Chrononautic Log

August 31, 2005

But you should all go read Cherie Priest instead.

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From ArtsJournal’s ongoing hurricane coverage: A children’s hospital is reportedly under siege by looters. Not supposed to happen. Where’s the solidarity? Where’s the community spirit? Would this happen in New York?

(N.B.: I’ll cease to be freaked out by this if I find out there are not in fact any patients in the children’s hospital at this time. I’d be tempted to loot a hospital under the circumstances myself, I expect. I’d be one of the folks looting the Wal-Mart for sure, and what I’d be doing is trying to organize a community bucket brigade to loot all the bottled water, canned food, and first aid supplies. In the immortal words of Sigourney Weaver: They can bill me.)

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Update: The Times-Picayune blog has the less Mad Max “Also, looters tried to break into Children’s Hospital, the governor’s office said”

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Update: I take that back.

Late Tuesday, Gov. Blanco spokeswoman Denise Bottcher described a disturbing scene unfolding in uptown New Orleans, where looters were trying to break into Children's Hospital.

Bottcher said the director of the hospital fears for the safety of the staff and the 100 kids inside the hospital. The director said the hospital is locked, but that the looters were trying to break in and had gathered outside the facility.

The director has sought help from the police, but, due to rising flood waters, police have not been able to respond.

Bottcher said Blanco has been told of the situation and has informed the National Guard. However, Bottcher said, the National Guard has also been unable to respond.

Though it’s still not the Assault on Precinct 13 scenario I was hearing in the word siege.

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Update: It’s all a big lie, apparently:

Doug Mittelstaedt, vice-president of Human Resources for Children’s Hospital in New Orleans, said one of the biggest issues at the hospital on Wednesday was debunking the prevalent rumor that looters had stormed the hospital.

Mittelstaedt said things actually were operating smoothly at the hospital — the generator was running efficiently and efforts to relocate patients were going well — but fighting the rumor was a major issue.

Officials had to lock the doors of the hospital because people had arrived, apparently thinking there was a mob scene and they could get in on looting.

Nice. (Thanks for the link, Rob.)

(By the way, some of the permalinks on NOLA.com are broken, because the name attributes of the <a> tags have #s in them; you may need to double the # in the link if you want to post it somewhere.)

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From BoingBoing: in Ned Sublette’s introduction to “Email attributed to NOLA rescue worker”:

The poorest 20% (you can argue with the number — 10%? 18%? no one knows) of the city was left behind to drown. This was the plan. Forget the sanctimonious bullshit about the bullheaded people who wouldn't leave. The evacuation plan was strictly laissez-faire. It depended on privately owned vehicles, and on having ready cash to fund an evacuation. The planners knew full well that the poor, who in New Orleans are overwhelmingly black, wouldn't be able to get out. The resources — meaning, the political will — weren’t there to get them out.

White per capita income in Orleans parish, 2000 census: $31,971. Black per capita: $11,332. Median household income in B.W. Cooper (Calliope) Housing Projects, 2000: $13,263.

At least it looks like, contra the initial impressions of the contrasting photos and captions in “Black people loot, white people find?” (also BoingBoing), the difference between “looting” and “finding” may be the difference between AP and AFP/Getty, not between black and white.

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August 30, 2005

Am I the only one wondering why this NYT story, “Rape Charge Follows Marriage to a 14-Year-Old,” about a 22-year-old Nebraska man married (in Kansas) to a 14-year-old girl and charged with statutory rape, focuses almost exclusively on him and his parents, with only one quote (on college more kids [Thanks, Jed]: “But later on. Much later on.”) from her?

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August 29, 2005

I am now the proud possessor of the Museum of Jurassic Technology’s lovely hardbound Jubilee Catalogue. You, I suspect, are not.

(Thanks to Meghan for tilting the Plane of Existence of my 1996 visit to the Museum, postponing the day on which its Perverse Experience Boundary crosses my Cone of Obliscence.)

