Britt's Blog

If you like SF and you like podcasts, you owe it to yourself to check out the excellent science-fiction podcast, Escape Pod.

Take a listen toExhalation, a Hugo Award nominee by Ted Chiang and a mind-blowing (ha!) story. It’s all kinds of awesome: absolutely fantastic and imaginative but rooted firmly in the laws of physics, surprising yet exquisitely logically consistent.

The episode clocks in around 50 minutes, which is long for Escape Pod, but it is worth the time.

A statue of Kentucky Fried Chicken founder/mascot Colonel Sanders was found in a river in Osaka.

“He was apparently found standing upright, which is fitting, because although he was a nice man he could also be very strict and demanding,” said Sumeo Yokakawa, a spokeswoman at the chain’s Tokyo headquarters.

I feel like this should give me some kind of insight into Kafka on the Shore, but, alas, I am just as confused as ever.

1. Gamma rays interfere with microwave communications.
2. X-rays counteract gamma rays.
3. Ergo I feel quite safe in concluding that x-rays would make microwave communication clearer.
4. If you have a hypothesis based on four data points, the next obvious step is self-experimentation. Alone, at night, using equipment that you are not familiar with.
5. The automobile tires of the 70′s cannot compare with today’s super-tires in terms of not blowing out and subsequently not causing the vehicle to catch fire.
6. How did we achieve the technological superiority that gives us the super-tires of today? I’m guessing self-experimentation.

It turns out to have been a strange week to start my noise fast. I’ve just been so stressed and busy and behind on everything that I haven’t been tempted to surf the web…

… much …

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In case you were wondering, “Is it in fact true that xkcd is made of awesome and plated in gold?” I offer this stunning evidence in the affirmative: The Universe on a Logarithmic Scale.

This is not a totally new idea. The original logarithmic map of the Universe was published by Gott, Juric and others in the Astrophysical Journal¹ and the images are available online. (Beloiters may recognize this as the map, as I had it posted next to my office in Chamberlin.)

But note how much more intuitive and understandable xkcd has made the logarithmic scale by including human- and earth-scale objects, such as airliners, mountains, building, people, and, yes, grass.

The xkcd map is also nerdified by the inclusion of science fiction references, which cannot be considered a bad thing. I heartily approve of any merging of science fiction and real science!

I think analyzing this map will be an excellent end-of-the-semester activity for my astronomy class!

¹ Gott et al., 2005, ApJ, 624, 463

I’ve been thinking a bit more about choice being bad. What happens when you take choices away from yourself? What happens when other people take your choices away from you?

I just finished Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel. The eponymous daughter, Suor (Sister) Maria Celeste, spent the majority of her short life, from the age of 12 to her death at 36, behind the walls of a convent. As in, she was never allowed to leave. The nuns were even separated from visitors by an iron grille; she could never touch even the members of her own family or view them unobscured.

Astoundingly, she was downright chipper about the whole damn thing.

Despite her confinement and the many demands of a life of toil and prayer, Suor Maria Celeste flourished. She did a brisk trade in handicrafts, candies, and nostrums. Somehow Galileo managed to foist her off on the cloister, and yet still have her do his laundry, mending, and a significant amount of cooking. She also did secretarial work for him, at times keeping his accounts, transcribing manuscript pages of A Dialog Concerning Two Chief World Systems, and running his household when he was called before the Inquisition and then imprisoned.

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I read pretty much everything Haruki Murakami publishes, aided and abetted by Jason, who tends to secure the latest Murakami for most major gifting occasions. I figure I should probably read something other than science fiction on a semi-regular basis, and Murakami is of the highest-quality snobby non-genre genre—trendy and well-reviewed—so, intellectually speaking, I’m balancing out the fact that I’m rereading Podkayne of Mars for the fifteenth time.

After Dark would make a great introduction to Murakami, because it has the Murakami weirdness but not on the omgwildsheepchase level. Also, the weirdness is rather nicely segregated from the main plot, while of course turning out to be absolutely integral to what is going on, which makes me kind of think of Hard Boiled Wonderland, my first Murakami love. And there’s also a bit of the “WTF? That dude seemed way too important to the plot for me to not to have the slightest clue who the hell he was and what the hell he was doing,” à la Kafka on the Shore.

But at its heart, I think After Dark is really all about the gaze: What it is to look at others, and to be looked at by them. How we gain power and lose power, how we get connected by looking and by being seen. And, maybe, how technology interferes with this fundamental relationship. I think I’m going to have to reread the book again, because, as usual, I didn’t catch on to the stunningly obvious theme until somewhere around the halfway point. Luckily, After Dark is fairly short, so it’s not so onerous to read and the re-read—or maybe I should skim it.

I’ve been doing some reading about reading—that is, how to read well—in preparation for teaching a course in the fall, and I keep coming across this “skimming” idea, but frankly I don’t know if I’m capable of it. I seem to be able to skim for a few pages, but then I get sucked in and I’m reading again, which defeats the purpose of skimming. But perhaps skimming, and only slowing down for important passages, is a skill I should learn. If it works out I’ll let you know.

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I’ve been trying to work on my drawing lately, working through the book How to Draw What You See, which I refer to as Drawing on the Left Side of the Brain. That’s in contrast to the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which is about turning off the analytical side of your brain to allow unlock the amazing hidden drawing talent that we all have, apparently. I found Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain interesting to work through, no doubt, but I don’t know that it helped my drawing all that much. Plus, the analytical side of my brain and I are on pretty good terms, and How to Draw What You See appeals much more to that side, starting with basic geometrical shapes and perspective, which I can grok. I’ve managed to turn out some fairly satisfying line drawings of simple objects.

I’m kind of stuck at the part where you start doing shading and shadows, though. I haven’t been having much luck with my subject. I wanted something white and matte-surfaced, and the only thing I found around the house was an oversized coffee mug that has kind of a weird shape, and I feel like I’m fighting against the unusual shape of it while trying to also master a new skill. I wanted to try a different subject, but haven’t stumbled across anything useful IRL.

However, I am reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which has lead me to do a little googling for interesting shells, and I found this gorgeous page of shell photographs. I couldn’t wait for my next official drawing session, and did this goofy little sketch of a Martin’s Tibia with a gel ink pen on a piece of scratch paper:

It hardly does the original justice, but it sucks less than my malformed coffee mug sketches. It was considerably more fun to draw, too!

In Mindless Eating, Brian Wansink describes, with perverse glee, how easily we can be tricked into eating much more than we want, need, or expect to. I was most intrigued by the many examples of the food researchers themselves being tripped up by the exact phenomenon they have just discovered. The moral of these stories is it isn’t enough to be aware of the effect that variety, portion size, environment, etc. have on your eating habits—you can’t outsmart your own psychology.

I’m currently reading Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, which has a similarly ticklish paradox.

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