Dear History Channel:

You've gone in the crapper.

Regards,

Me.

I've had a whopper of a cold the last few days, and I spent most of today in bed. While I was there, I watched some of the History Channel's programming. Holy cow. I used to make fun of the History Channel by calling it the "Hitler Channel" since it was just one dull documentary about Hitler after another - Hitler's doctors, Hitler's women, Hitler's desk toys, Hitler's hemorrhoids. But the History Channel (and I use the word "history" reluctantly) has apparently retooled itself into the Whack Job Channel.

Reality shows about pawn shops. Not my speed at all, and I'd rather go to the dentist and have this troublesome tooth fixed than watch them, but at least they don't drive me mad.

Reality shows about ghost hunters, usually featuring some guy in a dark room blurting "Did you just feel that? I swear, it felt just like Elvis Presley pinching me on the ass!" Or the ridiculous EVPs that purport to be William the Conqueror muttering "Rosebud..." Stupid, but when it's a reality show about ghost hunters, you know what you're getting to.

Ancient astronauts. This is the mother lode, the thing that finally produced in me a state that I think is known to medical science as a "conniption fit". It isn't just that they're stupid. With a title like "Ancient Astronauts", you know what you're getting into. It's the wide-eyed credulity of the stupidity that gets me. Thanks, History Channel, you've put legitimate history and rational thought back at least a century, and made a mockery of yourselves.

I can't even begin to critique the shows point by point, because the lame stupidity piles on so fast I can't even keep up with it. And they have these guys, these "experts", mouthing the most ridiculous gibberish without any kind of accountability at all. They don't even get the jargon right, for crying out loud - how am I supposed to take seriously people who speak of "direct energy weapons" or "the constellation Sirius"? And that digital scale model of the Sirius star system has to be one of the most laughable things I've ever seen.

The History Channel executives will probably say "Hey, man, we don't make the shows, we just air them." Yeah? Well, you decide which shows you put on your channel, don't you? That makes you responsible.

The History Channel executives may also say "Well, we got you to watch, didn't we?"

True - but for the last time. If that's your idea of programming fit for something called "The History Channel", you can proceed without me. You've insulted my intelligence for the last time.

I used to think that TLC was the most lame cable channel - I even referred to it as "The Lame Channel". But now I'm going to call it "The Loser Channel" because in truth, the History Channel is now the lamest thing going on my satellite TV system. (Actually, the lamest moment in the history of satellite TV, as far as I'm concerned, was when the Sci-Fi Channel renamed itself "Syfy". But this retooling of the History Channel is pretty damn close.)

To The Movement

Dear Occupy Phoenix movement:

It seems to me that there are only two routes to social and economic change: revolution, or evolution. I'm not prepared to endorse a revolutionary agenda. Talking of putting the bastards up against the wall makes good copy, and it might be a consoling strategy when you're crying in your beer, but it isn't a viable strategy, and it isn't one that I support.

So that leaves evolution. Rather than destroying the entire social fabric and starting over, you alter the social fabric in little steps. To do this, you need votes. That's all. Specifically, you need the votes of moderate conscience-driven Republicans. How do you get those votes? By demonstrating that your cause is morally right to the point that people of good conscience cannot possibly oppose you, regardless of their politics.

And now do you do that? By demonstrating your moral rectitude in a public forum so that people of good conscience can see what you stand for, and be moved by it. By managing the face you display, by taking care to maintain as positive a public relations spin as possible.

I hear the complaints already. "This shouldn't be about spin, or PR, it should be about ideas!" True - and if we lived in a debating society, that might have merit. But this is the real world, and the real fact of the real world is that the average Repbulican ALREADY views you as a bunch of foul-mouthed Gen-X slackers. How do you propose to gain the votes and support of moderate Repulicans, whom you absolutely, utterly need on your side to accomplish anything, when they're already predisposed to see you as foul-mouthed slackers?

By proving that you aren't. And that means controlling the face you display to the public.

"But that's not fair! We should be judged for our ideas!" Oh, grow up. Life is unfair. Get used to it.

So you have a live feed. Good for you. But instead of using this live feed to display your best face, or present coherent arguments in favor of your cause, or to demonstrate the virtue of your cause, it's turned into an open microphone at a convention of anarchists. Lovely.

It seems that a lot of time on the live feed is spent debating whether to take the word "non-violent" out of the mission statement. Are you insane? What do you propose to do, hulk up and out-fight the police department? The authorities are already having elaborate fantasies about beating you all down with clubs and exiling you to the modern equivalent of Siberia, and you're going to actually *facilitate* that? Good luck with that.

"But there's no definition of what non-violent means!"

Sure there is. It means an absense of violence, physical or otherwise. And if you think otherwise, then you're already lost MY support, and since I'm already predisposed to support the goals of the Occupy movement, imagine how this sort of discussion plays with Republicans, who *already* don't like you and don't trust you. You think Gandhi succeeded in freeing India by screaming at British soldiers, or by scuffling with Indian riot police? Think again. He succeeded because people of good conscience were so sickened by the image of the authorities clubbing down unarmed, non-violent people that they said "This is wrong, this cannot continue."

But go ahead, change your mission statement, and get your anarchist rocks off screaming insults at the police. Just do it without me, and without my support.

Here's another problem you face. Nobody controls your live feed. Nobody enforces any standards of conduct or message, so you end up with some foul-mouthed Gen-X slacker screaming about how it's a free country and she can curse as much as she wants on the live feed. Is that really what the movement is about? The alleged right of some malaffected whiner to curse? I thought it was about social and economic justice, but suddenly it's turned into the right to say "fuck" on the live feed?

I don't care if people curse. I curse. Practically everyone curses. But the freedom to curse isn't the issue here. The issue is showing voters who don't agree with you why they SHOULD agree with you. And every time the movement gets sidetracked into some stupid postmodern rebellion against social norms and oppressive social expectations, you lose support. You hear that dribbling sound? That's the sound of you pissing away your support every time some rabid narcissist screams "It's my right to say FUCK as much as I want, because it's a free country."

It is a free country - and I'm free to choose not to support people like her in any way at all. And if she irks me, imagine what Joe the Plumber must think of her!

It's noble that you want to be fully inclusive and utterly democratic. But this isn't a debating society. This is the real world. And in the real world, money and votes matter. To get either, you need to manage your message, and sometimes that means not being democratic. Sometimes that means having someone responsible in charge of the live feed so that pseudo-anarchistic nitwits can't soil your public face with their intemperate shouting. Sometimes it means telling people "No, you can't take the words non-violent out of the mission statement, and no, you can't curse on the live feed, and no, you can't just say whatever doofus thing occurs to you, you have to think about what you're doing, and why you're doing it."

All you have, ALL YOU HAVE, is the moral rectitude of your cause, and if you don't make that the centerpiece of your movement, and if you allow yourselves to come off looking like a bunch of hardcore punk screamers, you're doomed. You'll never amount to more than a sad footnote in the big book of failed social movements.

And sometimes that means telling the screamers that they can either use their grown-up voices, or they can shut up, or they can go the hell away.

Harsh? Maybe - but this isn't a game, and it isn't some private rebellion drama where you earn points for being extreme. This is for real. This is a movement with real goals and a real moral message, and you should be constantly mindful of that.

More Of That

Whenever I start to feel that I'm becoming too bogged down in my own problems and the dull requirements of daily life, I like to think about things like the X-15, seen above not longer after being dropped from its NB-52 carrier airplane. The X-15 flew in the early to mid 1960s. Maybe that wasn't really such a great time, and it's probably dangerous to overly romanticize the whole thing, but there was a lot to be said for being young and innocent and living in a world where bold men flew these black aircraft to the very edge of space.

The X-15 was never meant to go into orbit. The engine lacked the power, and a combination of thermal and stability issues prevented it from re-entering safely from altitudes above about 360,000 feet (450,000 feet seems to have been the thermal limit, and 360,000 feet the safe stability limit; the X-15 tended to be divergent in yaw at high angles of attack and re-entry from above 360,000 feet would require an angle of attack so high the pilot wouldn't be able to maintain control if the stability augmentation system failed, which it often did).

