Well, I Guess You Can Call it the End of an Era

Astute readers of this blog will note I have not written much about Uncharted lately.

First, it was because we'd moved and that, for a while, our Internet access was spotty at best. But life kept getting in the way, and for some reason or other -- some good, such as I've taken on a part-time job of teaching English classes at a local university; and some not so good, such as I flat out got used to not checking my Uncharted email.

So as of this weekend, I'm no longer working for Uncharted.

This isn't a bridges burned, friendships-be-damned parting, however. Just a shift in priorities and where I can put the free time I've got. In many ways, I'll still be involved in Uncharted, through doing some on-call writing, consulting, and other such work fro the very good friends I still have at the company. I just won't be involved in day-to-day operations, or be in charge of editorial content any more.

Why the departure?

See the reasons above. Taking on a part-time job in addition to my full-tme job was rather time consuming, but at the same time was getting some short shrift as I tried to balance Uncahrted win with teaching and working full time and also being a full-time husband. There are those at Uncharted who have lives as busy as this, and I am in awe that they can keep it all together as well as they do. The challenge simply proved, over time, to be too great for me.

Add to that there's a little part of me that has always preferred inertia to action, like Petey here encountering his stink bug, and that makes for a heavenly mix of conundrums mixed in enigmas wrapped in Twinkies.

Oh. I'm also back on writing novels, another significant time-taker.

Lest any rumors be spread, let it be known that I enjoyed my time at Uncharted, as did my wife Michelle. We made some good, lasting friendships that I'm confident will last as we move in a different direction. And you'll still see me on Uncharted as an Explorer, though not one doing the double-duty of pulling strings behind the scenes. You're not rid of my Uncharted babblings yet.

Wegwets . . .

Friday we travel to Logan to watch Michelle be hooded and awarded her masters degree.

I had my chance. Back in the summer of 2009 when I finished the coursework for my masters degree, she gave me the option of doing the same. I opted not to.

Watching her be hooded is going to be fun. She's worked hard for her degree, and is looking forward to having her evenings and weekends free of classwork and papers. I'm looking forward to the same -- though she'll certainly find things with which to fill the time.

But should I have gone through the hooding ceremony? Maybe . . .

Brother VanWinkle

This was me at church a few weeks ago. Literally and figuratively.

When Touring the LHC, Please Stay With Your Group

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.

Social Networked-Out

I think it was when I got the invitation to the BYU-Idaho online instructors’ social networky thingy that I finally snapped.

Snapped is probably a bad word for it. Felt a teense overwhelmed, perhaps.

Social networks are, of course, de rigeur nowadays, and everyone has them. From knitters – you bet your perled little booties that there’s a social network exclusively for knitters – to, yes, the multiple, and I mean multiple, social networks to which BYU-Idaho has invited me, there are plenty of social networks to go around.

And that’s great news. I, myself, am involved on a foundational level with Uncharted, a social network of its own standing (more on that in just a little bit). That the Internet can provide venues for like-minded people to gather and share information and comeradeship is a wonderful thing, if they’re managed properly. BYU-Idaho’s networks, right now, are giving me fits but that’s likely because I’m new to navigating the whole system. (Surely, somewhere, there must be a Facebook-like option for me to see everything that’s going on in the multitude of little BYU-Idaho networks I’m tied to at the moment.)

Many moons ago – I might have a copy of it somewhere – I wrote a short story outlining the life of a man so dependent on computer technology for his work and social interaction that he rarely left his home, instead focusing on his work which came to him via email and in a cloud-sorta thing (this was just at the advent of email and before anyone had heard of The Cloud, so I was a bit prescient there) to the exclusion of all else. When the power went out and he had to go outside to see what was going on, he was overwhelmed by the beauty of nature, the multiplicity of marigolds that had spilled out of their flower beds and overrun his disused driveway, and by the death of his next-door neighbor, dead at her computer in a room with the shades drawn at the exclusion of all else.

No nevermind on that. Just brought it up as an example of why maybe the BYU-Idaho social network pushed me over the brink. I’m social networked-out.

Let’s go over the roll-call: Facebook. Twitter. Google+. Uncharted. BYU-Idaho. GoodReads. LinkedIn. Did I miss any? Plenty. And these are only the ones I’m involved in to any degree. Plus the family of blogs I run, including this one. They don’t necessarily count as social networking because it’s not social networking when you’re yelling into an empty room, but I’ll include them here for argument’s sake.

There are plenty more out there I could join. Obviously doing so would drive me insane.

I’m not dissing any of the social networks I’m involved in. or those I’m not involved in. I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve reached a saturation point. I’ve reached the point where I need a social networking website that collects all the information from my other social networks and presents it in one convenient package.

