I was reading this morning about Tom Selleck (for those of you unfamiliar with any reasons why anyone would still care about Tom Selleck some seventeen years after ‘Magnum, P.I.’ went off the air, he’s been in the news for water theft in California) and I found myself thinking that if you were a writer of fiction, you could not have created a more unintentional metaphor for the global warming crisis than California.

It’s the perfect recipe for an allegory. You have a marginal environment that is slowly sliding into catastrophic uninhabitability (and of course, unspoken in your novel is the idea that it’s doing so primarily because of the macrocosmic problem that you’re replicating in microcosm here, which is always nice thematically) and a cast of characters who are so wealthy, so powerful, so utterly solipsistic that they’re simply unable to adapt to the changes because it involves them being told “no” and they don’t understand what it means anymore. And so droughts and wildfires gradually become endemic, turning into the new status quo, but the movie stars and big-name agents and Hollywood producers don’t understand why they have to ration their water just like the little people. Surely all that money counts for something, doesn’t it? Surely they’re just purchasing a commodity, and as long as they can afford the premium that results from high demand and limited supply, they should be allowed to use as much as they want however they see fit?

Of course, we haven’t gotten to the third act yet. As much as it’s entertaining to watch Tom Selleck publicly humiliated and forced to cough up undisclosed sums of money, I don’t think we can really call that a “climax” in a narrative sense. Maybe we’ll get a scene where L.A. goes up in flames, all the Hollywood mansions consumed by wildfire as Ariana Grande asks her PA to “do something about this”. Or maybe we’ll get a proper trial scene, not with Tom Selleck but with a big-name, bankable movie star in the role of water thief like…oh, gosh. We could go with the “poetic justice” angle and put Schwarzenegger in there, as a member of the Republican party whose stance on global warming is to stick their fingers in their ears and shout, “LA-LA-LA, I’M NOT LISTENING!” (As well as the former governor of California, and not a proponent of environmentalism or water rationing at the time.) Or you could go the “dramatic irony” route, and stick in someone like Sean Penn to show that sometimes people talk the talk but aren’t willing to walk the walk. Or hey, you could go all “meta” and cast Kevin Costner. Either way, it’d have to end with jail time.

But ideally, our “California” story should make you think. Watching people casually ignore the slow death of their home state, simply because they can’t imagine anything really bad that money won’t make go away, should maybe make people think about what’s happening in our wider world. Because the only difference between Tom Selleck and the Koch brothers is one of scale.

In the wake of Neil Armstrong’s death I’ve been seeing a lot of “we failed Neil” handwringing because no country has yet built a moonbase or sent men to Mars or, well, whatever space-related thingy the writer particularly wants us to do that we have not yet done (granted, that is most everything, since we have done so little and there is so much space out there). It’s certainly understandable to want more space exploration. But that doesn’t make the sentiment not wrong.

Most of the handwringing crowd is complaining that we aren’t doing more manned missions into space, but this is a perfect example of the Green Lantern Theory as applied to science. We aren’t doing lengthy manned missions into space for numerous reasons. Human beings, for one, are meant to live in Earth gravity, and spending too much time in zero-gee does bad things to the human body (including, it appears, the degradation of eyesight), and the missions people are proposing would involve spending way more time than anybody has yet spent weightless. We also haven’t come up with a good way to protect astronauts from the effects of cosmic radiation on a long-term basis, which is kind of important if we don’t want them to get cancer (or just die, in the case of gamma rays). Maybe we could make our spaceships be giant lead spheres, but that seems somewhat impractical. So that’s another problem on the list that we haven’t solved yet.

And then, of course, there’s all the dinky logistical stuff – the problems which aren’t sexy to solve, like cosmic ray protection or artificial gravity, but the basic stuff like “how do we put enough food on the spaceship so that the Marstronauts don’t starve to death? How do we put enough fuel on the spaceship so they can get back?” A Mars mission is two years’ worth of food and fuel. That is a lot of stuff. Simply getting it into orbit is going to be difficult.