It was really designed to perform basic research on the then-mysterious field of hypersonic flight, to answer questions like how does hypersonic flight differ from supersonic flight and are our theoretical predictions of heating, drag, and aerodynamic forces in hypersonic flight really accurate? Hypersonic flow is hard to achieve in a wind tunnel, and even then, shock wave interactions in the wind tunnel itself make it difficult to say anything meaningful about the behavior of the model. Nowadays we can use supercomputers and computational fluid dynamics to simulate hypersonic airflow, but even if they had had supercomputers and CFD in the 1960s, they wouldn't have known if the CFD models were valid or not.

The only way to test the theoretical projections was to actually build a plane that could fly at hypersonic speeds - to go that fast and see exactly what happened. The X-15 did a lot of research in hypersonic flight, of course, with a heavy emphasis on heating and drag studies. That was its main mission. But in the process, the program did a lot of other research on things like spacesuits, insulators, ablators, reaction control systems, cockpit instrumentation, energy management systems, inertial platforms, adaptive-gain flight control systems, hypersonic degradation of cameras, and other things.

It's dangerous to say that any one airplane was the most significant airplane ever flown. But I think it's safe to say that the X-15 program was probably one of the most fruitful aerospace research programs in human history.

But once you dispense with all the jargon and technical palaver, it speaks powerfully to me of a time when I was young and anything was possible.

Redemptive Engineering

I find this picture pretty striking. This is what NASA calls the "Common Extensible Cryogenic Engine." It's really a variant of the fairly venerable RL10 rocket engine, built to test various methods of modifying the RL10 to achieve wider throttle ratios.

Maybe the most striking thing about this picture is the lack of overall rumpus. The thing is running at full throttle and yet it seems as placid and harmless as the burner on a gas stove. No smoke, no roiling clouds of flame, no explosions. This is what a well-controlled rocket engine should look like.

Another striking thing is the blue color of the exhaust plume. I believe the blue color is produced by what are called "Swan bands", bands of light at specific colors produced by highly excited hydrogen atoms. Unlike the orange glow of a campfire, which is produced mainly by black body radiation coming from glowing bits of soot, the color here is atomic in nature and not any kind of black body radiation. It's the same blue color as a blowtorch flame, the characteristic blue of highly efficient hydrocarbon combustion.

But let's look a bit deeper. At high magnification, one can see that there are actually icicles hanging from the skirt of the nozzle. The nozzle is so well cooled that the superheated steam in the exhaust plume condenses into water and then freezes into ice, even though the temperature of the exhaust plume is on the order of several thousand degrees. That's some serious regenerative cooling.

The heat flux staggers the imagination. The temperature in the exhaust plume is high enough to melt the engine, but the cooling system can draw heat out of the metal nozzle so fast it not only doesn't melt, but it actually runs below room temperature.

Another striking feature of this engine is its "deep throttling". Throttling a rocket engine is exactly like throttling a car engine - making it produce more or less power as circumstances dictate. But unlike car engines, rocket engines are notoriously difficult to throttle. On the one hand, if your throttling system goes haywire on the high side, the engine can over-pressurize and blow up (though RL10s and other expander-cycle engines don't really have this problem, as the square-cube law means that even with the propellant valves thrown wide open, the engine can't really run away and blow up). On the other hand, reducing the engine's power creates all sorts of complications, like flow separation in the nozzle (bad), and periodic combustion instabilities like "chugging" and "screeching". Screeching isn't really a combustion instability; it's a regenerative acoustic effect, but it can happen by accident (it's always by accident) as you throttle an engine.

The X-15 rocket plane was designed to have a pretty wide throttle range, from about 30% to 100%. But the mission logs of the X-15 program reveal that the XLR99 engine just didn't like to run at low throttle. It wouldn't start reliably at low throttle, and would occasionally just cough and die when throttled back (and the X-15 fell so fast after drop that you didn't get many restart attempts before it was time to start dumping propellant and get ready to land the thing).

But this engine has been run from 8% to 104% throttle. That's pretty amazing to me. 8% is particularly striking - I can't begin to imagine how they do that without employing exotic variable geometry in the nozzle throat (my understanding of de Laval nozzles is that the gas flow rate through the throat must be sufficient to cause sonic choking. How they can keep the flow sonic at 8% throttle without necking down the nozzle is a mystery to me - either that, or the engine is seriously underexpanded at full throttle - or something...)

My point is that this photograph shows off some very advanced rocket science. Whenever I start to feel that modern life has turned into a cornucopia of dung designed to appeal to the least common denominator, I look at pictures like this and think "Man, we really are pretty smart, aren't we?"

Well, I'm not that smart. But I'm smart enough to recognize staggering engineering achievements when I see them, and be cheered up by them.

The Fate of the World...

I accidentally watched an ad for an NFL documentary a few weeks ago. Only now, weeks later, have I calmed down enough to bitch about it.

I'm really tired of professional sports in general, and mostly because they won't just let me enjoy the sporting event for what it is. Instead, they have to try to make me believe that it matters who wins, and I just refuse to believe that. As a result, I am ridiculed. "You aren't a true fan!" Nope. I'm not. I was never really a "fan" in the usual sense of the world, but now, I'm even less of one.

The documentary: "NFL Turning Point" or some such nonsense, and the subject being the turning point when the New York Jets defense "got their swagger back". Maybe there was more to it, but the sheer gall of the line "got their swagger back" made me cough and splutter and almost pass out and I may have missed the larger message, if there really was one.

You know the style of documentary I mean, I'm sure: the narrator with the grave voice, the portentous music, lots of super slo-mo of guys digging down deep, reaching for the last 1%, putting on their game face, or engaging in any of a thousand other dumb sports cliches. Like any of it mattered. Would the Jets get their swagger back? Would the Commies win the Cold War? Would the 5th Guards Tank Army fail to stop the 2nd SS Panzer Korps at Prochorovka? Would all of Western civilization indeed slide right into the crapper???

For the record: I don't actually give a shit if the New York Jets defense has swagger or not. And I really doubt that it makes any difference if they do or not.

I'm not saying that I reject sports because I think it's frivolous. I like lots of things that are totally frivolous - Star Trek, building model airplanes, Mystery Science Theater 3000, canned pork and beans (okay, canned beans may not be frivolous, but they're often rather unwelcome). What moves me to object is when they want me to believe that something that is fundamentally frivolous really matters. Do I care where LeBron James went? Nope. Do I care if the Jets have swagger or not? Nope. Do I care if there's going to be an NBA season or not? Nope. In fact, I increasingly anti-care about such things. Do I care if there's going to be an NBA season or not? No, and I actually sort of hope not. Do I care if there's an NHL or not? Nope, and frankly it would make my life easier if there weren't any hockey games on TV to ignore.

But not because it's frivolous. Because it's frivolousness pretending to be important. If it was just a game again, I might be inclined to enjoy it.

Sometimes the sports fans tell me it matters because "it's a huge business!" Sure it is. But so was IG Farben. My point is that just the fact that the mere fact that something is a huge business doesn't make it right. And on a more libertarian note, I get a little cheesed every time local sports fans think I should pay higher taxes so they can have a professional team in Phoenix. If it's such a huge business, why do the taxpayers always seem to have to pay for everything? Why don't the people with a vested interest in sports - the "true fans", the owners, the players - pay for a new stadium? The county can't afford to fix the potholes in a public road, but we're all supposed to chivvy up so hitherto-frustrated sports fans can have a team?

I think back to the days before the Cardinals came to Arizona, and then I compare them to the days after they came to Arizona. Nope. My penis is still exactly the same size. Can't say it did anything for my swagger, one way or the other.

So then the sports fans say "Well, if you don't like it, don't watch it!" Fair enough. And they don't have to read this either.

New Album

Insomnium has released a new album called One For Sorrow. Every time I look at it, I think "one for the show, two to get ready, three to produce yet another decent melodic death metal album."

It's good. I don't think it's their best work, but it's good. My personal opinion is that they need to turn the "melodic" dial down a hair, and turn the "metal" dial up a hair. And the guitar sound is less pronounced; it has a more compressed and Marshall-y sound than usual - hence the need to adjust up the metal dial a tad. I happen to like the guitar sound on the album Sterling Black Icon by Fragments of Unbecoming. It may or may not be a good album, but I really like their guitar tone, especially on the song "Dear Floating Water." It's kind of thin and edgy, and I like that. (But apparently I'm a colossal hypocrite, because I also like the guitar sound on the Carcass song "Corporeal Jigsore Quandary", and there isn't anything thin about it. It is, in fact, the sound track of the apocalypse.)

