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.

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.

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

Created by OnePlusYou

It’s science!

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!

I’m at the end of my queue of podcasts, with just two more to share with you.

Continuing the trend of completely irrelevant introductions, I would like to say that I love comment spam. I approve all posters in order to ensure the high quality of commentary that you have come to expect from blurrypicturesofmycat, and I don’t have any kind of a spam filter, which means I have to go through and disapprove a staggering amount of comment spam.

I have to applaud the more clever random-text comment spam that actually get me to hesitate a moment before I realize they’re just a random excerpt from a novel or news article that happens to be bizarrely apropos. The comments which are nothing but a deluge of filthy, filthy descriptions of porn have a charm all their own, but my favorites are the comments that try to coax me into accepting them through pure flattery. “This is amazing sight! I thank you!!!” “You are stunnning brilliant!” “I read your blog everyday. You have excellant info!” I know, rationally, that it’s bot-generated bullshit, but it still warms me, somehow.

As such, it also pleases me to assume that all the Cyrillic comment spam is saying the same thing, but in Russian.

Getting on to the podcasts:

Radio Lab
I haven’t been listening to Radio Lab for very long, (it’s a relatively new show). They’re pretty experimental, playing around with sound, sound effects, and different ways of presenting information, but the content us usually interesting enough to sustain me through the weirder parts. Each week’s show is on a different topic, and it’s a little more unified than This American Life, and a little more fact-delivery-oriented, but some part of me keeps wanting to lump it in as the same genre. It’s the same, yet different. “Real different,” as they say in the Midwest. ;) I’ll leave it at that. :)

X Minus One
This is nothing more than the classic 50′s SF radio program, featuring dramatic productions of the work of all the great authors of the day. They’re wrapped up, irritatingly, in lots of ads for the US Navy. (I haven’t exactly figured that out yet. They’re public domain, so I guess somebody just picked ‘em up and sold advertising on them. To the gubmint. Well, I guess it makes sense for a lot of the stories, thematically.) No host, no intros, just classic science fiction radio drama Lotsa, “Now, see here!” and “Well, I’ll be…” plus suggestions that you’d be really cool if you joined the Navy.

Your intrepid reviewer has taken a break from dodging tornadoes (no joke: actual tornado the next county over today… in January) to bring you three more of the podcasts near and dear to my heart.

Kick Ass Mystic Ninjas
I probably should admit that I mostly listen to KAMN because of the theme song, but also because of their interesting reminiscence and analysis of classic sci fi. The subject matter runs the gamut from the intellectual (Stranger in a Strange Land, Left Hand of Darkness, etc.) to the goofy (Knight Rider, Airwolf), and everything in between. This is definitely on the casual end of the podcast spectrum, basically some friends sitting around chatting.

NPR Playback
This amusing little show features NPR news stories each month, from 25 years ago. Explore the politics, pop culture and events of 1982… and the January 1983 show should be coming up soon.

NPR Shuffle
My 20-minute commute to work wasn’t very environmentally friendly, but it did give me a daily double dose of intelligent news and information. Now that I walk to work, I listen to NPR shuffle instead, which features an assortment of stories—and they’re not just from Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

I thought it might be nice to kick off the new year by giving some props to the podcasts I like. (Does one still give ‘props’ or do I sound like I just stumbled out of 1994?) So here they are, a few ‘casts a day, in iTunes-approved alphabetical order.

Coverville
This is the only music podcast I listen to. Brian Ibbott is one of the Grand Old Men of podcasting, having reliably cranked out something like three episodes a week since 2004, and he still has a great ear for surprising takes on familiar pop songs. He also provides a quality product, while retaining the casual and familiar tone that distinguishes podcasts from other media. [UPDATE: OMG, Brian mentioned my goofy little blog on the virtual air, in nearly the same breath as another podcasting pioneer, Scott Sigler, and linked to my humble weblog at the Coverville Blog. Whoa!]

Escape Pod
It’s an SF magazine, like Asimov’s, F&SF, or Analog, for your ears. The authors, including some big names, are paid for their stories, which are read by your host, Steve Ely, or one of his stable of fine readers. Probably the best compliment I can pay is that it seems that I’m constantly telling J, “Oh, that reminds me of a story on Escape Pod…”

Handwritten Theatre
It’s hard to explain the appeal of these little dramatic vignettes, written by veteran TV and movie writer Jonathan Dougherty, supposedly with a fountain pen, in a little black notebook. (Moleskine, one presumes, but one is perhaps just being snobby.) They’re a lavishly self-indulgent, but, IMHO, always intriguing. (Note: I’m linking to the podcastdirectory listing, not the homepage, because the homepage, handwrittentheatre.blogspot.com reliably freezes up my browser window. Approach with caution.)

