And Now, A Message From My Dog

I kind of ate your sandwich by accident.
Are those potato chips?

No Wonder I'm Confused

The more I think about "alternate timeline" stories, the less I like them. Someone smarter than I once said that alternate timelines (or alternate universes) were a way of making up for a bunch of bad writing with a whole bunch more bad writing. And in the end, what do you get? More inconsistencies than a bowl of badly-mixed cake batter. Comic books are especially notorious for this kind of thing. Even in comic books as conceptually simple as The Punisher there seem to be alternate universes, alternate stories, alternate alternateness. A friend and I went into a comic books store once and I happened to see a comic called Crisis on Infinite Worlds. Or maybe it was Infinite Crisis. Or Crisis on Infinite Earths. I don't remember - there was a crisis, and it was apparently infinite, but past that, I'm no expert.

So he undertook to explain it to me, using merchandise on the shelves as visual aids, and occasionally with the input of the proprietor. I still didn't get it. Either comic book fans are a lot smarter than I am, or none of this shit makes sense to anyone and they're just nodding and smiling and pretending to be up to speed. Or maybe the true fans understand all the alternate universes and alternate timelines and the mere poseurs are the ones who mumble "I don't think I get it."

So he's showing me some comic book and trying to explain it to me.

"It would make more sense if you read it from the beginning."

"The main one?"

"Yeah. Some of it, anyway. You'd need to read the two alternate histories first..."

"Alternate histories? They aren't alternate timelines?"

"Sort of, but not really. So after the alternate histories, you'd need to read the virtual timeline..."

"The what?"

"It's like an alternate timeline, only it never really happened. Kind of like the dream season in Dallas, only some of the stuff in the virtual timeline got into the main alternate timeline, and then that led to the sub-alternate timeline..."

"Is that the one where Superman was a Nazi?"

"No. That's a virtual timeline. And he was a Communist, not a Nazi."

"My mistake. Authoritarian regimes sometimes run together on me. But wouldn't he have been Ineffectual-Bush?"

"What?"

"If everything in that timeline is the opposite of this one, he should have been Ineffectual-Bush. The opposite of an animal would be a plant, and the opposite of having super powers would be complete ineffectiveness. So, Ineffectual-Bush."

"But if he was a bush, he couldn't move. He'd have to be an animal. Maybe a mollusk of some kind. Barnacle-Man or something."

"Barnacles don't move either."

"Mudskipper-Man. That was he could swim and crawl across the mud flats."

"But he'd still be ineffectual."

"Oh, absolutely, that's a must. But the timelines CAN get a little confusing, but remember that this comic book is a sub-alternate timeline of an alternate timeline spawned by a virtual timeline that relies on stuff in the two alternate histories. And then there's the crossover..."

"The what?"

"That's where timelines from two distinct universes intersect. Like that one where the new-old Punisher and the new-old-new Batman got together to defeat the old-new-old Joker."

"Does anyone get laid in that story?"

"What?"

"I'd feel better about this whole mess if someone, somewhere, was actually getting some sex out of it."

"I don't think so, no."

"I was afraid of that."

"But anyway, there's the pseudo-alternate history, the one where Kal-El ended up landing in the Garment District and turned into Sewing Machine Man, and him and his sidekick Scissors Boy fight against the evil Off The Rack Man and HIS sidekick, One Size Fits All Boy."

"A ripping yarn, I'm sure. Get it? Ha. I crack me up."

"But then Mitochondrion Man and Clodhopper, the girl with the huge foot, come back from the future, and then they have to fight Count Nausea and the Gag Reflex, only because it's an alternate timeline, the Egad Flux doesn't work the same way, and they end up spawning a whole bunch of muddy cannibal children, and..."

"I can see this is going to take a while. Lunch at the Indian restaurant?"

Denim Diapers

I saw an ad on TV the other day for disposable diapers printed so they look like denim shorts. On the one hand, this sort of agitates my WTF instinct. It has nothing to do with actual babies, who would be just as happy running around entirely nekkid. It has everything to do with the smug self-satisfaction of the hipsters who think this sort of thing is cool, and I am as a general rule dubious of practically anything that makes the average hipster's sense of smug self-satisfaction any more smug or self-satisfied.

But in another way, I wish they had had Depends printed with various fabric patterns back when I was going through chemo and had to wear them because I was, for lack of a more delicate phrase, an unpredictable fountain of loathsomeness. It would have saved a lot of time - buy a package of tweed-printed Depends and you're good to go. And no laundry! You just throw the things away and that's that.

Some people think things like Depends are funny. I invite such people to undergo six months of chemotherapy and see if it's still so funny. But I still think denim-printed diapers are, well, kinda silly.

