Filed under: Connections, DARPA, Guns, H. G. Wells, Mars, Music, Paleo-Future, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, tech, YouTube | Tags: blogging, DARPA, H.G. Wells, Jeff Wayne, jim downey, laser, literature, Martians, music, predictions, science, Science Fiction, technology, Thunderchild, War of the Worlds, www youtube
A news item you may have seen:
Fighter jets to be fitted with laser weapons for 2014
Very soon the U.S. Military will be fitting some of their fighter jets with real laser weapons. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) says that the new laser system will be fitted onto jet aircraft in 2014 as a defensive weapon capable of knocking out missiles and other projectiles while in flight.
If you’ve been waiting for the future to finally get here, just go ahead and mark your calendar for 2014. It was recently announced that the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) would be retrofitting some U.S. military jets with actual 150KW lasers that will be able to knock missiles out of the sky.
The new laser weapons are part of DARPA’s High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System and are purportedly being fitted as a defensive measure specifically for knocking projectiles out of the sky such as surface-to-air missiles or any type of larger projectile. The exact specifics of the system’s capability are still classified.
This may … ring a bell:
Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some invisible jet impinged upon them and flashed into white flame. It was as if each man were suddenly and momentarily turned to fire.
Then, by the light of their own destruction, I saw them staggering and falling, and their supporters turning to run.
I stood staring, not as yet realizing that this was death leaping from man to man in that little distant crowd. All I felt was that it was something very strange. An almost noiseless and blinding flash of light, and a man fell head-long and lay still; and as the unseen shaft of heat passed over them, pine-trees burst into fire, and every dry furze-bush became with one dull thud a mass of flames. And far away towards Knaphill I saw the flashes of trees and hedges and wooden buildings suddenly set alight.
It was sweeping round swiftly and steadily, this flaming death, this invisible, inevitable sword of heat.
Small wonder that I’ve had this song kicking around in my head, from what is probably a largely-forgotten concept album 35 years old.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Connections, Fireworks, Gene Roddenberry, Man Conquers Space, NASA, Phil Plait, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Star Trek, Survival, YouTube | Tags: Bad Astronomy, Bill Nye, blogging, jim downey, NASA, Neil deGrasse Tyson, predictions, science, Science Fiction, space, Star Trek, video, www youtube
Unsurprisingly, this has been making the rounds among my friends:
I say “unsurprisingly” because a lot of my friends are reacting to yesterday’s well-documented meteor explosion in the Ural mountains (Russia), and today’s near-pass of a much larger body:
As noted in the various science stories, 2012 DA14 is about 150 feet in diameter, and would have about the same effect were it to hit the Earth as Meteor Crater, depending on the exact composition, speed and angle of approach of the meteor. If you want to play with the variables, here’s a simulator I’ve had fun playing with in the past Impact: Earth!
On one end of the range of effects would be just another bright light in the sky, as the thing exploded in the upper atmosphere. On the other end, another mile-wide crater where a city used to be. Fun, eh? And remember – 2012 DA14 was just discovered last year, and then by pure chance. There are any number of such potential threats out in space. As the Washington Post puts it:
For the foreseeable future, then, Earth will continue to reside in a cosmic shooting gallery with an enormous number of currently unknown objects, some of which may have a direct bead on us without our knowing. While it is probably much more unlikely than likely, a potentially disastrous collision with an asteroid of at least the dimensions comparable to DA14 could occur anytime possibly with little or no warning in our lifetimes.
Keep your fingers crossed that our luck — and our atmospheric ‘shields’ — continue to hold until we no longer have all of our eggs in this particular basket.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Art, Blade Runner, Connections, Depression, Failure, Flu, General Musings, Health, Philip K. Dick, Ridley Scott, Science, Science Fiction, Scientific American, Society, Writing stuff, YouTube | Tags: Alzheimer's, art, bipolar, Blade Runner, blogging, care-giving, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, health, Her Final Year, hospice, jim downey, John Bourke, Kickstarter, memoir, memory, New York Review of Books, Oliver Sacks, parainfluenza, Philip K. Dick, reality, science, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, video, writing, www youtube
Of late, as I have been slowly getting over the rather nasty bout of parainfluenza I mentioned previously, shedding the more annoying and disgusting symptoms, I’ve also come to realize that just now I am pulling out of the depressive trough of one of my long-term bipolar cycles. It wasn’t a particularly bad trough, and was somewhat mitigated by the success of the Kickstarter back in the fall. Nonetheless, it was there, as I can see in hindsight.
