The Skirtmanwarrior Saga

CSI: Russian Horse Unit

2011-08-22T06:14:00.000-07:00

Last night, the "Global E-Book Award" winners were announced. Alas, my book was not among them. On the other hand, it did manage to finish in the top three "finalists." Hooray! I didn't quite get the gold, but apparently I did no worse than bronze, and maybe silver.

But... before I go tooting my horn about this, I'm reminded of the old joke about the Russian horse. If you haven't heard that one, it goes something like this: The US and USSR decided to settle, once and for all, whose system was best. And for some reason they decided to resolve the question through a horse race--the winner of the Leningrad Stakes vs. the winner of the Kentucky Derby, on a track in neutral Switzerland. After the American horse won by a handy margin, the following headline appeared in Pravda:

SOVIET HORSE TAKES SECOND IN BIG RACE!

American Horse Finishes Next To Last

So, before bragging about taking maybe second or third, only to discover I was in a three-horse race, I decided to count the entrants. This turned out to be a little tricky, as the GEBA's categories sort of evolved on the fly. At the level of "nominee" (that is, you've sent them the proper paperwork and the check, if any, has cleared), my book fell into the general category of SF/Fantasy/Paranormal, which turned out to have 34 entries. By the time of the final judging, this category had been split into three sub-categories of "Speculative Fiction": SF, Fantasy and Paranormal. But the contest's web site didn't say which books had been assigned to which sub-category. Given the popularity of fantasy and paranormal stuff of late, there still might be only three competitors in SF.

So I had a look at the synopses of the entries. All 34 of them. And I came up with this count:

SF: 14 entries
Fantasy: 16 entries
Paranormal: 4 entries

I admit I'm not all that certain about the breakdown between "Fantasy" and "Paranormal"; I think it has something to do with settings--if you have supernatural beings like vampires and angels, and a more-or-less real-world setting, it's "Paranormal"; if you have these things in a kingdom "once upon a time far, far away," it's "Fantasy." Or something like that. Anyway, I didn't need to be precise on that, as my main concern was how many books were in the SF category. And now I know.

Yeah, it was an hour that could have been more productively spent working on the new book, cleaning the gutters (winter's coming!) or catching up on those pipe tunes I still haven't learned. Then again, it's nice to know for sure that my book is not the Russian Horse!

Help a Struggling Author!

2011-04-29T15:41:00.000-07:00

Good news: The Last Protector is an official nominee in the "Global E-Book Awards" competition. (Yay!!)

Bad news: being "nominated" for a competition just means I did the paperwork correctly. It doesn't mean that any of their judges have yet read the book, or for that matter that Global E-Book Awards World Domination Headquarters has even received a copy. All that stuff comes later. (Aww...)

My past experience with book competitions (which all authors are encouraged to enter, as they are supposed to be marketing tools) is that competition follows these steps:

The author fills out a form and sends it to the contest promoter. Along with some money, of course.
Once the form has been found to be complete and correct (i.e., accompanied by the appropriate amount of money), the author or publisher sends the promoter a copy of the book.
The author then waits to see what happens next.

And step 4... well, much of the time, for many authors, there is no step 4 beyond perhaps going to the contest website a few months later and discovering that some other book won the contest. And, of course, filing the receipt for the entry fee amongst the business expenses.

To its credit, the "Global E-Book Award" contest seems to be at least a bit different. For one thing, during "National Read an E-Book Week," they waived the entry fee. Second, they gave me this cool little badge to put on my website, saying that my book is officially a "nominee." And third, they gave my book a page on their site, which people who are perusing the site looking for interesting books might stumble across.

This third thing is where you come in, dear reader, should you wish to help out a struggling author (or, if you don't particularly want to help me, you may still want to help my publisher make a profit): go to the Last Protector page on the Global E-Book Award site, and register a vote by clicking on one of the ratings in that line of blue letter eeeee's just above the book blurb (it would be nice if you clicked on one of the more favorable ratings, of course). While the contest officials say the number of favorable votes won't determine who wins, they also say that the judges will be able to see the results of the voting. So... click away... and thanks much.

Passion of the Snowman

2011-04-22T09:34:00.000-07:00

Today is the peculiarly named "Good Friday," the day in which we remember the story of one who came into this world in a way that was magical or perhaps miraculous, attracted a band of followers, led a procession into the city to the cheers of little children, met his demise saving others, was miraculously raised from the dead and ascended into the sky promising to return.

I'm talking, of course, about:

Well, who did you think I had in mind?

Seriously, it's almost creepy how this classic "secular" cartoon parallels the Easter story. The correspondence is so close that I've used this cartoon in a Sunday school class. I often wonder if the writer consciously set out to create a "Passion of the Snowman" tale, or if he just happened into it while figuring out how to stretch a three-minute pop song into a half-hour TV show.

There's no apparent religious content to the song "Frosty," and the 1954 black-and-white cartoon from UPA (once on YouTube but, alas, since removed for copyright reasons) depicts him as more a force of nature, a sort of winter free spirit who's out to have fun and not at all bothered by the knowledge that he'll soon melt:

But the Rankin/Bass half-hour show follows the life-of-Christ story almost incident-by-incident:

...from the magical "Happy Birthday!" (and let's not even start delving into what the magic hat might symbolize)

...through the Palm Sunday procession...

...to his sacrificial melting at the hands of Professor Hinkel...

...to his subsequent re-freezing (with Santa Claus doing a guest appearance as God)...

...to the final ascension, with the promise to return

Strange and heavy stuff for a secular cartoon about a talking snowman...

So, was this an intentional re-use of the Easter story? A coincidence? Perhaps the "bones" of the Passion story are so universal (maybe we all want to believe there's somebody in the world who'd sacrifice everything for us) that it just happened to work out this way. After all, it's been said that just about every novel, play or movie has some character who's identifiable as the "Christ figure." So it could be that any resemblance between Frosty and Jesus is just accident and should be taken as having no significance whatever. It's one of those things that we all must decide for ourselves.

That said, let me observe one other "secret message" in "Frosty." It's a well-known fact that cartoon characters, from Mickey Mouse to Homer Simpson, have three fingers and one thumb on their hands. True, there are a few exceptions, but it's a pretty established rule. And, as this frame from "The Simpsons" demonstrates, one exception occurs when the character is divine:

So, if three fingers means "human" and four means "divine," what do we make of this frame from "Frosty"?

Count the fingers: three (human) on the left hand (plus one thumb), but four (divine) on the right hand. Frosty is apparently both human and divine at the same time, which is of course one of the fundamental (if confusing at times) items of Christian doctrine. Hmm...

The Return of Read An E-Book Week

2011-03-05T04:22:00.000-08:00

Yep, it's National Read an E-book Week, March 6 through 12. In honor of the event, OmniLit is offering The Last Protector for a whopping 50 percent off, now through March 15! So if you're one of the people who wanders by this site for advice on motorcycle repair, and have been toying with the idea of maybe perhaps reading my novel, now's the chance to pick it up for half price. CLICK HERE to find out more about this deal!