But any new Insomnium is better than no new Insomnium, and the album is still worth a listen.

Every band produces a disappointing album at some point in their career. Some bands produce a great many disappointing albums. Some bands are just flat disappointing period. My benchmark for disappointing albums is the extremely disappointing The Great Burrito Extortion Case by Bowling For Soup.

And hey, here's good news: I didn't hear a single pinched harmonic on the entire album. Pinched harmonics, I contend, are to metal what trucker hats are to headgear, and always make me think of crappy 1980s hair "metal" like Bullet Boys or... oh, I can barely type it... Whitesnake...

Total Invasion

I happen to like the Polish metal band Behemoth. They play "blackened death metal", as cognoscenti call it, and it isn't bad. It's considerably more spare than the melodic death metal I usually listen to, but not quite as thin and abraded as classical Norwegian black metal like Darkthrone. It's just good.

The lyrics are generally indecipherable, and that's good, because I'm sure the lyrical message isn't all that savory. Let's see, an extreme metal band that does a song called Lucifer... Gosh, I wonder what it could possibly be about... You don't have to be The Amazing Kreskin to guess what those lyrics are going to be like.

Some of the singing seems to be in Polish. Some of the singing seems to be in some other language. Latin, maybe, or Aramaic, or who knows what. And some of the singing just amounts to roaring and screeching. It reminds me of a classic Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode where they were mocking a song by Motorhead.

"Oh, must they scream so?"

"Because it's rage, dear."

I could go to www.darklyrics.com and find out what the lyrics really are, but I just don't want to. I enjoy metal music, but I don't give much of a hoot for the metal lifestyle, and all that palaver about left-hand paths strikes me as a bunch of weary adolescent rebellion (you want to experience real metal? Try chemotherapy. That's real metal).

I just like the music, and prefer to make up my own lyrics to the songs. For example, the song Total Invasion, a bonus track on Behemoth's album Evangelion. It's a pretty good song, right down the middle of the blackened death metal turnpike that happens to work for me. And I'm sure that the "total invasion" referenced in the title is something evil and diabolical. But since I can't make out what they're saying, I'm free to think it's a total invasion of bathing beauties bearing trays of iced tea and cucumber sandwiches. Oooh, don't mind if I do!

(Postscript: In the Behemoth song Lucifer, there's a long section where someone is chanting in some language unknown to me. Polish? Latin? Klingon? Well, probably not Klingon, but that gives me an idea for my own blackened death metal band... Anyway, at the end of the chanting in that song, the guy says - and I swear I'm not making this up - "Here comes Bogart." So in my mind, the song is no longer about the Foul Deceiver; it's about Humphrey Bogart. It's much more palatable that way.)

Inartistic License

I haven't written anything in a while. No, let me correct that, I haven't written a blog post in a while. But I've written plenty elsewhere. I'm suffering from an advanced case of the novelist vapors, an odd medical condition where I start to believe that I really could write a book, and most of my writing lately has gone into the treatment of that peculiar medical condition.

As it happens, I can write a book. I've done many times. Publishing a book, on the other hand, has proved to be more difficult. That's a fairly self-serving remark, suggesting that I've been out flogging my latest manuscript to agents and editors and building up a wall-sized collage of rejection slips. But I haven't. The whole process seems so complicated, and so unlikely to succeed, that I just can't be bothered. Yeah, I know all the aphorisms, but spare me - I happen to enjoy writing, but I don't enjoy writing cover letters and going through all that hoohah. All of which means, I suppose, that I shouldn't quit my day job.

But honestly, it isn't as though any of the derivative crap I write is ever going to be featured in the Oprah Book Club, and without that sort of endorsement, commercial success is unlikely. Nor have I sunk to the level of considering e-publishing or a vanity publisher. I'm not sure I want to hand out copies of any of my books and have people call me and say "Gee whiz, what did you write that crap for?" Not that I'm embarrassed about it, but I will admit that it isn't particularly literary.

I notice something in my own personal writing experience that puzzles and amuses me. People read some Famous Horror Author, whose initials may or may not be "Stephen King" or "Dean Koontz" or "Bentley Little". And they say things like "Wow, wasn't that a great villain? He was so AWFUL!" But they read something I wrote, and they get to the villain, and they turn on me. "What did you write THAT for? How could you even THINK that? Are you really THAT sick?" If Stephen King creates some odious character, he is lauded for creating a chilling bad guy. If I do it, people think I've got a screw loose and assume I actually approve of the bad guy. I've never figured out why that double standard exists, but it's very pronounced and predictable. Not everyone does it, but enough have that I've become wary of handing out manuscripts willy-nilly. Nothing takes the fun out of writing faster than trying to convince someone that the fact that your bad guy hates fluffy kittens doesn't mean that YOU hate fluffy kittens too. Or there are exchanges like this: "Look, right here on page 354, the villain gets what's coming to him and justice is served!" "Yeah, but couldn't you have written about big-eyed rabbits in footie pajamas and skipped the bad guy?" "But I was writing a horror novel. Big-eyed rabbits in footie pajamas aren't horrible." "What's wrong with big-eyed rabbits in footie pajamas?" "Nothing! But... But..." And so on.

Everyone else gets to exercise artistic license. Me, I'm held accountable for every damn word I've ever written. It's as though I've been nominated for the Supreme Court. Good thing I haven't been. That zombie apocalypse novel I wrote a while back would come back to haunt me something awful and severely damage my chances of getting the nod from the committee.

"We note in leafing through the corpus of your work that this novel mentioned drug use, drunkenness, sex outside of marriage, death metal, wanton disregard for traffic laws, undercooked pork, and unsafe use of firearms. How do you respond to that?"

"It was a ZOMBIE NOVEL, for crying out loud! And Carpathian Forest is black metal, not death metal!"

Flip-Flop

It drives me crazy when someone accuses a political candidate of "flip-flopping". Since when is changing your mind a bad thing? Wouldn't we want leaders who say things like "Well, having thought about the matter, I now realize that I was wrong"? And to make it worse, partisan journalists dredge up stuff that someone said twenty or thirty years ago to prove that so-and-so is an inconstant, untrustworthy flip-flopper.

Holy shit. What's the point of having a brain and at least a flicker of sentience if we can never change our minds? And how far back does it go? Will we be dragging future Supreme Court nominees through the mud because as six-year-olds they said "eww, boys are icky"?

I'd rather have a leader who changes his mind on the basis of new information and prolonged thought that some straitjacketed ideologue who never, ever, changes his mind, often because he subscribes to some essentially anti-intellectual ideology that doesn't brook intellectual dissent. People are complicated. Issues are often complicated. And changing your mind in the face of some complicated issue full of complicated people doesn't sound like weakness to me; it sounds like the sign of a brain at work.

And frankly, if I was today called to account for all the ridiculous things I thought when I was twenty years old, I'd be in a world of trouble. For instance:

* I used to hate Brussels Sprouts

* I used to think Blade Runner was a terrible movie

* I used to listen to Jethro Tull

* I used to think that Zoroastrianism was a dualist religion

* I used to think that barbarian hordes overran and destroyed Imperial Rome

* I used to think that the Battle of the Atlantic was irrelevant to the course of WWII

* I used to think that Blue Oyster Cult was heavy metal

* I used to think that senators and legislators had some vested interest in orderly governance

* I used to think that TV could have didactic purpose

* I used to think that the NEA should support one form of art over another

* I used to think that the stereotype of the loud, boorish, anti-intellectual American was a myth

* I used to think that postmodern "critical analysis" was something worthy of attention

* I used to think that East and West Germany would never reunify in my lifetime

* I used to think that automatic transmissions in cars were for lamers

* I used to think that there should be no speed limit at all

* I used to think that the Space Shuttle was a great idea

* I used to think I understood what Edmund Husserl was talking about

* I used to think that there was something glamorous about air travel

I no longer think such things. Does that make me a flip-flopper? According to American politics, yes, it does, and even worse, I'm not to be trusted with a burnt-out match. Maybe that's why American politics is such a pathetic joke these days.

Roman Perplexity

I've always been perplexed by one thing about Rome (the antique political entity, not the city itself). Actually, a lot of things about Rome perplex me, but the main one is this: given that the Roman people seemed so profoundly disinclined toward the notion of kingship, why did they tolerate a system of emperors, in many cases hereditary emperors, that look a whole lot like kingship? What's the difference?

