Chrononautic Log

October 28, 2005

Seriously. I seem to have misplaced it somewhere. A couple of months ago I was blithely talking about how I was getting tired of Seattle and how for my next trick I’d probably be moving to “either Shanghai or Switzerland.” Then this week while I was home with a mild case of stomach flu, and poking around on Monster.com, I found myself thinking about looking for jobs in Portland. Portland.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Portland, as such. A smaller, less screwed-up version of Seattle, from what I can tell. The downtown’s nice. It’s got bookstores and stuff. But it’s nothing special, either. There’s no reason for me to move to Portland.

Moving to Portland would be a really safe choice.

Yeah.

I did look at jobs in Shanghai. (Didn’t find much.) I looked at jobs in Sydney. (Pay cut.) I looked at jobs in Switzerland. I even applied for one job in Surrey (UK, not BC), though I’m not really expecting to hear back. (Just because I found it in Monster’s “work abroad” section, doesn’t mean the company that posted it is actually interested in hiring expatriates.) And I thought a bit about Singapore, and Seoul, and even some places that didn’t start with S.

And I just couldn’t get excited about it.

After I graduated from high school I moved, like, five times in ten years. Now I’ve been in the same place for five and, God help me, it’s easier to just keep rolling along. When did this happen?

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If cellular automata aren’t your thing, how about Jim Macdonald’s cutting (and professionally informed) review of the latest piece of first-person exploitware from Kuma Games (the people who brought you John Kerry’s Silver Star).

In the Training Scenario, the first thing you do is sneak up and shoot a guy in the back while he’s guarding a vehicle. He has a beard and is wearing one of those Afghani felt hats. “Congratulations!” I thought when I saw that. “You’ve just blown away one member of the small but tenacious local Christian community. He was guarding that truck for his brother, the plumber. Now the brother’s ticked off — and he was previously pro-American. He has access to lots of threaded pipe. A friend of his cousin knows where to get explosives. His father-in-law is an electrician, and can rig a simple firing circuit. When your patrol gets greased by a pipe bomb two weeks from now, you’ll know the reason why.”

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October 27, 2005

My head, for unrelated reasons, hurts too much for me to formulate a sensible response to Ted’s comments on the Sapir-Whorf post below. In the mean time, though, y’all can read this snarky yet informative review of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, by Cosma Shalzi.

Let me try to sum up. On the one hand, we have a large number of true but commonplace ideas, especially about how simple rules can lead to complex outcomes, and about the virtues of toy models. On the other hand, we have a large mass of dubious speculations (many of them also unoriginal). We have, finally, a single new result of mathematical importance, which is not actually the author’s. Everything is presented as the inspired fruit of a lonely genius, delivering startling insights in isolation from a blinkered and philistine scientific community.

(This time merely via The Valve.)

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October 25, 2005

“If our thinking was determined by language, we’d all be completely batshit.”

(Embedded in a flippant yet thoughtful review by Ray Davis of The Transition to Language, a collection of essays edited by Alison Wray. You’ve got to love an academic review that starts with WARNING: SPOILERS, don’t you?)

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October 21, 2005

Forster and Benioff are able craftsmen who apparently thought it might be interesting to seal themselves into a narrative box with no way out. Sorry about that, guys — I hope it was a growth experience.

— Andrew O’Hehir, reviewing “Stay” for Salon

On a side note: A week or two ago I was thinking of getting some T-shirts printed up that would read NO ONE WANTS YOUR IDEA.

Naturally I am now, on two or three different fronts, stuck for ideas.

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October 17, 2005

Update: Cosmic Variance has more. Sean, over there, does a good job explaining (for layfolks like myself) exactly what they were trying to say, mathematically, and what was fishy about it. It’s not as simple as the “just use GR” story one gets from skimming the paper.

In a paper that somehow got mentioned in the CERN Courier and on Slashdot, authors Cooperstock and Tieu have suggested that nonlinear effects in GR could explain flat rotation curves in spiral galaxies (one of the historically important pieces of evidence for dark matter). And in two papers, Kolb, Matarrese, Notari and Riotto and then just Kolb, Matarrese, and Riotto have suggested that nonlinear effects in GR could explain the acceleration of the universe (a key piece of evidence for dark energy). Are these people making sense? Are they crazy? Is this worth thinking about? Have they actually explained away the entire dark sector? (Answers: occasionally, possibly, yes, no.)