My publisher, Twilight Times Books, has a bunch of other Read and E-book Week promotions going on as well--many books are marked down, and some are available for free--a few are available for free all week long, and there are daily free downloads as well. CLICK HERE to find out more about the free books.

One of the free-this-week books is How I Wrote My First Book: the Story Behind the Story, in which twenty authors (including yours truly) spin the epic tales of how we came to write our first books. CLICK HERE to find out more and read a sample chapter (not, alas, mine...).

Read an E-book Week only runs until March 13, and OmniLit's half-price offer on The Last Protector only runs through March 15, so get clickin' while there's still time!

Watson Wins Jeopardy

2011-02-16T07:29:00.000-08:00

On the occasion of IBM's "Watson" computer beating two human "Jeopardy" champions (though it could not properly identify Chicago in the "Final Jeopardy" round), I note the following chronology:

1940s: computer power is measured in hundreds of operations per second, and we use computers to do things like crack the Enigma cipher and win World War II.
1960s: computer power just makes it into the millions of operations per second, and we use computers to put men on the moon and control the national telephone network.
1980s: computer power is comfortably in the tens of millions of operations per second, microchip technology crams these onto tiny chips, and we use them to put a phone in every pocket, so people can annoy each other while driving 60mph in a school zone.
late 1990s: we break into the billions of operations per second, and use this power to render really realistic blood in first-person shooter video games.
2000s: computer power is now in the tens of billions of operations per second, and we use this power to win a TV trivia game show.

Conclusion: over time, the power of the computer multiplied by the usefulness of the application remains constant.

The logical extension is that when we finally do build a computer that matches the power of the human brain, all it will do is sit around, watch TV and play video games. Which might be a useful thing, if it frees us from those tasks.

Making Things Harder, Digitally

2011-01-08T05:26:00.001-08:00

For the last week, I've been subbing a high school physics class and teaching about projectile motion (that's determining how far something will fly after you launch it into the air--think Monty Python and the Holy Grail, when the French catapult a dead cow out of the castle at the knights). There's a lot of math in this (as there is in all physics), and I found I had a fair number of students who were having trouble not with the physics but with their calculators.

When I took physics, way back in the Dark Ages (that is, when determining how far you could catapult a dead cow was still relevant), we used pencil, paper and this amazing device called a slide rule, which could multiply, divide, take square roots, do sines, cosines, tangents, and so forth, all without pressing buttons or discovering the batteries had died on the second question of the final exam. But the slide rule (and the first generation of electronic calculators) could only do one thing at a time, so you had to do the operations in order and sometimes write down partial results that you'd use later.

Now we have hand-held calculators with big screens and more computing power than was in the high-end scientific computer I used in college. So you can enter a whole long expression, as a mathematical expression, and just hit the "=" button to get your result.

This should be easier, but it turns out not to be. The reason is that the calculator, like the computer I used in college, has a keyboard. And a keyboard is, by nature, a one-dimensional thing: one letter (or digit, or symbol) follows another. Mathematical notation, on the blackboard or on the sheet of paper, is two dimensional. Look at this example, finding the time it takes an object to fall 14.4 meters:

You need but one set of parentheses to note that the 14.4 is negative (heading downward). The fact that the numerator has multiple terms is implied by its being above the line, and the extended line atop the square root symbol conveys that you first do all the multiplication and division, and then take the root. And the value of the second dimension only becomes more apparent when you start using superscripts (for squares, cubes, etc.) and subscripts... and when you start nesting more complex expressions within each other.

If you do this computation with a slide rule or primitive calculator, you start by noticing that the minus signs in numerator and denominator cancel out, which means you can forget them. Next you multiply 14.4 times 2, then divide by 9.8, and finally take the square root.

But if you're going to do this the "easy" way, letting the calculator do all the work, you've got to translate this two-dimensional expression into a line of characters on the display. You might do what several of the students did, and enter it like this:

Notice you've already had to add one more set of parentheses, to tell the calculator that the denominator is negative and you're not subtracting. But even so, this won't give you the right answer, as the calculator sees the square root symbol and assumes you just want to take the square root of two and multiply it by the stuff that follows (because square root is a higher priority operation than multiplying, and anyway, it's at the beginning of the line). So you have to add some more parentheses to make sure you get the right answer:

So now, an expression that required only one set of parentheses in two-dimensional math notation requires three sets to properly convey your intent to the calculator. And, if you left out the extra parentheses the first time, you've just distracted yourself from learning physics (which is the whole intent of taking the course; that's why it's called "Physics") and are now for all practical purposes debugging a FORTRAN program. Welcome to 1973.

In short, the calculator, billed as a device to make your work easier, has in fact made it harder--because each time you enter one of these expressions (which, I repeat, was the thing you were actually trying to learn in your physics class) you must translate it into a form the calculator understands. You must now be both a physicist and a programmer. And an unpaid one, at that.

We have touch screens and tablet interfaces. We have lots and lots of computing power available. We have the ability to play Tetris on the calculator if the lecture seems boring. Why don't we have the ability to just scribble the expression, in traditional mathematical notation, on the calculator's screen? Why must we still translate it to a fifties-vintage programming language?

Welcome to 1984 (again)

2010-12-14T13:54:00.000-08:00

One of the most memorable parts of George Orwell's 1984 was the use of language, in particular the way words were warped and tormented till they meant the exact opposite of what they said. For instance, if the Ministry of Truth said the sun came up in the east, you'd know the world had reversed its direction of spin, because nothing the Ministry ever said was accurate. You could count on them that way.

Well, I've been following the coverage of the "tax cut" legislation, and it seems to me I'm seeing exactly the same thing: words being used in such a way that their meaning is for all practical purposes reversed. The very phrase "tax cuts" is a lie: if the bill passes, nobody's taxes are going to go down. Got that? What this bill does is continues the tax rates that were put in place way back in 2001. The politicians are not cutting taxes; they're simply agreeing not to raise them (as would happen if the "sunset clause" of the '01 legislation were to take effect).

Why does this matter? Because people are making claims that this "tax cut" legislation is in some way an economic stimulus. Which it's not, which it can't be, because it's not actually changing anything. Jon Stewart's been having a field day on this subject, observing that the plan seems to be to stimulate the economy by doing nothing. It meets the classic definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. The economy's been staggering for the last few years. Keeping the tax rates the same is unlikely to change that. You may argue that raising taxes would make things worse, but you can't even bring up that argument as long as you cling to the faulty belief that the bill is a tax cut.

I've seen this kind of "we're cutting by not raising" nonsense before. Several years ago, the Ill-Annoy Tollway installed its "I-Pass" system, and announced that henceforth people who insisted on paying as they go, in cash, would have to pay twice as much. People who paid in advance and bought a transponder would not see an increase. The Tollway Authority described this as a "discount" for I-Pass users rather than calling it what it obviously was: a doubling of the price for people who didn't want to hand over a year's supply of toll money in advance. To my surprise, they pulled it off--even the Chicago Tribune went along and reported that I-Pass users receive a "discount." (We now see why they removed Colonel McCormick's phrase The World's Greatest Newspaper from their masthead some years back.)

