Dubious Maxims

I'm Bleeding

2012-01-29T17:34:00.000-08:00

I'm bleeding. Seriously. As I write this, my arm is emitting a stream of the red groovy, as Alex might say. I find it fascinating and somehow life-affirming to sit here and bleed.

I've done a lot of bleeding in the last few years, but it was always for some grim medical reason. When I was preparing for my stem cell transplant, I had to sit connected to an apheresis machine for about ten cumulative hours. They draw blood out of one tube, run it through a machine, take out what they want, and pump it back in through a different tube. I think they said my entirely volume of blood was run through the machine sixteen times over.

That's a lot of bleeding. Granted, it didn't end up pooled on the floor or splattered on the wall for some CSI geek to ponder, but still, it's an interesting state of mind to sit there for about thirty minutes and think "I would have bled to death by now if the machine wasn't pumping it back in."

I bled when they put the tubes in. I bled when they took the tubes out. During the lethal-dose chemo, I bled continuously from my nose and lips because my blood simply wouldn't clot, at all. Every needle stick bled for five minutes, and every time I bumped into anything, masses of pooled blood formed under my skin. And I bled copiously during my bone marrow biopsies (I seem to remember someone saying "It's a gusher" during one procedure, and I never seemed to emerge from them without dried blood and Betadine all over me).

But this is different. I was bleeding because I'd stupidly gouged myself while cutting a huge limb off a tree. It wasn't for some grim medical purpose driven by some dire diagnosis; I was just cutting a limb off a tree because the tree would be better off without it. No cancer, no chemo, no nausea, just me and the saw and the tree, and the notion that I was just being a regular guy again, doing what had to be done for the good of everyone involved.

And I'll bleed for that. Sure.

Nothing On

2012-01-21T19:48:00.000-08:00

There is NOTHING on TV. I don't mean that literally, of course, because there's a ton of stuff on TV. Just nothing I want to watch. And since I'm kind of bored and at loose ends to begin with, that's pretty sad. I should go work on a model instead, but I'm in the midst of a minor scale modeling lull - all my current projects seem to be stuck at the stage where they need interior green paint, and I'm fresh out.

So I decided to see what was on TV instead of going to the hobby shop and getting new paint (besides, it's 9 pm and the hobby shop proprietor probably has better things to do right now than sell me a couple of bottles of Testors interior green). I started at Channel 1 and finally gave up somewhere around Channel 750, and nowhere did I see anything that interested me, not even in my current mildly bored state.

Sports! Holy cow, look at all the sports! There are apparently more sports channels than there are actual sports, because some of the channels were actually replaying past sporting events - football games from 1982, especially tense putts from some golf tournament, highlights (I kid you not) of some poker championship. I had no idea there was a tennis channel, or a golf channel. There's a Major League Baseball channel, even though I'm reasonably sure they aren't playing baseball right now.

Reality shows! American Pickers! Pawn Stars! Storage Wars! Pass. How can the so-called "History Channel" executives sleep at night knowing that they're running this kind of crap? The only reality shows I watch are the ones involving hoarders, and even then, I watch with a certain reluctance. I confess that a part of me watches those shows just to see how awful the latest hoarder home really is - "Oh my god, they just found a dead cat in the clutter!" And while a certain part of me feels a certain sympathy for the bizarre psychological pathology of the victims, there's also a part of me that bellows "You've got dead cats in your glacier of litter because you're a lazy slob, not because of psychological trauma! Quit crying, get a garbage bag, and start throwing some of that junk away!"

I watched the Food Network for a while, but apparently today it's all Guy Fieri, all the time. He's okay. But after an hour of watching Guy Fieri eat enormous hamburgers and do fist-bumps with the greasy spoon chef, I'm ready to move on (and I see that the Food Network still airs "Chopped". In today's episode, some unwashed-looking guy with way too much oily-looking hair and ridiculous hipster eyeglasses was going on and on about the artistry of his work. I wouldn't have trusted that guy to cook me a Pop-Tart; I don't want greasy hipster hair and droplets of hipster perspiration in my breakfast, thanks very much, and you can pay for your tattoos yourself).

There are a lot of paranormal shows these days too. Ghost hunters, vampire hunters, UFO investigators, psychics, people who will (for a modest fee) channel the soul of President Hoover, and more shows combining Nostradamus and the Mayan apocalypse than I could shake a stick at. These shows can sometimes be unintentionally funny, like when they do their ESV analysis and mistake someone's squeaky shoe for a woman's voice saying "Which one of you bastards ate all the potato salad?" Please.

And then there's the sudden sobering realization that I really am deeply naive. I had no idea there was so much pay-per-view porn on satellite TV, such as "Hot MILFs Like It Black 3". I think what disturbs me about that show is the "3" business. Is it kind of like Star Wars, where if you watch them out of sequence they don't make much sense? Do we fail to appreciate the emotional nuances of Hot MILFS 3 if we haven't seen the backstory presented in Hot MILFS 1 and 2?

There are a couple of channels that I won't watch because of unfortunate names. Syfy, for example, which I haven't watched since they adopted the name "Syfy", and H2, which used to be History Channel International but is now just "H2". It sounds like a little-known mountain, not a TV channel - but maybe one of those hundreds of interminable sports channels will air something about a team of bearded guys with vaguely European accents trying to climb K2 and climbing H2 by accident. I see them on the summit of the mountain, exchanging weary breathless congratulations, and then someone says "Wait, wait, you wanted to climb K2? I thought you said H2! CRAP!"

The more I think about it, the more I think that I'd be better off mixing paints and coming up with my own shade of interior green paint than wasting any more time on this ultimately fruitless attempt to find something that wasn't either deadly dull or blatantly insulting on TV.

Andromeda Strain

2012-01-17T20:35:00.001-08:00

The other day I happened be waltzing through the house and saw that the 1970s movie The Andromeda Strain was on. So I sat and watched it for a while. It was made in 1971 and was full of mainframe computers, decidedly low-rez graphical effects, and the cheesiest plane crash I've ever seen (I guess they couldn't even afford stock footage of one of those missile live-fires, or a NASA controlled impact demonstration or anything; they just showed a guy in an oxygen mask rolling his eyes and slumping over, and then showed us a bunch of junk from the prop department scattered around to simulate a crashed plane, including the tail section from an F-100 and a cockpit section from what I guess to be an F-86D).

But I kid the movie. It isn't bad. It's probably the best of Michael Crichton's novels, and probably the best movie version of any of his novels too, with the exception of the fabulous The 13th Warrior.

But here's where the movie is at its best: any time some young punk asks "Gee, pops, what was life like before the Internet," you just point them at that movie.

Faintly Amusing

2012-01-16T19:38:00.000-08:00

I've noticed an amusing trend lately. Amusing or annoying, depending on my frame of mind at any given moment.

When I was first diagnosed with cancer, my friends got pretty thin on the ground. A few stuck around, but most of them couldn't put distance between me and themselves fast enough to suit them. Maybe they thought cancer is contagious. Maybe they didn't want to hang around and watch me die. Or maybe I'd merely become inconvenient. But either way, with certain notable exceptions, I went through all that business almost alone.

But now that I'm apparently cured, they come flooding back in. "I'm so OVERJOYED for you!" Maybe they really are, but you'll pardon me if I'm dubious of their sincerity. They couldn't be seen with me when I was sick, but now they all want a piece of me, to rub the top of my head, perhaps hoping that some of my good fortune will rub off on them.

I don't really mind that. People going through chemo aren't much fun, and if I had had the option, I might not have visited myself either. But the part that makes me grind my teeth is when they take credit for any of it. "We got you through that," they say.

Wait a minute - who exactly is "we"?

You have the right to distance yourself from me when I get sick. But you then don't have the right to claim so much as an atom of credit for me getting better. You want to be friends again? Groovy, I'm not bitter. But the minute you say "we" in the context of chemo, your chances aren't good. I suffered the torments of the damned during chemo and hardly ever bitched about it; I just tightened my belt and got on with it. And it's a disservice to me and the people who really DID help me get through it for other people to coast in long after the fact and take credit for any of it.

Mostly, though, it just makes me chuckle.

Three Years

2012-01-10T19:24:00.000-08:00

Let's do a quick recap on the last three years, shall we? In December of 2008, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma, stage 4, and pretty far along in the process of dying with tumors, some of them quite large, throughout my innards.

Six months of ABVD killed most of the tumors, except for several in my groin and one in my neck.

I did three months of rear-guard ESHAP chemotherapy to keep the tumors from going completely out of control again while I was preparing for a tandem bone marrow transplant.

The first bone marrow transplant toward the end of 2009. It was successful in that the transplant "took" and my bone marrow starting growing replacement blood cells, but the tumors were still there.

The second bone marrow transplant was in January 2010, a fantastically unpleasant experience, but I guess it could have been worse. This scorched-earth chemo killed the tumor in my neck and all but two of the ones in my groin.

Then I did radiation treatments through the spring and summer of 2010, concentrating on the two stubborn tumors in my groin.

And now, three years after my original diagnosis, where am I?

It's been roughly two years since I had any tumors showing any appreciable sign of life in PET scans, and for the last eighteen months, my tumors have all been dead and cold and slowly shrinking.

So today I got my final PET scan results. I say "final" because my oncologist believes that my cancer is dead and that there's nothing further to be gained from expensive and highly radioactive tests. I am in complete remission, a remission that seems likely to hold.

As of today, I'm no longer a cancer patient. I'm just a regular dude, getting on with things.

And it's pretty groovy.

Tuesday Appointment

2012-01-08T22:00:00.000-08:00

I find out Tuesday what the results of my PET scan are. I had the PET scan last Friday, and a good time was had by all. A good nap, anyway. The only real problem with a PET scan (other than having to have one, that is) is that I'm always awakened from a nap twice. I fall asleep after they give me the radioactively tagged sugar, and then they wake me up and put me in the machine. I fall asleep again, and then they wake me up when it's done.

All that falling asleep and waking up leaves me with mental whiplash. I also think I react mildly to the tagged sugar. For a few hours after the PET scan I always feel kind of slow and block-headed.*

So Tuesday I find out the results. I'm pretty confident of a good result. I don't have any reason to believe it's back - I have no lumps or bumps, I don't have any of the weird B-symptoms that come with that kind of lymphoma, and most importantly, I just don't feel like I have cancer. Wishful thinking, maybe, but this isn't exactly my first rodeo and I don't thin I'm trying to fool myself.

I know what it feels like. In December 2008 I knew I had cancer, I knew I was dying, and I could feel it happening. I don't feel that way now. I don't even feel like I did after the tandem bone marrow transplant, when the cancer was *almost* dead, but I could still feel a suspicious (and very discouraging) lump in my neck.

As far as I can tell with the diagnostic tools at my disposal, it's still gone.

But I'm still just slightly anxious. It's a Big Deal, in capital letters; it isn't like going into Discount Tire and finding out that they can't fix the hole in my flat tire.

*Some might argue that I'm ALWAYS block-headed and slow, and am only aware of it after PET scans.

Star Peace

2012-01-04T19:17:00.000-08:00

I never really thought a lot about George Takei. Mind you, I didn't think poorly of George Takei. I mean, I enjoyed his work in Star Trek, and he always seemed to be a decent guy, but he just didn't really cross my mind all that often. But recently, George has slowly been working his way to the higher reaches of my geek appreciation list. His latest work, the attempt to broker peace between William Shatner and Carrie Fisher, may well put him over the top and ensure him a lifetime place in my personal geek-roll.

Let's face it, Twilight is a mess. Immortal vampires with super powers (to say nothing of sparkling) who go to high school? Oh man. Vlad would be SO disappointed. If Vlad went to high school, it would be to drain all its occupants of blood, not to sit in third period history and mope.

There's a lot in geekdom that I don't really "get". I don't "get" anime, for example. And I don't really "get" the modern take on vampires. But the fact that I don't "get" them doesn't mean I hate them. I just don't spend much time thinking about them, or watching them. My opinion is that I don't understand anime and don't really like it, but it doesn't bother me personally. I don't get True Blood, especially in its HBO formulation, but it doesn't offend me.

But something about Twilight does bother me personally. If George can get fandom in general to just say no to that brooding nonsense, I'd vote for him for President.

Dear History Channel:

2011-12-28T18:12:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-11T10:25:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-02T22:56:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-02T22:05:00.000-08:00

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...

2011-11-27T10:50:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-13T20:09:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-13T12:28:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-06T20:14:00.000-08:00

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

2011-10-22T18:46:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-16T10:07:00.001-07:00

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

2011-10-08T12:18:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-19T20:35:00.000-07:00

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...

2011-09-16T23:09:00.000-07:00

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.

2011-09-10T20:32:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-02T23:10:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-27T22:19:00.000-07:00

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!

2011-08-27T21:36:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-27T20:39:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-21T15:37:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-17T20:06:00.001-07:00

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

2011-08-14T11:57:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-11T22:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Stupornova

2011-07-31T13:27:00.000-07:00

I tried to watch the movie Supernova today. Really. I tried. I didn't have any illusions going in, in part because I've never been particularly enamored of James Spader. He just seems creepy to me, in the same way Christopher Walken always seems creepy. But James Spader seems creepy in a different and less interesting way.

But I'm not an ideologue, and I thought "Oh, who knows, he might be good. After all, he was pretty good in Stargate, creepiness aside."

I'll never know, because I had to stop watching the movie long before I could decide if I liked James Spader. The movie itself seemed like a combination of Event Horizon, Alien and Firefly, which is all good. Unfortunately, it's also like Battlestar Galactica. Maybe even worse.

My main beef with Battlestar Galactica was the Unsteady Cam. Whatever the director may or may not be trying to tell me by wobbling the camera around like that, my reaction was to see it as someone's badly-done home movie and I lost interest in it very quickly. But Supernova takes the Unsteady Cam to new and altogether infuriating lengths. I found the Unsteady Cam in Battlestar merely annoying. But in Supernova, it was actually frustrating. It made me angry. I'm sure director and cinematographer and all sat around the screening room high-fiving one another over the artistry of the wobbling, but me, the consumer, got angry and turned the TV off because I couldn't bear any more.

The Unsteady Cam in Supernova has an all-new mode of unsteadiness. It rolls back and forth, incessantly, obnoxiously, to the point that most of the time I felt like I was watching the movie from a rowboat in the open ocean. Why? What possible idea does this rolling camera convey? That we're in space? That we're in a rowboat? That the Unsteady Cam has become such a trope in science fiction that one has to have an Uber-Unsteady Cam to be noticed? That we've drunk half a dozen bottles of cough syrup and can't hold our heads steady?

The movie also had the annoying habit of having wildly out-of-focus things in the foreground. I guess it's supposed to make us think we're actually on the ship, but most of the time it made me feel like a Peeping Tom, like I wasn't just on the ship, but hiding on the ship and viewing people in a furtive and somehow shameful way.

I turned it off. I have no idea if the story is worth anything, because the camera work alienated and frustrated me to the point that I turned it off and did other things instead.

I think what really gets to me is that someone had to design and build a special camera mount to produce that sickening rolling. It's probably some amazing construction of motors, joints, feedback devices, computers, and thousands of lines of code. It probably cost a pretty penny to develop. It's probably an amazing technical achievement. And all so I could feel like I was in a rowboat in the open ocean.

Come on, people. This is getting ridiculous. When your audience starts to shout "Hold still, for crying out loud," you may have taken artistic pretension just a little too far.

Bad Game Art

2011-07-30T16:37:00.000-07:00

Two contestants in the "Cheesiest Game Cover of All Time" contest, at least as far as I'm concerned. I don't know which is really worse, the guy with the six-foot-wide helmet gripping the green-clad hostage one-handed and firing at the aquarium-head mantises with the other hand, or the dreadful strutting adventurer on the cover of Universe. Is he wearing a shirt? I can't tell. It looks like he's shirtless and wearing corduroy trousers, which I think would tend to give his position away, what with all that zip-zip-zip when he runs. And what are those amorphous greyish bipeds in the lower right? Rejects from the Tron animation team?

But one shouldn't judge a game by its cover. Rescue from the Hive is simple and kind of dorky, but reasonably fun - it's better than Worldkiller, which isn't saying much, and better than The Return of the Stainless Steel Rat, which now that I think about it isn't saying much either. Let me put it this way, if someone gave me a choice between eating asparagus or playing Rescue from the Hive, I'd go with the latter. And Universe is simply way better than its cover art would suggest.

I think the worst game cover art I've ever seen is Panzer Command by Victory Games. Just glancing askance at that jut-jawed, steely-eyed Nazi caricature unsettles me. I'd post it here, but it's so atrocious I don't want to look at it. It's horrid, but even worse, it's predictable, which makes it even more horrid.

Gunslinger

2011-07-28T21:01:00.000-07:00

GUNSLINGER qualifies as a role-playing game only by the most slender of margins, that being that the rules mention the words “role playing” somewhere. The role playing rules are extremely abbreviated – essentially, everything that happens outside of a gunfight is abstracted out, and player-characters are expected to have about one gunfight a month for two years or so, at which point the role-playing game ends.

So what I’m really saying is that GUNSLINGER is actually a tactical game of gunfights in the Old West with a thin, skimpy veneer of role-playing tacked on just so they could mention it on the back of the box. But as a tactical game, it’s actually not bad. It’s a “sequenced” system were you lay out five action points’ worth of activities per turn using cards, and the cards tell you up front how long each action takes. Each turn lasts about five seconds, so each “sub-turn” lasts about a second, which is plenty detailed enough for the purposes of shootouts in the Old West. Instead of rolling dice, players draw from a shuffled deck of about 110 “event cards” every time a dice would normally be rolled. It’s mostly a gimmick, but a harmless one (and one borrowed from the Avalon Hill “Strat-O-Matic” sports games, I think).

It’s an interesting system. It’s different from the system in BOOT HILL, but about as much fun to play. Not quite as deadly, though. BOOT HILL was rightly infamous for its profusion of one-hit, one-kill gunfights. Such things aren’t as common in GUNSLINGER; people seem a bit more resistant having their heads shot off, I guess. It’s more likely that you’ll be wounded and bleed until you pass out than be completely killed with one shot. Chances are you’ll die anyway – you take “supplemental damage” during the dealing process, presumably the result of cod liver oil and bloodletting and trepanning and tuberculosis and whatnot, and that’s usually enough to do you in. The point is that though characters don’t croak quite as often during the shootouts, their lifespans still aren’t terribly long and you still shouldn’t make wedding plans for them more than about two weeks in advance. (Actually, it's entirely possible to have a major exchange of gunfire in GUNSLINGER and never hit anything. More than once I've seen players unload all their weapons at one another without hitting anyone. The smoke clears and the posse and the gang are still standing there, wide-eyed and completely unhurt, and the drama then revolves around who can reload the fastest.)

Where GUNSLINGER really shines compared to BOOT HILL is graphical sophistication. GUNSLINGER has eight or ten full-color geomorphic maps, usually with some kind of rural terrain on one side and a town building on the other. No end of interesting map configurations are possible, and the game had nice round counters for the characters, weapon counters, a stagecoach/buckboard, horses (both alive and “lying down”, as we don’t want to tell my wife that horses can be shot), and counters for things like bales of hay, whiskey bottles, pitchforks and the like. There are even floor plans of four additional buildings printed on the backs of the player aid cards, a nice touch and a nice use of otherwise blank paper. GUNSLINGER also has quite a brace of nice optional rules for things like sun dazzle and ladders and whatnot.

In other words, BOOT HILL offers a good character generation system, better role-playing rules, an area or strategic map, and ideas for things to do when one isn’t right in the middle of a gunfight (and it has that masterstroke of Old West RPG design, "Greased Lightning" speed). GUNSLINGER has pleasing, colorful and useful components and nice special and optional rules. Combine the two and you might really have something.

Favorite RPG

2011-07-28T19:35:00.000-07:00

I sometimes wonder what my favorite role-playing game is. It's sort of like wondering what my favorite meat dish is - the answer doesn't matter, and it's never the same answer twice in a row. But it's an amusing and harmless way to spend an evening when you don't feel good enough to do anything, but not quite bad enough to justify going to bed early.

The game I played the most was without a doubt Dungeons & Dragons. I started playing it back around 1977 or so, when the game consisted of three flimsy tan booklets and the Greyhawk and Blackmoor business (remember them?). Though there were things about D&D that I heartily disliked, it was still fun to play, to the point that it was almost impossible to talk my hearties into playing any other RPG.

Is it just me, or the backwards armor class drive anyone else crazy too? How much sense does it make that armor class -3 is better than armor class +17? And the profusion of dice bugged me - woe betide the player who lost his 12-sided dice, or who stepped on that ridiculous 4-sided dice in the middle of the night while scrounging around for uneaten Fiddle Faddle in the dark.

But I played a lot of D&D. I knew people who were quite monogamous with D&D. They played only D&D, and they bought only D&D. But I was considerably more promiscuous. I could even be called an RPG slut, because I could never survive the temptation of a new RPG on the shelves at the game stores I haunted. I bought Tunnels & Trolls, Bushido, Chivalry & Sorcery, Arduin, three versions of Traveller, Metamorphosis Alpha, Gamma World, The Fantasy Trip, Dragonquest, Star Trek, Universe, The Morrow Project, Shadowrun, D&D, Twilight 2000, Boot Hill... I bought games that were only loosely role-playing, like Deathmaze, Citadel of Blood, Car Wars, and Gunslinger. For crying out loud, I even played Squad Leader/Cross of Iron as though it were a role-playing game, and managed to convince myself that when I played NATO Division Commander, I was indeed the Division Commander in question. (One of the few major gaps in my RPG collection in those days was a lack of Runequest. I don't know anything about Runequest as a game or a system, but I eventually got kind of tired of those elite RQ people constantly harping about how Runequest was the "thinking man's RPG" as opposed to the schlocky crap that was D&D. I don't normally spend much of my time defending D&D, but gee whiz, guys, give it a rest already.)

