Filed under: Arthur C. Clarke, Astronomy, Carl Sagan, Fermi's Paradox, George Carlin, movies, Predictions, Preparedness, R. Buckminster Fuller, Religion, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Society, Space, Writing stuff | Tags: Arthur C. Clarke, blogging, Carl Sagan, George Carlin, jim downey, predictions, R. Buckminster Fuller, science, Science Fiction, space, technology
While I’m on a bit of vacation, I have decided to re-post some items from the first year of this blog (2007). This item first ran on June 26, 2007.
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A friend passed along this entry from today’s Quote of the Day:
Communion of Dreams is, essentially, about what happens when we are unexpectedly confronted with the reality of the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence. In this I am echoing countless other science fiction stories/novels/films, some more consciously than others. Most directly, I am paying homage to two authors:Sir Arthur C. Clarke, and Carl Sagan. For anyone interested in doing so, references can be found in my novel to both men, directly and indirectly.
And whenever you tackle this problem (whether or not there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe), you are also basically dealing with issues similar to religious faith. At least for the time being, we have no evidence, no scientific proof, of either E.T. or God. Friends who know me as a strong atheist have commented how surprised they were with how I deal with the issue of religion in Communion. Yet this is in keeping with how science fiction writers, and Carl Sagan specifically in his novel Contact, tend to approach this issue: leaving open the possibility and understanding the revolution in thought which it will demand when there is proof of E.T. (or God, for that matter). I don’t recall it being in the book, but there’s a line in the movie version of Contact which has always made sense to me, when the protagonist’s father says regarding the possibility of life on other planets: “I don’t know, Sparks. But I guess I’d say if it is just us… seems like an awful waste of space.”
Which brings me to another favorite quote, one I’ve appended to my emails for the last several years:
“Sometimes I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not.
In either case, the thought is staggering.”
– R. Buckminster Fuller
And I think that sums it all up for me, on both the question of God and whether there is other intelligence out there. For Communion, I come down on the side of proving the existence of one, and figure that is enough for one book to tackle.
Jim Downey
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While I’m on a bit of vacation, I have decided to re-post some items from the first year of this blog (2007). This item first ran on November 12, 2007.
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Over the weekend, news came out of yet another “Trust us, we’re the government” debacle, this time in the form of the principal deputy director of national intelligence saying that Americans have to give up on the idea that they have any expectation of privacy. Rather, he said, we should simply trust the government to properly safeguard the communications and financial information that they gather about us. No, I am not making this up. From the NYT:
“Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,” Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, told attendees of the Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s symposium in Dallas.
* * *
“Too often, privacy has been equated with anonymity,” he said, according to a transcript [pdf]. “But in our interconnected and wireless world, anonymity – or the appearance of anonymity – is quickly becoming a thing of the past.”
The future, Mr. Kerr says, is seen in MySpace and other online troves of volunteered information, and also in the the millions of commercial transactions made on the web or on the phone every day. If online merchants can be trusted, he asks, then why not federal employees, who face five years in jail and a $100,000 fine for misusing data from surveillance?
Or, from the Washington Post:
“Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,” Kerr said. “I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up, in terms of anonymity, but (also) what safeguards we want in place to be sure that giving that doesn’t empty our bank account or do something equally bad elsewhere.”
This mindset, that allowing the government to just vacuum up all of our personal information, to monitor our email and phone communications, or whatever else they are doing but don’t want to tell is, is somehow equivalent to my posting information on this blog or giving some company my credit card number when I want to buy something, is fucking absurd. First off, there is a fundamental difference between what I willingly reveal to someone in either a personal or commercial exchange, and having my information taken without my knowledge or agreement. To say otherwise is to say that just because my phone number is listed in the phone directory, everyone who has the ability to do so is free to listen in on my phone conversations.
Even worse, it shows how we are viewed by this individual, and our government: as their subjects, without rights or expectations of being in control of our lives.