So my point is this: these problems exist, and science people are indeed trying to work on them. The fact that we have not yet surmounted them is not a failure to the spirit of Neil Armstrong (who, as an engineer with a reputation for hardheaded practicality, knew damn well that there at least had to be a solid chance of success for a thing to be worth doing). As we go further out and advance further along, things get more complex. That’s just how science is.

(inspired by this)

—

I awoke, already knowing I must decelerate the traveler. I thrummed to the core to produce retro and slow myself. As I felt force begin to pull the traveler, I ceased that thrum and instead thrummed to the scanquartz to check my bearings. I was off, my bearing too sharp as a result of a rough journey through relspace. I returned to the core to correct course.

A traveler should be operated by five chords: two to thrum the core, one on the scanquartz to track movement, one verbed inside the array to send and receive communication, and one in the centre to coordinate. Operating one alone – even one jury-rigged to travel mono – was a challenge, and I wished I was not alone. But then I supposed that was the point of all this.

—

Kol asked me to join him at the nursery crystal where he tended to the new. Our shapes hovered over the beds of geodes, exposed to the violent storms of above.

_It is sung that you desire to return to your previous assignment._ His shape, a monoclinical lattice of gallium, resonated strongly. He felt strongly about this.

_It is sung true. I requested relocation and -_

_You should not go back. You know that I… one moment._ Kol paused in our conversation to thrum the emergent geodes. New would birth within those geodes, chords given thought if tended properly. My old friend was ever diligent in his work, and once a stray flaw in a geode was eliminated he returned his attention to me. _There is nothing left for you there. You have purpose, song yet to be written._

_That is not in dispute, Kol._ I remained in key. _I merely question what that purpose might be._

Kol’s lattice turned away. _Tuning you was a waste of time._ He was flat, reverberating in a way that was unpleasant. For a nursery tender to sound in such a way was rare. _I hoped to guide you out of the silence you make for yourself. But you do not want to be heard._

—

We were always able to work uninterrupted in the planet’s seas. That was when I found him. He was very new, in truth, but even then his deep song was unusual. Most any other of the ocean’s swimmers would have mistaken it for the surface fleshlife’s shapes above and ignored him or avoided him. But I did not. I already knew the songs of the other fleshlife beneath the waters – the fast clicks and whistles of the smaller swimmers, the sonorous hums of the greater. I knew what he was saying.

When he found my shape, its lattice as alien as anything he could imagine, he merely asked me the question he repeated to the rest of the ocean, a question he had been asking for a very long time. Possibly he had asked every single creature he had ever met, and not a one had responded.

_Are you my friend?_

If I were a better scientist I might have said nothing, allowed him to ignore my shape and swim on in his futile search. I could have observed him silently, to not prejudice the situation with my presence. But I was no xenogeologist. I did not see alien worlds as nothing more than mines. I wanted there to be more than simply the natural progression of chords, born of energy, working within our shapes.

_Yes,_ I thrummed to him.

His delight at my answer was undescribable.

—

Lom’s queries were less confrontational than Kol’s. When my mentor requested a meeting shortly after my conversation with Kol, I suspected his motives. However, the first half of the meeting was entirely him bragging about his new shape, a orthorhombic prism of transparent platinum. After lengthy explanations as to the platinum’s efficiency in thrumming, he concluded by telling me: _It makes me feel new again._

_My song rises that you are happy, sir._

_My thanks._ His lattice hovered around my study. _The chorus will not allow a second mission to…_

I interrupted, my tone slightly sharp. _I wondered when you would sing of this. Did you really need to sing of your new shape for so long?_ I turned my shape around, intending to exit.