I didn't play most of them. At least not with other people. The only ones I played with other people were a lot of D&D, a little bit of Traveller, and a dab of Boot Hill. But I spent unholy amounts of time on Twilight 2000, Traveller, and Boot Hill, and maintained very long campaigns in all three played solitaire. And how sad is that? Who ever heard of playing an RPG solitaire? It's like playing poker solitaire! It's unseemly and kind of disturbing. Traveller in particular soaked up an awful lot of my time back in those days. I still have all my Traveller notes in a plastic bin - more subsector maps than Carter had pills, hundreds of characters (including several that I strongly believe were lifted more or less intact from the game Freedom In The Galaxy, including Sidir Ganang). I wrote several very substantial programs on my Commodore 64 to automate the character generation systems in High Guard and Mercenary, and to design starships using the "little black book" rules.

So if "favorite RPG" means the one I played the most, it's D&D. If it means the one I spent the most time on, it's Traveller. If it means the one that I found most amusing to tinker with, it's Boot Hill.

I never designed a world in D&D - I was content to merely play, and never really did any of the creative work. But I did design several new subsectors in Traveller, and created a whole fictional part of Arizona in Boot Hill (I note with some amusement that many of the planets in my Traveller subsectors had names drawn from Gordon Dickson's "Three to Dorsai" set, courtesy of the Science Fiction Book Club, and many of my Boot Hill characters had "X-eye" names, like Deadeye, Pig's Eye, Eagle Eye, and, sadly, someone named "Numbnuts").

I also spent a lot of time on Twilight 2000, but I developed a love-hate relationship with that game. I loved aspects of it, such as the two-card draw to determine NPC personalities, a system I freely adapted to Boot Hill and even Traveller, but the game itself wasn't terribly rewarding to play. Firefights took so long to resolve (especially if they involved more than a handful of characters) that I ended up writing a computer program (in Pascal, aieee) based on Dupuy's Quantified Judgment Model to resolve them. Of course, the QJM is highly statistical and generates bizarre results when there are only 11 people in the fight ("What do you mean, an advance rate of 177 kilometers per day??"), but at least it allowed me to resolve the fights between the "good guys" and the "evil Spetsnaz colonel's army" in less than six calendar months.

Eventually my RPG pilot light went out and I stopped fiddling with them. One milepost on the highway to ruin was the release of Traveller: The New Era, which I heartily disliked. Another milepost was the realization that D&D, by now AD&D or ADHD&D or whatever it was, had become less a game than a lifestyle choice (in the same way that Advanced Squad Leader or full-house Starfleet Battles could only be grokked if you lived them to the exclusion of everything else for about eight months). And RPGs started coming out faster than I could buy them, let alone learn them, and indeed Shadowrun was the last one I ever bought (and, perhaps not coincidentally, I found it entirely unworkable).

This is not to say that I have no interest in RPGs. I still tinker with a new set of Boot Hill rules from time to time, and I occasionally find myself flipping through Universe and thinking "This actually seems pretty interesting." (Not to digress too far, but one of the things I liked about Universe was that it took place in roughly the 23rd century, in a tiny part of the galaxy. This was in direct contrast to Traveller, which was in the 35th century and spanned pretty much the whole galaxy. I could wrap my mind around the society that existed in Universe, but Traveller was sometimes hard to visualize. What's a trip to a Tech Level 15 convenience store like? In the 35th century, what are money, infotainment, sex, and restaurants like? Beats me!)

Will I ever play an RPG again? I can't say I never will. But if I do, you can probably bet it'll be either Universe, Boot Hill, or some vintage variant of D&D.

Is That A Stetson?

2011-07-19T21:49:00.001-07:00

BOOT HILL was an attempt by TSR to do for the Old West what D&D did for the fantasy novel. It was first published in 1975 as a set of miniatures-based combat rules with no particular role-playing accessories, and again in 1979 as a “full” RPG. It was the first role-playing game to be set in the Old West, and remains one of the most spectacular flops in all of gaming. Most RPGs manage to scrape out a niche of committed (if perhaps slightly deranged) players that cling to it through thick and thin. There are, even today, small communities of die-hards who still play DRAGONQUEST, for crying out loud, and there’s even an on-line community of THE MORROW PROJECT players! And THE MORROW PROJECT sucked! BOOT HILL never managed even that much; the number of fans was so small that they never managed to find one another and link up the way the somewhat more numerous DRAGONQUEST or THE FANTASY TRIP fans managed to do, like survivors of the Titanic clinging to one another for warmth.

The designers of BOOT HILL made certain design choices (or lack of design choices, which amounts to the same thing) that tended to inhibit true role-playing and made the game seem more like a long-running TV show and a role-playing game. In most successful role-playing games, role-playing is the whole dang point. The point of the game is to blur as much as possible the line between the me sitting here and the me striding through this imaginary glen. Among the things these games tend to do is honor the characters with a certain durability – it’s hard to evolve a deep role-playing connection with a character if his life expectancy is measured in minutes. This means that combat systems in particular are tweaked in such a way that they are rarely immediately mortal. There’s almost always a way out, even if it involves pell-mell retreat or godly intervention. Your character can die, and often will especially at low levels, but if you survive “game infancy” and get a few levels under your belt, you can look forward to a certain longevity.

But not in BOOT HILL. It started out as a wargame of gunfights in the Old West, and as it evolved into a role-playing game in its second edition, it never lost its detailed and accurate combat system. And an unfortunate fact of life is that to accurately model gunfights, you have to accurately model the fact that a single gunshot wound can kill dang near any cotton-picker. Once you’ve made the decision to throw down, anyone can be killed, from the lowliest minor character to the most veteran player character in the game. All it takes is one shot, and there’s no option to retreat and no divine intervention. Wounds in BOOT HILL are divided into three categories – light, serious, and mortal. Head wounds are mortal 60% of the time, which is realistic, but it’s kind of a bummer all the same.

In other words, you learn not to develop deep role-playing connections with characters because they have a habit of not sticking around. Instead, you tend to view them as actors in a long-running TV show. You may like them, you may have a strong emotional attachment to them, but they aren’t you and you know that in the long run they’ll be replaced by someone else.

BOOT HILL had a lot of strange quirks. It had no alignment rules, for example, and in a genre that was almost obsessed with alignment, the sheer amorality of the system could be alarming. You could shuttle seamlessly between black evil and upright decency without the slightest penalty, and some players didn’t like that. The swift and sudden lethality of the combat system was very unusual for an RPG, as we’ve already discussed. Characters never really grew or evolved. There were no levels and no skills, and really no way for a character to benefit from experience. You were who you started out as, and that was that. And these were all deliberate design choices.

TSR didn’t help its cause by its strange management of the game. The rules were always heavy on combat, especially gunfights, and fairly weak on everything else. There was a decided lack of supplemental material, and the “campaign game” (as TSR called the role-playing element of the game) rules were distressingly brief. Everything, it seemed, except the rules for gunfights was up to the players to work out, and not everyone liked having to finish the game design. Every new edition of the game was so unlike the earlier editions that it was like getting a whole new game, which tended to make rubbish of all the work you’d done for the earlier editions (a problem it shared with other TSR games like GAMMA WORLD).

Personally, I like the mythical Old West of gunslingers and outlaws, and I liked BOOT HILL. I liked it a lot. I generated hundreds of characters to populate the town, and hundreds more to populate the ranches, mines and settlements that I scattered across the countryside. I evolved a region that was locked in perpetual struggle between miners and ranchers, between open-range and closed-range ranchers, between an increasingly urbanized town population and an essentially feudal rural population, between high-born Mexican nobles and hardscrabble campesinos… Oh, you get the idea. But it was never really role-playing; it was more like writing a movie or a TV show and I never really identified with any of the characters. I think the failure of BOOT HILL was a tragedy, and to this day I harbor dreams of writing a “fourth edition” of the rules to correct its quirks and deficiencies, but that’ll have to wait.

Those Sorts of Games

2011-07-19T20:56:00.000-07:00

Behold Starforce, a game originally published back in the Pleistocene by Simulations Publications Inc. Okay, 1977 or thereabouts. Kids today would probably look at this and say "This is a game? Where's the controller? Does it run on an X-box or what?" No, boys and girls, it ran in your brain and it consisted of nothing but paper. Well, paper, a little bit of cardboard, and occasionally some dice, though SPI stopped shipping dice with its games as a cost-saving measure, and a good thing too because it got to the point I had so many of those characteristic SPI dice in my bedroom it looked like I was developing some kind of fetish for them.

The elite stance on Starforce was that it had interesting mechanics and a reasonably thoughtful premise, but that in the end it boiled down to a guessing contest. You might as well throw dice and the high roller wins. Maybe so, but I thought it was reasonably educational, and I still think it's a pretty elegant solution to the problem of simulating three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional map. (Other solutions have not been quite so successful, in my opinion. Vector 3 and games of its ilk were difficult for me to visualize, and I often found that despite my incessant bitching about how science fiction games didn't have good 3D systems, when they gave me one, I bitched about them too. Sometimes the best solution is to a Traveler - just pretend there are three dimensions and get over yourself.)

But one thing Starforce did was get me interested in these sorts of games. Here are some of my thoughts on various science fiction games of that era:

Starfire: Loads of fun to play and offers a lot of simulated complexity without really hurting your brain, but it bears as much resemblance to actual interstellar flight as Justin Bieber does to a death metal singer. It's really Jutland in deep space, but it's still fun.

Battlefleet Mars: The map is a brilliant learning exercise, and you really wish it was good, but in the end, tedium sets in.

Mayday: Hot diggity dog! Vector movement, computer programs, sandcasters, what more can you ask for? Ships with hulls larger than 50 tons, for one thing.

Starfleet Battles: It was fun in its early incarnations, but as the game grew more complex, my brain couldn't keep pace and I found myself muttering "Am I doing this right?" way more often than I should have.

Vector 3: Novel 3-dimensional vector movement, and proof that you should be careful what you ask for. I asked for a novel 3-dimensional vector movement system, and they gave it to me. Boy, did they ever give it to me. Still, I liked the "pod" idea.

Warpwar: Another gem from Metagaming that packed a whole lot of game into a tiny package (you could easily carry the entire game in your shirt pocket). The technology levels and the diceless combat system were interesting wrinkles, but the game lacked chrome (yes, I know, and I have the gall to bitch when they give me too much chrome).

Voyage of the BSM Pandora: A classic highly deserving of whatever praise it gets these days. It cheeses me mightily that I put a gallon can of paint on the booklet of paragraphs and melded them into a monolithic block of off-white paint.

Rescue from the Hive: Cheesy science fiction of the stringiest and gooiest sort, but I sort of liked it even though it really was pretty bad. And I was pleased to see the old Starsoldier counter art come back for an encore.

Starsoldier: How many linear equations can you solve in an hour? Not enough! The game had interesting ideas and mechanics, and I always liked the future history it was drawn from, but you end up having to do an awful lot of math and the map is probably the most unattractive piece of printed paper since Tank! And that's bad, me buckos. Still, who could resist tinkering with the constants for gravity and atmospheric attenuation and fighting it out on a cylindrical asteroid?

Invasion Earth: There are more Traveler-related game products than there are kinds of light bulbs, and keeping them straight is tricky. But don't waste much effort on this one. Other than a novel (and ugly) attempt to render a map of a globe with equal-area hexes, there isn't much going on here.

Dark Nebula: It's sort of based on Imperium with a dash of Warpwar, but it's quick and easy and doesn't assault you with much in the way of math or mind-bending complexity. The trick, really, is remembering that whatever it is, it isn't Traveler, even though it feels like it.

Starship Troopers: This game amounts to Panzerblitz in spacesuits, and that isn't for everyone. I generally enjoy it only if the Mobile Infantry player lands his boat right on top of my nuclear demolition charge. If not, I lose interest because there are only so many bug beams to go around.

Car Wars: Not really a science fiction game, and surprisingly akin to Starfleet Battles in mechanics. It's a game that is more fun to think about than to actually play, but it isn't bad to play either, especially if you keep the chrome quotient low and refight Mad Max encounters. It also helps if you can do a good impersonation of Wez from The Road Warrior: "Toady! The gassssss!"

Traveler: A science fiction role playing game, sort of like D&D with lasers and computers instead of swords and orcs. As such, it's a hoot. Or was, anyway. I liked the first version, the "little black books" as they are known, along with the twelve or so supplements. But after that, the pain began to mount. Mega-Traveler had many tasteful ideas but no discipline. Traveler: The New Era was just too much. The mere technical supplement, Fire, Fusion & Steel, was weighty enough to beat a home invader to death with. I'm still very fondly disposed toward this game, but only in its early pre-Mega incarnation.

Universe: SPI's answer to Traveler, and in many respects a strikingly effective role playing game. It was generally much more restricted (geographically and technologically) than Traveler and I personally found that pleasing, as I almost suffered whiplash when some kid told me he was a tech level 27 Transformer in the Traveler universe. But alas, Universe went down with the ship when SPI folded, though I still have all the stuff, including two or three copies of the Delta Vee starship game.

Manly Tears of Regret

2011-07-16T23:15:00.000-07:00

I haven't had all that many jobs in my life. I had the pleasure, dubious or otherwise, of getting started in my present career at a fairly young age, and before long was making more money in it than I could make elsewhere. Since bills tend to expand to consume available income, I couldn't just back out and do something else without suffering some loss in my standard of living. Thus I am what Karl Marx used to call a "wage slave." It’s not that I dislike what I do for a living. It’s just that my favorite job, without a doubt, was working at the landfill, and it didn't pay as well as other things.

Back in the 1970s the local county government operated a number of landfills, mostly intended to serve county residents. Most of them were very small and rather crude affairs that weren’t even staffed on a daily basis, but some of them accepted commercial trash hauling and were quite busy indeed. Over my two years of employment with the county I worked at all of them, though most of my time was spent at the Avondale landfill near Avondale, Arizona. I worked at pretty much every facet of landfill operation, or at least those facets of landfill operation that the county cared about.

Let's settle something now, at the outset. There is a difference between a landfill and a dump. Actually, there isn't such a thing as a landfill per se. The proper term is sanitary landfill, but it's hard to say the word sanitary when you work at the dump. For one thing, it's obviously unsanitary, and for another thing, sun-bronzed sweaty guys on bulldozers don't say words like "sanitary." Ever. Yes, it's hard to believe, but I was once a sun-bronzed sweaty guy on a bulldozer who refused to utter words like "sanitary" or "esteem-building" or "Baluchistan." But I digress.

Mostly I liked crushing things. The D6C dozer we used wasn't particularly large by dozer standards. It weighed about fifteen tons and produced about 150 horsepower, but you'd be amazed what you can crush with a fifteen-ton machine. I've seen them crush cars and pull buildings down, and I personally crushed many a TV set with one. My Inner Hooligan never tired of hearing the muffled whoomp of TV sets imploding under the tracks.

The only thing that I couldn't break with the D6 (and by that I mean I couldn't break it even after I set out to break it) was the canopy from a US Air Force RF-4B reconnaissance plane that Goodyear Aerospace threw out one day. I drove the dozer up one side and down the other of that canopy for quite some time, and all it did was push itself down into the ground.

People sometimes ask me "Didn't it stink?" Well, sure. It's a dump, for crying out loud. Dumps have a characteristic smell that's hard to really describe. It's somewhere between dirty socks and old potato peelings, but the truth is that after you've been at the dump for a half an hour, your nose goes numb to the stench and it simply no longer registers. The only time you notice a smell is when you pick up a whiff of something well out of the ordinary.

For instance, one day I was sitting on the dozer waiting for it to cool off. This was summer in Arizona, and our D6s tended to overheat. You could dig pretty hard for a half an hour or so, but the temperature would creep up the whole time, and eventually you'd have to stop and let the thing sit and blow off heat at fast idle for a while. So I was sitting on the dozer while it cooled off, and I kept getting a whiff of something good. Good as in tasty.

And then I saw it: a catering company had thrown away about four big aluminum pans of lasagna. There they were, sitting on top of the trash, four glittering pans of rich, cheesy, aromatic lasagna. Probably still piping hot. Bubbling. Full of ooey gooey cheese.

Dear God.

You see, lunch at the landfill was always a nightmare. I brought my own lunch, usually some variant of a sandwich and Twinkies. And the lunch sat in a lunch box all morning, getting good and hot. By lunchtime the the top slice of bread had already started to curl up into a shape akin to a horse saddle. The lunch meat was turning a greyish color that I imagine Sherwin-Williams would have called Gangrene. It wasn't uncommon for one's Twinkies to get so hot that they actually excreted their cream filling. (Veteran landfill employees never put lettuce or tomatoes on their sandwiches. Ever. Lettuce simply evaporated by lunchtime, as though it had never been there at all. Tomatoes almost evaporated, but they usually left behind a stringy rind and a vague smear of goo, which had by then heat-melded to the saddle-shaped piece of bread. Modern foodies would pay through the nose for such a thing, "dried tomato and crispy bread slabs", but back in those days, such things were about as welcome as skunks.)

And there was that lasagna. Sigh. I argued with myself for quite some time. "I'm sure it's still good! It doesn't look contaminated, and damn it smells good, and all I have to look forward to for lunch is gangrene-colored lunch meat and bread that's curled up like Seabiscuit's saddle. I could hop down off the dozer, rescue that lasagna, and I'd eat like a king!" Hell, if I rescued all the lasagna, I'd eat like a king for days!

In the end, common sense prevailed and I dozed the lasagna into the hole along with the rest of the trash, but not without the need to dash away the occasional manly tear of regret.

Plastic Pail List

2011-07-16T00:50:00.001-07:00

The other day I was talking to a friend about "Bucket Lists", the things one intends to accomplish before one kicks the bucket. I don't intend to publish my Bucket List, at least not in this venue, because I'm not of a mind to put up with the ensuing hoots of laughter.

But we discovered that beneath the weight and solemnity of the official Bucket List is the Plastic Pail List - stuff that would be nice to accomplish, but since it's all pretty corny to start with, it doesn't really matter if you accomplish it or not. The world won't change much either way.

So here's a sample of my Plastic Pail List.

I wish I knew the constellations better. I can identify a few by sight, but most of them might as well be graffiti. Consequently, I can't find most stars to save my life. I can find a few. Polaris, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Sirius. But Vega? Hmm. Procyon? Hmmmmm. Antares? I thought I saw Antares once, but maybe it was the red light on the microwave tower down by the pottery outlet place.

I'd like to memorize the entire Periodic Table of Elements. I've memorized the first three rows, but that's as far as I ever got. (My mnemonic for this is assembling the elements into Russian-sounding names. The first two rows are H. He. Libebcnofne. The next row is Namag Alsipsclar. But I ran out of enthusiasm for the project after three rows.)

I want to plug an accordion into a metal distortion pedal designed for a guitar and try to imagine a world of norteno music in a really bad mood. (Though every time I think about it, Finntroll is what comes to my mind. Humppa, anyone?)

I'd like to open for Insomnium with my new accordion death metal band. Have I mentioned how much I like Insomnium lately? They don't get an inordinate amount of respect from the metal underground, but they work for me.

That'll do, for starters.

Went Viral

2011-07-16T00:27:00.000-07:00

I spent a good chunk of my week off from work being ill. And I didn't just feel ill either - I had an actual fever of 103, which isn't THAT serious, but it's still somewhat unpleasant. It's a good thing I wasn't trying to climb Mount Everest last week - I don't think I would have made it to the summit.

But it's kind of ironic. I went through about a year of chemotherapy, and one of the consequences of chemo is that your white blood cell count varies between low and zero (normal chemo gives you low white cell counts, while the lethal-dose chemo gives you zero white cells). So there I was, little more than a large walking agar dish, and I never got sick. No fevers, no infections, nuthin.

And now, with a full complement of white blood cells and all, I couldn't take a few days off from work without some stupid virus having Spring Break somewhere in my innards.

Still, there's sick and then there's sick. This was just annoying and inconvenient. It wasn't like I was planning on climbing Mount Everest, after all.

Would I? Climb Mount Everest, I mean? I've always had an odd interest in high-altitude mountaineering. I don't think I really want to go forth and actually do it, but I find it fascinating at least as long as I'm lying comfortably in bed reading about it.

One reason it appeals to me is that I'm a jargon junkie, and mountaineering is crammed full of interesting jargon. The Hinterstosser Traverse, the Black Pyramid, the First Step, the Second Step, the Yellow Band, the Western Buttress, the Ruta Normale, the South Col. And those are just geological features, to say nothing of things like seracs, couloirs, laybacks, descendeurs, jumars, and Advanced Base Camp. It's fascinating. The only field of human endeavor that has better jargon, in my opinion, is aerospace, where the mere idea of a convergent-divergent supersonic de Laval nozzle gives me chills.

But I'm not particularly fond of heights, and I'm not sure that halfway up the Lhotse Face is the right place to discover that heights make me barf. I once saw a poster of two climbers traversing an ice field high on K2, and the exposure was absolutely breathtaking. Could I stand it? I mean, assuming I could get to that altitude without imploding like the core of a Type-II supernova, could I hold it together psychologically or would I gibber and walk right off the edge?

Sick As A Dog

2011-07-08T21:56:00.001-07:00

I've been sick as a dog the last day or two.

I actually wonder about the origins of that phrase. Sick as a dog? Really? My dog eats really horrible things and never gets sick. My parents used to have a miniature dachshund that was famous for pilfering Cadbury chocolate bars from my grandmother's purse, and he never really got sick either. It's like saying someone has the constitution of a dinosaur - how do we really know what their constitutions were like?

But sick, yes. I woke up last night with intense nausea, and it hasn't really gotten much better since. Please understand that when I say "intense nausea", I know of what I speak, because I went through cisplatin, and that's the mother of all intense nausea.

In a way it's sort of nostalgic to wake up at 2 AM with hair-trigger nausea and fumble for the Ativan and compazine. Wow! Just like the good old days!

One might wonder why I'm so sick. I either ate something that didn't agree with me, or I'm just damaged from all that chemo and prone to occasional upsets, sort of like Frodo getting sick on every anniversary of being stabbed with the Morgul-blade on Amon Sul. The only difference is that Circan doesn't wait for me at the Grey Havens. At least as far as I know.

And can I tell you how impressed I am with myself for working a couple of Tolkien references into a post on nausea??

Week Off

2011-07-08T10:42:00.001-07:00

I'm in the midst of a week off from work. Unpaid, mind you, but still, a week off. And what have I accomplished? Nothing. But I have come to terms with the fact that I haven't accomplished anything.