And the notion that we can just trust governmental employees with our private information is patently ridiculous. First off, saying that we should because we already trust commercial businesses with our private information is completely specious – how many times in the last year have you heard of this or that company’s database having been hacked and credit card, personal, and financial information having been stolen? This alone is a good reason to not allow further concentration of our private data to be gathered in one place. Secondly, think of the many instances when hard drives with delicate information have been lost by government employees in the State Department, at the Department of Veterans Affairs, or even at Los Alamos National Laboratory – and those are just the things which have actually made it into the news. Third, and last (for now), anyone who has had any experience with any government agency can attest to just how screwed up such a large bureaucracy can be, in dealing with even the simplest information.
I recently went round and round with the IRS over some forms which they thought I had to file. I didn’t, and established that to the satisfaction of the office which contacted me. Yet for six months I was still being contacted by another office in charge with collecting the necessary fees and fines – three times I had to send a copy of the letter from the initial office which cleared me of the matter, before they finally, and almost grudgingly, admitted that I owed them no money (for not filing the documents I didn’t need to file). These are not the same people I want to trust to handle even *more* information about me.
Allowing the government to take this position – that the default should be that they can just take whatever information about us they want, so long as they promise not to misuse it – is to abandon any illusions that we are in any way, shape, or form a free people. It would turn the entire equation of the Constitution on its head, saying that the government is sovereign and we its subjects. That such a thing is even proposed by a government employee is extremely revealing, and should cause no little amount of concern.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Apollo program, Art, Astronomy, Constellation program, Failure, Feedback, General Musings, Government, ISS, Man Conquers Space, NASA, NPR, Predictions, Preparedness, Science, Science Fiction, Scott Simon, Space, Survival, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: jim downey, NASA, NPR, predictions, science, Science Fiction, Scott Simon, space, technology, travel
While I’m on a bit of vacation, I have decided to re-post some items from the first year of this blog (2007). This item first ran on November 24, 2007.
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I have a special place in my heart for Scott Simon, the host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday program. Oh, I’ve long enjoyed his reporting and work at NPR, but in particular it was the experience of being interviewed by him in 2001 for my “Paint the Moon” art project which endeared him to me. As it was just at the beginning of the media coverage of that project, and most people as yet didn’t understand what I was trying to do with the project, it would have been easy to mock the idea and portray me as something of a fool – but Simon was kind and considerate in his interview with me (which took almost an hour to do from my local NPR station facilities), and the end result was an interesting and insightful segment for his show.
Anyway, I go out of my way to try and catch the broadcast of Weekend Edition Saturday each week, and today was no different. One of the segments this morning was an interview with Pat Duggins, who has covered over 80 shuttle launches for NPR and now has a new book out titled Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program. In the course of the interview, Simon asked the following question (paraphrased; I may correct when the transcript of the show is posted later): “Are Americans unrealistic in the expectation of safety from our space program?”
Duggins paused a moment, and then gave an unequivocal “Yes.”
I had already answered the question in my own mind, and was pleased to hear him say the same thing. Because as I have mentioned before, I think that a realistic assessment of the risks involved with the space program is necessary. Further, everyone involved in the space program, from the politicians who fund it to the NASA administers to aerospace engineers to astronauts to the journalists who cover the program, should all – all – be very clear that there are real risks involved but that those risks are worth taking. Certainly, foolish risks should be avoided. But trying to establish and promote space exploration as being “safe” is foolish and counter-productive.
I am often cynical and somewhat disparaging of the intelligence of my fellow humans. But I actually believe that if you give people honest answers, honest information, and explain both the risks and benefits of something as important as the space program, they will be able to digest and think intelligently about it. We have gotten into trouble because we don’t demand that our populace be informed and responsible – we’ve fallen very much into the habit of feeding people a bunch of bullshit, of letting them off the hook for being responsible citizens, and treating them as children rather than participating adults. By and large, people will react the way you treat them – and if you just treat people as irresponsible children, they will act the same way.
So it was good to hear Duggins say that one simple word: “Yes.”
What we have accomplished in space, from the earliest days right through to the present, has always been risky. But for crying out loud, just going to the grocery store is risky. None of us will get out of this life alive, and you can be sure that for even the most pampered and protected there will be pain and suffering at times. To think otherwise is to live in a fantasy, and to collapse at the first experience of hardship.