Is that a phaser in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

Villainy

It turns out that I may have stopped watching Star Trek Voyager prematurely. Why? Because when I stopped watching, the chief villains were the Kazon, whom I generally referred to as "Broccoli-Heads", as in "Oh crap, another episode with the Broccoli-Heads and Chakotay's love child." But later on, the Borg apparently became major players in the series, along with the mysterious Species 8742 (an interesting wrinkle, that: if the Borg represent the pinnacle of technological sophistication, what with their history of centuries of raiding other civilizations for their goodies, Species 8742 represents the pinnacle of evolutionary sophistication, what with their unnatural strength, vitality, and aggressive immune systems).

I'm generally drawn to engaging villains. The normal rules of writing generally argue that the best villains are those that the reader (or viewer) can link in allegorical fashion with something in their own world, and the more personalized the villain is, the better it is supposed to be. The Klingons in early Star Trek, for example, were meant to be overt allegorical references to the USSR, which played well at the time because of the Cold War. The Empire in Star Wars appears to be a sort of direct allegorical reference to Nazi Germany, what with its usurpation of constitutional authority, tendency to wear black uniforms, and complete fascist ruthlessness.

(Here's an odd thing: in the Star Wars movies, I often find myself rooting for the Bad Guys, but I never do that in Star Trek. I suspect that this means that I view the Federation as inherently good, as demonstrated by its actions, while I don't necessarily see that the Rebel Alliance is any distinct improvement over the Empire in Star Wars.)

But the Borg break all of the rules of villainy in writing, and maybe for that reason I find them especially interesting. They don't appear to be an allegorical reference to anything in modern life (though I sometimes refer to those cheesy cell phone gizmos that Happenin' Young Guys wear on their ears as "Borg implants"). They aren't really personalized at all; one Borg drone is as good (or bad) as any other. Not even the Borg Queen really puts a face on them, as she can apparently be destroyed without really being destroyed, and there are still questions about whether she is the Borg, leads the Borg, represents the Borg, or is just something the screenwriters came up with to give Picard and Data a foil to work against in Star Trek: First Contact. Alice Krige is a piece of work, huh?

Nor do the Borg really strive for any of the ends that most of our villains aim for. Power, profit, love; these all seem to be alien to the Borg. They assimilate species and technologies because that's what they do; that's their path to species improvement. They don't even fight wars in the usual sense. They come, they assimilate, and they move on, not out of aggressiveness or militarism or even military strategy in the usual sense, any more than a tarantula wasp is engaging in organized hostilities when it paralyzes a spider and lays an egg on it. And since the Borg don't really "want" anything except to assimilate us, they are next to impossible to negotiate with. No tense negotiations, no summit meetings, no treaties - they either assimilate us, or they don't. And they don't do any of it out of maliciousness; they appear to sincerely believe that this assimilation method moves both them and the assimilated species closer to perfection.

There have been some good villains in Star Trek. One of my favorites was the Doomsday Machine, which appeared to be a stand-in for the "cobalt bombs" that people talked about in those days. But sometimes the villains aren't really things at all, but attitudes. One of my favorite Next Generation episodes was the one where David Ogden Stiers was a scientist who was right on the verge of figuring out how to stabilize a star and thus save his whole civilization from annihilation, but he has to go back and commit suicide because he's about to turn 60. What's the villain? The star? The scientist? The culture that requires such ritual suicide? Or the Enterprise people who think they know better than those yahoos do what's important in life?

Even V'Ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture was a good villain, at least for me. The movie had its flaws, I suppose, though I tend to be indulgent of it and cut it a great deal of slack. V'Ger has strong Borg overtones, so it isn't surprising that I liked it. (There is some "chatter" that the "machine planet" that rebuilt Voyager VI was really a Borg or proto-Borg planet, and I like that hypothesis.) Or the giant energy-eating amoeba in The Immunity Syndrome, or the guys who had institutionalized thermonuclear war to the extent that they didn't bother launching actual nukes; they just sent notes to the probable victims asking them to report to the disintegration booths.

But I confess I grow somewhat weary of certain villains, and the motif of large-scale war between rival political entities never really grabs my interest. There is a wargame that I enjoy called Starfleet Battles, which simulates in a fairly detailed way battles between various Star Trek ships (detailed to the point that you have to keep track of energy expenditure, and since it requires energy to keep your shields up and keep your weapons going, sometimes you really do have to shut off the life support systems to stay in the fight). It's a wargame, so its background requires there to be war, otherwise there would be no game. But boy howdy. I don't know if any of the background material in Starfleet Battles is considered canonical Star Trek material, but I hope not. There are constant wars, often all-out wars, and when all-out war between the Federation and Klingon Empire doesn't satisfy, they bring in other species with bigger and more powerful ships. Soon there are coalition wars that span pretty much this whole side of the galaxy. Pretty soon that isn't enough either, so in comes a wave of fascist bastards from the Andromeda galaxy to invade our galaxy.

