The Phoenix and the Eagle

This is another old book that I did as a partial eons ago and then put on the shelf but never forgot. I took a look at it after finishing Time and the Soldier and got hooked again. It's a sword and sorcery epic saga with giant men and giant swords and giant politics and giant magic. Much fun. Unless I change my mind, this is what I'll be working on now.

Like pretty much all such books, it's set in a madeup world with its own geography, demography, and history. This one is peopled by, well, people. No orcs or dwarves or elves or fairies or whatever.

It started out as a long short story, which I was never able to sell and eventually decided to expand into a book. To keep things straight, I scribbled a messy little map for myself, so that I wouldn't have a character head east and end up in a city which I had earlier mentioned was to his west. Daniel was very young at the time and redid the map for me with colors and added geographical stuff of his own invention. While searching for old notes, etc. (and finding some that were actually written by hand - ack! - and are therefore unreadable), I found his map. I'm about to have lunch with him and will ask if it would embarrass him too much if the entire world, or at least the very tiny part of it that reads this blog, sees his map. If not, I'll scan it and if the result looks okay, I'll post it here.

Evening Update:

Daniel said he had no objections, as long as I point out that he was very young at the time. I can't remember when this all was, but I assure you he was young. Very young. A kid! He also came up with the title, The Phoenix and the Eagle. I'd forgotten that. Oh, and I do remember that he came up with the title Time and the Soldier; my original title for that was River of Time, which is very descriptive, but also very trite, cliched, dull, boring, and a real yawner to boot.

And now, without more ado, Daniel's map of the world in which P&E is set. See if you can figure out where he came up with the name he assigned to this land:

Some Guy Just Died

And I'm depressed. Well, more like somewhat sad. Well, let's say sobered. Momentarily.

He was either someone I went to high school with or someone I worked with at NASA. I check a blog maintained by my high school graduating class, and the only posts on it concern the latest classmate to die. I'm also on a mailing list from my old workgroup at NASA, and those e-mails also are entirely, or mostly, about someone going into a hospice or into a cemetery.

That's depressing enough. What's worse is that I never remember the person. Or maybe it would be worse if I did. No, maybe what's worse is that so many of them are around my age. Keerist.

The high school classmates I do remember, I remember as teenagers. The occasional photos on that blog seem to be of someone's grandparents. Which, of course, they probably are.

My coworkers at NASA were mostly older than me, but since I was in my twenties, that still meant they were mostly young - thirties for the most part, with some really old people in their (gasp!) forties. It was a glorious, young-person's undertaking, just as high school is (albeit that rarely includes the glorious part) (well, most of the time, neither did NASA).

Well, at least I'm younger than the Apollo astronauts. Those who haven't yet died of old age. And by the way, the few of themI encountered in those days were obnoxious jerks. That's not relevant, but I thought I'd mention it. Now that they're old, or dead, they should be remembered for what they were in the flower of their just-post-youth.

Fifth-Order Polynomials for Edwards!

The link to the right, Rasmussen Daily Dem Tracking Poll, now takes you to a modified version of the daily Rasmussen numbers. I dropped the All Others numbers and added trend lines for the three top dogs.

I tried various types of trend lines available in Excel and, like any self-respecting, serious researcher, chose the one that gave me the results I wanted. That turned out to be a fifth-order polynomial fit. Check it out; it looks great.

Of course, the problem with fitting a curve to such data is that there's no underlying physical process which we're trying to get at. Or if there is, no one but Hari Seldon knows how to model it. But, what the Hell, so long as the curve looks good, I'll leave it there.

Just fling the guy around

About a week ago, I was watching a Sci Fi Channel movie about vampires, titled Bloodsuckers. It was bad, which I know is redundant, but it did at least have a babe or two in it, and it was the kind of mindless eye-candy that I prefer when I'm exercising. Also, it did make a stab at dealing with the idea that there are different types of vampires, with different habits and histories, who have to be killed in different ways.

But that's all irrelevant.

In one scene, the hero is fighting a supernaturally power vampire (his former captain, with pretty revolting rotting-flesh makeup, but that's also irrelevant), and the supernaturally powerful vampire keeps pinning the human hero and then, instead of simply killing him (as the vampires standing around watching the fight keep urging him to do), picks him up and flings him across the room.

Which of course means that the hero hits a wall back first (just like a stuntman!), slides to the floor, looks dazed, shakes his head, and then recovers, without any sign of broken bones or torn or pulled muscles or tendons or ligaments or even serious bruising. And then eventually kills the vampire.