Not likely, per Jeff Tinsley, one of the original brains behind mylife.com, a website aiming to be the “one social network to rule them all.” Says Tinsley:

The fact is, no matter how great, no one network is able to deliver on every front. For instance, can any platform match Twitter when it comes to short, instant global communication? Or will any network ever equal Facebook when it comes to making and sustaining connections the world over? Users will embrace a variety of sites, each of which excels at its unique method of connecting, sharing and more.

For the future of social networking, that means tolerance is key, and integration and management tools will have essential roles to play. Those that succeed will offer users simple, comprehensive solutions to maintain their connections and make new ones.

Sure, users recognize that a definitive, end-all platform to communicate may be ideal. But it isn’t essential. People will share, friend, link, circle, pin, like, tweet and post — and they’ll do it happily. They know that when it comes to making quality connections, “more” is always better. Social networking, it turns out, isn’t a zero sum game after all.

I guess I’m getting old. Don’t have the attention span any more.

Here is Your War

Another plane throbbed in the sky, and we lay listening with an awful anticipation. One of the dogs suddenly broke into a frenzied barking and went tearing through our little camp as if chasing a demon. My mind seemed to lose all sense of proportion, and I got jumpy and mad at myself.

Concussion ghosts, traveling in waves, touched our tent walls and made them quiver. Ghosts were shaking the ground ever so lightly. Ghosts were stirring the dogs to hysteria. Ghosts were wandering in the sky peering for us cringing in our hide-outs. Ghosts were everywhere, and their hordes were multiplying as every hour added its production of new battlefield dead. We lay and thought of the graveyards and the dirty men and the shocking blast of the big guns, and we couldn’t sleep.

“What time is it?” came out of darkness from the next cot.

I snapped on the flashlight. “Half past four, and for [expletive] sake go to sleep!”

Finally just before dawn we did sleep, in spite of everything. Next morning, we spoke around among ourselves and found that all of us had tossed away all night. It was an unexplainable thing. For all of us had been through greater danger. On another night the roll of the guns would have lulled us to sleep. It was just that on some nights the air became sick and there was an unspoken contagion of spiritual dread, and we were little boys again, lost in the dark.

Fear without using the word. Fear through repetition of congruous imagery. Fear that brings us back to that world of little boys, spooked in the familiar surroundings of their neighborhood, their back yard, by an unexpected light or shadow or sound that ordinarily would not have bothered them. For me, the sound is that of a cat in heat. Never bothered me during the day, but at night, that eerie cry like that of a baby, bothered me terribly.

 This is the writing of Ernie Pyle, World War II combat correspondent, describing the creeping fear he and his fellow soldiers felt during battles in Algeria and Tunisia in 1942-43, collected in his book "Here is Your War." Pyle writes in an astringent manner, but occasionally lets fly with what John Steinbeck would describe as a bit of hooptedoodle, such as what is duplicated above. He handles the hooptedoodle well, filling in the space between his fits with spare, riveting reporting of the war that today’s correspondents might do well to emulate.

Emulation, however, might be a difficult situation. It’s clear where Pyle’s loyalties lay, and today’s journalists’ loyalties are far from his. I’m not discussing objectivity – Pyle could certainly tell horseshit from reality – but rather I’m wondering if today’s war correspondents would even consider reporting in this manner, as a soldier-correspondent, not as a reporter dropped in for a day, a few days, a week, and then outta there before the real hot stuff begins. No matter. For World War II buffs, reading Pyle’s tales is a requirement.

Only the Planets are Big

Outer Space from Sander van den Berg on Vimeo.


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

-- Robert Kleinmann

Bugs in the Arithmetic

So, did the Viking landers really find life on Mars, way back in 1976? Headline writers and breathless bloggers across the Internet sure think so.

What did they really find?

Gullibility. Or at least evidence that an as-yet unverified mathematical process that could detect signs of life in data from the Mars Viking landers might possibly have found proof of life in that data.

But there’s a problem with their method: It’s unverified. Writes Discovery.com:

Critics counter that the method has not yet been proven effective for differentiating between biological and non-biological processes on Earth so it's premature to draw any conclusions.

"Ideally to use a technique on data from Mars one would want to show that the technique has been well calibrated and well established on Earth. The need to do so is clear; on Mars we have no way to test the method, while on Earth we can," planetary scientist and astrobiologist Christopher McKay, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., told Discovery News.

Sounds like the researchers used a complexity analysis to see if Viking’s readings showed biological chemical reactions in tested soil, rather than geological reactions, as the scientific consensus lies. I don’t pretend to understand the math, but apparently there is some caution urged when using such analyses, as data showing, for example, poor results as compared to another analysis could, in the longer run, actually show better results over time.