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Our picture of the universe may have just gotten a lot simpler. The major driver behind theories of non-baryonic (that is, not made out of the protons and neutrons that make up you and me and the rest of the observable universe) dark matter was that it seemed impossible to explain the way galaxies rotate without it — the observed motion only made sense if you assumed that the visible galaxy of normal stuff was surrounded by a massive halo of weird stuff.

Now two astrophysicists at the University of Victoria, Fred Cooperstock and Steven Tieu, have published a paper that makes all the weird stuff go away. According to Messrs. C. & T., the Newtonian approximation works well for stuff like the solar system because the planets’ contribution to the overall gravity of the system is so small compared to the sun’s, but it doesn’t work nearly as well for something like a galaxy where all the elements in the system (stars, in this case) contribute more or less equally. For that, they say, you need general relativity — and if you model a galaxy (which they did — ours and three or four others) with general relativity, explaining galactic rotation just with normal matter becomes pretty straightforward.

On the other hand, Mikolaj Korzynski of Warsaw University says that the Cooperstock-Tieu model requires, in addition to stars and dust and whatnot, a giant, infinitely thin disk cutting through the middle of the galaxy like a black hole in the shape of a cookie sheet, and “should therefore be considered unphysical.”

Still, the approach sounds promising. At least, it raises the bar for dark matter — I suspect more than one astrophysicist out there is now feverishly “doing sums” trying to relativistically replicate the Newtonian dark-matter halo model. Good times!

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October 16, 2005

Despite all my bitching, I managed to install MySQL and MediaWiki on my laptop this afternoon. I’ve just spent a happy seven hours transcribing scribbled notes and unwritten thoughts into my own personal Wikipedia.

Well, six hours. The first hour I spent fiddling with the color scheme.

Figure 1. No obsession is complete without a logo.

I think I can confidently say that this is the first time advancements in computers have actually gotten me something that I wanted before it was invented. (If last week’s video iPod announcement had included making it as easy to rip DVDs and play video as iTunes makes it to rip CDs and play audio, that would have been number two. But it didn’t, and anyway I never wanted that this bad.) Since college, if not earlier, I’ve been daydreaming about being able to collect and cross-reference all my character notes and story fragments and plot ideas and settings — I think I even spent an afternoon trying to cobble together a Hypercard stack for it, some time in the early 1990s. Now I’ve actually got it.

I know you don’t understand how momentous this is. That’s okay. This isn’t about you.

Figure 1. China Miéville says he’s in it for the bestiary. I’m in it for the gazetteer.

One hopes that in the long run this will be a productivity tool. In the mean time, it at least gives me something to do, excavating this box full of notebooks, on long and uninspiring winter evenings.

(And some day, when I’m implausibly successful — and also dead — future scholars and writers of tie-ins will thank me!)

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October 14, 2005

Sometimes the Gray Lady pulls through. In this case, with the amazing “Wading Toward Home,” by Michael Lewis.

Just then a car turned the corner, rolled up to a house in the next block and stopped. Its appearance was as shocking as the arrival of a spaceship filled with aliens — apart from Ms. Perrier, I hadn’t seen a soul, or a car, for miles. Four men with black pistols leapt out of it. Two of them looked as if they belonged in the neighborhood — polo shirts, sound orthodontia, a certain diffidence in their step. But the other two, with their bad teeth and battle gear, marched around as if they had only just captured the place.

. . . They had just landed Russian assault helicopters in Audubon Park. Not one, but two groups of Uptown New Orleanians had rented these old Soviet choppers, along with four-to-six-man Israeli commando units (platoons? squads?), and swooped down onto the soccer field beside the Audubon Zoo.

. . . The commandos went inside to “clear the house.” A nice little yellow house just one block from my childhood home. Not a human being — apart from Ms. Perrier and me — for a mile in each direction. And yet they raised their guns, opened the door, entered and rattled around. A few minutes later they emerged, looking grim.

“You got some mold on the upstairs ceiling,” one commando said gravely.

(Courtesy of MaxSpeak, You Listen!.)

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This time: wicked infrared pictures of the Andromeda galaxy, again over at Cosmic Variance, courtesy of the other space telescope.

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Portraits of elementary particles, by Jan-Henrik Andersen. The collections of quarks are a bit dull and educational, but I do like the photon and the up quark and some of the other “solo” portraits. More on Mr. Andersen’s site, too.

Figure 1. Supersymmetrical W boson.

(Via Cosmic Variance, who got it from BoingBoing.)

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I’m not sure I actually want to read it, but how can you resist the premise?