We see this all the time in movies and TV shows. The villain may be supernaturally superpowerful - e.g., a vampire - or just a humongous and heavily muscled but apparently normal human being, but he always does the same thing. He has the hero at his mercy and instead of simply killing him with his humongous strength, he picks him up and throws him across the room - knowing perfectly well, because he's seen these movies before too, that the hero will slide to the floor, look dazed, shake his head, recover, and eventually kill the supernaturally superpowerful bad guy.

It undermines my willing suspension of disbelief. Which was already on shaky grounds when I watching Bloodsuckers, even before that scene.

The Looming Liquid Nitrogen Shortage

I went to the dermatologist today for my six-month checkup. As always, she came into the examination room with a container of liquid nitrogen in one hand and a cotton swab in the other and attacked my skin. Ow! Ow! I hate that stuff and the process involved - i.e., freezing off various growths before they can become dangerous - but it's the price I pay every six months for being red headed and fair skinned and for having tanned and roasted every summer as a kid and teenager. Most of that in Africa, to boot.

People are affected differently by the application of LN₂ to them. Daniel once told me that it didn't bother him at all and felt just like a pin prick. For me, it's very painful. I can feel every cell screaming in agony, I tell you!

Okay, that's enough self-pity for one post. Now I await the blossoming of red splotches on my forehead, so that I'll look evilly diseased just in time for the local science fiction convention, Mile Hi Con, next weekend.

Oh, and if you go to a doctor and need something frozen off but are told that it will have to wait because of a nationwide shortage of liquid nitrogen, you'll know why.

David's Definitions for November 2007

Vilify

(Appeared in the November 2007 issue of Community News)

To vilify someone is to say extremely nasty things about him. Those things may be true or false, just so long as they're really nasty. Its root is the Latin word vilis, meaning cheap. The English word vile comes from the same root. In both cases, the words acquired much stronger meanings in English. Vilify isn't commonly used in conversational English, but we can expect to see it in action a lot during the upcoming election season. The candidates will be vilifying each other. Vilification will fill the air.

(Oh, this is embarrassing! I copied the above from the e-mail I sent to the editor, and I noticed that I had typed it's root instead of its root. Aargh! And now it's too late to fix it. How could I have done that? Sheesh.)



I'm collecting all of these at: http://www.dvorkin.com/davidsdefs.html

Messy, Complex Ethnic Foods

This evening, Leonore and I went out for a light Vietnamese meal. We shared what the restaurant calls Fisher Man Soup - a hot and sour broth filled with mung bean sprouts and a medley of parts of creatures that once lived in water - and egg rolls.

This is an egg roll dish that comes with six shortish Vietnamese egg rolls and plates of lettuce leaves and rice threads and bean sprouts and mint leaves and cucumber slices and shredded carrots and other shredded stuff, plus bowls of fish sauce. You lay a lettuce leaf on a plate, then you put an egg roll and an assortment of the other stuff on the leaf, then you roll the leaf up, then you dip one end of the rolled-up conglomeration in fish sauce, then you stuff that end in your mouth and gnaw off a big bite, then you make grunting animal noises of delight while you chew and swallow. And of course, this not being your native cuisine, you make a mess.

Between bites, we were congratulating each other on making much less mess than in the past. After all these years of trying, we're finally getting the hang of it.

And then it struck me. What if the Vietnamese don't really eat this way at all! What if it's a huge con game, a setup, so that they can laugh at us as we spill sauce and stuff all over the table while thinking that we're really doing this ethnic thing well. All of those ethnic places where we have tried so hard over the years to master the art of eating complex, messy ethnic foods in a genuine, proper, ethnic way - what if it's all a trick designed to make us look stupid? Successfully, at that. What if they're all in cahoots?

I expressed this fear to Leonore around mouthfuls of scrumptious, if messy and complex, Vietnamese egg roll assemblages. She pointed out that we've seen Vietnamese at adjoining tables eating the same dish in the same way. Much more neatly, too, which implies that they've had much more practice, starting at an earlier age, which implies that they really do eat that dish that way. I said that that just shows what a carefully thought out conspiracy it is and how long it's been going on.

You see, just can't trust foreigners. Immigrants are devious by their very nature. The only people you can depend on to be straight with you, whom you can trust not to make up ridiculous stories, are native-born Americans!

Harrumph!

The German Salute

In Nazi Germany, what we think of the Heil Hitler gesture was officially called The German Salute. The Nazis wanted Germans to think that greeting their friends by holding their hands up palm out and saying "Heil Hitler!" wasn't Nazi but typically German. A common joke among Germans at the time was that the real German salute was the surreptitious look from side to side to make sure no stranger was listening before speaking frankly with a friend.