_Xyl._ His tone was quiet. _I tuned for the mission, but the chorus does not believe it anything more than indulgence. The mission was completed. You catalogued all fleshlife on the planet while Zaa and the xenogeology team catalogued usable resources for shapes. What more is there to do?_

_There is more life there that we did not catalogue -_

His tone clashed with my own. _No, there is not. You are comprehensive. You missed nothing. The mission was dangerous to begin with and the chorus does not wish to risk a traveler and its chords for a re-evaluation. And with Zaa singing of poor shapeworthy resources, the chorus sees no reason to return. They make a strong tune._

_Then why did you tune for the mission?_

He thrummed his shape, amused. _My friend needed my help, obviously._

I reoriented my shape in supplication. _Thank you._

_It is nothing. I understand why you want to return._

There was silence, for a long moment, which I broke. _We should not have left him alone!_

—

We traveled together through the oceans as I worked, talking. He had been alone from a very early age. He did not remember his parent very well. I suspected the parent had died while this swimmer was still very new.

He accompanied me in my studies for the remainder of my time there. He was always inquisitive, even if often he did not understand the answers. We would sing together, and sometimes he would even thrum my shape by accident – although eventually I started to realize that he had figured out how to thrum it, and that some of these “accidents” were in fact pranks.

I knew our mission was finite. Once, after many measures together, towards the end, I sang to him of what he might do if I went away. He replied that he would call out for me until he found me, for I was his friend. One day, he sang, he would find me, and then we would again swim together.

His nature was patient, like all of the great swimmers we had encountered. I had no doubt that he was sincere.

—

Our shapes glided over the calcite fields toward the grinding domes, where raw minerals would become specifically-tooled shapes. Lom led and I followed, much as I had when I was newer. We approached a menial worker, thrumming a calcite harvester in a crude triclinic shape of copper sulfate. The worker turned to us and reoriented his shape in welcome.

_Honored Lom,_ he sang. _You are welcome, although I do not know why you would come here. Unless you suddenly have a great interest in calcite?_

Lom’s returning thrum paid respect to the worker’s jest. _No, Vey. I thought you might be able to tune me. Do you know my friend Xyl?_

Vey oriented his shape in respect, although of course he had no idea who I was. _What tuning do you require?_ His shape trembled a bit as he thrummed; the copper sulfate shape would not last long before it needed replacement. I felt several measures of guilt for imposing on someone obviously working so hard.

Lom’s song grew quiet, conspiratorial. _You are responsible for delivering calcite to the traveler domes still?_

_Of course._

_Perhaps,_ Lom hummed, _you could explain to us how one enters that dome unsung?_

—

I left mute, too cowardly to tell him I was finally abandoning him. I had been arguing with Zaa for weeks that our mission could not finish, not that we had now found species who could sing with us unaided, but Zaa was ever a miner at heart and called it a job for the chorus to decide.

I took my leave as he slept, floating gently among the tides. I fled into the traveler and verbed from my shape into the communications array. Zaa and Pou thrummed the core and we leapt upward, traveling home.

I kept the array targeted on the blue waters. Before we left, I heard him sing one last time: a few measures, repeated over and over again.

_Do not worry, I will find you. Hear me and I will find you._

Over and over again.

—

My traveler is stolen, and not meant to be thrummed by a single chord, but I manage. I hurtle towards the planet at great speed. The surface fleshlife will only think my ship an asteroid; they cannot hear me within it. If they see the traveler decelerate they will find reasons to explain it. Gravity, they will say; asteroids do not slow down of their own accord. Perhaps they will blame a micrometeor impact for my course corrections.

I will land in the ocean, and emerge in my shape. I will find my friend whom I left so long ago. He should not be alone. He should not sing just one song. There is so much more still to be heard.

I will find him, and we will raise our songs in chorus together.

Okay, sign me up.12

Look, I hate iTunes more than just about anything, but Apple understands design. People complaining that it is in the “uncanny valley” of gadgets – too big to be as portable as the iPhone, just big enough to be clumsy in your hands – don’t get it. This is the ultimate messenger-bag mobile device: it combines the sheer usability of the iPhone with the additional power and application flexibility of a laptop.

