Barry

I’m not much for “tell all” memoirs. I don’t think that I have the right to invade others’ privacy to any great extent, and the diligent reader will observe that most of the times when I’ve mentioned other people in these essays, I’ve either obscured the names or tried to paint the others in a good light.

But there is the matter of how to treat those who are dead, those who can neither grant or deny permission. I can see both sides to the argument there, so it’s inevitably a case by case basis. In this case, I think that Barry would not mind, and besides, I think he deserves some sort of eulogy from me, the sort that I could not deliver at his actual memorial service, because there were friends and family there who might have been wounded by some of the details.

Barry was a drug dealer. He began peddling marijuana in the early 1970s, and had graduated to cocaine by the time I met him in the early 80s. He was, when I met him, at something of a low ebb. A while before he’d planned on giving up the trade, getting married, the whole bit, then his fiancé ran off with someone he’d thought was his best friend, and then a series of ill-advised deals went sour, rendering him, if not impoverished, at least less able to finance the sybaritic life style that it turned out most of his other “friends” were interested in. So he was struggling to keep from foundering financially, a struggle made much more difficult by the lure of the product that he was back to peddling.

We met through a mutual friend, and Barry and I became friends. I won’t say that there weren’t drugs involved, because at that time, if you were around Barry, drugs were usually involved. However, we also joined a bowling team together, went to concerts, parties, etc. Barry was an amateur theater person, so I went to some of his performances, and he was interested in standup comedy. I never saw him perform, but we did go to see various comics he was interested in, and the SF comedy scene has had a lot of talent pass through.

When I started to feel the effects of “the Lurgy,” the maybe-it-was-chronic-fatigue-syndrome that I got in the mid-80s, drugs were one of the first things I gave up (with the occasional lapses, of course; I’m not some sort of iron-willed paragon). But Barry remained a friend, one of those who was willing to help with those minor things that sick people need, like the occasional trip out to a restaurant when I just couldn’t get it together to feed myself.

Barry got busted in the late 80s, but he was only holding grass at the time, the dealers’ paranoia serving him well enough that he didn’t take any coke to that particular meeting. The prosecutors tried to get him to set up his own suppliers (just as he’d been set up), but Barry was having none of that. While awaiting trial he dumped the rest of the business, cleaned up his act, and took a job as a night security guard. He sufficiently impressed the arresting officer that the man recommended straight parole, no jail time, and that was that for Barry as dope dealer.

Still, Barry was ever the entrepreneur, making frequent trips to Bali, to buy artwork that he then sold when he returned home. And he’d always been a comics collector, so he ramped that up as a small business as well.

Barry had an occasional girlfriend, whom I’ll call Di. It turned out that Di had lived near RPI during my time there, as a place called “The Farm” (did every college in the early 1970s have a “Farm” associated with it?). She’d been involved at that time with a guy I put in the acknowledgements to SunSmoke, Jim Nagy, who’d played McMurphy in the RPI Players production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and had been given tepid reviews because he obviously hadn’t been acting, just playing himself. Which is to say that Nagy had major charisma, and I had the unfortunate task of telling Di that Jim had died in the mid-80s. He’d lived an amphetamine fueled life for years and had cleaned up too late, apparently, the damage having been done, and something critical finally gave out.

It can be a small world in the fast lane, even if you’re usually just a passenger.

After I married Amy, she and I had dinner a few times with Barry and Di. Amy told me after one of them that, during a time when I’d left the table to go to the restroom, Di had confided to her, “If ever any man looks at me the way he looks at you, I’m his forever.”

Barry quit the drugs, but he kept his Corvette, and that was what did it for him. He was on Highway 101 in Northern California, a twisty turny stretch that shrinks to two lanes for periods, and he was behind a camper and he was always impatient. He tried to pass when he couldn’t see far enough ahead, and someone was coming.

I developed a theory about the illegal drug business back when I had a better vantage point for observation. It seemed to me that the nature of it was primal, stark, a world of black and white. There is no legal system to enforce contracts and the regular criminal justice system is often deliberately manipulated by criminals to their own advantage, creating situations where the police and the law was the instrument of injustice, rather than of justice. And it looked to me like the tradesmen were either snakes or honorable men, with a great gulf between the two.

A friend of Barry’s told me he saw the highway patrol report of the accident, and it suggested that Barry deliberately went through a railing and down a steep embankment, rather than hitting the oncoming car. I believe it, because that was Barry, always taking risks, but trying his damnedest to confine the damage to himself.

Versions of Immortality

In my general musings about science fiction substituting as religion (for some people at least) and the social implications of that substitution, I thought that the offer of the hope of temporal immortality might be a big item. On further thought I realized that this isn’t the case. People, or at least the Americans of my experience, are so hungry for any hope of a loophole on death that they glom onto anything that seems like it offers said hope, even if they are conventionally religious and the hope goes against that religion.