For some reason, recently, it seems like every book I read and every movie we watch has some kind of a bummer ending. Caution: spoilers.

Follow:

• The World Without Us by Alan Weissman. Speculative non-fiction: What indelible mark have humans made on the Earth? Our vast stores of knowledge? No. Our monuments? No. Our cities? No. Our great earthworks and dams? No. The answer? Besides greenhouse gasses and climate change? Lots. And. Lots. Of plastic.
• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. I read this because we are considering it for our Freshman Year Initiative common reading. If you have not read this dystopia, you should. It’s brilliant. It’s a crime that everybody reads 1984 and Brave New World but this novel is so hard to find. Unsurprisingly, the Russians can kick the ass of your namby pamby British George Orwells and Aldus Huxlies in the grim and depressing department.
• I Am Legend. Whereas The Omega Man was delightful postapocalyptic romp with a Playboy Stronghold, a Hot ‘Fro-Wearin’ Mama, and plague victims approximately as frightening as Hari Krishnas, I Am Legend is scary and mean, with the uplifting message that, yes, God exists, and He is one brutal and sadistic mofo. It’s not a bad movie. It’s far and away better than The Omega Man. But, yeek, depressing!
• Children of Men. Oy. How bad can human society get? This bad. Like V for Vendetta without the light-hearted fun of the imprisonment-torture subplot. Dead bodies everywhere. Human life utterly devalued because mankind has no future. Like I Am Legend we have a nominally positive ending that still makes you want to jump off a bridge.
• The Pursuit of Happyness. (Will Smith has been a strange, reoccurring theme in our entertainment life lately. We just watched Jersey Girl, which is a delightful film, and not nearly as bad as it’s made out to be.) Okay, enough of the dystopian postapocalyptic crap, I thought, this movie has to be uplifting, but, nope. I trust I’m not spoiling anything when I tell you he gets the job in the end. Everybody knows he’s going to get the job in the end. But we have to watch this guy go through one defeat and humiliation after another, until… he gets the job in the end. Which we knew he was going to do anyway. I found the whole exercise depressing.

It’s gotten bad enough that I picked up Tunnel in the Sky, which I know has a happy ending about the triumph of reasonable and intelligent people. Damnit.

These two novels demonstrate the classic early 70′s science fiction formula: laughably contrived gimick + naked people => Hugo Best Novel.

In the foreword to The Gods Themselves, Asimov explains how the novel originated in a conversation he had with Robert Silverberg about a mistake the latter made about a basic principle of nuclear physics, to whit, giving the atomic weight of an impossible isotope of Plutonium.

Sounds like a real page-turner already, doesn’t it?

For a book with such a mind-numbingly arcane premise and disproportional nuclear physics content, there’s a heck of a lot of hand-waving about the actual nuts and bolts of the process the plot revolves around. But, long story short, the author writes people acting in an irrational and stupid way, then mocks them and looks down on them for being irrational and stupid.

Then there’s a bit with extraterrestrials, which is actually extremely interesting and made the book less than a complete disaster.

Then we’re on the Moon, with people—indeed, naked people. Except that you’re told that Lunarites don’t wear clothes, and you’re picturing them naked, but then dropped into every scene is some casual reference to somebody’s trousers or shirt collar, and occasional grousing about having to wear clothes because of the “Earthies.” I mean, c’mon, it’s a novel. Just say they’re naked (no need to belabor the point) and let the reader get his/her jollies picturing everyone naked. Whats’ the point of this incessant fig-leafing?

The Moon-dwelling protagonists are mostly unappealing, unsympathetic jerks, and they save the world, and then there is implied sex. The End.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first novel of the Riverworld Saga by Philip Jose Farmer, has many, many more naked people, but lacks anything in the way of interesting ideas. There is much telling and little showing, and if there seems to be an interesting thought coming up, don’t worry, it will probably be derailed in short order by a brawl, or an attack by dudes with spears, or a war-party coming alongside in a canoe flinging incendiary devices. The prose and dialog is workmanlike and uninteresting, a fault made even more egregious by the fact that the main character us supposed to be the poet Richard Francis Burton.

The author and editor kindly warns us at the end of To Your Scattered Bodies Go that the main character of the second Riverworld novel is none other than Mark Twain. No doubt the wit and wisdom of the extraordinary wordwright Samuel Clemens is entirely absent from the volume, and I am grateful for the thoughtful warning which permits the traumatized reader to give wide berth to the inevitable travesty.