Lights Out! (follow up)

Yesterday's post (Lights Out!) about Europe's recent ban on the 100-watt incandescent lightbulb elicited a response from an actual European. Woo - Virtual Vellum's gone international!

Anyway, commenter Panta Rei linked to a blog by Dr. Peter Thornes at Ceolas.net. Dr. Thornes has clearly given some serious thought to the whole lightbulb issue and has some strong opinions about how, why and whether bans, taxes or any changes at all ought to be implemented. I haven't read all the posts yet (there are quite a few), but the gist of it appears to be that the EU is enacting some broad-swath legislation that makes life for Europeans harder without necessarily making it better in terms of the often-touted (by Obama, anyway) cost savings or overall effectiveness.

I wouldn't characterize myself as a lightbulb or energy-efficiency zealot on either side of the issue, but Dr. Thornes makes some very interesting points if you've ever been inclined to think that the whole Compact Flourescent vs. Incandescent debate is just a bunch of hot air designed to stir up public support to fix something that's not actually broken and divert attention away from more serious issues. Not that our government (or the EU, presumably) would ever do such a thing.

It's also nice to see that my skepticism about CF bulbs, based on my experience with them rather than any sort of scientific analysis, wasn't necessarily too far of.

Lights Out!

Europe Evicts the 100w Incandescent Bulb

In April, President Obama made remarks about clean energy that included a reference to Compact Fluorescent light bulbs.

If each one of us replaced just one ordinary incandescent light bulb with one of those compact fluorescent light bulbs -- you know, the swirly ones -- that could save enough energy to light 3 million homes. Just one light bulb each -- 3 million homes worth of energy savings.

You can’t disagree with him (at least I can’t, I have no data either way), but that’s not exactly a bold, detailed plan. Europe, meanwhile outlawed the 100w incandescent light bulb effective this past Tuesday. That’s some hardcore environmentalism right there. They’re gone – you can’t buy them anymore.

Now I’m not entirely sold on replacing incandescent with CF bulbs. I’ve replaced quite a few already, but they’re far from perfect. They don’t fit all existing sockets due to the large plastic neck just above the metal screw threads. Also, you can’t stick a lampshade on one if it’s the kind that grips a round incandescent bulb with two wire loops. But more importantly, the things don’t work right away and they’re not all that environmentally friendly.

CF bulbs generally take up to 30 seconds to come to full brightness once you flip the switch. That’s a long time if you’re using the light to go up a dark flight of stairs or look out onto the front porch to see who’s at the door. “Hang on, the light’s not really bright enough to see who you are. I’ll open the door in, um, 22 more seconds. Sorry!” That feels a bit like a step backwards to me. How about some whale oil and a hurricane lamp?

Equally disconcerting, the CF bulbs are full of mercury. They may last much longer, but disposing of one is a hassle. Traditional light bulbs get tossed in the trash. If you break a CF, it instantly becomes a hazardous spill zone.

All of which wouldn’t be quite as bad except that the things are expensive – quite a bit more than the comparable incandescents. So you’re paying more for something that (in some ways) doesn’t work as well and is more dangerous than what you used to use. The energy-savings looks like less of a no-brainer in that context.

Don’t get me wrong, incandescents are on their way out, though perhaps not as quickly in the rest of the world as in the EU. I actually suspect that in the next 8-10 years, quite a few improvements are likely to be made that will change energy consumption modestly. I looked into putting solar panels on my home a few years back. We’ve got a clear southern exposure that would be perfect for them. However the cost of the panels alone, with installation, was around $22,000. And that didn’t include a system of batteries that let you store the electricity to use when the sun went down or during a mainline power outage. I use most of my electricity in the evening, so the cost/benefit didn’t look good to begin with. In addition, battery technology sucks and I’d have had to replace the (fairly expensive) batteries every few years, with other maintenance and upkeep thrown in.

But batteries are an obstacle in automotive energy efficiency as well. The auto-makers are really hot on alternative-fuels at the moment, and most of the technologies seem to involve electricity in some fashion. I think it’s likely that solar cell, battery and lighting technologies will all look quite a bit different a few years down the line when the demand for them has increased enough for them to no longer be considered “alternative” technologies. Well, let me rephrase that – they’ll likely be “less alternative” technologies, as I don’t really expect America to embrace them to the degree that they’d actually upset the status quo. The "cleantech" joint venture between the US and China may even stimulate growth in that industry, though so far the $15M investment is pretty lackluster.

But if we just can’t wait for that time to come, if Americans get really desperate for environmentally-friendly change, and stimulation, there’s always the eco-vibrator to shake things up a bit. Yes, that’s right, that’s a hand-cranked vibrator. You’re welcome!

