Deep Time

Reading about cosmology can be kind of depressing. I don't see right off-hand how any of the possible outcomes are in any way pleasing. If the universe is sufficiently massive, expansion will slow down and stop, then the universe will begin to contract. Everything gets mashed together, ordinary light gets blue-shifted, X-rays and gamma rays bombard everything, and then everything gets compacted into a singularity in the so-called Big Crunch.

That's not so fun. Are there alternatives?

If the universe is insufficiently massive, the expansion continues forever, even accelerates under the influence of dark energy. Galaxies recede from one another and eventually pass from view entirely, stars die, everything becomes cold, dark, and impossibly far removed from everything else.

Well, that's not so fun either. Anyone got any other ideas?

Maybe expansion will accelerate to the point that space itself fails, ripping apart like a too-small latex glove on a too-large hand, in an unimaginable cataclysm called the Big Rip. I can't begin to imagine what that would be like, having space itself rip apart, but I don't think one needs to be The Amazing Kreskin to guess that it would be bad.

So where are the cosmological outcomes where everything remains more or less groovy in perpetuity? I confess that I always preferred the Steady-State Universe model on emotional grounds, which at least offers the notion that the universe is eternal and continually renewed. Too bad that it turned out to be wrong - among other things, it can't explain the cosmic microwave background or the Hubble constant. But on strictly emotional grounds, it seems a lot more palatable than any of the extrapolations of the Big Bang, all of which are about as cheerful as the movie Event Horizon. Without popcorn.

Just In Case

You know, just in case anyone was wondering, it's really awfully nice knowing that I don't have cancer, at least at the moment.

I've been working nights lately, which is interesting. It's very dark and quiet in the plant; I'm basically the only one there. But I get a lot done, and the days (or nights) just fly by, for some reason. It probably has something to do with not having to go to any meetings. There's usually one or two meetings right at the start of my evening, but then it's just me and the code.

And when I get home, the garage is fairly cool and the bugs have largely gone to bed, so I'm able to tinker at the workbench for a while without either sweating myself to death, or having to fight an onslaught of bugs. The other day I opened my tube of white glue for some reason or another, and a stupid wasp crawled right into the spout and became entombed in white glue. Well, better that than flying into my cup of coffee.

I note a lot of mosquitoes these days, though, which I don't like. I'm not sure where they're coming from - there's probably an old tire with water in it somewhere nearby. But every time I hear the whine of a mosquito, I can't help but think "West Nile Virus..." No laughing matter, but I am somewhat relieved by the fact that my immune system is more or less back to normal and I'm not liable to be laid low by whatever virus comes along.

CANCER:

I came, I saw, I kicked its ass.

Who's next?

The Nature of Things

My oncologist says that it is the nature of cancer to grow, to the point that growth is defining characteristic of cancer.

With that in mind, I got my PET scan results yesterday, and they showed no change compared to an earlier scan in April. No change = no growth = no active cancer. It doesn't mean I'm cured, but it does mean that nothing is growing inside me, and as of right now, no treatment is called for. No poisonous chemicals, no horrid bone marrow transplants, no beams of highish-energy X-rays. We wait, we monitor, we observe, and we watch.

It's the best news I've had from a doctor in a long time.

The CT portion of the scan shows widespread tissue damage in my groin - thickened skin, dead nodes, general wreckage. I imagine the tissue there probably resembles the Somme just after World War One. It is this general wreckage that is thought to be responsible for the swelling in my leg, and I find that I can live with that. I'll have to go to a lymphedema clinic to learn how to manage the swelling, and if the leg doesn't drain, I may may have to have some kind of vascular surgery to restore drainage, but that's not so bad.

Vascular surgery I can live with; it's cancer that's a bummer.

I think to celebrate, I may go to a hobby shop on the way to work today and score me some Star Trek models. Can't have too many Trek models, can you?