At least that is my interpretation of such oddities as the “weight of the soul” idea (21 grams?), which lots of people seem to buy, even those who profess to believe in the “immaterial soul.” Still, maybe people who believe that something immaterial nonetheless has weight are merely ignorant of what “immaterial” means.

In any case, you don’t have to be a science fiction fan to hope for “scientific immortality” though I suspect it helps.

One of the current magic wands, The Singularity, is substantially science fiction-y. As nearly as I can tell, this is the idea that we’ll soon have artificial intelligence and that said intelligence will be able to evolve exponentially to higher and higher intelligences, and at some point said AIs will become indistinguishable from God, even down to the part about loving each and every one of us so much that He, She, or It will grant us physical immortality. Or maybe we get mental immortality, by uploading each of our minds/souls into the Great AI, to dwell in the presence of the Lord forever, amen.

Apparently I’m not much of a fan of The Singularity.

Of course, the upload/download thing has been around for quite a while (Tron, anyone?). It’s an extension of an older idea, that Everything Is Information. I once had an immortalist on the Compuserve Science Forum try to convince me that the information contained in my brain is important (which I certainly believe), so important that it constitutes my essence (which I don’t buy for a minute). Yes, without my memories I’m not me anymore, but putting my memories into some other brain doesn’t make him me, not even if it’s my genetically identical clone. It just means there’s two guys walking around thinking they are me, which I don’t believe is the same thing, and neither would they, I’ll bet.

The Pop Culture version of immortality is that our souls are made of some sort of Special Matter. We know that it’s matter because it has weight (see above), is immortal (which, in actuality, matter more-or-less is and spirits aren’t, nearly as I can tell), and can give you a body image even without a body wrapped around it. In other words, a ghost made out of ectoplasm, an astral projection, a hoodoo of some sort. When physicists go off into these nether realms, they start talking about the “physical basis of consciousness” and try to conjure up special particles, special physics, or paraphysics. Going back a ways, you get physicists who are interested in parapsychology.

J. B. Rhine, who kicked off the whole parapsychology movement, was pretty specific about his aims. He believed that it should be possible to directly perceive God. Of course, if there were some aspect of the mind that was not part of physiology and beyond conventional physics, then all the wonders of the immortal soul would be real, even if not necessarily concrete.

John W. Campbell bought it hook, line, and plot device, so we had a couple of decades worth of psi stories, whose tropes are part and parcel of science fiction, so well established that you really don’t even need to explain them any more. Though they are déclassé in the “cutting edge” part of SF, they are well represented in mass media SF, and will no doubt outlive us all.

Later we had cryonics, the Disney version of the Egyptian afterlife, as it were. That Uncle Walt is in cryonic suspension is an urban legend engendered by the coincidence that there was publicity for cryonics on the same day Disney died, and some reporters covered both stories, with speculative results. After people began to realize just how much damage a frozen corpse had sustained, nanomachines came to the rescue, at least fictionally. For all I know there’s a nanotechnology story that has someone resurrecting Egyptian mummies. Or maybe there will be soon. My favorite nanotech story was the one where Gregor Samsa wakes up one day to discover himself transformed into a giant jelly donut.

I remember a story, by del Rey I think, that begins with the observation that every ghost story, even a horror story, is a bit hopeful, since if the ghost survives after death, then that is evidence that death isn’t the end. As I recall, the story then specifically torpedoes that hopefulness, but most ghost stories do indeed fulfill that purpose, to provide just a little more confirmation that death might not be the end to your own personal viewpoint.

Science, of course, has powerful mojo, and people generally would like to appropriate that mojo for their own ends, including the “be not afraid” part of religion. The crassest kind of comfort is the kind that says that what you’re afraid of doesn’t exist, in this case that death is somehow contingent, that there are loopholes (just like for taxes!), and all will be taken care of because someone who is all powerful is watching out for you.

For my own part, I remember being struck by a line in an F&SF story many years ago. One character asks another (who, if memory serves was the Devil), what would happen to his soul when he died. The Devil answered, “What happens to the information in a book when you burn the book?”

Years later, at the memorial service for my first sensei, someone remarked, “In some of the Zen traditions, the soul is a candle flame; it doesn’t go anywhere when it goes out. But one flame can light many others while it lives.”

If you spend all your efforts in trying to keep the one candle lit, you might not be lighting the other candles. That, ultimately, is the danger of promises of immortality, that you spend so much of your life trying to compensate for your own fear of death that you fail to expend effort on living your own life, whatever that may mean to you.

Phil

Phil worked at Systems Applications Inc. in the late 1970s, as did I, although he worked in the telecommunications policy analysis group, while I was a smog modeler. I'm not sure how long he'd worked there before we got to know each other, but I'm pretty sure that the first thing he said to me was "Were you at Westercon last weekend?"