Oh yeah, one note: the UK Guardian's Technology Section rocks. I'm not necessarily a giant anglophile or anything, it's just a terrific resource for tech info.

A Seemingly Typical Morning

Tuesday morning was pretty standard. I had an 8:30 conference call with my team of contractors in the US and India who were helping my company to upgrade some 15 million lines of COBOL code to a newer version of the language that would work with the forthcoming 64-bit mainframe upgrade. As was often the case, it took a while to get everybody connected, so while the meeting was about twenty minutes long, I spent a full hour sitting in a conference room that was too small for its table. My co-manager, Lori, was there too. We chatted about whatever office drones chat about when they’re sitting around waiting. We connected with Senthil in Connecticut and Ravi in India and completed our daily status review of the project. It was cordial and friendly – I liked these guys a lot and enjoyed working with them. It was a thankless project nobody wanted at our company – it added no new functionality or capabilities, it just upgraded the programs to work with the new mainframe. It was being done purely out of necessity, with no glory or enthusiasm. And it was boring. That was my typical Tuesday morning. At about 9:35 AM, I stepped out into hell.

There was a crowd of perhaps twenty people gathered around a television on the 10th floor of MONY Tower I. There was a lot of fidgeting and tension, but it was quiet except for the news broadcast. It wasn’t just the silence of people paying attention, it was the mute atmosphere of a wake, when nobody speaks because they don’t know what to say and would rather just be alone with their thoughts but still in a room full of people. It was a cocktail party without drinks or conversation – everyone together and alone at once. I sidled up to the fringes of the crowd to learn what held their rapt attention. I could tell it wasn’t good.

Somebody had wheeled out a large TV on a sturdy metal stand and tuned it to the news. Two airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City around an hour before – just after I’d gone into the conference room and shut the door. And something else had happened in Washington, D.C. A helicopter had crashed outside the State Department or somesuch. All air traffic was grounded, but not everything had landed yet.

A few minutes later, the news was updated – it hadn’t been the State Department that was attacked, it was a plane that had crashed into the Pentagon moments before. It was 9:45 AM and I’d been watching events unfold for ten minutes. Three planes full of people had been turned into enormous bombs, screaming missiles that had been carefully guided into three of the country’s largest office buildings. And the Pentagon – the Pentagon! The symbol of America’s military machine. The headquarters of the armed forces that kept us safe and ensured that our enemies didn’t send our aircraft hurtling into skyscrapers in a jumbled, twisted crunch of metal and incendiary jet fuel and burning dying people.

And this just in: there was one more jetliner still flying around out there somewhere that nobody could reach. Best guess is that it was over Pennsylvania, but in all likelihood it was now a missile aimed at the White House.

It was another twenty minutes before the next major event and people would, from time to time, break out of their stunned malaise and speak softly to a person standing nearby. The murmur would rise from a barely-audible hum to a low rumble that didn’t seem to emanate from anyone in particular but filled the area thickly the way fog wraps itself around you and feels close and solid and heavy. Every so often, someone’s logical progression of thoughts would pull them out of the scenes on the television – cameras pointed up at smoke billowing out of two New York skyscrapers – and back to their own lives. And you’d see it happen, because they’d look around in wide-eyed wonder and cock their head just so, as if listening for the approach of a jetliner with mad-eyed religious nutjobs at the controls screaming to Allah as they dove headlong into

OUR skyscraper. OUR twin towers. Holy hell, we were standing in a building that was the World Trade Center in miniature.

The realization came to different people at different times, but you could see it happen by the way they gazed around as if they’d never really thought about the office they worked in. True, they were nineteen stories high rather than a hundred and ten. True, they were in Syracuse rather than New York (and what was the likelihood that Arab terrorists had ever heard of Syracuse?). True, these weren’t even the tallest buildings in the city, nor did they house anything especially symbolic or important. But they were where we were standing at the moment and WE were important to US, dammit.

We were all in a daze and you don’t think cogently when your mind is overloaded by the impact of events and the enormity of the unknown. So there was fear, if only briefly before the reality that we weren’t a target sank in. But then, for me at least, a larger, less personal fear sank in. What would be next? More attacks? Was the White House going to be destroyed while I watched on television? Were we at war on our home soil for the first time since the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor? And if so, with whom? Faceless cowards who hid in mid-east ratholes, darting out on occasion to nip at our heels before ducking back in? Surely not an army to stand and face the wrath of a fully-awakened U.S. war machine out for blood and vengeance.

The clock ticked on, but time seemed slow to us standing there in a crowd around this TV watching people stream out of the World Trade Center buildings. By 10 AM it seemed as if the worst was probably over in New York – it would just be an effort then to put out the fire and tend to the wounded people and count the bodies from the plane and from the floors where the inferno had roared up and incinerated everything and everyone. It was awful, to be sure. There were people smashing windows and jumping from the 100th floor because they preferred a few seconds of wind and falling with a quick death at the end to being roasted alive by the hungry flames. But the damage had been done at that point and the authorities should get things under control in reasonably short order.