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but as far as I'm concerned keeping the tax rates the same is not a tax cut, and offering your customer the same price instead of a higher one is not giving a discount. Unless, of course, you're part of the Ministry of Truth...

Naughty Jane!

2010-12-06T10:07:00.000-08:00

So I'm reading the funny (web) pages, and I happen to look at yesterday's "Tarzan" strip, when I notice something a bit... umm... unexpected.

This strip takes place when Tarz is in his "secret identity" of Lord Greystoke (well, it's not technically a secret identity, as everybody knows that Tarzan and Greystoke are one and the same, but the comics world doesn't seem to have a word for non-secret alternate identity). He and Jane are enjoying a Day At The Races, which means they're dressed for civilization: Tarzan is wearing a business suit instead of his usual leopard-skin Speedo, and Jane's wearing a classic trench coat over...

umm, over...

apparently over her birthday suit! It would appear that even the Lord and Lady of the Jungle need a little something to spice up their love life from time to time, eh?

Okay, it's probably just a coloring error. I think these are "classic" strips, not new ones, and as such may have been initially published in black and white. Or, if they were originally color, maybe they've had to be re-colored for the modern world of digital typesetting. In any case, it seems that somebody (or perhaps some piece of software) neglected to notice Jane's rather daring neckline...

Or maybe, just maybe, Jane's a little more naughty than we thought.

The Asymptotic Quest

2010-09-08T06:22:00.000-07:00

I have an idea for a story. Well, maybe not so much an idea, but a seed... just a scene, or maybe not even a complete scene, just a setup and a line. I think that maybe I'll drop it into the Cesspool of Knowledge for this year's National Novel Writing Month, and see what sticks to it.

The scene involves a Protagonist--I can't say Hero or Heroine, because I don't yet know whether this person is male or female. It could be a Soldier, a Sorcerer, a Secretary, a Servant... no idea yet. Don't know if the genre is Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Historical or maybe just Here and Now. What I have is a few lines of dialog:

The Protagonist marched into the presence (tent, office, cave, throne room, whatever) of the Mentor (commander, CEO, high mage, king, whatever) and yelled, "You son of a bitch!"

The Mentor looked up, unperturbed by this outburst, and said, "Yes? Is something the matter?"

"I'll say," the Protagonist roared. "You bastard, you sent me on a stinkin' Asymptotic Quest!"

The Asymptotic Quest is something I first recognized over the weekend, when a friend handed me a huge door-stop of a fantasy book and asked if I'd read it. The cover proclaimed it had been written by a New York Times Bestselling Author, and while I hadn't read this book I had (unfortunately) seen the truly awful TV series it supposedly inspired. I read the back-cover synopsis, which described how the Protagonist was sent on a Quest that would ultimately save the world (or something like it); I read the page facing the title, which listed the dozen or so volumes (so far) in the series; I flipped to the end and found (after several hundred pages of small type and narrow margins) that the Protagonist had achieved a Small Victory over the Forces Of Evil, but in the next volume would have to move on to another Strange Land controlled by the Bad Guy.

And at that point, it hit me: this series is never going to end. The Protagonist is never going to slay the dragon, rescue the princess, defuse the bomb, relieve the curse, or whatever the hell was the point of the original Quest. Nope. Each book (and each episode of the TV series, no doubt) will move the Protagonist a little bit further along, but as long as people are buying the books and tuning in to the show, the Quest will not be resolved. It can't be, since resolving the Quest would mean the series is then over and the money train would stop running. But if people stop buying books or watching the show, the author and publisher (for whom time and paper equal money) will have no reason to finish a series that nobody cares about anymore.

The Asymptotic Quest is fundamentally different from the Multi-Volume Quest (for instance, "Lord of the Rings"), in which the story plays out over some number of books and then ends. It's also different from the Open Ended Series (think "The Dick van Dyke Show"), in which the same characters, settings and situations go through a number of pretty much complete and independent stories (think about it--if you watched the episodes of "Star Trek" in random order, most of the time it wouldn't matter. Each story has its own beginning, middle and end).

It seems to me that it must really suck to be a character in an Asymptotic Quest, especially once that character realizes the situation. So I'm now thinking, what would a character do after discovering he/she's stuck in a Quest that can't end? Especially if he/she can identify the author (or the author's agents) inside the story?

Well, NaNoWriMo is almost two months away. Maybe I'll have some ideas by then...

FLOOOOOOM, Revisited (Poetically)

2010-09-01T12:09:00.000-07:00

The opening panel of today's Dick Tracy strip contained one of those bizarre alliterations that left me in a poetic mood. Tracy, musing over the current case, asks "Who would want David Dierdorf D'Buckworth dead?" Somehow, the phrase "David Dierdorf D'Buckworth Dead" made me think of Shel Silverstein's old bit about Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout (Who Would Not Take the Garbage Out), and next thing I knew I was waxing poetic:

David Dierdorf D’Buckworth Dead
Had millions of dollars stashed under his bed.
He had lots of people he wanted to thank,
So he withdrew many millions more from the bank.
Then he sat on the corner and gave them away
To any small child who wanted to play.
But the children had parents who all screamed “EEEP!
This David D’Buckworth is some kind of CREEP!”
They called up the cops, and in a short while
Dave was arrested as a pedophile!
He screamed, “I’m D’Buckworth, a very rich man!
You can’t arrest me!” They said, “Yes we can!
And we’ll take out our nightsticks and clobber your head,
Dick Tracy has proved that D’Buckworth is DEAD!
So if you’re D’Buckworth, the thing we must do
Is kill you and cut off that girlie tattoo!
(for we cops all wonder what kind of a guy
would put on his shoulder a big butterfly)”
So they took him away and they smashed in his face
In the hope that Dick Tracy could now solve the case.
So the cops could go home to the friends they held dear
If not by Thanksgiving, at least by New Year.

It was probably just that I couldn't resist trying to find something that rhymes with "pedophile."

Anyway, an hour or so later I was again seized by the muse, this time by the ghost of Dr. Seuss...

I do not like D’Buckworth Dead
I do not like his hands or head.
I do not like him in the room,
I do not like him with a FLOOOOOOOM!!!!
I do not like him drinking Tab,
I do not like him on the slab.
I do not like his corpse of goo,
I do not like his lame tattoo.
I do not like his ugly crone,
I do not like her funky phone.
I do not like him, though I still
Would take his thousand-dollar bill.

I think I need to find something more useful to do with my time.

Read An E-Book Week

2010-03-07T18:03:00.000-08:00

Yep, March 7-13 is officially Read An E-Book Week, so declared by... well, by whoever declares such things. It's been recorded in Chase's Calendar of Events since 2004, and that's good enough for me.