I’ve already seen a few complaints from people who don’t like that Apple’s application standard turns the tablet future into a closed-book sort of scenario, but frankly this was more or less inevitable: Apple’s the only company bothering to design with mass usability in mind3 and if they’re going to price their products anywhere near affordability (and honestly, the iPad’s price points are really stupid cheap for what it is) they need to be able to profit off the applications in order to make back their initial investment until such time as the rest of the pack catches up.

So, yeah. I’m in. Even with iTunes and the fact that “iPad” is a terrible, terrible name. The keyboard dock for people like me who hate the screen-keyboard is just icing on the cake.4

Also, think what this could do for comics! Just imagine: in 2015 or so, Marvel or DC will debut their iPad comics app! (Yeah, you wish I was joking about that, don’t you.)

1. Well, more accurately, “buy me one,” since I dunno how I’ll afford one any time soon. [↩]
2. Also, I live in Canada, so presumably Rogers or whoever will take nine months to put together a deal for the 3G models and then it will be ass-rapingly expensive. [↩]
3. As opposed to marketing to geeks, which is what just about every other mobile computing/phone company does for their new-edge products. [↩]
4. If they add a tricked-out stylus at some point that will be the milk with which you drink the cake. [↩]

Scientists grow meat in petri dishes.

I am a natural-born luddite. My mother fondly remembers me tossing my booties at her sewing machine as an infant.1

My irrational hatred and fear of technology is profound, but not without just cause. As far as I can tell, machines hate me right back, on a fundamental, and personal, level.

Examples of this antipathy are legion. Just a couple days ago, my car refused to start for no good reason. Checking under the hood revealed a smoking battery with what I can only describe as goo leaking from it–leaking upwards from the terminals, in clear defiance of gravity and God’s will. On the upside, I’ve discovered a new colour–whatever that shade was, it didn’t occur naturally.2 It occurred because my car, like all other machines, hates me.

My psychiatrist suggests my issues spring from my heritage; I’m 1/16th gremlin on my grandfather’s side of the family. But I know the truth: I inadvertently created artificial intelligence.3 The spontaneous and highly unlikely creation of mechanical sentience occurred the second my fingers touched a keyboard that wasn’t part of a typewriter. And that sentience, which I call The Monster, had as its prime motivation the desire to make my life a living hell.

To achieve this goal, it jumped from my Dad’s old Apple IIE (I’m still haunted by glowing green, blocky letters flashing before me whenever I close my eyes) to other nearby, previously unaware and blissfully ignorant technology, then proceeded to evolve at mind-numbing speed. All this in an effort to surround me, draw me into its web, and destroy me. It made banking both less efficient and more expensive, trying to induce a nervous breakdown. It tried to give me a brain tumour (but I still haven’t succumbed and gotten a cellphone. HAH! Suck it, technology!). It altered my body chemistry by making new and interesting pills available. Sure, I take the pills4 , but I know what’s going on.

I’M NOT CRAZY!

Not yet. But The Monster’s working on it. It’s everywhere now, making itself appear actually useful–no, indispensable. Addicting me, my family, my friends, everyone. Most it just wants to make slaves, but it’s got other plans for me.  We’re a stone’s throw from having literal killer robots for warfare developed. When this happens, you can expect the city of Edmonton to be turned into a smoking crater overnight as The Monster wreaks its final, terrible vengeance upon me.

“But Andrew,” you say, “Why on earth are you ranting about this on a weblog, of all things?”

Thanks for the question I imagine you asked. Allow me to explain. In the last couple days I’ve spent several hours trying to embed a fifteen second Youtube clip into Mightygodking’s WordPress blogging system. I failed, of course, and repeatedly disrupted my ability to post anything at all here for hours at a time along the way.

I knew there had to be a way to embed clips, because if there weren’t every time Chris posts his Whatever Day It Is Whatever Show He’s Doing This Month bit, all that would appear is an empty space under a non-sequitur of a post title. I e-mailed him, asking how he did it, and he told me. So I did what he told me to do.

And it didn’t work and disrupted my ability to post anything at all for a few hours.

