The first magazine that I edited at RPI was a thing called Perspective. It was a journal of politics and philosophy, founded by a couple of students named Ken Rothschild and Rick Kamens, both of whom were seniors my freshman year. They hadn't done all that much preparing a succession, so there was really no one to turn the thing over to except me, which they did in the spring of my freshman year.
Rothschild deserves a little tangent. He'd won some sort of prize in physics his freshman year, and he was one of those fellows who was always bursting with a hundred ideas at once. The problem was that, of those 100 ideas, 95 of them were crap, 3 were marginal, 1 was good, and 1 was excellent. But he didn't really seem to have a notion as to which was which, so he spent a lot of his time working on crappy ideas. I hope he�s found a good editor somewhere along the line.
Anyway, at a time of student unrest and the "New Left," Perspective had a very strong philosophical bias, and its patron saint philosopher was Nietzsche. This was the Walter Kaufman version of Nietzsche, who was a lot more interesting than the dreary man-into-superman-peering-into-the-abyss-will-to-power guy that most people think of when they hear his name. I once asked Amy about Nietzsche, and she said that she�d always gotten the impression that he was cold and humorless. So I read her a couple of my favorite passages, and she said, "Well, that's just hilarious, isn�t it?" Poor Frederich always had the problem of being too hip for the room.
Anyway, Kamens wrote an article for the first issue of Perspective that I edited, entitled "Science and Tragedy" using Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy as a spring board for some ruminations on science. I changed the title, for layout and space reasons, and Kamens got pissed, as well he should have. My bad. He wasn't the last person I managed to alienate in my roles as editor during my college years, and I can't think of a single case that wasn't my fault. My only defense is that I don't think I made the same mistake twice.
Perspective was a camera-ready, photo offset print job, and we made good use of the cool fonts you could get with the IBM Selectric typewriter, though we did have to settle for ragged right justification. Later, on the Rensselaer Engineer, we got full linotype justification, though the printer then used the linotype to feed a photo offset. We eventually won some awards for things like layout and such. In fact, as nearly as I can recall, we won awards for almost everything except Editor and Editorials. In case you're keeping score, those would have been the awards that were specifically to me.
I managed to get out two issues of Perspective, plus a special little one-shot called Ellipsis, covering the Moratorium March on Washington. We did Ellipsis on a ditto machine, because I was fascinated by the ditto stenciling process, which allowed multi-colored printing. You were limited to maybe 25-100 copies, but it's not like there were thousands of readers clamoring to read more of the political musings of yours truly. Or even dozens, to be honest.
In the two issues of Perspective, I made maybe 2,000 lame jokes about the title of the magazine. Or maybe 2; memory is a tricky thing. I'd like to think that Perspective was where I first got to thinking about the point-of-view problem in philosophy, but I think it was more like just part of the general background. That was when I was learning about Special Relativity and quantum mechanics in physics, after all, and both of those have their own interesting (and differing) take on what observer means. I'd also taken mechanical drawing in high school, (front, side, top, and perspective views), and I'd been writing amateur fiction since grade school. Point of view was always on the list of interesting topics in each of those endeavors, and yet it still took me many, many, years to generalize the subject.
Ben is of the belief that the discovery of perspective in the graphic arts is one of the most important, if not the most important, ingredients to the Renaissance. He'll even go so far as to suggest that the camera obscura was the defining invention of the time, though he might backpedal a little if you mention moveable type.
Moveable type was an insidious invention. Without moveable type copyright law would never have come about, to mention one unobvious connection. The ability to mass produce books also led to the King James Bible and the Protestant Reformation. Without the ability to put bibles into the hands of the masses, common language translations were unnecessary, and without mass bible reading, why (and how) would the Reformation have occurred? Before general literacy, the Church told you what God said, and as long as they kept their stories straight, how would you ever think otherwise?
I've heard it said that Martin Luthor believed that if common people read the Bible, then they'd interpret it the same way he did. So Luthor had himself a bit of a viewpoint problem. Once people generally got to stick their oars in, all hell broke loose, as it were. The back and forth amongst those who were, each and every one of them, convinced of their possession of the real meaning of scripture, is the stuff of history, i.e. wars, torture, unrest, and revolution.
Then Descartes slipped one in on everybody with Cogito Ergo Sum. His little aphorism made "I" the test of existence, but only in translation, as it were, since there is no first person pronoun in the original Latin. Descartes elevated subjectivity to the level of a first principle, almost without anyone noticing that was what he�d done.
Nietzsche had his own take on the matter. If one's personal relationship to God is the important thing, how about if I relate to God as if he were past tense? "God is dead," Nietzsche wrote, doing a little Snoopy dance on the grave still haunted by the Holy Ghost. Nietzsche had mastered the art of being both humorous and serious at the same time.
Or, as I like to think of it, he had his own perspective on Author Omniscient and he was going to follow it to the vanishing point.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Blowback
I don't really know enough European history. It's long, it's complicated, and in the end, it often comes down to a some guys who really hated each other getting large numbers of people killed.
I admit that's something of an oversimplification.
In any case, much of what follows comes from some conversations I've had with Dave Stout, a fellow who knows his history far better than I do. However, all errors that follow are mine, because that's the way this goes.
The American Revolution was a wondrous thing from European eyes, reflecting (or at least seeming to) the ideology of The Enlightenment, with all the rights of man, scientific principles, etc. that were so much in fashion. There was also the "Nostalgie de la Boue" thing that Tom Wolfe has written about, literally, "Nostalgia for the Mud" but more figuratively, the "romanticizing of primitive souls." I remember a tale from high school history (and hence very suspect) that Ben Franklin's first appearance before the court of France came before he'd had a chance to unpack, so he could not wear his powdered wig. His naked head charmed the French aristos, him being a child of the wilderness and all. And so clever.
So old Ben became a Rock Star in his seventies, in Paris, and took to just a charming anyone who'd come around, including, it was rumored (and kinda said outright by John Adams) practically anyone in a skirt. I find it difficult to be shocked. Or, for that matter, surprised.
There was apparently something of an "egalitarian" fad before the French Revolution, with all sorts of aristocrats and privileged folk deciding that it would be a good idea to get to know their servants and others among the "little people." I'm bound to wonder if that helped or hurt their chances when the great guillotine lottery came to town. I can see it going either way. It's a "laws and sausages" thing from either side.
The French Revolution scared everybody in Europe, and by "everybody" I mean all the powerful folks whose necks began to itch at odd intervals. France itself was a mess; one of the features of the American Revolution was that, if things got too feisty in one area or another, a bunch of folk would just pull up stakes and move on. In France, there wasn't really any "on" to move to. It also turns out that all those principles of The Enlightenment, can squish around as much as Biblical text in producing whatever result one has in mind. Who knew?
Anyway, France had been at war with various other European powers for quite a while prior to the Revolution; the King's military spending was, in fact, one of the commonly cited factors for the country's near bankruptcy, which in turn gave the Revolution a good headlong shove. Add to that the fact that there was this grand social experiment going on (one which was explicitly rejecting the "divine right of Kings," and, for that matter, "the diving right of the Pope"), and the surrounding countries were not neutral observers.
So there followed a series of "Coalitions" amongst the Great Nations of Europe, sending armies to bite off as much of France as the situation would allow, and if the Revolution could be forced into collapse, so much the better.
The problem was, and here I specifically note Dave's excellent imagery, the "Coalitions" generally amounted to coming at France more or less the same way that ninja come at Bruce Lee in a Kung Fu movie, i.e. without much in the way of coordination. Britain could more or less kick anybody's ass at sea, but the land campaigns from Italy, Prussia, Austria, et al. were of the "our guys will just go in and brush them aside" (I'm unable to find a direct Dr. Strangelove link) sorts of deals. So they kept losing.
And as they were losing, the best commanders and tacticians in the French military (now cleared of a lot of deadwood by the aforementioned guillotine) were rising to the occasion. And rising in rank.