Anyway, what makes it important is discounts and freebies. Twilight Times books, including my own opus The Last Protector, are available with some serious discounts at the Barnes & Noble E-book store. (Click HERE to see what a pittance B&N is asking for a book that took me nine years to write. Oh, the humanity...) Furthermore, TTB is giving away free downloads of several titles this week (not including my book). Click HERE to check out the freebies. The specific freebies vary from day to day, so visit early and often... just pretend the TTB website is a Chicago polling place...

If you're new to e-books, know that you don't need to buy an expensive, special-purpose reading device. Barnes & Noble's e-book software is free, and runs on the iPhone, iPod Touch, various species of Blackberry, and of course PCs and Macs. The freebie downloads from TTB are available in HTML and PDF, which can be viewed on anything. Well, just about anything, anyway. I just downloaded today's TTB freebie (Behold the Eyes of Light by Geoff Geauterre) in HTML format, and opened it up on my NEC MobilePro 900 "saddlebag computer." This is a little handheld PC running Windows CE, a machine that hasn't seen a software update since about 2004. If an e-book will work on that antique, it'll work on anything.

Physics Problem of the Week

2010-02-26T09:02:00.000-08:00

So... I'm reading the current Dick Tracy comic strip (online, of course), and lo and behold, a physics problem comes up. The current story line, which has been running since Thanksgiving, involves a Stradivarius violin that's been loaded with plastic explosive, rigged to go off when the violinist hits a high C (most likely a C-4), and sent to a fancy reception at a foreign embassy. We don't yet know why somebody's going to such great lengths, or such a roundabout plot, to assassinate the ambassador (perhaps that will be revealed later), but we do know that as of last Saturday, Tracy had grabbed the Strad and chucked it into the swimming pool seconds before it went off with (and I quote) an enormous "FLOOOOM!"

In the wake of the blast, several questions came up:

Why would someone pay two million bucks for a Stradivarius, when a cheap high-school orchestra violin would have exploded just as well?
Why is there and embassy in Naperville?
What are those two big hand-like things sticking out of the pool during the "FLOOOOM!"? (Could the explosion have aroused the Ancient Slime Monster foretold by Mayan prophecy?)
Why is there a swimming pool in the embassy's formal dining room?

Of course, these are questions that can't be answered by physics (or any science, for that matter). But two other questions came up, questions that are amenable to science, and they center around what happened to the water:

Since the water seems to have simply disappeared in later strips, did the explosion vaporize it?
Or, if the explosive lacked the ooomph (that's the technical term) to vaporize the water, could it at least actually blow the water out of the pool.

These questions we can answer with a little chemistry and physics.

A quick trip to the internet divulged two important bits of information: C4 plastic explosive is mostly something called RDX, with a chemical formula of C3H6N6O6. It's a pretty interesting molecule, with a structure kind of like a snowflake--an inner hexagonal ring of alternating carbon and nitrogen atoms, and branches off that ring. Each carbon binds to two hydrogen atoms (that's pretty standard, like gasoline), and each of the three nitrogens is hooked up to an NO2 group, which is sort of a molecular menage a trois, in which the two oxygen atoms are hooked up with the nitrogen for now, but would happily take a better offer if one came along. The RDX molecule is energetic and only kind of stable, and when it breaks down into N2, H2O, CO2 and some loose carbon soot, it gives off a lot of energy. How much? Well, according to a paper I found on the internet, where the author analyzed those complicated "resonance" bonds in the NO2 groups, RDX liberates 10 million joules of energy per mole when it goes off.

According to another website on military stuff, the "standard" brick of C4 explosive is half a kilogram, and is about 90 percent RDX (the rest is binders and stuff). So, given the molar mass of RDX is 222g, that brick is just about exactly two moles... so when the Stradivarius goes off, 20 million joules get released.

Is that enough to vaporize the water in the pool? Not even close. It takes a lot of energy to boil water--something over 2 million joules per kilogram, so the 20 million joules released by the explosive in the Strad would only boil away about ten liters. Barely enough energy to boil the champagne.

But is it enough to empty the pool? Well, let's look at the pool and make some estimates. Looks to be about ten meters in diameter, and let's assume it's about two meters deep. That gives a volume of 25 times pi times 2, or 157 cubic meters. A cubic meter is 1000 liters, or 1000 kilograms, so the mass of water in the pool is 157,000 kilograms. So, when the Strad goes "FLOOOOM!", we've got 20 million joules acting on 157,000 kilograms. From these numbers, and the formulas for kinetic and gravitational energy, we can figure out how fast the water will be flung out of the pool, and how high it will splash.

First, how fast: the formula is Ek=0.5mV**2 (sorry, but Blogger won't typeset exponents). Rearranging the terms to solve for velocity, we get V=sqrt(2Ek/m), and if we plug in the numbers that's V=sqrt(2*20,000,000/157,000)=sqrt(255)=16 meters per second, which is about 35 miles an hour.

Second, how high: the formula is Eg=mgh, where g=the acceleration of gravity, 9.8 m/sec**2. Rearranging the terms to solve for height, we get h=Eg/(mg), and plugging in the numbers gives us h=20,000,000/(9.8*157,000)=20,000,000/1,530,000=13.1 meters, or about 43 feet. That's a pretty good lift, but... it's been three days since the Strad went off, and the water still hasn't come back down. Time must work differently in the Dick Tracy universe... but that's relativity, and that's a problem for another day.

Medieval Underwear, and Other Topics of Research

2010-02-22T11:37:00.000-08:00

I spent the better part of an hour yesterday wandering about the internet in search of information about what forms of underwear were worn in various periods of history. No, I'm not a pervert; it was research for a book I'm working on.

My approach to research, at least in my first novel The Last Protector (available for purchase; just click one of those links to the right) is a simple one: I just make stuff up. It's an approach that works pretty well in fantasy and SF (not so well in historical fiction, of course, which is why I avoid that genre). I'll recommend it without reservation to any aspiring authors who might be reading this.

Alas, I don't always take my own advice. I'm currently working on a story set in a place that the inhabitants at least believe is Camelot. Which means I have to do some research. Not a lot, since the first thing you discover when researching the "historical Camelot" is that there is no such thing. Or there are dozens of them, which is the same as saying there aren't any. Nobody really knows if there was a King Arthur, let alone when or where he might have reigned. So researching in that area was pretty easy; I listed a dozen or so popular options and then picked the one that best fit the rest of my story (which, in this case, meant the one where the supposed ruins of Camelot were such a minor archaeological site that the Ministry of Transport built a four-lane motorway right over them).

Other research was a bit more daunting. At one point, I found myself wondering if there was any chance that a set of bagpipes that had been put away for twenty-five (in a cool, dark, dry place, with the reeds sealed in a baby-food jar) could still be revived and played. Luckily, there's a huge group of experts out on the Bob Dunsdire piping forum. Not only did they tell me just how the pipes would have to be stored (and whether the bag seasoning would survive that long); they also gave me loads of insight into how pipes changed over that twenty-five years (mid 1970s to the beginning of the new millennium). It was a most profitable, and most enjoyable discussion.

