No News, or What Killed the Past?

I have always enjoyed reading James Thurber.

I wonder how he'd do today.

Impolitic. And probably a little racist. He slips into "patter" when he puts words in the mouths of some of the maids the Thurber family had in Ohio, some of them Black.

Maybe something like this (a recitation Thurber mentions in his book "My Life and Hard Times."

Thurber says in his book (and much thanks to this blog for posting this bit so I didn't have to search it out on the bookshelf).

"Father was usually in bed by nine-thirty and up again by ten-thirty to protest bitterly against a Victrola record we three boys were in the habit of playing over and over, namely, "No News, or What Killed the Dog," a recitation by Nat Wills. The record had been played so many times that its grooves were deeply cut and the needle often kept revolving in the same groove, repeating over and over the same words. Thus: 'ate some burnt hoss flesh, ate some burnt hoss flesh, ate some burnt hoss flesh.' It was this reiteration that generally got father out of bed."

Do I want to pose the question: Is this use of patter racist?

Wills himself almost uses a Black patter, though he's in and out of it so much it's hard to tell. It might be the spelling used in the text here that influences the ear.

Arthur C. Clarke mentions such patter in his book "Imperial Earth," but it's mentioned as a passing joke that the Earth is so post-racist it was looked on as a linguistic anomaly to be enjoyed by an academic playing a role.

We are not post-racist. So the patter's use is a no-go.

But some kind of elocution is called for in the piece, or you get something like this:

This performance is good. But rather dull.

Now, if the farm hand were to have, say, a cracker accent, or rube or hick accent, probably no problem. And that in of itself might be a little racist too.

No one has to cancel Wills or Thurber these days as nobody outside of academics or old-timey aficionados are likely to be familiar with them. Not that they wouldn't try, of course.

Rendezvous with Rama, Again

I fully expected to live as an adult on the Moon, or beyond, when I was a kid.

Alas . . . 

Maybe that time will come. Not within my lifetime, however.

But thanks to science fiction, I can still dream it.

Two books still manage to capture my imagination. The first is "The Lotus Caves," by John Christopher. Yes, the living in, then escaping from, the aforementioned caves is exciting. But I like the bit beforehand, where life on the Moon appears so pedestrian to its residents as to be boring.

Boring.

Living on the Moon.

I suppose it would be after a time, given the limited capacity we have for wonder on a daily basis.

Then there's "Rendezvous with Rama," by Arthur C. Clarke.

Not the Gentry Lee-ed sequels. I've read one, and it was terrible.

But Rama. There's the stuff. And every time I read it, the more I think I might have followed the Cosmo Christers and Boris Rodrigo's idea that Rama was an ark, meant for those to be saved.

Though that clearly was not the case -- and even at that time, Earth et al appeared not to have the spacefaring resources to get people to the ark in a timely basis if that were the case.

But that's all speculation, of course.

Right now, all I can hope is that Morgan Freeman follows through with his plans for a Rendezvous with Rama movie. Though even there I am not optimistic and believe it won't happen in my lifetime. Freeman has been talking about the movie since the early 2000s. And the book isn't a complicated one. A script ought to be pretty easy to generate, if they stuck with it. The story moves along at a brisk pace, and would not need embellishment (although moviegoing weenies don't appear to like space-based think pieces, else Interstellar would have done better).

There are a few Rama-oriented videos on YouTube. None of them worth posting here, particularly as most of them don't appear to have read the book, or at least forgot about it, in the throes of making their videos.

This is a story that has to be done right, or not at all.

Of note: I appear to have a first edition of this novel. Pretty cool.

From Hooptedoodle to Kreptdedoodle

In a prologue to his “Sweet Thursday,” John Steinbeck puts the words of an author into the mouth of one of his characters, who launches into a monologue about what he’d do as a writer to entertain his readers.

One of the things he mentions is hooptedoodle, which he defines as a spot in the story – really outside the story – where the author is allowed to play with language, write something pretty and entertain the audience who can skip it if he or she wishes so they can get back to the story at hand.

Here it is:

I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from what he says. I like some description, but not too much of that. Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. Spin us up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.