Then the South tower crumbled to the ground. It was spectacular and horrifying and seemed to suck all of the air and life out of the room. The sibilant whispering murmurs receded again to silence, except for shocked gasps. There were no exclamations of “My God!” or “Oh no!” or the like, as you might have expected. The sight of such unimaginable destruction actually happening live while we watched denied any such articulation. Breathing, being autonomic, continued and gave the silent watchers the barest conduit to express their dismay through sharp intakes of breath, but for most the experience elicited not a sound. A tightening around the eyes was common. A relaxing of the muscles of the face and jaw certainly. But the shockwave of that building collapsing under its own burning weight created an electricity-dampening field that instantly enveloped every watcher around the world (excepting, perhaps, those who had orchestrated the day’s events and were viewing them not with horror but with joy and pride) and snuffed out the impulses that normally jumped from one synapse to the next within their brains. SNIK! All thought, all speech, every conscious action was rendered impossible at that moment by the impossible suddenly becoming real in a way that couldn’t be disbelieved or refuted, but had to be absorbed and reconciled and accepted because it was real and it was happening right then and it was on TV.

I wandered off a few minutes later. I think I walked over toward my desk, refreshing CNN.Com in my browser window but not being able to really make sense of the words on the screen. I remember, and it seems silly now, but I remember being emotionally dead at the time, and realizing that I wasn’t all there, and being unsure what I ought to do about it. I had the notion that I ought to try to shake it off and get back to work, losing myself in the routine of my projects and reports and emails. Within ten minutes or so, I was heading down to the ground floor to get a soda from the little convenience store down there. There was a TV on behind the counter and I was standing in line waiting to pay when the second tower crashed down, so small in black and white and shades of gray.

I went back to my desk and drank my soda. Both towers and part of the Pentagon had fallen. The fourth, lost plane had crashed into an empty field in Pennsylvania rather than the White House. We all went home within an hour or so to sit and watch the world’s reaction to that seemingly typical Tuesday morning.

Ciao Iraq!

The Debut of the Iraqi Virtual Museum

Back in July, Wired magazine reported on a trip by an array of US technology executives to Iraq as part of an effort to determine how US internet companies could contribute to the rebirth and growth of that busted country. During a visit to the Iraq National Museum, they noted that the museum had no functioning website. So one might assume that the tech giants had been responsible for the birth of the Virtual Museum of Iraq. But no – it was instead the government of Italy that stepped up and funded the development of what turns out to be a pretty cool view into the artifacts on display in the very cradle of human civilization.

The Virtual Museum features galleries from eight eras in Iraq’s history, from prehistoric and Sumerian times through the modern Ottoman empire and the rise of Islam. Inside each gallery are displays of various artifacts and informational banners, many of which allow you to further drill down through timelines, maps, and various levels of detail. For example, in the “prehistoric” gallery, one can select a map on the wall, then choose whether to view a timeline of Iraq or to view the full, interactive map. On the interactive map, you can click the ancient settlement of Tell es-Sawwan to see a multi-level map of how the city looked at various times throughout ancient history, with text explaining the configuration of the buildings and the major features, such as walls and ditches, that were added over time. The map is available at each of the eras, and features new and different cities to explore as you move through the galleries.

The site also features various videos both narrated and accompanied by instrumental music. The video-game-quality CGI is nothing spectacular, but more than adequate, for instance, to give the viewer a sense of the grandeur of ancient Babylon’s temple of Marduk.

It’s good to see Iraq’s national treasures made available in a safe and accessible fashion. I wonder, of course, whether the country’s infrastructure allows many of Iraq’s own people to take the virtual tour, but, as I said above, it’s a start. I think it’s also great that Italy stepped up, took on this project, and did a really fine job with it. Yes, the US needs to help put Iraq back on its feet after we lead the charge to knock it down. But we didn’t fight that fight alone, nor did the rest of the world think highly of the former government, its leader, or its conduct. It’s probably not realistic that the US, facing a wide array of domestic and international challenges of its own, could set Iraq fully back to rights on its own. But if other countries step in and capably take on projects that help put the country back on track, success, growth, prosperity and stability may not be too far off. Bene, Italia. Molto Bene!

Funky Dates

Hey Look! It's 09/09/09 at 09:09! Blogger doesn't support posting by the second, but you get the idea.

$3.24

The McDonalds Value Menu Kicks Ass

I should begin by saying right up front that I am emphatically NOT being compensated in any way for this blog-based endorsement of McDonalds. Which really sucks. Ronald, bubby, give me a call, I’m sure we can work something out. I’ll shill whatever you want to my 18 loyal readers if you make it worth my while.