Napoleon is the obvious result, but there were a number of other pretty smart guys who gave a pretty good show, like Carnot, Jourdan, Moreau, and the like. Napoleon just happened to be the cream of the cream, and his nationality (Corsica being Italian, well, okay, Genoan, until it's purchase by France in 1768) made it easy for him to snap up Italy early on.
He eventually overreached, as so many do, and that story is pretty well known, what with the Russian winter, massive loss of men, and exile to palindromic Elba. Then there was the "over the hill boxer coming out of retirement" deal, and "The Hundred Days" ending in Waterloo, blah, blah, blah. There was also a thing called "The Holy Alliance" (catchy name; it got reused), that tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and managed to do pretty well, provided you ignored the fact that a number of the new kings and other royals weren't quite exactly who they would have been before Napoleon.
So we get the 19th Century, with the nations of Europe playing Risk with the rest of the world, all the while all the Royals looked over their shoulders, wary of the next mob, the next Commune, the next guillotine, or the next Napoleon. Actually, they didn't mind the next Napoleon so much, since he put scotch to the second French Republic. Besides it was those damned Republics that they really hated, and all those weird democratic notions that The Enlightenment had put out there.
The next grand "popular fashion" was a romanticization of war, an epidemic of war fever, and what was called at the time, The Great War.
Some didn't think it so great, but you've got to break some eggs to make some Dada.
In The Great War, aka WWI, we had the famous sealed train sending Lenin into Russia to make as much trouble as possible (they had a low estimate on what "as possible" meant). The Brits carved up the Ottoman Empire into what they considered manageable bites, and they missed that by a margin as well. The U.S. backed a lot of petty dictators because they were "bulwarks against communism" and for those efforts we got a theocratic Iran, after the Shah fell, theocratic Afghanistan (because, really, what kind of harm could a bunch or armed fanatical Muslims do to us?), and (in case I've been too subtle) a nuclear Pakistan teetering on the brink of collapse because it turns out that when you invade or otherwise meddle in other countries, there can be unexpected consequences.
Well, who would have expected that?
I admit that's something of an oversimplification.
In any case, much of what follows comes from some conversations I've had with Dave Stout, a fellow who knows his history far better than I do. However, all errors that follow are mine, because that's the way this goes.
The American Revolution was a wondrous thing from European eyes, reflecting (or at least seeming to) the ideology of The Enlightenment, with all the rights of man, scientific principles, etc. that were so much in fashion. There was also the "Nostalgie de la Boue" thing that Tom Wolfe has written about, literally, "Nostalgia for the Mud" but more figuratively, the "romanticizing of primitive souls." I remember a tale from high school history (and hence very suspect) that Ben Franklin's first appearance before the court of France came before he'd had a chance to unpack, so he could not wear his powdered wig. His naked head charmed the French aristos, him being a child of the wilderness and all. And so clever.
So old Ben became a Rock Star in his seventies, in Paris, and took to just a charming anyone who'd come around, including, it was rumored (and kinda said outright by John Adams) practically anyone in a skirt. I find it difficult to be shocked. Or, for that matter, surprised.
There was apparently something of an "egalitarian" fad before the French Revolution, with all sorts of aristocrats and privileged folk deciding that it would be a good idea to get to know their servants and others among the "little people." I'm bound to wonder if that helped or hurt their chances when the great guillotine lottery came to town. I can see it going either way. It's a "laws and sausages" thing from either side.
The French Revolution scared everybody in Europe, and by "everybody" I mean all the powerful folks whose necks began to itch at odd intervals. France itself was a mess; one of the features of the American Revolution was that, if things got too feisty in one area or another, a bunch of folk would just pull up stakes and move on. In France, there wasn't really any "on" to move to. It also turns out that all those principles of The Enlightenment, can squish around as much as Biblical text in producing whatever result one has in mind. Who knew?
Anyway, France had been at war with various other European powers for quite a while prior to the Revolution; the King's military spending was, in fact, one of the commonly cited factors for the country's near bankruptcy, which in turn gave the Revolution a good headlong shove. Add to that the fact that there was this grand social experiment going on (one which was explicitly rejecting the "divine right of Kings," and, for that matter, "the diving right of the Pope"), and the surrounding countries were not neutral observers.
So there followed a series of "Coalitions" amongst the Great Nations of Europe, sending armies to bite off as much of France as the situation would allow, and if the Revolution could be forced into collapse, so much the better.
The problem was, and here I specifically note Dave's excellent imagery, the "Coalitions" generally amounted to coming at France more or less the same way that ninja come at Bruce Lee in a Kung Fu movie, i.e. without much in the way of coordination. Britain could more or less kick anybody's ass at sea, but the land campaigns from Italy, Prussia, Austria, et al. were of the "our guys will just go in and brush them aside" (I'm unable to find a direct Dr. Strangelove link) sorts of deals. So they kept losing.
And as they were losing, the best commanders and tacticians in the French military (now cleared of a lot of deadwood by the aforementioned guillotine) were rising to the occasion. And rising in rank.
Napoleon is the obvious result, but there were a number of other pretty smart guys who gave a pretty good show, like Carnot, Jourdan, Moreau, and the like. Napoleon just happened to be the cream of the cream, and his nationality (Corsica being Italian, well, okay, Genoan, until it's purchase by France in 1768) made it easy for him to snap up Italy early on.
He eventually overreached, as so many do, and that story is pretty well known, what with the Russian winter, massive loss of men, and exile to palindromic Elba. Then there was the "over the hill boxer coming out of retirement" deal, and "The Hundred Days" ending in Waterloo, blah, blah, blah. There was also a thing called "The Holy Alliance" (catchy name; it got reused), that tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and managed to do pretty well, provided you ignored the fact that a number of the new kings and other royals weren't quite exactly who they would have been before Napoleon.
So we get the 19th Century, with the nations of Europe playing Risk with the rest of the world, all the while all the Royals looked over their shoulders, wary of the next mob, the next Commune, the next guillotine, or the next Napoleon. Actually, they didn't mind the next Napoleon so much, since he put scotch to the second French Republic. Besides it was those damned Republics that they really hated, and all those weird democratic notions that The Enlightenment had put out there.
The next grand "popular fashion" was a romanticization of war, an epidemic of war fever, and what was called at the time, The Great War.
Some didn't think it so great, but you've got to break some eggs to make some Dada.
In The Great War, aka WWI, we had the famous sealed train sending Lenin into Russia to make as much trouble as possible (they had a low estimate on what "as possible" meant). The Brits carved up the Ottoman Empire into what they considered manageable bites, and they missed that by a margin as well. The U.S. backed a lot of petty dictators because they were "bulwarks against communism" and for those efforts we got a theocratic Iran, after the Shah fell, theocratic Afghanistan (because, really, what kind of harm could a bunch or armed fanatical Muslims do to us?), and (in case I've been too subtle) a nuclear Pakistan teetering on the brink of collapse because it turns out that when you invade or otherwise meddle in other countries, there can be unexpected consequences.
Well, who would have expected that?
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Lunacy
During my first Aikido involvement, I used to repair to a bar in Berkeley after training, to, um, replenish body fluids I’d lost from the exercise. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
The bar, Shattuck Avenue Spats, had two entrances, one in the front, the other leading out back to the parking lot. One evening I left by the back entrance and was confronted by a full moon in full “horizon effect,” its image close to the tops of the nearby buildings and looking close enough to reach out an touch.
I stopped dead in my tracks for several seconds, just marveling at it. Then, I noticed what I had just done and got curious.
I went over and got into my car, but I just sat there for another 15 minutes or so, watching people as they came out of the bar. Many of them stopped, just like I did, and gazed at the moon for a second. Others pointed it out to their companions. A few became very animated, even to the point of doing a little dance, or otherwise expressing physical excitement.
There have been a fair number of studies attempting to document the “full moon effect,” the notion that crimes get weirder, emergency rooms more crowded, and things generally just get stranger, around the time of the full moon. To the best of my knowledge, none of these studies has ever found a relationship between the full moon and abnormal behavior.