There is (or at least was, back when I stopped buying expansion packs for it) exactly one "science mission" in the game, and you only played it while you were waiting for your friends to show up so the real fighting could begin. You collected "science points" by studying the anomaly of interest, and when you'd collected enough science points, you could say "Hot dog, now let's blow that goddamned thing up!" (I found it pleasing to put limits on our destructiveness - only one or two ships per side, no battleships or super-dreadnoughts, and with a backstory that didn't involve open warfare but something more like cleaning up pirates or putting down renegades.)

Another Star Trek villain that I really like are the Klingons. They started out as cheesy stand-ins for the Soviets, but over time fans (and writers) got hold of them and transformed Klingons and their culture into something that seems to resemble feudal Japan if you squint. They may still be rivals, but they aren't really adversaries any more. I for one found the "retooled Klingons" interesting. I have to say, I'd make a wonderfully crappy Klingon in real life - their preoccupations with knives and violence seem strange to me, all that hair would bug me, and they have the ugliest shoes in known space. But Klingons are fun to think about, and I wrote several novels retelling the exploits of a certain Klingon starship commander. Alas, these novels are long gone, destroyed by catastrophic hard drive failures over the years. But there was a lot of swearing of oaths, a lot of that "Kahless awaits thee at Sto-Vo-Kor" business, and enough boarding actions and deliberate ramming maneuvers to keep Horatio Hornblower busy for months.

I never had much use for the Romulans, though, which seems odd given my abiding interest in the history of the Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. I think the problem is the way they look - their bowl haircuts and really badly tailored clothes bug me. Plus I had the bad fortune of reading a Star Trek novel (this was back in the days when Trek fan fiction was considered kind of icky) that basically made the Romulans into the heroes of what amounted to a bunch of bad BDSM erotic fiction. You like BDSM? Indulge in good health, by all means. But it isn't something that I'm particularly keen on reading about, and to this day when I think of Romulans, I have this mental image of guys with pointy ears, bowl haircuts, leather underwear and whips.

And who wants THAT?

Farcebook

Facebook gets a lot of attention these days, especially on the CNN website, where I guess there isn't enough real news to keep the alleged journalists busy so they write stuff about Facebook. I'm not normally in the business of defending Facebook from its detractors, and I sometimes find the gush about "social media" a little nauseating. But sometimes the opposite camp nauseates me a little bit too.

You're talking to a guy at work, and you happen to mention Facebook in passing. AHA! He leaps on the comment.

"I'm not on Facebook," he cries.

"Well, good. As I was saying..."

"No, you don't get it, I'm not on Facebook!"

"I heard you. The point is, if you take the..."

"No, listen to me! I'M NOT ON FACEBOOK, WHICH MEANS I'M SMARTER THAN YOU!"

You don't want to be on Facebook? Then don't be; I don't care either way. But spare me the self-satisfaction, if you would, because being on or off Facebook has nothing really to do with anything except whether you're on or off Facebook.

The implication of these Luddites is that somehow being on Facebook makes me a tool of corporate interests - as though they never buy anything or watch TV commercials. Or being on Facebook somehow exposes my vital bodily fluids to contamination by hackers - as though anything on the Internet is secure and safe. Or that being on Facebook somehow makes me a narcissist who strokes my own ego by having umpteen jillion "Facebook friends", or that being on Facebook somehow makes me a lemming who follows whatever trend comes along.

Yeah. I remember when I was 17 I wouldn't go see Star Wars either because the thought of liking something that was popular bugged me. But then I grew up and realized that it doesn't matter.

So I'm on Facebook, and I use it for my own purposes. If you think that makes me a lemming, or a tool, or a retard, be my guest. But do shut up about it, would you? If you're so insecure that you think not being on Facebook makes you cool, hip or mature, well, you have issues you need to spend some time thinking through.

What I find most amusing is the way these people moan about how "Nobody seems to enjoy face-to-face communication any more, except me." Uh huh. And they're the same guys who sit in their cubicles texting their friends about YouTube videos. I may be a lemming, a tool and a retard, but I can still smell hypocrisy. Or, just about as fun, the guys who say "I prefer the human touch; that's why I use my cell phone." So one artificial means of communication is okay, but another is uncool? Okie doke.

I'm also amused by the people who say "I'm an engineer and I think Facebook sucks because of X, Y and Z." Or "I'm an IT professional and I think Facebook sucks because of X, Y and Z." Or "I'm an MBA and I think Facebook sucks because of X, Y and Z." The implication is that their educational status gives them unique insight into Facebook. Well, I happen to be an engineer, and I know a lot of engineers and MBAs, and I know that some of them believe some frightfully stupid things. So spare me the credentials, would you? You may be an engineer, but you also believe that Croatian troops are massing in Canada to invade the United States... And I happen to be an engineer, and I chat with friends on Facebook about the goofy stuff their cats did. So there.