The story goes that the city of Rome before the advent of the Republic was ruled by seven kings. The last, Tarquin the Proud, supposedly raped a woman named Lucretia. She committed suicide due to the trauma, but before she did, she told her brother Brutus (not the Brutus, merely a Brutus) about the attack. Brutus went on to raise the people of Rome against Tarquin and inaugurated the Roman Republic, with its system of elected magistrates and checks on power in the form of the tribunes of the plebs. From then on, the Romans tended to react quite negatively to the notion of kingship, the way third grade boys tend to react to the notion of girls. Kings, like girls, apparently have cooties.

It's arguable that one of the threads of resentment that led to the assassination of Julius Caesar was the dark suspicion in some quarters that Julius intended to have himself named king. That business where Marc Antony tried to lower a king's crown on Julius's head and he ostentatiously refused it notwithstanding, I wonder if some people worried that he was going to turn into a new Tarquin. That isn't the only thread, of course. Not even the main one. I think the main one was simply Julius Caesar's complete inability to compromise with the senatorial class, and vice versa.

Rome didn't really have political parties in the modern sense of the word, but there were two identifiable lines of political thought in those days. The Optimates generally seemed keen to preserve the rights and privileges of the patricians in general and the senatorial class in particular, while the Populares exhibited a sort of populism and claimed to act in the best interests of all citizens. Any reading of the fate of the Gracchus brothers would reveal that one tinkered with the rights and prerogatives of the senatorial class at one's peril, and one could argue that the day thugs in the employ of the Senate clubbed the elder Gracchus to death, the Republic took its first long step toward autocracy. There was that unpleasantness with Cornelius Sulla and Gaius Marius and all that, but the politically-motivated murders of the Gracchi seem to me to mark a line of departure, the day the Republic started to fall.

(But curse it all, it's very complicated. Another thing that led to the fall of the Republic was winning the first and second Punic Wars and the discovery that the Republican form of government that might be suitable for a small inland Italian city-state was simply not up to the demands of running a country that spanned most of the western Mediterranean. Empire was simply more efficient than Republic, especially since the Romans kept ending up with a bigger and bigger empire to administer, and not always intentionally either.)

But maybe what allowed the Romans to accept the notion of emperors was the idea that emperors had a different public face than kings. Both were absolutist leaders, both tended to be hereditary. But kings were seen as remote and distant - they lazed in their posh villas and were basically never seen by the common people (either patrician or plebian), as distant and unapproachable as the gods on Olympus. But the emperors were much more public. The Romans often referred to them as princeps, or "leading man" or "first citizen". Yeah, there were absolutist leaders, but they were public ones. They were expected to be seen, and to exemplify the hallowed virtues of Rome, virtus and all that. And unlike kings, they had to at least pretend to maintain relations with the senatorial class (in Rome, as in every society, money buys power, often through the direct method of buying soldiers who in turn generate power). It seems notable to me that the emperors that lasted the longest were the ones who were most able to keep peace with the Senate (Augustus, for example, even though Augustus was careful to never refer to himself as an emperor, but he clearly set the stage for Tiberius, who everyone agrees was an emperor).

Anyway. That's all the thinking on Rome I can manage without coffee. I'd make a terrible emperor.

"Princeps, the barbarians are attacking again!"

"Tell them to go away; I haven't finished waking up yet."

The Prison Sentence

I see that people occasionally want to declare George R. R. Martin "the American Tolkien." They can do so if they like, but I don't think I will.

I'm halfway through the fifth book, and aspects of while Fire and Ice thing are starting to really seriously wear out their welcomes with me. The books are slowly becoming more and more tedious to read, and I find myself skimming more and more.

For example, I don't need to know the following:

* What anyone is wearing

* What anyone is eating

* What songs anyone is singing (I swear, if I am reminded of that "A bear, a bear" song one more time, I may shriek.

* What subsidiary banners fly from what castle's walls

* What the "words" of the houses are

* The names of people who could just as well be anonymous

Admirers of this sort of thing may argue that all this needless palaver lends verisimilitude, but to me, it's like hanging out with a hard-core SCA geek: it's fun for a while, but comes a time when it starts to become tedious, even a little annoying.

But I think the thing that wears on me the most is the endless cynicism of the whole series. Admirers of this sort of thing will probably say that the deep cynicism of the series lends even more verisimilitude; that people really are that self-interested and ignoble. Maybe. But I think that when you put the label "fantasy" on a book cover, realism becomes entirely moot, and I find myself preferring the hints of nobility in Tolkien's writing over the endless barbarism of Martin's. Oh great, another ten-page digression on alliance-by-marriage. Skim. Oh great, another ten-page digression on who has the stronger claim to what throne. Skim. It's an endless procession of murder, insanity, incest, naked ambition, rape, regicide, patricide, fratricide, probably matricide, hanging, torture, mutilation, cruelty, bowel movements, cannibalism, bestiality, greed, and hypocrisy.

Realistic? Sure. But just because it's realistic doesn't mean I want to read about it either. I like to read the occasional fantasy novel as an escape, but Fire and Ice is less an escape than a prison sentence.

It isn't all bad. It has interesting ideas and interesting characters, and I am curious how certain things come out in the end. But it's also bloated, slow, tedious, cynical, encrusted with far too much irrelevant detail, and not especially entertaining, at least in my opinion.

Stop Crapping On My Magazine

I don't listen to talk radio, of any political persuasion. Well, I do listen to NPR, mostly because I can't abide commercials on the radio, but when any given show gets to the "call-in" part of the program, I tend to turn the volume down and whistle. There's something grating to me about having some group of people who know something about any given subject give their spiels, and then inviting people who may potentially know squat about the subject call in and offer their insights and opinions.

Yes, I'm an elitist and a meritocrat - I believe that there tend to be experts in any given field and I'm quite willing to shut up, let them talk, and think about what they said. And I don't see how "opening the phones" necessarily improves the quality of what they have to say, or my own private deliberations on what was said.

But at least in talk radio, there's someone (presumably the person who answers the phone) who winnows out the real flakes. It isn't full peer review by any means, but at least the screening process tends to weed out some of the most incomprehensible commentators. But this doesn't exist on the Internet - anyone can say anything they want, wherever they want, and reading their comments is often very bad for my health.

Some comments are just completely incomprehensible, and lead me to suggest that drinking a fifth of Jack Daniels may not be the right way to prepare for writing a comment on an Internet news story. Others are so poorly written I can't figure out what they're saying, usually because the commentator is either illiterate or has lapsed into some kind of Twitterspeak that I can't follow. I'm no Hemingway, but even I get twitchy when I see comments like "r u kddng me". Come on, people, written language is one of the greatest things we're capable of, and you treat it like an outhouse. Then there are the people for whom everything devolves into an exercise in ideology - you're reading a story about paleontology, and some yahoo diverts it into a name-calling exercise in politics. And then there are the foil-hatters, the people for whom everything, literally everything, is either a conspiracy or a cover-up. And there's the contingent of people who don't know a damn thing about the subject, but still think they have the right, nay, the obligation, to utter some ridiculous nonsense, as though the First Amendment isn't just a guarantee of free speech, but an actual moral imperative to exercise it.

It drives me up the wall.

But the ones that really annoy me are the ones who poop on my magazines. Let me explain. Once I was lying in bed reading an issue of a magazine. It happened to be Sky & Telescope, but the name doesn't matter. Being tired, I laid the magazine on the floor and went to sleep. During the night, my dog came along and pooped on my magazine. I know it wasn't malicious - she probably figured she'd get in less trouble if she pooped on something disposable instead of on the carpet - but still, it was hard to not imagine that she was saying "Stop reading that stupid magazine and pay attention to ME!"

Internet comments abound with this sort of thing, people who metaphorically poop on your magazine because they don't think they're getting enough attention. A good example are the NASA-bashers. These guys go to the trouble of reading NASA news stories or feeds, and then post long, often moronic comments expressing their black hatred of NASA and everything it stands for. They're just pooping on our magazines - hating whatever they read simply so they can hear their own voices and get a little attention. NASA is certainly not above criticism, but simply crapping on the magazine because you're unhappy with life doesn't count as criticism.