I read about that while researching my novel Budspy, and I recognized it instantly. To me, it was The South African Salute, and I had seen it while growing up in Apartheid* South Africa.

I remember once watching my father and a neighbor circling around each other verbally at the beginning of a conversation. It turned out that they both wanted to attack the government, but they couldn't just come right out and do it. Instead, they had to sound each other out, make sure the other guy wasn't a government supporter who might inform the government about treasonous talk. Eventually, they each decided the other guy was safe, and then they launched into anti-government vitriol. As I remember, the starting point was that the postman was late that day, but complaints about the postal service quickly moved on to passionate agreement that the government was generally worthless.

That was in a police state. Remarkably, South Africa in those days still had a fairly independent press and judiciary. Well, how about us? We're not a police state at all, right? We're free, a great democracy, the light unto the world, the shining city on the hill. But people in our broadcast media have said that they won't even criticize Bush family members because that could look "unpatriotic". Fourth Estate? Hmph. They're an adjunct of the White House Office Of Propaganda. Our courts have become a stronghold of vile rightwing undermining of democracy. They don't defend us against oppression, they rationalize and uphold it.

This is what we've become. The German Salute and The South African Salute have become The American Salute.





* That's pronounced apart-hate**, not apart-hite.

** Because the suffix is Afrikaans, not German, and in Afrikaans the ei dipthong has a long a sound***, not a long i sound.

*** Because it does, that's why.

It's Not Rocket Science

Because nothing is. Because there ain't no such thing.

I don't know when people starting saying It's not rocket science to indicate that something isn't very difficult. I'm sure I never heard that back when I was an aerospace engineer* - or, as some people would say, a rocket scientist.

But there's never been any such thing as rocket science. Even when the field was being pioneered by Tsiolkovsky and Goddard, or for that matter by unknown Chinese experimenters many centuries earlier, what they were doing was a branch of engineering, not science. The cutting-edge work is not trivial. The people who do it aren't dummies. But they're also not scientists; by any reasonable definition of the two terms, they're engineers.

Maybe I'd be willing to go along with the silly usage if I thought it was just an acknowledgement of the complexity of the work involved. What keeps me from doing so is the figure of the rocket scientist in popular entertainment. The latest and most bizarre example is the character Henry on the TV show Eureka.

I loved the first season of the show (the second season approached dangerously close to suckitude), and Henry is an interesting character and the actor who plays him is outstanding and should be far better known. However, Henry, who told the hero, Jack Carter, that he used to be an engineer and worked on the space shuttle, knows everything about everything. He's the generic TV/movie scientist - the guy who knows every science the plot requires him to know and who can do all the hands-on stuff brilliantly, while solving monstrously difficult scientific problems in one hour. But of course he can! He worked on the space shuttle! He's a rocket scientist!

Why, Henry even understands quantum mechanics. Hmph. Let me tell you, despite having played a part in sending man to the moon and the Viking lander to Mars, I still think that quantum mechanics is smoke and mirrors and electrons are little gray ball-bearinglike things that have a definite position and velocity vector.*****






* Yes, I mentioned that as a way of pulling professional or maybe rhetorical rank. I didn't endure seven years in the aerospace biz for nothing.** If nothing else, it gives me the appearance of authority when I have this argument with people



** Okay, I also got a draft deferment*** out of it during the Viet Nam war, which is certainly far from nothing.



*** Until they changed the rules because they were getting so desperate for bodies to send into the quagmire, but by that time I was a daddy, just like Richard "The Dick" Cheney, but in my case it was a happy circumstance, not something we'd cynically planned solely (and soullessly) for that reason.****



**** But that's another story.



***** Oh, probably not. What do I know? I'm just a rocket scientist.

Of course things will get worse before they get better

And they will also get better before they get worse. If things are not completely flat and stable, then they are presumably rising and falling. So, unless we're already at a trough, things will continue to get worse until they reach the trough, and then they'll start to get better. And similarly, unless we're already at a crest, things will continue to get better until they reach the crest, and then they'll start to get worse. Unless, of course, there is no trough ahead, and things will continue to get worse forever and ever. But history doesn't look like that. Human events as a sine wave!

I've heard people say for years that things will get worse before they get better. They say that as if it were a great, serious, somber insight. But it's pretty silly, really.

Here's another one: "I searched everywhere, and then I finally found it in the last place I looked!" Well, duh. That's because, once you found it, you stopped looking.

Occasionally I hear other standard lines that strike me as just as silly and obvious as those two, but those are the only ones I remember right now.