I'm not a fountain of deep wisdom about much of anything. Oh, I've learned a few things over the years, but they aren't really "wisdom" in the spiritual sense. To give you an example of what sorts of things I've learned, here's a brief list:

1. Don't set steel wool on fire. It burns way better than you think it does.

2. Don't thin Ceramcoat paint with rubbing alcohol unless phlegm is the desired outcome.

3. When making a model of the planet Mars, remember that pi is 3.1415, not "about 3".

But I actually have learned a few things that might be more useful.

One is that people are way too judgmental about things that don't matter, and way too prone to applying the word hate to the fruits of their judgment. It's gotten to the point you can't even have a conversation with someone about the relative merits of Macintosh or PC computers without it turning into a hateful grudge match, or politely disagree with someone about politics without it turning nasty.

I'm not arguing that we should all practice bland acceptance of everything. If someone commits a horrible violent crime, they deserve to be judged, and certain things, like the Nazi Party, are so heinous they really deserve to be hated.

But cancer did teach me that I have only so much spiritual energy to go around, and I can either expend it hating things that really don't deserve to be hated, or I can expend it in more amusing pursuits.

Not that I think I'm better than anyone else. If hating LeBron James or hating Justin Boober (neither of whom I like at all) gets you through the day, go for it. Part of being nonjudgmental is not judging people who are judgmental. But for me, personally, I'd rather spend my time and energy thinking about things that I enjoy, not endlessly prodding my Inner Wound and nursing a deep grudge against life.

The other thing I learned is that in the long run, it really doesn't matter very much if you accomplished everything on your to-do list or not. Will the universe really be any different if I wash out the pool filters today instead of tomorrow? I don't think so. And when you're in the hospital getting ready for the next round of lethal chemotherapy, the fact that you're a week overdue on washing the drapes won't even cross your mind.

Granted, there are things that have to be done on time. You have to pay the mortgage on time, or unpleasantness ensues. But other than that, what difference does it make?

There are certain personalities that enjoy crammed to-do lists, and it's possible for one to become too lax and never do anything. But consider this week. Does it matter if I replace the water filter in the refrigerator today, or tomorrow? Not really. And I'm not going to beat myself up because I haven't checked off a bunch of stuff on my to-do list.

Here's what I have done this week: I found the long-lost instructions and decals for a Star Trek model. And that made me happy. Happier than replacing the water filter would have made me. So there.

Battlestar Vertigo

2011-07-02T09:43:00.000-07:00

I tried watching the remake of Battlestar Galactica today. BBC-America was running a marathon of said show, and since I hadn't watched it before, it seemed like a good opportunity to catch up on it. I'm sorry I did. It isn't for me.

The main problem is that I didn't care for the "documentary style" it used. Maybe some people like it, and the producers clearly must have or they wouldn't have used it, but I found the endless weaving and wobbling of the camera to be annoying, distracting, and ultimately productive of a mild case of motion sickness. The bigwigs who developed the show will probably argue that the erratic, restless camera is somehow "realistic". But when I view the world through my own eyes, I don't see it wobbling and shaking; it seems very solid and stable no matter how my head moves. So I don't think it's realistic at all; I just think it's a distracting artistic fetish, and it made me want to reach for some of my leftover anti-nausea medications.

The second problem was that the one episode I managed to watch before I got kind of queasy and had to turn it off was dumb. You're on a ship fleeing an attack by the Cylons. You're in the middle of a war for your very survival against an implacable foe that will stop at nothing to see you dead. You're in a ship that's been around for a good long while. So when all the water tanks on your port side blow out and vent said water, what's your first supposition? Sabotage? Enemy action? No - you conclude that the tanks, which have been utterly reliable till now, were "structurally weak" (as opposed to "morally weak", I guess) and simply failed simultaneously.

And then there was some space battle, with Colonial Vipers and Cylon fighters zipping around doing heaven knows what. I couldn't tell, because the camera moves in the special effects shots were, if anything, even more wild than during the tepid staff meetings. Maybe the producers were trying to give us a sense of the confusion and chaos of battle. Or maybe their digital effects weren't great and by confusing and confounding us with wild and erratic camera moves, they didn't have to spend so much money on detailing and texturing the models (digital or practical).

And I hate the helmets the human fighter pilots wear. Yeah, I know that you have to light the actors so the audience can see their faces, but every time they showed a human fighter pilot's face, I had the strange feeling that said fighter pilot had just awakened and was staring, bleary and half-asleep, into the flat white zombie-glow of a refrigerator. Very unappealing.

The bottom line: the story wasn't good enough to make me want to put up with the irritatingly unstable camera.

Done and done.

This isn't to say that the premise is bad. I just didn't care for the execution, and got so tired of IRRITATING camera I felt absolutely no desire to stick around long enough to give a shit about any of the characters or what happened to the humans in the end.

Quitting Writing

2011-06-04T21:22:00.000-07:00

The other day I did a Google search for "quitting writing". Not because I was personally quitting writing - that would be akin to voluntarily quitting digestion. I'm not sure how I would do such a thing even if I wanted to.

The search led to a long list of blog posts about people who had sadly elected to give up writing because, basically, rejection letters were hard on their egos, and they were tired of begging people to read their stuff. Not that I'm belittling that. Rejection letters aren't much fun, and the one time I was actually published, I found the process of being edited (ruthlessly edited, I point out) uncomfortable (I was tempted to refer to my editor as "The Esteemed Attila the Hun, Scourge of Western Civilization").

"What, they took out the Khrushchev line? That was GOLD!"

And it's mildly irksome to have people say "I'd love to read your stuff" and then never acknowledge it.

"Did you read that Lovecraft-style short story I sent you six months ago?"

"Oh, the dog ate it."

"I sent it by email."

"Um, I have a cyber-dog."

Maybe I'll feel worse about if I was actually writing for a living. Being reduced to gnawing the varnish off the baseboards for your evening meal because you can't get anything published is probably pretty disheartening.

And then there are the people who say things like "Gosh, after all this time and effort I'm still not published... Maybe I just suck."

Where I come from, this is tantamount to cadging for sympathy sex, only in this case, they're hoping that some big-hearted agent or publisher will swoop in and make everything better with a giant advance. And like cadging for sympathy sex, it doesn't usually work, and even if it does, it still leaves you feeling kind of funky.

Besides, it sounds kind of funny to me to write and publish a letter resigning from the act of writing. It's like people who post on Facebook about how they're going to quit posting on Facebook, or who write tearful blog posts about how they're going to quit blogging. Just do it already, sport, and save us the histrionics, because as a first approximation I don't think that many people really care.

I'm a talentless hack who writes unpublishable genre crap. And I'm okay with that - I write it to please myself and nobody else. I have a couple of manuscripts that by some fluke of planetary alignment turned out to be pretty good, and one day I intend to query them around, but I'm in no particular hurry. And if they don't sell, well, they weren't really intended to sell.

My point is that I'm not sure how I would choose to quit writing. I write crap, but I write a shitload of it. The dreck piles up faster than I can shovel it off my hard drive, and I wear out keyboards the way drag racers wear out engines. How exactly would I quit that?

I can't. But I'm also aware that I shouldn't quit my day job either.

www.e-damn-nuff.com

2011-05-24T18:47:00.000-07:00

Dear Hollywood:

Please consider featuring less of the following:

Judd Apatow

Will Farrell

Movies involving weddings

Saccharine animated morality plays

Jennifer Aniston

Movies that mostly seem to feature people having tired postmodern conversations on cell phones bemoaning the fact that they never seem to do anything but have tired postmodern conversations on cell phones

I think a pretty convincing simulation of Hell could be had by having Judd Apatow produce an animated movie with Jennifer Aniston and Will Farrell as voice talents where they talk endlessly on cell phones about the postmodern angst triggered by their upcoming wedding. Man. That would be enough to make me confess to crimes not yet committed!

Back To The Grind

2011-05-22T20:17:00.001-07:00

I've been on vacation.

No, I haven't. I'm lying. I only wish I'd been on vacation, flitting around the South Pacific in my own flying boat and doing... well, whatever one does in the South Pacific in a flying boat.

Mostly I spent the last few weeks sitting on my well-padded keester writing a novel. Note that I didn't say "publishing" or "sending to an agent" or anything like that. I just like writing them; what happens to them after I'm done seems to be secondary. Oh sure, I think it'd be great to be a rich and famous author, but it's one thing to put about 130,000 words down on in Microsoft Word, and quite another to actually try to sell the thing. I may be 51 years old and I may be fairly secure emotionally, but I'm still in no hurry to start collecting rejection notices in a shoe box. Besides, I have a hard time imagining that anyone would actually pay me to read my stuff - it's hard enough to get people to read it for free.

Still, I may look into e-publishing. I don't have huge financial expectations, and I'm sure the advance for genre fiction of this sort amounts to about fifteen dollars, so I don't think e-publishing would be a major blow to my potential earnings. But it certainly sounds easier than conventional publishing, especially for a hack like me.

What genre is my novel? There are more genres today than one can shake a stick at, but I think when people say "genre fiction" today, they mean that dark romance stuff like Twilight and True Blood, romance novels retooled with vampires and werewolves. That sort of thing isn't for me - I prefer my vampires to look and act like Bela Lugosi, thank you very much, and I am openly scornful of the super-fast vampires popular these days. Watching the backwoods shit-kicker vampires in True Blood go booking off across the bayou at 150 miles per hour makes me roll my eyes, to say the least. (And while I'm the subject, why does every damned vampire in True Blood seem to own a bar or night club? How come none of them are ever shrimpers, or work on off-shore oil rigs?)

Not that I have anything modern "dark romance" novels. I have friends who enjoy them considerably, and that doesn't bother me.

Mostly I write science fiction. Among the novels I read in my formative years were Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama, The Forever War, the Berzerker series, Tactics of Mistake, Dorsai!, and to a lesser extent World of Ptaavs and Ringworld. That's more or less what I write, though my own "house universe" that I tend to revisit over and over borrows some prehistory from the old Simulations Publications wargames Starforce and Starsoldier, and maybe a hint of Battlefleet Mars.

And the day that makes me a fifteen dollar advance, I'll be frankly surprised.

Good Fortune

2011-05-01T12:48:00.000-07:00

I don't remember reading a lot of fortune cookies as a boy. Maybe they didn't exist back in the Pleistocene, when mammoths (and I) roamed the landscape. I read that fortune cookies were invented "in the early 20th century", so maybe they predate me a little (I hail from the "middle 20th century", and my fossils can be found in strata marked "Late Eisenhower Epoch"). But I still have no boyhood memory of fortune cookies, or for that matter Chinese restaurants in general.

It wasn't that we disliked Chinese food. Later on, Dad got in the habit of stir-frying, and I remember that pretty clearly. His stir-frying endeavors were enthusiastic, but not always strictly successful. An adherent of the Iowa "More Isn't Enough" school of cookery, he overloaded the wok to such an extent that nothing was ever truly stir-fried; the best one could say of it was that it had been stir-simmered. And he made heavy use of five-spice, which is truly the plutonium of gastronomy. (Ralph Nader once said that a pound of plutonium, ground into dust, could kill eight billion people. Critics of this theory cry "Bullshit! A pound of plutonium could only kill two million people!" That's a relief. For a while I was getting really worried.) It doesn't take much five-spice to make everything taste like five-spice, and dad shoveled it in by the tablespoon. Weeks later I could still taste it, and I later estimated the half-life of five-spice was about twenty days.

What I'm really saying here is that I don't know what the fortunes in fortune cookies were like back in the golden days, when cars had fins and Ike's ghost beamed paternally down at us. There is some argument that fortune cookies are actually Japanese in origin, sort of a shotgun (or Shogun) wedding of independently-existing cookies and fortunes at some temple in Kyoto. This could be true. Any viewing of anime must surely lead one to the conclusion that Japanese culture is capable of producing almost anything.

But mostly I wonder if the actual fortunes in the cookies were different in the Olden Days. Were they actual fortunes? Actual testable predictions of events yet to transpire? Like the California Psychics, only without a 1-800 number? I like to think so. You will meet an enigmatic stranger. That would be kind of fun. Or maybe they would be vaguely ominous, like Beware of Pomeranians, leaving you to wonder if they were referring to the dogs or the people. Or maybe they'd be strangely self-referential, like Help, I'm trapped in a Chinese fortune cookie factory!

I don't know. But what I do know is that the three most recent fortunes I've gotten in Chinese restaurants have been unsatisfying. The discovery that multiple Chinese restaurants all used fortune cookies made by the same company unsettled me - the notion of fortunes being bought and sold wholesale seems to cheapen the whole endeavor, just a little. This suggests that somewhere in the sprawling Chinese Fortune Cookie works, there is one guy at a desk writing fortunes, and he's starting to get a little bored and complacent. "Nobody reads this crap anyway," he says as he copies and pastes in random text. But I read them.

So let's look at my most recent fortunes.

A smooth sea never made a skillful mariner.

Huh. You might want to double-check with the skipper of the Exxon Valdez on that one. And I might point out that a smooth sea never made me spill coffee on my shirt either. This one has a distinct consolation prize quality about it, as though it feels sorry for me and is trying to buck up my flagging joie de vivre by chucking me on the shoulder and offering some small-potatoes consolation like "Well, at least you didn't lose both eyes..."

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true.

And if this was really true, we'd still be drilling holes in people's skulls to let the evil spirits out. It turns out that what we believe to be true often turns out to be total crap, and when we realize how wrong we were, we feel pretty stupid. But in a way, this fortune does provide one useful service: it seems to sum up the entire body of post-modern thought in one sentence. It may be wrong, but saves one a good deal of time and bother. Don't bother with Harvard, guys, here's post-modernism in a single sentence.

Alas! You are the apple of my eye.

This one really bothers me, mostly because it sounds so embarrassed about the whole thing. It's like it has a crush on me, but it finds that crush distasteful in some way. I like you, but you always embarrass me in public. I like you, but my friends think you're a loser. I like you, but I wish I didn't because you always smell like Beef-A-Roni. I like you, but honey, nobody cares if the Ringworld is unstable or not.

But I guess it isn't a total loss. At least now I know what my lucky numbers are. All eighteen of them.

Haven't The Gear

2011-04-18T21:42:00.000-07:00

Many years ago I was sent to England on business. A driver picked me up at Heathrow to drive me to my place of work in Basingstoke. Nice car, too - a big comfy Mercedes so shiny and black I could practically hear Darth Vader's heavy breathing every time I glanced at it. But some sort of irritating flying insect had gone up the driver's nose and he had an axe to grind. This was not long after Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s, and my British driver felt the need to tell me what he thought of Americans in general, and the US Air Force in specific. The American military was a bunch of amateurs, he claimed, and the Royal Air Force had had to carry the bulk of the burden in Desert Storm because "you Yanks haven't the gear." According to him, the British had flown most of the sorties in Desert Storm because US aircraft and weapons were inferior, US pilots were untrained rabble, American junk was shot out of the sky as soon as it appeared, and only the British could get the job done.

At the time I'd already helped myself to a series of reports submitted to the Office of Management and Budget, which included among other things a very detailed inventory of "select aircraft types" that flew missions in Desert Storm. Certain aircraft were not listed. The AC-130 was not in the report, for example, because its mission profile didn't fit the "sortie" model that the report was based on. F-15C Eagles were not included, as they flew air superiority missions and had no ground attack mission programming (though a separate section on the report on F-15C Eagle air-to-air kills in USAF and Saudi hands made fascinating reading). Other aircraft, such as United Arab Emirates Mirage IIIs or Kuwaiti A-4s, were not in the report because they were felt to be statistically insignificant. And some aircraft were excluded for reasons I simply can't fathom, such as F-4G Wild Weasels, B-52 Stratofortresses, A-7 Corsairs, USMC AV-8 Harriers, and F-111Es (the report only included F-111Fs).

So the data aren't entirely complete, but the report does paint a pretty clear picture, and several conclusions could be drawn from it. The most obvious one is that the vast majority of programmed strike missions in Desert Storm were flown by US aircraft, and specifically USAF aircraft. In fact, the breakdown looks a bit like this:

Aircraft Percentage of Strikes

F-117 Stealth Fighter 5.03%

A-6E Intruder: 7.36%

A-10 Thunderbolt: 24.31%

F-111F: 7.88%

F-15E Strike Eagle: 5.98%

F-16C Falcon: 32.92%

F-18 Hornet: 12.81%

Tornado GR.1: 3.71%

Two USAF types, the A-10 and the F-16, flew over half of all programmed strike missions in Desert Storm, and the total USAF contribution amounted to about 76% of all missions, and that doesn't include F-111Es, B-52s, or F-4Gs. Not bad for people who "haven't the gear."

Another interesting part of the report listed Coalition air losses. Here are the tabulated air losses from Desert Storm:

Aircraft Number Lost

F-117: 0

F-111F: 0

F-15E: 2

A-6E: 3

A-10: 5

OA-10: 2

F-16: 3

F-18: 3

B-52: 0

Tornado GR.1: 9

F-4G: 1

F-14 Tomcat: 1

EF-111A "Sparkvark": 1

OV-10 Bronco: 2

AV-8B Harrier: 5

AC-130 Spectre: 1

F-5E Tiger II: 1

A-4 Skyhawk: 1

The striking thing here is the Tornado GR.1, which suffered by far the highest absolute and percentage loss rate of any airplane in Desert Storm. The Tornado GR.1 loss rate per mission was twenty-six times higher than the F-16s, which isn't very good for an aircraft which, presumably, "has the gear". (There are reasons why the Tornado's loss rate was so high. The Tornado's low-altitude, high-speed mission profile is very demanding even in peacetime, and I can't imagine the balls of the British and Saudi pilots who flew those missions at night, with tracers and missiles coming up, in hostile territory. But it is interesting to note that once the RAF abandoned these low-altitude missions and adopted the USAF model of dropping PGMs from medium altitude, using Buccaneers as marker aircraft, Tornado losses dropped to about what one would expect - basically zero, in other words.)

Someone Famous once said that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics, and the accuracy of my analysis can be no more accurate than the data that was in the reports submitted to the OMB. And institutions (such as the USAF, the RAF, and even NASA) have on occasion been known to spin statistics in their favor. But it's hard to fake things like the numbers of aircraft committed, the numbers of missions flown, and the numbers of aircraft shot down. Where the fudging may have taken place is in the part of the report that listed "fully successful" missions as opposed to "not fully successful" missions, and I won't speculate on that data. It is altogether too easy for analysts to adjust the success criteria to make whatever point they want to make, and in any event, it's hard to tell in the real world if a given strike has been fully successful or not. When you attack a single tank with a GBU-10, success is pretty easy to determine. But when you attack the Baghdad Nuclear Research Center with a strike package of 60+ assorted aircraft, how exactly do you determine whether you were "fully successful" or not?

I knew all this, but I didn't argue with the driver. Mistaking my silence for agreement, he seemed very pleased with himself, as though he'd scored some sort of moral victory over those awful, amateurish Colonials, and restored the Crown to its rightful stature. But I've rarely been so happy to get out of a car as I was that day, and I drew considerable comfort from the fact that I'd never see him again.

But not because of his obvious and fairly impassioned anti-American bias. He has the perfect right to think whatever he wants about Americans, or Germans, or Brazilians, or about the Scots, for that matter. I really couldn't have cared less what he thought of America or Americans. I disliked him because I am readily irked by ignorant, uninformed people who won't keep their ignorant, uninformed cake-holes shut. I don't mind ignorance. And I don't mind obstreperousness. But obstreperous ignorance really wears me out. So if you're going to give me a 45 minute lecture on something, please endeavor to know about it than I do. There are a great many subjects that I know nothing about. Public education, psychology, gene splicing, TCP/IP protocols, cell phone apps, Russian politics, child-rearing, Paris Hilton, the stock market, monetary policy, Hinduism, class warfare in Brazil, narco-trafficking, HDTV, fashion, book publishing, tensor calculus and a hundred others. So please lecture me on something I don't know about, so it's a win-win all the way around.

The car driver's impression of the US military isn't exactly unique. There's a widespread bias in books written by British authors against the US military. Some of their criticisms are certainly valid, such as the observation that the US Army worried so much about the old threat (the Soviet Group of Forces in Germany) that it was poorly trained and poorly equipped to deal with the new threat (Osama bin Laden on horseback escaping from Tora Bora). British critics who pointed out that the US Army's tendency to relentlessly escalate the application of firepower in any given situation was counterproductive in an insurgency were right - there were even Americans who said that, chiefly US Marine Corps counterinsurgency experts, who seemed to be the only people in the US military who did any serious thinking about asymmetrical warfare at all.

Mostly the European bias against the US military is expressed in glossy photograph-laden popular books about weapons, especially tanks and airplanes. There's often a sort of sports mentality to the thing, where Some British Guy asserts that the Tornado is way better than any stinking American airplane simply because it's British. And if you read enough of these books, you find yourself inhabiting a world where European and especially British weapons are always superior because Americans are bumpkins fascinated with gadgets. The Eurofighter Typhoon is way better than the F-16. The Tornado is way better than the F-15E. The Rafale is way better than the F-18. The Vulcan was way better than the B-52. And certain notorious program failures, like the TSR.2 and the Avro Arrow, always seem to end up being my fault in some way (as an American, I am apparently an accessory after the fact to whatever nefarious American schemes that led to the cancellation of the TRS.2 or the Arrow or whatever).

To be fair, there are plenty of American writers who do the same thing, only in reverse. The F-16 becomes the most amazing fighter ever built simply because it wears stars-and-bars instead of roundels, and the whole thing turns into slightly goofy boosterism - my football team is better than your football team because everyone knows that red jerseys are better than green jerseys! My football team is better than your football team because you live in a warm city and the climate makes people soft and flaccid, while my cold and demanding climate makes linemen tough and mean! My football team is better than your football team because... Well, because I've attached my ego to my football team and I demand that it's better!