Sometimes, research results just dropped into my lap, courtesy of Mother Nature and Global Climate Change (tm Al Gore Enterprises): while we may argue about the precise location of Camelot in both space and time, we do tend to agree it was somewhere in England. And I needed to know a bit about winter weather in England--how cold does it get, for how long, and how much snow might be expected. In particular, do they have anything as brutal as a Chicago winter? Fortunately, Mother Nature obliged with a once-in-a-lifetime cold snap and winter storm, so I was able to get my characterization of "extreme winter weather" from the BBC's daily reports (and no, it's not up to Chicago standards--ten centimeters of snow, about four inches, brought things to a halt; and there were warnings of severe cold, which meant sustained temperatures below zero degrees C). Thanks, Ma Nature... and to those of you in England who suffered through the storms, sorry 'bout that. We do apologize for any inconvenience.

And then there's the matter of those Arthurian undies. Suffice it to say that I found about as much reliable information about what Guinivere wore under her royal gowns as I did about when, where and whether Camelot actually existed. In other words, a lot of speculation, a lot of inference, and very little actual historical fact. It appears they didn't publish the Victoria's Secret catalog in pre-Victorian times. Sigh... a lot of work for what will probably end up being all of two or three paragraphs. I think I'll just go back to my primary research technique and just make something up.

Or I could just put everybody in kilts. That would solve the underwear problem, right?

We're Done. Who's Next?

2010-02-09T13:22:00.002-08:00

Last week the Obama administration announced the official end of the US manned space program. The "Constellation" project, which had just barely gotten off the ground with a fairly pointless four-fifths-stage rocket test last month, is now dead. When the last shuttle flight comes back down, sometime late this year, the United States is officially ending its career as a space-faring nation. Americans may still travel to the space station, but they'll do so as paying passengers aboard Russian Soyuz craft. More ambitious stuff, like returning to the moon or going on to Mars... forget it. We're done.

So, since the US has abandoned space, who might pick it up? Who's going to press on to the next lunar landing, the trip to Mars, the journeys to find out if anything lives in the vast ocean under the ice of Saturn's moon Enceladus? If it ain't us, then who?

Will the Private Sector pick up the slack? That's the administration's claim, but it strikes me that somebody's been overdosing on the Hopium(tm). Going into space, particularly going further than low earth orbit, is a long-term, costly, risky, and technically complex project that actually involves building stuff. Back in the days when Visionaries ran the big publicly-held companies, something of that magnitude might have been possible. But these days, most of the decision-making power in a publicly-held company resides with the Wall Street Herd, who are looking only for whatever creates a short-term spike in share prices (most typically the announcement of layoffs). And privately-held companies, while they're more immune to the Herd's influence, just aren't big enough to tackle much beyond low orbit. Elon Musk's SpaceX is doing some cool stuff, but his fortune is what, four or five billion. Nowhere near enough for a moon mission.

So what about the Russians? While they've been by far the most steady space-faring nation, having had the ability to put people in orbit continuously since about 1966, they've said they have no interest in the moon.

Which leaves the Chinese, who've also put a couple people into orbit. But China's historically not been an outward-looking country. There's the tale of the Chinese emperor who built a big fleet and sent it off to explore. When the admiral returned and reported there was nothing out there as magnificent as China, the emperor ordered the fleet sunk. Unless the moon turns out to be inhabited by aliens who'll produce export goods for even less than the Chinese workers do, it's unlikely that China will spend the money to land there.

So, in answer to the question "who will be the next to send people to the moon?" the most likely answer seems to be "nobody." Perhaps the moon race of the 1960s was just a Cold War aberration, something never to be repeated. Could be that a million years from now, when our species is long gone, replaced by either something we constructed as an obedient servant (oops) or perhaps by a More Perfect Cockroach, aliens will land on the moon. There, they'll find the names of four human beings, all that remains to mark our time on this planet.

One of those names, of course, will belong to Tricky Dick Nixon.

Best Facebook Page Ever?

2010-02-07T06:00:00.001-08:00

So this morning I fired up the ol' web browser and went over to Facebook to see if anyone had anything of great cosmic interest to say, and this is what popped up as the "Top Stories" in the "News Feed" view:

Hmm. No posts to display. No news out there at all. Cool... "Use the Publisher above to add your own." Or, perhaps, close the Facebook window and get on with your life... Sounds like a plan to me...

What They've Been Doing In Area 51

2010-01-23T07:43:00.000-08:00

Well, the cat's out of the bag: the US Air Force is traveling to other planets on a routine basis. All that stuff NASA's doing with the shuttle, space station and plans to go back to the moon someday, are just a smoke screen to keep us from knowing what's really going on.

I submit as evidence this frame, snapped from a USAF recruiting ad that's been getting a lot of TV and internet play. You can see the whole ad here. The helicopter comes in, drops off a couple paratroopers, and as we see clearly in the screen snap, they float down into the jungle, silhouetted against a pair of large moons. Which, of course, means it's not taking place on Planet Earth, which has only one moon (if you don't believe me on this, go out and check tonight).

So, it's a bit of sci-fi, a bit of artistic license, perhaps? Nope--a few seconds later, the ad explicitly states that "IT'S NOT SCIENCE FICTION. IT'S WHAT WE DO EVERY DAY."

Which, of course, leaves us with only two possibilities: first, that the ad is lying to us. We can dismiss this, of course, as we know the government never lies. That leaves only the second option: that the Air Force does in fact conduct everyday operations on another planet, one that's apparently covered in jungles and equipped with two moons.

Somehow, this makes me feel better about the military budget. When you read the news stories about Pentagon projects going massively over budget while delivering bombers that can't be flown in the rain, or the infamous $600 toilet seat, or the latest over-runs on airplanes the military doesn't even want anymore, it's easy to get depressed about where our tax dollars are going. But, thanks to this ad, we know that the money's really been going into the development of technology that's now routinely visiting other planets (and rather cool-looking ones at that).

I can't wait for the next revelation: that all that stuff in "Avatar" isn't CGI after all, but another of the planets where the Air Force is operating every day.

I Must Confess I Missed Something

2010-01-21T08:42:00.000-08:00

We bought a new computer the other day. First new one in something like five years. Yesterday, I migrated all our stuff from the old machine to the new one. And in the process, I realized I'd made an awful, terrible omission from my novel The Last Protector.

They say confession is good for the soul, so here's the oversight: all through the book, we see Ranger Jape routinely using a "softscroll," a sort of roll-up personal computer. And yet, at no point in the story does he ever have to do a backup, software upgrade, virus scan, or other piece of administration. At no point does the softscroll pop up a dialog box saying, "Please Enter An Administrator's Password," or "You Must Restart Your Computer After Finishing This Installation," or "New Software Is Available..." (this last one's particularly amusing: the computer's brand new, just back from the Apple Store, and it needs some 760 megabytes of updated software, including a half-gigabyte update to the operating system itself? Talk about inspiring confidence...)