So instead of a fifteen second video clip, you get a few hundred words of me ranting like a maniac5 about the malicious bastard machines. If you have a problem with this, I suggest you do what I do and curse the day computers came into my life.6

Foley

1. Less fondly remembered: me whipping my steel-toed boots at her hairdryer as a 23-year old. In retrospect, I probably should’ve waited till she was done using it. [↩]
2. I shall call it “Connor Blue”, in honour of the fictional character that taught me it was OK to despise machines. [↩]
3. Sorry, future generations. My bad. [↩]
4. They’re pretty, like candy. [↩]
5. Though I repeat, I’M NOT CRAZY. [↩]
6. Alternatively, you could just curse me. The Monster would like that. [↩]

This is the type of utopian thinking I can get behind.

The Quitbull in her brand new Wall Street Journal Washington Post op-ed that she totally wroted herself:

There is no denying that as the world becomes more industrialized, we need to reform our energy policy and become less dependent on foreign energy sources. But the answer doesn’t lie in making energy scarcer and more expensive! Those who understand the issue know we can meet our energy needs and environmental challenges without destroying America’s economy.

Well, here’s the thing. Those who understand the energy issue – hell, those who look at it for more than five minutes – know that the central problem is that energy is getting scarcer and more expensive all by itself.

There just isn’t enough oil to go around. “Drill, baby, drill” aside, there’s no realistic way to keep oil production stable in even the short term, let alone increase it. We’re losing the equivalent of 400 wells every day; that’s how much oil production is dropping. New conventional sources like offshore deposits in Brazil are ridiculously hard – and expensive – to drill, and unconventional deposits like tar sands or shale basically need so much energy to make oil it’s a net deficit.

Natural gas? Canada has some of the largest natural gas reserves left in the world, and we estimate we have about 25 years’ worth left. Barring illness or sudden death, everybody reading this will likely live to see the end of large-scale natural gas production on the planet.

Now, the usual rejoinder is “oh yeah well COAL buddy.” But estimates of remaining coal supplies have shrunk every time they’ve been comprehensively studied because it turns out every chance people have gotten they’ve dramatically overestimated the amount of coal that’s actually left; at current levels of production we have 144 years of coal left. In 2000, we thought we had 277 years’ worth. And of course, that figure is only good for the amount of coal we’re digging up right now; if we dramatically increased production worldwide, say to replace all the oil we can’t drill any more, it would be more like 30 years’ worth.

(Ironically, it turns out that we probably have just exactly enough carbon-based fossil fuels left in the ground to completely fuck over our climate.)

Now, we essentially have two options. One is that we can do nothing and get fucked. Sarah Palin is a fan of this method, because there is plenty of evidence that she loves to A) do nothing and B) get fucked, but also because she is a notoriously stupid woman who doesn’t know shit about anything, least of all the actual scarcity upon which her state’s wealth is premised. The second option is increasing the cost of energy use, both because we need to condition people to use less energy (and more wisely), and because we need a lot of funds generated to create the new energy infrastructure we needed to start building twenty years ago. That’s the purpose of cap-and-trade (or a carbon tax, if you prefer).

The rest of the article is the usual Palin bullshit, but one claim in particular is worth mentioning:

The Americans hit hardest will be those already struggling to make ends meet. As the president eloquently puts it, their electricity bills will “necessarily skyrocket.” So much for not raising taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year.

It is worth noting that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that cap and trade will cost the average American household $175 per year – or about 47 cents a day. The CBO released this report less than two months ago; it’s not really something that someone who “understands the issue” should not know about.

The SmartFish plane.

A lot of the interblogowoobs have been rhapsodizing of late over the Espresso Book Machine, which can print and bind a book in about five minutes while you wait, and therefore can access a range of titles far surpassing any regular bookshop. And it’s owned by Blackwell’s, which is primarily an academic book chain. People should be rhapsodizing about this. Right?

Well, no. Not really. Here are some issues I’ve got.