The "horror story contingent" amuses me too. You run into some guy who says "My cousin posted pictures of himself smoking a huge joint on Facebook, and now he can't get a job. Damn Facebook, damn it to hell!" I don't mean to sound snippy, but how is it Facebook's fault that your cousin is a moron?

Get a grip. Here's a news flash for you: Nobody cares if you aren't on Facebook, and nobody thinks you're smart or cool or hip because you aren't, because ultimately, it just doesn't matter one way or the other.

And now, back to my usual nonsense.

The Great Game

The great game - you know what I mean, the endless debate about which is better, Star Trek or Star Wars.

If you just compare technical manuals to see who could kick who's ass, Star Wars wins. The firepower and power generation of SW ships are so high they're almost ridiculous, so high that they might as well measure them in terms of bazillions or jillions of Watts. A yield of 45 quadrillion tons? Uh, yeah, whatever. Sounds like kids playing with model airplanes saying "My plane goes umpty-leven kerbillion miles per hour, so I WIN!"

But I generally prefer Star Trek. I like the vision of the future where the replicator and essentially free energy have completely transformed society and the nature of work into something I quite like (imagine being able to do what you like, what interests you, whether you can make a living at it or not). Apologists for capitalism tell me that this is the worst idea since plutonium. But there are no corporations in Star Trek, they complain. Yes, I reply. Exactly. (It isn't, as some have argued, a case that all corporations have been nationalized in Star Trek. Rather, it's that the replicator and free energy have made that whole model obsolete.)

Not that I'm dogmatic about it. I like both franchises, and I try not to get myself wrapped around the socio-political axle. But I tend to take Star Trek more seriously - it just seems to hang together better for me than Star Wars.

And I have to say, the three most recent Star Wars movies were really bad. God knows Trek has produced its share of clinkers, and I for one thought the whole first season of Next Generation was pretty reprehensible. And Voyager? Forgettable in its entirety. But nothing - nothing - in the entire Trek universe comes close to matching the epic badness that was Jar Jar Binks.

The great thing about Trek, from this fan's point of view, is its compartmentalized nature. Programmers might call it encapsulation. I didn't like Voyager, so I simply ignore it. I didn't much like Deep Dish Nine, what with its endless whiny Bajoran spirituality, so I simply ignore it. But it's a lot harder to ignore blatant turds in Star Wars, because it's all more or less of a piece.

Words Non Grata

I think it's time to list a new set of people, things, words and expressions that I'd really like to see fade into oblivion. Not because they necessarily exhibit bad grammar or bad usage, but simply because I'm sick and tired of them, and it's all about me.

Social Media. Sounds too much like an embarrassing disease you wouldn't want to admit to your family. Besides, I can't turn on the radio these days without hearing some technophile flapping his cake-hole about how social media is going to completely transform the way I eat a sandwich.

Smart Phone. No it isn't.

String Theory. No it isn't. (In science, for something to be a theory, it must be proven by experiment or observation. String theory hasn't been proven by anything yet, so it's more like a string hypothesis, or, if you're feeling uncharitable, a string wild-assed guess.)

At the end of the day. Unless you're actually British or Indian, this just makes you sound smug, self-satisfied, and pretentious. I know an Indian engineer who says this from time to time, and coming from him, it seems entirely appropriate. But coming from a guy from Iowa? Nope.

Hipster. I have arrived at the conclusion that three things America has a great excess of are lawyers, MBAs and self-professed hipsters.

Consume media. What, I can't just read a book, or watch a movie? I must consume media instead? Closely related to this is content, as in "I bought some content yesterday and today I'm consuming me some tasty media." I guess it isn't cool to buy and listen to a CD.

Facebook. Yeah, I have a Facebook page, and yeah, ninety percent of the stuff I see on it is a complete waste of network capacity. Saw a killer TV show. Stand by, I'll alert the President. (One hates to wish ill on people, but sometimes I wish it really WAS a "killer show".)

App. Guys always want to show you their apps. In the old days wristwatches with 15 hands and glowing tritium hour markers were the road to superior oneupmanship, but these days, it's your apps. It is by your apps that we shall judge ye! One guy showed me an app once that showed that we were sitting in a restaurant near I-17 and the Loop 101. But wait a second, I already knew that!

iPad. So it's sorta like a laptop, only not as good? Why not just get a laptop? Oh, right, because it's a luxury item.

Back in the day. As opposed to the night, I guess. This is a little less annoying than referring to one's "salad days", but I still tend to glance askance at a 22-year-old who says "Yeah, back in the day we used to like have wires that connected our controllers to our game consoles!" I prefer "back in the old days" because it distinguishes the old days from the newer days, like yesterday.