I’m a victim of what Steinbeck and Elmore Leonard call “mainly hooptedoodle,” and as I revise, I try to get rid of as much as I can bear to cut.

Then there are other authors who don’t cut it.

And, frankly, there are other authors who go beyond hooptedoodle into what I call kreptdedoodle – writing bits that are outside the story and easily skipped but so gosh-awful that you have to read it two or three times just to ponder why the author thought it was a great idea to include it.

Here’s an example from Arthur C. Clarke’s 2061 (Clarke, by the way, as his career lengthened, has become an absolute kreptedoodle artiste, which is unfortunate because I really enjoy most of what he writes).

“. . . lucky you missed the annual ball: believe it or not, it was just as grisly as last year’s And once again our resident mastodon, dear Miz Wilkinson, managed to crush her partner’s toes, even on the half-gee dance floor.

“Now this Shaka business. We know you love pulling our legs, but frankly, Jerry and I were horrified! I can see why Maggie M turned him down – yes, of course we’ve read her Olympic Lusts – very enjoyable, but too feminist for us . . .

“What a monster – I can understand why they’ve called a gang of African terrorists after him. Fancy executing his warriors if they got married! And killing all the poor cows in his wretched empire, just because they were female! Worst of all – those horrid spears they invented; shocking manners, jabbing them into people you’ve not been properly introduced to . . .

“And what a ghastly advertisement for us feys! Almost enough to make one want to switch.”

I hope you get the point. Here we have the kreptedoodle come out in a purely Vaudevilleian portrayal of homosexuality. I know it’s couched under the sci-fi cliché of tolerance and acceptance of every little thing in the distant future, winking as us provincials of the past who let divisions, well, divide us, but the way it’s written here, outside of the story, not vital to anything, is pure unadulterated kreptedoodle. I’m glad I can skip it.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of kreptedoodle in 2061, from the golly-bob-howdy revelations that passengers on a spaceship bound for Halley’s Comet can swim in the ship’s water propellant to the inclusion of everyone but white anglo-saxons to the point the only way you can figure out they’re even there in the story is that the author doesn’t have signposts pointing out with flashing bulbs that they aren’t members of some “other” ethnic or national group.

I feel like this reading kreptedoodle of this magnitude.

Rama II: Needs More Apes

It’s taken me nearly 225 pages of Arthur C. Clarke/Gentry Lee’s Rama II to figure out what it is about the book in general that’s rubbing me the wrong way. Here it is:

It’s not science fiction.

At first I thought it was a division between the hard sci-fi that Clarke is known for and the softer version of the genre that’s increased in popularity since the 1970s. You have all the classic elements of soft sci-fi: The touchy-feely with the characters, their inner ponderings, the confusing shifts of narrative tone.

But it’s not that this is soft sci-fi.

It’s that it’s not really sci-fi at all.

Oh, it takes place in Rama II, twin of the anticipated triplets of the first enigmatic spacecraft to sail through the solar system. But it’s not science fiction. It’s science verisimilitude. And for that, I’ve got to blame, well, Gentry Lee.

This is the first Lee book I’ve read, and if it’s indicative of what he writes in general, I won’t be reading any more. He’s taken this not from a scientist’s perspective, nor even from a writer’s perspective, but from an engineering/management perspective and in creating an exciting (I use the term loosely) soap-operatic story filled with dramatic deaths (three so far, completely inconsistent with what Clarke wrote and envisioned in Rendezvous with Rama) that makes this read more like a softie Michael Crichton written-for-Hollywood story than an engaging scientific tale written by a hard sci-fi writer who knows what he’s doing.

Clarke obviously let himself be taken for a ride on this one, which is a pity. (Seems I’m not the only one to think so; Wikipedia’s entry on the books contain a mild rebuke.) Other reviewers are equally disdainful – and, ironically, use some of the same words I have to describe the book. I write this review before I read any other reviews. I promise.)