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.
Which isn’t true, of course, but that was the emotional reality which I had been dealing with. The “narrative truth”, if you will. A term I borrow from a very interesting meditation by Oliver Sacks at the New York Review of Books website titled Speak, Memory. From the article:
There is, it seems, no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections. We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true (as Helen Keller was in a very good position to note) depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected. (The neuroscientist Gerald M. Edelman often speaks of perceiving as “creating,” and remembering as “recreating” or “recategorizing.”) Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory, and follows from its basis and mechanisms in the human brain. The wonder is that aberrations of a gross sort are relatively rare, and that, for the most part, our memories are relatively solid and reliable.
Let me repeat one bit of that: “Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves.”
I think this is at the very heart of why fiction has such power, and appeal. I also think that it explains the well-documented phenomenon of people believing things which are clearly and demonstratively false, if their facts come from a trusted source.
Little surprise that writers of fiction are aware of this very human trait, and have explored it in all manner of ways. I have a note here on my desk, a scrawl written on a scrap of paper some months ago as I was thinking through character motivations in St. Cybi’s Well, which says simply: “We take our truths from the people we trust.”
And here’s another example, from one of my favorite movies, exploring a favorite theme of Philip K. Dick’s:
That theme? The nature of reality. And this is how the Sacks essay closes:
Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.
In other words, that reality is a shared construct. A Communion of Dreams, if you will.
Time for me to get back to work.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Astronomy, NASA, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Space, tech, YouTube | Tags: art, Communion of Dreams, jim downey, laser, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mona Lisa, Moon, NASA, predictions, science, Science Fiction, space, technology, video, www youtube
I don’t want to reveal any spoilers, but here’s a passage from Chapter 15 of Communion of Dreams:
The moment the projector was set down and turned on, Jon could see what had them all so excited. There were flashes of light coming from the image of the ship, clearly directed back at the ASA.
“It’s brilliant. They’re using the point-defense lasers designed for clearing away debris in their path as strobes, to communicate with us,” said Gish.
Gregor nodded. “Yes, yes. Simple digital message, as fast as lasers can be switched on and off. Not designed for communications,so cannot transmit as much data as normal. But pretty good.”
Why do I mention this? Well, guess what’s just been done by NASA? Take a look:
Here’s an excerpt from the associated article:
NASA has turned the Mona Lisa into the first digital image to be transmitted via laser beam from Earth to a spacecraft in lunar orbit, nearly 240,000 miles away, thanks to a technology that may soon become routine.
The experiment took advantage of the laser-tracking system that’s in operation aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the moon for the past three and a half years. NASA sends regular laser pulses from the Next Generation Satellite Ranging station at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland to the space probe’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, or LOLA, to measure its precise position in lunar orbit.
I love to see my predictions come true.
Jim Downey
With thanks to Wendy for sending me the article!
Filed under: Apollo program, Astronomy, Connections, ISS, Man Conquers Space, NASA, Predictions, Preparedness, Science, Science Fiction, Space, Survival, tech | Tags: Apollo, blogging, ISS, jim downey, NASA, predictions, science, Science Fiction, space, video
It all depends on your point-of-view:
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Connections, Feedback, Health, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Writing stuff | Tags: art, Australia, blogging, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, health, jim downey, Karst, literature, Missouri, Nullarbor Plain, reviews, science, Science Fiction, writing
Sorry I haven’t posted much — been down with the nasty respiratory virus which is going around, and which has aggravated my torn intercostal muscle. So I’ve been devoting most of my energy to other things, like not hacking up a lung.
Anyway, thought I’d share a new review:
Oh dear; a shocker. Not only did this diatribe descend into fantasy rubbish, but the characters were as flat as the nullabor plain. The whole thing had about as much narrative flair as a year 8 kids English assignment
Ouch. Unsurprisingly, he gave it only 1 star. Though he did say that he wished he could give it zero stars.
Bad reviews are part & parcel of being a writer or artist or just about any other kind of public person. No biggie — Communion of Dreams isn’t to everyone’s tastes, and that’s OK. I do wonder a bit whether this review was intended for another book. Evidently a couple of other people wonder the same, given the comments.