In the comments, chris mentioned this old cliché: "It's always darkest before the dawn." Does anyone really believe that? That would be as likely as it always being darkest right after sunset. Surely, if the only light in question is from the sun, then it's darkest at the midway point between sunset and sunrise. In practice, that would be complicated by moonlight and manmade light. Maybe at certain times of the lunar cycle, and if all the manmade light gets switched off in the wee hours, then on a given night it might just happen to be darkest before the dawn. But that would be a rare night.

I hate

writing query letters.

Update: Daniel likes the book, Gary likes the book, Leonore doesn't know when she'll be able to read it, draft of query letter done. So the query will go out soon, and then I'll put the whole matter entirely out of my mind and not think about it again until someone, preferably an agent, mentions it to me. Book? What book? Oh, that one! Oh, yeah, I'd forgotten all about it.

How not to query an agent

One of the many ways, anyway. This example is on agent Kristin Nelson's excellent blog.

Darn. Now I have to revise that query letter I was working on!

One Done Book

And one author whose brain has turned to mush and is off traveling somewhere in time.

On their blogs, various agents mention that they prefer that science fiction novels submitted to them not be longer than 120,000 words. (Subtext: unless you're already well established, in which case no rules apply to you.) At one point, Time and the Soldier was over 130,000 words. That was when I started trimming, trimming, trimming the fat while also filling in the remaining gaps. I think the result was an improvement, but for all I know, it made the book too terse. In any case, the ms. as it now stands is at about 119,850 words. Under the wire!

So now it's off to three beta readers. Gary, who comments here occasionally, is reading it for continuity. Daniel will read it for continuity and military details (there aren't many, but I want them to be correct, of course), if he's able to. He'll have to choose whether working on his PhD is more important than helping out his aged dad who used to drive him all over the city so that he could see if other public library branches had books he hadn't devoured yet, but I'd never put any kind of unfair emotional pressure on him. Leonore will read it at the level of individual scenes and prose but not for plot because time-travel stories drive her nuts.

As a longterm captive, I mean inhabitant, of the software biz, I find the term "beta readers" very amusing. Just thought I'd add that.

So after I get their comments back and make any adjustments (and of course I'm hoping they will be just adjustments, not major surgery because someone discovered a monstrous plot hole), I'll have to face the really hard part: the AAAIIIIEEEE! agent search AAAAIIIIEEEE!

Rassmussen Daily Dem Tracking Poll

The Rassmussen polling company publishes a daily tracking poll of the Democratic (and Republican, but who cares) primary race. Unlike other such polls, this one displays the actual daily numbers as opposed to occasionally letting you know what the current state of the race is. You can see those numbers in tabular form here.

(Rass only publishes the numbers for the top three Democrats, but does anyone other their most rabid fans think that Dodd, Biden, Kucinich, Gravel, or Schlumwallinger has a realistic chance of winning the nomination?)

It's hard to get an overall feeling for the numbers when they're displayed in that format, so I decided to put them in a spreadsheet and generate simple line graphs. The result is here.

I'm planning to keep updating that graph with the new Rassmussen numbers every day, so anyone who's interested can follow the bouncing ball of our national destiny at that link.

I think I'll also put a link to that graphic on the side.

Gore is really my man, but I'm beginning to think that he won't run. In the meantime, I'm backing Edwards, and I'm getting more and more comfortable with that choice as Edwards gets more and more populist. So I'm hoping to see the Edwards line keep rising. Right now, it's happening sloooowly, but it does seem to be happening - but over the short term, so far.

Did Eureka just jump the shark?

We've been hooked on the television show Eureka since its first episode. The premise is clever, the characters are likable and well acted, and the scripts tend to be pleasantly witty.

But tonight's (9/11/07) episode annoyed me considerably. Some parts of it were fine, but the underlying theme of the town's scientific geniuses finding religion because of mild stress made me grind my teeth.

At the start of the episode, it's clear that almost no one in town is interested in churchgoing. Given that Eureka is filled with the world's greatest scientific geniuses, that's appropriate. Studies show consistently that scientists tend to be much less religious than the general public, and the more advanced they are in their field, the less likely they are to be religious. However, when a series of rather minor (by Eureka standards) calamities strike the town, the geniuses start heading to the church. (It wasn't clear if there's more than one church in town.) This didn't happen in previous episodes, when Eureka faced much more serious dangers. We also know that it doesn't happen in real life -- that not only are there atheists in foxholes, the experience of the foxhole tends to destroy people's faith, creating more atheists. More atheists come out of foxholes than go into them!

Moreover, at the end of the episode, it's made clear that many of the brilliant scientists have retained their new-found religion, even though they have discovered that the town's recent problems were manmade! Aargh!