Some people are idiots, and they can't help that. Some people are apparently genetically predisposed to like conspiracy theories, and they can't help that. Some people just can't spell or write a coherent sentence, in the same way that I just can't pole-vault - it just isn't in my makeup. I can understand all that, up to a point. But when some idiot intentionally craps on my magazine because he's unhappy with his life and wants attention, that bugs me.

The Unrounded Man

Robert Heinlein once wrote "Specialization is for insects." That was actually the payoff line for a much longer thing, a list of all the things that Big Daddy Heinlein imagined that a well-rounded man should be able to do. I don't remember the list exactly, but was things like ride a horse, raise a child, write a song, defend the weak, skin an animal, use differential equations, join a comically inept left-wing revolutionary movement, drive a nail, program a computer, sew well, die well... Oh, I don't remember what all.

Apparently I'm not so well-rounded, because it turns out that I can't do a lot of things that a man, a REAL man, should probably be able to do.

I cannot, for example, come up with good impromptu Halloween costumes. Some people, you give them a half an hour and some paper plates, aluminum foil and socks, and they transform themselves into Bib Fortuna, complete with tentacles. But me? Pfft. A houseful of clothes and craft stuff, and the best I can do is put on a cowboy hat and tell people "I'm going as me, assuming I had ever been in Lonesome Dove." (Not to digress, but the best move you can make on Halloween, guys, is to rent the largest, fluffiest, pinkest rabbit costume you can find. You'll be mocked mercilessly on the way to the Halloween party, but once the sun goes down and all the girls in the skimpy witch and vampire costumes start getting cold, who do you think they're going to want to hug? That's right, the guy in the fluffy, warm rabbit costume. Trust me.)

This extends into other forms of weekend craft, such as making "macaroni art". Some people can pull off a pretty good copy of "The Last Supper" on a cookie sheet. Me, my macaroni art looks like either a Rothko or a Pollock, depending on how much coffee I've had. And while Rothko and Pollock got away with it in the world of high art, showing up at the county fair with a macaroni version of a Rothko just doesn't cut much mustard.

Some men - manly men, I guess - can wear cowboy boots. I cannot. Actually, I can wear them okay, I guess, I just can't get them back off. They stick as though they've been super-glued to my feet. I watch westerns on TV where guys pull off their boots without so much as a grunt. How do they do that? Me, I'm there with a bench vise, a can of WD-40 and a knife, and I still can't get them off. This probably just means that all the cowboy boots I've ever owned were the wrong size. But I have a new problem these days: my left foot is now larger than my right foot. A while back I sent an order in to a specialist boot-maker who claimed that they could and would make any kind of cowboy boot you could ever want, no matter how big, small, deformed, or mismatched your feet were. So I sent in an order and included the measurements of my feet. About a week later they cancelled the order by email with the apology "Maybe you'd be better off with flip-flops." If I had been a cowboy, I would most likely have died with my boots on, because I wouldn't have been able to get the damned things off.

Not that I can wear flip-flops either. After about six steps they always turn sideways, heels outboard, and threaten to trip me. Some people can wear flip-flops for hours. Some people can probably run a marathon in flip-flops. Me, I can't get from the pool to the back door without something going horribly awry. And I tend to leave my flip-flops outside. Normally I don't spend much time worrying about being stung by insects. I don't LIKE being stung, but it isn't something I really worry about very much. But somehow, I look at my flip-flops lying out on the patio and I know, I just know, that something hideous lurks within them, that I'll end up having to go to the ER with some kind of mutant scorpion stinger hanging out of my foot. Most times, I just leave the flip-flops alone and take my chances barefoot (once I got stung on the testicle by a wasp, and remember thinking "If this turns into a serious problem and I have to go the ER, there's simply no good way to explain how this happened.")

And I'm not good with revolutionary movements of any sort. "Come, brother," the leader says. "It's time to storm la Bastille!" And I purse my lips and say "But, Star Trek is coming up in an hour, and it's the one with the Yangs and the Kohms, and I haven't seen it in ages!"

And, despite all the nails I've driven in my life, I'm just no good at all at driving nails. Period. For a while I thought I just had crappy hammers, so I bought several new ones, of varying design and weight. For a while I thought I was being tormented by crappy nails, so I bought bigger nails. Nothing helped. At least a quarter of the time something goes horribly awry. The nail shoots off into the lower stratosphere, never to be seen again. The nail bends. The nail falls out. The board splits. I miss the nail entirely and mash a half-moon-shaped dent in the wood (or, if I'm using the framing hammer, I convert a circular region of the wood into a passable simulation of cube steak). People have actually tried to help me with this. Some urge me to choke up on the hammer and not swing so hard. Others tell me to get a bigger hammer and just wallop the thing, the theory apparently being that if you can sink the nail in two blows, there are fewer opportunities for it to bend. Nothing helped. Though these days, I AM better at not hitting myself with the hammer. (Once I was mowing a field of alfalfa and bent one of the triangular cutting blades in the windrower. I took the blade off and laid it on the drawbar, thinking I'd pound it flat with a big hammer. But every time I hit it, the bent tooth jumped ten feet in the air. So I thought "I'll hold it down with just the very tip of my left thumb." I ended up hitting my thumb so hard I tore my thumbnail off. My grampa also took off his left thumbnail with an axe, so maybe there's a genetic component to my futility with hammers.)

So here I stand, a man in full, but decidedly unrounded. Big Daddy Heinlein would be SO disappointed.

Well, I Liked It...

I don't read many movie reviews, and I can't remember the last time I bothered to "keep score" on Hollywood by looking up how much money this or that movie made, or lost. I also hate the word "engage", which I often hear on NPR from Brooklynite artist types who bestir themselves to leave their trendy digs and venture out into the real world to witness people "really engaging with the tornado" or "really engaging with the wildfire".

I hate that use of the word "engage". But I'll go ahead and use it anyway, in this context: I don't "engage" with movies as a business, or as harbingers of trends, or as some kind of pithy social commentary. I "engage" with them as a means of entertainment.

So when I read that Cowboys & Aliens has been officially declared "under-performing" or even "tanking", I couldn't care less, because hey, I liked it. And it doesn't matter to me what the critics said about it, or what the box-office bean counters came up with. I like westerns, I like science fiction movies, and hey, sometimes I like loud movies that don't make a lot of objective sense. Must every movie be a heartfelt examination of loss and redemption, or a heartwarming tale of love and acceptance? Can't I go see a movie that features Daniel Craig blowing big smoking holes in four-armed aliens once in a while? Can't I go see a movie that doesn't star Jennifer Aniston or Seth Rogan every now and then?

Sure I can. And I did. So put that in your box office totals and smoke it.

I can't seem to turn the news on lately without hearing someone tell me how "9/11 was when we lost our sense of safety and security."

Who's "we", kemosabe?

I have to say, up front, that I think there's something a little disturbing and histrionic about our fascination with 9/11. It was a tragedy, absolutely, and to the people who lost loved ones in the attacks, it's a tragedy that will never wane. But the unprecedented contemplation of the national navel this week... I don't know. It just bugs me.

It bugs me when they say "we lost our sense of security and safety" and have to live in fear now. We did? And we do?

If you thought the borders of the United States somehow granted us magical protection from harm and 9/11 jolted you out of your naive innocence, then you're just deluded. You didn't lose your sense of security; you lost your comfortable illusion of security. I grew up during the Cold War, when the 1,500+ ICBMs of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces were no more than about fifteen minutes away at any time. This wasn't the unformed dread of some bearded guy in a cave in Afghanistan planning to knock down a few buildings; this was over a thousand ballistic missiles armed with nuclear weapons, multiple nuclear weapons in many cases, to say nothing at all of the Soviet Navy's SLBMs or Tu-26 Backfire bombers carrying out "kamikaze" attacks. This would not have resulted in the loss of a few thousand people. This would have resulted in the loss of a few tens of millions of people, probably a few hundreds of millions of people, and the general collapse of anything resembling modern technological civilization.

Remember those days? Remember being taught to hide under your school desk? Remember people building fallout shelters in their back yards? Remember civil defense shelters? Remember how it felt when we deployed Pershing II missiles to Europe? Remember when the imminent introduction of neutron bombs appeared to coat the slippery slope toward nuclear immolation with Teflon? Remember when the cornerstone of US nuclear strategy was the principle of Mutual Assured Destruction? Remember when nuclear strategists argued that hardening the civilian population would actually destabilize deterrence? Remember when acronyms like MAD and ABM and ICBM and MIRV and FOBS weren't just alphabet soup nonsense but really stood for really serious shit? Remember when the movie Fail-Safe scared the crap out of you because it could happen?