By the same token, and to the best of my knowledge, these studies never correct for whether or not the moon is actually visible on the nights in question. No one has tested the idea that it is the sight of the full moon that affects people, in other words.
Yet the sight of the full moon clearly does affect people. Songs have been written about it; it appears in art and literature.
This seems to be part of that unconscious, social bias in science that I’ve mentioned before. Certain hypotheses are more easily addressed than others. The bias extends to pseudo-science as well. People have a lot of water; the oceans are water; the moon affects the oceans by raising tides. Maybe the moon affects people the same way. That’s considered an acceptable hypothesis to test (and debunk).
The moon affects people through aesthetic influence does not seem to be a readily acceptable hypothesis. It’s subjective. Science is objective; it doesn’t like being reminded of the subjective.
It’s a blind spot, a lacuna. Rhymes with Luna.
The bar, Shattuck Avenue Spats, had two entrances, one in the front, the other leading out back to the parking lot. One evening I left by the back entrance and was confronted by a full moon in full “horizon effect,” its image close to the tops of the nearby buildings and looking close enough to reach out an touch.
I stopped dead in my tracks for several seconds, just marveling at it. Then, I noticed what I had just done and got curious.
I went over and got into my car, but I just sat there for another 15 minutes or so, watching people as they came out of the bar. Many of them stopped, just like I did, and gazed at the moon for a second. Others pointed it out to their companions. A few became very animated, even to the point of doing a little dance, or otherwise expressing physical excitement.
There have been a fair number of studies attempting to document the “full moon effect,” the notion that crimes get weirder, emergency rooms more crowded, and things generally just get stranger, around the time of the full moon. To the best of my knowledge, none of these studies has ever found a relationship between the full moon and abnormal behavior.
By the same token, and to the best of my knowledge, these studies never correct for whether or not the moon is actually visible on the nights in question. No one has tested the idea that it is the sight of the full moon that affects people, in other words.
Yet the sight of the full moon clearly does affect people. Songs have been written about it; it appears in art and literature.
This seems to be part of that unconscious, social bias in science that I’ve mentioned before. Certain hypotheses are more easily addressed than others. The bias extends to pseudo-science as well. People have a lot of water; the oceans are water; the moon affects the oceans by raising tides. Maybe the moon affects people the same way. That’s considered an acceptable hypothesis to test (and debunk).
The moon affects people through aesthetic influence does not seem to be a readily acceptable hypothesis. It’s subjective. Science is objective; it doesn’t like being reminded of the subjective.
It’s a blind spot, a lacuna. Rhymes with Luna.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Patience
I'm not a very patient man. The best I can do generally is to fake it with a mix of persistence and procrastination. But at least I understand the dimensions of my problem.
One of the difficulties of the democratic political process is how slowly it moves. This includes the criminal justice system, but I'm thinking here about the other parts of what we call "government." The designers of the U.S. Constitution very consciously put in a lot of time lags, plus those pesky things we call "checks and balances" in order to impede "popular enthusiasms" that they (rightly, in my opinion) feared.
One necessary exception to this was during emergencies, especially the time of war. But even then, the Constitution tries to parcel out the authority and responsibilities, again, fearing the tides that sweep nations into foolish conflicts. It's worth noting that two of our greatest Presidents who had first been Generals, warned of the pernicious effects of conflict. Washington's warning about "foreign entanglements" was directed at treaties that might embroil the U.S. in someone else's wars, and Eisenhower's criticism of the "military/industrial complex" was a warning about how those who profit from war may push a country against its own interests.
The other great President/General, Jackson, stands as something of a cautionary tale all by himself.
So now we're stuck in the middle of a post-colonial occupation, one of the most seriously wrongheaded maneuvers in the history of the Republic, and we've seen the entire set of warnings disregarded. Foreign entanglements, check. Military/Industrial Complex, check. "Popular enthusiasms," check. Oh, you want to tell me now that you were against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq from the beginning? Yeah, I believe you. Sure was lonely, wasn't it? Or are you one of the "Afghanistan was fine, but Iraq was a mistake?" Or maybe, "We're better off without Saddam, but the war was badly mismanaged." Yeah, you keep thinking that.
Many in the country are now sick of military "glory," though it's worth bearing in mind that even little minor changes in the ongoing slaughter are enough for hordes of people to begin spouting inanities like "The Surge is working!" Working at what? Have U.S. soldiers stopped dying? No, they're just dying at a somewhat slower rate than before. Iraqi citizens? Maybe the same thing, though is there anyone reading this who is naïve enough to take the U.S. military's word about that, to say nothing of the Bush Administration?
Besides, these conflicts are unwinnable. How do I know that? Because I have yet to hear someone give me a plausible theory of what winning would look like. The closest was on The Family Guy, where they had a sequence showing Iraqi women stripping off their burkas and opening a bikini car wash. It made as much sense as anything else I've heard, and at least it was concrete. Yeah, we'll have "won" when Iraq is a safe and stable democracy.
Just for the record: if you plan for "winning" depends on favorably changing the attitudes and behavior of some people who hate you, and who have hated you for decades, you're probably not going to win.
Oh yeah, and then there's that part about how Pakistan is destabilizing as we speak. Not that anyone could have predicted that a U.S. invasion the country next door, driving a pack of radicals with military training across the border could destabilize a country. I mean, after all, the corrupt military dictator said he was our friend. What could go wrong? And why would Iran want nuclear weapons just because it has a nuclear Pakistan to the east, and the U.S. military immediately to the West. I mean, really, why wouldn't they trust us? We only have their best interests at heart.
Anyway, so the American public is pretty sick of the matter, which I'm sure comes as a complete surprise to Islamic radicals in the Middle East, and we had an off-year election in 2006. Lo and behold, a lot of warmongers lost their seats in Congress and the Senate. Congress flipped, and everyone expected the whole foreign policy situation to change immediately.
Because George W. Bush had shown himself such a flexible guy up to this point. I mean, the people speak and he listens.
Besides, Congress is so very, very powerful. It's not like the President can just ignore what it says, right? And Bush never uses his veto power, well, at least he didn't up until the point when Congress stopped giving him absolutely everything he asked for.
Anyway, some people are pissed at Congress. How dare they not take the 51-49 vote mandate in the Senate and just stop the war? It's easy. Cut off the money, pass a law, impeach the bastard. Etc. Etc.
It has been my observation that it's very easy to tell other people how to do their jobs. Everybody's job looks easy from the outside. And maybe all it really would take is some "leadership," and some "courage," though I have to think that those aren't really that high up on the real talents required in Congress. And one might consider parsing that "courage" thing to remember that every member of Congress has to be thinking that their phones are tapped, that maybe their offices are bugged, and that there is a legion of political operatives ready to run with any hint of a scandal. Hell, in 2002 and 2004 we had two decorated war heroes lose elections because their patriotism was called into question. What do you think would have happened if there had been a real scandal to work with? Oh, and there's the part about how the U.S. Attorney's in Bush's Justice Department have been cooking up fake investigations of Democratic candidates just before elections.
But all it takes is a little courage—say internet bloggers and commenters who don't even use their real names online.
The Conservative Movement has been trying to take control of the country for at least the last 50 years, using the same fear-and-smear tactics all the while, but with a growing ideological base that allows them to paint a nice coat of rationalization over what is basically just Big Man Authoritarianism. September 11 gave them their chance and they glommed onto it and rode that puppy into the ground, feeding on the deaths long after the remaining bodies had been buried. The only thing that prevented the establishment of the Theocratic Plutocracy that they really, really want is that the whole enterprise is irrational and contradictory. Oh, and undemocratic.
But going off on a snit and blaming the current Congress for not cleaning up the whole thing immediately, that's also pretty undemocratic, too. We had a single election. That's not enough to usher in the Progressive Utopia. (I'm pretty much on record as not thinking Utopias are a good idea, anyway).