Lee is too intent in letting us share in the inter-Cosmonaut intrigue than with the mystery of Rama – he tosses in a death or two just to heighten Rama’s mystery, where in the original, Clarke didn’t have to kill off a single astronaut to do so (he put some in peril, but it was more the peril brought on by mankind’s own self-destructive tendencies, as Scott Meyer puts it in his excellent comic, than malevolence on the part of Rama, its biots, or its creators) Lee relies on death as the ONLY plot device to show that Rama II is, indeed, as mysterious as its precedent. That’s cheap writing, in my view.

There are other books in the Rama universe, all written by Lee. I will not be reading them. I like my sci-fi to come with mystery; I don’t need to know everything. Today’s penchant to fill in the backstory is, in my view, annoying. Hoping Peter Jackson et al don’t ruin The Hobbit doing that very thing. Which it sounds like they’re doing, turning a much simpler children’s tale into three, count ‘em, three movies.

Mining in Space

I like it when reality even approaches the coolness of science fiction, so to hear of a Wahsington state company making plans to mine near-Earth asteroids for materials makes me a happy man.

Rather than wasting money by pursuing the Apollo 11 engines resting at the bottom of the sea (like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos) the investors in this company hope to see a future when resources mined in space are used on Earth or in orbit for building everything from rocket fuel to space-whale-repelling battleships (of course, one of the investors is James Cameron, who seems bent on giving us vapid entertainment between trips to the deepest recesses of the ocean floor and the Titanic, so they’re not all innocent here).

In short, Planetary Resources hopes it will be in a crucial and lucrative position of not only boosting terrestrial industry, but also setting up a network of fuel depots that humanity will need to better explore the solar system and beyond.

"The Earth is feeling a resource pinch, and ultimately we will have the ability to turn that which is scarce into abundant," [Peter] Diamandis, who co-founded Planetary Resources with Anderson in 2009 but generally kept mum about the project until this month, said at a press event in Seattle on Tuesday.

"It can be done, and yes, it's very difficult ... but the returns economically and the benefit to humanity are extraordinary," added Diamandis, who also is chairman of the X Prize Foundation.

When I worked for the Post Register, I actually interviewed Diamandis for some story whose import and subject are completely lost to me now. Probably had something to do with the X Prize, though why a lowly reporter from a Podunk paper like ours was interviewing him I can’t remember. I’ll have to sort through my files to see if I can find the article. Nonetheless, it’s exciting to see people still doing that forward-thinking that characterized so much of the post-war era and that, in many ways, seems lacking today. When he talks of fuel stations scattered throughout the inner solar system, all I can conjure up is images of Arthur C. Clarke’s Imperial Earth, and how awesome it would be if science fiction could become science fact.

Near-Earth objects abound, but you have to wonder if they’ll come in the size these guys need to make their company viable. I find it hard to believe that objects as big as Eros have gone undetected in near-Earth orbit, so they’ll have to be contented with smaller pickings or go further afield. Given their moxie, I don’t see the latter bothering them all that much.

I just hope the scout satellites they're sending up aren't just MAMA in disguise.

Only the Planets are Big

Outer Space from Sander van den Berg on Vimeo.


"Space is small. Only the planets are big."

-- Robert Kleinmann

Mandelbrot and Fibonacci Mush

I’m trying – really trying – to understand why I should care about Fibonacci numbers.

Today’s contemplation all started with today’s New Adventures of Queen Victoria comic strip, in which artist Pab Sungenis the following:

I’ve heard of the sequence before. I know that it’s been “spotted in nature.” I know it gets math nerds as excited as Winston Churchill retorts get word nerds excited.

I just don’t know why I need to be excited about it.

Whee. The Fibonacci sequence has been noticed in the clustering of florets in some flowers. That’s neat. It’s just as neat as the phenomenon of pareidolia, which involves people spotting, say, images of Jesus or the Virgin Mary in tortillas, tree bark, or grilled cheese sandwiches. Just because you can sorta see something in something else doesn’t mean it’s there on purpose or that I should get all whipped up about it. Maybe those florests arrange themselves that way because that’s how they’re arranged. Then we come along behind and notice that some mathematical sequence happens to match the pattern and then boom it’s the Face on Mars all over again, but since it’s science-y, that takes the curse off it.