There's your insecurity for you. How quickly we forget.

Experts can argue about when the Cold War really ended. The USSR fell apart in 1991, and one could argue that the real Cold War was over before even that, when the Soviets withdrew the bulk of their SSBNs from launch stations off the coasts of the United States. But just for the sake of discussion, let's say that the Cold War and the possibility of a spasm nuclear exchange between the USA and the USSR ended in 1991. 9/11 happened in 2001. Unless you were younger than ten years old at the time of 9/11, you lived at least part of your life under the specter of full-scale nuclear war with the Soviets. Against that backdrop, claims that 9/11 destroyed our sense of security seem just a little overwrought to me.

I'm not arguing that the Cold War was good. I'm not arguing that nuclear war against the Soviets was ever likely (though at times, such as during the Yom Kippur War or the ghastly Soviet misinterpretation of a NATO military exercise in the 1980s, we got close). The entire Cold War was a horrid waste of resources and lives, and we'd all have been better off if saner heads had prevailed, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But they didn't. And the reality was that for many years, both we and the Soviets were armed to the teeth, and all we needed was one accident, one misreading of intention, one madman, to burn down the whole world. And we knew it.

So you'll pardon me if your "loss of safety" doesn't move me very much. I feel far, far more secure now than I ever did during the Cold War, thank you very much. I'll take my chances with a terrorist armed with a box cutter. That's something I might be able to do something about, in the unlikely event that said terrorist ever conceives the notion that a yokel like me in the rural Arizona countryside is worth attacking. But a MIRVed SS-18 cold-launched out of a silo in some grim Soviet ICBM complex? Nothing I can do about that but wait for the end.

Calm Down

The other day I mentioned to someone that I never watch music videos. The reaction was something akin to horrified disgust, as if I had said I never changed my socks. The guy said "I can't believe what a dull, drab, lifeless life you must lead without music!"

I wonder what part of the American educational system failed him that he can't fathom the distinction between watching and listening. One you do with your eyes. The other you do with your ears. And it's true, I almost never watch videos. But I often listen to music. Confused? You shouldn't be.

But I guess we've become so used to the idea of watching things that we don't do anything else. The other day I saw a commercial for some tablet computer. The commercial briefly showed some kind of text, as though to highlight the fact that the tablet could be used as an e-reader, but then the disembodied hand came in, dashed away the text, and replaced it with a video of some guy surfing. Yeah, we can't be bothered with words, get that intellectual crap out of here, there are videos to be watched! We have media to consume!

I try not to have a lot of pet peeves, because I try not to be too peevish in general. But there is one thing about modern life that makes me clench my teeth so hard I think I'm going to break all my teeth. It's being dragged into someone's cubicle at work to watch a YouTube video. There's something about having to stand behind someone and watch a video over their shoulder that drives me right to the brink of physical violence. It doesn't even matter what the video is. It could be something really fun, like Scarlett Johansson in a leather bikini explaining the shock wave interactions in the exhaust nozzle of a Rocketdyne F-1 rocket engine, and it would still gall me. Send me the link and I'll look at it later, but please, I beg you, don't drag me into your cubicle and make me watch a Sesame Street video. Ever.

I don't trust computers that don't have keyboards. But I guess that explains a lot about me, me and my stodgy old-fashioned refusal to watch videos and my insistence that tweeting something like "i 8 2 much sicky sick" isn't writing. I don't tweet anything, actually. Writing this blog is about as self-important as I can get. I don't really think anyone cares about what I write about here, and I can imagine even less that anyone would read tweets from me like "I saw a bird" or "Is it lunch yet?" (Considering that apologizing for inappropriate tweets now seems to take up about 40% of the average celebrity's time, is tweeting anything at all a good idea? Though when I was going through chemo, I did seriously consider - for about five minutes - the idea of tweeting "I'm throwing up" every time I did, just so everyone could understand what it's like to throw up every half-hour or so.)

But it isn't a case of me making a stand for artistic integrity. I just happen to think that most of the videos I've ever really watched were kind of dumb. The chief exception to that being Dethklok videos, and they're parodies anyway. Death metal videos are especially obnoxious. I don't mind the ones that just show the band windmilling their hair - watching that holds a kind of sick fascination for me. But my idea of fun isn't watching some scrawny, heavily be-tattooed yokel who couldn't defeat a Subway six-inch tuna on white in a grudge match grimace for the camera. That's just stupid. Almost as stupid as the "hellish image" videos, where we're supposed to be jolted out of our smug bourgeois sensibilities by flying skulls and whatnot.

Just play the music, chief, and spare me your edgy video.

Before and After in the Back Yard

Here are some before-and-after pictures of our back yard.

Before - my wife out training the baby miniature horse in her ancient electric wheelchair. It worked okay, though she tended to get stuck in soft soil, and eventually the controller had a major failure and it would only go in circles. Note the conspicuous absence of anything in the yard except for a few weeds and the one tree.

Digging the pool. Note the tree that the dump truck almost backed into - same tree as in the picture above. The guy running the excavator said "At least there's no problem with access on this property!" I should say not. They dumped the dirt off to the left and I ended up using all of it making flood control berms.

The back yard as it stands more or less today.

More of the back yard. Note the size of the tree now, which is on the left side of the picture.

We've done a lot over the years. But I wonder how much more I could have done if I hadn't spent two years dealing with cancer. Oh well. At least I'm still here to enjoy it.

It Is Haboob!

This has been a pretty active year for dust storms around Phoenix. Here's a view of a rather substantial dust storm about to hit - the picture is looking southeast, toward Phoenix, and the dust cloud is the solid light-colored bank in the distance. I was driving home from work when this thing was brewing and though I can't cite actual numbers, I do know that it spanned the entire southern horizon and must have been sixty miles long, if not more.

There's a certain amount of controversy these days about what to call such things. The local media has taken to calling them "haboobs", which is an Arabic word. Some people think it's unpatriotic to use Arabic words, or think that using them somehow insults US soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. I personally think the uproar is kind of silly. English has been borrowing words from other languages since day one, and other languages have been borrowing words from English just as rapidly. If they think "haboob" is unpatriotic, maybe they'd like to give up other Arabic words like algebra, Rigel, alcohol, Betelgeuse, sultan... (Actually, some people really WOULD like to give up algebra, now that I think about it.)

As George Carlin once said, there are bad thoughts and bad intentions, and then there are just words, man. Haboob is just a word. If you don't like it, don't use it.

I confess that I generally don't refer to these sorts of things as haboobs. I'm used to the term "dust storm" and that's what comes most readily to mind, but it isn't an exclusionary practice; it's just the way my brain works. And it doesn't bother me if you do or not. Unlike the Thought Police that want to tell me what words I can and can't use, I hew to the line that the ultimate freedom is freedom of thought, and that means you can call them Floyd if that's what makes you happy.

Note the dry wash beyond the edge of the "cleared area". I grade the cleared area with my tractor every so often because that's where the garbage truck and mailman turn around, and it also serves as a firebreak. But I leave the dry wash alone (if I were in a sufficiently perky mood, I might refer to it as a wadi, another one of those dratted Arabic words). It doesn't look like much in the picture, but it's a wonderland of weird rocks, weird insects, and weird reptiles.

I go out in the dry wash - I mean, the wadi - with a metal detector from time to time. My master plan is that I'll find some enormous nickel-iron meteorite among all the rocks, and that isn't an entirely forlorn hope. But mostly I find bottle caps, nails, ancient steel Coca-Cola cans, the metal stubs of shotgun shells, and on one occasion an odd piece of wrought iron hardware that looks like it was once part of a horse-drawn wagon. And every now and then I find walnut-sized lumps of magnetite. Heaven knows where that stuff came from originally.

I also find a lot of tires. Someone upstream of me must have dumped a bunch of old tires in the wash, because every time it runs, a few tires come down with the flood and get beached in my part of the wash. I also suspect that that's how the shotgun shells and bottle caps get there too.

Practical Starships

You don't often see practical spacecraft capable of manned flight between stars. And you won't see it here either, because the ship shown above is not a practical starship. But it is a lot more practical than pretty much anything else I've seen in science fiction since the days of 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is, of course, the ISV VentureStar from the movie Avatar. What makes it more practical than other things in sci-fi-dom?