Well, The Last Protector is science fiction, right? Maybe someday software really will get settled to the point where it doesn't require a steady stream of updates. Or maybe the update process really will become transparent and foolproof. It's only a matter of time and the relentless advance of technology.

Nah. That's more than science fiction; it's fantasy...

Born At the Not-Quite-Right Time

2010-01-08T14:42:00.000-08:00

Every now and then, one of my students will look at me and ask, "Were you a hippie?" And then I have to explain that I'm not quite old enough for that. During the great Summer of Love (1967), I was all of thirteen years old, hardly up to the journey from the Chicago suburbs to San Francisco. And during the Summer of Unrest (1968), when war protesters put an end to Lyndon Johnson's presidency, I was still a wee sprout of fourteen (I have since learned that some of the protesters at the '68 Democratic convention in Chicago were as young as 14, but they were a small minority--most were of draftable age, 18 or over). Sorry, but I was born just a couple years too late for the Great Adventures of the Sixties (sigh).

I seem to have been born just a bit too late for a lot of things, some good, some bad. On the one hand, people point at my wide variety of interests and say, "You're a real Renaissance man" (to which I reply, "Could be, but the Renaissance was 400 years ago"). On the other hand, I was born exactly seven days too late to have to worry about being drafted for the Vietnam war. Win some, lose some...

But my big "born too late" was around the space program. I was a fanatic follower of the moon program during the '60s, getting up early in the morning to sit through unending holds and delays, in the hopes of seeing somebody actually rocketing into orbit. I dreamed of a career in the field, not necessarily as an astronaut (that dream ended when I got my first pair of glasses), but at least as an engineer or scientist. Alas, when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, I was all of fifteen years old, and by the time I had to select my college major in 1971, the space program was obviously winding down. When I graduated with my degree in Computer Science, in 1975, people had stopped dreaming of walking on Mars. And so, I went into the telecom field, where I had an interesting enough career. But it was never the same as what I'd dreamed of. I'd been born, oh, about ten years too late for that.

Most of us, I suspect, can point to some way in which we were, with apologies to the Paul Simon song, not quite "Born At the Right Time." And there's not a whole lot we can do about it--unless we happen to be authors. Then, we can at least let a character work through the whole matter. Maybe have the character born at the right time. Or perhaps have the character be, like most of us are, born at the not-quite-right time, and then give him a chance to live out the dream anyway. It's not quite the same as having been born at the right time ourselves, but it's at least a chance to imagine what might have happened. And, perhaps, a chance to find out that maybe the Right Time wasn't so right after all...

Staking a Couple Claims

2009-12-31T10:18:00.000-08:00

I work on the assumption that there really aren't any new ideas in Science Fiction. Oh, we change the names, but whether your Rambo-esque Galactic War Super Soldier is created by exoskeletal machinery, embedded cyborg stuff, genetic engineering, or nanotech, it's pretty much the same idea, just a different name. For that matter, often "Fantasy" is just another name for "SF," with "magic" replacing "technology" (example: what's the difference between a "scrying spell" and a spy satellite? Just the "genre" note on the spine of the book). So, NO NEW IDEAS. Only Old Ideas in New Combinations. The "New Stuff" in SF is in how it relates to characters, society, how we see the gadgets and people interacting.

Having said that, and having carefully perused The Last Protector to make sure every Sci-Fi gimmick in it had been used in at least a half-dozen prior works (not to mention that "everything in here is a bleepin' cliche!" is the best way to assure you'll never be accused of plagiarism), I fear I may have inadvertently slipped in Something Original. If not a completely new idea, a significant new variation on an old idea. Namely, alcohol-fueled nanotech.

It was kind of a one-shot gag, a way to signal that something weird was going on: Scrornuck, the hero of the piece, knocks back several full-strength beers without getting a buzz, the Breathalyzer(tm)-equivalent machine says his blood alcohol is 0.00%... Obviously something strange is happening, and later on, we find out just where the alcohol went.

But, having read a few nanotech-using SF books of late, I've noticed that I haven't seen anybody else suggest that nanotech might run on alcohol (in fact, nobody seems to be terribly concerned about what it does use for fuel). So I did some Google searches, and again came up dry as Moore County, Tennessee (which, though it's home of the Jack Daniel's distillery, prohibits the sale of alcoholic beverages). Indeed, what I found is better represented by this request from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (click here), which is asking only for nanotech that would help determine alcohol levels and concentrations in tissues. Seems to me they're missing the bigger opportunity. Consider this scenario: It's New Year's Eve (which, in fact, it is as I write this). Before going out, you swallow a pill loaded with nanobots (or, alternatively, they're already in your bloodstream doing other useful things). They've been programmed to start consuming alcohol at 12:01 AM. You then party all night, you're pretty far into the bag by the time the ball drops in Times Square, and then... click! Schlurp (on a nano scale, of course)! And at 12:02, you're good to drive home... Think there'd be a market for this kind of nanotech? I do...

I really wish I'd explored the idea of blood-and-tissue-borne, alcohol-powered nanotech a bit further in The Last Protector. Oh, well... there's always the next book... And in the meantime, till I write that book, I'm gonna sit here on this idea and yell like a two-year-old, "MINE! MINE! MINE!"

And in the second Claim I'm Staking this morning, I found the Twitter name MyBeerTalkin wasn't taken. Given the popularity of ShitMyDadSays and similar Twits, I'm astonished. So naturally I grabbed it. Not sure what I'll do with it. Maybe best to let the beer talk...

(Later: Thought about this some more and concluded it's probably not a good idea. Better to let me talk, and let somebody else's beer do the Twitter thing. Beer is a complex subject, not well served by 140 character messages. On to things with some meat on their bones...)

Numbers

2009-12-26T17:49:00.000-08:00

Today's numbers: 46,253; 159; 195; 51.

No, they're not the winning Lotto numbers; they're the numbers I get when I ask Google how many books are out there with titles that begin "The Last (something or other)." I got curious because I have this book out there called The Last Protector, and I found myself thinking, "I bet there are a bazillion books out there with similar titles." So I did a little checking, and here's what I came up with:

46,253: the number of hits Google returns when you ask it to search for fiction books in the English language whose titles contain "The Last"
159: the number of books Google displays when you start working your way through the results. Why it stops after the first 159 is a mystery to me. Are the other 46,084 all duplicates? And why isn't my book among the 159 it lists?
195 is the number of hits Google returns when you ask it to search for science fiction books whose titles contain "The Last"
51 is the number of books Google actually displays. Again, I have no idea why it doesn't display the other 144 it claims to have found. At least The Last Protector appears among the 51 that Google displays. So, my existence is validated. I think. In the Googleverse, at least.