This doesn't bother me. I generally hew to the Trevor Dupuy school of thought anyway, which is that in the end, the exact operational parameters of any given weapon aren't nearly as important as the uses to which you put it - that leadership, logistics, organization, surprise, training, and even numbers are in the end considerably more important than whether this airplane is a bit faster than that one, or whether this airplane can turn at 9.5 gees and that one can only turn at 8.5 gees. One wouldn't expect a Sopwith Camel to prevail against a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 in air combat too many times, but as long as the airplanes are reasonably comparable - a Spitfire V against an Fw 190 - the "paper" advantages of one airplane over the other are largely swamped by other, often intangible factors (maybe, on the day in question, Fritz had a hangover and never saw Nigel in his Spitfire until it was too late).

So I was driving home from work the other day, listening to the BBC news on NPR, and some NATO "defence" spokesman was pleading for help from - gasp - the United States Air Force. Apparently, according to this spokesman, NATO lacks aircraft with "precision ground attack capability." But wait a minute, haven't you guys been cudgeling my brain for the last ten years on the superiority of the Tornado, and the even more sheer superiority of the Typhoon? If they're so good (and they are good, I don't doubt that) why does NATO need "precision ground attack capability" from the US Air Force? Are you admitting, in your roundabout fashion, that the US Air Force possesses capabilities that your air forces don't?

Of course it does.

What this NATO spokesman was asking for were two USAF aircraft in particular, the A-10 Thunderbolt and the AC-130. Yes, I know most people call A-10s "Warthogs", but for some reason I just don't feel entitled to use insider jargon in such matters. My friend may have served on the "Bonnie Dick", but to me, it was the USS Bonhomme Richard. My uncle may have worked on "Aardvarks", but to me, they're F-111s. A distant, distant uncle may have flown a "Gustav", but to me it's an Me 109G.

But whatever I call it, it seems clear to me that NATO is asking for A-10s and AC-130s, aircraft that are capable of attacking ground targets in a fairly heavy-duty way. As far as I know, no other air force has aircraft like the A-10 or the AC-130, the nearest analog to the former being the Russian Su-25, and nobody else has anything like the AC-130.

They don't have a single good thing to say about the US Air Force, but when it turns out that they can't destroy elderly Libyan T-55 tanks that are almost completely unprotected by battlefield air defense systems, they plead for A-10s and AC-130s.

It must gall my British car driver to no end to realize that, in the end, "they haven't the gear."

Writer's Block

2011-04-10T20:56:00.000-07:00

Boy have I have writer's block lately. I'm sure this is a cause for national alarm. "He had writer's block! Quick, someone send him a cup of tea or something to get him unstuck!" Most people probably think writer's block is a made-up condition, a chic affectation of some self-described intellectual elite. But it's real, and it sucks.

It isn't that I don't have ideas or things that I want to write about. I just can't seem to articulate anything. It's like knowing you want to build a cabinet, but every time you plunk down a piece of wood on the table saw, it comes out ragged or crooked or flies out of the saw with such force is goes through the wall and into the neighbor's house. After a while you get gun-shy and reject every idea. "A novel about an imprisoned cannibal serial killer who helps an FBI agent solve a series of gruesome murders? That's STUPID. Nobody will buy that."

Back in my college days I found calculus a somewhat difficult subject. I still do, and recognize my relative lack of facility with higher math as a kind of character flaw. Sometimes during tests I'd erase my work so many times I'd erode holes through the paper, and afterwards when I stood up a half a pound of overheated eraser crumbs would fall off my lap onto the floor. That's kind of like what having writer's block is like - I produce a lot of eraser crumbs and I backspace over things so many times the phosphors fall off my computer screen, but I never seem to actually write anything.

To an extent, writer's block in an amateur writer is kind of silly. It's like telling someone "My doctor has advised me not to attempt Mount Everest" while you're standing in Iowa. It may be true, but so what? But since I am now by my own definition anyway a published author, it is now a professional handicap, like someone suffering from Tourette's Syndrome trying to make a living as a professional poker player ("Son of a bitch! Three of a kind!") I'm not MUCH of an author - one writing job for an extremely niche magazine - but hey, one has to start somewhere.

Usually I have the opposite problem - namely, writing WAY more than was necessary or wise. I'm sure when I turned in my magazine job, the editors had to take a hedge clipper to it. "We asked for 1500 words and we got this! Hand me the chain saw!" It isn't easy being edited, especially when you tend to run long by nature, but it probably isn't easy being an editor either, asking for 1500 words about the Chinese invasion of Tibet and getting something on the scale of Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs. I have to imagine that editors must sometimes clap their hands to their foreheads and sigh "How many bags of M&Ms did he have to eat while he wrote this opus?"

I'm always amused when people tell me how they had to squeeze in the margins and enlarge the font to get their scrawny papers up to five pages. I was always having to move the margins out and use fonts like Flyspeck-3 to get them down to five pages. I wrote a paper for some sociology class once whose mere bibliography was longer than the complete papers of most of the other students. Another time I was placidly typing away at a novel and realized that I was up to 1,150 pages and I still had no idea how to end the thing! I still don't. A long time ago I was writing a novel on my old Commodore 64 and hit the limits of how big the document in the word processor could be. Not one character more would fit. I felt a bit like a chastened Christopher Columbus sailing off the edge of the word crying "Crap! I thought the edge of the world was just a metaphor!" Another time I was writing a paper about the early days of NATO, especially the decision to allow West Germany to rearm, and was suddenly struck by the fact that I was writing a section on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870! Now THAT'S a digression. (One might profitably surmise that writing outlines isn't one of my strengths either. But I'm pretty good at writing outlines. I just suck at sticking to them.)

Normally I have two weaknesses as a writer. The first is that I can be unbelievably prolix. The second is that I have trouble finishing anything. The two are related, but distinct. In a nutshell, I'm bad at writing the way Stephen King advises. That is, to write the dang thing down at least once with no attempt to edit, self-censor, embellish or otherwise meddle. Write it once, finish it, and then put it away for a while to steep. Me, I get halfway through, have a better idea, back up, start over, become disillusioned with the better idea, undo everything and revert to the original, make some more progress, then decide that the better idea was better after all... "No! Circus clowns! That's it! It's all circus clowns and it takes place in... Paraguay! Yes! No! Yes!" It starts out being a horror novel, so why have I written thirty pages on how rock crushers at gravel pits work?

It's so demoralizing.

The result is a hacked-up mass of scar tissue that makes Joseph Conrad seem breezy and concise. And then there's the fact that they never actually end; I just run out of interest or ideas or, sometimes, memory in my computer.

But these days I'm really stuck, and it's frustrating. The best approach is to not worry about it. It's like trying to remember Ethel Merman's name - as soon as you stop trying to remember it, you'll remember it. But it takes longer. To get rid of writer's block, I have to stop writing for a week or two, and that's bad. Writing is (for me, anyway) a bit like taking out the trash: if I don't do it on a fairly regular basis, things kind of pile up and start to smell. So not writing for any length time amounts to dropping a tuna fish sandwich in the kitchen trash can and pretending it isn't there for a week or two, olfactory clues to the contrary.

So that unpleasant smell you're picking up right now? That's just my tuna fish sandwich.

Martian or Lunatic?

2011-04-09T13:06:00.001-07:00

I used to be an unconditional proponent of manned spaceflight. Manned spaceflight was good by definition, and I didn't need no steenking arguments about jobs, spin-offs, or anything else to justify it. And that's still generally true. If the choice is between manned spaceflight with no purpose, or no manned spaceflight at all, I'll take manned spaceflight for a thousand, Alex.

But I'm not as naive as I used to be, and while I'm still a strong proponent (or exponent?) of manned spaceflight, I'm reaching an age and level of maturity where I'd like to see results. Manned spaceflight, yes. But preferably, manned spaceflight for a reason, and not just so we can say we have some government employees floating around up there.

Let's cut the mustard (or the cheese) right up front: people in space appear to generate very little in the way of fundamental science. When you name some of the most fruitful space explorations in terms of raw scientific output, they're always unmanned: Hubble Space Telescope, Galileo, SOHO, Voyagers 1 and 2, Viking - the list is endless. What great hauls of scientific data has manned spaceflight brought back? Umm....

The point of people in space isn't to do Big Science. People actually get in the way of that. Ever wonder why there isn't a big telescope mounted on the ISS? Because the vibration of all those people moving around, and all those fans and pumps that keep the people alive, makes for truly miserable seeing through a telescope.

Well then, what's the use of sending people into space at all? If it's easier and cheaper to launch robotic probes, and if the scientific haul is better anyway, why send people up there at all? Well, basically, to study how people live in space. The goal of putting people in space should be to eventually develop the ability to send them somewhere and establish, if not an actual colony, then at least a semi-permanently manned facility. So when we send people to the ISS now, it should be with the goal of developing the capability for manned interplanetary spaceflight.

NASA seems bad at articulating this sort of strategy. They present all sorts of arguments in favor of the ISS, but never the most important one. They talk about the science, the economic benefits, the technological spin-offs, but they never seem to come out and say "We want to learn how to live and work in space so we can go to Mars." I'm not naive and I know why they don't - going to Mars sounds like science fiction, and very expensive science fiction at that, and if the average lawmaker in Washington suspected that NASA was having Martian dreams, they'd probably preemptively de-fund the whole thing. In the same way that von Braun had to build vengeance weapons for Hitler to pay for his private dreams of colonizing space, NASA has to do what Congress will allow it to do so it can have its private dreams of colonizing space too. And as Carl Sagan once said, if Teflon is your main justification for the Apollo program, wouldn't it have been cheaper to just develop Teflon in the first place and skip that whole moon business?

The point of putting people into space is to send them somewhere so they can live. Ultimately, so that if something dreadful happens (asteroid impact, nuclear war, pandemic) and civilization on Earth crumbles, there'll be other human civilizations out there that won't go down the drain with the mother planet. That is the basic reason for going - so that if the worst happens, there'll still be people out there somewhere who remember Beethoven.

But where should we go? The moon seems like an obvious candidate - we've already been there, and it's close at hand. But I think building a permanent presence on the moon would amount to a long and very costly sideshow.

Moon proponents point out that eons of exposure has filled the crust of the moon with a rare isotope of helium, helium-3, and that it might be commercially lucrative to mine the lunar regolith for helium-3 and ship it to Earth, where it could be used in fusion reactors to provide essentially free energy. And that argument might make sense if we actually had fusion reactors that could use helium-3, but we don't, and probably won't for another hundred years pending some exotic breakthrough in magnetohydrodynamics.

I think Mars is by far the most logical candidate for future human colonization, much more so than the moon or the asteroids.

Mars has water. Lots of water. And water is practically the sine qua non of a space colony. And Martian water is probably going to be a lot easier to get at than whatever scant amounts the moon can offer.

Mars has an atmosphere, which means you can do all sorts of things with heat shields and parachutes to lose velocity that you can't do on the moon. Aerobraking and parachute-retarded entry have engineering challenges of their own, but as recent Mars probes have shown, once you figure out how to do it, you can use the atmosphere as a powerful brake and save enormous quantities of rocket fuel.

Mars has free carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, free for the taking. Carbon dioxide isn't too useful to humans in its native state, but it can be used as feedstock for chemical reactions that produce things that are useful to humans.

The Martian atmosphere provides pretty good protection from meteoroids, so you can think about building large inflatable structures without having to worry too much about them being deflating by any passing grain of dust. Large impacts can still deflate your domed city, but the Martian atmosphere essentially removes small objects as potential threats.

The Martian atmosphere provides at least some radiation shielding. Mars has no ozone layer, so the surface is exposed to full-bore ultraviolet radiation. And Mars has no magnetic field, so the solar wind isn't deflected as it is around Earth. But random collisions with the Martian atmosphere would attenuate at least some of the radiation threats. You'd probably still need to bunker in and sleep underground to protect yourself from the solar wind, but you'd have to do that on the moon anyway.

The Martian atmosphere offers advantages in cooling. On the moon, the only means of cooling anything is radiation. But on Mars, heat exchangers or radiators become possibilities, so the power density of your power generation systems can presumably be increased because of the more competent cooling schemes available. There wouldn't be a lot of cooling by convection or direct transmission, but some is a lot better than none.

The Martian day is pretty close to an Earth day, which would seem to have advantages in terms of adaptation. A lunar "day" is about two weeks long, which would take some getting used to, but a Martian day is about twenty-four-and-a-half hours.

The Martian atmosphere moderates temperatures. On the moon, temperatures vary wildly as objects pass through shadow and sunlight. Temperature swings of hundreds of degrees exist, and engineering things so that they aren't damaged, overwhelmed or even prematurely fatigued by wild temperature excursions is tricky. But on Mars, it's mostly just cold. There are temperature extremes, and it still gets plenty cold, but the atmosphere limits the scale of the swings so your engineering challenge is somewhat less daunting than it would be on the moon.

Mars isn't perfect. The atmosphere is extremely thin and some sort of pressure suit would still be required. It isn't a vacuum and it wouldn't kill you as quickly as a vacuum, but it would still kill you, and in a matter of minutes rather than hours. The topsoil on Mars isn't very hospitable either. The incessant bombardment by ultraviolet radiation (which is bad in and of itself) creates weird peroxides and superoxides in the Martian soil, and it isn't entirely clear to me if they would present a health risk if you tracked in a bunch of that junk on your boots. And since Mars has no magnetic field, you can't rely on compasses to tell you which way to go. But these caveats are all true of the moon as well, and the moon doesn't appear to offer any compensating advantages.

The moon has, as near as I can figure, only two real advantages. The first is that it has a low escape velocity and no atmosphere at all, so it isn't entirely unrealistic to imagine that one could launch cargoes from the moon using some kind of mass driver or rail setup. The other is that the far side of the moon is the only spot in the solar system that is permanently shielded from Earth's endless electromagnetic radiation, and it would be a good spot to build big radio telescopes.

But past that? I'd rather be a Martian than a Lunatic.

Fermi Paradox

2011-04-06T20:54:00.000-07:00

I enjoy thinking about the Fermi Paradox.

The Fermi Paradox, if you haven't heard of it, basically amounts to the question "Where the hell is everyone?" If the universe is as old as we think it is, and if it's as large as we think it is, and if it's as full of water, organic molecules, and temperate planets as we think it is, how come the universe isn't teeming with intelligent life? How come all our SETI screensavers aren't finding alien radio signals all the time? Why the hell is the universe so silent?

Who knows why. But it's fun to posit possible answers to the Fermi Paradox, mostly because it's so much like writing science fiction. There's no evidence one way or the other, and for now there isn't even hope of find any evidence, so we can imagine whatever we want, in effect projecting our particular outlooks on the universe at large.

Some answers are religious in nature - that is, that God made man in His image on one planet and one planet alone, and the rest of the universe is nothing but a fairly showy backdrop for our terrestrial drama. Some answers have a deep-rooted pessimism that basically argue that the coefficients we plug into the Drake Equation aren't just wrong, they're wildly wrong, many orders of magnitude wrong, leading to so-called "lonely Earth" scenarios.

But the best ones sound like the plots of science fiction novels, or vice versa.

Such as the theory that the aliens are already here, but such is their technological sophistication and their discretion that they only reveal themselves to selected individuals, often in rural settings. Why they'll visit the guy that runs the body shop and not the President is a question I leave to the specialists.

Such as the theory that some alien race somewhere along the line developed nanotechnology, but didn't put enough safeguards in place. Their nanoassemblers got loose, and now the biospheres of most of the planets in the universe consist of barren rock and a grey goo of trillions of nanoassemblers.

Such as the theory that some alien race, on the losing side of some terrible war, built a doomsday weapon of some sort that got out of control, and this weapon now cruises the universe, still faithful to its original programming of finding and exterminating life where it finds it (insert here any number of science fiction stories, everything from Star Trek to Fred Saberhagen's Berzerkers). Who knows, maybe even as you read this, this terrible doomsday machine has detected the ghostly signals of Three's Company re-runs and is already on its way to Earth.

Or maybe the "default egghead position" is wrong, and that advanced alien civilizations are not necessarily peaceful, benevolent, or even indifferent; maybe they're openly and avowedly hostile and think nothing of wiping out, enslaving, or even eating lesser civilizations, such as ours.

Or maybe the universe is populated by some incredibly powerful alien civilization, a civilization so advanced that it doesn't even recognize us as being intelligent, and maybe this alien race dispassionately exterminates young civilizations where it finds them, the same way we spray new ant colonies where we find them.

Or maybe some group of wise alien civilizations had a big meeting and decided that we were currently too brutal, too primitive, too warlike to make contact with just yet, so they've put us in a kind of galactic play-pen until we grow up a little.

Or maybe life is common, but intelligent life is not so common because it is the habit of technological civilizations to develop the means of mass destruction (that is, nuclear weapons) before they develop the wisdom to refrain from using them.

Or maybe it is the habit of young technological civilizations to exterminate themselves through ever more destructive wars, or to engineer their own demises through foolish genetic experiments, ecological mismanagement, or technological hijinks like the famous Tralfamadorian spaceship propulsion system accident that Kurt Vonnegut wrote about.

Or maybe it's more sociological than that. Maybe it is the habit of the citizens of technological civilizations to get so hooked on materialism and entertainment they forget that civilization doesn't exist to exalt the ego of the individual, but to ensure its own survival and success, and thus yet another civilization slips into what Arthur C. Clarke called "the dream of the lotus-eaters".

Or maybe the universe just isn't a very good place to live. Gamma ray bursts are rare, but maybe they happen just often enough that most of the universe at any given time is either being sterilized by a gamma ray burst, or recovering from being sterilized by one.

Or maybe every civilization eventually reaches the point where it can build particle accelerators powerful enough to create strange forms of "exotic matter" like magnetic monopoles and strangelets that go on to consume their planets right out from under them.

Here's my take. Maybe in every technological civilization there exist budget-cutters who kill their space programs so that when a big planet-killing asteroid comes along, and one most assuredly will, they don't have any kind of efficient nuclear propulsion systems that would allow them to deflect said planet-killing asteroid.

Hmm.

The NERVA of them!

2011-03-27T09:41:00.000-07:00

On his blog, Warren Zoell asked the question "What went wrong?" on his excellent modeling blog. What went wrong with the space program, that is; how did we go from the seeming optimism of the late 1960s and early 1970s to this current sorry state of affairs? You can read his post here: http://thegreatcanadianmodelbuilderswebpage.blogspot.com/2011/03/you-look-up-at-sky-one-night-and.html.

I've been so busy at work I haven't had time to work on a model or write anything about the demise of the space dream in general, but I've at least thought about it.

We all know the arguments, one way or the other. How can we afford space when we have all these other problems on Earth to deal with? How can we NOT afford space when we have all these other problems on Earth to deal with? I'm not going going to recapitulate the arguments, partly because I'm never going to change anyone's mind, and partly because I'm so tired, frustrated and aggravated with work issues I'm not sure I'm capable of generating a coherent argument in favor of anything (the only thing I'm sure of right now is this: I cannot allow them to stress me into losing my cancer remission).

But here's my vision of What Should Have Been.

It starts with the basic technology of the Apollo Program, specifically the Saturn V booster. You then add a nuclear upper stage to the Saturn V.

This is what a flight-ready nuclear engine would have looked like had the NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications) program been allowed to produce one. It basically amounts to a modest nuclear reactor roughly the size of a large curbside garbage can. You pump liquid hydrogen into the left end (and, because you're pumping liquid hydrogen, you can exploit odd exothermal effects to bootstrap the pumps so you don't need anything extra to run the pumps). The liquid hydrogen is heated to about 2,000 degrees C in the reactor core in the middle, and then you allow it to squirt out the back.

But why? What advantages does this offer over an existing chemical rocket engine?

The efficiency of a rocket engine, and thus its final ability to do useful work, depends upon an arcane measurement called specific impulse. Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that the specific impulse rating of a rocket engine is sort of like the miles-per-gallon rating of an automobile. People get all worked up over total thrust, which is sort of like a car's horsepower rating, and total thrust is a factor when you're actually trying to leave Earth. But assuming you're already in space (that is, assuming that the Saturn V booster has already gotten you into orbit), thrust is meaningless. All that matters, once you're in space, are two numbers: the rocket's mass ratio and the engine's specific impulse. That's all. (Mass ratio, by the way, is a measurement of how much of the spacecraft's total weight is fuel.)

The point is that once you get in space, all the other measurements fall away and all you're working with is mass ratio and specific impulse. Nothing else matters, at least from the performance point of view.

The higher the specific impulse, the better. A given engine's specific impulse is determined basically by one thing: how fast the junk squirts out the back. And as it turns out, how fast the junk squirts out the back depends on two things: how light the junk is in the first place, and how hot it is when it squirts out the back. Lighter junk squirts out faster than heavier junk, and hotter junk squirts out faster than cooler junk.

So let's say we have some rocket engine, and we want to send some imaginary payload to some groovy place like Mars. We've done all we can to make the payload as light as possible, but it turns out that we still can't get there from here - to make the mission work, we either have to increase the mass ratio to the point where the booster is the size of a small moon and sends a payload the size of a lunch box, or we have to increase the specific impulse of the engine.

How do we increase the specific impulse? One is to use propellants with a lighter atomic weight - that is, make the junk lighter. Another is to make the engine run hotter by burning more energetic fuels.

Chemical rocket engines work by combining two different chemicals, igniting them, and allowing the heat of combustion to force the burned junk out the back. The choice of fuels determines how hot the fire will be, and how light the burned junk will be. Sometimes there are good engineering reasons for using less than optimal propellants - the Saturn V first stage burned kerosene and liquid oxygen, a combination that isn't great for specific impulse but has certain advantages in terms of cost and ease of handling. But once you're in space, you want to use the best combination you can so you can get the best specific impulse, and that means oxygen and hydrogen.

Burning liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen gives you hottest fire, and it gives you the lightest burned junk squirting out the back. And it turns out that this combination gives you a specific impulse of about 460 seconds (don't worry about what the seconds means). And there's nothing you can do to make it better. There's no way to engineer more specific impulse out of the engine - no magnets on the fuel lines, no chips, no vortex generators in the air filter. You can add stuff like fluorine to the liquid oxygen to make it a little hotter, but the engineering challenges of a fluorine oxidizer are so formidable they aren't worth pursuing.

The point is that the best chemical propellants will give you a specific impulse of about 460, because they only burn so hot and the burned junk is only so light (the combustion product of oxygen and hydrogen is water, two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom, and there's just no way to make that any lighter than it already is).