Right, so, McDonalds has this dollar menu. I always sort of knew it was there, and I’ve occasionally ordered off of it, but I didn’t look at it very closely. It turns out, there’s a double-cheeseburger on it (one slice of cheese, which I didn’t want anyway), a small French fries on it, and a small soda on it, among other things. I don’t eat at McDonalds much – my family and I felt that we were spending way too much money eating fast food, and the nutrition was terrible, so we cut it out almost entirely several months ago. And, in general, we haven’t missed it at all. I know I haven’t.

But today I was in a serious hurry. I needed to get from one end of town to the other to teach a class, I was starving, and I had zero time to fiddle around with food. I didn’t want to spend much, but I wanted to eat in a big hurry. I decided McDonalds was the answer and I’d try to eat off the dollar-menu if possible. Sure enough, I walked out with a soda and a bag of food for the low, low price of $3.24. I can’t think of the last time I ate a full meal from any restaurant that cheaply. It wasn’t a lot of food, but I didn’t need a lot. It probably wasn’t the healthiest thing I’ve ever eaten, either, but one meal won’t kill me. Apparently it totaled 670 calories and 34 grams of fat, which is roughly 1/3 of my total daily recommended calorie intake but over half what I ought to get in fat. But it did get me on my way really fast for barely any money and filled my tummy. Mission accomplished! If I were less lazy, there are probably even healthier alternatives between McDonalds own menu items and other restaurants, but then laziness is central to my character.

I think it just surprises me that you can buy an actual meal for three and a quarter and get change back (albeit in the form of one measly little copper penny). And, if I'm honest with myself, I don’t really need the fries and might choose to forgo them in the future, which drops the fat and calorie count by a fair bit. They’re just so darn tasty, and I’m all about tasty. And cheap. And lazy. Yep, that about sums me up. But at least my laziness doesn’t interfere with my commitment to share finds like these with you, my fine readers, with or without an endorsement deal.

Preferably with.

Nothing New Today

With school starting and various other stuff going on, today is about 50 different kinds of crazy. Look for a new blog entry on Wednesday and thanks for stopping by.

Actually, "thanks for stopping by" puts me in mind of this toy my kids used to have. It was awesome - probably the single most-used toy they ever owned. It was a Winnie-the-Pooh toy with four different colored pegs, each in a different shape. The pegs could be put through various doors and slides in the toy, or could be inserted into corresponding depressions at the front of it. When you got the right colored/shaped peg into the correct depression, one of the characters would congratulate you. The game would also verbally challenge the player to get the pegs into the right spaces, along the lines of "Can you find the red square?"

As I said, it was a great toy and very popular with my kids, including my daughter. However she didn't fully appreciate all aspects of it. My daughter never cared for deep voices in her toys, and in this device the "red square" corresponded to Eeyore. When you got the peg in the right place, it would say in Eeyore's deep, slow, indolent drawl "Thanks for stopping by." Which she hated and did her best to avoid at all costs. She NEVER pressed the red square on purpose.

So when my daughter was posed the question, "Can you find the red square?" she would tell the toy, "NO!" It would ask her again and again, and each time her reply was the same. I don't recall that either of them ever really won that argument.

Reflections on Summer

Labor Day is here at last, and with it comes the “unofficial end of summer.” The calendar says fall begins at the Autumnal Equinox on September 22nd at 5:18 PM. I’m not clear how that works, actually – if the equinox is the day when day and night are of equal durations, shouldn’t the equinox occur at a midpoint somewhere – the midpoint of the day or the midpoint of daylight or at sunset or something like that? A time like 5:18 PM just seems random to me, but I suppose that’s why I’m not a meteorologist.

But, Labor Day seems like a good point at which to reflect on the summer. Weather-wise, the summer of 2009 was something of a bust. June and July were remarkably wet and cool, even for Central New York. A lot of people are writing it off as a total loss. Still, I think I’ll remember this as one of the best summers ever. It was certainly one of the busiest, even though I wasn’t driving off to work every day.

Summer, for me, began with the end of the last school year. Prior to that, I’d been home all day with my youngest son, which was a really wonderful time for us. My prior work schedule had meant I spent less time with him than I had with my other kids and I felt like my rapport with the little guy had suffered. Getting to spend March through June with him all day went a long way toward healing that wound and bringing us closer together, for which I’ll always be glad.

Once the kids were out of school, we started right in with swimming lessons. Remarkably, the kids made more progress in this one summer than they’d made in the last two years combined. My daughter kept up with her piano and trumpet practice, usually without significant grumbling or argument. My older son and I learned to play the guitar together. We tried to get outside - I puttered around in my garden and took the kids to the zoo and Beaver Lake Nature Center.