Alternate Timeline. Ever since Lost came out, alternate timeline stories have been tres popular. They made a Star Trek movie that was nothing but an alternate timeline. They're fun because you can re-imagine Captain Kirk as a leatherboy, I guess, but I find them too easy and too convenient. One of the reasons I think Star Trek: First Contact was the best of the Trek movies was because it was all about preventing an alternate timeline, and I'm 100% down with that.

Teenage Vampires. Oh god, not more of these pallid weirdos! A few is okay, but it's getting to be a regular damned plague of the things (one wants to go to Home Depot and get the two-gallon-size jug of Teenage Vampire B Gone and spray the outside of the house). I remember (with some fondness) the days when vampires were cursed soulless undead things, not objects of angsty teenage lust. And while I'm at it, why do all these modern "dark romance" vampires move at about 800 miles per hour? Does being a vampire exempt one from the laws of physics? If you had a sloth and turned it into a vampire, would it be slow or fast?

LeBron James. I don't care where he goes. Really. Honestly. Take my word for it.

Indie. There's a conceit that indie anything is better than commercially produced anything, like indie music and indie movies. Is that so? I have two words for you: Sonic Youth. Oh, wait, I have four more: My Own Private Idaho. Yeech.

Twitter. Been there, done that, and didn't really see the attraction. "But it's a great way to keep in touch with your friends," they tell me. Do you think my friends had any interest in what I was doing when I was going through chemo? Throwing up. Throwing up again. Terrible diarrhea. Throwing up. Had diarrhea but was too weak to get out of bathtub in time. Uh huh. Some things people just don't want to know.

It Isn't The End, But...

It isn't the actual end of the world, but you can see it coming from here.

Every now and then I see something on TV that literally stops me short, makes me scrunch up my face, and causes me to blurt What the fuck?

I cite the "window shopping" ad for beer, which now has a convenient window cut in the side of the 12-pack so one can visually confirm whether the beer is cold or not. It's not the end of human civilization, but it's another long step closer.

What's wrong, is actually touching the beer to see if it's cold too difficult these days? I think what really makes me foam at the mouth is the sick feeling that somewhere, someone actually thinks that's an actual innovation. "See, this way, I don't have to lift my arm and touch the beer; I can just stand there and survey the beer with my eyes, thus saving me valuable physical effort." Yeah, heaven forbid you should have to put down your National Enquirer long enough to put a fingertip on the 12-pack.

Or is the effort of working out the logical problem too much trouble?

Given: the beer is in a refrigerator.

Given: the refrigerator is cold.

Conclusion: The beer might be so hot it'll burn my fingertip if I touch it!

We're doomed. In 1969 we harnessed the power of 7.5 million pounds of thrust and went to the moon. In 2010 we cut holes in cardboard boxes so we can be sure our beer is cold. We're just doomed.

Fandom

I think it would be nice to live in a world where hardcore sports fans are ridiculed, not Star Trek fans.

If we're going to hew to the stereotype that all Star Trek fans are corpulent, unwashed virgins who live in their mom's basement, let's also hew to the stereotype that all sports fans are functionally illiterate simians who scream violent abuse at opposing players (and their own players too). And that's when they aren't exchanging insults in sports bars, driving drunk, blowing the mortgage payment on huge-screen TVs and slathering the walls of their trash-strewn "man caves" with giant vinyl images of LeBron James.

At least I realize that Star Trek is a TV show that has basically no connection with real life. Do the people who had emotional breakdowns over Tiger Woods or Lance Armstrong or LeBron James also have that detachment?

And at least Star Trek presents a halfway entertaining vision of a future where greed and ignorance are largely eradicated. What vision of the future do professional sports offer us? More greed and stupidity. Oh, and more tattoos too, probably.

Great. Count me out. I'll take my chances with the Trekkies.

Bull!

I rode a mechanical bull yesterday. That isn't that big a thing; lots of people ride mechanical bulls, so don't think I'm boasting. Nor have I really hungered to ride mechanical bulls, so this wasn't finally paying off some suppressed lifelong desire. But I'm still glad I did it. For a while I weighed the pros and cons of the thing. On the con side, we have the fact that my sternum is held together with pieces of wire, and a hard fall could crack me open like an egg. On the pro side, it was there, I was there, and why not? As I told myself, "Pain is temporary. Regret is eternal." And when am I ever likely to ever find myself in such a position again?