All of this reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “The Ghost From the Grand Banks,” in which the story’s requisite genius has a lake in the form of the Mandelbrot Set. He had to include the Mandelbrot Set in a novel because, well, it was the newest, neatest science-y mathematical thingie to mince down the pike.

Problem is, he had no idea what to DO with the Mandelbrot Set now that it was in his novel, except to have it be the place where the requisite genius (or whomever, it’s been a while since I read it) meets his/her/its end. The lake could have been in the shape of, say, a four-leaf clover or the sigmoid colon and the end would have been just the same: Genius and/or minion and/or relative dies in the lake, shaped like the whatever.

If a science weenie like Clarke (he came up with the concept of geosynchronous satellites, for heaven’s sake) can’t do much beyond introducing a mathematical wowie as a mediocre plot device in a rather boring novel, then how do the rest of us stand a chance at getting all excited about it?

Heaven knows I tried. Waaaaay back when the Mandelbrot Set was all the rage, I labirously typed a computer program into my Radio Shack Color Computer 3 to reproduce the Mandelbrot Set on my computer. I remember sitting there, watching the image slowly – and I mean slowly – form on my screen, and stroking out every time one of he pixels turned up a color other than black, because that meant the program was going to run faster for a while until it got back to that familiar field of black.

I’m not saying here that these sequences and sets aren’t neat, or that they don’t help to solve problems, or help mathematicians to visualize what’s going on in nature or the universe or whatever. I’m just saying that the public relations people they have working with them aren’t doing their best to get the rest of us excited about it all.

Maybe I’ll go read about Mario Mertz instead.

. . . Only the Planets Are Big

This NASA photo is in the public domain. The large white-rayed crater is Debussy. Note to the west another crater, with much smaller black rays.

Space is small; only the planets are big.

Robert Kleinman, fictional spacefarer in Arthur C. Clarke’s “Imperial Earth”

I think Robert Kleinman would agree that Mercury is looking pretty big.

This is, of course, the first photo taken of Mercury from NASA’s Messenger probe, which entered orbit of the planet on March 17.

Why is this exciting? Well, I’ve been caught up with NASA’s exploration of our solar system since the days of Pioneer 11 when I was a kid. I used to draw elaborate charts of the paths of Pioneer and the Voyager spacecrafts, indicating how old I would be when the probes reached the outer planets.

I was a geek, yessir.

Still am. I’m still convinced I’ll be able to walk on the moon as a space tourist before I die. How that will happen, I don’t know. But I maintain faith it will, even if I have to get an old space suit, a lawn chair, some scuba gear and an awful lot of helium-filled weather balloons.

Mandelbrot is Dead

So Benoit Mandelbrot is dead.

YouTube is filling with tributes to his genius, or so the video descriptions say. I won't dispute that perhaps he was a genius for laying the foundations for fractal geometry, and am in awe at how some are able to take such esoteric concepts and apply them to real-world solutions, using fractals to help understand how enzymes form and function, for instance, or using fractals to figure out if there are detectable earthquake precursor patterns in minor seismologic events.

Fractal geometry is also used to explain how frost and snowflakes form, and how plant leaves and their complex system of veins form as well. And then there are the people who figure they can see fractals in the art of Jackson Pollock, though it's likely certain Pollock wasn't going out to form fractals in his paint splatterings. Still, it's interesting to see how these complex patterns show up in nature, even if it's done unintentionally.

But sometimes I have to laugh at how important people think they are and how they try to inject their importance into what they do.

The most egregious example of fractals being misused has to be in Arthur C. Clarke's book "The Ghost from the Grand Banks," in which a family of genius scientists are so fascinated with fractals that they have a pond on their estate shaped like the "Mandelbrot set," made famous by the man himself. At the climax of the book, members of that family die by drowing in said pond during a thunderstorm -- another event example of fractals applied in nature, as some weather scientists see or seek complex, repeating patterns in the weather.

(Don't get me wrong. I enjoy much of what Clarke writes. But as he got older, he became more obsessed with having his characters have sex than anything else, so my interest in the science end of his writing waned as he wrote more to appeal to the masses.)