The highlights, though, were the events. For my wife and me, this was the trip to New York City in particular. For the family as a whole, our two summer vacations were outstanding. The first was a 2-day trip to Rochester, NY, where we spent time at the Museum of Play (which evidently is aimed at kids that are younger than mine) and Seabreeze (which my daughter still cites as the “happiest day” of her life). Later, my wife took a week off for a vacation that included miniature golf, the zoo, a picnic at Shove Park, and lunch at Olive Garden (not all on the same day, of course).

And, finally, the Great New York State Fair had arrived, and we were furiously baking and framing and mounting in preparation for the Art & Home Center competitions my wife and kids had entered. The final tally included ribbons for just about everything we entered, including a 2nd prize for my older son’s artwork and a 2nd prize for my wife’s Pink Lemonade Cupcakes. Pretty good for a first attempt!

And now it’s Labor Day and all three kids are readying to head off to school – the first time they’ve all gone together. My youngest has an enormous backpack that he likes to put on and strut proudly around the house. Except for the color it looks like he’s a Marine with a full combat load. The kids will march off to school and I’ll get to work writing and we’ll all be able to look back on an especially fun and exciting summer. I’ve got a lot of catching up to do with the kids after so many years of corporate grind, but this summer put a big dent in my Daddy Deficit. There’s nothing like being fully immersed in the reality of what it’s all about. What an outstanding summer, whatever anybody else may think.

Laughing Bride

Anybody who knows me well will find some similarities in this video. Skip to about 45 seconds in and then enjoy.

"I'm not using the GPS any more. It's trying to kill me"

Courtesy of Ken at Popehat comes a really funny blog entry at The Bloggess. Since my "official" blog entry for today (below) is unusually heavy, I thought I'd toss this out for kicks. Everything on both blogs is safe for work as far as I can see (occasional vulgar language on Blogess is all I noted).

Getting Political for a Moment

My Disgust with American Politics

I don’t feel like Obama’s making the kind of difference he promised, though I wouldn’t say it’s entirely his fault, either. The US government is built on a strong foundation. I happen to believe that the Constitution of the United States of America is a pretty good basis for government. The problem is that people have spent the last 200 years figuring out how to game the system. The result? Pork-barrel spending on a lot of crap nobody needs (and some useful stuff that sometimes seems like it fell in along the way), political “pundits” from both sides of the aisle who serve more to rouse the rabble than to draw attention to cogent and meaningful issues, and lobbyists who spend fortunes to bring political pressure to bear for their cause, whatever that cause may be. I don’t believe that any administration, in light of that, can affect the sort of change that America desperately needs to continue to be a bastion of hope and freedom for another 200 years.

What has me particularly outraged at the moment is Obama’s planned address to students on Tuesday. The message, according to the White House, “will emphasize the importance of education and hard work in school, both to the individual and to the nation.” (quoted from the New York Times). Seems reasonable, right? Not according to Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer, quoted from ABC News:

Nonetheless charges from Republican officials that President Obama is seeking to indoctrinate students -- unsupported by any real evidence -- have been flying.

Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer, who this week called President Obama’s planned speech to school children an attempt to “indoctrinate America’s children to his socialist agenda,” told ABC News' Steve Portnoy that he’s pleased with the change in the Department of Education document.

Greer said "this administration has been very aggressive and very vocal of their vision of what America should look like in the future and that is not my and my wife’s vision of what America should look like.."

He said "this White House has been very diabolical in creating outlets to communicate with young people."

The Times also quoted him as saying:

Jim Greer, said he “was appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology.”

Diabolical? Are you kidding me? What’s so socialist about “education and hard work in school”? There’s more. From the Times:

Mark Steyn, a Canadian author and political commentator, speaking on the Rush Limbaugh show on Wednesday, accused Mr. Obama of trying to create a cult of personality, comparing him to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader.

What??!? Is there any sane person who can look at that without their head threatening to simply explode? Apparently yes – this crap works! From the Times:

Chris Stigall, a Kansas City talk show host, said, “I wouldn’t let my next-door neighbor talk to my kid alone; I’m sure as hell not letting Barack Obama talk to him alone.”

Mr. Stigall, I humbly submit that a nationally-televised broadcast to students is not the same as taking your child into a closet. There’s nothing “alone” about being in a classroom with 20+ other kids or an auditorium with hundreds of fellow students (none of whom are actually listening to the President's speech anyway). More:

“The thing that concerned me most about it was it seemed like a direct channel from the president of the United States into the classroom, to my child,” said Brett Curtiss, an engineer from Pearland, Tex., who said he would keep his three children home. “I don’t want our schools turned over to some socialist movement.”

Again, what?!? We don’t trust the President of the United States to make a public speech directed at America’s students? Because some Canadian on Rush Limbaugh says so? I struggle to wrap my mind around the breadth and scope of this nonsense.