(And damn William James and Geoffrey Sonnabend for being born half a century apart, anyway. They so need to go on an adventure together! With Gérard Depardieu as Louis Agassiz.)

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Oops, sorry, wrong Grimm. But clobberin’ is what the reviews have mostly been doing to Terry Gilliam’s new movie. Non-reviewer Jamie Zawinski, who was apparently driven bugfuck crazy by the Grimm experience, tells us that “Van Helsing was a far, far better movie,” and it’s not as though he’d somehow been fooled byVan Helsing.

Anyway, having sat through Van Helsing myself, not to mention such explosive summer blockbusters* as The Matrix Reloaded and Star Wars: Episode III, I didn’t think Gilliam’s Brothers Grimm was nearly that bad. It wasn’t even as bad as The Village. In several places, yes, it was in-a-bad-way Hollywoody, and yes, some of the fairy-tale logic was illogical in a merely illogical way (as opposed to a fairy-tale way), but the performances weren’t at all bad and there were some truly Gilliam moments. (The Gingerbread Man scene alone was worth the price of admission. Matinee admission, anyway.)

If you go in hoping for Grimm to be to fantasy what Twelve Monkeys was to time travel, well, yeah, you’ll be disappointed. On the other hand, if you go in as if it was just another committee-written summer movie, you may be pleasantly surprised.

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P.S.: Gwenda’s description of the film as “a terror of mediocrity” is not exactly undeserved. However, one could do a lot worse with one’s moviegoing dollar, this summer, than mediocrity.

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* I guess “explosive blockbuster” is kind of redundant, being as a blockbuster is a kind of bomb. Hey — bomb, Hollywood. Think about that.

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And Mississippi, too.

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August 26, 2005

Seeing matters arriving at this unpromising situation, Bunyip Bluegum interposed by saying, “Rather than allow this happy occasion to be marred by unseemly recriminations, let us, while admitting that our admirable friend, Sam, may have unwittingly disturbed the composure of our admirable friend, Bill, at the expense of our admirable Puddin’s gravy, let us, I say, by the simple act of extending the hand of friendship, dispel in an instant these gathering clouds of disruption. In the words of the poem —

   ‘Then let the fist of Friendship
      Be kept for Friendship’s foes.
   Ne’er let that hand in anger land
      On Friendship’s holy nose.’”

— Norman Lindsay, The Magic Pudding

In honor of Australian fiction, I’ve changed the icon for this weblog’s Art category from this abstract ornament thingy —

— to this noble Puddin’.

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Who knows? Maybe they’ve got Tim Powers or James Blaylock working for them. (Or Brendan Doyle himself — he wasn’t exactly Dr. Ethics, was he?)

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Fig. 1. Best metaphor for the Internet ever, courtesy of Cat and Girl.

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August 25, 2005

Hey, Why Aren’t More Australian Things Being Written That I Like?

Hey, why aren’t more Australian things being written that I like? That is to say, I used to read a lot more cool stuff by Australians, but now I don’t. What is up with that? The decline of Australian things that I like has its roots in Australian societal changes that include the increase in things that I don’t like. I also think that there used to be a lot more interesting stuff by Australians out there, but now there isn’t. In fact a lot of my Australian friends and colleagues have told me this, and I happen to agree. I did happen to read a couple of Australian stories recently that I liked, and they were pretty good. But those were the exceptions. Why is this? Australian stories used to be adventures but now they’re too adventurous. They are confusing and I don’t like that! Sturgeon’s Law still applies but it also applies to the 10% of Australian stuff that isn’t crap. So needless to say there’s more Australian crap. Look, just start publishing more good Australian stories that I like if you want to save the genre in Australia. I just know that there are other people who like what I like. (Young Australian readers in particular like what I like; it was what I liked at that age.) Clearly, something needs to be done about this to protect Australian publishing venues that have remained unchanged since the 1940s. You know, the good old days.

(I’m just kidding! Apologies to Alan. And to Justine. And to Australia!)

