The Brooklyn Space Program

The New York borough of Brooklyn has its own space program.

A group of parents and children, led by Brooklyinite videographer Luke Geissbuhler, successfully sent a homemade capsule containing a high-definition digital camera and an iPhone (acting as a GPS) into space, successfully sending their capsule via weather balloon to a height of nearly 19 miles, or 100,000 feet, and then retrieved their capsule for further experimentation after it landed a mere 30 miles north of its launch site.

Pretty damn cool and, frankly, done at a fraction of the cost of the first space launch. Of course, this team didn't have to design the camera or the location system, and they used ancient analog technology -- a weather balloon -- to launch, but they still had to overcome some pretty interesting engineering problems. Protecting their gear from the altitude and the cold? Hand-warmers and a waterproof capsule. How cool is that?

Well done, crew. I'll follow your further experiments with interest. You can read more about them here.

What is That Cereal About?

I used to think it was Charles Schulz who understood children the best. Now, I'm not so sure. I think Richard Thompson has at least accomplished the feat of becoming Schulz' equal.

And maybe this is an eerie view into how we understand products -- that each has its story. Of course the childrens' cereal is going to be more appealing -- it has, for them, a much more appealing story of activity, quick gratification and manic moving-on. The adult cereal has a more adult theme: Please help me poop. And that horse, well, I'm as confused as Petey" What does it have to do with digestive help? Maybe it passes on the message that by eating this cereal, one may continue to live the active, happy lifestyle one is accustomed to, even if the only time one gets close to a horse is when one is eating an unknown meat in Mexico.

So here -- and I'm sure you saw this coming -- is a good lesson for writers. Consider your audience, and how the story you're trying to tell appeals to them. Or doesn't. If, in reading your audience, you discover you're offering poo-poo help rather than the story they want, you've got a problem. Equally so if the story is compelling, but could be even more compelling if presented in a different way -- a graphic novel versus a straight novel.

But where to find that audience, in this day and age? I've had my novel on Scribd and on my blog for months now, and only a few perfunctory replies. But that's what's to be expected -- putting something up on the Internet like that is like shooting a shotgun blast into the air and expecting the shot to intersect with a duck. I've got to find some audience members willing to read and give this book a good critique.

But back to the comic strip. Bravo, Mr. Thompson. Your story is playing very well to this audience member. Please continue.

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.

Lying Computers and the Lies You Tell Them

Earlier today, as I was helping our oldest son wrap up the final requirements for him to earn his Arrow of Light Cub Scout award, we talked about the importance of telling the truth. When you lie, I told him, you have to remember your lies, and if you forget even one of them, your whole false tale is unraveled. Better to tell the truth, I said, and never have to worry about forgetting the details.

I so wish the same thing applied to computers.

I wrote earlier this week about having to reconfigure parts of our home computer network because things had gone wrong. Part of the reconfiguration involved having to reset our router because, for some reason, the computer we had our network set up on suddenly decided our network wasn't set at all, and thus had forgotten the security encryption key to get into the router. Resetting the router put it back to its factory settings.

That solved the connection problems, but brought up other problems: We lost our connection regularly, sometimes mid-work session, meaning we had to unplug the router to reset things and to get the connection back. After three days of that nonsense -- and we knew it was on our end because we never lost our connection to the ISP, because sometimes the connection would drop on my computer and not Michelle's, and sometimes vice versa.

Then I remembered something: Sometime in the past, I'd updated the router's firmware. Perhaps the reset made that update disappear. So I updated the firmware again, and voila, the connection hasn't dropped once since. And the little indicator light on the router, which was orange from the factory, is now a nice blue-gray. Don't know what that means, but I do know I'm happier having the connection working again.

But this is what I hate about resetting, restoring, erasing, reconfiguring and doing anything else with computers: You have to remember all the lies you told it in the past to keep it working. If, in the restoration of all things, an update or something is missed, things just don't work as well as they should.

This doesn't hold true for everything, however. The annoying programs -- Spybot Search and Destroy comes to mind -- tenaciously hang onto their spots in your computers' memory without wanting to leave, while things that are essential and useful -- a constant internet connection, for one -- are the things that are affected most adversely. So I may begin keeping a log of the lies I tell my computer so, if in the future (and I should say when, not if) things go wrong, I have a trail to get things set aright again.

My Kids' Refrigerator: Butthat

Once and a while, when your kids draw something you see not just the pat little things they know they're supposed to draw: The houses with the four-pane windows and chimney, the cute little horse, the cowboy the rocket ship. Sometimes you see their budding senses of humor come out.

As in this drawing. Meet Indiana Jones' newest enemy: Butthat. Go here for even more fun drawings.

Telling, Not Showing

One of the first Ten Commandments of Writing (said with appropriate thundery and bush-burney respect and affect) is this:

Thou Shalt Show, Not Tell

meaning, of course, that if you're telling the action rather than showing the action in your story, you're screwing up.I beg to differ. Sometimes, if you do it just right, telling is a lot more writerly than showing. Behold: 

We're not shown the off-screen action until the fourth panel, and even then, we only get to see the result of the action, not the action itself. The characters in the first three panels are effectively telling the action, and it's in their telling that we get a different perspective on the action, rather than just the action itself. It's effective, brilliant, and helps add a bit of variety to the overall storyline. (If you want to see more of Rocket Man and the Emperor of the Moon, just peruse Mr. Meyer's comics here. Well worth the trip, I must say.)

This is just one fina example of how we can, as writers, add variety to our narrative and bring in odd little side stories that entertain our readers as well as keep us in the "action," albeit not the straight, linear action that is most expected. Use such tricks sparingly, though, as there are few (with the exception of Tom Stoppard in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" who can keep the action we expect and are familiar with off the screen nearly entirely as they tell their story.