There’s a real opportunity here for parents to say to their kids, “ You’re going to hear a speech from the President tomorrow. I want you to listen to it and think about what he’s saying, then come home and we’ll talk about it.” Instead, parents like Mr. Curtiss are actually taking their kids out of school for the day to protect their tender ears from our own President’s scurrilous message of education and hard work.

Or maybe they’re actually worried that the speech is the prelude to a death panel.

Look, I’m not so naïve as to believe that Obama walks on water or that he doesn’t have ulterior motives in everything he says and does politically. I even recognize that the Times is widely viewed as having and supporting a Democrat/Liberal agenda. But that, too, is part of the problem. The media doesn’t so much report news as stir up popular concern over crap like this. And the American people eat it up! I’m just disappointed.

I’m disappointed that in order to be a politically viable candidate, a man like John McCain, who I really wanted to vote for back in 2000, had to so fundamentally change his doctrine that by the time he was done, I no longer wanted to vote for him. I’m disappointed that efforts to fix the economy, health care and education get bogged down in crap about death panels and a “socialist agenda.” I’m disappointed that Obama’s commitment to hope and change is almost certain to fail because there’s a huge political machine in our country that doesn’t really want either. It just wants to keep churning along, pumping money into the establishment and stirring up public outrage over things that generally aren’t even true or are stretched so far out of context as to be irrelevant.

It’s just such a mess that I begin to wonder if what we’ve got can really be fixed. And if it can, how? And if it can’t, then what?

Moments

How do you define a "moment"?

What are the memorable and not-so-memorable moments in your day, your life?

I stumbled upon this really great short film on Youtube called Moments. It's described as "a celebration of life that was inspired by David Eagleman's book, Sum."

Lightspeed is Relatively Complicated

Faster Than Light Travel in Sci-fi

The problem with outer space is that it’s too damn big. Really really freaking big. No, bigger than that – keep going. It’s so big, that there’s simply no quick way to get anywhere – it would take hundreds of years to get to another star system even if you could go as fast as light. And Einstein theorized that even approaching the speed of light was physically impossible – exceeding it would require an infinite amount of energy according to his theory of Special Relativity (the exception being certain hypothetical particles, such as tachyons, that always travel faster than the speed of light).

This is a big problem for sci-fi writers, who often like to have their characters do stuff in outer space that involves moving between worlds, between solar systems or, unlikeliest of all, between galaxies. It’s a big problem – truly galactic in its proportions (pun intended). Even light can take a really long time to go places such as between stars or between galaxies. This is why all of those lovely pictures from the Hubble and other deep-space telescopes are always seeing images of things as they looked thousands or sometimes millions of years ago – because they depend on light and the light takes that long to travel to Earth from those places. Can you imagine a sci-fi book predicated on travel taking thousands or millions of years? Well, there have been several, of course, but I don’t think any of them included the kind of space battles or immediacy of action that fans of Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica are used to.

No, if you want to have ships approach each other from more than a few thousand miles away, you really need to speed them up. It took Apollo 11 over two days just to travel from Earth to the Moon, a mere 230,000 miles. It made for a wonderful event back in 1969, but it’s less than ideal for most action-oriented space stories.

So to speed things along, most writers assume (and ask their audiences to accept) that at some point in the future, the light speed barrier is overcome. And it needs to be overcome in a big way – even moving at light speed isn’t all that fast when you account for the enormous size and emptiness of space. To get things properly accelerated, both from a travel and a narrative perspective, you need to move at several times the speed of light. And, ideally, you probably don’t want to deal with Einstein’s theorized effect wherein as you approach the speed of light, you, the traveler, age slowly relative to those who are moving at a more sedate pace. While this works for some writers, typically it’s problematic to have a character zip off to another planet and have everybody he left behind grow old and die.

I’ve got some space-based sci-fi in mind to write, so I’ve been giving this issue some consideration. There’s a tremendous variation in how different writers have solved the faster-than-light issue, but most of the mainstream stuff tends to go for a “Keep It Simple, Stupid” approach. In this paradigm, a ship has engines that produce some sort of faster-than-light effect. In Star Wars they were hyperdrives, in Star Trek they were Warp Drives, and in Dune they used the Holtzman “foldspace” drives (plus a guild navigator who was nicely buzzed on Spice). In most cases the engines either made the ship “go very fast” or they manipulated the fabric of space itself in some fashion, thereby taking a short-cut from where you are to where you’d like to be. Some writers like to really get into the math and physics of how their drives do the impossible, while others just “initiate FTL jump on my mark. Mark!” and zip, off they go. The Battlestar Galactica remake is an example of the latter, where they had FTL engines and an elaborate pre-jump sequence, but never actually explained what the drives did. David Weber’s Honor Harrington series takes the former approach, with all sorts of math and physics describing how Impeller Drives and Warshawski sails get the job done.