It is impossible that the stupendous events which followed the disastrous invasion of the earth by the Martians should go without record, and circumstances having placed the facts at my dispoal, I deem it a duty, both to posterity, and to those who were witnesses of and participants in the avenging counterstroke that the earth dealt back at its ruthless enemy in the heavens, to write down the story in a connected form . . .

Figure 1. VENGEANCE AT LAST UPON THE PITILESS MARTIANS.
“As we got near them a terrible scene unfolded itself. Two of the Martians were stretched headless upon the ground. Three others had suffered horrible injuries, and only one remained apparently unhurt . . .”

(Some incredibly thoughtful gentleman — who is shortly going to wish he had more bandwidth — has helpfully scanned both the original 1898 New York World serial and the 1947 reprint. With illustrations!)

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October 13, 2005

In comments tangential to this post on Meghan’s LiveJournal, various theories of “hard fantasy” are proposed:

Tim Pratt: I always thought “hard fantasy” just meant fantasy that was emotionally realistic and had a well-developed setting. So no vague rolling fields of elfland or great destined earth-altering one-true-love. Fantasy where things are messy and Fate doesn't take care of everything.

Meghan: Hard SF has a much more specific program about grounding SF in “real” science. So, just hearing the phrase “hard fantasy,” I think of that same “rigor,” i.e. grounding the fantastic in actual folklore traditions and not riffing off other writers and creating a genre echo chamber.

Also Meghan: [Or] perhaps “hard fantasy’s” rigor is more about writing the fantastic in settings that humanity would actually inhabit — with pain, with class, with ugly people — as opposed to a boring (and ideologically problematic) ye-old-golden-middle-ages.

Niall Harrison: I think of Ted Chiang — i.e. treating fantastic premises with the rigour charateristic of hard sf.

So what would bad hard fantasy be? What would be the equivalent of the quintissential hard-SF clunker that not even an Analog reader could love? I think I’ve seen it in Meghan’s first version, stories of the middle-class American family inherits Scottish lakeside castle — little girl dreams of horses — water-horse drowns little girl variety. But what’s the “rigorous premises” version? The “emotionally realistic” version?

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Update: Jeez — sorry, Niall! Too much time in the economic history section of Waterstone’s.

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Apparently when you tell google Google’s Advanced Search “Return pages written in English,” it figures you really mean “Oh, anything North Germanic, we don’t care what.”

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Update: For the two of you actually following the Ahnlund/Jelinek story, an amusing twist: Apparently it’s not actually possible for Ahnlund to resign from the Swedish Academy. Also, he’s apparently been in a snit and boycotting the Academy since 1996.

It’s oddly . . . legitimizing to know that this sort of behavior isn’t confined to our little literary demimonde. Though I’m willing to believe that Ahnlund’s Svenska Dagbladet piece was a little more coherent than Mr. Truesdale’s opus.

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October 12, 2005

So: Trying to put together a guerilla Twenty Epics reading for World Fantasy. Problem: Venue. Ideas, so far:

• Michelangelo’s coffee shop: Advantages: No friction with hotel or with concom. Disadvantages: No alcohol. Might need permission.
• Hotel room: Advantages: Easy to do. Disadvantages: Crowded, less convenient for audience, could generate noise complaints.
• Second-floor conference room hijacking: Advantages: Convenient for audience. Disadvantages: Could collide with official programming.
• Party coup d’etat: Advantages: Cheeky, beer-friendly. Disadvantages: Staging an event in the middle of someone else’s event always confusing. Don’t know if there are any good target parties.
• Hotel lobby invasion: Advantages: Cheeky, public. Disadvantages: Hotel might get irritated if we start handing out free beer.

Other thoughts?

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October 11, 2005

Chiwetel Ejiofor is the man. Let’s get that out of the way up front. I’ve got nothing against Daniel Craig, but if Sony/MGM had any balls, Chewy would be the next James Bond.

As for the rest —

Things blur together. Clearly it is pure coincidence that the outfit Annabella Lwin was wearing, Saturday night at the Paramount, was no more than a strap and a shade of blue removed from the inexplicably tattered outfit Summer Glau was wearing all through Serenity. A strap, a shade of blue, and a pair of boots. Coincidence. Clearly it was only to be expected that Mark Mothersbaugh and the Casale brothers would embrace, extend, and accelerate any fragments of science-fictionality that might happen to be rattling around your subconscious. Clearly, going from the movie theatre, to Telegraph Avenue, to an Art Deco monument filled with exotic spuds of all ages, colors, shapes and sizes — following two hours of space cowboys and exploding spaceships with a comforting dip into familiar countercultural strangeness, that with the raucous but innocent carnality of Bow Wow Wow and that with the full-on, space-age, Technicolor, punk-rock superluminality of Devo — was asking to have my brain scrambled. And yet.