I think that we are better than that. Just look at all humankind has accomplished, in spite of the risks. To say that Americans are unwilling to accept a realistic view of death and injury associated with the exploration of space is to sell us short, and to artificially limit the progress we make. I think it *has* artificially limited the progress we have made.
One of the most common complaints I get about the world I envision in Communion of Dreams is that the exploration of space is too far along to be “realistic”. Nonsense. Look at what was accomplished in the fifty years that lead up to the first Moon landing. In a world filled with trauma, war, and grief, some risks are more easily accepted. In the world of Communion, post-pandemic and having suffered regional nuclear wars, there would be little fixation on making sure that spaceflight was “safe”, and more on pushing to rapidly develop it.
We can go to the planets, and then on to the stars. It is just a matter of having the will to do so, and of accepting the risks of trying.
Jim Downey
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While I’m on a bit of vacation, I have decided to re-post some items from the first year of this blog (2007). This item first ran on September 24, 2007.
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“All of life can be broken down into moments of transition or moments of revelation.”
-G’Kar, Z’ha’dum
Yesterday a buddy of mine and I got out to do some shooting. It may seem odd to someone who isn’t into shooting sports, but this can actually be one of the most relaxing things you can do, at least for me at this time. Why? Because, when I’m shooting, I have to be completely attentive to what I am doing – I can’t be thinking about what is going on at home, whether my MIL is stirring and needs attention, et cetera. As I have mentioned previously, one of the most exhausting aspects of being a care-giver for someone with Alzheimer’s/dementia is that I always, always, have part of my attention diverted to keeping track of what is going on with my MIL. You try doing that with part of your brain while accomplishing anything else, and you’ll quickly understand the problem.
Anyway, it was a good time, doing some informal shooting out on private land. We shot some pistols, a little 9mm carbine of mine which is just a lot of fun, and then my friend got out one of his black powder rifles: a Peabody .43 Spanish made in 1863. My friend is something of an authority on 19th century guns, and has been educating me about them. We shot several rounds, the large 400 grain bullets punching paper at 40 yards, the gun giving a slow but very solid shove back into your shoulder. That’s typical with black-powder: it’s not the sharp crack you get from modern weapons, with their higher pressures from faster-burning powder. After each shot, we’d pull down the trigger guard, rolling the receiver down and ejecting the cartridge, then insert another cartridge by hand and set it before closing the rolling block to prepare the weapon to fire again.
After all the shooting was done, our equipment packed up and put away, we headed back into town and got some lunch. As we talked over lunch, I asked my friend about how long it was before the Peabody we had been shooting evolved into the later repeating rifles which proved so reliable and popular. Because, as I saw it, all the elements were there: a dependable brass cartridge, a mechanism to extract and eject the spent shell, the moving receiver. All that was needed was a way to hold more rounds and feed them.
As we finished up our meal he gave me the brief run-down of the history or the repeating rifle development (which is basically what you’ll find in this Wikipedia article, particularly the sub-headings of ‘predecessors’ and ‘development’), and the conversation moved on to a more general discussion. I started to explain that one of the things I find so interesting, one of the unifying themes in all the things I have done is an interest in…
“Transitions,” my friend said.
I stopped. I was going to say “innovations,” but he was right.
“It shows in your novel.” (He’d recently read Communion.)
“Actually, I was thinking more of ‘innovations’ – those instances when people bring together different and diffuse elements to achieve something new, whether it is a mechanism, or a procedure, or just a way of looking at the world.”
We paid the bill, headed out to the car.
“Yeah, but it’s like the way that the people involved in your book – the characters – are all struggling to understand this new thing, this new artifact, this unexpected visitor. And I like the way that they don’t just figure it out instantly – the way each one of them tries to fit it into their own expectations about the world, and what it means. They struggle with it, they have to keep learning and investigating and working at it, before they finally come to an understanding.” He looked at me as we got back in the car. “Transitions.”
Transitions, indeed. Moments of transition, moments of revelation. Because that is all we have, when you come right down to it.
Jim Downey
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While I’m on a bit of vacation, I have decided to re-post some items from the first year of this blog (2007). This item first ran on March 29, 2007.