A much more enjoyable treatment of fractals in literature comes in Terry Pratchett's "Interesting Times," in which a butterfly with fractal wings induced microclimactic changes in the weather for comic effect, mainly to wet Rincewind the Wizard's hat enough so he'd finish falling through a hole into a hollow mountain in order to find and deploy the Red Army. Read the book if you haven't; it's delightful. And skip Clarke's, as he only used fractal geometry as a lame plot device, thinking he had to put them in a book to continue to be scientifically relevant. Pooh to him.

From Luddites to Tapeworms

I'm the last one you'll find complaining about social networking. I blog,obviously. I'm on Facebook and Twitter. Heck, with a few friends, we've started asocial network of our own, revolvikng around professional writers and photographers workin with amaterus who want to shre their vacation adventures. But the whole idea of using social networking platforms to tell people where I am when I'm tweeting or blogging or whatever, I'm not sold on that.

Foursquare, obviously, is making news these days, with people all excited to tell others what restaurant they're eating at, where they're waiting on the curb for a cab and such. I just don't see the utility. My Foursquare entries would probably look something like this:

On the bus, US Highway 20, heading for work.

At work. Radioactivity down to nominal levels.

17-Mile Cave, staring at the graffiti.

In the bathroom.

Still in the bathroom.

Wandering amongst the cows.

I'm a boring guy, see? And then there's the criminal element. I don't need to broadcast that, hey, while I'm having fun somewhere else, there's NOBODY at the house. Come on in and burgle!

Not that I think that's likely to happen; it's just a typical scare tactic brought up by people like me who want social network location tagging to get off our lawns. That's why I'm not turning on the "Where Am I" feature in Twitter, and that's why I'm careful when we're on vacation not to be too braggy. But also, that's why when we leave the house, we tell our neighbors (whose son is a cop) to watch the house and thump on or wing unfamiliar passersby.

All of this need to tell people where we are, though, reminds me of a passage from Arthur C. Clarke's novel Imperial Earth. I'm too lazy to get off my duff (I'm in front of the computer @home) to get to the bookshelf (about six feet away) to get the book (between Susannah Clarke's Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norell and Beverly Cleary's The Mouse and the Motorcycle) to quote directly, but, oh, hell, let me get it:

"I must ask you, [Boss] said, "to hand over all watches, radios, and communication devices. You won't need them until you get home."

He held up an admonitory hand at the chorus of protests.

"There's a good reason for this -- and for any other peculiar requests I may make. Remember, this whole program has been worked out for your benefit. If you won't cooperate, you're only cheating yourselves. Cameras and recorders -- yes, of course, Use them as much as you like."

There was a general sigh of relief at this. Duncan had noticed that most of his companions were festooned with equipment designed to capture every aspect of their experience. A couple were obviously "tapeworms," those peculiar addicts who went through life accompanied by voice-actuated recorders, so that nothing they said -- or heard -- was ever lost. Unless they could do this, Duncan had been told, they did not believe that they had really and truly lived . . .

So that's why I've got a picture of a chatty tapeworm for this post. (The quote here is from Chapter 25, "Mystery Tour," of Clarke's book.)

About the only thing he got wrong, I think, is the plural "devices." These days, of course, most everyone has one device, a smart phone, with which he or she can do all of these things. I'm still enough of a technology pseudoluddite that I have a still camera (a very nice digital) a video camera (HD, of course), an iPod Touch and, shockingly enough, a cell phone that ONLY MAKES AND RECEIVES phone calls. So I am festooned, as Clarke says. But I don't have them going every second of the day, either. No matter what my wife says.

The Hermit of Iapetus, Part VI

Read previous bits of the story starting here.

Arthur C. Clarke's spaceman Robert Kleinman is cryptically to have said "Space is small; only the planets are big." In the years I have wandered Iapetus, I have not found ground to dispute him. As A boy, I reveled in reading about Saturn's moons. The giant Titan was the tempting home of liquid seas of methane and other petrochemicals, the human inhabitants of Clarke's Oasis City. The books I read described Iapetus as tiny. Odd, but tiny. Miniscule compared to Titan, to the Galilean moons of Jupiter, to our own moon, Luna -- when I discovered it had a name, it was the Moon to me no longer.

