha Sr, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.
So when I see someone come up with an interesting take on procrastination, I pay attention. Here’s a very good one:
In the monkey world, he’s got it all figured out—if you eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re tired, and don’t do anything difficult, you’re a pretty successful monkey. The problem for the procrastinator is that he happens to live in the human world, making the Instant Gratification Monkey a highly unqualified navigator. Meanwhile, the Rational Decision-Maker, who was trained to make rational decisions, not to deal with competition over the controls, doesn’t know how to put up an effective fight—he just feels worse and worse about himself the more he fails and the more the suffering procrastinator whose head he’s in berates him.
It’s a mess. And with the monkey in charge, the procrastinator finds himself spending a lot of time in a place called the Dark Playground.*
The Dark Playground is a place every procrastinator knows well. It’s a place where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening. The fun you have in the Dark Playground isn’t actually fun because it’s completely unearned and the air is filled with guilt, anxiety, self-hatred, and dread. Sometimes the Rational Decision-Maker puts his foot down and refuses to let you waste time doing normal leisure things, and since the Instant Gratification Monkey sure as hell isn’t gonna let you work, you find yourself in a bizarre purgatory of weird activities where everyone loses.**
* * *
There was a great story yesterday afternoon on All Things Considered, about a little boy who was terrified by a statue of Frankenstein(‘s Monster). It was funny, charming, and insightful.
What insight? This one:
“Well, your nephew is a brilliant story editor,'” says psychologist Tim Wilson of the University of Virginia.
Wilson has been studying how small changes in a person’s own stories and memories can help with emotional health. He calls the process “story editing.” And he says that small tweaks in the interpretation of life events can reap huge benefits.
This process is essentially what happens during months, or years, of therapy. But Wilson has discovered ways you can change your story in only about 45 minutes.
* * *
There’s a second part to that item about procrastination I posted above (hence my ambivalence about whether this blog entry was about three things or four):
There’s only one way to truly beat procrastination:
You need to prove to yourself that you can do it. You need to show yourself you can do it, not tell yourself. Things will change when you show yourself that they can. Until then, you won’t believe it, and nothing will change. Think of yourself like a basketball player on a cold streak. For basketball players, it’s all about confidence, and an ice cold shooter can tell himself 1000 times, “I’m a great shooter, I’m going to hit this next one,” but it’s not until he physically hits a shot that his confidence goes up and his touch comes back. So how do you start hitting shots?
* * *
3) Aim for slow, steady progress—Storylines are rewritten one page at a time.In the same way a great achievement happens unglorious brick by unglorious brick, a deeply-engrained habit like procrastination doesn’t change all at once, it changes one modest improvement at a time. Remember, this is all about showing yourself you can do it, so the key isn’t to be perfect, but to simply improve. The author who writes one page a day has written a book after a year. The procrastinator who gets slightly better every week is a totally changed person a year later.So don’t think about going from A to Z—just start with A to B. Change the Storyline from “I procrastinate on every hard task I do” to “Once a week, I do a hard task without procrastinating.” If you can do that, you’ve started a trend. I’m still a wretched procrastinator, but I’m definitely better than I was last year, so I feel hopeful about the future.
* * *
Wait — I said three things? Or maybe four?
I suppose it’s really only one, after all.
Time for me to get back to work.
Jim Downey
Filed under: ACLU, Brave New World, Civil Rights, Connections, Government, Predictions, Privacy, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: civil liberties, Constitution, government, jim downey, Jonathan Turley, NSA, predictions, privacy, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, technology, writing
I’ve complained a number of times recently about how revelations of spying and other government activity from our reality keep messing up my efforts to depict a growing dystopian society in St. Cybi’s Well. It’s happened again, and I’m gonna just give up on the effort to try and stay ahead. I swear, it’s like my ideas keep bleeding over into this existence.
What am I talking about? Well, here’s a passage from what I call the “Prelude” to St. Cybi’s Well, which I wrote months ago:
He turned the hand-held on, did a quick check to make sure it had the software and apps he’d asked for. Everything was there. He’d pick up a burner phone later, and swap the SIMM card into the hand-held. He turned off the hand-held, dropped it into a special pocket inside his vest – one which was RF-blocked. He had another such compartment in his satchel. These, like the wallet/holster, were prohibited items and grounds for arrest in the States, but while they would raise an eyebrow in the UK they weren’t technically illegal.