It has taken decades for the Conservative Movement to bring the country to its current miserable state. It will take that long (at least) to dig ourselves out of it. Those who want the overnight fix are setting themselves up for another ride on the Authoritarian roller coaster, or maybe just another big disappointment. I'm hoping for the last one, in fact. It's less of a betrayal of what I like to think my country is about.
One of the difficulties of the democratic political process is how slowly it moves. This includes the criminal justice system, but I'm thinking here about the other parts of what we call "government." The designers of the U.S. Constitution very consciously put in a lot of time lags, plus those pesky things we call "checks and balances" in order to impede "popular enthusiasms" that they (rightly, in my opinion) feared.
One necessary exception to this was during emergencies, especially the time of war. But even then, the Constitution tries to parcel out the authority and responsibilities, again, fearing the tides that sweep nations into foolish conflicts. It's worth noting that two of our greatest Presidents who had first been Generals, warned of the pernicious effects of conflict. Washington's warning about "foreign entanglements" was directed at treaties that might embroil the U.S. in someone else's wars, and Eisenhower's criticism of the "military/industrial complex" was a warning about how those who profit from war may push a country against its own interests.
The other great President/General, Jackson, stands as something of a cautionary tale all by himself.
So now we're stuck in the middle of a post-colonial occupation, one of the most seriously wrongheaded maneuvers in the history of the Republic, and we've seen the entire set of warnings disregarded. Foreign entanglements, check. Military/Industrial Complex, check. "Popular enthusiasms," check. Oh, you want to tell me now that you were against the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq from the beginning? Yeah, I believe you. Sure was lonely, wasn't it? Or are you one of the "Afghanistan was fine, but Iraq was a mistake?" Or maybe, "We're better off without Saddam, but the war was badly mismanaged." Yeah, you keep thinking that.
Many in the country are now sick of military "glory," though it's worth bearing in mind that even little minor changes in the ongoing slaughter are enough for hordes of people to begin spouting inanities like "The Surge is working!" Working at what? Have U.S. soldiers stopped dying? No, they're just dying at a somewhat slower rate than before. Iraqi citizens? Maybe the same thing, though is there anyone reading this who is naïve enough to take the U.S. military's word about that, to say nothing of the Bush Administration?
Besides, these conflicts are unwinnable. How do I know that? Because I have yet to hear someone give me a plausible theory of what winning would look like. The closest was on The Family Guy, where they had a sequence showing Iraqi women stripping off their burkas and opening a bikini car wash. It made as much sense as anything else I've heard, and at least it was concrete. Yeah, we'll have "won" when Iraq is a safe and stable democracy.
Just for the record: if you plan for "winning" depends on favorably changing the attitudes and behavior of some people who hate you, and who have hated you for decades, you're probably not going to win.
Oh yeah, and then there's that part about how Pakistan is destabilizing as we speak. Not that anyone could have predicted that a U.S. invasion the country next door, driving a pack of radicals with military training across the border could destabilize a country. I mean, after all, the corrupt military dictator said he was our friend. What could go wrong? And why would Iran want nuclear weapons just because it has a nuclear Pakistan to the east, and the U.S. military immediately to the West. I mean, really, why wouldn't they trust us? We only have their best interests at heart.
Anyway, so the American public is pretty sick of the matter, which I'm sure comes as a complete surprise to Islamic radicals in the Middle East, and we had an off-year election in 2006. Lo and behold, a lot of warmongers lost their seats in Congress and the Senate. Congress flipped, and everyone expected the whole foreign policy situation to change immediately.
Because George W. Bush had shown himself such a flexible guy up to this point. I mean, the people speak and he listens.
Besides, Congress is so very, very powerful. It's not like the President can just ignore what it says, right? And Bush never uses his veto power, well, at least he didn't up until the point when Congress stopped giving him absolutely everything he asked for.
Anyway, some people are pissed at Congress. How dare they not take the 51-49 vote mandate in the Senate and just stop the war? It's easy. Cut off the money, pass a law, impeach the bastard. Etc. Etc.
It has been my observation that it's very easy to tell other people how to do their jobs. Everybody's job looks easy from the outside. And maybe all it really would take is some "leadership," and some "courage," though I have to think that those aren't really that high up on the real talents required in Congress. And one might consider parsing that "courage" thing to remember that every member of Congress has to be thinking that their phones are tapped, that maybe their offices are bugged, and that there is a legion of political operatives ready to run with any hint of a scandal. Hell, in 2002 and 2004 we had two decorated war heroes lose elections because their patriotism was called into question. What do you think would have happened if there had been a real scandal to work with? Oh, and there's the part about how the U.S. Attorney's in Bush's Justice Department have been cooking up fake investigations of Democratic candidates just before elections.
But all it takes is a little courage—say internet bloggers and commenters who don't even use their real names online.
The Conservative Movement has been trying to take control of the country for at least the last 50 years, using the same fear-and-smear tactics all the while, but with a growing ideological base that allows them to paint a nice coat of rationalization over what is basically just Big Man Authoritarianism. September 11 gave them their chance and they glommed onto it and rode that puppy into the ground, feeding on the deaths long after the remaining bodies had been buried. The only thing that prevented the establishment of the Theocratic Plutocracy that they really, really want is that the whole enterprise is irrational and contradictory. Oh, and undemocratic.
But going off on a snit and blaming the current Congress for not cleaning up the whole thing immediately, that's also pretty undemocratic, too. We had a single election. That's not enough to usher in the Progressive Utopia. (I'm pretty much on record as not thinking Utopias are a good idea, anyway).
It has taken decades for the Conservative Movement to bring the country to its current miserable state. It will take that long (at least) to dig ourselves out of it. Those who want the overnight fix are setting themselves up for another ride on the Authoritarian roller coaster, or maybe just another big disappointment. I'm hoping for the last one, in fact. It's less of a betrayal of what I like to think my country is about.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Surfaces
Something in the smog biz that used to drive me nuts was when someone would look at some smog chamber experiment that had some unusual feature to it and remark, “Well, that’s just a chamber effect.” The subtext was “We’re studying gas phase kinetics, and that’s something having to do with a surface phenomenon, so we shouldn’t pay any attention to it.”
I didn’t think that should let us off the hook. What kind of surface effect was it? How did it behave? And were we absolutely sure that such effects didn’t occur elsewhere?
Eventually I wrote a paper, “Background Reactivity in Smog Chambers.” Google scholar tells me that it’s been cited at least 17 times, as recently as last year, so it did okay for a paper published 20 years ago.
In the 60s and 70s, there were a lot of smog chamber experiments done on all sorts of individual compounds; there was a belief that one could produce a “reactivity scale” that would let you reduce those things that had the most smog forming potential. As the complex nature of smog chemistry began to dawn on people, such experiments became less common, because “reactivity” has multiple components, sometimes 2 + 2 = 6 in smog chemistry, making the development of a single scale problematic. There’s a fellow at SAPRC in Riverside, Bill Carter, who has developed a much more complicated way of estimating “incremental reactivity,” which has its own problems, but it’s better than “one size fits all.”
Anyway, one of the “pure compound” experiments involved methyl chloroform, and I found it fascinating.
Methyl chloroform is also called 1,1,1 tri-chloroethane. If you start with ethane (CH3CH3) and replace all the hydrogens on one methyl group with chlorine, you get methyl chloroform. It’s pretty unreactive stuff; the only reaction sites for hydroxyl radicals are the ones on the methyl group and methyl hydrogens are bound pretty tightly. So for the first part of the chamber experiment, using very high concentrations of MCF with some added NOx, the thing just sat there.
Then, after a couple of hours of induction, something began to happen. The NO began to convert to NO2, some of the MCF began to decay, then suddenly, wham! The whole system kicked into high gear, NO went down like a shot, the MCF began to oxidize like crazy, and ozone began to shoot up. Then, just as suddenly, the ozone just disappeared, all of it, in just a couple of measurement cycles.
Everyone who looked at it said, “Ah, chlorine chemistry,” which was a sure guess. Chlorine will pull hydrogen off of even methyl groups with almost collisional efficiency (if a chlorine atom hits the molecule, it pulls off the hydrogen almost every time). Moreover, chlorine atoms destroy ozone; that’s the “stratospheric ozone depletion” thing.