So Phil was a science fiction fan, among other things, the other things including being an economist and a libertarian, back when there was still some intellectual meat in libertarianism, which is to say before it became a front operation for the Conservative Movement. Phil was a fan of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy, for example, and did a bit of work on "cap and trade" air quality management policy analysis for SAI before he left. In those days, cap and trade was a new idea, and new ideas fascinated Phil.

We were simpatico, he and I. We had one long conversation once on a drive down to Los Angeles, five or six hours of non-stop ideas, back-and-forth on philosophy, economics, space exploration, computers, science fiction and fantasy, all the seriously geeky stuff that we sort know each other by. There were the usual "agree to disagree" areas, and we were also fine with that.

At one SAI party, there was a game of charades where I drew "The Hound of the Baskervilles." Phil was on my team and the clues went, five words, first word short, second word sounds like [make circular movement with hands] round, ground, hound, on the nose, fifth word sounds like [makes dribbling motion] Basketball!—blank Hound blank blank Basketball, The Hound of the Baskervilles! On the nose, and we were done, total elapsed time less than fifteen seconds and the other players were just blinking. What had just happened? Some form of telepathy no doubt.

Phil left SAI to go to work on a "dream project," one of those companies trying to build a private space launch vehicle. He also got involved with Eric Drexler's Foresight Institute, and Drexler stayed with Phil and his wife Gail when he first moved to California. Gail was more serious than Phil; when one of my first stories, "Shaggy Purple" came out, one about the discovery of an astronomical object so implausible (a purple star, inspired by a piece of astronomical art I'd once seen at a convention) that one of the characters decided it must have been artificially constructed. Later in the story, some alien artifacts are discovered orbiting the star, cinching the theory, but the character does not tell anyone except the narrator that he's pretty sure that whoever made the star did so as a joke, to upset alien astronomers perhaps. But with only the star and a few enigmatic artifacts as evidence, the story soon fades from public attention.

Gail was of the opinion that the discovery of the existence of an alien race would have had a bigger impact. Phil understood why the story was named "Shaggy Purple."

I lost track of Phil when I got sick in the mid-80s. In the early 90s, when I was beginning to reconnect with various folks, I checked the phone book, found Phil's name, and called the number. I only got an answering machine the first time, and it was Gail's voice, and the message made no mention of Phil.

I was hoping that they'd gotten divorced. Not because I wanted them to split up, of course.

When I finally got through to Gail, she told me that Phil had died the year before, at 41, of stomach cancer, only a couple of years after his father had died of the same thing. She speculated that whatever had activated the cancer had done so for both of them at some time in the past and the induction time had just been a little different.

That's another one of those examples of intellectualization that I sometimes point out.

We spoke for over an hour, maybe more than two. It turned out that a college buddy of mine had worked for the Foresight Institute for a time, so there was some gossip about that. Periodically we circled around to Phil and his quick and untimely death. He'd only lived a couple of months after the diagnosis. One of his comments at the time was to envy the 18 months to two years that AIDS took to kill its victims. Two years looks awfully good to someone with only a month to live.

I want for Phil to not have died. I want for him to have made a lot of money, one way or another, and to have gotten into space, either in a sub-orbital flight in a craft from a company he was a part of, or as one of those space tourists who get to go to the Space Station by paying the Russians. I want for nanotechnology to have created a cure for Phil's cancer, even though I don't believe that Drexler has a clue and that his view of nanotechnology is snake oil squared. I want a time machine to be able to go back and stop whatever it was that triggered Phil's and his father's cancer so that both of them would still be alive.

I want world peace and I want to dance the Charleston with Louise Brooks. I want to hear a duet between Joni Mitchell and Tim Buckley. I want to teleport to Barsoom. I want all sorts of things that I can't have, that I could never have, even if I were fortune's most favored son.

Everybody Beats Mozart (Except Those who Don't)

“It is a sobering thought that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.” –Tom Lehrer

I noticed when writing (actually reposting from my sff.net newsgroup) my recent memoriam for Lin Carter that I am now the age at which he died of mouth cancer. Actually, I'm a little older than he was, so I beat Lin Carter.

Dan Fogelberg, who was not quite a year younger than I, died late last year, so I beat Dan Fogelberg, too, and, for that matter, John Entwistle, who died a few months shy of 56.

There's a whole raft of pop culture icons who died in their early-to-mid 50's. Frank Zappa, Jerry Garcia, Michael Landon, Bill Bixby, John Ritter, Jim Henson. All of us guys from the peak of the Baby Boom who are still around, we win the slow bicycle race, right?

My favorite headline from the now defunct Weekly World News was "Elvis Dead at 57!" which they published in 1992, when Elvis would have been 57. Or perhaps I should say, when Elvis was 57 in Earth-WWN. Elvis actually died in 1977, when he was 42. I have slightly-better-than-urban-legend knowledge (a friend of mine knew one of the ER staff that dealt with the body when they brought it in) that he was really D-E-A-D on arrival. They tried to revive him anyway, of course. I mean, it was Elvis.