And it turns out that a specific impulse of 460 seconds is pretty limiting. It becomes hard to do things with such a low specific impulse. Missions take much longer (remember how long it took Cassini to Saturn?) and payloads have to become very small (remember how dinky Mars Pathfinder was?) for anything to get done, and the combination of long mission times and small payloads makes manned landings on Mars (the sine qua non of any space program, as far as I'm concerned) exceedingly impractical.

What can you do? Nothing. There's no chemical propellants that give a better specific impulse, and you can't squash men down until they have the size, weight, and life support requirements of fruit flies.

But you can abandon chemical rocket engines entirely and use a nuclear engine. Nuclear engines can run arbitrarily hot - ideally, as close to the melting point of the engine's components as you can get without it actually melting. And gaseous-core reactors are potentially possible, which have no arbitrary temperature limit at all. They're already in the form of a gas, so the melting point of the components doesn't matter. And since you don't have to actually burn anything to produce the junk that squirts out the back, you can pick the lightest junk possible - hydrogen.

This gives you an engine that runs much hotter than a chemical engine, and squirts out the lightest possible junk. All you need is the will (and the money) to build it. And with such an engine doing the pushing, mission times drop dramatically, and payloads increase dramatically. Want to get to Mars in sixty days? Can do. Want to land men on Mars? Can do. Want to send a probe to Pluto in a year? Can do. Want to build a kind of space tugboat that can efficiently shuttle cargo back and forth between a space station and the Moon? Can do.

The advantages of this sort of nuclear-thermal propulsion have been known since the days of Tsiolkovsky, and all of the major pioneers (Goddard, von Braun and Oberth, among others) understood the advantages of them too. The only limit on the specific impulse of the nuclear rocket is the temperature of the reactor core, and there's no arbitrary upper limit on that; it's simply a matter of how good your engineering is.

The first tests were performed by the Americans after World War Two. The first tests were pretty unpleasant affairs - the reactors tended to disintegrate and it was common for them to spit glowing chunks of uranium fuel a thousand feet into the air, which nobody wants. But development went smoothly and quite quickly, and by the mid-1960s the NERVA program had produced engines that ran reliably for hours at a time, remained under good control while being throttled, could be started up and shut down relatively quickly, and most important of all tended to stay together in one piece. And they produced specific impulses that started at about 850 (that is, almost twice as efficient as the best conceivable chemical rocket engines) and proceeded upward from there, some of them nudging 1,000 as the high-temperature engineering of the fuel assemblies proceeded. The Soviets, who came into the game later, were said to have built an engine that ran with a specific impulse of 1,200 in the 1980s.

The success of the American NERVA program is not well understood, even in the aerospace field. I've talked to engineers in the field, and though my results aren't scientific by any means, the common perception is that the nuclear-thermal engines either didn't work at all, only barely worked, or tended to blow up in glowing mushroom clouds. But they didn't. They worked. They worked spectacularly well.

There were accidents, of course. During one engine test, they ran out of liquid hydrogen and the reactor melted down almost instantaneously. In other tests, the fuel elements broke and glowing bits of the core shot out the nozzle. And all the tests tended to make the test stand radioactive through the process of neutron activation on hitherto-nonradioactive materials. And there was always the problem of the exhaust plume blowing atoms of uranium and other radioactive fission products into the atmosphere, which probably wasn't smart, Ann Coulter's belief in radiation hormesis notwithstanding. And in one test, they deliberately allowed a reactor to catastrophically overheat and blow up, just to see how bad a launch pad accident would be (the answer: not as bad as the doomsayers predicted, but still bad enough - it's still a nuclear reactor, and nuclear reactors aren't the same as a vinegar-and-baking soda rocket at all).

But my central point is that if you combine the power and relative safety of the Saturn V booster with the efficiency of the nuclear rocket engine, many things suddenly become possible. Not just possible in the engineering sense, but even practical. Without getting all bogged down in the mathematics, teaming a nuclear upper stage with a booster like the Saturn V doubles the payload that can be dispatched to any point in the Solar System, and halves the time it takes to get there. And that's the worst case. By clustering nuclear engines, or by using better nuclear engines, the payload just keeps going up and the mission time just keeps going down.

Consider the Orion shuttle from the movie 2001. I always assumed it used nuclear-thermal engines in orbit. You wouldn't want to light up its nuclear engines on the ground, because you don't want to make the spaceport itself radioactive. And you wouldn't want to run the nuclear engines in fairly dense air, because the air itself tends to backscatter neutrons and gamma rays from the reactor core. But once you're above 100,000 feet, backscatter radiation becomes negligible (neutrons and gamma rays from the cores fly out in straight lines and no longer reflect back into the passengers). So all you have to do is get Orion to about 90,000 feet or so, and we already know how to do that using turbofan engines. And the use of the nuclear engines would completely transform the economics of the Orion shuttle.

A useful rule of thumb is that it'll cost you about $2,000 per pound to get yourself into orbit using an expendable booster like the Delta or Ariane. The Saturn V was cheaper, about $900 per pound, partially because those were 1970 dollars and partially because the Saturn V lifted so goddamned much the economics of scale came into play. The American Space Shuttle was about $7,000 per pound, which is pretty pricey. But suppose I fly from here to London on the Concorde (which no longer flies, but we'll pretend it does). The total bill is about $10 per pound, and it's even less for subsonic airliners like the 777 (the last time I flew to England, the bill came out to about $2.50 per pound, not including my luggage).

I read somewhere that a shuttle employing jet engines to take off and nuclear engines to reach orbit would cost the user about $14 per pound. Let's say that's wildly optimistic and the real cost is double that. Say, $28 per pound. And someone has to pay for all that orbital infrastructure. Let's say it costs $50 per pound, once you add everything up. An Orion shuttle, using mixed turbofan and nuclear propulsion, would still be 40 times cheaper than a Delta, and about 140 times cheaper than an American Space Shuttle.

In other words, a nuclear shuttle would operate on airliner economics, not rocket economics, cheap enough that I'd probably do it just to say I'd done it.

(Here we are combining, of course, the efficiency of nuclear rocket engines with the efficiency of jet engines. Modern jet engines are so efficient they're almost embarrassing to rocket engineers. Specific impulse is kind of meaningless for jet engines since they ingest air from the environment as reaction mass and oxidizer, but their specific impulses are in the vicinity of 15,000, which gives you an idea of how good they are. Jet engines aren't perfect, though. They suffer from thermal problems at high speed, and at high altitudes they just flat run out of air. But if you let jet engines do what they do best, and then at high altitude and high speed hand over to nuclear engines and let them do what they do best, well, you're in bidness, as they say.)

So why not? Why aren't we using Saturn Vs (or derivatives thereof) to boost heavy stuff into orbit and using nuclear rockets to push the heavy stuff around? Why aren't there shuttles that combine the efficiencies of jet engines and nuclear rockets? Why aren't there footprints on Mars? Why isn't there a moon base, or multiple moon bases, or an actual goldurn city on the moon? Why aren't there radio telescopes on the far side of the moon, and helium-3 mines on the moon, and people extracting water from permafrost on Mars?

Part of it is ignorance. If even engineers in the aerospace biz think that nuclear rocket tests in the 1960s were a fiasco, what must the layperson think of them? Part of it is apathy. Even in the 1970s most people didn't give a rat's ass for space exploration any more, and they probably only got interested in it in a "let's beat the Commies" sort of way in the first place. Part of it is that nobody seems to care much about anything at all any more, other than jailbreaking their iPhones and finding cool apps and watching Lady Gaga videos on the train. Part of it is a failure of education. I don't think schools do a good job of preparing people to think about space exploration, and as a result we as a people don't realize that in the 1960s we had in our grasp two keys to doing serious work in space, the Saturn V and the nuclear rocket.

Part of it is an anti-nuclear backlash. The word "nuclear" came to mean "evil" by definition, and I can sort of understand that. You say the world "nuclear" to the average person on the street, and they're liable to think "Three Mile Island" and "thermonuclear war", not "a specific impulse of 1,000" and "vastly improved capability in space". Nuclear rockets aren't nuclear weapons, but they're still nuclear reactors, and they aren't toys and they have certain rather serious risks, and I'd be the last person to say that the risks of operating things like nuclear-thermal rocket engines and SNAP reactors in space should be ignored (even I, a proponent of nuclear propulsion, view photographs of the NERVA engine tests with misgivings, and my toes curl when I see the plumes of hot hydrogen and radioactive junk spewing out of the NERVA engine test rigs and into the open atmosphere. By way of vast digression, our family lived for many years in Flagstaff, Arizona, which was more or less downwind of the nuclear test facilities in Nevada. When my dad died, the US government paid us a not inconsiderable sum of money because it was plausible that his cancer may - I emphasize may - have been caused by fallout from nuclear tests in Nevada. My cancer, however, isn't on that government list, as there is no reliable statistical link between Hodgkin's Lymphoma and nuclear tests).

The Vietnam War played into it too. That war cost a fortune, and it's even worse now, what with unending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Vietnam War's voracious appetite for funding was arguably the final straw that caused the Nixon Administration to shut down the Saturn production line and terminate the NERVA nuclear rocket program.

People of good conscience make the argument that space exploration isn't worth the cost, given the scale of problems we already have on Earth. Wouldn't the $1.5 billion we spent on the NERVA program have been better used finding a cure for cancer, or improving public transportation, or taking care of people with serious mental illnesses? I can understand those arguments. I don't necessarily agree with them, but I can at least understand them. My main counterarguments to them are A) it's difficult to say what sorts of world-changing spinoffs a large space program might have produced, and B) money taken from NASA was never redirected into programs designed to fight cancer or end childhood hunger anyway; for all practical purposes it just vanished, and a lot of it just vanished into the ever-hungry maw of the Vietnam War. If you want to defund something in order to pay for things like fighting cancer or educating children or ending mental illness, wouldn't it have made more sense to defund the Vietnam War, whose yearly budget vastly, vastly, exceeded NASA's paltry $5 billion?

But as I said, I can at least understand arguments against the space program on the grounds of fiscal conservatism, or social progress, or cost-versus-benefit calculations. The arguments I have difficulty wrapping my mind around are the ones based on ignorance and anti-intellectualism, which are unfortunately pretty common in America too.

That's a subject for a different day.

My point is that as a kid in the 1960s, it was easy for me to imagine a future that included the following:

* Saturn V heavy-lift boosters remaining in production and carrying big payloads into low Earth orbit at reasonable cost and with minimal risk to the planet.

* NERVA-style nuclear-thermal rockets moving those payloads around the Solar System on a scale and with a speed and efficiency that no chemical rocket could ever hope to match.

* A jet-nuclear shuttle like Orion providing cheap and reliable access to space for ordinary people, on an economic scale more akin to airline operations than rocket operations.

* A whole infrastructure springing up in space, not necessarily because some bureaucrat in Washington said so, but because they made economic or scientific sense. Space stations, mines, bases, exploration camps, telescopes, particle accelerators, factories...

* All of this leading in the end to the ultimate in cheap and reliable access to space, a space elevator as described by Arthur C. Clarke. It wouldn't happen in my lifetime, but it would happen, because once you had the nuclear rockets to do the work with, the idea of fetching hither a suitably large rock to serve as an anchor for the far end of the space elevator stops being impossible and merely becomes difficult.

Goodness. That got long and tedious, didn't it?

CE3K

2011-03-17T13:31:00.001-07:00

I got home from work last night in kind of a funky mood. Software tests hadn't gone particularly well, my new shoes had made my feet sore and unhappy, and the apocalyptic rumor-mongering of co-workers had sapped my will to live. So I laid down and turned on the TV, and started watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a movie that I haven't seen in ages.

What a relief. It took me back to a time when the world was young (well, when Richard Dreyfuss was young, anyway), aliens were enigmatic but benign, and one could say "Jeez, Melinda Dillon is cute" without some yahoo accusing one of having a mid-life crisis or lecturing one on the moral delinquency of single mothers (calm down, guys, maybe dad is at a tractor exposition in Decatur).

I wish aliens really were visiting us. I for one would like to know that there is other intelligent life out there in the universe. I'm not sure it would make any practical difference in my daily affairs, but I'd still feel better knowing that. And yes, I'm one of those eggheads who believes that alien race capable of efficient interstellar spaceflight would be peaceful and benign. Why? Because that's the way, uh huh, uh huh, I like it, uh huh, uh huh. But unfortunately, the Sagan Doctrine still holds, which is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and thus far, I haven't seen any.

But a note to potential alien visitors: if you do drop by, don't land in the pasture in the middle of the night wearing Halloween masks, and don't enter my house by oozing through the crack at the bottom of the door. Land in the middle of the day, and ring the doorbell like any respectful visitor. Thank you for your cooperation.

Bull!

2011-03-14T11:42:00.000-07:00

Guilherme Marchi

We went to the Professional Bull Riders "Glendale Invitational" last night. I enjoy bull riding, even though I don't seem to have much in common with the bull riders themselves or the vast majority of bull riding fans. And the PBR itself is changing in ways that I'm not exactly in favor of. But I still enjoy the events, even if I sometimes feel a certain amused skepticism about the whole thing.

The first part of all the PBR events I've been to are really patriotic pep rallies - last night's event featured a film about the US Air Force and the swearing-in of a bunch of new recruits, and the combination of loud music, pyrotechnics, and promiscuous brandishing of patriotic symbols seems to make the crowd feel better about things. "Yeah, maybe the invasion of Iraq was a costly mistake, and maybe we can't find Osama bin Laden, and maybe the devastating firepower of the US military doesn't translate into anything meaningful in a confusing and complex world, but DAMN I feel better!"

Then, after enough beers have been consumed, the atmosphere changes from one of patriotic fervor to plain old likkered-up hooting, which I find easier to roll with. I was born in Flagstaff Arizona, and I grew up in rural parts of the state, and beer-fueled rural shenanigans are part of my cultural heritage. I don't personally indulge in beer-fueled rural shenanigans and I'm more likely to spend my time splitting infinitives than spitting tabakky juice, but at least I'm familiar with rural shenanigans.

I don't really have any favorites in the PBR. There are certain riders whose intellectual and philosophical outlooks irk me, and I tend to root for the bulls when they're in the chutes. And I do have a sort of soft spot for Guilherme Marchi, who seems impossibly decent, and for Dustin Elliot, who has an actual sense of humor.

The PBR started out as a kind of foreshortened rodeo. Someone realized that the most popular events at any given rodeo were the so-called "rough stock" events, and that the bull riding was the most popular of the rough stock events. So they pared away all the other rodeo stuff - the team roping, the barrel racing, the steer wrestling - and kept just the bull riding. But up until a few years ago, it was possible to squint at the PBR and still see it as a rodeo. It wasn't the PRCA, but it sort of looked like the PRCA.

But now it seems that the PBR is trying to sever all of its old cultural links with the world of rodeo. They're trying to turn it into an Xtreme Sport, or perhaps a variant of NASCAR, leading to an ever-widening gap betwee PBR fans on the one hand, and old-guard fans of the PRCA on the other. Since television revenue is the manna that fuels pretty much everything in America, the PBR is destined to prevail over the PRCA on the basis of better television deals.

Is that good? I don't know. And the PBR is visibly struggling with certain inherent problems, such as the fact that from the perspective of TV sports in general, most bull riders aren't very telegenic. Americans seem to enjoy their sports heroes most when they're bold, brassy, even flagrantly narcissistic. But a great many bull riders don't seem capable of striking the kind of elitist, arrogant stance that seems to come so naturally to the NFL and which Americans seem to demand. Especially the old guard, the riders who would probably claim that they live by the "Code of the West", one of whose stipulations is that One Does Not Talk Much About One's Self (the actual stipulation is "One Does Not Talk Much". The rest follows logically). So for the PBR to really penetrate the mainstream sports market, they're going to have to find (or create) mainstream-looking sports heroes, or at least ones that don't live by the Code of the West and are willing to be arrogant on-camera. And I think that'll be a depressing day, myself.

Another problem the PBR has to deal with is the considerable success of Brazilian riders. On the one hand, the PBR likes to advance them as ideals - they're men who came from meager circumstances and became successes by dint of toughness and hard work, the American Dream incarnate. On the other hand, not all PBR fans are comfortable with the success of foreign riders and see it is a kind of sell-out to political correctness, as though bull riding is somehow a uniquely American undertaking and these Brazilian riders are about as welcome as Juan Pablo Montoya was in NASCAR. So they have to figure out how they're going to spin that.

And the PBR (and the rodeo world from which is sprang) has to come to grips with women competitors someday. Rodeos are very much a male enclave, but rodeo fans tell themselves they're being inclusive by having barrel racing, which is a "girl's event". But I think that's kind of odious. If boys want to barrel race, why not? And if girls want to ride bulls, why not? The problem of women competitors isn't unique to the PBR, but there are certain facts about the sport that make it a bigger problem in the PBR than in, say, the NFL. In the NFL, it's fairly easy to see why there aren't many woman in the game, simply because there aren't many 6-foot-6 350-pound women defensive tackles in the world. The sheer size and strength of the average NFL player makes it difficult for women to compete.

But this isn't the case in bull riding. One of the PBR's founding members, Ty Murray, is often quoted saying that bull riding isn't a matter of strength, but of balance and timing. In fact, he's on record saying that size is actually a detriment; that it's the smaller cowboys who are best suited for the sport. Well then, since size is a detriment, and strength isn't an issue, what does the PBR propose to do with women, considering that there are probably a lot of girls who could ride bulls effectively if they chose to do so? (Hell, there are probably a lot of girls who could beat up Brian Canter is a bar fight, if you want to get right down to it.)

I didn't mean to go so far afield. But I often do.

Frustrating

2011-03-14T11:07:00.000-07:00

The news frustrates me. I check various news websites to try to find out what's going on with the nuclear reactors in Japan, and perhaps to learn why the cooling systems failed in the wake of the earthquake, and what do I find?

Seventeen bazillion links to gosh-wow videos of Japanese buildings, boats, and people being annihilated by a tsunami, videos that I really don't want to watch at all.

Thirteen bazillion links to stories about Charlie Sheen, stories that I really don't want to read at all.

I'm not arguing that links to tsunami videos or stories about Charlie Sheen should be banned, though there's a hint of schadenfreude in them that I find unappealing ("Wow, that Charlie is such a doofus; I feel much better about myself now!"). But is it too much to ask that somewhere in this glut of news we find something serious about the nuclear reactors?

I'm rethinking my position on nuclear power. I think I'm still for it generally, because I think the main alternative, widespread burning of coal, is even more unpalatable. But multiple cooling system failures in the wake of an earthquake suggest that somebody overlooked something. Maybe engineers can't anticipate everything that could fail during a very powerful earthquake, but maybe they should have anticipated their inability to anticipate and not built nuclear reactors in a geologically active area in the first place.

I'm just guessing, but I suspect that one of the issues at work here is that when you bring a reactor from normal operation to shut-down quickly, the reactor core can't cool itself by convective flow if the cooling system pumps fail. The only way to keep the cooling water from flashing into steam is to pressurize it, and the hotter it gets, the more it has to be pressurized to keep it from boiling. So at some point either a weld will fail, the pressure relief valves will open, or the water will boil, which even assuming there's any convective flow in the core to begin with will "steam-lock" the core and shut down whatever convective flow there happens to be.

Though the precise nature of the nuclear reactors in ships are classified, I believe them to employ liquid metal (such as sodium) as a primary coolant, so they don't have the immediate problem of steam formation vapor-locking convective flow. Of course, there still has to be a secondary coolant to remove heat from the "far side" of the liquid metal primary loop, which in a submarine is probably pretty easy, considering that it's surrounded by cold seawater all the time anyway. But if a land-based liquid-metal reactor had the far side of the liquid metal loop in a large pond, you'd think the pond could sink enough heat to keep the reactor from melting down for quite some time even in the complete absence of pumps.

I may be missing something, because I'm not a nuclear engineer. And it's easy to imagine a sufficiently powerful earthquake breaking the pipes that carry the molten sodium, which may be a worse outcome than the formation of steam in a pressurized-water system. Or the earthquake could cause the pond to drain. Or who knows what.

So maybe the real answer is not to build them near subduction zones in the first place. But then countries like Japan, which are pretty much one giant subduction zone, couldn't have nuclear reactors at all, unless some country with more geologically stable regions (such as China or Russia) agreed to host the Japanese nuclear reactors, which is a little hard to accept. Or maybe nuclear reactors shouldn't be operated for profit and shouldn't be considered national assets at all - maybe since a major nuclear accident would be a global problem, the ownership and operation of nuclear reactors would be globalized as well, with some supra-national agency building them in safe areas and operating them for the benefit of all.

Like that'll ever happen.

(And, parenthetically, exactly what does a "geologically safe area" really mean? When is a fault system really dead, and when it is merely biding its time? Earthquakes still happen even on mid-plate fault systems like the New Madrid system, and maybe there really is no such thing as a geologically safe area. What then? I don't know. Fusion reactors sound like a pretty good alternative to me, except for one minor inconvenience - they don't exist yet.)

But I still believe that given our appetite for energy and our inability to generate meaningful quantities of energy by means of fusion, we're more or less stuck with fission reactors. I wish it were otherwise, but it isn't.

Cults

2011-03-03T21:21:00.000-08:00

I've often considered starting my own cult. I'm not much of a joiner by nature and I'm not sure I'd want to join any pre-existing cults not of my own making, but I think it might be fun to form my own cult. And if not a cult, then at least a secret society that meets every so often in some manor house in the English countryside where we park ourselves in leather chairs in an enormous library, sip brandy, and exchange wry witticisms about Erasmus and Samuel Pepys.

But to form a cult or a secret society, I think I need to figure out what my objective is first. The real objective, of course, is to get a whole bunch of people to give me their money so I don't have to work any more, but I can't just come out and say that. Instead I'm going to have to invent some mumbo-jumbo to the effect that your Lexus is an affront to a Well-Ordered Universe and that I'm the only one who can dispose of said Lexus. There is doubtless a whole list of things that are an affront to a Well-Ordered Universe - cars, Cartier watches, Waterford crystal, bills in denominations larger than $20 US, Wingnut Wings 1/32nd scale model airplanes, Babe Ruth baseball cards, diamonds the size of almonds...