But I was puzzled. Where did the chlorine atoms come from? Yes, there was plenty of chlorine in the MC, but that was bound. To get one off, you need to create a free radical and those ain’t cheap. If you create an HO radical, that can pull off one of the hydrogens, and that, after the usual reactions, gives you chloral, a tri-chlorinated version of acetaldehyde. Put in a high enough rate of photolysis for chloral in your simulation and you can get the whole system to react.
The problem was, it didn’t look right. With a high rate of photolysis for chloral, the simulation kicked off too quickly. Lower the rate and you never got the sudden takeoff. I’m pretty good at fitting the curves, and I could never get it to work.
So I started looking at the other actors in the system. The end result of chloral oxidation is phosgene (see why I was looking up all those post-WWI gas papers?), but phosgene itself didn’t fill the bill. So maybe the phosgene was converting to CO and Cl2 on the chamber surfaces like it does in someone’s lungs. No, that didn’t work either.
I kept returning to the problem over the years, trying yet another idea, each time getting no further.
In 1985, the “ozone hole” over the Antarctic was reported, and everyone in the stratospheric ozone community, including Gary Whitten, my boss at SAI, immediately suspected that it had something to do with the ice clouds that only form in the stratosphere over the Antarctic. In 1987, Mario Molina published a series of papers describing the surface reactions of stratospheric chemical species on ice crystal surfaces. The really critical reaction was the reaction of chlorine nitrate with hydrochloric acid to form nitric acid an molecular chlorine (Cl2). Cl2 photolyzes so rapidly that it might as well be two chlorine atoms.
I’m not sure when I first tried the Molina reaction on the methyl chloroform system, but it worked much better than anything else I’d tried. It makes the whole thing a very strong positive feedback system. It worked well enough to convince me that it was probably the missing factor; if I wanted to get a better simulation, I’d have to get very specific about some details of the original chamber experiment, and that one’s 35 years old. It’s pretty well moot at this point anyway.
Molina won the Nobel Prize for his work on stratospheric ozone depletion, and it was well-deserved. I was just looking at a single smog chamber experiment, one with a surface reaction that no one was interested in. The chance that I would have figured out the right answer to the peculiarities of that experiment is pretty small. The chance that I would have made the leap from the chamber walls to the stratospheric ice clouds is smaller still; I’d never heard of them before Whitten told me about them, and I certainly didn’t make the connection between them and the chamber experiment until Molina worked out the correct surface chemistry. So I’m certainly not trying to say that I coulda been a contenda.
But I will say that we all should have been paying more attention to the chamber wall effects. You don’t get to say beforehand what will turn out to be important.
I didn’t think that should let us off the hook. What kind of surface effect was it? How did it behave? And were we absolutely sure that such effects didn’t occur elsewhere?
Eventually I wrote a paper, “Background Reactivity in Smog Chambers.” Google scholar tells me that it’s been cited at least 17 times, as recently as last year, so it did okay for a paper published 20 years ago.
In the 60s and 70s, there were a lot of smog chamber experiments done on all sorts of individual compounds; there was a belief that one could produce a “reactivity scale” that would let you reduce those things that had the most smog forming potential. As the complex nature of smog chemistry began to dawn on people, such experiments became less common, because “reactivity” has multiple components, sometimes 2 + 2 = 6 in smog chemistry, making the development of a single scale problematic. There’s a fellow at SAPRC in Riverside, Bill Carter, who has developed a much more complicated way of estimating “incremental reactivity,” which has its own problems, but it’s better than “one size fits all.”
Anyway, one of the “pure compound” experiments involved methyl chloroform, and I found it fascinating.
Methyl chloroform is also called 1,1,1 tri-chloroethane. If you start with ethane (CH3CH3) and replace all the hydrogens on one methyl group with chlorine, you get methyl chloroform. It’s pretty unreactive stuff; the only reaction sites for hydroxyl radicals are the ones on the methyl group and methyl hydrogens are bound pretty tightly. So for the first part of the chamber experiment, using very high concentrations of MCF with some added NOx, the thing just sat there.
Then, after a couple of hours of induction, something began to happen. The NO began to convert to NO2, some of the MCF began to decay, then suddenly, wham! The whole system kicked into high gear, NO went down like a shot, the MCF began to oxidize like crazy, and ozone began to shoot up. Then, just as suddenly, the ozone just disappeared, all of it, in just a couple of measurement cycles.
Everyone who looked at it said, “Ah, chlorine chemistry,” which was a sure guess. Chlorine will pull hydrogen off of even methyl groups with almost collisional efficiency (if a chlorine atom hits the molecule, it pulls off the hydrogen almost every time). Moreover, chlorine atoms destroy ozone; that’s the “stratospheric ozone depletion” thing.
But I was puzzled. Where did the chlorine atoms come from? Yes, there was plenty of chlorine in the MC, but that was bound. To get one off, you need to create a free radical and those ain’t cheap. If you create an HO radical, that can pull off one of the hydrogens, and that, after the usual reactions, gives you chloral, a tri-chlorinated version of acetaldehyde. Put in a high enough rate of photolysis for chloral in your simulation and you can get the whole system to react.
The problem was, it didn’t look right. With a high rate of photolysis for chloral, the simulation kicked off too quickly. Lower the rate and you never got the sudden takeoff. I’m pretty good at fitting the curves, and I could never get it to work.
So I started looking at the other actors in the system. The end result of chloral oxidation is phosgene (see why I was looking up all those post-WWI gas papers?), but phosgene itself didn’t fill the bill. So maybe the phosgene was converting to CO and Cl2 on the chamber surfaces like it does in someone’s lungs. No, that didn’t work either.
I kept returning to the problem over the years, trying yet another idea, each time getting no further.
In 1985, the “ozone hole” over the Antarctic was reported, and everyone in the stratospheric ozone community, including Gary Whitten, my boss at SAI, immediately suspected that it had something to do with the ice clouds that only form in the stratosphere over the Antarctic. In 1987, Mario Molina published a series of papers describing the surface reactions of stratospheric chemical species on ice crystal surfaces. The really critical reaction was the reaction of chlorine nitrate with hydrochloric acid to form nitric acid an molecular chlorine (Cl2). Cl2 photolyzes so rapidly that it might as well be two chlorine atoms.
I’m not sure when I first tried the Molina reaction on the methyl chloroform system, but it worked much better than anything else I’d tried. It makes the whole thing a very strong positive feedback system. It worked well enough to convince me that it was probably the missing factor; if I wanted to get a better simulation, I’d have to get very specific about some details of the original chamber experiment, and that one’s 35 years old. It’s pretty well moot at this point anyway.
Molina won the Nobel Prize for his work on stratospheric ozone depletion, and it was well-deserved. I was just looking at a single smog chamber experiment, one with a surface reaction that no one was interested in. The chance that I would have figured out the right answer to the peculiarities of that experiment is pretty small. The chance that I would have made the leap from the chamber walls to the stratospheric ice clouds is smaller still; I’d never heard of them before Whitten told me about them, and I certainly didn’t make the connection between them and the chamber experiment until Molina worked out the correct surface chemistry. So I’m certainly not trying to say that I coulda been a contenda.
But I will say that we all should have been paying more attention to the chamber wall effects. You don’t get to say beforehand what will turn out to be important.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Radio, Radium, and Ray Guns
Helix #7 is out, and I seem drawn to the same structure of review as I did for #6, which is to first comment on the John Barnes essay, then try to get an overview of the fiction (and, again, not critiquing the poetry because I am incompetent at it).
But here we get one of those little ironies of life, which is that it is hard to write much about things you agree with ("Here, here, I say." "What he said."), but disagreement sparks so many interesting little tangents. So many, in fact, that I've been having a hard time sorting them out. So I'm going to concentrate on a single theme, and maybe get to some of the other tangents later.