I'm still puzzling over why The Last Protector doesn't come up in the hit list that Google generates when I look for fiction books whose titles contain "The Last..." The hit in the SF category demonstrates that Google knows the book exists, so I have to wonder--are books only allowed to exist in one category? Is SF not considered a subset of fiction? Does Google somehow think the book isn't in English (that's what I get for using words like "scrornuck")? Or does Google know something I don't--that all the sci-fi stuff I thought I'd made up about alternate universes and time travel and stuff is actually exactly how things work?

Uh-oh...

Unclear on the Concept (Internet Content Division)

2009-12-23T19:04:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago I was watching the "Daily Show" over on hulu.com (because I'm too cheap to buy even basic cable), and the video stream broke for a commercial. Nothing out of the ordinary there. Screen went blank, I got the little "spinning wheel of pain" for ten seconds or so, and then this message appeared:

Let's see if I can list all the things that are just wrong about this...

They're apologizing because they can't rot my brain with a commercial--in other words, they assume I'm disappointed because they couldn't shove a brain-rotting ad in my face
They're giving me advice about how to make sure I won't miss the next commercial--in other words, they assume I have such a desire to watch ads that I'll actually screw around with my computer's settings so the ads come in properly
And they think I'll email their support folks if I'm unable to receive all the mind-numbing commercials I'm entitled to

This just might be a new record in the category of Unclear On The Concept. Or, perhaps, a sign of the extent to which our society is hooked on advertising. After all, it's said that people who hate football still have Super Bowl parties--to sit and watch the ads. And a few weeks back, as part of the marketing campaign for the movie Avatar, Fox TV ran an ad on Sunday night, reminding people to tune in Monday night to see... an ad for the movie.

A society that hooked on advertising is just a little scary, folks...

A Lengthy Pontification About Copyright

2009-12-22T07:42:00.000-08:00

Been reading a lot lately about copyright issues. Y'know, "piracy" of recordings, electronic books, movies, and so forth; debates over the wisdom of digital rights management technology; strange stories like the one in which Amazon had to silently delete some books from its customers' Kindle machines because Amazon had erroneously assumed George Orwell's work was in the public domain. Or the stories of huge record companies suing little old ladies whose idea of "contemporary music" is still Al Jolson, because their grandkids had downloaded bootleg copies of Metallica's latest (I found the last one hard to believe--Metallica's fans are of my generation, old enough to have grandkids, not to be grandkids...). It's a strange situation indeed. Almost chaos.

As an author with a book out in the marketplace, I have a certain vested interest in seeing the current copyright system continue. I like those royalty checks (and I'd like 'em more if they were bigger. Click one of those links to the right, please...). But I also spent twenty-six years of my life in the telecom and software industry, where I learned a lot about the nature of digital technology. And I made the mistake of studying history. In the process, I learned a few things.

First: copyright isn't something handed down on stone tablets atop Mount Sinai. It's a human invention, a means to an end--in particular, a way for people to turn their creativity into food, shelter and maybe even a few luxuries of life. It's not the end in itself.

Second: the definition of copyright has changed over time, in response to changes in culture and particularly changes in technology. Before the development of large-scale printing technology, "copyright" meant, literally, the right to make a copy of a document. The classic case, in seventh-century Ireland, was decided along the precedent of animal husbandry: "to every cow its calf; to every book its copy." That is, if you loaned somebody your cow, you still owned any calves that cow produced while in your neighbor's custody. In the same way, if you loaned your precious codex to your neighbor, and he made (by hand) a copy of it, the copy was rightfully yours. This made sense in a time when books were copied by hand, and each copy was therefore precious.

Our current system of intellectual property (the creator owns not just the physical artifact, but the very words themselves) and per-copy royalties derives directly from properties of printing technology. In particular, the master/copy relationship created by the printing plates. The master (the plate) is expensive, but it creates an unlimited number of cheap copies. That's what gives the words themselves their value, and establishes both the concept of owning the words and the concept of per-copy royalties. In addition, because you can't make cheap copies without the master (ever try to photocopy an out-of-print book?), it's easy to prevent piracy: you just keep the plates locked up in a safe place. And, for additional security, you make unauthorized possession of plates a crime (every now and then you'll hear of someone arrested for possession of printing plates that could be used to make counterfeit money--even if the perp has not actually printed any bogus cash. Possession of the plates is sufficient to prove guilt).

But the times they are a-changing, and that brings me to my next discovery.

Third: digital technology breaks the model created by the printing plate. In the digital world, any copy can be a master for making more copies. Oh, you can try to make this harder with DRM or proprietary encodings or copy-protect scrambling... but at some point, the data has to go into the clear so the customer can use it, and at that point it can be hijacked. You can pass Draconian laws against copying (or even possessing the technology to copy, as in the "Digital Millenium Copyright Act"), but they're hard to enforce when the underlying technology says, "go ahead and copy; it's easy!" And anyway, when you get to the point of prosecuting and suing the very people who should be your best customers, you kinda suspect your business model's got a problem.

So, what's going to happen? I believe that copyright as we know it is going to change, whether we like it or not. We're going to have to find a new way to transform creativity into cash. We already see some signs of this, particularly in the music field: Apple's iTunes Store model is built around the idea that you sell the stuff so cheaply that most of your customers will just buy the song rather than going to the effort of locating, downloading, and disinfecting a bootleg copy. Radiohead's experiment in "set your own price" (on the album "In Rainbows") demonstrated that people will pay for something they can get for free (thus shooting the knees out from under classic economic theory). Over in China, where just about everything is pirated, performers accept that they won't make money selling discs, so they make their money in sponsorships instead. Back in this country, Prince experimented with simply giving the disc to everybody who bought a concert ticket, turning the disc into a ticket-selling tool.

Similar things are happening in the publishing industry. Some publishers give away free downloads--often early books by an author who's got something new out in print, or perhaps the first book in a multi-volume series. Baen's got a whole library of SF (both classic and brand new) that you can download for free. Authors put them up voluntarily, in the belief that at some point you'll part with some cash because you like a particular author's work. How about books derived from movies or video games, sold for cheap (or perhaps given away entirely) and financed by sales of the DVDs or game cartridges? How about books financed through product placement? For that matter, it might be interesting to experiment with the "name your own price" scheme that Radiohead used.

There are lots of possibilities--all we need to do is go back to the basic question of "how do I turn my creativity into money?" and the constraint that once it's in digital form, it's going to be freely copied. With those things in mind, a new model of copyright (or perhaps many new models) will emerge.

I think it will be fairly easy for creators and consumers to arrive at a new model for their business relationship; I think it's already happening (again, consider "In Rainbows"). It's the middlemen--publishing companies, record companies, and so forth--who'll have to make the biggest adjustment, because the whole system of middlemen grew and evolved in a way that optimized it to the intellectual property/royalty business model. This is particuarly true of the biggest middlemen, the ones who operate on the "blockbuster" model (in which "success" is defined as "at least a million copies sold"). That model is so optimized to the IP/royalty environment that I wonder if companies built around it will still be around in twenty years.