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Some 14 years ago, a full five or six years before I even thought about writing Communion of Dreams, I made the following “artist’s book”. Full images are hosted on my website. The following essay was bound into the ‘book’, as well as on the floppy disk in the still-functional disk-drive.
Jim Downey
Binary Dreams
A bit of whimsy.
I’ve always loved books, as far back as I can remember. Even though the shock of my parent’s death ended my childhood early, and left me with only fragments and dreams of my pre-teen years, I do remember reading, reading, reading. Books were part of my life, too much so for my parents, who were intelligent but uneducated, and who wondered about my fascination with almost anything written. Often I was told to put down the book and go outside to play, or turn out the light and go to sleep. Even the black & white television given to me at Christmas when I was 8 (the year my sister was born…I suspect my parents splurged to offset my disquiet at having a sibling at last) couldn’t take the place of the books I constantly checked out of the library.
I got lost in science fiction as a youth, first as a feast for my imagination, later as an escape from the harsh realities of my world. All through high school, where the demands my teachers made on my time and intellect were modest enough to be met with a few minutes study, and even through college, where I would reward myself with a new book by a favorite author after studying hours and hours of Russian history, economics, or German. Always I would turn to science fiction as a release, maybe even as a guide to how I could bring myself through my own rebirth. It took a very long time.
I even wrote a little, now and then. Starting with a junior high school fiction class, graduating to the novel I wrote while suffering in traction in the hospital in ‘78. After college I thought I would try and be a writer, with my old diesel-powered IBM Model C. But struggle though I did, I knew that I needed help with my writing that I couldn’t get from friends, or from the contradictory text I could find on the subject. A gentle man, an acquaintance I knew through work, was kind enough to read some of my stories and point to the University of Iowa. “The Writer’s Workshop,” he said, “an old friend of mine from grad school is the head of the program.”
I went to Iowa City, took a few courses. I was rejected for the Workshop by the ‘old friend’ because he didn’t like science fiction, but was stubborn enough to get into the English MA program, where I was allowed to take some Workshop classes on the same basis as those admitted to the program. I learned a lot, and the bitter taste of rejection was replaced by the realization that the Workshop thrived on angst, and that I had had enough of that to fill my life previously and didn’t need more.
I gathered together the credit hours needed to complete the degree, though I was in no particular rush to finish. And one day while looking for a signature for a change to my schedule I stumbled into the Windhover Press. Wonderful old presses and bank upon bank of lead type. I spent the next couple of semesters learning how to build a book, letter by letter, page by page, from those little bits of lead. I got a rudimentary course in sewing a book together, in pasting cloth, in terms like “text block” and “square”.
Then I met Bill. He led me through the different structures, and was tolerant of my large, clumsy hands. I spent hours just watching him work, watching how he moved with a grace that I could only dimly understand, as he slipped a needle onto thread, through paper, around cord. Trimming leather to fit a corner or a hinge. Working with the hot brass tools on a design that those magic hands formed seemingly without effort. But I didn’t spend all the time with him that I could, distracted by other things I thought needed doing. I squandered my time with him, not knowing what gifts I was passing up, what opportunity I allowed to slip from my hands.
But in spite of my best efforts to the contrary, he made an impression, and taught me a lot. Without quite realizing it, my hands became less clumsy, my understanding a bit brighter. I learned a few things, and came to appreciate much, much more. Somewhere in there my need for the refuge for science fiction diminished, though it was never completely left behind. Like a man who has long since recovered from an injury, but who still walks with a cane out of habit, science fiction stayed with me, occasionally coming to the fore in my interpretations of the world, in the ways that I moved from what I was to what I became.
Bill left us, in body at least. Part of his spirit I carry with me, and it surprises me sometimes, in a pleasant way. Now I am at home with paper, cloth, leather, and thread. I make and repair books for friends and clients.
The book is a mutable form, reflecting the needs, materials, and technology of the culture that produces it. Broadly speaking, a “book” is any self-contained information delivery system. And any number of ‘book artists’ have taken this broadly-defined term to extremes, some more interesting than others.