Maybe I should start small and aim to create a cult where the act of going to get me a cup of coffee earns initiates big spiritual brownie points. You there! Don't you know that the path to enlightenment passes right by the coffee maker? What are you doing standing around then? Get me a cup of coffee, and while you're at it, grab my Kindle!

Any takers? No? I didn't think so.

Bloggus Interruptus

2011-02-27T20:12:00.001-08:00

I haven't written anything in about a month, which is pretty unusual for me. I could cite a litany of reasons for my odd silence - a personal crisis, a tiger in the bathroom, UFO abduction. But mostly I've just been busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. At work two major programs are coming to fruition at the same time, and though I'm formally assigned to only one of them, as a practical matter I end up working on both of them. I don't mind. They're interesting projects. But as both programs reach final culmination, there's a lot of work to get done in a great screaming hurry - a couple of days ago I worked a 24-hour shift, went home and slept for about four hours, and went back for more. I'm not bragging, but I am pointing out that that's a lot of work and I don't always feel like writing anything when I finally get home.

All work and no play makes me a dull - and quiet - boy.

But somewhere along the line I managed to get in a trip to the oncologist, and I'm still clean. I'll have another PET scan in about six weeks, and it'll be decades before I start to take them for granted, but for now, I derive a certain perverse pleasure from being healthy enough and feeling good enough to actually do 24-hour shifts.

At one point one of my co-workers, in the very wee hours of the morning, groused about how bad it sucked. All I could say was "I've been through way worse things than this."

Anniversary

2011-01-28T01:26:00.000-08:00

It's been almost exactly one year since I got out of the hospital after my tandem bone marrow transplant. The tandem bone marrow transplant didn't quite kill my cancer, but subsequent radiation treatments apparently got the job done - at least for now, and these days I don't look any farther ahead than my next PET scan.

This was my hospital room. Note the potato chips, which I couldn't bear to eat, and the pile of model magazines. The red octagon stuck to the wall identified me as a "fall risk", and it's there because somewhere on the lower left side of the mural painted on the wall is a smooth hemispherical dent I made in the wall with my head when I passed out. (One of my chemo drugs caused my blood pressure to hover somewhere around 90 over 50, and that was while I was lying down. Once I stood up to use the facilities - I find those jug-like "urinals" undignified - and passed out cold on my feet and bounced my head off the wall on the way down.)

I don't dwell on it too much these days, because I really do feel frightfully good and I prefer not to waste too much of my time and energy on cancer or its treatments. But it did seem suitable to at least make a passing reference to this particular anniversary.

I did a lot of writing on the laptop, visible beneath the purplish vomit bucket, but none of it was very good. Chemo has a lot of weird and unpleasant side effects, but the most unpleasant side effect, to me anyway, was the way it destroyed my ability to read and write. I could read individual words and know what they meant, and I could type lots of words and know what they meant, but I couldn't assemble words into any kind of context. I was unable to extract any meaning from anything I read, nor could I express myself in writing, even though I knew perfectly well what each individual word meant.

All told, I spent about a quarter of a million dollars out of my own pocket fighting cancer. I don't regret spending the money - it was either that or die, and I wasn't too keen on the dying part. But now that the memory of cancer is fading, I find myself saying things like "Well, gee whiz, how come I can never afford to go on cruises like all my friends?" And then I remember why.*

But I'm not complaining. It turns out that just being alive is pretty cool.

*If you're wondering, no, my employer didn't provide health insurance, and the health insurance I bought privately turned out to actually cover next to nothing, and I made too much money to qualify for any kind of government assistance or charitable grants. For a while I couldn't get insurance at all, but now one of the provisions of the "Obamacare" that people screech about allows me to get insurance despite my pre-existing condition.

SF Philosophies

2011-01-26T13:39:00.000-08:00

I enjoy having philosophical discussions with friends about science fiction. Well, not science fiction generally; it's more along the lines of Star Trek versus Star Wars, which the SF elite might well regard as the equivalent of debating the differences between lunch meat and hot dogs - same crappy stuff, just in a different forms.

My friends are mostly Star Wars fans, and they assault me endlessly (but in a good-natured way) about the alleged "socialism" in Star Trek. In Star Trek, nobody seems to be motivated by greed or tries to get rich (well, the villains sometimes do, but not the Federation personnel themselves). This is taken to be proof of some kind of shambling socialist conformity in action - "It's like the USSR and the UN rolled together" is one comment I hear fairly often.

But I think that's a pretty fundamental error. The point of Star Trek is that certain enabling technologies (specifically, more or less free energy and replicators) have completely transformed societies and economics to the point that labels like "capitalist" or "socialist" don't apply at all. Star Trek isn't a socialist nightmare; it's a libertarian dream. When you no longer have to sell your labor to sustain yourself, you're free to do whatever you want, and the real value lies in the act of creation, not the act of production.

I suppose greed still exists in Star Trek, but when the replicator can give you practically any material good you could ever want, I'm not sure what the point of greed would be. It isn't that everyone has the same amount of stuff; it's that everyone can have everything, so in the end "mere stuff" no longer matters. What matters is the mind, the act of creating something new.

You want a gold goblet to drink Romulan ale out of? You presumably tell the replicator what you want, it it synthesizes it on the spot. But the replicator can't synthesize new works of art, new scientific discoveries, new technical approaches, new theories, new music. It can only reproduce what has already been made. So the value, the point, lies in creating, not having. The mind becomes the defining quality of a person - you're important not for what you have, or what you can produce in a material sense, but for what you know, what you can figure out, what you can create. I like that.

"I wouldn't want to live in that system," my friends say. "There'd be no ambition, no drive, no spiritus, no reason to strive; it'd be nothing but a bunch of couch potatoes eating bon-bons from the replicator and watching crap on what passes for TV in the future."

And I admit that the possibility exists that within the Federation, a large segment of the population sits around eating junk out of the replicator and doing nothing. But maybe they eventually get bored with doing nothing and decide to create something new. Or maybe the ambition to amass material possessions has been transformed into the ambition to be recognized as the most surpassingly important mind in whatever field of endeavor interests you. Maybe you like to design phasers. And maybe being recognized as the best phaser designer in known space is what gets you out of bed in the morning.

"But that just leads to a society of snobby intellectual elites!"

I'd rather have a society of snobby intellectual elites than a society of snobby materialistic elites, but I guess that's the difference between me and them. Though it does amuse that whenever a "noted scientist" is the episode's antagonist, he (usually it's a he, but not always) is almost always a complete asshole - they may celebrate the mind, but nobody likes a smug scientist.

Not that I have anything against Star Wars. They're fun movies (most of them, anyway), and the pulp fiction starkness of the black-versus-white moral issue allows one to watch the movies without being assaulted by moral ambiguities. But there aspects of the underpinnings of Star Wars that don't resonate with me very much. Royalty, for one. I don't have any problem with ceremonial heads of state, even hereditary ceremonial heads of state, in the manner of the United Kingdom. But I'm not too keen on the idea of someone being entitled to power and privilege simply by virtue of birth - I'd want to know what their qualifications for being in control of my life happen to be, and I don't accept "Because my daddy was king" as good enough.

There are, it must be admitted, certain things about Star Trek that rub me the wrong way. The show sometimes descends to almost hysterical moralizing. One of the episodes in Next Generation that particularly galled me was the one where they found the disconnected Borg, named him Hugh, and contemplated using him as a means of introducing a computer virus into the Borg collective that would essentially eliminate them. But no, Doctor Crusher goes off on some great crusade about how they can't just arbitrarily wipe out an entire species, using the "we'd be no better than them if it we did" argument. Does that mean that when a man destroys a nest of wasps on his doorstep that he's no better than the wasps? Maybe so - but it beats being stung every time you go out to check the mail.

What's next? We can't throw away rotten food because even rotten food has a right to be eaten? I don't think so. At some point people have to think about the matter and decide that it's either us or the Borg, period, and all the hand-wringing won't slow the Borg down by so much as a millisecond when they come to assimilate Earth. Starfleet Medical wouldn't hesitate to wipe out a dangerous virus that causes some serious disease, after all.

But what the heck. It's all in fun, and it isn't like it's really important, like whether I should have a salad or a sandwich for lunch.

Speaking of which...

Next Book

2011-01-21T12:24:00.000-08:00

I think I may read Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken next.

Horse racing isn't something that interests me very much, if at all. I don't have a moral stand against it, PETA-style; it just isn't something that normally interests me. I don't hate it, but I don't love it either. But because of the popularity of the movie Seabiscuit, and on the basis of my wife's solid recommendation, I read Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit, and I found it time well spent. The book probably means even more if you have some specialist interest in or knowledge of the word of thoroughbred horse racing, but she managed to write a book that I found pleasant, interesting and worthwhile even though I knew nothing about that world (to cite just one example of my ignorance, if someone said the word "Manowar" to me, I'd think of Lord Nelson, not race horses).

So I marked her down as an author I'd read again - if she could write a deft book and make me feel as though I was interested in something that I wasn't actually interested in, she could look forward to getting more royalties from me in the future (and I'm sure with the royalties she'll get from me, she'll be able to afford to add a new wing to her toothpick model of Monticello - assuming she has one).

I also confess that I feel a human compassion for her as a person. I don't have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but I went through an awful lot of chemotherapy, and I'd say that I probably have at least some idea of what CFS is like. Mine went away, fortunately, when my cancer treatments eventually proved successful (thus far, anyway). Hers is still around, and I can just imagine all the people out there telling her "Oh, CFS is all in your mind; you're just lazy; get off your ass and do something!" My answer to them is "She IS doing something; she's writing interesting and reasonably successful books."

And I wish her continued success too, though not at the cost of continuing to suffer from CFS.

I think my favorite example of her writing was in Seabiscuit, when she described how, in period photographs, a certain trainer's head seemed to dissolve into the sky behind him, as though his head ended at the eyebrows. I don't know why that stuck with me, but it did, and since I read that, I've looked at old family photographs with an eye for that kind of thing and actually found an example of my grandfather's head fading into the background.

Purists probably sniff at that and say "commenting on faded period photographs isn't real literature, or real journalism, or real history, or real criticism, or..." Maybe not. But I liked it, so to hell with the purists.

Crappy Novelists

2011-01-18T00:46:00.000-08:00

I've been reading "Atlas Shrugged" lately. Or more like, beaten over the head by "Atlas Shrugged." It's a struggle.

Whatever one does or doesn't think of Ms. Rand's political and economic philosophies, I think it has to be admitted that she's one seriously bad novelist. One could argue that she's making a series of philosophical arguments and thus one shouldn't evaluate the novel as a novel - but then again, I'm not the one who described it as a novel, and ye gods, is it ever a clinker. Between the endless philosophizing, the cardboard-cutout characters, the utterly impenetrable dialog, and the irritable nastiness of the whole thing, it's decidedly unpleasant to read.

If you took the word "contempt" out of the novel, none of the characters would ever have any emotions at all.

There's a scene where Henry Rearden and Dagny Taggart have managed to collectively (no! not that word!) build a new railroad, and incited to heights of animal passion by the dull roar of locomotive engines and their own bloated senses of self-importance, succumb to long-suppressed desire and have a night of volcanic sex.

So they wake up the next morning after this night of long-delayed, oft-desired sex, and the first words out of Ole Hank's mouth are "I feel nothing but contempt for you." Then he goes on for about six pages, describing exactly why he feels contempt for her, and plumbing the depths of his contempt for her. Maybe this is what passes for pillow talk among 'achievers'. And all of this happens before breakfast! I'm not typically that contemptuous, hostile and bitter until about lunchtime.

The book is worth reading to understand what all the fuss and hype is about. But as a philosophical argument, I find it unconvincing. I'm trying to be charitable and not describe it as "hysterical, histrionic and grandly over-wrought", so let's just leave it at "unconvincing". And as a novel, it's... Well, it isn't very good. At all. It's kind of fun as a sort of ultimate "nerd revenge" novel, but once the trained pony has shown off that one trick, there just isn't much left to like.*

The average Star Trek novel presents a more lucid philosophical argument, and is a lot more fun to read to boot.

You like it? Enjoy it in good health, by all means. But I for one won't be going back for seconds.

*Lots of TV commercials these days hype the notion of people getting special treatment because the carry the Chase Plutonium Card, or because they spent extra to get special tickets. And yet people like me, who have worked in the commercial avoinics industry for 30 years and who played a not entirely insignificant role in building the modern air transport system, are stuck in the long security line with the sweathogs and have to fly in coach with our kneecaps being compressed to the density of lead by the seat in front of us.

Yet how many of these Chase Plutonium card holders who get all the special treatment (and who emit waves of almost unendurable smug snottiness as they pass through the special short security line) would know an ATCRBS interrogation if one fell in their cappuccino, or could replace the brakes on a 757, or could design a wing that generates a lot of lift at high angles of attack, has clean and predictable stall behavior, and is efficient at high speed and high altitude? It does kind of irk me that it's the smug schmucks with the Plutonium cards who get all the cream, not the people who built and maintain the system.

Maybe - just maybe - some of what Ms. Rand said rubbed off on me...

Historical Illiteracy

2011-01-12T14:44:00.000-08:00

History is a tricky subject. Some historical facts (especially dates, times, locations, persons and so forth) can be known with considerable certainty, while other things are either too complex to analyze, or we simply don't know enough to say anything useful. We can have interpretations and hunches and even present pretty convincing arguments, but we'll never actually know.

A good example is the French Revolution. We know when it happened. We know the flow of events. We know the majority of the personalities. But why it happened? Jeez. There are probably as many reasons as there were participants, and the best we can do is say "Well... These seem to be the main reasons..."

It's hard to know where to draw the line. What can be accepted as a more or less concrete historical fact, and what is more or less a matter of opinion? (Possibly very well informed opinion, but still, in the end, opinion.)

Postmodernists seem to argue that there is no historical objectivity, that everything is a matter of opinion and that all interpretations are valid. While there is some truth in that (how can we, at this remove, ever possibly begin to imagine we know what Julius Caesar had in mind, except through his admittedly self-serving dispatches from Gaul?), I think it leads in the end to a kind of intellectual exhaustion where scholarship has no meaning - since any one interpretation of history is as valid as any other, why not just dump all the old books and documents in the incinerator, clear out some space in the library for books by Foucault, and imagine that pink bunny rabbits were the prime motivators in human history?

But I didn't really want to go there. Mostly I wanted to discuss the recent revelation that Hitler was a socialist. I can think of three reasons why people would believe this mistaken contention.

The first is that they were fooled by the Nazis themselves. Though Hitler was pretty much the complete opposite and mortal enemy of socialists, and though the Third Reich remained a more or less unfettered capitalist system throughout, the Nazis went to the trouble of calling their party the "National Socialist German Worker's Party". Sounds pretty socialist, doesn't it? And it was meant to sound pretty socialist too - Hitler and the early Nazis hoped to lure the German working class away from its alignment with the German Socialist Party by pretending to be socialist and hoping that most people wouldn't go to the trouble of looking deeper. But in practice, the best way to interpret the name of the Nazi Party is to skip every other word - National German Party. "Socialist" and "Worker's" was just more artful Nazi PR work.

The second is that thanks to postmodernism, we can say anything we want about history and it's still right - or at least just as right as anything anyone else says. Research? Fah. Facts? Fah. Screw it, we'll just make it up as we go. And I think this sort of moral exhaustion is infectious - people catch it, give up on any kind of intellectual rigor, and believe what's easy.

And the third is that I think certain people in America in particular wanted to recast Hitler as a socialist so that they could link President Obama and Adolf Hitler - linking someone with Hitler is pretty much the hydrogen bomb of political rhetoric, and it works. What one thinks of Obama or his policies is irrelevant, and none of my business anyway. In a democracy, we settle such issues at the ballot box, and all the screaming and howling is a waste of energy that could be put to better use elsewhere. But I do think it's cheap and shabby to deliberately distort and even falsify history just to provide ammunition for a modern-day political attack. I am not implying that only certain right-wing commentators do this. I've seen it from both sides. And it irritates me no matter who does it.

But let's make this clear: Hitler was no socialist. In fact, by destroying the German trade unions, denying German workers the right to organize, shutting down socialist and communist newspapers, kicking socialist organizers to death, and so terrorizing the SPD and KPD that their leaders actually fled Germany in fear of their lives, the Nazis produced a Third Reich that was profoundly less socialist than it had been during the preceding Weimar years. One could argue that the early Nazi economic programs like the construction of the autobahn system had socialist overtones, but they were a good deal more cynical than that - the Nazis knew that a particularly good way to buy a man's loyalty in economic hard times was to give him a job so he could feed his family. It had nothing to do with socialist notions of equitable distribution of wealth and everything to do with boosting the popularity of the regime (with a side-dish of giving the German army improved interior lines of communication).

There were, it is true, some Nazis, particularly some of the early ones, who placed more emphasis on the "Socialist" part of the name than the "National" part of the name. It is true that some of the Immutable Points promulgated by the Party in the early days had socialist overtones, such as vows to break up big businesses and seizure of war profits. But in actual practice, none of the economically-focused Immutable Points were honored, and in fact the suppression of socialist thought in the Nazi Party and in particular the SA was a sine qua non for Hitler's eventual appointment as Chancellor. It was part of the deal - Hitler offered the generals the prospect of rearmament and national revenge, and he offered the industrialists the prospect of amassing huge profits from rearmament without those dratted trade unionists and socialists getting in the way. And, it must be said, Hitler delivered on that deal, to the detriment of the world.

Alas.

No Alternative

2011-01-08T18:35:00.000-08:00

I'm going to have to drink about 27 beers and listen to music for a while - there is no alternative.

Today someone opened fire on a public event in Tucson (about an hour south of here) and killed a judge and a nine year old girl, and wounded a great many other people, including a member of the US House of Representatives. I don't know why this tragedy happened. I don't know who, or what, set this guy off. But I've been reading comments on various news websites, and everyone seems to be trying to make something out of the books that this obviously disturbed individual listed on some website or another.

"He read Mein Kampf, therefore he's a Nazi!"

"He read The Communist Manifesto, therefore he's a Communist!"

I read The Lord of the Rings - does that make me a hobbit?

Give it a rest, people. I've read most of the books on this guy's list, and I'm not a Nazi, a Communist, an anarchist, or a murderer. Sometimes a book is just a book. (Speaking parenthetically, it sometimes surprises me that books like Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto are not required reading in modern Western society - if only to serve as examples of how things can go terribly wrong when intellectual rigor does not keep pace with ideological fervor.)

There's a bizarre and to my mind most disturbing anti-intellectualism brewing in America, where just reading a book makes people suspect that you're a pinko commie fellow-traveler or a schnapps-fueled SA thug. And even listing them as favorite books doesn't make you a believer either. I really liked 2001: A Space Odyssey, but I don't think that I'm Heywood Floyd or imagine that black monoliths really tinker with us. And it's entirely possible for one to read Mein Kampf and find it an important book without putting on an armband and setting fire to synagogues (though I caution the reader that I view it as important in the sense of helping us to recognize that kind of institutional insanity and head it off at the pass before another 50 million people have to die).

This is one of the reasons I have some trouble defining myself by any one given political label - I don't like the idea of party elders sitting in judgment on my intellectual orthodoxy or telling me what or how to think. And this sort of thing is becoming very common in America. Not that I necessarily regard myself as an intellectual - but I hate being told what to think.

The right seems to demand ideological orthodoxy in the face of facts, such as the modern right's definition of Nazi ideology as "socialist" - ask Gregor Strasser just how socialist the Bavarian Nazis were. Go on, just ask him.* The far left demands obeisance to bizarre postmodern ideas like the relativism of science, that a "feminist physics" would be just as "valid" as the physics promulgated by all those Dead White Europeans like Max Planck and Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein (don't get me started on postmodernism - it makes me foam at the mouth).

Sorry, I just can't roll with any of that.

And in the end, a book is just a book. One of the mantras of the political right is "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." If that's true, then books don't have bad ideas; stupid minds have bad ideas. And leave the books out of it, please.

*He's dead. You can't.

Big Red

2010-12-30T12:50:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I assembled my Christmas present, a shiny red cement mixer from Northern Tool. It was actually fairly easy to assemble. Except for one corner of the motor housing that had been dinged up by some sort of forklift accident, everything was straight and the holes all lined up. Getting the rubber gasket between the upper and lower drum halves was amusing - if you can imagine a flat rubber snake with the patience of a two-year-old, you've got the basic idea.

So what does one do with a cement mixer? One mixes concrete. Which raises this question: if it mixes concrete, why is it called a cement mixer? Why are trucks that carry concrete called cement trucks?

Concrete is pretty amazing stuff, if you ask me. You just add water to this stuff and it turns into a greenish goo that in the long run cures hard as a rock?? That's pretty fabulous. There are things that are even more fabulous - hot dogs, for one - but still, that's pretty fabulous. Back in my youth my dad and I poured an awful lot of concrete for driveways and walkways. We were mixing it in an ancient cement mixer, so we tended to form up slabs that could be mixed and poured and finished in about a day. We used a huge pile of gravel ("ABC" round these parts) and cats also used it as a giant open-air litter box.

It was possible to determine the order in which we poured the slabs by counting the little irregular voids in the surface of the concrete where cat poops rotted and came out. The first slabs were smooth and clean, but then the number of cat poop craters began to increase. The last slab looked like Swiss cheese or perhaps a scale model of the moon. Some of those voids got pretty big - I remember not wanting to meet the enormous feral cats that produced some of those poops.

Fun facts about concrete! The first actual concrete was invented by the Romans, and was used to build all sorts of interesting things. So far as I know, the Pantheon in Rome remains the world's largest, and oldest, unreinforced concrete dome. Modern Portland cement of the form we use today was a product of the Industrial Revolution, invented in the mid-1800s by some British fellow. (I used to think that Portland cement came from Portland, and I worried that at the rate people were building concrete buildings and superhighways, that one day Portland would be nothing but a huge crater from all that mining, as though the Borg had come.)