"The parallels are astonishing. Elvis died on a toilet. Kennedy died in Dallas." –David Feldman

Kennedy was 46 when he died, so he beat Elvis. He beat Marilyn Monroe, also. But Elvis and Marilyn both beat Mozart. Hell, everybody beats Mozart.

Except, no, not everybody does. Mozart was just shy of 36 when he died. James Dean was only 24 when he died. Sal Mineo barely beat the Mozart mark by a little over a year, while Natalie Wood was and august 43, when she died, thus rounding out the doomed "Rebel Without a Cause" crew. Nick Adams, friend of Elvis, who played "The Rebel" on television (and also appeared in the sixth Godzilla film for Toho studios), just barely passed the Mozart mark and died of an apparent drug overdose at 36.

Hollywood can chew them up fast. Heath Ledger wasn't yet 29 when he died recently. River Phoenix didn't even beat James Dean. Even Jimi Hendrix did better than that; he was 27 when he died, as was Janis Joplin, and Brian Jones, for that matter. Keith Moon was a relative oldster when he died at 32, as was John Bonham. None of them beat Mozart.

Buddy Holly was 22 when his plane crashed. Richie Valens was 27. Jiles Perry "J. P." Richardson, Jr., aka "The Big Bopper" was 28. The pilot was named Roger Peterson, who was 21.

Duane Allman was in James Dean territory, dying from a motorcycle accident a month shy of 24. His bandmate Berry Oakley managed to make it to the full 24 before dying in his motorcycle accident. The rest of the Allman Brothers gave up motorcycles after that.

Part of the "famous death" thing is that you have to have time to get famous, and that tends to favor the artists and the warriors. Shelly was shy of 30 when he died, but both Poe and Baudelaire still managed to beat Mozart. Keats didn't, though; he died at 25. Christopher Marlowe died at 29, although there are legends that say he just skipped town, like Elvis.

Évariste Galois, the mathematician died in a duel at the age of 20. Mathematics and politics do not mix.

Joan of Arc was 19 when she died, and that's pushing the envelope for someone to actually accomplish something before their deaths. Sure, King Tut was a teenager, but he just died and was buried with a lot of gold that didn't get graverobbed. And history is awash with young royals dying of a plague or a murderous plot before they came of age.

But we do have child actors, and such folks as Heather O'Roark, of Poltergeist fame. She was 12, and did not die of a drug overdose, or a set accident. She had congenital intestinal stenosis, and died of septic shock following successful surgery. She died too young. Almost everyone does.

Binding Energy

The most tightly bound of the nuclei is ⁶²Ni, a case made convincingly by M. P. Fewell in an article in the American Journal of Physics. Though the championship of nuclear binding energy is often attributed to ⁵⁶Fe, it actually comes in a close third…

The high binding energy of the group of elements around A=60, typically called "the iron group" by astrophysicists, is significant in the understanding of the synthesis of heavy elements in the stars. It is curious that the abundance of ⁵⁶Fe is an order of magnitude higher than that of ⁶²Ni. Fewell discusses this point, and indicates that the reason lies with the greater photodisintegration rate for ⁶²Ni in stellar interiors.
--The Most Tightly Bound Nuclei

When I was eight, and cute as a bug, I spent several months selling candy door to door, to finance my way to YMCA summer camp. The camp’s name was Widjiwagan, some sort of Indian name that is at least superior to Sissimanunu (from the Dick Van Dyke Show episode "The Brave and the Backache").

That first year I sold enough mints to pay for the whole thing, something I never did again, I suspect because they kept lowering the price (and quality) of the sweets, first to mint cookies, then to some other kind of cookie (peanut butter?) as I recall. Every year I sold about the same number of units, but the unit price declined, and so did my sales figures.

My camp councilor that first year was James “Cookie” Cook, whose nickname was sometimes pronounced “Kooky” after the TV character on “77 Sunset Strip.” One story that he told was about his appendectomy surgery, which was funny as all get-out to hear him tell it. He did also say that his physicians were surprised at the speed of his recovery, and his surgeon had mentioned something about how many people get all anxious and tense before surgery, and that can be seen in the internal organs themselves, which “try to hide” as it were, under stress. His, Cookie said, were pretty well displayed, so the surgeon said it was an easy surgery.

I have no idea of the veracity of all this, of course. But I like Cookie a lot, which is why I was anything but a happy camper the next year, when I learned that he’d died in a car crash the previous spring.

I read the Norman Cousins book Anatomy of an Illness when it first came out, after seeing Cousins on the Dick Cavett Show. By then I was well along the path to becoming the raging skeptic that stands before you today, but I don’t think I saw much harm in telling sick people to take what enjoyment they could from life; hey, it probably doesn’t hurt and it might do some good. And Cousins book was specifically about laughter, which I do revere. But over time I saw the simple and basic prescription transmogrify into, at least in some cases, yet another way of blaming the victim. You can get well if you just have the right attitude, so your being sick is obviously because you can’t control your attitude. Suck it up.