Got it? For the world of St. Cybi’s Well it is *illegal* in the US to own a wallet or have a pocket which is hidden from government surveillance. For me, this was one way to draw a distinction between that society, and our own.
Well, guess what is in the news today:
There is a truly bizarre case out of Ohio where Norman Gurley, 30, was arrested for having a hidden compartment in his car. However, there were no drugs or guns or anything illegal in the compartment. Indeed, there was nothing illegal in the car or on Gurley. However, just have a hidden compartment in your car can now be charged as a crime in Ohio.
*Sigh*
Jim Downey
Filed under: Arthur C. Clarke, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Brave New World, Expert systems, Humor, Marketing, movies, Paleo-Future, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, tech, TIME Magazine | Tags: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke, artificial intelligence, blogging, Communion of Dreams, HAL, HAL9000, humor, jim downey, movies, predictions, Science Fiction, Seth, St. Cybi's Well, technology
One with an ‘expert’ like Seth from Communion of Dreams?
Or maybe, a little closer to our own time, say one which includes something like HAL from 2001?
Ha! Sucker. You should know that reality would prove to be more … banal. And corporate. Like this:
The phone call came from a charming woman with a bright, engaging voice to the cell phone of a TIME Washington Bureau Chief Michael Scherer. She wanted to offer a deal on health insurance, but something was fishy.
When Scherer asked point blank if she was a real person, or a computer-operated robot voice, she replied enthusiastically that she was real, with a charming laugh. But then she failed several other tests. When asked “What vegetable is found in tomato soup?” she said she did not understand the question. When asked multiple times what day of the week it was yesterday, she complained repeatedly of a bad connection.
Over the course of the next hour, several TIME reporters called her back, working to uncover the mystery of her bona fides. Her name, she said, was Samantha West, and she was definitely a robot, given the pitch perfect repetition of her answers. Her goal was to ask a series of questions about health coverage—”Are you on Medicare?” etc.—and then transfer the potential customer to a real person, who could close the sale.
Hmm, I think I can still work “Samantha” into St. Cybi’s Well …
Jim Downey
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Brave New World, Civil Rights, Comics, Connections, Constitution, Government, Humor, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Privacy, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Terrorism, Writing stuff | Tags: augmented reality, blogging, comics, Constitution, Edward Snowden, government, humor, jim downey, Non Sequitur, NSA, politics, predictions, privacy, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, technology, Washington Post, writing
As I’ve noted before, it’s hard to keep up with the steady trickle of revelations about what the NSA has been up to, and how the reality of what has actually been going on keeps surpassing the dystopian aspects I have been writing about in St. Cybi’s Well. For example, here’s this passage from the beginning of the book:
He turned the hand-held on, did a quick check to make sure it had the software and apps he’d asked for. Everything was there. He’d pick up a burner phone later, and swap the SIMM card into the hand-held. He turned off the hand-held, dropped it into a special pocket inside his vest – one which was RF-blocked. He had another such compartment in his satchel. These, like the wallet/holster, were prohibited items and grounds for arrest in the States, but while they would raise an eyebrow in the UK they weren’t technically illegal.
With this item from yesterday’s Washington Post revelations that the NSA and related agencies are basically tracking every cell phone on the planet:
The NSA’s capabilities to track location are staggering, based on the Snowden documents, and indicate that the agency is able to render most efforts at communications security effectively futile.
Like encryption and anonymity tools online, which are used by dissidents, journalists and terrorists alike, security-minded behavior — using disposable cellphones and switching them on only long enough to make brief calls — marks a user for special scrutiny. CO-TRAVELER takes note, for example, when a new telephone connects to a cell tower soon after another nearby device is used for the last time.
Now, see, I was thinking I’d use something exactly like that as the ‘rude surprise’ which would trip up my protagonist later in the novel, since he wouldn’t expect that the NSA would have that level of data-collection ability.
*Sigh.* So much for my trying to come up with a dystopian reality …
And this is timely:
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Connections, Failure, Feedback, General Musings, Health, Hospice, Kindle, Marketing, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction | Tags: Alzheimer's, Amazon, blogging, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, feedback, free, health, Her Final Year, hospice, jim downey, John Bourke, Kindle, literature, predictions, promotion, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, writing
So, without a lot of fanfare I went ahead and scheduled a two-day promotion for the Kindle edition of Communion of Dreams the other day, as mentioned. After I posted something about it on Facebook, John Bourke, my primary co-author on Her Final Year asked whether we might as well do a similar promotion for the Kindle edition of that book. D’oh! An oversight on my part.