Part of the fun of sci-fi, of course, is making up stuff that doesn’t exist but possibly could one day if you accept that a) laws, even laws of physics, are made to be broken, b) people often figure out how to do crazy stuff, and c) there’s so much we don’t know about things like particle physics, gravity, dark matter, and quantum mechanics that just maybe the laws are really more like guidelines after all. And it applies to all kinds of good stuff once you get going. If you’re not limited by what seems plausible, you can create shields of energy, weapons of coherent light or plasma beams, molecular transporters, artificial gravity, and artificial intelligence. Heck, if you’re Gene Roddenberry you can invent cell-phones and PDAs thirty years before they become commonplace consumer electronics.

So there’s my challenge – come up with a way to get spacecraft from place to distant place that’s credible and entertaining, supports the narrative, but has “rules” that don’t allow for too many “it’s magic” cop-outs on my part. Nobody likes it when a writer writes themselves into a corner then taps “magic,” whether in the form of wizardry or technology, to yank key characters out of otherwise certain doom, and FTL travel lends itself to this all too easily. This is a problem that has been solved many times before, which is good and bad. It’s helpful to have models I can look at for inspiration, but it also makes it hard to come up with something that’s unique without being so outlandish that it’s not credible to the reader. I’ll need to strike my balances – technical vs. accessible; easy vs. complex; detailed vs. vague; commonplace vs. challenging (to the characters using it, not to the reader). It’s a fundamental part of the creative process for space-based sci-fi, but it’s also part of the creative joy of writing that I get to build not just whole worlds, but the natural laws under which they operate and the technologies that connect them. As daunting as it may be to overrule Albert Einstein, it’s fun to hold the power of whole galaxies in your mind for a bit and, if you do it well, to take others there with you.

A Tale of Honor

The Works of David Weber

My good friend John has turned me on to several authors I really enjoy. John and I met very briefly some years back at a Project Management Institute function after he had resurrected the organization’s local chapter here in Syracuse. I then had the privilege to work with him a couple of years later and our friendship sprouted, at least in part, when we discovered we shared a love of alternate history novels. We had both read Harry Turtledove extensively, enough that we could discuss his works in detail, including his often formulaic characters and his overuse of phrases such as “Can you tell me I’m wrong?” or variations thereof. Which isn’t to say we enjoy his books any less, we just recognize some of their foibles as we immerse ourselves in the author’s detailed knowledge of historical time periods and his ability to weave a story around real events and characters as they might have been had things worked out just a bit differently. I’ll likely blog about Turtledove at some point in the future.

John also clued me in to S.M. Stirling, whose fictional world revolves around a pivotal event centered on the New England island of Nantucket. In one series, we get the story of the people of Nantucket, and a nearby Coast Guard ship, who find themselves magically transported back in time some 2,000 years. In a second series, he tells the tale of the rest of the world after modern Nantucket is sucked away – a world where all forms of man-made fire are rendered inert. This leaves them without electricity, gunpowder, explosives, and virtually all forms of complex machinery beyond about the mid-1800s. While I think the latest novels in this ongoing series are getting a bit carried away with the inexplicable introduction of magic, I’d still say I’ve enjoyed Stirling’s books very much and am indebted to John for introducing me to them. Once more, I expect I’ll blog just about Stirling’s books sometime down the road.

But after a couple of years of urging on John’s part, including a free-to-copy CD-ROM he lent me some time back, I finally decided to give Weber’s Honor Harrington books a spin. And I’m very glad that I did. I’m halfway through the third book in a series of about a dozen novels and several spin-offs and collaborative novels set in the same universe, all of them essentially “military sci-fi.”

Honor Harrington is an officer in the Royal Manticoran Navy, a space fleet built in support of an “Empire” of three worlds settled by colonists from Earth hundreds of years in the future. She excels at pitting her usually out-gunned and out-classed ships against superior enemy forces and scraping out narrow victories by being smart, cunning, and scrupulously “heroic” in a way that encompasses bravery, faithfulness, loyalty and a tenacity to do what’s got to be done because it’s the right thing to do.

In his works, Weber does quite a number of things extremely well. First, he creates very solid characters and describes them in detail without weighing down the narrative. He’s extremely adept at building “people” who feel like more than just words on a page. He then puts those people into very credible situations and challenges them to make choices that the reader can readily identify with. Often, they involve a choice between doing what’s right and doing what’s easy. One of the most brilliant things I think I’ve seen Weber do was in his second novel, wherein a major character chooses to do what’s easy and suffers terribly for it.