Anecdotally, well, I’ve known what seems to be more than my share of people who died, enough for the Jim Carroll song to resonate pretty strongly. Some of them had terminal illnesses and plenty of warning. I’ve also known a fair number of people who had what might have been fatal illnesses who nevertheless survived. In one period in the late 70s and early 80s, I specifically remember four people who developed pretty serious cancers. The two who had really positive and optimistic attitudes died; the two gloomy depressives lived.

Sure, sure, anecdotes aren’t statistics, but the statistics are just as suspect. Certainly being ill makes people anxious and depressed, so you start out with the obvious correlation that sick people are inevitably going to be less “positive and optimistic” than people who aren’t sick. The studies that attempt to assess “attitude” attempt to correct for this by objectively assessing people’s prognosis, then seeing if those with a “positive attitude” have better results. The real problem there is that people may subjectively have some information about their own health that doesn’t show up in the objective prognosis. If that is the case, then all the “positive attitude” does is to include that subjective judgment into the mix. In other words, optimism may well be an effect, not a cause.

Still, physicians are human, and nobody really likes dealing with gloomy people all the time. So if the “positive attitude” prescription is more for the benefit of the physician than the patient, it still might make the situation better for the patient if it improves the attitude of the physician. That explanation is less harsh than to say that it’s just more victim blaming, and I’ll take the incremental improvement. Blaming the physician is seldom any more productive than blaming the patient.

In 1989, my Dad was diagnosed with cancer, first liver cancer, then someone else thought it was lung. Both had abysmal prognoses. Some family connections got him into the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, where they re-diagnosed him as having a carcinoid tumor, an intestinal tumor that was producing substantial amounts of serotonin, which accounted for some of his mood swings in the years preceding.

The tumor had metastasized to his liver, and there was the rub. Surgery could remove the colon tumors, but the liver tumors were inoperable, as such. But the Mayo boys had developed a life extending surgery that involved cutting the arterial blood supply to the liver. The liver can still live (albeit, not happily) on venous blood, and removing the arterial blood supply would starve the liver tumors and give an estimated 2-5 years of added life. Not the best result, but a lot of things can happen in 5 years including better treatments.

While we were visiting him prior to surgery, one of his doctors made a visit and made some remark about how important “attitude” was. As I’ve said before, I don’t have much of a poker face, so after he’d left, Dad said, “You looked pretty skeptical there when he said that.”

I said, “I don’t really think that attitude is that important. I think you’ll be okay because you have a healthy heart and good constitution, and I’m fine with that.” Dad nodded. Maybe he was getting tired of acting chipper all the time. Maybe he was relieved that I’d told him that I wasn’t going to blame his attitude if the outcome wasn’t as good as we hoped.

He survived the longer-than-expected four hours of surgery, then died in the recovery room, before he regained consciousness. The subsequent autopsy revealed that he had over 90% blockage in one of his coronary arteries, an absolutely “silent” condition, possibly because the serotonin had masked any chest pains he might have had.

Being right in the abstract and wrong in the particulars is seldom any solace. Things do not always work out for the best, unless your idea of “best” is that everybody dies, but life still goes on. I’m also none too keen on this unintentional irony business, so I try not to think of it too often. Yet there it is, emblazoned above my words, for the world to see.

If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron. – Spider Robinson

The Linear Hypothesis

One of the many problems with using "animal models" for estimating human health effects of exposure to various toxins, radiation, etc., is that most animals are short-lived, so the effects of chronic exposure to low levels of the toxin of interest does not become apparent during the animal's lifetime. The method generally used to try to get around this problem is to boost the dosage, which is assumed to shorten the "induction period" of disease progression in a more-or-less linear fashion. The idea is that doubling the dosage will halve the time it takes to get a response, more or less.

That is a pretty kludgy method, of course, but all the methods are pretty kludgy. Using longer-lived animals also has problems, not least being that you have to wait much longer for results. Moreover, the lower the general exposure, the fewer responses you are likely to get, statistically speaking, so the use of realistic exposures and exposure times becomes prohibitively expensive. Also, longer-lived animals tend to be more "charismatic" in the sense that people like them more and animal rights activists pay them more attention, sometimes to the detriment of the researchers.

For the purposes of this little essay, I'm going to use radiation as the example, mostly because there are so many places to get information on the radiation/cancer debate, but also because the chemical/cancer debate gets even more arcane in spots, and I'm doing a once-over-lightly here.

The main alternative to the "linear hypothesis" is the "threshold hypothesis," the idea that a toxin or radiation does not overwhelm the body's cellular defenses until it gets above a certain level, or threshold. There are clearly many, many cases where such thresholds exist; "the dose makes the poison" as Paracelsus claimed, and there are few things that don't become poisonous at a high enough concentration.

