How Fast Are You?

To my fellow Crewtons: The sky calls to you, my friend, and a still more glorious dawn awaits you, a morning filled with 400 billion suns.

I’m not very good at singing songs, but here’s a try:

If you wish to make
An apple pie from scratch,
You must first
Invent the universe.

Space is filled
With a network of wormholes.
You might emerge somewhere else in space,
Some whenelse in time.

The sky calls to us.
If we do not destroy ourselves,
We will, one day,
Venture to the stars.

A still more glorious dawn awaits.
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with 400 billion suns.
The rising of the Milky Way.

The Cosmos is full beyond measure
With elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature.

I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this Cosmos,
In which we float, like a mote of dust,
In the morning sky.

But the brain does much more than just recollect.
It intercompares,
It synthesizes,
It analyzes,
It generates abstractions.

The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning.
The brain has its own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world.

A still more glorious dawn awaits.
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with 400 billion suns.
The rising of the Milky Way.

The sky calls to us.
If we do not destroy ourselves,
We will, one day,
Venture to the stars.

For thousands of years
People have wondered about the universe.
Did it stretch out forever?
Or was there a limit?

From the Big Bang to black holes,
From dark matter to a possible Big Brunch,
Our image of the universe today
Is full of strange sounding ideas.

How lucky we are to live in this time:
The first moment in human history
When we are, in fact,
Visiting other worlds.

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with 400 billion suns.
The rising of the Milky Way.

A still more glorious dawn awaits,
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise,
A morning filled with 400 billion suns.
The rising of the Milky Way.

The surface of the earth
Is the shore of the cosmic ocean.
Recently we’ve waded a little way out,
And the water seems inviting.

As a metaphor for our current curmstance, it ain’t bad.

Reader Dave commented on yesterday’s post about those pro-atheist ads that will be running in New York transit stations soon.

Quoth he:

My only issue with this is that it is creating a double standard for expression of religion (or lack thereof). How is it that the Ten Commandments are banned from public court houses everywhere but tax payer funded public transportation can be used for support the Atheist movement? I don’t think this is right. I think there are a plethora of other places this could have been done without encroaching on public funded domains. I certainly understand why someone would not want to have to go ride the subway everyday and have the ten commandments, or any other religious doctrine, staring you in the face. However, there are two sides to that story. I do believe in God and I would not want to have to go ride the subway everyday and be visually told that I should just denounce that belief. I respect your convictions and definitely empathize with, what I am sure, is a personal belief that you may find yourself constantly defending. I just ask that you respect mine in return.

I replied to Dave’s comment, but I’d like to re-post my reply here because, frankly, I want to be really clear about a couple things.

In my (ever so humble) opinion, freedom of religion and freedom of speech are essential human rights. Therefore, I will not only respect your beliefs, but I consider it my duty to promote and defend your right to believe as you will, and your right to express yourself as you will.

(continue reading…)

Because that’s the kind of reaction that Locke and Demosthenes’ blog would get in the world you and I inhabit. I mean, if I can’t get billions of readers, how could they?

(Yes, I know. I don’t have any readers because I never post anything good.¹ Still, I’m going to keep telling myself that I am the best blogger ever. Please be gentle with the fragile ecology of my delusions.)

From the ever acute and accurate xkcd.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that this post is really about me complaining that I don’t get enough visitors, and uses a reference that less than 0.00003% of the population will understand. I think I may have inadvertently put my finger on my problem, so to speak. Silly bald man.

Brought to us by the letters xkcd.

From Savage Chickens – Cartoons on Sticky Notes by Doug Savage.

From xkcd, the best damn comic on the weebs.

Fair warning: any larval human committing an offense of this nature against the Precious Puppy Princess will be thrashed within an inch of their short little lives.

Apparently, when this mom wasn’t looking, her two-year-old decided the dog was a suitable canvas. Note to self: when you have kids, keep the permanent markers hidden away. Or perhaps locked in a safe deposit box.

Now, if this had been washable marker, it’d be pretty funny. In fact, I think I have some around here somewhere…

ViaNeatorama.

<rant>

Cubes. The Cube Farm. Soul-sucking, life-diminishing, stimuli-deadening cubicles. I just wanted to go on record saying how much I loathe them.

(begin Dr. McCoy voice) Dammit, we’re human BE-ings, Jim! (end)

I am fortunate enough to have received word from some incredibly nice people that I have been released from Cube Hell and will soon be able to have one-two-three-four-five senses working overtime for good, and not for evil.

I am *so* happy. </rant>

Charlie Stross went on vacation recently, read some pulpy books, and when he got back, posted a bit about the state of the SF and horror genres, and what their respective best-sellers say about the state of the reading public.

For starters, the strange rebirth of the horror field is quite illuminating. We used to know what horror was about — it was about Killer Whelks menacing a quiet English seaside town, from which a strong-jawed but quiet fellow and a not-totally-pathetic female lead might eventually hope to escape with the aid of a stout two-by-four and a lot of whelkish squelching after trials, tribulations, and gruesome scenes of seafood-induced cannibalism. Then Stephen King came along and transcended, becoming a mini-genre of his own. Attempts were made to replicate the phenomenon, but instead the bottom dropped out of the market.