Here's another fun fact about concrete: mixing concrete in a wheelbarrow is one of the most unpleasant tasks known to man. I'd rather dig splinters out of my fingers. I'd rather try to give Baxter T. Cat a pill. I'd rather sand the raised panel lines off a 1970s-era Monogram airplane model and rescribe them (and if you know me very well at all, you know that I regard rescribing panel lines as exceedingly unrewarding).

Hence Big Red. Now that I have it, what do I propose to do with it? Building a Pantheon might be a little ambitious, but maybe a nice sunken garden...

Death Metal Dead

2010-12-18T15:53:00.001-08:00

Death metal has been pronounced dead.

I had occasion to read the list of the top ten metal songs of the year, as picked by "Noisecreep", whoever they are. I'm not normally prone to reading this sort of thing - I like what I like and generally don't require validation from alleged cognoscenti. But it is interesting to note the bands who produced their top ten songs:

Priestess

Fear Factory

Scorpions

Iron Maiden

Mar De Grises

High on Fire

Deftones

Nachtmysterium

Ratt

Triptycon

Not a death metal act in the whole bunch. Actually, not much metal of any kind at all.

Here's one of their comments on Nachtmysterium:

'No Funeral' pulsates like something you might hear in a darkwave/goth dance club, and despite its gorgeous synthesizer-led melodies, many closed-minded metalheads shunned it.

If I wanted darkwave/goth dance music, then I guess it would make me happy. But I don't, so it didn't. But I guess that makes me a "hater".

Here's another comment on Deftones:

On top of everything, Chino Moreno's angelic crooning during the track's chorus is total ear candy.

It's like a segment from Sesame Street where we're enjoined to guess which one of these things just doesn't belong - metal music on the one hand, and total ear candy angelic crooning on the other. It's like going to a Mexican restaurant and getting Hollandaise sauce on one's enchilada - someone somewhere didn't get a very important memo. There's nothing wrong with Mexican food, and there's nothing wrong with Hollandaise sauce, but I prefer that the two not fuse into some horrid postmodern mess.

But, then again, Noisecreep picked Judas Priest winning some kind of award as the top metal moment of the year. Since when did metal care about awards? And since when was Judas Priest metal? I don't dislike Judas Priest by any means - but if you think Judas Priest is metal, you probably think canned tamales are Mexican food.

And the very thought of a Ratt song being the #2 metal song of the year made me buy a whole Amon Amarth album by way of overcompensation.

Vacuum Collapse

2010-12-15T23:50:00.000-08:00

People talk a lot these days about the "zero-point energy" or "vacuum energy". You know an idea is hot when people start trying to sell you gadgets that supposedly exploit whatever the idea is, and I've seen at least a few products or services that were in some way supposed to derive some kind of power from the vacuum energy.

Unfortunately for them - at least if I understand this correctly - the vacuum energy predicted by quantum field theory is the minimum allowable energy. Since the vacuum is already at its minimum energy potential, there's no way to get any energy out of it (once the gas tank is empty, you can't get another 20 miles down the road by making the gas tank extra-empty). Virtual particle production continues apace because - again, if I understand this correctly - the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle allows a little slop in time and energy, as though the universe doesn't mind violations of the conservation of energy if they're sufficiently temporary.

Curiously, these virtual particles can actually be promoted and turned into real particles, but you have to supply some energy to do it. Hawking radiation is one example of how you can make virtual particles real.

But what if the vacuum isn't at its minimum energy? What if it's as a false minimum? What if, by means of quantum indeterminacy, or some sort of high-energy procedure carried out by earnest physicists, the false vacuum is allowed to tunnel or collapse to a lower energy, presumably the real minimum? Physicists argue that such a collapse would completely destroy the universe in its entirety - the mathematics of such things argue that the potential energy of a new pocket of lower-energy vacuum actually increases as its volume increases, so it would propagate outward at just below the speed of light, and we'd have no warning whatsoever. Not that there would be much we could do about it even if we had advance warning. The whole universe would end up collapsing to this new minimum energy vacuum, and us along with it.

For a while people were worried that the Large Hadron Collider at CERN might do the trick, but it seems unlikely. I'm no physicist, but it seems to me that if all it took to cause a vacuum collapse was a sufficiently energetic collision, it would have happened already - cosmic rays hit the top of the Earth's atmosphere with energies many times above what the LHC can generate, and we're still here. Even more dramatic, if current theories about the Big Bang are correct, there was a time in the very early universe when energies were much higher still, at the Grand Unification level if not the Planck energy itself. And we're still here.

So I think it's safe to assume that we aren't ripe for a vacuum collapse.

But even so, when I go outside to look for falling stars, I prefer not to think about the notion of a vacuum collapse. I have enough to worry about as it is without having to fret about the possibility of the entire universe being destroyed in a catastrophic vacuum collapse, thank you very much.

Most Obnoxious Noise

2010-12-14T12:35:00.000-08:00

I am pretty sensitive to noise pollution. Light pollution doesn't really bother me. Air pollution is unsightly and unsafe, but I can sort of ignore it. If I come across a stream clogged with old tires, shot-up cars and beer cans, I'm irked, but I can always close my eyes. But I have a hard time shutting out noise pollution. It works its way into my brain until I'm actually listening to it. I'd almost rather have toxic chemicals in my water supply than noise in my ear.

Most forms of human endeavor seem to create noise, and most of the time it's okay with me. You need to mow your lawn or cut your firewood? Fine and dandy - I can live with noise that exists for some gainful purpose. You want to race your dragster at the nearby drag strip? I'm okay with that too, because you're racing your car at a place that was designed for car races, and sometimes I sit outside on a Friday night and listen to the roaring of the V-8s in the distance.

But there are certain classes of noise that just irk me to no end.

Commercials on the radio are especially annoying. They blare in my ear, and they're always so damned insistent. Commercials on TV are annoying too, but I'm usually in a position to mute them as they occur. Radio commercials always seem to feature a rapid-fire torrent of goofy sound effects with a breathless announcer with maximum reverb bellowing Bring Your Camera!

A TV in another room always kind of irks me, especially if the TV isn't being watched. It just sits there, pumping out its endless blare of noise, and it always seems to be tuned to a TV show I really can't stand, like The Obnoxious Self-Absorbed Housewives of Hoboken. I'm trying to understand the Schwartzschild solution of General Relativity, and suddenly the TV is screaming at me about the ignominy of having a flat butt.

Loud motorcycles are no picnic either. Several towns in Arizona have enacted noise laws because the incessant racket of thousands of these rolling ego-machines eventually pissed off the whole population, and I don't blame them.

Telephones. I've never liked talking on the telephone. Never. I don't know why; I just don't. And the idea of calling someone on my cell phone because I'm bored just never occurs to me. It therefore should be no surprise that I don't like telephone ring tones, and I don't enjoy listening to people talking on their phones. I know they enjoy it, and I don't mind that, I just don't particularly want to listen to someone saying "Dude, guess where I'm at! No, man! Guess again! No, dude, not even close!"

I don't like crowd noise at concerts. I'm there to hear the music, not to listen to a bunch of people go WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Honestly, people, just shut up and listen. I like to watch videos of my nephew's doom metal band on YouTube, but they're hard to fully appreciate because there's always some beered-up numbskull in the audience who keeps screaming FUCK YEAH! It isn't the cursing that bothers me; it's the fact that I can't hear the music over his beery screeching. (Closely related to this are the people who want you to listen to some groovy new piece of music they found, but they're so busy talking about the groovy new music you can't actually hear it. Sometimes they have to explain what makes the music so groovy, but more often than not they think it'll put the music in context if they explain in great detail everything they were doing and thinking at the moment they discovered this music - "I first heard this when I was in high school, Ted and Scruffy and I had gone to the Tastee-Freez in Avondale, this was back when going to the Tastee-Freez was what we did, you know, we'd go to Tastee-Freez and talk about girls and stuff, and Ted was wearing this hat... Oh man, I remember that hat! It was like...")

There are people who echo everything I say, and embellish it. I'm in the parking lot at work, walking to my car to get lunch, and the following conversation ensues:

"Where you going?"

"Lunch."

"Lunch. Munchies. Grub. Where you going?"

"McDonalds, probably."

"Micky-Ds, the Golden Arches, Ronald's Place. Whatcha getting?"

"Maybe a Big Mac, I haven't decided."

"A Big Mac. Big Whack. El Mac Grande. Mac-a-rack-a-ding-dong-dang. Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce--"

"Look, I have a half an hour for lunch, so if you want to chat, get in the car and come with me. If not, can we pick this up again later?"

I honestly think that the main reason people make so much useless noise is that introspection makes them uncomfortable.

Lose-Lose

2010-12-09T13:03:00.000-08:00

Proponents of unmanned space exploration rejoice! The space shuttle is dead. Well, dying, anyway.

How do we get into these situations? Why do people always insist on turning things like this into zero-sum games, where anything that the manned space exploration part of NASA loses, the unmanned side gains, and vice versa? And we all know what's going to happen anyway - whatever money is saved by shutting down the Shuttle program isn't going to go toward new unmanned space science; it's just going to vanish in the overall Federal budget.

Nobody wins, as far as I can see.

Now the only way to get people into space is the Russian Soyuz. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the Soyuz except that it is too small, can't carry any meaningful cargo, and can only barely reach orbit in the first place (the reason Mir and the ISS have to be re-boosted every so often is because the basic Soyuz-U booster can't reach a higher orbit, so the ISS has to orbit so low it encounters a good deal of atmospheric drag). Ever seen the interior of a Soyuz TMA with the crew aboard? It looks like one of those fraternity row stunts where they try to pack as many people into a phone booth as possible.

Soyuz just doesn't seem like the road to the future. Neither did the Shuttle, to be honest, as its design requirements forced it to be much heavier and less efficient than it should have been (in particular, the abandonment of the "flyback booster" and the high cross-range wing demanded by the single-revolution return to launch site abort requirement). But I always thought the shuttle would just be a sort of stand-in while a more sensible replacement was developed.

But no. Turns out, there is no replacement. The Shuttle is gone, and all that's left is Soyuz. No X-33, no NASP, no Lockheed Starclipper, no Rockwell low-cross-range orbiter, nothing. In a single move, we go right back to the same booster that launched Sputnik. I don't see that as a positive development.

I am occasionally accused of being opposed to unmanned space science, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Unmanned probes often return astounding insight into the nature of things, and often at next to no cost. It is quite impossible to look at the accomplishments of such unmanned probes as COBE, WMAP, Galileo, Voyager 1 and 2, Opportunity, Spirit, Viking, SOHO and others without being forced to say "Yeah, those were excellent investments."

But I also happen to believe that people have business being in space, and I think that the next logical objective should be the establishment of a manned presence on Mars.

So to me, it isn't a question of unmanned space science or manned space science; I think it should be both. Yes, I'm a naive dreamer. But is seems to me that if we as a society can spend billions on hair replacement, billions on erection pills, and billions on breast enhancement, we could also spend billions on manned and unmanned space science.

But honestly, I don't think we give a rat's ass any more. The Far Left is suspicious of space science, because it rejects the notion of science in general. The postmodernist stance seems to be that science is "just another myth" and that "the project of the Enlightenment is dead." (It amuses me that they use the product of that "western scientific myth", namely computers and the Internet, to write and publish their profoundly mistaken bullshit.*) Religious conservatives, on the other hand, are known to argue that anything we need to know is already encoded in scripture and that attempts to learn about ourselves and the universe amount to some kind of strange secular assault on religion. And in between, the majority of Americans seem so absorbed by numbnut celebrities, the wonders of their smart phones, and irrelevancies like "style" and "self-expression" to have any kind of curiosity about the universe around us.**

And meantime, people who should really be allies - the proponents of manned and unmanned space exploration - savage one another to try to get as much of the dwindling pie as they can.

*I recently read a quote from some postmodern scholar that argued that Einstein's famous equivalence, E = MC^2, is "sexed" and "biased" because it accords a special power and significance to the speed of light, thus discriminating against other speeds that are just as useful to us. But what galls me even more than the aggressive stupidity of this allegation is that I can just picture this scholar's acolytes, all shaking their heads and whispering oh, the injustice! That Einstein was SUCH a white male oppressor! Sometimes all I can do is grip my forehead in both hands and sigh.

**Here's a "fun" (read "depressing") statistic. According to CNBC, the "diet industry" amounted to $59.7 billion last year. NASA's budget for 2010 was about $18.7 billion.

Dark Flow??

2010-12-08T00:26:00.000-08:00

I do a lot of reading on the subject of cosmology. I find the field fascinating for a variety of reasons, not least because it includes aspects of quantum mechanics, General Relativity, high-energy physics, thermodynamics, astrophysics, and a heap of other stuff. If you read about, say, quantum chromodynamics, all you get is quantum chromodynamics, but if you read about cosmology, you get the whole enchilada.

And it's so weird.

At first we thought that all there was in the universe was matter and radiation. Then it turned out that there wasn't enough matter to explain the behavior of stars in galaxies, so we had to postulate the existence of "dark matter". Nobody knows what dark matter really is, but it seems almost a given that is has to exist, even though we can only guess at most of its properties. Then it turned out that the expansion of the universe was not slowing down, as one would expect, but actually speeding up. So we had to postulate the existence of "dark energy" to explain this accelerating expansion. Thus far nobody has any idea what dark energy really is, and there doesn't even seem to be much agreement on what observations we might make that would give us insight into its nature.

And now we have something new - "dark flow". Analysis of great heaps of data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe suggest that a fairly sizable chunk of the observable universe (the Local Group, the Virgo Supercluster and perhaps even the Great Attractor) all demonstrate a fairly uniform peculiar velocity (the term "peculiar velocity" refers to the velocity being directed in an actual direction with respect to the cosmic microwave background, rather than just being the recessional velocity that the Hubble Constant implies). This peculiar velocity is called "dark flow", maybe just because it sounds creepy.

It seems that us, the Local Group, the Virgo Supercluster and the Great Attractor are all being drawn toward something. But what? Something hugely massive, surely, but as far as we've been able to see, there's nothing out there that fills the bill. One theory is that it's something hugely massive that lies beyond the rim of the visible universe - not because our telescopes aren't good enough to see it, but because light from this sinister thing out there hasn't had time to reach us even though it's been traveling at the speed of light since the beginning of the universe.

I don't know if that's actually the case. Some theorize it's gravitational attraction from a parallel universe, or perhaps from a sub-universe that split off from ours during the period of superluminal inflation, or... But whatever it is, it fascinates me.

Cosmology can be kind of a bummer, because none of the theorized "ends of the universe" are at all appealing. The Big Crunch is bad. The Big Rip is bad. The Big Bounce is bad, but maybe not quite as bad. Universal heat death is just plain depressing. (I can fully understand why physicists like Fred Hoyle might have preferred the Steady State theory, which at least offers an eternal lifetime and doesn't require that the universe be obliterated in one way or another. Though I accept the Big Bang on intellectual grounds, a part of me pines for the comforting eternity of the Steady State model.)

But the presence of this unseen thing out there that causes dark flow might open the door for other outcomes. Maybe we really are headed somewhere special, and maybe the universe isn't just a really big, really long-playing exercise in the conservation of energy. Or maybe I just find ideas like the Big Rip or the Big Crunch spiritually unrewarding and hope for some other outcome because I find futility depressing.

Erroneous Celebration

2010-12-05T14:32:00.000-08:00

I was watching a football game for a while earlier. I was actually working outside, but the tractor had developed a malfunction and I decided that it was more important to me that I eat something than fix it.

But anyway, I was watching the football game mostly because out of seventeen thousand channels on satellite TV, it was the least offensive thing. And they were playing, and the officials threw the occasional flag for "excessive celebration". And I think we as reasonable people can all agree that a seven-foot-six 850-pound lineman doing the Funky Chicken really is excessive.

But I notice there's a lot of other celebrating that goes on. Some guy comes off the field, downs a cup of Gatorade, and pumps his fist. "Yeah! I totally owned that beverage! Boo-yah!" Most of the time it seems to me that they're celebrating just doing their job. Excuse me, Mr. Defensive Tackle, but isn't it sort of your job to tackle the running back when he attempts to run up the middle? Why are you celebrating doing something that you're expected to do? Do you need more attention? Do you need a cookie? Other than paying you your generous salary, I'm not sure what more the world owes you for stopping the running back on a third-and-short.

But maybe I have it backwards. Maybe we should all celebrate doing our jobs. Maybe if I write a big chunk of code and it successfully compiles and links, I should jump up, windmill my arms, and shout "Oof! Oof! I pwned that do-while loop, oof, oof, who let the dogs out, oof oof. Oh yeah, look at that loop counter increment; I am THE MAN, I took that loop counter downtown and totally made it look like an unsigned short integer!"

Or maybe I just think "Well, that's pretty much what I get paid to do, and besides my ego is pretty secure and I don't require sustained pumping-up."

I finally had to admit to myself that I don't like watching basketball any more. The endless celebrating, taunting, pumping up, chest-bumping, huffing, puffing, and wall-to-wall tattoos finally got to me. I like playing basketball, and I like basketball the game, but I don't care for the NBA's apparent idolization of thuggery and nastiness (and I don't like how the only play they run any more is "clear out for the superstar"). And football isn't all that far behind. The only thing going in its favor is the fact that they wear more clothes and their tattoos aren't as visible.

And with that said, permit me to spin wildly in my chair and shout "Oh YEAH, I totally made this post my bitch! Boo-yah!"

The Envelope Please

2010-11-29T19:50:00.000-08:00

I got my PET scan results today, and they're good. Remission is still holding - there's been no real change since the last scan. The disturbed nodes are still scarred and oversized, but not growing and not particularly active in a metabolic sense. And nothing's cropped up elsewhere. I am, for the moment at least, not afflicted with cancer.

Some people might celebrate this by going to Disneyland. Others might pop a beer. I believe I might dig out an old Monogram X-15A2 and convert it to a delta-winged X-15A5. Or maybe dig my Special Hobby 1/32nd X-15 out from under the bed and build it. Either way, I strongly suspect an X-15 is going to be involved.

Scanxiety

2010-11-28T17:53:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow I get the results of my PET scan. It'll probably be good news, but I suspect that cancer is going to leave as many scars on my mind as it did on my body. One of them is going to be a chronic nagging - not fear, really, more like irrational dread - that it's coming back, even when it isn't.

So.

I haven't watched the Food Network in a while, but I started to tune in again last week. I see that little has changed in my absence. There are a few new competition shows, but by and large, it's the same bunch of people. I'm a little surprised to see that Chopped is still on - I figured that culinary clinker was doomed to sink of its own unappetizing weight - and this new "Neurotic Chefs of Beverly Hills" appeals to me about as much as a good-sized slug of dacarbazine. But there's Ina Garten, and that's a relief. I'm also glad to see Bobby Flay is still gainfully employed. And Michael Symon grows on me; maybe he's growing into the job. And there's a new Iron Chef, I see. Pretty soon there'll be enough of them to play basketball, and won't that be fun, watching Masaharu Morimoto drive the baseline and dunk over Mario Batali. "In your FACE, Pasta-Man!"

Ace of Cakes is still on, and that's good. But it doesn't seem to have much to do with cakes any more; it's mostly the madcap antics of the quirky folk at the bakery. As long as you make that switch and don't expect anything technical, it's still fun. And Dinner: Impossible, starring Robert Irvine's Gigantic Arms. That seems only right and proper. And Paula Deen is still ya'lling and deep-frying butter, just as she should.

I watched the Cooking Channel the other day, but was rapidly driven away by the sheer smugness of it all. It doesn't seem to have much to do with cooking; it's mostly about status and style, and every time I switched to it, my Smug-O-Meter began to beep. The show where some numbskull insists that real hamburgers are fried on a slab of black iron was the coup de grace. I'll have my hamburgers done on a grill in the back yard, with lettuce and tomato and mustard, and if this stylish nabob doesn't like it, well, I'll fetch the stepladder... I live in Arizona. I was born in Arizona. And I don't necessarily accept the Received Wisdom that the New York City interpretation of a hamburger is the only valid one. (Michael J. Nelson once wrote that New York City is fine as long as you don't mind warm blasts of urine-scented air coming up out of gratings in the streets. And I find that I DO mind them.)

And the commercials! I like wine as much as the next person, but come on, at some point I have to throw a flag and call Excessive Smugness on the commercials (ten yards and loss of down). "This wine is fruity and round, but with hints of flint and tinder, and subtle tones of uranium hexaflouride that drape on the palate like the Golden Fleece." And what they really mean is "Won't your friends be shocked at your eliteness when they see you quaffing this shit!"

Of course, I'm drinking a glass of Spicy Hot V-8 juice, so I'm obviously a Philistine.

A possible exception is "Food(ography)", now with 100% more Mo Rocca than before. It has an Alton Brown-esque flavor, though without Alton's penchant for tedious amateur thespianism, and Mo himself doesn't bother me. So we'll see. The episode I watched was mostly about Julia Child, which seems like a good first step to me - if you're going to do a geek show about cooking, you'd best start by honoring the giants, in the same way that science shows on the Science Channel had best start out with a healthy amount of smooching on Albert Einstein's backside.

Thanksgiving

2010-11-25T19:03:00.001-08:00

Well, it turns out that dining out on Thanksgiving isn't the same experience as having it at home. It wasn't bad, it just didn't really feel like Thanksgiving to me. Just another family dinner - not that there's anything wrong with that. That's easy for me to say, though, since I'm not the one who roasts the turkey, or for that matter paid for lunch today.

I was hoping I'd have my PET scan results by now, but I probably won't hear anything until the 29th. I have no reason to believe that the results will be unfavorable, but still, I'd like to know. There's a theory that if the oncologist doesn't call you in a mild panic that they didn't find anything distressing, but my oncologist has not always been particularly efficient at returning phone calls and it is possible to hypothesize that he prefers to give bad news in person.

And I'm not going to think about that. I wanted to be thankful for still being alive, but now I'm starting to wear myself down. So it could be time for a cup of Earl Grey and a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, a combination that always makes me feel better.

A CNN Thing

2010-11-18T23:27:00.001-08:00

I read a thing on CNN today - I call it a "thing" because it certainly wasn't news.

Anyway, apparently someone has decided that some email domain names are "more awesome" and some are "less awesome." Myname@gmail.com is more awesome than Myname@yahoo.com. Having your own domain name is the most awesome, and having an AOL domain is the least awesome.