Keeping Myself Occupied

I hate waiting for PET scan results. I alternate between poles of supreme confidence and supreme lack of confidence, and the anxiety of not knowing wears on me. If I don't have cancer, well, that's dandy. If I do, well, that's okay too; we'll just move on to the next treatment. But the uncertainty is a bummer.

So to keep myself from fretting all weekend I put a new floor in the office. I can't remember the brand name, but it's a kind of laminate flooring. Once you learn a few lessons and develop a certain amount of technique, it's actually pretty easy to put in, and quite inexpensive. And as a means of keeping myself from fretting about cancer, it's first-rate.

Now I just have to finish putting all the books back...

This Just In

Here are the results of a new survey of Americans:

Americans unable to distinguish "shit" from "Shinola": 73%

Americans unable distinguish "ass" from "hole in the ground": 56%

Americans unable to find brain with both hands and hunting dog: 62%

I've been following the NASA and NOAA pages on Facebook. The information releases are generally kind of interesting and the pictures are cool, but it's the commentary afterwards that really amuses me. I know it's dangerous to characterize an entire population on the basis of twenty or thirty comments on a Facebook page, but when have I ever been leery of making sweeping generalizations about whole societies on the basis of a few comments?

From reading the comments, I conclude the following:

About one in twenty Americans can spell.

About one in thirty Americans can write a grammatically correct sentence.

About one in six people on the NOAA feed are conspiracy theorists who believe that NOAA is part of some sinister and apparently "Marxist" plot to... Well, I'm not sure what the ultimate goal of this plot is supposed to be. Usher in "soshulism", I guess. Whatever that is.

About one in four people on the NASA feed don't understand simple scientific concepts like the conservation of energy, the conservation of momentum, or what an "orbit" is.

About one in three people on the NASA feed will mention things like string theory or relativity to substantiate their goofy theories and beliefs, but it's obvious that they don't really know anything about string theory, relativity, or for that matter Swiss cheese.

About one in four people on both feeds tends to evaluate scientific research, or the results thereof, on the basis of ideological or religious correctness. (I am reminded of the way the Soviet Union officially banned the theory of continental drift, apparently finding the idea of continents floating on a semi-solid mantle to be contrary to Marxist ideology. But all the gassy Party rhetoric didn't change the fact that continents actually do float on a semi-solid mantle and actually do move. Soviet-era geologists, who knew that the theory was correct, were forced to call it something else to avoid invoking the displeasure of the grim grey anti-intellectuals in the Politburo. I think they called it the "down-going slab theory". And for what it's worth, I read Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, and I don't remember Marx or Engels saying anything at all about geology. But I may have been snoozing, as they are powerfully boring books. At least with Mein Kampf you could keep yourself awake by thinking Jesus, what loony nonsense is he going to spout next?)

I'm not saying that everyone should be a scientist. A lot of people just aren't interested in relativity or quantum mechanics, and that's fine. But I AM saying that if you don't know anything about a given subject, you may want to consider keeping your cake-hole shut. For instance - I have a friend that is going for a Masters in education. The idea that I, someone who doesn't know the first thing about teaching a child anything, would presume to tell her anything about pedagogy is just stupid. I have another friend who is a professional copy-writer for various groups who have to raise funds by sending people those scary letters in the mail. The idea that I would presume to think that my insights in the psychology and sociology of fund-raising are the same as hers is, of course, just flat wrong.

I'm not sure who to blame. Our educational system is clearly failing, but it goes beyond that. We've somehow gotten to the point where we believe that we have the perfect right, perhaps even the actual obligation, to tell people what we think about everything. I blame post-modernism for this, though up to a point I just think post-modernism is silly and like to blame it for all sorts of things, including toe-jam and those hideous cramps I sometimes get in my calves. The idea that everything is relative and there are no fundamental truths is silly, and the idea that everything must be evaluated on the basis of one's unique sense of victimization is... Well, let's just tactfully draw a sheet over that particular corpse before I become hysterical.