For one thing, it isn't superluminal. It doesn't go faster than the speed of light, so it doesn't have to contend with things like warp drive, hyperdrive, hyperspace, wormholes, or any of that other hoohah. It gets there the hard way, by covering every damn kilometer between here and Pandora over a one-way flight of five-plus years.

Here's the basic mission profile. When it leaves Earth, it is propelled by enormously powerful lasers shining onto an equally enormous solar sail. When it gets to the halfway point, it furls or jettisons the solar said and decelerates using its own matter-antimatter engines. No warp drive here, folks, the matter-antimatter engines are just reaction motors of extremely high specific impulse. Once its affairs at Pandora are ended, it accelerates toward Earth using its aforementioned matter-antimatter engines, and then at the halfway point on the way back it deploys an enormous solar sail (or redeploys the old one) and is decelerated by the same lasers that drove it toward Pandora.

The proposal contains several interesting technical features. One is that the ship is a tension structure - the engines and the solar sail attach point are ahead of the rest of the ship, meaning that the thrust of the engines or sail pull the ship rather than push it. It's easier to make a tension structure light than it is to make a compression structure light.

Another feature is the whopping size of the radiators. Really advanced spacecraft engines have a problem in that they aren't able to eliminate enough heat in their exhausts to keep them cool. Chemical rockets can, and up to a point nuclear-thermal rockets can, but engines of this sort tend to produce way more heat than they can dump through the exhausts. So advanced spacecraft propulsion is often more a matter of heat-sinking and radiator design than anything else. (Incidentally, they knew this when they made 2001 and Discovery was intended to have radiators of similar size, but they eliminated them for the sake of visual cleanliness.) In this artist's conception, the radiators are still glowing red-hot as they dump the heat from several years of engine operation.

Another interesting idea is the use of what is called "r-squared" shielding instead of a "shadow shield". Matter-antimatter engines will produce a lot of pretty harmful radiation, probably lots of high-energy particles and even more hard x-rays. One method of shielding the crew from this nastiness is to put a hockey-puck-shaped shield between the engine and the crew compartment - a "shadow shield", so-called because it makes a "radiation shadow". But shields are heavy, and lugging a sixty-ton lead shield to Pandora and back isn't efficient. So the ship uses "r-squared" shielding, which means that you simply put the people as far away from the engine as you can, because the radiation drops at the square of the distance between the engine and the crew. (Again, 2001 had this right; the design of the Discovery is just right to exploit r-squared shielding.)

The ship also employs a recognizable variant of Whipple shields. An unavoidable fact of life is that colliding with dust motes and even hydrogen atoms at a high percentage of the speed of light is a bad idea. In Star Trek this problem is dealt with by the navigational deflector, which moves such gleefus aside so it doesn't hit the ship. In Star Wars, this problem is apparently not dealt with at all. The VentureStar uses Whipple shields, which amount to stacked layers of aluminum foil. The dust mote hits the foil and blows the hell out of it, but doesn't get through to riddle the ship (it's almost like spaced armor or ERA on tanks).

But it still isn't practical. The design contains at least four industrial-strength hand-waves.

The first is that achieving the accelerations required for relatively brief interstellar flight (say, seven years) with a solar sail is hard. The propulsion lasers would have to be both numerous and incredibly powerful, to say nothing of the "pointing problem", keeping all those gigawatt-class lasers pointed at a solar sail that might be only on the order of ten miles in diameter at distances of two or three light years. It isn't impossible, but it isn't something we can do right now, and probably won't be able to do until the advent of cheap and reliable fusion reactors and probably several hitherto unknown breakthroughs in free-electron lasers.

The second is that the hundred or so passengers remain in suspended animation throughout most of the flight - not for their convenience, but so that the ship doesn't have to carry food, water, and oxygen for them. Only four people remain awake during the voyage. Is that sort of suspended animation possible? I'm no biologist, but my sense is that it isn't impossible in principle, but the details are liable to be a bitch.

The third is that the ship uses matter-antimatter engines, largely as a means of getting around the depressing reality that lower-energy engines either don't generate enough thrust to achieve a reasonable flight time, or consume so much fuel or energy that the ship can't actually carry anything but fuel. Matter-antimatter engines are not impossible. I myself have indulged in the subtle joys of matter-antimatter reactions; every time I get a PET scan to monitor my cancer, chemicals in my body are undergoing beta decay and producing positrons, which are antimatter. They collide with electrons, they annihilate, and 511 KeV X-rays go shooting off through my tissues. So a matter-antimatter engine isn't impossible by any means. The chief problem is collecting enough antimatter to fuel a starship, and containing it years without significant decay.

This leads to the fourth and final hand-wave, which is that the ship is said to employ the "unobtainium" mined on Pandora to contain the requisite amounts of antimatter for the requisite time. Unobtainium is an excellent plot device, but its physical properties on the face of it appear to violate the laws of physics. But don't take my word for that. I have a problem understanding the energy dynamics of magnets, which to my mind also appear to violate the laws of physics. You hold a magnet over a nail and suddenly the nail flies up to the magnet, against the pull of gravity. Okay, now where the hell did that energy come from?? The nail gains both potential and kinetic energy, and I can't for the life of me figure out where it came from. So given this critical failure in my understanding of ordinary physics, I may not be the person best qualified to say whether levitating unobtainium is bullshit or not. But I think it is.

Still, though, the VentureStar is an acutely interesting design and good food for thought, if nothing else. And I rather like the Valkyrie shuttles too, because they manage to get around all that hokey VTVL nonsense by employing dual-cycle engines capable of breathing air. But that's a whole different rant, innit?

Lament For My Feet

These are my feet, and one of my size-14 shoes. My poor feet are the main sufferers of chemotherapy these days. Chemotherapy causes all sorts of interesting and unpleasant side effects, but it turns out that for me, the longest-lasting side effect of them all is neuropathy in my feet. The chemo drugs damaged my peripheral nerves. In the heyday of chemo, I had neuropathy all the way up both legs to above my knees, and even in my hands, but since I stopped chemo, the damage has mostly healed. Now it's just concentrated in my feet, and it may never go away entirely. For a while my oncologist had me on Neurontin to help with the neuropathy, but drugs like Neurontin aren't without their own risks and we finally decided that the I'd be better off with the discomfort than with the drug.

What's it feel like? It's like my feet went to sleep and are just starting to wake up - endless tingling and prickling for the most part, but some days it's more achy and unpleasant than that. You get used to it and it isn't any particular badge of honor to live with this sort of neuropathy, but it does make me a little jumpy. My nerves are now uber-sensitive and the slightest touch on the soles of my feet makes me squeal and squirm. It's somewhere in between being highly ticklish and having an actual seizure.

A while back I was in my garage goofing around - barefoot, as I usually am around the house. I heard the garbage truck coming and decided to hustle the can out to the road across about forty feet of gravel. So I did, and such as my hurry that I didn't realize that I'd driven my entire nervous system into total collapse with that much overstimulation of my sad nerves. I couldn't walk. I could hardly stand. I was a seething, writhing pillar of acute nervous agitation, and I couldn't even move when the garbage truck swept up in a cloud of diesel smoke and dust.

I stood there, smiling blandly at the truck driver. The driver looked down at me. Moments passed. No, really, I'm fine, I'm just standing here like a fool because I'm very interested in how the truck's claws grab my trash can and hoist it. Nothing going on here. No nerves freaking out in my feet. By the way, there seems to be a minor leak in one of your hydraulic cylinders... He waved. I waved. Finally he seemed to shrug and hoisted the can, and I stood there the whole time.

It took me about fifteen minutes to pick my back across the gravel. I'd take a step and have to pause for about thirty seconds to let the nervous agitation wane a bit, and then I'd take another step. For a time I felt like a French Foreign Legionnaire in one of those March Or Die movies, tottering on my last remaining strength toward Fort Zinderneuf. I considered sitting down and sliding on my butt toward the smooth safety of the concrete, but then I became anxious about rasping the skin off my butt on that expanse of gravel. Plus the gravel was hot. It was a case of either making my feet suffer, or grinding my buttocks into Swiss steak. I suppose I could have stopped, dropped, and rolled toward safety, but how do you explain that to your neighbors? "It's okay, I decided to roll back to the garage. Suddenly I'm an eight year old boy again. Whee."