I don’t doubt there is life on other planets; to disbelieve such is ludicrous. Finding life, however, is going to take more than mathematical analysis. It’s going to take money, and the political will to send more accurate probes to places such as Mars to discover that life. It’s romantic to think that you’re going to find proof in data that’s been lying around since he 1970s, but if that proof relies on unverified methods, it’s not really proof at all.

Casualty of the Mommy Wars

Ah, the distractions of a political campaign.

When Rick Santorum was still in the running, it was contraception. Now, with him gone, it’s shifted from the War on Women to the Mommy War.
Give me a break.

I guess it’s hard having to fill all that air time. I suppose you could fill it with well-researched news and well-argued opinion, but that takes time. And by time I mean hours. But hours are an eternity to the fast-paced news business, where your competition can beat you with the next new completely idiotic distraction by mere seconds, and if they do, well, they get to beat on their chests (even the ladies) and strut about with their penises hanging out (even the ladies) because, hey, they’re the big news-oozing machine that beat the competition and got to make someone squirm on live TV because of the comments they said or were said against them or for them or in their general direction and some such drivel.

Bill Maher is the latest to open his gob in the Mommy War battle, saying something that sounds, on the onset, completely stupid but then, after you think about it, sounds even stupider than you first thought.

Says the man:

No one is denying that being a mother is a tough job; I remember I was a handful. But you know there is a big difference between being a mother, and that tough job, and getting your ass out the door at 7 am when it’s cold, having to deal with the boss, being in a workplace, or even if you’re unhappy you can’t show it for eight hours.

Anyone who has been a mother, or even spent more than five minutes thinking about motherhood, knows what Mr. Maher says is patently stupid.

My wife has to get three kids out the door to school by 8 am. So, it’s not 7 am, but when Bill gets himself to work at 7 am, I’m sure he’s only got himself to worry about – he doesn’t have to make sure three uncooperative little sprites are ready to go alongside him. She’s out the door with those kids rain or shine.

She doesn’t have to deal with a boss. She does have to deal with teachers who are wondering where the missing homework is, why junior britches is throwing an Asberger-related tantrum in class, why little miss chucklehead can never remember her lunchbox and why that little spaz, the young one, can’t find his jacket even though he’s standing on it.

She doesn’t have to deal with a workplace. Just home, where once the kids are at school there’s stuff that needs doing and she’s the boss telling her no matter how much she’d like to take it easy if she does she won’t get her homework done (she’s taking masters-level classes right now) or get her teaching material ready (she’s a volunteer with the Boy Scouts of America) or any of the other tasks she’s got to get done without anyone looking over her shoulder or even with a paycheck attached to it. Motivation boils down to maybe a grunt from the kids when they come home from school or a deep sigh from Dad when he has to figure out why her computer won’t talk to the color printer so she can get her work done, which she does without pay.

And she can’t show she’s unhappy. Well, in small, guarded moments she can, when the kids have blown her off for the nth time on getting their piano lessons done (which she teaches them) or their clothes put away (which she washes) or their homework done (which she corrects and signs for them) or when Dad gives that sigh or complains about having to do too much after he’s home from his job of whatever the hell it is he does each day without kids underfoot or one of them calling her to school with a plastic bag and a pair of clean underwear because he pooped his pants.

But of course going over all of this does nothing to help me decide if I should vote for the bozo with the big ears and the do-nothing-complex because the big, bad Republicans are in control of the House of Representatives or the guy who has to check the windsock at the airport every morning to see what his views on various subject might be and who has to kiss butt to the right-wing whackos in the party because they tend to be the ones who go out to vote. It’s all just fodder for the talking heads who are all satisfied that, at the end of each day, they’re helping me on the issues, they’re helping me sort out, via ludicrous comments on non-important things, who I should vote for so that the books balance, the wars end (but not the culture wars, let’s fan those because they give the TV folks something to jabber about).

Add to it all we’re reading Helaman in our scripture study, the chapters in which Helaman talks about the devil getting such a strong hold on the hearts of men, distracting them with their riches and with battles over politics and culture while the big, important things (like getting rid of the Gadianton Robbers, for one) go unchecked to the point they basically become the government*.

Let’s shut down the Mommy Wars. They’re nothing but a distraction.

*Before you get all knotted up, I’m not making any parallels between the robbers of old and anyone involved in current government. I don’t believe there’s a great conspiracy on either the left or the right to usurp and do whatever to the government to make it fall. I’m just saying there are distractions today, just like then, that are pulling our attention from the things that really matter.

Forgive me. Just feeling a bit Entish at the moment.