To some extent, the news media fails us. In their efforts to appear "balanced" on any given subject, they drag in self-declared "experts" to argue against whatever the subject of the day is. When they do stories about the alleged Apollo moon-landing hoax, they drag in some guy from the middle of nowhere with no credentials, and ask us to believe that his pro-hoax testimony is somehow of equal merit to the testimony of the 400,000 engineers and scientists who actually worked in the Apollo program. It's gotten to the point that if they have a news story about the sky being blue, they'll dredge up some crusty old crank who insists that the sky is really pink but we're just being conditioned by an incredibly sly and slick conspiracy to think it's blue.

A friend of mine is currently lobbying to have herself declared Empress of the World. I'm in favor of that, since she wants to apply simple IQ tests to various things. When you go to an amusement park, there are the signs that read "You must be this tall to go on this ride." She thinks there should be similar signs elsewhere that read "You must be this smart to procreate" or "You must be this smart to post comments on a Facebook news feed" or "You must be this smart to vote."

I'm in favor that. You've got my vote.

PET Scan

I had my PET scan today - part of the normal follow-up after radiation therapy, but my leg is also swelling up, so it'll also make sure that my leg swelling isn't being caused by a tumor. Which it might be. Hodgkin's has a lot of symptoms, and for me, my leg swelling up is one of them. But the doctors also think that there's so much scar tissue in my upper leg, leftovers of chemotherapy and radiation and biopsies, that the swelling could very easily be caused by that and not cancer.

We'll see. It'll take a few days for someone to look at my PET scan and decide one way or the other. I can interpret a PET scan; why don't they just give it to me? Liability issues, I'm sure, but I still COULD. It's pretty hard to miss an active cancerous node on a PET scan, unless it happens to be in your liver, heart or brain, which are all pretty active on a PET scan anyway.

I'm not fond of this waiting business, but I find that the more stuff I go through, the less difficult the waiting becomes. Cancer teaches one patience, I guess.

I don't like going to the PET scan place very much. It's one door over from where I got ABVD chemo, and just walking in the front door of the medical center causes my body to tighten up a bit, like it thinks I'm going to turn right instead of left and go get me some poison. And it's hard to look at the cancer survivors with their wispy hair, sunken eyes, and gaunt faces. Even though I was one of them. Am one of them.

You may have noticed that my blog has taken a turn for the geeky lately. This is deliberate. It struck me the other day that cancer or its treatment has invaded practically every part of my life, and there are times (LOTS of times) when I'd just as soon not think about cancer or its treatment. I'm not naive and I know that ignoring it won't make it go away, but as I sit here, there is nothing I can do about cancer one way or the other. And since there's nothing I can do about it, why think about it?

So I rooted around in the castle of my mind and found parts of my life that cancer has never managed to invade. Dumb things, to be sure, but still, cancer-free things. Star Trek. Science fiction goofiness. Physics. I have not, and never will, wear Spock ears to a Star Trek convention, but it doesn't bother me if people think I'm a Trekkie or a geek. There are worse things. (Honestly, which would you rather be called: a Trekkie, or a tandem bone marrow transplant patient? I rest my case.)

I like to think of my mind as being like a castle. Some parts of the castle are airy and open and kind of overly ornate, like Disney recreations of Neuschwanstein or even Versailles, though I suppose there is in strict terms a difference between a castle and a palace. Other parts are darker and grimmer, like the forbidding Krak de Chevaliers in Lebanon. The Trekkie stuff comes from the airier wings; the determination to keep going through chemo even when your body is screaming for it to stop comes from the darker precincts.

Breaking with Orthodoxy

Sometimes I just have no choice but to break with orthodoxy. Not because I relish being an iconoclast all that much, or because I fancy myself to be "eclectic" or "yooneek", but because the established orthodoxy just doesn't make sense to me.