The new horror isn’t about whelks, killer or otherwise: it’s about vampires, werewolves, and middle America. With police and detectives. Hell, you could even call it cop/vampire slash and have done with it, except that you’d be missing out on the tedious Manichean dualist drivel into which all these series eventually descend (unless they end up as soft porn instead — a very lucrative market, as Laurel Hamilton and her imitators have discovered — call it the fang-fucker subgenre). For the sad fact is, there seems to be some kind of law about contemporary American horror getting into furry sex by volume three then suffering a fit of remorse and going all god-bothering and Jesus-fondling by volume six. It must be all the crosses and holy water they need to fend off the blood sucking fiends, I suppose, but the endless re-hashing of tired old religious-sexual neuroses is getting to be a stereotype of the genre, and it’s not healthy. Horror isn’t about being born-again: it’s about bloody screaming catharsis, not a warm security blanket of belief that blocks out all menaces. But in the new horror, if the bloodsuckers are remotely sympathetic the story turns into some kind of supernatural redemption epic, and if they’re not, the protagonist eventually goes all googly-eyed and born-again.

What an interesting &mdash and frankly, sad &mdash point. And I can’t say I disagree with him. But what do you expect from American culture? We use sex to sell everything, then tell people that sex is a sin against God and nature.

He also draws some conclusions from the rise of the alternate history sub-genre of SF:

Probably the fastest-growing sub-genre in the swamp is alternate history. I’ve been known to dabble in it myself, I hasten to admit: it can be fun and educational, a desert topping and a floor wax. But mostly floor wax these days, I find, because a lot of authors who should know better are turning to it in a mad collective ostrich-head-burying exercise rather than engaging with the world as it is.

Yeah, that’s pretty much dead on. Americans don’t want to think about the here-and-now, ’cause it sucks. Between Dubya, bombs in our Gatorade and our iPods, a costly and perhaps illegal war, constant reminders of the “threat” of terrorism, the NSA spying on our fellow citizens, oil dependency, poverty, pending thermonuclear war with Iraq, pending war with/between everyone in the middle east, the end of the world as predicted by the Aztec calendar or whatever, etc., etc., ad nauseam, people want to escape. Fans of alt-history must find a great deal of solace in a revised world similar to our own. It doesn’t require a lot of thinking or the absorption of new ideas, just a different flavor of today. How nice. No wonder it sells so well.

But all is not lost.

Oh, there are exceptions. Vernor Vinge is swimming strongly against the flow in “Rainbows End”, where he envisages a future just a couple of decades hence where the machines dance. Peter Watts is doing stuff with the genre that just shouldn’t be possible (evolutionary biology, exobiology, and vampires in spaaaaaace — all done with a deft touch of plausibility and a refreshingly pleasant dose of bleakly nihilistic existential despair). And there are a few others.

In closing, let me point you to one of the others: Chris Nakashima-Brown. He’s got links to a bunch of his short-stories on the intertubes and in print, one of my favorites being Welcome Back Qatar. Good, smart, reality-based stuff.

I don’t know with whom I’m more frustrated:

• The government, for preaching and peddling FUD
• The FAA and TSA, for hiring completely incompetent drones workers
• The general public, for putting up with all of it
• The media, for taking the gub’ment FUD and spreading it like syphilis

In a nutshell: because of a thwarted attempt to hijack airlines, we are no longer allowed to bring liquids, books or electronics on board. No water (wait ad nauseum for a steward to bring it), no toothpaste (ew.), no books (just SkyMall, please. Consume!), no DAPs (music kills) and no laptops (because watching Captain Ron for the umpteenth time is sooo much better).

It gets worse: mindless chimps people are actually agreeing with authorities, spewing the usual tripe about feeling safer with more regulations and the “small price to pay” for safety.

Try this one, from Bill Brown, Harbeson, Delaware: “I agree with the UK banning all electronic devices in the cabin. These items need to be checked in and stowed in the cargo area. We can do without these items until we reach our destinations.” And he’s not alone.

F-ing what?! Are you serious? You’d rather place your cellphone, $2,000 laptop and PDA into the cargo hold and let the baggage apes throw it around like a dead panther cub in the wild? The utter lack of intelligence and foresight appalls me, and though I am no longer surprised, I still find myself shocked.

It’s not that we’re not safe; it’s just a different perspective. We’re just like the rest of the world, which gets on with its life and understands that things happen and crazy people blow things up. But Americans are giving up their rights left and right, telling themselves it’s OK. You can sit at home and wring your hands over it, worrying that the terrorists will steal your personal data unless you let your DSL provider charge you more to send “secure and reliable” email. You can stay off planes altogether, or board them and arrive dehydrated in all your glorious bovinity, proud that you didn’t let the terrorists win. You can sit and cower and obey everything the nice, white politicians tell you. And after a while, you won’t have a choice to do anything except listen, because it will be law, and you’ll be wondering why no one stood up to say it was wrong. No one stood up, including you.

Besides, you weren’t using those civil rights anyway, were you?