They're much more violent than they look, by the way. Bystanders may look at the thing and think "It goes up and down, it goes around and around, big deal..." But when you're actually on the thing, you're struck by how violent it is, and how hard it is. And it gives me a whole new appreciation for what bull riders go through. I now know how hard it is to keep from being jerked down, and how an interruption in the bull's rhythm can be fatal (you come to rely on the bull's head coming back up to keep you from going over the front, and if there's a stutter-step or anything, well, try not to think about Tuff Hedeman and Bodacious while you're on the way down).

Ever wonder why Adriano Moraes had an arm as thick as a sequioa? Well, now I know.

Inconstant Me

It strikes me that I've been inconsistent. And I will continue to be inconsistent. I'm not the least bit abashed; I just wanted to acknowledge my inconsistency.

I am on record as saying that I find the lamba-CDM model of cosmology convincing. I find the argument that hot dark matter would have erased fine structure in the early universe especially convincing. Fair enough. That's not terribly inconsistent.

I am also on the record as saying that WIMPs (weakly-interacting massive particles) are the most likely candidate for cold dark matter. That's not terribly inconsistent either.

But I'm on the record of being dubious of supersymmetry, and here's where I become inconsistent. WIMPs are conjectured to be unseen, weakly-interacting supersymmetric particles, but since I don't believe in supersymmetry, how can I believe in WIMPs?

One of the advantages of not knowing what I'm talking about is being able to gloss over inconsistencies like this with a shrug and a grunt of "Eh, nobody reads this anyway." But I do console myself with the observation that WIMPs need not necessarily be supersymmetric. They could be something else, though I'm not in a position to say what else. Perhaps a hitherto undiscovered fourth generation of particles. Klingons. Who knows.

Transformations in charge symmetry lead to antimatter. That is, if you take an electron and in effect rotate it around the charge axis (metaphorically speaking) you end up with a particle that is just like an electron except that it has the opposite charge and is by definition antimatter (a positron, in other words). Transformations in spin symmetry lead to supersymmetric particles. Take an electron and rotate it around the spin axis (metaphorically speaking, and always bear in mind that nothing is actually spinning) and you end up with the electron's supersymmetric partner.

Electrons, quarks and the other constituents of matter are called fermions and have half-integer spins. Force-carrying particles, like photons, gluons, W and Z mesons and theoretically gravitons have full-integer spins and are called bosons. This means that in supersymmetry, there is for every fermion a supersymmetric boson, and vice versa. And it is conjectured that somewhere in this new mess of stuff are the WIMPs that make up the extra mass required by the lambda-CDM theory. (There is even a naming convention for these particles - the supersymmetric partners for fermions have an "s" added to their names (leading to the selectron, the sneutrino and squarks) while the supersymmetric partners for bosons have "ino" added to their names (leading to the photino, the gluino and, I suppose, the Wino, Zino, and gravitino).).

I'm dubious of all this. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but I do find it increasingly compelling that even at the astonishingly high energies we've already reached in particle accelerators, supersymmetric partners remain unseen. -+ /8 (<-- this business was not intended as math; it was my nervous little dog dancing on the computer)

So where was I? I like WIMPs, but I don't like the main theory that explains where WIMPs come from. So I guess I'm waiting for some new explanation for them. Inconsistent? Sure. But at least it's fun.

Fetch Me A Stepladder

I don't say much on my blog about people I know personally - I figure they have a right to a certain amount of privacy, even here, and it is in any event a fairly lame maneuver to gripe about people in a forum they don't even know about. And then there's the basic fact that I don't have much to complain about in the first place; people are almost invariably nice to me.

But, having said that, I have to say that I've survived a heart attack, open-heart surgery, cancer, a mountain of chemo and two bone marrow transplants, and I'm coming to understand that I'm under no obligation to weather abuse. I may, but I don't have to.

So with that in mind, I'm going to keep a stepladder handy, because I'm slowly compiling a list of people who can kiss my ass. And I figure the least I can do is climb a stepladder first so they don't have to bend over too far when kissing my ass.

I'm nothing if not thoughtful.

Fungible Resources

Wouldn't it be fun if attention was a fungible resource? Wouldn't it be a hoot if one could gather up all the interest, outrage, splutter, time, effort, energy, worry, anxiety, in short, all the attention, that we give to celebutard dimbulbs and convert it into something useful?

It wouldn't even have to be very useful for it to please me. All the sick worry and attention devoted to Jon and Kate Plus Nausea converts into the equivalent of six months of dedicated research into Egyptian funerary practices? Bonus! A deeper understanding of Egyptian funerary practices might not make the world any better, but at least it doesn't make it any worse, which is more than can be said for the TV show in question.

And Britney Spears? Jesus! We might well have cured cancer by now with all that attention!