A-Hunting I Will Go

It’s official. I’m job-hunting.

Not that I haven’t been job-hunting prior to this announcement when in fact I have been job-hunting for quite some time now.

It’s not that I’m unhappy at my current job. I’m not. I love the work, I like the people I work with, and I love that I’m on a schedule that gives me Fridays off.

It’s just that, in the next two years, the company is going to shed between 700 and 1,000 people. It’s just that I’m a subcontractor, and the company has made it clear that unless subcontractors can poop golden eggs for the company, we’ll be the first to go, and without the little tinfoil handshake the company folks are getting.

Why are they laying people off? Some work is done, the contract is up in 2012 and they’re a business, not a social welfare agency. I understand that. I remain bitter (a bit) about the go-go attitude the company has whenever we have meetings – Hey! Everybody’s getting bonuses! Everyone’s getting safety money because of the safe way we’re doing our work safely! Except for subconctractors who, of course, contribute to the work and the overall safe safetyness but don’t get the bonuses because, well, you’re not really company employees are you? Yeah. I get the concept.

So if you know of anyone out there looking to hire a slightly cynical and pessimistic writer with ten years’ experience in journalism and five in technical writing, let me know. I’ve got a BA in journalism and mass communication and a MS in English with an emphasis on technical writing.

I am doing what I can, of course. Just signed a contract yesterday to teach a foundations English class at BYU-Idaho starting in January – providing they have enough takers and can fill my slot this time around. I’m also researching (slowly) grant opportunities for the local school district in the hopes of adding successful grant writing to my resume. And I’m signing up as a technical/creative writer at oDesk, to see if I can get into the freelance biz which is just as crowded as Homer Simpson made the jeans market out to be when Marge became a cop. And I’ve got that fantasy novel manuscript. I need to start writing and sending out some query letters. And the work at Uncharted continues unabated.

Incredibly as well I’m going to take on a positive attitude in all this. Layoffs don’t start until January, so we’ve got at least two months in which there are no real pressures. And we’ll see what happens then. Three rounds of layoffs in 2011. Pity is that if I can hang on until the end of May, I’ll get another 40 hours of vacation time from my employer. We’ll see what happens.

Maybe it'll be easier just to kill da wabbit.

And it doesn’t even bother me that potential employers might stumble across this blog and read my little bitterness here – because, outshining the bitterness, I hope, is a person working hard to cope with what life dishes out in a way that keeps bread on the table and a roof over our heads. Take that, Karl Marx.

Gabbling on Genre

They tell you – these experts, not Bernie Horowitz – that as you craft (that’s a word that’s all Bernie) your query letter when you’re searching for an agent for your novel that you’re better off knowing that the agents you’re querying handle the genre you’re writing in.

That brings up an even more fundamental question for Ur-writers such as myself:

What’s my genre?

Sadly, though the story’s first draft is done and I’m percolating on ideas for the second draft, what’s more important in getting this thing published is not that I’ve got a second draft, but that I know what precise pigeonhole to jam it into.

Not that the fissionability of the generic fantasy genre makes it any easier.

Honestly, and only in the most general sense, I don’t really fuss about the genre of the books I read. I read them because they’re by a familiar author. I read them because they’ve got a fascinating tale to tell. Or I avoid them because they’re Terry Brooks.

There are inherent dangers here; if fantasy genres were cartographized as things were in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, everywhere you look on the map you’d see the epigram “Here Be Monsters.”

Pick the wrong genre and send it to the agents who specialize in that genre, you’ve wasted effort. Pick too narrow a genre and you may never get your book published at all. Is what I’ve written Ergodic literature? Do I market it to agents as religious fiction? Or am I brilliant enough to classify this as a novel of ideas? But pick too generic a genre and you may not stand out much.

Here be monsters.

So worry about the story, I say. I know I’ve got plenty to worry about in that department. My story isn’t the best, though it’s got possibilities. Going to concentrate on the writing. But at the same time, I can’t leave the genre and query questions in the dust. So many things to think about . . .

Honors and Benefits . . .

You’re familiar, of course, with my saga of teaching and then not teaching at BYU-Idaho.

Things are looking up, however. Just yesterday I signed and sent in a contract to teach starting in January 2011 – and will teach, depending on if enough students take the class to fill in my section, wherever I may rest on the adjunct online instructor totem pole.

Even though I am not teaching at the moment, however, I am in the system. Officially. If you go to the employee directory and look up Large, Biff at, I am there in all my glory. Kinda like Newman:

And since I am in the system, officially, honors and benefits do arise . . .

Today Michelle called and said “Hey, you do get benefits from your theoretical teaching position.” Because of my “employment” status, she was able to get us two tickets for the university’s upcoming Halloween concert for $3 each, rather than $6 each. So my toil through a month and a half of training to become an online instructor has thusfar resulted in a net gain of $6. (We would have gone to the concert regardless, of course, so I’m not going to quibble over the net versus gross here.) And it looks good on the resume, though I’ve not technically added it yet, seeing as I haven’t taught any classes yet.

That Mad Accursed River

I'd love to go do this, as John Milligan says, before I don't.

There are problems with that: I tend to fall out of boats. A lot. My wife Michelle says she'll go with me, but only in a complete body wetsuit with a plug-in heater.

I do have one thing going for me: I can pass the Ed Norton Test necessary to get a job alongside him in the sewers: I can float. So maybe, just maybe -- when the kids are older, our oldest in is Scouts and the Scouts want to go do this -- I'll get to go.

Until then, I'll live vicariously through Alan Murray's wonderful story and photographs on the adventure he, John, Mike and others had rafting down the Snake River in Wyoming. You can read the story and see his photos here. Enjoy.