But, I think, an understandable one. Right now I’m focused on writing St. Cybi’s Well, the prequel to Communion of Dreams. So there’s that.
And there’s something else. This passage from a post last February sums it up for me:
I am frequently struck just how much of our life doesn’t make sense until seen from a distance. Just recently I was surprised at the revelation of *why* the failure of Her Final Year to be more successful bothered me as much as it did: it was because I had seen the book as being a way to create something positive (for the world) out of the experience of being a long-term care provider. To have the book only reach a limited audience was, in my mind, saying that our roles as care-givers didn’t matter.
Yeah, that. In a word: disappointment.
And when things disappoint, it is only natural to disengage somewhat from them, to not sink a lot of additional emotional energy into it. At some point you just say “well, OK, that’s done — time to move on.”
Except moving on isn’t always the best course, or even possible. John reminded me of that. So I went ahead and scheduled the promotion for Her Final Year to run the same time as the one for Communion of Dreams did.
And guess what? Her Final Year, for the very first time, did better in terms of the number of downloads than Communion of Dreams did. Not by a lot — just a dozen books — but still, it did better. Whereas in the past when we did promotions for the two books at the same time, CoD almost always did better, by upwards of a factor of 10. And for the first time, one of my books was downloaded through the Amazon Australia portal. Guess which one it was. Right: HFY. And I think that’s pretty cool.
Now, the numbers in either case aren’t huge. Just 271 copies of Communion of Dreams, and 283 copies of Her Final Year. But I find myself somewhat surprisingly pleased.
I hope you had a similarly good Thanksgiving holiday.
Jim Downey
PS: If you missed this promotion, don’t worry. For people who get new computers/readers/mobile devices, we’ll repeat in shortly after Christmas. And of course you can always just go to the links above and buy either book for only $3.01.
Filed under: Failure, Feedback, Predictions, Publishing, Science Fiction, Writing stuff | Tags: blogging, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, jim downey, Kickstarter, predictions, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, writing
I just put up the following update on my Kickstarter page:
13 months ago this Kickstarter project was successfully funded. You guys did your part in supporting it. I wish I could say that I’ve completed my end of the deal.
But I haven’t, in spite of my best intentions and hard work. This happened for all the usual reasons creative projects get delayed, some of which I have discussed on my blog — you can find them under the tag St. Cybi’s Well if you are interested.
Now, I am actually making great progress working on the book. The structure and format is all laid out, and presently I am working through writing the text systematically. I’m excited about it, to the point of being a bit obsessed, and when I’m not having panic attacks about being a complete hack of a writer (I’ve yet to meet a writer who doesn’t occasionally have such attacks) I get the sense that this may be the best thing I’ve written to date.
But progress isn’t completion. So this is my mea culpa, and an offer: if you backed this Kickstarter in good faith, and want a refund, just drop me a note to jim@communionofdreams.com and we’ll work things out. Now, I hope that you won’t. But I will understand if you do. We had a contract, and I have not fulfilled my obligations.
For those who don’t want a refund, here’s as realistic a progress report as I can offer: I think I’m about a third to halfway to completion of the book, and I hope to have it ready for editing in three or four months. One good aspect of how I am creating this book is that the manuscript should require much less reworking/redrafting when done. So, ideally, it should be ready for publishing sometime in the Spring of next year, with the various hand-bound editions and whatnot to follow.
Like I said, that’s my best estimate. But I also honestly thought when I launched this Kickstarter that I could have the book completed and rewards out by this point in time. The last year has taught me that sometimes you can’t force or predict creativity, no matter what your best intentions are.
One last thing: for those who decide to stick with the Kickstarter, I’ll find some way of enhancing your chosen reward. Not sure what that will be at this time, and I am open to suggestions.
Thanks, everyone!
Just thought I’d share that.
Jim Downey
PS: I just want to add that I’m not beating myself up over this missed deadline. Publishing has *always* had to take into account the fact that writing a book is a necessarily unpredictable process, and that it is foolish to try and be too hard-nosed about time schedules. But as I told another friend, in this case I felt that I had a direct relationship, a contract if you will, with the Kickstarter backers and that they deserved both an explanation and a option for making adjustments. So don’t worry.
Communion Of Dreams 