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August 23, 2005

Would indexicals still be interesting if you stripped all the example sentences down to something like Chomsky’s deep structure? In other words, is this really an interesting fundamental problem, or is it a historical accident, resulting from Western philosophy doing most of its work over the last two dozen centuries in a handful of Indo-European and Semitic languages?

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August 22, 2005

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling pretty depressed about the ultimate fate of the universe lately. All this damn dark energy accelerating everything —

For w=-3/2, the Milky Way will get stripped roughly 60 million years before the Big Rip. Curiously, when this occurs the horizon will still be ~70 Mpc, so there may still be other observable galaxies that we will also see stripped apart (although given the time delay from distant objects, we will see the Milky Way destroyed first). A few months before the end of time, the Earth will be ripped from the Sun, and ~30 minutes before the end the Earth will fall apart. . . molecules and then atoms will be torn apart roughly 10-19 seconds before the end, and then nuclei and nucleons will get dissociated in the remaining interval. . . . .

The end of structure, from cosmic, macroscopic scales down to the microscopic, leads us to remark that our present epoch is unique from the viewpoint that at no other time are non-linear structures possible. When the phantom energy becomes strong enough, gravitational instability no longer works and the Universe becomes homogeneous. Eventually, individual particles become isolated: points separated by a distance greater than 3δt(1+w)/(1+3w) at a time trip-δt cannot communicate before the Big Rip. Therefore, the dominance of the phantom energy signals the end of our brief era of cosmic structure . . .

(Caldwell, Kamionkowski, and Weinberg, “Phantom Energy and Cosmic Doomsday”)

— it’s like the post-Einstein, post-Hubble version of the last chapter (chronologically speaking) of The Time Machine:

The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives — all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity.

Then a few weeks ago, as part of my ongoing plan to clear my bookshelves by taking boxes full of books in categories J, L, M, and N down to the used book store and trading them in for a much smaller number of more expensive books (it’s kind of a Zeno’s Paradox thing), I picked up Infinite Worlds: An Illustrated Voyage to Planets beyond Our Sun. And what do I find out, in between all the pretty pictures of hot Jupiters and pulsar planets? That most of the stars that will ever exist have already been formed, and that even if the universe’s rate of expansion isn’t accelerating, in another 10 trillion years we’ll have drawn down our whole account in the cosmic hydrogen bank, and Stelliferous Era will be over. That most of the history of the universe, like 1040 years of it, is going to be spent sitting in the dark waiting for protons to decay. (And even when they do, it’s not very exciting.)

So I was pleased to run across this post from Sean Carroll (of the U of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute, and one of the brains in the vat powering Cosmic Variance — which if you’ve read this far without your eyes glazing over, you probably should be reading):

So when we evolve to “empty space,” there is still some energy pushing the universe around; the resulting spacetime is called “de Sitter space.” Along with this energy comes a small nonzero temperature, which keeps all the fields in the universe gently fluctuating. Gentle or not, however, if we wait long enough we will find a really big fluctuation — one that is large enough to make inflation spontaneously begin. In other words, we are suggesting (although it's not original with us) that de Sitter space is unstable; it doesn’t last forever, but eventually starts inflating here and there. These little inflationary patches will ultimately convert into ordinary matter and radiation, leaving behind universes just like our own.

(Yay!)

And here is the fun part: this story can be told either forward or backward in time. In other words, you give me some state of the universe, chosen however you like. (Maybe you calculated the wavefunction of the universe, who knows.) I evolve it using the laws of physics. If Jennie and I are correct, it first empties out into a cold de Sitter space, dominated by a tiny shred of dark energy. But eventually we get lucky, and a small patch of inflating universe is born within this de Sitter background. This will happen at different places and times, give rise to a fractal distribution of spacetime geometry in the far future. And I can do the same thing going backwards in time from the initial state you gave me; the generic evolution is the same. It will empty out, and eventually begin to spontaneously inflate. So in the super-far past of our universe, before our “Big Bang” (which is nothing special in this picture), we will find other Big Bangs for which the arrow of time is running in the opposite direction. On the very largest scales, the entire universe is symmetric with respect to time.