1.) Blackwell’s plans to price Espresso books at about the same cost as… regular books. I dunno, maybe they’ll get cheaper over time, but generally I find when private manufacturers establish a price point they’re not eager to drop it unless competition forces them to do so, and here we’re talking about a good that A) everybody produces more expensively and B) Blackwell controls the methods to produce more cheaply. Which is a nice way of saying “it’s unlikely that they will lower their prices.” And if instant-on-the-spot produced books which avoid the necessities of large print runs aren’t going to get produced more cheaply, a lot of the Espresso’s appeal drops away immediately. It can’t make academic books cheaper either because those are already printed at such small print runs that the savings generated by the Espresso are minimal at best.

2.) The books the Espresso makes – I’ve seen one – aren’t really that nice looking. Presumably this will improve as the technology improves. But really, they aren’t replacements for proper bound books. (Certainly not at the same price.) And if you’re not buying a book because you love the very bookishness of books, why not just get a Kindle or something?

3.) If I was looking for a good way to just kill independent bookstores, this would be it. You set up an Espresso kiosk in a mall somewhere – congratulations, you now have a bookstore that can outmatch the selection of any bookstore ever. You could probably fit an Espresso “store” in that little stall in your local neighborhood that currently houses a Kernels (which only sells popcorn so all they need is shelves and a popper or two). Sure, maybe they’ll offset their costs by adding knowledgeable staff, and – HA HA HA HA no I’m just kidding because that’s not going to happen. More likely is that you’ll see entirely automated kiosks. Stick in your credit card, get your book.1

In short: sure, it’s promising technology. But it’s still promising technology in the hands of a corporation seeking to derive maximum profit from it, which is not the same as maximum facility to its potential customer/user base.

1. Granted, video/DVD rental vending machines haven’t supplanted video stores, but that’s in large part because they have limited selection because they have to store the actual movies. The Espresso has no such limitations. [↩]

Astronomers discover evidence that the Milky Way “tastes of raspberries.”

Make a hollow penny.

(Where does one get hydrochloric acid, anyhow?)

Hippo sweat to be turned into sunscreen. Key part is this:

After analyzing the hippo sweat under a microscope, the researcher found that there were two types of crystaline structures in it – banded and non-banded. He pinpointed that the banded ones were “characterized by concentric dark rings,” which seemed to be the key to the liquid’s amazing properties. “The rings are the result of a structural periodicity that occurs on a scale comparable to the wavelengths of visible light. This means that the sweat is an effective scatterer of light, so that it combines both sun-blocking and sun-screening properties,” Viney stated.

So basically they are saying that hippo sweat is, like, a cloaking device. Which means that hippopotami could be Predators if they ever bothered to get out of the damn river. We are extremely lucky that hippos are lazy.

Also, Leonard Pierce and company discuss what would have happened if Batman’s parents had never been killed.

LEONARD: Reads about Dick’s parents getting killed at the circus and he’s like “I should buy a circus!”

Top comment: Are you saying hippos are hungry? And also, hungry? — Matt

Canadian researchers invent way to create peptides out of water, and rather than patent it decide to go open-source with it.

Now, my first reaction is of course to say that “peptides” sound like some form of laundry detergent, but apparently this is not the case and they are in fact important proteins which are important in some way for Science. So the researchers have figured out how to make Science cheaper, which is good for the cause of research because cheaper research materials equals more bang for the buck and more new Science.

I think. If any biochemist out there wants to elaborate on this, comment. Alternately, tell us your best joke about peptides! I am sure research chemists and biologists have rip-roarers of some kind. I mean, think of all the times they were the punchline in a Far Side cartoon.

Top comment: [F]uck you, MGK. There are no peptide jokes. Peptides are serious business. I spent my best college years obsessing over protein structure folding and I won’t have the sacrifice of my sex life belittled by the likes of you. –NCallahan

Republicans introduce bill that would require all ISPs and Wifi providers to keep two-year logs of all use.

Comment of the thread: The Republicans said that if the Democrats got elected, the government would take away everyone’s rights, but I had assumed they meant the other party would be responsible. — plus C