For me, the book is a codex, something that you can hold in your hand and read. From the earliest memories of my science fiction saturated youth, I remember books becoming obsolete in the future, replaced by one dream or another of “readers”, “scanners”, or even embedded text files linked directly to the brain. Some say ours is a post-literate culture, with all the books-on-tape, video, and interactive media technology. I think I read somewhere recently that Sony (or Toshiba or Panasonic or someone) had finally come up with a hand-held, book-sized computer screen that can accommodate a large number of books on CD ROM. Maybe the future is here.
Maybe. Lord knows that I would be lost without a computer for all my writing, revisions, and play. The floppy drive that is in this book was taken from my old computer (my first computer) when a friend installed a hard drive. It is, in many ways, part of my history, part of my time at Iowa, and all the changing that I did there.
So, in a bit of whimsy, I’ve decided to add my part to the extremes of “book art”. Consider this a transition artifact, a melding of two technologies, for fun. Black & white, yes and no, on and off. The stuff of dreams.
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In about 47 hours I’ll be on the shuttle to the airport.
* * * * * * *
There was a news item I saw the other day which indicates that this year’s extreme temperature records are starting to convince more Americans that global climate change is real.
Every summer it seems like a different kind of out-of-control weather pattern decides to strike. In the past month alone, we’ve experienced deadly Colorado wildfires, early-season heat waves and a wind-whipping hurricane, convincing formerly dubious Americans that climate change is actually real, according to the Associated Press.
“Many people around the world are beginning to appreciate that climate change is under way, that it’s having consequences that are playing out in real time and, in the United States at least, we are seeing more and more examples of extreme weather and extreme climate-related events,” Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told the AP.
* * * * * * *
Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co., said he was “dead wrong” when he dismissed media reports over trading in the bank’s chief investment office two months ago as “a complete tempest in a teapot.”
“When I made that statement I was dead wrong,” Dimon said in his Senate Banking Committee hearing on Wednesday, pointing the finger at the former chief investment office head Ina Drew, who Dimon said assured him that “this was an isolated small issue and that it wasn’t a big problem.”
* * *
Dimon abruptly disclosed last month that JPMorgan has suffered at least $2 billion of trading losses in a few weeks. The estimate of the trading losses has since increased to $3 billion and maybe more, although Dimon reiterated in Washington that he expects the bank’s second quarter to be solidly profitable and suggested the losses are under control.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Investors are gearing up for a week full of earnings reports and domestic news, but Europe will once again be hard for U.S. investors to ignore.
Dozens of companies are set to kick off earnings season this week. All eyes will turn to JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) on Friday, as the company will post its trading losses tied to its bad hedge from its London unit.
Some estimate that the loss could be as high as $9 billion, though the bank’s chief executive officer, Jamie Dimon, said back in May that the loss then stood at $2 billion.
* * * * * * *
My garden is about fifty paces behind our house, in a lovely large & open area. There are large trees closer to the house, but nothing back further, so it gets plenty of sun. Decades before we moved in my (to-be) father-in-law maintained a large truck garden there. He had a good eye for the spot.
Every three days for the last few weeks I make multiple trips out to the garden, swapping the feed on the soaker hoses. Each hose is laid out to water two clusters of plants. And I run each one for about 20 minutes. This whole process takes two hours.
Today, as I walked out to the garden, for the first time I noticed the crunch of dry grass underfoot. I had been watching as the lawn slowly turned increasingly brown, but this was the first time I noticed the actual sound of the grass breaking underfoot.
91% of Missouri is now under what is officially described as either “extreme” or “severe” drought conditions.
* * * * * * *
The biggest scandal in the world right now has nothing to do with sex or celebrities. It’s about an interest rate called LIBOR, or the London Interbank Offered Rate.
* * *
LIBOR, as it turns out, is the rate at which banks lend to each other. And more importantly, it has become the global benchmark for lending.
Banks look at it every day to figure out what they should charge you for not just home loans, but car loans, commercial loans, credit cards. LIBOR ends up almost everywhere.
Gillian Tett, an editor with the Financial Times, says that $350 trillion worth of contracts have been made that refer to LIBOR.
So literally hundreds of trillions of dollars around the world, all these deals, are based on this number. Now we find out this number might be a lie. At least one bank was tampering with that number for their own profit.