Eisenstein

I notice a sort of strange hunger in popular culture these days for Einstein to be proven wrong. What they mean, really, is that they want to see Relativity proven wrong. Einstein himself was often wrong. He once said, for example, “A little schnitzel never hurt anyone.” Yeah, tell that to people who choked to death on pieces of schnitzel! (And this in the days before the Heimlich Maneuver, when one imagines the cafes and bistros of the world were littered with the prostrate bodies of choking victims, when the accepted wisdom was to give a choking person a glass of water, thus compounding choking with drowning.)

Thus we see that Einstein WAS wrong. At least once. But here’s another example. He once said “I see; the souls of the departed pass into the trousers of the living.” (He really did.) This, as I think any thinking person will agree, is nonsense. The only stuff that passes into MY trousers are my legs and other bits of biological undercarriage. So there, Einstein was wrong twice. (Would it not be fundamentally creepy to find that the souls of the departed really DO pass into the trousers of the living? Imagine discovering that you've got the soul of Ho Chi Minh in your trousers. How would you even grapple with such a thing emotionally?)

But why do people hunger to see Relativity proven wrong? Do they not like Relativity? Do they not like Einstein? Do they blame him for the fact that science is hard? (Einstein once said “Do not worry about your problems in mathematics; I can assure you that mine are worse still.”) Do they not like his hair? Do they blame him for the atom bomb? Maybe they log on to the Internet to find out more about Lindsay Lohan’s fingernails and are suddenly confronted by news stories they don’t understand but seem to have something to do with that creepy German guy with the funky hair. You know, one of the Einstein Brothers, the one that went into physics instead of staying home like a good boy and making bagels, the one that came up with all that claptrap about invariance and equivalent frames of reference instead of just asking us if we’d like schmeer on our onion bagel.

In the novel “Angels & Demons” Dan Brown establishes the scientific bona fides of the luscious Italian physicist by tossing off the remark that she had “disproven Einstein with a stopwatch and a school of tuna fish.” Again, I think he means she disproved Relativity, not Einstein, because I can’t see what a stopwatch or a school of tuna have to do with choking on a piece of schnitzel. I’m glad they left that part out of the movie – I would have brayed like an Army mule and then, most likely, choked to death on a piece of schnitzel.

Thus I am deeply gratified to report that General Relativity just passed its most exhaustive and extreme test yet when the behavior of a binary pulsar system was found to agree with the predictions of General Relativity down to a ridiculous number of decimal places – it don’t get much more relativistic than two pulsars orbiting one another! And the early word from Argentina is that the GZK Cutoff is indeed observed in the real world, thus confirming Special Relativity, and consigning the dubious contender “Doubly-Special Relativity” (nicknamed “DSR” so it doesn’t sound quite so much like an ice cream dish) to the trash can of history. “I’d like a Doubly-Special Relativity, please. With sprinkles. And butterscotch syrup.”

I am, as you can doubtless tell, bored out of my skull. I think I suffer from a weird form of ADD. I know what the GZK Cutoff is and what it means, but I can’t balance my checkbook. Why is that? And why do I think you’re even remotely interested in the GZK Cutoff? (I don’t think you’re interested in the GZK Cutoff; I think that you’re interested in the fact that I’m interested in the GZK Cutoff. I think that’s what I mean. But I’m not sure it’s interesting. I think.)

I should go do something productive, like prove Einstein wrong with a sundial and a sleeping dog.

Years ago I watched an episode of Night Gallery (I think it was) where a guy had some kind of earwig eat its way through his brain from one ear to the other. I’m having the same problem, except without earwigs or a brain (so to speak). I’ve discovered that when shingles heals, intense itching sets in. It’s like someone rubbed a shedding cat all over the right side of my face; sometimes the desire to gibber and scratch at my face with some kind of gardening trowel is almost insurmountable. As it happens, I DO gibber, but lacking a garden implement, I’ve taken to worrying at my face with a comb. Good thing I’m not a werewolf; I’d tear the side of my face off by accident. Hard enough to explain the clutter of half-eaten sheep carcasses around the apartment without having to explain why your face is hanging off in ribbons at the same time.

666

This is my 666th post. Let he who hath understanding reckon the number of this post...

I may have to go listen to Iron Maiden just because!

Relapse?

I wonder if I'm having a shingles relapse.

My eye is extremely uncomfortable today. It's felt more or less normal for the last week, and it still works more or less normally (episodic fits of double-vision notwithstanding) but egads it hurts tonight. I can't touch my skin anywhere around my eye socket.

But at least I can see. Pain I can deal with, but not seeing well enough to manage something simple like eating a hot dog, that's a pain in the ass.

This is, by the way, the fourth anniversary of me not dying of a heart attack. I'm sure as holidays go it's of less than national importance, but it's a big deal to me personally Or has it been five years? I don't remember. I just remember that it was the morning of July 4th that my coronary arteries finally gave out, and the next day had my chest cut open with what I like to think was some sort of chain saw.