There is a variation of the threshold hypothesis, which is called the "hormesis model." This is a somewhat more extreme version of the threshold model, and postulates that low doses of radiation are good for you. This isn't an entirely loopy suggestion; after all, radiation is used to treat some kinds of cancer, because cancer cells are more susceptible to dying from radiation than most body cells. It does, however, contain echoes of the early days of radiation, when things like radium were used as "invigorating" tonics, and that didn't work out well.

There are a variety of arguments and observations made to support both alternatives to the linear model. One of my favorite involves studies that create biological systems that lack the naturally occurring radioisotope potassium-40 and include only potassium-39. This apparently leads to birth defects. However, a high concentration of deuterium in the body (i.e. biological systems using heavy water) also produces severe-to-lethal effects, with no radiation involvement whatsoever. It's not out of the question to suggest that our bodies' enzymes are "tuned" to a particular isotopic weight of the elements involved, and that even relatively small changes in these elements can cause problems. To the best of my knowledge, the potassium isotope experiment has never been performed with some external source substituting for the missing radiation. The result would need to be normal development, obviously, for hormesis to be validated.

Other observations that seem to support various versions of threshold or hormesis include epidemiology in areas of high natural background radiation, which seem to show no excess cancers. Again, matters of the adaptation of local populations, questions of whether or not differences in infant mortality create a "harvesting effect" (where susceptible individuals die before they reach the age where cancers would present), or even simple things like actually getting the exposure levels correctly measured, become important. I've seen claims that the linear hypothesis cannot explain the epidemiology of the Japanese atom bomb survivors, for example, but I know for a fact that the actual radiation exposure to these individuals is a matter of estimation and guesswork, so the "failure" may simply be a matter of not knowing what the true exposure was.

Then there is the fact that when we talk of "radiation" we're not talking about a unitary subject. There are many different kinds of radiation, and many different ways of being exposed to it. These "hypotheses" and "models" that we are talking about are just that: models. A lot of different phenomena are being compressed onto a single, seemingly authoritative graph, but the real, underlying situation is complex and complicated. It's entirely possible that some forms of radiation show some hormesis effect, while others are linear, with no safe levels. The science necessary to make these distinctions is lacking.

Ultimately, however, these models are not some abstract scientific question, but rather, they are used to sort out issues of regulatory policy. And there is where the rubber meets the road. Advocates of threshold and hormesis models are invariably proponents of nuclear power (the reverse is not necessarily true, since there are nuclear power advocates to have no problem with the linearity regulations). There are claims that the public is "radiophobic," which may be true, but then again, that is the public's right. It is not as if there has been a consistent policy of telling the public the truth about these matters, and people tend to get a bit antsy when they know they've been lied to.

Ultimately, the linear hypothesis is the easiest to administer and produces the most clear-cut regulatory framework. It is conservative. Threshold standards tend to create situations where pollutant releases go right up to the threshold and bump against the standard, usually exceeding it from time to time. Linear standards say, "Reduce your impact to the lowest possible level." I find this to be a useful first (and usually second and third) approximation to regulation. But then I am what used to be called a conservative.

Terry

Hot August night
And the leaves hanging down
And the grass on the ground smelling sweet
Move up the road
To the outside of town
And the sound of that good gospel beat

Sits a ragged tent
Where there ain't no trees
And that gospel group
Telling you and me

It's Love
Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show
Pack up the babies
Grab the old ladies
Everyone goes
Everyone knows
Brother Love's show
--Neil Diamond, "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show"

The Congressional Record contains many interesting items, especially from the days when a filibuster actually required Senators to continue speaking for the duration. Often a filibustering Senator would read from a book, insert cooking recipes, and the like, just in order to keep the words flowing. Nowadays, not only is this not required, owing to a thing called Senate Rule 22, which allows some Senators to say "we're filibustering," and then a cloture vote determines whether or not the bill is blocked.

It's also quite possible for things to show up in the Congressional Record that were never actually said on the floors of Congress, and things that are said may be taken back, the CR being amended to nullify the past, and isn't that the way it ought to be with everything?

I doubt that my name was ever said in the Hallowed Halls, but it does appear in the Congressional Record at least once, as a citation of an EPA report in the background documentation for some air quality legislation (you'd think I could be more specific, and I probably could, but there are limits to how much work I'm willing to put into these little memoirs). It was, as I recall, a monthly report that later went into a document sometimes cited as just "Killus et al." (heh, heh), primarily because I was co-author to a majority of the individual chapters. The final publication was titled "Continued research in mesoscale air pollution simulation modeling. Volume 5: Refinements in numerical analysis, transport, chemistry, and pollutant removal" [Final Report, Oct. 1979 - Jul. 1982] KILLUS, J P; MEYER, J P; DURRAN, G E; ANDERSON, G E; JERSKEY, T N.

The full report included new transport algorithms, chemistry, actinic flux calculations, aerosol formation mechanisms, and surface uptake models for a photochemical grid model. The subsection that went into the CR was on the surface uptake mechanisms, i.e. the way that pollutants are absorbed or otherwise destroyed or transformed by interactions with surfaces, and I co-wrote it with the last guy cited, Terry N. Jerskey.