So, you creationists: leave evolution to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Instead, thank God for vacuum fluctuations.

Still: I wish the cosmologists would hurry up and sort this stuff out. Heat death, Big Rip, brane collisions — how am I supposed to write my space opera if I don’t know how the universe is supposed to end?

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Update: Did I say most of the history of the universe is spent sitting in the dark waiting for protons to decay? I meant most of the history of the universe is spent sitting in the dark waiting for black holes to decay. Which takes even longer. Like, somewhere between 1083 and 10131 years, according to the University of Michigan.

And when you’re done with that, you can occupy yourself waiting for nothing.

Forever.

It’s like Sartre’s recipe for tuna casserole.

Except: Vacuum fluctuations! Yay!

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P.S. Justine — does this help? Or still bored?

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August 18, 2005

Hal “Smithereens” Duncan, over at the Night Shade boards:

I won’t deny that mainstream media is more than willing to jump on the easy “Sci-Fi Fans Beam Down To Glasgow“ story and exploit the freak show for all it’s worth, but at the same time, we have the masquerades and the filking and the furries and downright loons who buttonhole you in a corridor to tell you about the arcane mysteries hidden within this specific episode of Babylon 5 they’ve typed out from the video and are carrying with them in their bag (and that's a real incident I remember from last Worldcon). If crime fans all got together and wore trenchcoats and fired water pistols at each other, the media would treat that with the same Paxmanesque ye-e-e-e-es. The media exploit the spectacle of frippery, but they don’t craft it out of thin air; fandom is, for many people, partly about all that stuff, every convention a golden opportunity for exhibitionists to make spectacles of themselves. Part of me cringes, part of me says power to them; it’s not my idea of fun (largely) but po-faced puritanism isn’t my style so I’m not going to frown on it. But the subculture is absolutely begging to have the piss taken out of it.

Man, I would totally become a mystery writer if it meant trenchcoats and fedoras and water pistols.

Okay, I wouldn’t. But I would laugh at newspaper articles about mystery conventions.

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From the first of Stephany Aulenback’s questions to Kelly Link:

Diane Wakowski thinks that to work against your will is evidence of bourgeois neurosis.

A-ha!

I’m not lazy. I just refuse to succumb to bourgeois neurosis.

This bit of Kelly’s answer, by the way, is also reassuring:

And every time I come back to the story, I start again at the beginning and rework the story down to the place where I have to start writing new stuff. Writing new stuff is very satisfying, but I put it off as long as I can.

(Interview via Gwenda.)

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August 15, 2005

I’ve already spent a disproportionate amount of wordage on this question of self-indulgence (disproportionate, that is, to how much I actually care), over at Mr. Cheney’s Mumpsimus; but for you folks whose first-pass impulse is to interpret it in terms of reviewer distaste for originality: What do you think of the Turkey City critical term “Card Tricks in the Dark”?

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August 13, 2005

You get a chance to see “Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus,” you take it. You get a chance to see it when Jim White’s in town to talk about the film and play some tunes, so much the better.

(Also, anyone tell me if Harry Crews is worth reading? As a storyteller, in this thing, he was really something else.)

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August 11, 2005

Things I learned on the way to Scotland:

• JFK is the worst airport.
• Changing clothes in an airplane toilet takes longer than you think. But it sure beats the alternative.
• St. Pancras Station is always under construction.
• Shane Warne is one hell of a bowler. (His new hair plugs look pretty good, too.)
• On the train, when you close your eyes for a short nap, and wake up in love with the girl pushing the coffee trolley, it’s ’cause you’re jet-lagged.