Anyway, at least I learned something from the review: the Nullarbor Plain (which I think the author meant to say) is a geographic region of Australia. And it shares something in common with our property here in central Missouri: it’s a karst formation. So that’s kinda interesting.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go not hack up a lung.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Brave New World, Carl Zimmer, Connections, Emergency, Feedback, Flu, General Musings, Health, Kindle, Marketing, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Preparedness, Promotion, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, The Loom, Umberto Eco, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, antibiotics, blogging, Carl Zimmer, Communion of Dreams, Darnell Sidwell, direct publishing, fire-flu, flu, influenza, jim downey, Kickstarter, Kindle, literature, norovirus, pandemic, predictions, promotion, science, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, technology, Umberto Eco, virus, Wordpress, writing
So, the WordPress Machine informs me that I’ve had a fairly busy year blogging here.
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As I mentioned a while ago, earlier this month I had fallen prey to the nasty bit of cold virus going around. Turned out that the damn thing was even more stubborn for my wife, who is still struggling with a hacking cough and various other annoying symptoms. We’ve been keeping a close eye on it, watching for signs of secondary pneumonia, which would call for antibiotic intervention, but I think she’ll get past this on her own.
Which is good, because there really isn’t much we can do to fight a virus. In this sense, medical science is at about the same place in viral treatments as we were in dealing with bacterial infection 70 years ago:
In 1941, a rose killed a policeman.
Albert Alexander, a 43-year-old policeman in Oxford, England, was pruning his roses one fall day when a thorn scratched him at the corner of his mouth. The slight crevice it opened allowed harmless skin bacteria to slip into his body. At first, the scratch grew pink and tender. Over the course of several weeks, it slowly swelled. The bacteria turned from harmless to vicious, proliferating through his flesh. Alexander eventually had to be admitted to Radcliffe Hospital, the bacteria spreading across his face and into his lungs.
Alexander’s doctors tried treating him with sulfa drugs, the only treatment available at the time. The medicine failed, and as the infection worsened, they had to cut out one of his eyes. The bacteria started to infiltrate his bones. Death seemed inevitable.
* * * * * * *
You may not have heard much about it here, but the norovirus is causing all kinds of grief in the UK. Cases are up 83% over last year, and are estimated to have hit over a million people already. In the UK the norovirus is commonly called the “winter vomiting bug” whereas here we tend to call it “stomach flu”. As miserable as it makes people feel, it’s usually not a life-threatening disease for otherwise healthy people, and the best thing to do is just ride it out.
Of course, public health authorities have taken steps to try and limit the spread of the disease into populations where the virus could be life-threatening, and a lot of hospitals have curtailed or eliminated visiting hours. Furthermore, appeals have been made to the public to not to go see their doctors or go to emergency rooms for routine cases of the norovirus, since there is little that can be done to treat the virus and this just contributes to the spread of the disease.
Still, people get scared when they get sick, even when they know that it is a fairly common bug that’s going around — and one that most people have had before and gotten over just fine. So they tend to swamp available medical services, overwhelming the health care system.
Just think about what would happen if it was a disease which wasn’t known. And one which was killing people so quickly that they’d drop over in the street on the way home from work.
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I’ve been thinking about that a lot, since it is an integral plot point to St. Cybi’s Well. This isn’t a spoiler, since the advent of the fire-flu is part of the ‘history’ of Communion of Dreams.
But it is something which has had me in a bit of a quandary this fall, as I’ve been working on writing St. Cybi’s Well.
Howso? Well, because I kept going back and forth on making one final decision: where to end the book.
See, I know how the *story* plays out — I’ve had that all sorted since I first worked up the background for Communion of Dreams. But in going to write St. Cybi’s Well, I needed to decide exactly where in the story that book would end. Which is to say, I needed to decide how much, if any, of the onset of the fire-flu would be included. Because I could set everything up and have the book actually finish at the onset of the fire-flu — after all, the reader would know what was about to happen. Why drag the reader through that horror?
* * * * * * *
A week or so ago I made my decision, and I’ve been chewing it over since then as I’ve been busy with other things, making sure that I was comfortable with what I have decided, and why. I’m not going to give you the details, but you can safely assume from what I’ve said in this post that at least some of the pandemic will be portrayed.