This past week Barclay’s Bank was fined $455 million, and two senior executives (the chairman and the CEO) resigned as investigation into the scandal started to turn up evidence of the scope of the market-rigging. But many people familiar with the industry say that this is just the tip of the iceberg — that there will likely be a number of other multi-national banks proven to have participated.
* * * * * * *
Climate change? Climate change.
Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature Change
Line plot of global mean land-ocean temperature index, 1880 to present, with the base period 1951-1980. The dotted black line is the annual mean and the solid red line is the five-year mean. The green bars show uncertainty estimates. [This is an update of Fig. 1A in Hansen et al. (2006).]
Figure also available as PDF, or Postscript. Also available are tabular data.
(I don’t put up with climate change denial here. Take it to your own blog.)
* * * * * * *
Leaders shape the frame of argument. They delineate the forms of dissent and opposition. They define, both by what they say and by what they fail to rule out, whether we have a small “r” republican approach to government, or rule by the manipulators of the manipulated mob. When they stay silent they are the cowards of the headline, passive bystanders as their followers betray the basic principles of (small “d”) democratic politics.
Greece is a good place from which to think about this. You don’t have to go back to Agamemnon or to Plato; living memory—the civil war, the colonels, very recent memory indeed offer regular reminders of the fragility of government by consent of the governed. Words matter here, and have for millennia.
So it is in this place, with that history in mind, that I am reminded once again that the habit of dismissing crap like that spewed by Nicholson and Davis as wingnuts being wingnuts is not acceptable. The speakers themselves may not count for much, but for a nominally civil society to allow such speech to pass without massive retaliation, actual leadership from those who would lead from that side…well, that’s how individuals get hurt, and democracies die. It’s happened before, not many miles from where I sit as I write this.
* * * * * * *
In about 47 hours I’ll be on the shuttle to the airport.
Of course, I don’t have everything done which needs to be done. And I really shouldn’t have taken the time to put together such a long and wide-ranging post.
But I wanted to take a moment and thank those who bought books yesterday. It may have been prompted by yesterday’s blog entry, it may not — I have no way of knowing. But thank you. It wasn’t a big day for sales, but it was a nice bump up from the single sale the day before.
I won’t be traveling to Greece, but to Rome. And it won’t surprise me if I find a new perspective or two while I’m there. I’m hoping that the change will allow me to integrate some of the many things I have been thinking about concerning the next book.
Things like spontaneous combustion. It seems that the world is ripe for it.
Again.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Brave New World, Music, Predictions, Privacy, Science, Science Fiction, Society, tech, YouTube | Tags: augmented reality, jim downey, predictions, science, Science Fiction, technology
Better get used to it, because things like this are going to become ubiquitous:
A very interesting and somewhat counter-intuitive tech. I love the idea of the dynamic stability, and the fact that what makes the thing work as a viewing platform isn’t what makes it fly, but how the image stream is processed by software. And of course, this is just the start — such things will become tiny enough to effectively become unnoticeable at any distance, and cheap enough that everyone will be able to use them without cost concerns. Talk about ‘augmented reality’…
Fascinating.
Jim Downey
*With apologies to these guys, of course.
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Confused about what the announcement of the “Higgs Boson” means? Did the Wikipedia article about the theoretical properties of the Higgs make your eyes glaze over? Then, my friend, you should check out this explanation using Zombie particles: Closing in on the God(damn it, Jim! I’m a physicist, not a priest!) particle
(Seriously, it’s a good explanation for the non-sciency folks.)
OK, now, here’s a little reminder of something:
Yup, it’s my birthday. And that means it is time for you to get a gift. A wonderful gift. A momentous gift. The gift of a much larger universe than you ever thought possible. In other words, it is time for you to go download the Kindle edition of my novel, Communion of Dreams. For free. Yup. Absolutely free. You don’t even need a Kindle to enjoy it, because there is a free Kindle emulator/app for just about every computer/tablet/mobile device out there.
Oh, and if you want to give me a little something in return? Just tell others to download the book. Seriously, that helps a huge amount. It gives me a better ranking. Builds mass and momentum. Gathers Zombie particles to me, as it were. And we all know how popular Zombies are, right?