I don’t think at this point I can emotionally respond to Serenity in a way that doesn’t treat it as just one color of paint in the Pollock canvas that was this Saturday, especially since Sunday was red wine and California sunshine and mad conversation with Susan and Matt, and yesterday was hangover and not quite enough sleep and flying from summer into what on the California coast would easily pass for winter.

So what you get is the cold, clinical, intellectual reaction . . . which could best be described as a cartoon monkey in surgical scrubs with SCRIPT DOCTOR stenciled on his chest and the voice of Steve Buscemi, swinging from branch to branch through the tangled thickets of the plot, saying things like “Could we get a little romantic tension over here?” and “Listen, kid, make me care about the leads, then we’ll talk about this guy who’s only got six lines . . .”

What is Inner Script Monkey is trying to tell us? Well — Serenity was clearly a movie for the fans. It’s a high-mag zoom on overlapping segments of plot and character arc, high enough that some of the segments are optically flat, and all of them have their endpoints cropped out of the frame. It’s not that the plot wasn’t entirely comprehensible, but as a story, it was frustrating. It would have made a great season-ending two-part TV episode, but as a stand-alone film? Flat.

It’s easy to see what Inner Script Monkey would do, if there’d never been a TV show. Keep the prologue, cut the doctor and the crazy girl out of the opening sequences on the ship and the Wild West planet, make the fight scene in the bar the first time they meet the crew (making the captain’s choice to take them on contrast all the more sharply with his “I stick my neck out for no one” ethos). Show the crushes the doctor and the engineer have on one another instead of telling. Give some snappy Bogey-and-Bacall (or at least Ford-and-Fisher) scenes to the captain and the high-class tart. Give the village people more than one scene and the Oracle old black guy some more lines. Give us enough Union Alliance territory to make it clear why they’re worth fighting against, maybe a flashback or so to make it clear what the Confederates Independents went through. Give the crazy girl a costume change and a pair of shoes. You get the idea. There’s lots of ways to do it.

Script Monkey also would have had the schoolteacher in the dream sequence and the kids she was teaching, crazy girl included, sound like an actual schoolteacher and actual kids. He would have had the mad scientist sound like a sane scientist. And he would have either cut the folksy dialect or made the characters who spoke it speak it more consistently. But Script Monkey’s picky that way.

Seriously — I wanted to like it more than I did, which is a hundred and eighty from what I expected going in. I think most of the credit for that goes to the actors, not just Chewy Ejiofor, but the guy who played that one bad guy in Jade Empire, and the guy from A Mighty Wind and Best in Show, and the guy who had the cameo as the cult leader on Strangers with Candy, and the Baldwin brother who’s not actually a Baldwin brother, and the girl who’s done a bunch of TV that I haven’t seen, and the lady who probably deserves better than the work she’s got, and the girl who has really good hair, and the girl who could probably act well enough if she wasn’t being asked to play an anime character. They all tried like hell to sell it.

I don’t regret the cost of the ticket, by any means, but I do kind of regret not getting to see the movie it could have been.*

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* About that other movie, the one I didn’t actually get to see — just one question. If the Reavers are angry all the time, how do they keep their ships working? “Killing rage!! Arrrrgh! Must! Fix! Fusion! Reactor! Arrrrgh!”

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October 6, 2005

. . . is Rob’s clever suggestion for labeling — nay, describing — the nine bloodthirsty savages United States Senators who voted against John McCain’s Amendment 1977. So the next time you have occasion to refer to Wayne Allard (CO), Kit Bond (MO), Tom Coburn (OK), Thad Cochran (MS), John Cornyn (TX), James Inhofe (OK), Pat Roberts (KS), Jeff Sessions (AL), or Ted Stevens (AK), remember those three little words.