Iapetus is not tiny.

As a boy, I found that magical formula that allows one to determine the surface area of a sphere:

4 r²

It was simple, then, and elegant, to determine that Iapetus has a surface area of about 6,583,650 square kilometers depending upon which estimate of the moon's radius one uses in the formula. I always chose the more conservative estimate, a trait I inherited from my mother. That is immense, say, compared to the inside of your average spacer, which might stretch to meet 12,000 cubic meters. But Admunsen explored Antarctica, a continent that covers 13.2 square kilometers, twice that in winter when the sea ice expands.

To Admunsen and his compatriots, Antarctica seemed tractless. Often they traveled on their 99-day voyage in blizzard conditions, feeling their way forward gingerly, so as not to fall into a crevasse or become lost in the jumbles of ice and mountain. Some days, they covered nineteen, twenty miles. Others they sat in their tent with the wind howling through the guy wires. Once they sat for five days in a gale, waiting for it to abate. Finally, they took down their tent, carefully trying not to break its brittle, ice-coated canvas in pieces, and harnessed their dogs to voyage in the wind because they could no longer bear to be idle. "There's nothing so bad as lying weather-bound like this," Admunsen recalls a companion saying, while another added: "IT takes more out of you than going from morning to night." So as they wandered from crevasse to crevasse, bridge to bridge, glacier to glacier, occasionally catching a glimpse of the dome-shaped Mount Helmer Hanssen, "its top as round as the bottom of a bowl, and covered by an extraordinary ice-sheet, which was so broken up and disturbed that the blocks of ice bristles in every direction like the quills of a porcupine," he wrote. "It glittered an burned in the sunlight -- a glorious spectacle. There could only be one such mountain in the world, and as a landmark it was priceless. We knew that we could not mistake that, however the surroundings might appear on the return journey, when possibly the conditions of lighting might be altogether different."

But even Helmer Hanssen was lost in Antarcitca's immensity. A landmark it may be, but when landmarks disappear beneath the horizon, one knows one is walking in an immense land. In space, the landmarks are always there. Yes, the distance between them is in light years, but the guideposts are there to be seen nonetheless, without fretting over erecting spare ski poles in the landscape in order to guide one's return journey, without fretting over leaving a sledge erect against a pile of butchered dog carcasses awaiting human bellies on the return journey. And in space, one rides in a coccoon of aluminum, silicon, and other metals. One is propelled. One voyages when one sleeps, with computers monitoring the journey and the shirt-sleeve weather inside the immensity of cold space. In space, all one has to do is wait. Only on the planets -- and the moon -- does one have to walk.

Space is small; only the planets are big.

This I have tried to explain to Liam, in letters ferried to Mars by obliging couriers. I'm not sure he understands. I have recommended that he read the account of Admunsen, for I know it is available in the testosterone-dripping libraries on the Moon and Mars. I hope he reads it. I hope he takes home the lessons of the Butcher's Shop.

Titan's Lake Shines

The picture's not spectacular, but what that little shine at the top means is pretty significant. It's sunlight glinting off what's likely a lake of liquid methane or ethane on the surface of Titan. You can read more about it here.

"This is the first time outside Earth we've seen specular reflection from another liquid from another body," said Ralf Jaumann, a scientist analyzing data from the Cassini unmanned space probe.

Jaumann said he was surprised when he first saw the photos transmitting from Cassini, orbiting Saturn about a billion miles from Earth.

"It was great because if you look at photos of planets, you mostly see nothing is happening. But in two hours we saw a glint of light getting brighter."

What's cool about this is not that Titan is suddenly a little bit more earth-like -- because it isn't; it may have an atmosphere and liquid on the surface, but that's where the major similarities end. What's cool about this is that Arthur C. Clarke may be proved right, as he wrote about liquid lakes of methane or ethane, featuring fantastic icebergs of ammonia and other substances, on the moon. I like it when nature imitates art.