Right.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, Flu, Government, Health, NPR, Pandemic, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: avian flu, flu, H5N1, health, influenza, jim downey, NPR, pandemic, predictions, science, Science Fiction, technology
From the first page of Chapter 17:
“Sorry.” She looked over at him, the dread in her eye replaced by something else. “The 1918 flu was recreated in the early part of this century, as there was a growing concern about Avian flu. The scientists at the time discovered that the prevailing form of Avian Flu, the H5N1 virus, was surprisingly related to the 1918 pandemic virus. Almost identical RNA structure, similar DNA.”
“But you say this one is different.”
“Yeah. Ignis was such a nasty bug because it spread by aerosol, but it also had a very short incubation period, just a couple of days. Then the disease itself was very swift, and victims died within hours of onset. Like it was all time- compressed, hyper-virulent. This is one of the reasons that people thought then, and still debate now, whether it was a weaponized version of Avian flu.”
From yesterday’s All Things Considered:
Anyone and everyone can now look in the journal Science and read about how to make lab-altered bird flu viruses that have been at the center of a controversy that’s raged for months.
But in the eyes of some critics, the details of these experiments are effectively the recipe for a dangerous flu pandemic.
The H5N1 bird flu virus isn’t normally contagious between people, but these mutants most likely are. They were created with the best of intentions by a lab that’s trying to understand how flu viruses might change in the wild and start spreading in humans.
But as word of the experiments got out, scary headlines warned of a “doomsday” virus and a “super-flu.” Scientists, public health officials and security experts debated what to do in closed-door meetings, as others made their arguments in op-eds and at public meetings.
Remember when the “fire-flu” (Latin name: Ignis) was supposed to happen?
Yeah, 2012.
Draw your own conclusions.
Jim Downey
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Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions came out when I was only four years old, but the ideas it contained percolated through the culture I grew up with, having substantial impact on everything I read at a crucial point in my life. In many ways, the concept of paradigm shift was self-fulfilling, as it came to define and dominate a lot of the intellectual backdrop of my formative years. This in no small part will explain a *lot* of the ‘meaning’ of Communion of Dreams.
And, unsurprisingly, it still has a major influence on how I see the world. Which is why sometimes I am willing to try seemingly absurd things: not because I think that they will necessarily succeed, but because I am looking for an inflection point, a fulcrum, which will allow me to assess and perhaps change perspective.
One of those things has been playing with the idea of doing a Kickstarter in lieu of a conventional publishing deal, as I mentioned previously. Of course, I’m hardly the first writer to consider this, since it seems that Kickstarter-type crowdfunding of creative projects has started to take hold in our society.
Well, I just came across another one, something of a template by author Seth Godin. Here’s an excerpt from his blog about it yesterday:
My idea: Kickstart + bookstore + ebooks.
The publisher (my key to the bookstore) is only willing to go ahead with the rest of the plan if my Kickstarter works. No Kickstarter, no distribution, the stakes are high. (As you saw at the Domino Project, the ebook part is easy now, but the bookstore is still critical to reach the many readers who find and buy books in stores).
If the Kickstarter works, then all the funders will get to read the book before anyone else, plus there are bonuses and previews and special editions. A few weeks after the early funders (that would be you) get to read it, the book will be available to book buyers for purchase the traditional way (wherever fine books are sold in the US, including digital readers). Of course, the Kickstarter funders get a better price, get it first and get unique bonuses, plus the pleasure of being in early–and knowing that they made it happen. The only way this book becomes real is if my readers get behind it now.
This was outlining his project, basically starting it. For the experiment he set a goal of $40,000 on his Kickstarter, and had it running for four weeks to see if it was viable.
He met his goal in three hours. And it is currently funded at $194,873 – almost 500% of his goal.
Now, Godin is a published author and successful self-promoter. He has a real following. Most authors, myself included, have no where near his level of support going into such an effort.
But he has found his fulcrum. He has proven that this is possible, at least under some conditions.
Are there other fulcrums out there? Is it possible for other authors to succeed under different conditions?
Specifically, is it possible for me to do?
Your thoughts welcome.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 