We didn't really work that closely together, having broken up the problem into piece parts with Terry doing some chunks of it, and me the rest. But there was a fair amount of time sitting across the table from each other, talking about this or that aspect of things like surface resistance, diffusional transport in the planetary boundary layer and other nurdy things that we were being paid to talk about. It was a lot of fun, actually, for me at least. I hope Terry enjoyed it.

Terry's hands shook by that point, a tremor that was a side effect of the medication he was on, I think it was Haldol, but this is a 30 year old memory here, and he only told me once.

One day, late, after everyone else had left the office except Tom, who was a chronic workaholic, Terry went over to the shopping center across the street and bought several bottles of dry cleaning fluid, which he proceeded to swig down on the way back to the office, tossing the bottles into the trash cans on the way back. He made it back to the office and collapsed on the hall floor, where Tom found him a few minutes later.

In addition to being a workaholic, Tom was also a member of the Ski Patrol, and strong as an ox besides. Both turned out to be important, because, after he called for the paramedics, he had to use that strength to pry Terry's jaws apart, in order to give him mouth-to-mouth respiration. Terry's jaws had become locked with muscle spasms, you see.

Then, after the ambulance arrived, Tom raced across the street and located the bottles of cleaning fluid (which I suspect he'd tasted in Terry's vomit and breath during the time he was doing Terry's breathing for him) and reported what Terry had swallowed to the ER by the time Terry had arrived.

This wasn't Terry's first suicide attempt, it turned out. That was the reason for the anti-depressants. In fact, I heard that Terry's wife was pretty blasé about the matter when she was called.

The next day, Terry was sitting up in the ICU, alert, seemingly fine. He told everyone who visited that he'd be back at work pretty soon.

The next day he was dead. The cause of death was "aspirated pneumonia." Vomiting cleaning fluid and then breathing it into your lungs causes damage, and there was enough damage for entirely different fluids to build up in his lungs—enough to kill him, in fact.

The only thing that I ever learned about Terry other than our working together was that he loved Neil Diamond, even the later pretentious stuff like "Longfellow Serenade." When we spoke about Neil, I'd always talk about songs like "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show," because I could honestly say that I liked it.

I honestly liked Terry, too, but not nearly enough, really. For the most part, he was just a guy I worked with for a while.

Fallout

[crossposted from WAAGNFNP]

Hot gingerbread and dynamite
Boy, I drink nothing but that each night
Back in Nagasaki where the fellers chew tobaccy
And the women wicky wacky woo!

It was a lovely morning In Hiroshima town,
One summer morn in nineteen five and forty.
And the sun, how bright it shone
From a sky without a cloud,
One summer morn in nineteen five and forty.

Turn around, go back down, back the way you came.
Can't you see that flash of fire ten times brighter than the day?
And behold the mighty city broken in the dust again,
Oh God, the pride of man, broken in the dust again.

Hail the day so long expected,
Hail the year of full release.
Zion's walls are now erected,
And her watchmen publish peace.
Through our Shiloh's wide dominion,
Hear the trumpet loudly roar,
Babylon is fallen to rise no more.

And there were many children
Yet lying in their beds,
For this was still an early morning hour,
And the dew lay on the meadow
In the lovely slanting sunlight,
And the crowns had barely opened on the flowers.



Turn around, go back down, back the way you came
Terror is on every side, though the leaders are dismayed
Those who put their faith in fire, in fire their faith shall be repaid
Oh God, the pride of man, broken in the dust again

Hiroshima Nagasaki
Nagasaki Hiroshima
arigato Vanunu
ko n nichiwa Mossadegh
arigato Mordechai
ko n nichiwa Mohammad
Hiroshima Nagasaki

All her merchants stand with wonder,
What is this that comes to pass:
Murm'ring like the distant thunder,
Crying, "Oh alas, alas."
Swell the sound, ye kings and nobles,
Priest and people, rich and poor;
Babylon is fallen to rise no more.

Aw, man, how they entertain,
I mean, they hurry a hurricane.
Back in Nagasaki where the fellows chew tobaccky
And the women wicky-wacky-woo!

I come and stand at every door
Though none can hear my silent tread
I come and knock yet remain unheard
For I am dead, for I am dead

I'm only seven though I died
In Hiroshima long ago
I'm seven now as I was then
When children die they do not grow

Turn around, go back down, back the way you came
Shout a warning to the nations that the sword of god is raised
On Babylon that mighty city, rich in treasure, wide in fame
It shall cause thy tower to fall and make it be a pyre of flame
Oh God, the pride of man, broken in the dust again

You are my angel
Come from way above
To bring me love

Her eyes
She's on the dark side
Neutralize
Every man in sight

To love you, love you, love you ...