I decided this not because I have a desire to write about the horror (in spite of what I may have said previously) but rather because it is critical for character development of the main character.
Poor Darnell.
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So, the WordPress Machine informs me that I’ve had a fairly busy year blogging here. 293 posts (this makes 294), which is a faster pace than in some years. Of course, I’ve had a lot of promotional stuff do to with the launch of Communion of Dreams last January and everything to support that through the year, not to mention the Kickstarter for St. Cybi’s Well.
And while I’ve cautioned that I won’t be writing quite as much here on the blog as I’m working on St. Cybi’s Well, well, it does make for a nice change of pace.
So thanks for being along for the ride this year. Together we can see how things go in 2013.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, tech | Tags: blogging, CNN, Communion of Dreams, Hyperstealth, jim downey, News, predictions, science, Science Fiction, stealth, technology, video
This is starting to get some attention:
A Canadian company called Hyperstealth is reporting that it has developed Quantum Stealth, a material that renders the target “completely invisible by bending light waves around the target.” If the mock-up photos are to be believed, Quantum Stealth basically works like Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak.
Since 2002, Hyperstealth has been in the business of designing camouflage patterns for military uniforms, vehicles, and installations. In 2010, at the International Camouflage Symposium, Hyperstealth’s CEO Guy Cramer demonstrated SmartCamo — a material that could reportedly adjust its camouflage markings to match its surroundings. We say “reportedly” because Cramer apparently published a video demonstration of SmartCamo, but then US military intervened and asked him to take it down. Presumably Quantum Stealth is a follow-up from SmartCamo.
Again, for security reasons, Cramer is saying very little about Quantum Stealth. All of the pictures that you see here, and on Hyperstealth’s site, are mock-ups, because “for security issues we can not show the actual technology.” Cramer says that both the US and Canadian military have seen Quantum Stealth in action, and that they’ve also confirmed that the material obscures the target from infrared (thermal) imaging. Below, you can see Cramer talking to CNN’s Pentagon correspondent about Quantum Stealth.
In addition to the cited CNN video, there’s another news item from a paper which seems to be local to the company. In that article Cramer has more to say:
“That’s the thing that surprises most of the people at these meetings, that it works as well as we’re showing there. It only takes a few seconds for someone in these meetings to verify, yeah it obviously works for the visual spectrum.”
The invisibility cloak also conceals ultra-violet and infra-red heat rays.
“It actually masks the entire thermal signature from the user.”
Cramer added, “We’ve proven it, but I’m not about to show it because there’s no need to show you what works because the only people who need to see this are the people we have shown.”
Uh-huh. He has a magic, er, make that “quantum technology” cloak, but doesn’t want to show anyone outside of the military, even though he’s perfectly happy to discuss how great it is.
Is my skepticism showing? Or has that been masked by quantum effects?
OK, so he’s shown it to the military. Wouldn’t just about any special forces organization in the world literally kill for such technology? Here’s what one such officer said, again from the Maple Ridge News article:
Maj. Doug MacNair, with Canadian Special Operations Forces Command, confirmed that Cramer made a presentation to special operations within the last few years.
But there’s been no decision to follow through.
“We didn’t pursue it further, at least not at this time anyway.
“It wasn’t something we were interested in pursuing at the time. It doesn’t mean we wouldn’t in the future, necessarily. “We’re aware of the company, we have the information. But we don’t have a contract in place at the time.”
Maybe Mr. Cramer is asking too much money for his technology. Or perhaps this is some kind of ruse on the part of the military, to make it seem like the technology ain’t that big a deal. Because the clever thing to do is to promote this all over the web, and then deny that it is something that any government would want. That way no one will pay attention to it. Right?
Er, right.
Don’t get me wrong — I think such technology is possible, and I use something very like it in Communion of Dreams. This is from Chapter 18:
Jon walked to the edge of the pool. He heard a noise behind him, turned slowly to look at it.
From beside a large bush a pile of boulders shifted. The air shimmied, light danced, and a crouching figure emerged, covered in a fabric drape that tried to keep up with the changing surroundings. One hand pulled the drape to the side. Another was holding a very
large sidearm.
But that’s 40 years in the future. I don’t think that this is a tech which has come to be real quite so soon.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 