Things I learned in Scotland:

• It’s not just London that at 5:30 in the morning looks like the set of 28 Days Later. (I blame the tower blocks.)
• Best UK con custom e-var: Free drinks for every panelist in the Green Room before each panel. We need to import this one, guys.
• Irn-Bru tastes better than you’d think.
• Scotch doesn’t kill germs. Tequila kills germs. (Thanks, Gwenda!)
• You can get away with bringing overheads to a panel, if they’re good overheads.
• It’s still possible to have a good panel about slipstream, even if infernokrusher only comes up once or twice. (Thanks, Hal!)
• I should have listened to everybody who told me to read Paul Park’s A Princess of Roumania.
• Ben and I, in combination, are too loud. (Yeah, I know I should have known this one already.)
• Christopher Rowe really is a genius.

Things I learned on the way back from Scotland:

• JFK is the worst airport.
• However, it has the nicest immigration officers.
• And the beer’s not bad, either.

But:

• WisCon is still the Best Con.

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August 10, 2005

Could the web be any more useful than this? (Okay, it’s mostly about board breaking, but still.)

Meet Chris, kung fu expert and general, all-round crazy person. Sometimes he breaks concrete blocks just for the hell of it.

Meet Michelle. She’s a physicist working at the Institute of Physics, but recently she’s been learning kung fu. In particular she wants to learn how to break wood with her bare hands, and find out the physics behind the feat.

(Via Cosmic Variance.)

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So I’m not saying I support Google bombing, but I’m also not saying it would be a bad thing if this statement on Intelligent Design had a higher PageRank than, say, the Intelligent Design Network.

Fig. 1. Charles Darwin has a Posse.
More portable than The Structure of Evolutionary Theory,
yet less confrontational than a Darwin fish.

This is probably also a good time to point out Project Steve to anyone who hasn’t heard about it yet:

The list of Steves is far more prestigious then any list of living scientists the creationists have ever produced. It includes Nobel Prize winners, members of the National Academy of Sciences, and influential authors such as Stephen Hawking. It is telling that creationist lists tend to be lean on practicing research biologists. In contrast, about two-thirds of the scientists on NCSE’s list are biologists, who are the most qualified to evaluate whether the evidence favors evolution. Another point is that the NCSE’s list includes the information on where the Steves got their degrees and their current position. By not doing so, the creationist lists do not make it obvious how many of the people listed are not practicing scientists.

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August 8, 2005

Really. To all of you.

And so do I. Thanks for the condolences, everybody. It’s cool, really. And well done, Bear. (I knew I was doomed as soon as I saw Hammered in an airport bookstore. :)) I couldn’t ask better than to lose to such an honorable opponent.

Best part of the Campbell part of the ceremony: So Stan Schmidt’s talking about the award, and reading the list of nominees, right? And on the stage about twenty feet behind him is a guy holding the actual plaque. And as Stan’s talking, the camera zooms in on it. And there’s ELIZABETH BEAR up there on the video screens over his head in letters two feet high. (Camera zooms out quickly, but — too late!)

It was such a relief, really.

(And we got a good laugh out of watching Stan — who I’m pretty sure had no idea about any of these video hijinks — digressing and fiddling with the envelope and trying to draw out the tension. Brilliant.)

Anyway: My airport hotel here in Heathrow, unlike the Glasgow Hilton, does have free wi-fi (insert joke about civilized England and barbarian Scotland here, only don’t ’cause you’ll probably get your teeth kicked in) but it only seems to work reliably when the computer is turned on its side. Which, even with me turned on my side, is not what you call an ergonomic typing position. Or maybe that’s not what’s going on and maybe it would work fine if I took it over to the desk again, but electromagnetic fields are the point where I stopped paying attention in high school physics (partly ’cause I didn’t believe in “field lines” but mostly ’cause I was too lazy to learn any equations I couldn’t derive from F=ma or PV=nRT) and it’s all a big mystery to me and I’m not going to risk it.

(But any net access at all feels like land after a shipwreck, God help me. It’s a very SFnal feeling. Like Case on the temperfoam in Cheap Hotel after the surgery. I miss everybody — even you folks I saw less than 24 hours ago, though not quite so much as the ones who couldn’t make it.)

So, more later. Maybe from JFK tomorrow evening, if my layover’s as long as it looks.

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