How interesting. Smug hipsters, no longer content with merely turning clothes and gadgets into status totems, have now made email domains into a minefield of angst and inadequacy. According to their resident expert, having an AOL email account means that you're probably seventy years old and haven't changed your email address since 1997. Well, I'm not seventy, but I haven't changed my email address in years - since everyone knows this one, it seems easier to keep it than to change it just to fit in with a bunch of idiotic techno-hipsters. And somehow I really don't think that getting my own domain name will make me a different person in the morning.

What fun it must be to live in a world where everything, literally everything, is some kind of status struggle, where lives and reputations hinge on having the right email address, listening to the right kind of music, or driving the right kind of car.

They go to the store to buy paper plates, and it's all so damned elite. "These paper plates are made from the finest Canadian boreal fir trees, and are processed without bleach in a carbon-neutral plant employing dispossessed Cambodian smallholders." Or, "These paper plates are hand-made by soulful artists in Brooklyn, with whom I've gotten severely gassed on crappy American beer." Geez. How can I possibly compete with that, when my main criteria for buying paper plates is finding ones thick enough that the hot food doesn't fry my genitals when I eat dinner in front of the TV?

There are, I believe, certain experiences one goes through in life that put things like that into proper perspective. Once, when I was going through chemo, my innards were so devastated I had diarrhea and I had to throw up at the same time. As distasteful as it sounds, I had to decide (and right sharply at that) which spurting end of me was most profitably aimed at the toilet. Do that a few times and you realize that all your hipster pretensions, all your yuppie status displays, all your elite stances don't make any difference at all.

Ultimately, all that matters is which end you aim at the toilet.

PET Scan

2010-11-13T23:32:00.001-08:00

I have another PET scan Monday morning - at least I think I do. The oncology clinic called back and confirmed the scan, so I guess it's really going to happen this time. Scheduling PET scans is more ticklish than most medical procedures because of the brief half-life of the radioactive materials involved - in this case, a radioactive isotope of fluorine masquerading as oxygen, I believe. It doesn't exist in nature and has to be whipped up in a cyclotron, which I find endlessly interesting. In fact, I find the whole notion of beta decay endlessly interesting. How does it do that? And why??

I guess if we knew why beta decay happened, we'd all be wiser.

Anyway, I have no symptoms of cancer, so I expect the PET scan to be something of a formality. My leg is still somewhat swollen and sullenly uncooperative, but I think that's just a fact of life. I don't seem to have any bumps, lumps, night sweats, unexplained itches or that odd subliminal feeling that my body is up to something stupid.

But you never know, and if it's all right with everyone, I think I'll "go ahead on" (as Joe Don Baker said) and worry about it anyway, just in case. I personally find PET scans painless and restful, but I also find the business of waiting for the results quite stressful. I remember once I was waiting for a biopsy result to come back. I knew I still had cancer - I could feel the nodes in my neck and groin - so there wasn't that much stress. I knew I still had cancer; all the test could do was confirm what I already knew. But when you think you don't have cancer, the tests become even more stressful. You want good news so bad you can taste it, but at the same time, cancer has a weird inevitability that preys on the mind. It's like trying to keep Bermuda grass out of the garden - sure, there's no Bermuda in there now, but all it takes is one itty-bitty little Bermuda seed floating on the breeze and you've got real work on your hands. And all it takes is one mutant B lymphocyte to get a wild hair, and it all starts over again.

Back when I was going through chemo I used to listen to the song "Step Up" by Drowning Pool. I'm not a fan of the Drowning Pool ouerve, but that song had a certain accessibility, and it served as well as any other as a chemo fight song. But then I made the mistake of viewing the music video for it a few weeks ago. Oh dear. What is that thing on that guy's chin? And they're all so noodley!

I'm tempted to declare "Runes To My Memory" by Amon Amarth as the new fight song, because I happen to really like that song, and at least the guys in the band are fairly big and tough-looking. But I'm not sure the message of the song is one that I want sent down to my immune system. I want those little T-cells and whatnot to go around and kick the crap out of my mutant B lymphocytes, not sit around lamenting the fact that they're dying next to a river deep in the land of the Rus and they'll never make it home.

"Gods Of War Arise" by Amon Amarth might be a better choice. (In case you haven't noticed, I've been listening to Amon Amarth a good deal lately. Normally I just pick and choose the one or two Amon Amarth songs that I like, but I was fiddling with one of those gadgets that broadcasts your iPod on an unused FM radio station, and inasmuch as I was going about 70 miles per hour on the freeway, I didn't think that screwing around with the iPod was such a hot idea. So I just let it play, and the song "Asator" came on. I'd never really listened to it all the way through, and it really isn't that good, but about halfway through they drop into a thrashy sort of riff that kind of reminds me of "Dark Transmission" by Vader (or "Trans Dark Mission" as they say more than once). And yes, that's a good thing. So I've been listening to that Amon Amarth album ever since, trying to see what other good things I've missed.)

Getting Ready for Thanksgiving

2010-11-13T21:22:00.000-08:00

It occurs to me that this is the first Thanksgiving in a long time when I haven't felt bad for one reason or another. Thanksgiving 2008 was ruined because I had advanced cancer and didn't know it; I only knew I was a wreck. Thanksgiving 2009 was ruined because I was rushing back and forth from the hospital getting ready for the first bone marrow transplant. Or actually having it, I don't really remember.

So I intend to celebrate this year in a way that makes up for the last two years. I may eat the whole goddamned pie, just because.

Table Finis

2010-11-13T17:15:00.000-08:00

The table project is at an end. Not bad for just goofing around. Professionals and experts will no doubt spot a million things wrong with it, but if they'd seen it in the "before" state, even they'd have to say it was an improvement.

Unless they like gloss black furniture.

Not Such A Bummer

2010-11-10T15:09:00.001-08:00

My wife's table-thing, after being stripped, sanded, stained, and given one coat of varnish. Tomorrow I'll sand the varnish lightly and give it another dose, and will repeat that until nausea sets in or she demands that I give it back. Lots better than the old gloss black paint, if I do say so myself.

Bummer

2010-11-10T15:06:00.000-08:00

Bummer. It doesn't look too bad in this picture, but that tire is roont, as they say. There's a rip in the sidewall and the valve stem actually sucked back in through the hole in the rim and vanished (yes, it's so old it isn't tubeless). Drat.

Restart

2010-11-08T22:59:00.001-08:00

I haven't done much around the house in the last few years. It's hard to attend to various jobs, tasks and chores when your sternum has just been sawed apart, or when you're so messed up from ESHAP chemotherapy you hallucinate that all your skin has fallen off, or when the tandem bone marrow transplant renders you so weak you can't walk twenty feet without stopping.

But I'm feeling much better these days, and I'm starting to do more things. I still get pretty tired if I do too much, and I still have occasional outbreaks of the blackest sort of depression - a gift of chemo, I'm sure. But I try to work through these things, and by and large I succeed. There are still things I can't do very well because my leg is uncooperative, and I don't have a whole lot of cardiopulmonary reserve yet. But I try.

I'm trying to emulate our neighbor, Doug. I'm not sure where Doug is from. Oklahoma, judging from his accent. But wherever he's from, he's tough. He isn't a big man by any means, but he's tough and he just won't quit. Something happened to his shoulder and he's basically lost the use of one arm completely, but he still goes up ladders and drags bales of hay off the top of his haystack with only one functional arm. I'm not sure I could do that. Not because bales of hay are too heavy, but because I have acrophobia and find the experience of being on top of a tall ladder most unpleasant.

As Justin McKee would say, "He's tougher than boiled owl."

I'm not as tough as boiled owl. But I'm trying.

X-15

2010-11-06T03:15:00.000-07:00

And now, just because, a photograph of an X-15 high speed research aircraft, taken just at the moment of release from its NB-52 carrier aircraft, probably somewhere over southwestern Nevada. The photograph was probably taken in the early 1960s. Note the white astronaut helmet of the pilot barely visible through the window - yes, there's really a guy in there, and he's about to light the fire on a rocket engine with a thrust of about 60,000 pounds, and in a scant few moments he's going to leave that shiny F-104 Starfighter in the background behind like a dog leashed to a fireplug.

The X-15 has a long and distinguished record, racking up many "firsts" and a very solid body of research data in its 199 flights. Until the first flight of the Space Shuttle, it was the fastest and highest-flying manned winged aircraft ever flown, and most of its pilots are today considered astronauts even though for policy reasons NASA and the US Air Force didn't seem to give X-15 pilots astronaut wings.

Back when I was in elementary school, NASA used to send packages of photographic prints and data sheets to elementary schools. Whatever else could be said for NASA back then, they took excellent photographs, and their shiny prints were highly prized. All us kids were squabbling over the photographs in the NASA school kit, most of them color stuff from the later Gemini missions, but suddenly I saw a photograph of this strange black airplane. Back then I knew nothing about hypersonic flight, rocket engines, thermal issues in high speed flight, or much of anything else. I just knew that when I saw that picture of that airplane, I went oh... my... God...

I am still an X-15 junkie. Though I am widely quoted as saying that the Saturn V is the most impressive machine ever made by mere humans, the X-15 is still my favorite airplane. We just don't seem to do things like this any more. We (meaning NASA) seem to have gotten so caught up in PowerPoint presentations, program management mumbo-jumbo and political wrangling we just don't seem build things like the X-15 any more, or ask men like Pete Knight or Neil Armstrong to take them out see what they'll do.

What, No NDA?

2010-11-06T02:11:00.001-07:00

I don't want to go into too much detail on who I work for, or what exactly I do. I don't necessarily have an NDA with my employer or contractor; suffice it to say that I'm a freelance contract test engineer and the fewer names I spill, the better.

Mainly I work in the area of airliner collision avoidance systems, known generally as "TCAS", which I think stands for "Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System". As an oversimplification, it's a two-part system, with each aircraft being equipped with a transponder and a TCAS interrogator. There are a bunch of different modes and sub-modes, but fundamentally an interrogator transmits an encoded signal that basically reads "Who are you and how high are you?" The transponder receivers the interrogation and transmits a reply that basically reads "This is me, and I'm at 15,000 feet."

The TCAS interrogator then works out the approximate range by which whisper-shout step triggered the reply and the approximate bearing by differential signal strength and phase as seen by four directional antennae. It then does some spooky math on all this and determines if the "intruder" (as the replying airplane is known) is too close or likely to get too close in the near future (and if so, it has what I like to think of as a "conniption fit" and instructs the flight crew to take evasive action - when the voice advisory system is working, you get all sorts of interesting voice messages, like CLIMB! CLIMB NOW! CLIMB, CROSSING, CLIMB! And then, at the very end, the meek little Clear of conflict... Voice advisory is a whole 'nuther subject. One of the voice messages you can get is the mysterious word "MINIMUM", which I believe is announced as the aircraft is nearing its decision height in an instrument approach, or perhaps decelerating toward its minimum safe flight speed, I'm not sure, though I think that one gets you "AIRSPEED". Anyway, a woman at work once asked me "Why does that thing keep saying enema, enema?")

It's more complicated than it sounds, especially when everything is working in full Mode-S mode and transferring data back and forth by means of DPSK modulation (I've always had this odd "wouldn't it be a fun world" fantasy where women are more impressed by the fact that I know that DPSK stands for differential phase shift keying than by some guy's fancy-shmancy Corvette, and where they say "Is that a long Mode-S interrogation you have there, or are you just happy to me?").

Anyway, among other things I design the hardware used to test and calibrate all this stuff, and write the software that runs the tests themselves. It's fun, except that the airways are now so crowded that there's a constant barrage of interrogations and replies flying back and forth. All of this traffic makes it hard to perform certain tests - when you're trying to get the unit to reply to a single interrogation while everyone else on the planet is transmitting away, well, it can be a mess. Synchronous garble is fun. Weird FRUIT is even more fun. I'm not exactly sure what FRUIT stands for - I've seen at least two different versions, but I prefer False Reply Uncorrelated In Time, meaning a reply that comes at a time when one is not expected...

The short version of all this hoohah is that to get a quiet enough environment (from a radio frequency point of view) it is sometimes necessary to set up your equipment and run your tests in a screen room. A screen room is just a metal room, almost always copper, usually either solid or what looks like window screen made out of copper. The power feeds have special filters, and even the air conditioning ducts have special traps in them that in some cases look like metal honeycombs, specially sized to reject radio signals at a particular frequency (in my line of work, the frequencies of interest are 1030 MHz and 1090 MHz). The doors are usually solid metal, and are secured with mammoth latches that wouldn't seem out of place on a battleship.

The point is that these screen rooms are like submarines. Once you're in and the door is latched, you're in your own private world. You can't see the outside world. You can't hear the outside world. Your cell phone doesn't have any bars at all. Wireless network devices don't work. And for some reason, such screen rooms are always either insufferably hot or bone-chillingly cold. I've worked in both. The hot ones are like being in a sauna; at the end of the day you're sweaty and kind of ripe, and all you really want to do is go home and take a shower. The cold ones are worse, if anything - your body takes on a deep, persistent chill that's very hard to break. You know your screen room is too cold when you go outside in a Phoenix summer just to warm up. And I note that ever since chemo, I'm much more sensitive to cold, though I tend to blame everything on chemo. "I dropped a hammer on my toe; damn I hate chemo!"

I've been working nights lately, meaning for the last couple of months. There are two real reasons for this. The first is that there's only one test station, and two different groups of people want to use it (Production, so they can test and ship boxes and make money, and me, so I can develop the remainder of the tests). The second is that there's less air traffic in general at night. In particular, the VFR traffic at the nearby airport stops, so there's just less of a mess in the airwaves. Though I don't think you need a transponder for strict VFR operation, they always do, and they're always a-squittering away in Mode-A or Mode-C, either of which can cause synchronous garble with Mode-S ("Crap! It missed three replies! I wish those flight students would turn off their transponders!") (One of the unsolved mysteries in this whole ATCRBS (Air Traffic Control Radar Beacon System) business is why an unsolicited reply is called a "squitter". But sometimes when someone tells me something I didn't want to know about, I catch myself thinking "Oh great, he's squittering again.")

My point, really, is that working nights in a copper screen room is doubly isolating. I hardly see anyone at all in the span of any given week. There are a few people loitering around the place in the late afternoon when I get there, but otherwise, it's just me, the cleaning crew, and the night guard. And since they are not typically fluent in English and I am not fluent in Spanish, there isn't much opportunity for conversation beyond the occasional friendly nod. It's just me and my Finnish and Polish death metal.

So those are my workdays lately: bone-chilling cold and levels of isolation that probably rival those of a nuclear submarine on patrol. But hey, at least the traffic is pretty light going home.

So the next time you're on approach to some airport and you sense that your airplane suddenly stops descending and climbs a little bit, look over at the passenger next to you and say "DPSK, you know..."

Sound Infidelity

2010-11-03T01:25:00.000-07:00

I dislike my new headphones. I have trouble with "ear buds", frankly, and I prefer not to use them. They fall out, mainly. Either I have enormous ear canals that one could fit a squash into, or I have really tiny ear canals and the ear buds won't go in, but either way, they won't stay in.

So I normally listen to music using headphones. But the other day the right channel in my old headphones went out. Listening to music with one ear makes me constantly feel like I'm turning to the left, like some kind of 1960s NASA "nausea chair" experiment. So I got some new ones. They're bigger than the old ones. Beefier. And better at sealing out ambient noise. But man, they sound awful. The low end is gone. Just gone. The midrange is gone. All there is is treble, and a whole lot of overly bright, clashy treble at that. You know your bottom end is gone when you can't hear the double bass drum in an Amon Amarth song. And my old headphones were way loud - with everything turned up, they were loud enough to hear across the room, loud enough to probably cause me permanent loss. But these new ones are like a carpeted library - even with all the amps spun wide open and pumping out all the Joules they can, everything has a curiously hushed quality.*

It's a little like hearing the world as though it had been mixed by early primitive black metal bands. Everything sounds wiry, abraded, muddy...

So I tinkered with the various equalizer settings, hunting for something that would make the new headphones sound tolerable. Only one did: Spoken Word. Is it just me, or is there something fundamentally wrong with that?

* Back in my youth I had a component stereo system that included, among other things, an audio power amplifier that would pump about 2KWrms. It was so ugly I kept it in a closet all by itself, and its heat sinks were so heavy they caused a measurable perturbation in the orbit of Neptune. I spun it wide open one day because I really wanted to hear the shit out of the cellos in the opening part of Saturn by Holst. I don't know what the wavelength of the fundamental tone was (I read somewhere it was 32 feet), but it seemed to cause my whole house to resonate and the air conditioning vent fell clean out of the wall, screws and all.

Proposition 203

2010-11-01T14:08:00.000-07:00

We've been getting a lot of phone calls from various groups trying to get us to vote against Proposition 203, which if passed would permit medically-supervised use of marijuana. I'm not here to debate the fine points of the Proposition itself, since it is my general belief that ballot propositions are so closely-worded you need to be a lawyer or a specialist to make sense of them.

But I do wish to make two points.

The first is that one of the phone calls against Prop 203 was funded by the Arizona Cardinals football team. Wait a second. You guys get the taxpayers to build you a new stadium, and then you turn into an advocacy group? Am I the only one who thinks that a commercial enterprise that was bankrolled in part by the taxpayers ought to have the good grace to keep its mouth firmly shut? And I ask you this - how many Cardinals fans have a brewski at the game? If you're going to piss and moan about destructive drugs, you may as well drop the hypocrisy and add alcohol to the list. Oh, but that might eat into the Cardinals bottom line! Can't have that.

The second is that when I was going through my many chemo treatments, if my oncologist (the inestimable Dr. Sarkodee-Adoo) had permitted me to smoke a little marijuana to help with the daunting side-effects of chemotherapy, I would have. In the words of Captain Willard from the movie Apocalypse Now, "Absolutely goddamn right." I'd probably have tried to eat a hash brownie, though it probably wouldn't have stayed down long enough to do any good.

And I'm hardly a stoner.

The pro-marijuana groups make me chuckle though. They always have some frail bald woman who is undergoing savage chemo and asks "Please, if it'll help me get through this hell, can I please smoke a little marijuana?" And right next to her are a bunch of stoners with scraggly hair and seed burns on their shirts saying "Like, it's totally natural, dude." Get your message in order here. Middle America, whose votes you need to pass things like this, sees only the stoners and thinks "Well, I'm not in favor of that." And so the frail bald woman continues to suffer.

It's like the gay rights advocacy groups. All Middle America remembers are the guys in tiny leather shorts dry-humping one another in the gay pride parades, and thus the message is lost. I suppose as a general proposition I accept the notion that people have the right to wear tiny leather shorts and dry-hump one another, but it isn't a question of what's right or not; it's a question of how you manage your message so you don't alienate people who are not generally committed to your cause in the first place.

And in closing, I offer this thought. The "War on Drugs" has failed. Prohibition failed. All of these attempts to legislate morality inevitably fail. At what point does one accept the inevitable - and tax it appropriately? Personally, I'd rather marijuana be legal, regulated and taxed than see all that money flow into the hands of drug cartels and smugglers. Since it is obvious that marijuana use cannot ever be stopped by passing ever more draconian laws, the choice (it seems to me) is who you want the money to go to: your local municipality, or the drug cartels. I know which way I lean.

Cunnel Quaritch

2010-10-27T18:07:00.001-07:00

Heap Big Numbnuts

Just so we're on the same page, I'm referring to the character, not the actor. I don't know if this will be Stephen Lang's favorite role when he gets around to making a final summing-up of his career, but he, Stephen Lang, was certainly good in this role.

Cunnel Quaritch, on the other hand, is a complete numbnuts.

Proposition 1: The Navi have a single target they must defend. It's not just a high-value target, it's a maximum-value target.

Proposition 2: The Navi have no means of defending said maximum-value target from orbital bombardment.

Proposition 3: Cunnel Quaritch has at his disposal a groovy VTOL shuttle that is capable of not just exo-atmospheric flight, but actual orbital operations.

Proposition 4: Dropping a suitably large inert mass (say, a bulldozer) on the maximum-value target from orbit may not destroy it the first time around, but if you repeat it about 20 or 30 times, the job can eventually be considered done.

Proposition 5: There's more than enough cheddar in the ground to pay for all of this.

So what does Quaritch do?

Well, I guess it wouldn't be much of a movie if they did it the the way I think they should have. It would be more like the closing scenes of Metaluna in the movie This Island Earth, with those doggone Zagon meteors smashing everything flat, and we'd have to listen to Barber's Adagio for Strings as the Navi come to the belated understanding that sometimes even the fanciest flying dragon is no match for a seventy-ton bulldozer traveling at oh, say, 20,000 miles per hour. Physics be physics, man, whether you're flying the Hero Dragon or not.

My point is that once Quaritch and The Company (was it Weyland-Yutani, as in Aliens?) had decided that matters had degenerated into a "shit-fight", Quaritch made one serious operational blunder after another.

German generals made a sort of second career after World War Two at blaming everything on Hitler. It was Hitler's fault the British Army got away at Dunkirk. It was Hitler's fault the Luftwaffe was unable to subdue the RAF. It was Hitler's fault that the Red Army handed them their hats at Stalingrad. It was Hitler's fault that nobody could come up with a good answer to the USAAF and RAF bomber offensives. It was Hitler's fault the cream of the German Army got plowed into the topsoil at Kursk. It was Hitler's fault that German radar research was so bad they never realized that the British were using high-frequency centimetric radar against German U-boats. Of course, this wasn't all Hitler's fault, but when you've got an opportunity to offload blame on someone that nobody will stand up for and defend, you take it. (If I were Iraqi, for example, I'd blame my fallen arches on Saddam Hussein, and who would argue otherwise?)

But in the case of Avatar, Quaritch owns all the command mistakes.

People occasionally accuse me of siding with the Company in the movie. That's not necessarily true - my own feelings on the matter are complex, but somewhere in amongst them is the understanding that the Company could give me electricity and the Navi could not, and that's a pretty powerful argument in favor of collaboration. But in any event, my real point is that contrary to the "life lessons" people think they've taken away from the movie, naturalistic spiritual harmony counts for exactly squat in the face of extremely high kinetic energies.