So here I am, debating whether I still have cancer or not, trying not to touch my eye lest it go mad, listening to Insomium and wondering if I'm really that that fortunate I didn't die four years ago.

Of course I am. Duh. I have no deathwish, despite my penchant for death metal.

Panel Discussions

Panel discussions are all the rage today - in our modern punditocracy, they're the new town hall meetings, I guess. And panel discussions on alternatives to fossil fuels are especially popular, in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon mess, $110 a barrel oil, and mounting evidence that we're doing something evil to the planet, even if we aren't sure exactly what.

So they get some experts together, they have a panel discussion, and it's so goddamned frustrating. Once again, nothing can be done. The wind power pundits do nothing but debunk solar power. The solar power pundits do nothing but debunk wind power. The conservation people debunk everything. The conservatives (some of them, anyway) debunk the notion of climate change. The end result: intellectual gridlock, because everyone assumed that it's their way or the highway; that any "mind share" a competing technology gains is that much money they lose.

But one thing is a given: nobody takes a beating in these discussions quite like nuclear power. They practically take turns dragging nuclear power out to the woodshed and beating it like an army mule. But here's where I break ranks with my cohorts. I think nuclear energy is absolutely essential if we're going to be serious about reducing our consumption of fossil fuels. Let me reiterate: absolutely essential.

I am not saying that we should give up on solar power, wind power, hydroelectric power, and whatever other alternative forms of power generation there are. But if we're serious about significantly reducing our emissions of carbon dioxide and ending our dependency on "foreign oil", we're going to have to stop burning oil, gas and coal. That means taking millions of cars and trucks off the highways and replacing them with electric cars. That means closing gas and coal fired power plants. That means we're going to add a whole new load on our electrical generation infrastructure (battery-powered plug-in cars) just as we're taking a big chunk of our generating capacity off-line (coal and gas-fired power plants).

Can't get there from here. You can't double and triple the demand, reduce the generation capacity by 70%, and expect the books to balance.

Now, clearly, wind and solar power have a significant role to play. But even if we quadruple solar power and wind power generation in the next ten years, where are we? Doodley-squat times four is still roughly doodley-squat. Pursue it, by all means, and pursue it hard. But what do we do in the meantime? What technology can, relatively quickly in terms of economic cycles, gear up and generate a lot of power without increasing our consumption of fossil fuels?

Yes, that dreaded red-haired stepchild, nuclear power.

I don't make this stand frivolously. It only takes one "accident" like Chernobyl* to make the whole enterprise decidedly unappealing, and nobody finds the idea of thousands of tons of radioactive waste hanging around for thousands of years very pleasant. But if you want to generate serious megawatts of power, and if you want to stop pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and if you want to stop writing checks to oil sheiks, well, the options seem pretty limited to me.

It strikes me that fusion power is the desired end state. We're able to generate scads of power with fusion, even today, but unfortunately the difficulty lies in harnessing the power. How exactly does one capture the output of a ten-megaton thermonuclear weapon? I don't know how long it'll take to develop the technology required to generate power by fusion in a controlled and reliable way. But once we do, all the other technologies become irrelevant. We can dismantle the windmills, recycle the solar panels, cement over the nuclear power plants, dynamite the hydroelectric generators, because the days of virtually free energy will be upon us.

We just have to get there. I figure it'll take about 100 years for this to happen, and I suspect it's going to require breakthroughs in magnetohydrodynamics that we can't even guess at today. But it'll happen. Stars do it all the time, so in principle we should be able to as well. So we've got to find a way to bridge the gap of about 100 years, and I think well-engineered nuclear power plants are the answer.

Emphasis on well-engineered. No RBMK reactors, no graphite moderator, no reactors with positive void coefficients, no harebrained experiments on reactors that have been poisoned with xenon, no guessing at water levels because the core itself doesn't have water level instruments... I'm kind of impressed by the Canadian heavy water reactors, myself, since they seem to sidestep the whole issue of fuel enrichment entirely, and I confess I find the very idea of "heavy water" groovy.

This means, more than likely, that the pundits will drag me out to the woodshed and give me a thorough thrashing, but that's okay. I haven't done any research or anything (heaven forbid), but I'd be greatly surprised (greatly surprised) if the combined energy output of all the solar power plants in America exceeds the output of just the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station near Buckeye, Arizona. And that's probably true of all the windmills in America too. Put that in your energy equation and calculate it!

(It bears noting that fission-based nuclear power has a limited lifetime. In a few tens of thousands of years, natural radioactive decay will have converted all the useful fissionable isotopes of uranium and thorium into useless stuff. So it's a case of use it now, in the next ten thousand years or so, because eventually the option to use it will expire.)

*Chernobyl was no "accident", any more than hitting another car because you're texting on your cell phone is an accident.