For example, I break with party orthodoxy by supporting nuclear power and advocating for research and experiments in ballistic missile defense (for the record, I don't think a Reagan-esque "Star Wars" impermeable shield is possible, but you never really know where programs like the US Army's Homing Overlay experiments might lead, and in any event, more research is better than less).

But today I break with the orthodoxy that Gene Roddenberry was a genius. Yeah, Star Trek was a good idea, and I like that vision of the future. But man, I can't believe I'm the only person to arrive at the conclusion that Roddenberry was, in many ways, Star Trek's worst enemy. It sounds like he was hard to work with, was plagued by a whole series of really bad ideas, and did his best to kill Next Generation before it ever really got started. The idea of the future having "no conflict" is laudable, and something we should work toward, but as a way of writing a dramatic TV show designed to entertain people, it sucks. We might as well watch Rachael Ray instead (and I sometimes do), and not just because she's cuter than Gene Roddenberry.

And in a way I think the cult of personality that has grown up around Gene Roddenberry is a disservice to a lot of other people who played very significant roles in Star Trek. Yeah, yeah, I know, de mortuis nil nisi bonum and all, but what about people like Gene L. ("the Other Gene") Coon, or D.C. Fontana, or Rick Berman, or even Bjo Trimble? (I don't actually know what Bjo Trimble's role in Star Trek really was, but I do know that she makes a good convention guest, and that's not a bad thing.)

Yeah, yeah, I know, without Roddenberry there wouldn't have been a Star Trek, and without him the show might have evolved in strange and unsavory ways (like Babylon 5, for example, which was brilliant up to and including the Shadow War, but after that it just sort of hung around in the house in a soiled t-shirt for a couple of years, never really doing much except piling up dirty dishes in the sink and squashing a butt-shaped dimple in the sofa). So let's give Roddenberry credit for a great idea and a nice vision, but also admit that without the contributions of a whole bunch of other people, Star Trek would probably have been pretty boring and unappealing.

While I'm breaking with things in the Trek universe, let me also say that I grow somewhat weary of the Shatner-bashers. I'm not saying Shatner's a great actor. I'm not even sure I know what a "great actor" really is. Maybe he's no Patrick Stewart, who I think is great, but I think allegations that Shatner's acting is "embarrassing" or "cringe-worthy" are over the top.

But here's what really wears me out - all the legions of minor and supplemental Star Trek actors who come along and write books "exposing" how mean and egocentric Shatner was. "He acted like he was the star of the show" seems to be a fairly common complaint. Well, he WAS the star of the show! That's why his name has top billing on the opening credits! My perhaps unjust opinion is that the show could have survived without actors like Walter Koenig or George Takei (not that I dislike them, by any means; Sulu was always a favorite character of mine), but I don't think the show would have survived without William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy or Deforrest Kelly. James Doohan is arguable either way - Scotty is an iconic character, but I think other people could have played him. But I suspect that James Doohan had a larger creative role behind the scenes than is widely known.

And now, a note about Star Wars. I watched a few interview segments with George Lucas the other day, wherein he seemed altogether fatigued with his own creation. I can't remember the quote exactly, but he said something akin to "I'm glad I'm done with Star Wars so I can stop having to please all these irritating fans and can do go things I want to do." Gee, George, excuse the fuck out of me for giving you some of my money by watching your movies. Had I know that making you RICH would be such a headache for you, I'd have gone to see A Bridge Too Far again instead.

Wasn't it Saturn who ate his own children? Maybe successful science fiction movie franchises are like Saturn, only instead of eating their children, they dement their creators. Roddenberry apparently came to believe that his success had made him infallible, and Lucas came to believe that popularity of Star Wars had become a burden of some kind.