I suppose the moral of the story is that I should wear shoes when I go outside, but I often don't. Shoes hurt. Wearing shoes for any length of time makes it feel as though I've clamped my toes in a bench vise, and that isn't much fun either.

What's a boy to do? Pour lots and lots of concrete, I guess. Or make someone else take the trash can out to the road.

But I kid my feet. They've actually been pretty reliable, considering the abuse I've heaped on them, and I wouldn't blame them if they gave up on me altogether. One day I might wake up and find that my feet have detached themselves and gone off to live with some rich guy who does nothing but sit in hot tubs all day. Who could blame them?

Pool Blues

I've been working on our swimming pool a lot lately. It's now about five years old, and for about two of those years I've been more or less completely out of commission and neglected some basic maintenance. So this year I've been trying to fix some of the things that have gone wrong with it.

It's a thankless task, because the pool builder put the control boxes in the worst imaginable spot, crammed into a corner formed by the house and a block wall. The only real way to get to the control boxes is to lie on your right side and work with your left hand, which means that unless you're a left-handed gibbon, there's really no easy way to get at anything.

Then someone (it might have been me, but I don't remember) covered the ground around the pool equipment with coarse gravel. Very coarse, as in one-inch screened stuff that I think was intended for septic tank leach fields. Every time I work on the thing I end up covered with bruises from lying on the rocks, and my knees look like they've been attacked with hammers. It's awful.

And then nothing is ever easy. To wit:

THE POOL LIGHT

The pool light quit. So I thought it was a bad bulb, and I wrestled the fixture out of the "wet niche" and got it out on the pool deck. The bulb was thoroughly dead - it rattled like a gourd when shaken. So I got a new bulb and a new gasket. Still nothing. So I get out my trusty Radio Shack DMM and take a few measurements, and note no AC going to the remote switch. Aha - the GFI outlet had probably tripped. But they put the GFI receptacle between two boxes in such a way that the hinged plastic cover cannot possibly be opened. Solution: grab the plastic cover with both hands and physically rip it off so I can reset the GFI. The light comes on. The light stays on for about two hours, and quits again. Grrr. At that point I had to go back to work and just had no time to work on it, so we had the "pool guy" come out to look at it. Turns out that the white replacement gasket had failed and the lamp fixture was full of water, and the GFI receptacle had also failed. One lamp, one GFI outlet, and one new gasket later, it was working. Only, it wasn't. The remote switch no longer worked. Turns out that the outlet it was plugged into had ALSO failed; its GFI mechanism had permanently tripped out. So now the remote switch is on the countertop in the kitchen, and the light works again.

THE CHLORINATOR

We have a salt-water pool, and I happen to like them. But tests revealed that there wasn't so much as an atom of chlorine in the pool, and the salt water generator control box was showing fault code 94, meaning no current draw in the generator. Oh, how hard could that be to fix? I replaced the fuse inside the box, which was blown, but still had a 94 fault. More poking with a DMM (again carried out while lying on my side, using one hand) revealed 28 VDC at the output pin of the box. So I thought it was perhaps a problem with the cell itself, perhaps a corroded or broken contact. So I tore the cell apart, which involves taking about about fifteen enormous screws with the biggest Phillips screwdriver I possess, and half-breaking my wrist in the process. Then thirteen (or so) plates fell out like playing cards, $600 worth of titanium and ruthenium oxide clattering around on the rocks.

By now it was getting dark, way too dark to figure out how to reassemble the cell, so I just screwed the cover back on and reassembled the plumbing. But in the process, a little rock got stuck in the o-ring groove and when I turned on the pump, a veritable Old Faithful eruption ensued. A great deal of struggling with enormous water pump pliers ensued, only because of the way the pool installer did the plumbing, the lower union was now in a pool of muddy water. It's enough to make a man scream. In the darkness. While lying on one-inch rocks.

The next day I did more electrical tests. Only the pool installer wired the disconnect strangely. The cell had a white and a black wire. The control box had a white and a black wire. But they crossed them at the disconnect plug, so the white wire connected to the black wire and vice versa, making a mockery of my continuity tests. For a long time this miswire made it seem like the fuseholder had failed, so I cut the shrink sleeving off it to get to the terminals, and then cut more shrink sleeving off the disconnect to get to the pins, and finally I figured out what they had done.

Finally, I found that the cable was bad. The white wire was open. But where? I had to slit the sheath of the cable along most of its length and finally found a spot where a squirrel had bitten through the insulation and exposed the conductor of the white wire, which had then corroded completely away. Half an hour later, armed with black tape and wire nuts, the cable was fixed. But now I had to reassemble the cell, which involved aligning all thirteen plates in twenty-six parallel grooves. I ended up using model railroad scale two-by-sixes as spacers to keep the plates aligned.

I guess the bottom line is that the light now works, the chlorinator is once again generating chlorine, and the water is now unbelievably clear, like glass. And my bruises are slowly healing. But the emotional trauma is still with me. So tomorrow I'm going to start the tractor and drag as much of that stupid gravel away as I can, and then get in there and get the rest of the rocks out by hand. And then I'm going to pile up the rocks and scream at them for a while, just because, and then invite the dog to piddle on them.

I look forward to that.

Spliced

I tried to watch the movie Splice. I was unsuccessful. I can't even tell you if it's a good movie or not, because I found the "male lead" so unappealing I simply couldn't continue. Was it the greasy, stringy, Severus Snape hair? Or the endless procession of uber-hip t-shirts? Or the ironic hip of him driving an AMC Gremlin? Whatever, he aggravated me to the point of anguish and I flipped to an old Western instead, where nobody wore any uber-hip t-shirts or drove a 1970s piece-of-crap car as a statement of ironic style.

My first car was an AMC Hornet, which was basically a Gremlin with a trunk. And I can assure you, there was nothing hip about a Hornet, then or now. They say people develop an emotional soft spot for their first cars. I didn't. My Hornet was a rolling mass of issues, including chronic electrical problems and torque converters that wouldn't stay together. My second car was a Ford Pinto, which was, if anything, even worse - it is impossible to think tenderly about a car that developed two horsepower (I'd tell dates "Hang on, I have to use both horsepowers now!").

The first car I really liked in any real way was a late-1970s Chevrolet Nova, mostly because when you stepped on the throttle, it would actually do something. The Hornet just vibrated; the Pinto spit and coughed. But the Nova would at least move. It wasn't a muscle car and wasn't meant to be, but it would at least get out of its own way.

The use of an AMC in Wayne's World was funny because the main characters were either too dumb or too self-absorbed to realize it wasn't hip. But the guy in Splice drove an AMC apparently because it was retro. But so are outhouses, and I don't notice a strong movement toward outdoor toilets as an expression of personal style.

I seem to have a pretty low threshold of pain when it comes to ironic retro hipness in movies. And I'm okay with that.

Curiosity

I see there's a new TV show called Curiosity. The tag-line, at least according to the ads I've seen, is "No question is off limits." I agree that in principle no question should be off limits. But some questions just aren't worth asking.

"Are we prepared for an alien invasion?" the ad asks. Well, that depends. If the aliens are two inches tall and are armed with thumbtacks, I'd say we're in good shape. If the aliens hit us with a twenty-ton iron projectile at .995 c, then we're in trouble. But is that an alien attack or an alien invasion? Does it matter?

It just seems to me that in a time when people are trying to kill the James Webb Space Telescope, the Discovery Channel could find better questions to ask than "Are we ready for an alien invasion?" Like, "Is basic scientific exploration worth anything?" Or, "If the Tea Party has its way and science becomes strictly a for-profit enterprise, are we better off?"

What's gone wrong with cable TV? Professional wrestling on Syfy? Storage Wars? A TV show about people who bellow a lot while they convert cars into Xtreme aquariums? Remember when TLC used to stand for "The Learning Channel" and not "The Lame Channel"? No wonder people believe crazy things when the supposedly highbrow cable channels are a wasteland of UFOs, ghost hunters, Nostradamus, and reality shows about pawn shops, storage units, and people who like to yell a lot.

I always liked the TV shows Cosmos and Connections (the one with James Burke), and I thought they were genius when they first aired. But against backdrop of the crap that passes for "educational TV" these days, their genius seems even more profound, and very badly missed.