In "Who'll Save the Torchbearers?" Barnes returns to the notion that Science Fiction as a genre is dead ("walking dead" actually), and has been for a while. He's now speculating on whether or not genre SF was linked to what he calls the "Seventy-Five Years' War." Barnes' thesis seems to be that Science Fiction was a balm for nerds, during a time when "the goons took the nerds' toys and turned them into tools of horror," which is to say, weapons of war.
Now that's a pretty interesting tangent, because Barnes dates the end of the SFYW as the fall of the Berlin Wall. This glues together The Great European War, WWI and WWII, with the subsequent Cold War. That's far and away to complicated a subject for this essay. (Am I implying that Barnes' view is simplistic? I'll need more time to have an opinion about that). I will note that I've been doing some thinking about 20th Century Communism recently, and I'll suggest that, at the very least, Barnes' view overweights the importance of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain for at least a twenty-year period toward the end. I'd also like to see a comparison between aggressive wars and civil wars, since it looks to me like (the Great/World War notwithstanding) the real mass slaughters in the 20th Century were civil wars.
And all that would ignore science fiction though, wouldn't it?
Barnes and I seem to be in agreement that genre SF was a literature for certain sorts of people (let's call them nerds) trying to make sense of their lives and the world around them; it was especially an attempt to manage dislocation and change. I've taken a turn or two around that critical track myself.
Barnes concentrates on the war aspects of the transformative technologies, and maybe I would too if I wrote military SF. But I don't read the history of SF that way.
Let's look at the decade where most place the origins of science fiction, the 1920s, a year of comparative peace in the United States, and we're talking about the U.S. as the cradle of genre science fiction here.
The first commercial radio station went on the air in 1920; less than a decade later, radio had engulfed the country. RCA was the biggest and fastest growing corporation in history, the dot com of its day. Radio had spawned a host of subsidiary industries, including the recording industry, which only really took off when recorded music became a radio staple. Radio also gobbled up the remnants of vaudeville, and then merged with the motion picture industry when talkies came to power.
Back off a bit, and consider the necessary precursor to radio: electricity. Alfred Lee Loomis was a well-born son of a somewhat impoverished branch of the American aristocracy; his first cousin was Henry Stimson, secretary of war and secretary of state in the Taft administration, and Stimson took a hand in Loomis' upbringing and education after Alfred's father died. Loomis attended Yale in math and science, but on his family's insistence went to Harvard Law School, graduated summa cum laude, and worked for several years at a law firm until he enlisted in WWI, where he spent time at Aberdeen testing grounds, where those nerd toys were turned into weapons.
After the war, Loomis joined his brother-in-law in investment banking. The firm specialized in raising capital for the creation of public electric utilities. During the 1920s, the firm was responsible for the financing of a large fraction of the electric utilities that were created during that decade. Loomis saw the 1929 Crash coming, and cashed out at something on the order of a billion dollars.
Wealthy beyond dreams of avarice, Loomis retired to Tuxedo Park, New York, where he created a private industrial laboratory that was central to the U.S. side (the other side being British) of the development of radar.
Electricity. Radio. Radar. The electric light and the toaster. Toss in the automobile and the telephone. Put a few airplanes flying overhead. Then tell me that the dislocation was all about the warfare.
The early science fiction magazines used a fair number of reprints, because the "scientific romance" had already been established by the likes of Wells, Verne, Burroughs, and Conan Doyle. Hugo Gernsback was a radio buff. Ultimately, however, if you really want to get a taste of the imagination of the times, look to the Sunday Supplements. I once read a year's worth of newspapers from 1911. The Sunday Supplements were always going on about all sorts of scientific miracles. One was on how organ transplants (from gorillas, no less) were "just around the corner."
But nuclear energy was also a gleam in the eye, and radium was the new wonder material. New and wondrous elements had been discovered, and one need look no further for the origins of Dick Seaton and the rest of Doc Smith's menagerie. To judge from some of the stories of the time, radium was the new philosopher's stone; it was in tonics and elixirs, and it stared at you from the dials of your alarm clock.
It didn't stop at radium, of course. Vitamin D was discovered in the 1920s, and the link to sunlight and ultraviolet light helped create a fad for mercury vapor tube "health gadgets" including combs. That mercury vapor UV light also creates ozone was considered another plus, because ozone was held to be healthy; witness all the "Ozone Park" named suburbs from the early 20th Century.
So, radiation, rays of all kinds, those were part of the "science" mix at the dawn of science fiction.
Then you get Goddard and his rockets, and you get ray guns. Why do I link the two? Because the rockets are how you get to Mars or Venus and the ray gun is how you "tame the frontier." The early science fictions stories were "space operas," just as westerns were "horse operas." Many an early science fiction story is just a western hero with a ray blaster instead of a six gun, and bug-eyed monsters instead of Indians or wolves.
Science fiction was born in turmoil, sure enough, but not the turmoil of war, per se (people just do the war thing all the damn time). It was the turmoil of change, the usual suspects in other words. And pulp literature was just wide open for it. Cross breed an adventure story with a Sunday Supplement and you get Science Fiction.
That's the beginning. How about the middle? Why did science fiction outlive the pulps, when so many other forms died?
Well, let's not overthink this. The mystery story survived. The puzzle story led to the hard-boiled detective, then the procedural. They still do pretty well. The romance is still doing well, better than SF, actually, with a new crop of hybrids like "time travel romances," and "paranormal romances" and a flock of werewolves, vampires, fairy folk and monsters keeping the pot on the boil. Some SF folk hate the stuff, and say the same sorts of things about it that others have said about Science Fiction. Instant Karma, bub.
But there's another reason for the extended lifetime of Science Fiction as a genre, and it contains the seed of its demise.
Science Fiction was never simply romanticism, or escapist literature. It had a Program, a Cause. Actually it had several, but the Big One was the Colonization of Space. Again, it was right there from its birth, at the end of the Colonial Empires, the closing of the Frontier. It was easy for the writers to morph one narrative into an extraterrestrial counterpart, and it was easy for the readers to go along. Indeed, they were expecting it.
Later came the paranormal stuff, ESP, Psi, all the spiritual wish-fulfillment fantasies, and those translated pretty well for the counter-culture. I knew more than one fellow who believed that you could get ESP by taking enough of the right drugs. (Insert "he gained the power to cloud his own mind" joke here). And biological engineering, cyborgs, ecological engineering (for which read: terraforming) all the other transformative aspects of modern biology, all those have been enlisted in the space colonization fantasy.
The problem is that it just doesn't work out. There are no inviting frontiers in space, no place where a man can "live off the land," as it were, no place where the land is even as hospitable as the Antarctic, the middle of the Sahara, or the bottom of the ocean. Space is vast and harsh, miserably expensive to visit, with nothing in it that justifies the enormous cost of picking it up and bringing it back. It's a scientific wonderland
(As an aside, let me mention another one of the SF programs that failed miserably: artificial intelligence. We get no wonderful robot pals to keep us company, either. Dang.)
So the space colony dream is brain dead, kept alive on life support by deep denial and libertarians who blame "The Government" for screwing up the space program. Some have taken stock option lottery money and are trying to do it with private enterprise, the way Heinlein assured them would work. I hope something serendipitous comes out of it, because I'm pretty damn sure that it won't be a Mars colony that comes out the other end.
That's not me being pessimistic, incidentally. I think all sorts of great things came out of the Space Program (and, by implication, out of the Cold War, so maybe that's the connection that Barnes is groping for). We got microchips, Tang, and my college education. Those have got to count for something.
[Let's not forget the inevitable plug for Helix. It's reader supported, so put some money into the tip jar. You'll feel noble.]
But here we get one of those little ironies of life, which is that it is hard to write much about things you agree with ("Here, here, I say." "What he said."), but disagreement sparks so many interesting little tangents. So many, in fact, that I've been having a hard time sorting them out. So I'm going to concentrate on a single theme, and maybe get to some of the other tangents later.