IPMS

The IPMS (International Plastic Modeler's Society) is having its national convention in Phoenix this weekend. One might argue that early August is a rotten time to be having a convention in Phoenix, but since they built an air conditioned pedestrian tunnel from the main hotel to the convention center, the guests from Minnesota and other temperate climes won't be cooked to a crispy golden brown as they try to walk across the street. (I once saw a woman wearing high-heeled shoes get stuck in a crosswalk when her heels speared into the pavement that had softened in the mid-summer sunlight. Cars waiting at stoplights routinely press dimples into the pavement with their tires, and the crosswalk markings actually move, migrating in squiggly lines as cars move the hot blacktop around.)

I first heard the convention was coming to Phoenix was back when I was going through chemotherapy, and in fact when all I had to look forward to was more chemotherapy. You learn not to look too far ahead when you're going through chemotherapy, because the short prospects are ugly (Hmm, what shall I do next week? How about have more poison pumped into bloodstream that'll make me feel like complete crap?) and the long-term prospects aren't so hot either (Assuming this works, I could come out of this with damaged heart valves, oxygen toxicity, hearing loss, cognitive deficits and a greatly elevated risk of leukemia. And assuming it doesn't work, I'll still have cancer. Those are lovely options).

But looking forward to the IPMS convention seemed safe. It was far enough out that I'd be more or less over chemo by the time it happened, but not so far out that I'd be dead if my cancer wasn't defeated. Plus it's such a generally innocuous thing, just a bunch of guys who like to build scale models getting together and generally enjoying their geek-nature.

Only, my family rented a cabin in the mountains and scheduled a sort of family reunion-ish sort of thing for that same weekend (through no fault of their own, naturally - they didn't present me with this scheduling problem out of spite, or even knowingly). So for a long time I struggled with the choice. Go to the mountains with my family, or go to the convention as I always promised myself I would once the hell of chemo and bone marrow transplants were over with? I had to go with the convention, in the end. Thinking about going to the convention isn't what got me through four courses of chemotherapy, three bone marrow biopsies, two courses of chemotherapy, and one course of radiation therapy, but it was part of it, and for the last eighteen months I've promised myself that if I could go, I would go.

But boy do I feel guilty about it. I'd feel guilty about it either way. If I go to the convention, I'll feel guilty about not going with my family. If I go with my family, I'll feel guilty that I didn't follow through on going to the convention as I promised myself. But my family will understand (I hope!), while the convention will probably never be back, and I'll probably never get a chance to go to another one.

Sigh. Why couldn't the IPMS have come here in April, for crying out loud? Oh, because in April my bone marrow was still growing back and I wasn't allowed to be in public places, that's why.

Infinite Regress

I got kind of interested the other day (in a somewhat relative way) about how phasers in Star Trek worked. Or, more precisely, how they were said to work, since they don't really work at all. But in the various shows, they can do just about anything, from stunning obstreperous, foul-mouthed hipsters into blessed silence, to burning holes in things, to blowing stuff up, to making entire human beings vanish utterly (in the fashion, though perhaps not the form, of Milli Vanilli or Gary Hart).

So I look up "phaser" on the Internet. It's a weapon that emits a beam of "nadions".

Okay, what's a "nadion"? Apparently, it's an "artificially-produced particle." And by altering the characteristics of the beam of nadions, one can, say, stun obstreperous hi... Oh, we're back to the same problem, aren't we?

I generally enjoy Star Trek technobabble, which is at least as interesting to me as terminally-hip urban slang. Okay, a lot more interesting than urban slang. You only have to innocently look up something horrid like a "Dirty Sanchez" once before you realize that Treknobabble (as they call it) is way less disturbing than the real world. On my spare time at work I even wrote a Treknobabble generator, which is pretty easy - you just assemble three lists of words and assemble them randomly, as in "optimizing deuteron polarizer" or "structural modulus flux" or "inverse quantum rectification". (In fact, assemble any of these in any way you like, as long as you don't change the word order - anyone up for some structural deuteron rectification?)

But nothing's as much fun as emitting a tachyon pulse, which they do in Star Trek all the time, and which I'm known to do myself.