I assume this was due to network pressure, in turn due to pressure on the network from rightwing/fundamentalist religious groups. I don't know that; I haven't read anything to that effect. It could have been simple cowardice on someone's part. Or ignorance.

I guess I don't really care what was behind it. I only know that I'm quite pissed off right now.

Not so silent, after all

Whew. What a relief.

I took my hearing aid to the audiologist today, and the situation is not as bad as it might have been. The innards are still working. It's just the casing that was destroyed. So the audiologist took a new impression and will send that to the factory, along with the smooshed hearing aid with its electronical guts, and they'll recreate the thing for me. Not cheap, but a fraction of the cost of a completely new one.

So possibly by this time next week, I'll be able to hear with both ears again. At least, to the extent that a deafish guy with hearing aids can hear.

David's Definitions for October 2007

Nicety

A nicety is a small, important detail that can make a large difference. The word is commonly misused to mean an appealing characteristic, but in fact a nicety may not be nice in that sense. For example, knowing which knife and fork to use for which food at a formal banquet is one of the niceties of formal etiquette, but most of us would agree that such rules are silly, not nice. The confusion arises because the word nice, on which nicety is based, has changed meaning over time. The Latin word it comes from meant foolish or silly, but in English, in different centuries nice has meant timid, then dainty, then precise, then pleasant. Some of the older meanings survive. A subtle difference between two things is still called a nice distinction.


I'm collecting all of these at: http://www.dvorkin.com/davidsdefs.html

Wimpy Georgie

Republicans have long tended to build cults of personality around their leaders, and when one of their own is in the White House, they go completely around the bend. In the case of Georgette, I mean Little George, I mean George W., they've tried to tell us that he's brilliant, saintly, and a rugged, manly, tough athlete and weightlifter. He bicycles! He cuts brush! He can beat up any other president on the world stage! (I'd like to see him try it with ex-KGB thug and still a thug Putin.) He bench presses a gazillion pounds!

This has always infuriated me, and the last item has infuriated me in particular. I can't remember what the poundage claim was, but it was something impressive. Rather, it would be impressive if it were true. Even with the carefully staged and posed photos, one can see that Georgie is no athlete and certainly not a serious lifter.

Here's a picture that his handlers didn't manage to pose carefully enough. This is from our fake president's recent fake visit to Iraq in his latest attempt to boost support for his fake Crusade.



Now, I'm not going to find fault with Georgie for his sagging jawline and wrinkly neck, which are so painfully apparent in contrast with the jawline and neck of the young man he's shaking hands with. Those are inevitable with age even in genuine athletes. And even though I think that if Georgie were as athletic as his worshipers like to think he is his jawline would be firmer, I'm sympathetic because of my own jawline, and I'd be willing to commiserate with Georgie about the sad effects of age over a beer or two. Oops! I forgot! He no longer drinks alcohol! Yeah, right.

But look at that arm and that chest. Those are not the arm and chest of a serious lifter of Georgie's age. Those are the sagging chest and arm of an older man who is not in particularly good shape for his age. By George, George, you've become your father! But with a lower IQ.

Okay, people get old. (Unless they're unlucky enough to be Iraqi civilians, in which case, thanks to George W. S.O.B. Bush, the odds are against them.) And no one is morally obligated to be an athlete. It's the pretense that bugs me. The lies. The posing. The swagger.

And the fact that millions of Americans voted for this pile of horse manure! Twice!

Loitering Gentlemen

Car 54! Car 54! Check out report of gentleman loitering in front of liquor store. ...

I'm watching the evening news on Channel 2 in Denver, and they said that a gentleman was reported loitering in front of a liquor store in a scuzzy neighborhood. Said gentleman approached a customer, asking for money. Words were exchanged. Gentleman stabbed customer and ran away. Gentleman was later found hiding in a dumpster.

Gentleman?!

"Sir, I must apologize for addressing you even though we have not been properly introduced. I wonder if you could advance me a small loan -- What? You would, would you? Sir, you leave me no alternative but to draw my knife and stab you. Hah! There! Take that, sir! And now, I take my leave. I bid you good day, sir. You have my card. I shall be in my dumpster. Harrumph."

New meaningless deadline

The time-travel novel that will never be finished is requiring more tweaking than I had anticipated. (Don't they all? Or don't many of them, anyway?)

So I've decided to order myself to be done by my birthday, which will be five weeks from tomorrow.

Five weeks! That's, like, an enormous and immense amount of time! Of course I'll be done by then. Although that does sound a bit like something I remember saying to a coworker many, many years ago: "That hard drive gadget holds five megabytes?! Man, you'll never fill that up!"