In "Who'll Save the Torchbearers?" Barnes returns to the notion that Science Fiction as a genre is dead ("walking dead" actually), and has been for a while. He's now speculating on whether or not genre SF was linked to what he calls the "Seventy-Five Years' War." Barnes' thesis seems to be that Science Fiction was a balm for nerds, during a time when "the goons took the nerds' toys and turned them into tools of horror," which is to say, weapons of war.
Now that's a pretty interesting tangent, because Barnes dates the end of the SFYW as the fall of the Berlin Wall. This glues together The Great European War, WWI and WWII, with the subsequent Cold War. That's far and away to complicated a subject for this essay. (Am I implying that Barnes' view is simplistic? I'll need more time to have an opinion about that). I will note that I've been doing some thinking about 20th Century Communism recently, and I'll suggest that, at the very least, Barnes' view overweights the importance of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain for at least a twenty-year period toward the end. I'd also like to see a comparison between aggressive wars and civil wars, since it looks to me like (the Great/World War notwithstanding) the real mass slaughters in the 20th Century were civil wars.
And all that would ignore science fiction though, wouldn't it?
Barnes and I seem to be in agreement that genre SF was a literature for certain sorts of people (let's call them nerds) trying to make sense of their lives and the world around them; it was especially an attempt to manage dislocation and change. I've taken a turn or two around that critical track myself.
Barnes concentrates on the war aspects of the transformative technologies, and maybe I would too if I wrote military SF. But I don't read the history of SF that way.
Let's look at the decade where most place the origins of science fiction, the 1920s, a year of comparative peace in the United States, and we're talking about the U.S. as the cradle of genre science fiction here.
The first commercial radio station went on the air in 1920; less than a decade later, radio had engulfed the country. RCA was the biggest and fastest growing corporation in history, the dot com of its day. Radio had spawned a host of subsidiary industries, including the recording industry, which only really took off when recorded music became a radio staple. Radio also gobbled up the remnants of vaudeville, and then merged with the motion picture industry when talkies came to power.
Back off a bit, and consider the necessary precursor to radio: electricity. Alfred Lee Loomis was a well-born son of a somewhat impoverished branch of the American aristocracy; his first cousin was Henry Stimson, secretary of war and secretary of state in the Taft administration, and Stimson took a hand in Loomis' upbringing and education after Alfred's father died. Loomis attended Yale in math and science, but on his family's insistence went to Harvard Law School, graduated summa cum laude, and worked for several years at a law firm until he enlisted in WWI, where he spent time at Aberdeen testing grounds, where those nerd toys were turned into weapons.
After the war, Loomis joined his brother-in-law in investment banking. The firm specialized in raising capital for the creation of public electric utilities. During the 1920s, the firm was responsible for the financing of a large fraction of the electric utilities that were created during that decade. Loomis saw the 1929 Crash coming, and cashed out at something on the order of a billion dollars.
Wealthy beyond dreams of avarice, Loomis retired to Tuxedo Park, New York, where he created a private industrial laboratory that was central to the U.S. side (the other side being British) of the development of radar.
Electricity. Radio. Radar. The electric light and the toaster. Toss in the automobile and the telephone. Put a few airplanes flying overhead. Then tell me that the dislocation was all about the warfare.
The early science fiction magazines used a fair number of reprints, because the "scientific romance" had already been established by the likes of Wells, Verne, Burroughs, and Conan Doyle. Hugo Gernsback was a radio buff. Ultimately, however, if you really want to get a taste of the imagination of the times, look to the Sunday Supplements. I once read a year's worth of newspapers from 1911. The Sunday Supplements were always going on about all sorts of scientific miracles. One was on how organ transplants (from gorillas, no less) were "just around the corner."
But nuclear energy was also a gleam in the eye, and radium was the new wonder material. New and wondrous elements had been discovered, and one need look no further for the origins of Dick Seaton and the rest of Doc Smith's menagerie. To judge from some of the stories of the time, radium was the new philosopher's stone; it was in tonics and elixirs, and it stared at you from the dials of your alarm clock.
It didn't stop at radium, of course. Vitamin D was discovered in the 1920s, and the link to sunlight and ultraviolet light helped create a fad for mercury vapor tube "health gadgets" including combs. That mercury vapor UV light also creates ozone was considered another plus, because ozone was held to be healthy; witness all the "Ozone Park" named suburbs from the early 20th Century.
So, radiation, rays of all kinds, those were part of the "science" mix at the dawn of science fiction.
Then you get Goddard and his rockets, and you get ray guns. Why do I link the two? Because the rockets are how you get to Mars or Venus and the ray gun is how you "tame the frontier." The early science fictions stories were "space operas," just as westerns were "horse operas." Many an early science fiction story is just a western hero with a ray blaster instead of a six gun, and bug-eyed monsters instead of Indians or wolves.
Science fiction was born in turmoil, sure enough, but not the turmoil of war, per se (people just do the war thing all the damn time). It was the turmoil of change, the usual suspects in other words. And pulp literature was just wide open for it. Cross breed an adventure story with a Sunday Supplement and you get Science Fiction.
That's the beginning. How about the middle? Why did science fiction outlive the pulps, when so many other forms died?
Well, let's not overthink this. The mystery story survived. The puzzle story led to the hard-boiled detective, then the procedural. They still do pretty well. The romance is still doing well, better than SF, actually, with a new crop of hybrids like "time travel romances," and "paranormal romances" and a flock of werewolves, vampires, fairy folk and monsters keeping the pot on the boil. Some SF folk hate the stuff, and say the same sorts of things about it that others have said about Science Fiction. Instant Karma, bub.
But there's another reason for the extended lifetime of Science Fiction as a genre, and it contains the seed of its demise.
Science Fiction was never simply romanticism, or escapist literature. It had a Program, a Cause. Actually it had several, but the Big One was the Colonization of Space. Again, it was right there from its birth, at the end of the Colonial Empires, the closing of the Frontier. It was easy for the writers to morph one narrative into an extraterrestrial counterpart, and it was easy for the readers to go along. Indeed, they were expecting it.
Later came the paranormal stuff, ESP, Psi, all the spiritual wish-fulfillment fantasies, and those translated pretty well for the counter-culture. I knew more than one fellow who believed that you could get ESP by taking enough of the right drugs. (Insert "he gained the power to cloud his own mind" joke here). And biological engineering, cyborgs, ecological engineering (for which read: terraforming) all the other transformative aspects of modern biology, all those have been enlisted in the space colonization fantasy.
The problem is that it just doesn't work out. There are no inviting frontiers in space, no place where a man can "live off the land," as it were, no place where the land is even as hospitable as the Antarctic, the middle of the Sahara, or the bottom of the ocean. Space is vast and harsh, miserably expensive to visit, with nothing in it that justifies the enormous cost of picking it up and bringing it back. It's a scientific wonderland
(As an aside, let me mention another one of the SF programs that failed miserably: artificial intelligence. We get no wonderful robot pals to keep us company, either. Dang.)
So the space colony dream is brain dead, kept alive on life support by deep denial and libertarians who blame "The Government" for screwing up the space program. Some have taken stock option lottery money and are trying to do it with private enterprise, the way Heinlein assured them would work. I hope something serendipitous comes out of it, because I'm pretty damn sure that it won't be a Mars colony that comes out the other end.
That's not me being pessimistic, incidentally. I think all sorts of great things came out of the Space Program (and, by implication, out of the Cold War, so maybe that's the connection that Barnes is groping for). We got microchips, Tang, and my college education. Those have got to count for something.
[Let's not forget the inevitable plug for Helix. It's reader supported, so put some money into the tip jar. You'll feel noble.]
Monday, January 7, 2008
Jealousy
Cause all I really want is to be with you
Feeling like I matter too
If I hadn't blown the whole thing years ago
I might be here with you
Tomorrow we can drive around this town
And let the cops chase us around
The past is gone but something might be found
To take its place...hey jealousy
-- “Hey Jealousy” Gin Blossoms
On a spring afternoon on a Saturday in 1984, I got a telephone call from my ex-girlfriend. She’d just broken up with her current flame and she wanted to talk, It seems he’d said something about “maybe seeing other people” and that was it for her, because she was always as possessive and jealous as a stereotypical Latina or Southern Belle, without being actually Hispanic or Southern.