Another thing Weber does well is to create a universe that feels like a living, breathing community – including government and military officials who sometimes act in opposition to their own peoples’ best interests. Sound familiar? He usually has at least three major “sides” in his stories and deftly juggles his characters as they, in turn, juggle the needs, desires and self-interest of the different factions.

One thing Weber struggles with, and I don’t especially blame him, is the technology of future science. Faster-than-light travel is, as far as anybody knows, bullshit. But space-based sci-fi is pretty dull without it – all of that hibernating and floating for decade after decade to get where you’re going slows the narrative down considerably. Weber has created a detailed methodology for both inter-system and cross-system FTL travel and it works, but it also involves a lot of math and a lot of details that can bog the story down at times. My biggest gripe, and I’ve mentioned it before, is when he stops the action in the middle of a final, climactic space-battle, to explain over several pages the history and science around FTL travel. It was necessary because the battle involved a lot of FTL maneuvering that was dependent on, and limited by, those details, but I thought his timing was lousy.

Also, while a high body count in military sci-fi is certainly understandable, I think Weber’s a bit guilty of the old practice of “introduce character… make us like him/her… blow him/her away.” I suppose it’s preferable to only offing a bunch of characters that the reader is indifferent to, but it sometimes seems like I’m having my heartstrings tugged at artificially rather than sincerely.

But with that said, I’m pretty well hooked on these books. When I finish this one, I’m likely going to get my hands on the next couple and proceed until I’ve read them all or the quality deteriorates. I’d certainly recommend them to lovers of military sci-fi, right along with William C. Dietz, Orson Scott Card, and the often-overlooked John G. Hemry (whose Stark books really deserve more attention). I also recommend the Strange Horizons article Wordcraft and War Fiction: An Interview with David Weber. Strange Horizons is a nifty little online Sci-fi magazine that I’m finding I like a lot. The interview really goes into detail about how Weber does his work.

[Film] District 9

It’s not particularly original to rave online about this movie – everybody’s doing it and the sales figures says that lots of other people are seeing it besides me. But the movie impressed me enough that I was motivated to write about it anyway.

Good sci-fi movies are to be savored, treasured, and appreciated. There are so many things that can go wrong with sci-fi movies. Like with any film, the acting, lighting, direction, camerawork, editing, sound, plot and dialogue can all be bad, which makes the movie hard to watch and enjoy. But in sci-fi, you tend to have a whole array of potential issues that can also fail – such as believable physics (for everything from spaceships to how creatures move), special effects (from explosions to weapons), and xenobiology (aliens that make sense in how they look and how they live). District 9 wasn’t a revolutionary film – the backstory wasn’t much different from Alien Nation (which I also liked) – but it was a really good film because it hit on all cylinders.

The aliens were suitably alien to feel like they were really from elsewhere, yet they blended seamlessly with the humans in the film. The alien technology (and the special effects that went with it) had a realistic feel to it. But for all of that, what made the film work was that it wasn’t really a film about aliens. The film was about a human cube-dweller. His name might has well have been Dilbert and he would have been just as much at home in New York or Los Angeles as he was in Johannesburg. This poor slob gets saddled with a crappy job and doesn’t even realize it. More, he attacks it with enthusiasm and relative good humor despite the fact that his work, evicting aliens from one slum and forcing them to move to a worse one, is clearly despicable. And when he gets his come-uppance, in the form of contamination by alien technology, we still identify with and feel for the guy.

District 9 is also a good film because it has quite a few genuinely funny moments. Most of them are dark comedy, but not in the tedious, boring, hideously unfunny way of Burn After Reading or the like. Again, through humor we identify with Wikus Van De Merwe, the everyman just trying to do his crummy job and go home to his wife.

The film is split into essentially two parts. The first half or so of the movie is told documentary-style, as cameras follow Van De Merwe from his office through the actual eviction. The second half is more action-oriented, but still with the shaky, steady-cam style of a documentary just without the presence of an overt camera crew. They flow seamlessly one to the next, and I can’t say I noticed when exactly the change occurred and the documentary crew disappeared. As the film progresses, we are introduced to the alien “prawns” and find them to be more than just child-minded scavengers crawling around the giant garbage heap of their shantytown home. We meet “Chris,” an alien who’s sharper than most, and we can even identify with him. As is often the case in this sort of film, we end up seeing the people as the monsters and the aliens as having real humanity (with all of its capacity for error and failure and even betrayal). Again, that’s hardly original, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a theme that people understand and relate to, and it makes for solid entertainment with a bit of a message that doesn’t club you over the head with its morality.

So kudos to Neill Blomkamp for turning his short film Alive in Joburg into a hit movie. He did the hard work, made a really decent film, and is reaping the rewards. If all sci-fi films could hit on all cylinders the way District 9 does, the world (of entertainment, anyway) would be a much better place.