Hiroshima Nagasaki
ko n nichiwa arigato
Nagasaki Hiroshima
Nagasaki Hiroshima
arigato Vanunu
ko n nichiwa Mordechai
ko n nichiwa Mohammad
Hiroshima Nagasaki
ko n nichiwa arigato

Blow the trumpet in Mount Zion,
Christ shall come a second time;
Ruling with a rod of iron
All who now as foes combine.
Babel's garments we've rejected,
And our fellowship is o'er,
Babylon is fallen to rise no more.

Before we die, let’s dig that high, that frees us from our binds…
That blows all cool, that ego drool, and burns us from our minds…
That last big flash, mankind’s last gasp, the trip we can’t take twice…
But before I did let me make that trip, before the nothing comes…
The last big flash, to light my sky…and zap! the world is done…

My hair was scorched by swirling flame
My eyes grew dim, my eyes grew blind
Death came and turned my bones to dust
And they were scattered on the ground

Fujiyama, got a mama,
Then your troubles increase, boy!
It's a bottle in a, bottle in a, bottle in a, bottle in a, bottle in a
Nagasaki!



They hug and kiss each night,
By jingo, boys, worth that price!
Back in Nagasaki where the fellows chew tobaccky
And the women wicky-wacky-woo!

Oh thou that dwell on many waters, rich in treasure, wide in fame
Bow unto a god of gold, thy pride of might shall be thy shame
Oh God, the pride of man, broken in the dust again

And only God can lead the people back into the earth again
Thy holy mountain be restored, thy mercy on thy people Lord

------------------------------------------------------

The Ballad of Hiroshima Town, Jens Bjørneboe, “Vise om byen Hiroshima.” Samlede Dikt, ©1977, 1995 by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag A/S. English translation ©1997 by Esther Greenleaf Mürer
Nagasaki, performed by the Don Redman Orchestra, 1932, lyrics by Mort Dixon, 1928
Pride of Man by Hamilton Camp
Babylon is Fallen, Sacred Harp, W. E. Chute, 1878
Foreign Accents, by Robert Wyatt
Hiroshima, Baez version of the Grey Silkie
The Big Flash, from short story of the same name, Norman Spinrad
Angel by Massive Attack

Immortality for the Demographic

If we buy into my notion that the science fiction demographic consists of socially and economically mobile children of former working class families uprooted from their original support systems (immigrants to America, farmers moving to cities, etc.), the question to ask is “What do they get from science fiction?” What part of the former support systems does science fiction replace?

One obvious answer is religion, though that answer turns out to be not as simple and obvious on further inspection. Religion offers many things to people, a philosophy of life, a meeting place, a centralized organization for charitable and other works, an inspiration for art, a comfort to the sick, dying, or bereaved.

I have notions about how SF relates to all of those, but one aspect that I’d like to begin with is religion as a hope for immortality. Clearly it’s one of the things that many religions offer their believers, and just as clearly, science fiction also holds out that promise.

Again, there are many variations. The one I’d like to start with, I’ll call “Actuarial Immortality.”

I was on a convention panel a while back when one of the other panelists announced, “My life expectancy seems to be going up at a rate of about one year per year and I’d like to know what that means.” I said nothing at the time, partly because he’s older than I am and it’s rude to point out to people that you’re probably going to outlive them. Also, I was at a loss to explain to him just how many mistakes he’d made in the one short sentence.

The idea that rising life expectancies can hold out hope for immortality or even a fabulously long life is fairly common in SF circles. I’ve lost count of the number of writers and fans I’ve heard say, “By the time I get old, they’ll have a cure for aging,” or, ruefully, “I’m probably part of one of the last generations that will inevitably grow old and die.”

Average life expectancy did go up very rapidly during the 20th century, with a U.S. baby born in 1900 having a life expectancy of about 49, while one born in 2000 has a life expectancy of over 77. However, an awful lot of that increase was due to a reduction in infant and childhood mortality; life expectancy at age 65 went from about 12 years to about 18. That’s a similar proportionate increase, but much smaller in absolute terms. And “one year per year” requires an increase in absolute terms.

Assuming that my co-panelist was not delusional, I assume that what happened was that he’d checked his life expectancy near the times when the standard actuarial tables are updated, which happens once every ten years. If he got ten years worth of increase all in a year or two, it might look like the “one year per year” promise was being kept.

But you know, even “one year per year” isn’t nearly enough. Because even if you get that, you’re still playing Russian roulette.

Suppose that someone at age 65, with an 18 year life expectancy, suddenly gets “one year per year.” What does that mean? It means that he (or she) has a 50% chance of living past 18 years. The next 18 years also gets a 50% chance. Flip a coin every 18 years and if it comes up heads you die. Think you’ll live forever?

Actually, even that understates the problem. Look around at all your family and friends. Suppose that every 18 years, half of them are gone. How long before you are all alone?

I once said to my much younger niece, “If you live long enough, everyone you now know will be dead.”

“Thanks very much for sticking that image in my head,” she replied.

Oops.