That had been more or less the reason why we’d broken up, in fact. One of the phrases you can almost always count on as a hit in a cold reading is to suggest that someone “wants love but has a fear of commitment.” At least that works for anyone who is in his mid-thirties and has never been married. So sue me.
We spoke for a while, about all manner of things. Neither of us had any strong urge to get back together; that wasn’t what the call was about. But we’d been in love at some point at least, strong feelings linger, and we’d worked at staying friends, so there we were.
Then, after maybe a half hour on the phone, she said, “Uh, Jim, you’re going to have to help me out here. I’ve suddenly got a splitting headache,” Then I heard the phone clatter to the floor, and there was nothing but silence on the other end.
I like to think that I’m capable of rising to most occasions, but on this one I think I failed more or less completely. I couldn’t call her aunt and niece who lived in the same house with her, because the phone was off the hook. I should have called 911, but it didn’t occur to me, partly because I had no idea what had happened. I could have called a friend of mine, who lived only a few blocks away, and asked him to check up on her, but I didn’t think of that at all.
All I could think of to do was to run out to my car, hop in, and drive over. If I thought of any of the other things on the drive over, I didn’t think to stop the car to try to find a phone. Once you commit to a particular action (drive over as quickly as possible), you’re loathe to change direction.
The drive took about half an hour. I got there just as they were loading her into the ambulance. Either her niece or aunt had tried to use the downstairs phone and had gone upstairs to see why it was off the hook. They’d found her and called 911, like I should have done.
I pulled into what turned out to be an illegal parking space, thereby earning my one and only San Francisco parking ticket. I rode with the ambulance to the hospital. I don’t have lot of reliable memories of that evening but two stand out: watching the CAT scan results as they appeared on the screen, and, earlier, just as she was about to go into the MRI, holding a bedpan to her lips as she vomited into it.
The technical term for what I watched on the CAT scan is “hemorrhage of a sub-arachnoid aneurism.” The sub-arachnoid arteries are in the skull, but not in the brain, as such. A hemorrhage of one of these arteries produces the usual: pressure on the brain which causes extreme pain and nausea. An aneurism is a bulging weakness in a blood vessel, which makes hemorrhage more likely.
It turned out that it had happened to her once before, in college, when the only treatment was a week in a dark room, hoping that it would get better. It had, but it was still a ticking time bomb in her skull. It’s amazing how much people don’t tell you about themselves; she’d never mentioned it to me.
Since her college days, a surgical treatment had been devised: a metal sleeve to put over the aneurism to keep it from rupturing. I happened to know a neurologist who gave me the statistics on the matter. About 50% of patients never make it to surgery; they die either in the initial bleeding or from subsequent short term complications. Of those who manage to make it to surgery, the survival rate is 50%. I hope it’s gotten better in the intervening years.
I did not share those statistics with her, or anyone in the family as we all waited for her to stabilize sufficiently for surgery.
The boyfriend was there the next day, and he didn’t leave her side during visiting hours during the time leading up to surgery, nor during the week after it, while she was recovering to go home. Actually, that’s not quite true; he did leave whenever I was around. By the time she went home, he’d convinced her to get back together again.
They lasted about another year, as I recall, but I might have that wrong. By the time they broke up for the second time, I’d gotten my own illness and wasn’t paying much attention to the outside world.
His motives for the bedside vigil are too obvious to be worth analyzing, but I will note one thing. He’d always resented me, the ex-boyfriend, which is hardly a news flash on anyone’s terms. But it took me a while to realize the new element that the crisis had added. I’d been the one who held her head while she vomited into a bedpan. And he was jealous of that. It was an intimacy that he had been denied.
Feeling like I matter too
If I hadn't blown the whole thing years ago
I might be here with you
Tomorrow we can drive around this town
And let the cops chase us around
The past is gone but something might be found
To take its place...hey jealousy
-- “Hey Jealousy” Gin Blossoms
On a spring afternoon on a Saturday in 1984, I got a telephone call from my ex-girlfriend. She’d just broken up with her current flame and she wanted to talk, It seems he’d said something about “maybe seeing other people” and that was it for her, because she was always as possessive and jealous as a stereotypical Latina or Southern Belle, without being actually Hispanic or Southern.
That had been more or less the reason why we’d broken up, in fact. One of the phrases you can almost always count on as a hit in a cold reading is to suggest that someone “wants love but has a fear of commitment.” At least that works for anyone who is in his mid-thirties and has never been married. So sue me.
We spoke for a while, about all manner of things. Neither of us had any strong urge to get back together; that wasn’t what the call was about. But we’d been in love at some point at least, strong feelings linger, and we’d worked at staying friends, so there we were.
Then, after maybe a half hour on the phone, she said, “Uh, Jim, you’re going to have to help me out here. I’ve suddenly got a splitting headache,” Then I heard the phone clatter to the floor, and there was nothing but silence on the other end.
I like to think that I’m capable of rising to most occasions, but on this one I think I failed more or less completely. I couldn’t call her aunt and niece who lived in the same house with her, because the phone was off the hook. I should have called 911, but it didn’t occur to me, partly because I had no idea what had happened. I could have called a friend of mine, who lived only a few blocks away, and asked him to check up on her, but I didn’t think of that at all.
All I could think of to do was to run out to my car, hop in, and drive over. If I thought of any of the other things on the drive over, I didn’t think to stop the car to try to find a phone. Once you commit to a particular action (drive over as quickly as possible), you’re loathe to change direction.
The drive took about half an hour. I got there just as they were loading her into the ambulance. Either her niece or aunt had tried to use the downstairs phone and had gone upstairs to see why it was off the hook. They’d found her and called 911, like I should have done.
I pulled into what turned out to be an illegal parking space, thereby earning my one and only San Francisco parking ticket. I rode with the ambulance to the hospital. I don’t have lot of reliable memories of that evening but two stand out: watching the CAT scan results as they appeared on the screen, and, earlier, just as she was about to go into the MRI, holding a bedpan to her lips as she vomited into it.
The technical term for what I watched on the CAT scan is “hemorrhage of a sub-arachnoid aneurism.” The sub-arachnoid arteries are in the skull, but not in the brain, as such. A hemorrhage of one of these arteries produces the usual: pressure on the brain which causes extreme pain and nausea. An aneurism is a bulging weakness in a blood vessel, which makes hemorrhage more likely.
It turned out that it had happened to her once before, in college, when the only treatment was a week in a dark room, hoping that it would get better. It had, but it was still a ticking time bomb in her skull. It’s amazing how much people don’t tell you about themselves; she’d never mentioned it to me.
Since her college days, a surgical treatment had been devised: a metal sleeve to put over the aneurism to keep it from rupturing. I happened to know a neurologist who gave me the statistics on the matter. About 50% of patients never make it to surgery; they die either in the initial bleeding or from subsequent short term complications. Of those who manage to make it to surgery, the survival rate is 50%. I hope it’s gotten better in the intervening years.
I did not share those statistics with her, or anyone in the family as we all waited for her to stabilize sufficiently for surgery.
The boyfriend was there the next day, and he didn’t leave her side during visiting hours during the time leading up to surgery, nor during the week after it, while she was recovering to go home. Actually, that’s not quite true; he did leave whenever I was around. By the time she went home, he’d convinced her to get back together again.
They lasted about another year, as I recall, but I might have that wrong. By the time they broke up for the second time, I’d gotten my own illness and wasn’t paying much attention to the outside world.
His motives for the bedside vigil are too obvious to be worth analyzing, but I will note one thing. He’d always resented me, the ex-boyfriend, which is hardly a news flash on anyone’s terms. But it took me a while to realize the new element that the crisis had added. I’d been the one who held her head while she vomited into a bedpan. And he was jealous of that. It was an intimacy that he had been denied.
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