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Steve Cook, in a Valve Crooked Timber comment thread on the latest crackpot Shakespeare authorship ideas:

I’m fully aware of some of the peculiarities of early modern authorship, and I’m certainly willing to accept the ideas that Shakespeare stole rather quite a lot of his drama and that many of his plays were more collaborative than most people make them out to be. Indeed, given the way that seventeenth century drama worked and given the publication history of the First Folio, it seems quite possible that that’s the case. What I’m not willing to do is accept on faith that, say, Cyrus Vance wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark and didn’t fess up to it because it was seen as unbecoming for a Secretary of State to write about a two-fisted archaeologist. George Lucas spends all of his time in Northern California and attested work of the Skywalkerian is really bad, whereas Vance is a globetrotter who fought in World War II.

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October 5, 2005

. . . but I’m cautiously optimistic about the Halo movie. Alex Garland is a very good writer, for one thing (go read The Tesseract if you don’t believe me — I’ll wait); and for another, it seems like Microsoft is really interested in protecting the value of the franchise, and not just out to make a quick buck. Latest news is that Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh have signed on as executive producers and WETA’s signed on to do the effects — so at least the monsters probably won’t suck.

The worldbuilding in the Halo games is as good as any I’ve seen in a video game, and better than the worldbuilding in a lot of SF novels — in some ways I think it’s as close as the US gets to answering the UK’s New Space Opera. (The plot doesn’t have as much to recommend it, but, hey, Alex Garland.) It’d be nice if some of that could make it on to the big screen.

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October 4, 2005

So, we’re down to 11½ hours of daylight and already I can feel the (undiagnosed, probably not clinical, but you never know) seasonal affective disorder setting in. It’s hard being a morning person when there’s barely an hour of morning before you need to be at the office, and even with daylight saving time to look forward to, it’s pretty much only going to get worse from now till January.

Anyway, I’m thinking of getting one of these. Amazon seems to sell a hell of a lot of them. Any of you ever use one? Or a conventional light box? Or maybe a dawn simulator? Consumer Reports has let me down on this one.

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Update: What the hell; I just sent away for a Pi-Square SunUp programmable lamp controller. (It can be found cheaper than at that link, but Indoor Sun is local and their web site isn’t as tacky-looking as the place I actually ordered it from.) The official phrase is, yes, “dawn simulator,” but that seems like an awfully fancy name for a rheostat connected to a timer. Still, it’s got some clinical trials backing it, and unlike the blue LED gizmo shouldn’t require me to actually pay attention to it once I’ve got it set up.

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October 3, 2005

I am planning to see Serenity at some point, and might even have gone yesterday if the weather hadn’t been so stay-on-the-couch crappy. But. From the Box Office Prophets’ Monday-morning quarterback team:

The marketing campaign for Serenity has cleverly focused upon that grass roots idea of confidence. They feel you might not know the characters in this franchise yet, but if you take the opportunity to do so, you will fall in love with them.

This is nearly the perfect encapsulation of the line everyone has taken with me on Firefly, and Buffy, and for that matter — though less consciously — Seinfeld. Not to mention lots of books whose titles I am ashamed even to mention. Not to mention a couple of acquaintances’ unfinished manuscripts. And here’s what I want to know:

Why doesn’t it work on me?

It’s not that I don’t like character-driven fiction. I fuckin’ venerate character-driven fiction. But why isn’t character alone enough to get my attention? Or keep it?

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. . . and into the realm of “So what are they cutting his crack with?” Shorter Eric Lerner, as paraphrased by Ken Macleod:

Lerner’s thesis is that there’s a tight connection between technological devlopment, our understanding of the universe, and the general condition of society. The Big Bang cosmology has an immense ideological appeal in a society without any hopeful vision of the future. The shift from experiment and observation to increasingly arcane theory and the multiplication of epicycles is a further malign twist, digging us deeper into the hole. Fundamental technological developments are slowed down. Apart from biotech, in which great advances in both theory and practice have gone together, the rest of our technology — even the Internet — is an elaboration, refinement and diffusion of developments made half a century or more ago.

Look, there may be good reasons to criticize Big Bang cosmology — though I’d still put my money on either the string theory kids at Cosmic Variance or Malcolm’s Loop Quantum Gravity posse to sort them out. But personal pique at society’s failure to provide you with a fusion-powered rocket car (with big tailfins!) is not one of them.

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October 2, 2005

Congratulations, Tim and Heather. Sorry I couldn’t be there.

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So, no eviction notice yet, though maybe it’s just that process servers don’t work Sundays. I looked at one apartment this weekend and wasn’t too impressed, and between heading down south to see Devo next weekend and World Fantasy at the end of the month — no, i still haven’t got tickets — I haven’t really got the time or the money to move in October. If no eviction notice turns up, it looks like I’ll be staying put at least through November.

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