Smaller middlemen, such as small/medium press publishers and indie record companies, will probably adjust much more easily. They still provide a valuable service of finding the good stuff (contrary to the beliefs of some in the self-publishing universe, I don't think the vast majority of readers are going to start paying for the privilege of rooting through the slush pile), and polishing it into a ready-for-prime-time form. But the future is going to be different, I suspect.

Hey, a new model of copyright is one of those things that only comes along every several centuries. It's going to be an adventure. We should be trying to enjoy it, not fight it.

Orwell Would Be Proud

2009-10-23T08:10:00.001-07:00

Congressional Democrats have apparently figured out that they've got a better chance of passing a "public option" health plan if they re-brand it as "Medicare Part E," where the E is supposed to stand for "Everybody." And, predictably, right-wing commentators are up in arms about this attempt to deceive the public by changing the program's name.

Of course, all concerned doth protest a bit much, because such manipulation of language has been a standard part of politics for years. See the PBS "Frontline" documentary, "The Persuaders" (which you can watch online here). Part 6 of the broadcast describes the Republicans' successful effort to gain public support for a repeal of the inheritance tax--through re-branding it as the "death tax." Consultants found that while voters had a generally positive response to the term "inheritance tax," seeing it as justly taking some of the ill-gotten gains that the filthy rich were passing on to their worthless and lazy offspring, the term "death tax" summoned up visions of poor Uncle Fred being unable to give Aunt Martha a proper burial because the government had taxed her demise. In truth, of course, the inheritance tax already had something like a million-dollar exemption, so if Uncle Fred was having trouble burying Aunt Martha, he must have been planning one lavish funeral. But this is politics, where truth matters much less than perception.

And manipulation of language for political gain wasn't new when the Republicans pulled the "death tax" thing. When I was but a young sprout, borrowing government money to pay for my college education, I received what was called a "National Defense Student Loan." President Kennedy had launched this program in the 1960s, in the belief that we needed lots of college graduates (especially in science and engineering) to defeat the Red Menace and win the Cold War. But by the early '70s, with "detente" the word of the day and the public pressuring Congress to cut the defense budget and increase spending on domestic priorities like education, Tricky Dick Nixon figured out he could pull of some re-branding sleight-of-hand: the student-loan program moved from the Department of Defense to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and its name changed to "National Direct Student Loan." Yep, Nixon didn't even change the acronym! Nor did he change the amount of money spent on student loans, or the amount spent on bombs. All that changed was one word in the name.

You can go back further, of course: in 1947, under Harry Truman, the former War Department was re-branded as the Defense Department. Doesn't that sound a lot more peaceful? "War Department" sounds like a bunch of military badasses looking to start a fight; "Defense Department" sounds like the John Wayne character who never throws the first punch. Oddly enough, the US seems to have gotten into more wars of choice in the sixty years since the re-branding than it did in the previous 150 years.

All of this, of course, goes back to what Orwell said in his classic 1984: that language matters. If you can control the words people use to debate an issue, then you control the debate, and ultimately the issue itself.

Which brings us back to the First Law of Science Fiction: the more things change... (the rest is left as an exercise for the reader)

The Cosmic Coke Bottle

2009-10-20T15:52:00.000-07:00

I just finished the "Muse Online Writers' Conference," including a session about keeping the science part of science fiction reasonably accurate. By coincidence, a friend passed me a link to this story at physorg.com: Jupiter's Moon Europa Has Enough Oxygen For Life. According to the article, scientists have estimated that the frozen surface of Europa turns over and remakes itself rapidly enough that oxygen, produced by cosmic radiation striking the surface, would make it down through the ice to the 100-kilometer-deep ocean believed to exist between the surface and the rocky core. Given abundant oxygen, or so the thinking goes, Europa should be able to support complex and interesting life, things equivalent to the fish found in our oceans.

I'm not so sure. Europa apparently has a steady supply of oxygen, but does it also have a mechanism for recycling the oxides (primarily carbon dioxide) produced by living creatures? On earth, we don't have simply water, oxygen and carbon; we've got a system of unstable equilibrium in which life constantly cycles the components around: CO2 plus water plus sunlight plus plants creates carbohydrates (like sugar) and free oxygen; carbohydrates plus oxygen plus animals (and plants at night) returns us to CO2, water, and waste heat. So while energy passes through the system, downgrading from light to heat in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, mass cycles endlessly around within the system. Oxygen, water and carbon dioxide levels remain approximately the same, in a wonderful unstable equilibrium.

But what of Europa? Here, if the scientists are right, we have a constant influx of oxygen, courtesy of cosmic rays interacting with something on the surface. The article doesn't say what, but I assume it's water (since Europa's surface is ice). The oxygen dissolves in the moon's abundant water, while the hydrogen most likely leaks off into space. So, over time, the concentration of oxygen in Europa's ocean increases--unless that oxygen reacts with something.

That something would be carbon and other reactive elements being released from Europa's core, which is supposedly made of rock, much like Earth. Okay... so, with or without life (oxygen doesn't need life in order to react with carbon; it's just doin' what comes naturally), as carbon-containing materials are brought up from Europa's core (the core is heated by tidal forces as Europa orbits Jupiter), they react with oxygen to form CO2, which goes... where?

Well, CO2 dissolves in water, forming a weak acid solution. As far as I can tell, there's no mechanism described for turning that CO2 back into carbon and oxygen, so the dissolved CO2 will just pile up, rendering Europa's ocean more and more acidic, and consuming carbon from the planet's core until either the carbon's all gone (at which point any life starves) or the water's too acidic to support life (in which case any life expires). Either way, the situation doesn't look good for Arthur Clarke's Europan creatures.

Of course, how quickly this happens and how far it goes depends on a number of factors. How much water is in Europa's ocean? How quickly do the oxygen (introduced at the surface) and carbon compounds (introduced by hydrothermal events at the sea floor) mix--is it slow diffusion in a largely stagnant ocean, vigorous circulation due to a warm core, some form of stratification, or what? Bodies of water on earth display all of these behaviors--which one characterizes Europa? And just how much carbon dioxide can be dissolved in an ocean of that size? Is there enough carbon in Europa's rocks to reach this limit? How acidic will the water eventually get? I suppose there is a window--which, if life is lucky, is several billion years in length--between the start of these processes and their eventual end in carbon exhaustion or acidification.

And one more thing to think about: after enough CO2 builds up, Europa would have an ocean of carbonated water, making it the solar system's Coke bottle...

Instrument of War?

2009-10-13T07:02:00.000-07:00

The "sonic weapon"--a musical instrument that's also a machine of war--plays a minor role in The Last Protector, and a much larger role in my current work-in-progress, The End of the Song. So I've been doing research into the whole idea of instruments as weapons, and made some interesting and surprising discoveries.

The most famous "instrument of war" (there's even a video series with that title) is the bagpipe. It has quite a reputation--there are stories of pipers leading the Scots into battle, only to have the enemy turn tail and run at the first sound of the pipes. To my disappointment (since I play the pipes myself), these yarns seem to be little more than legend. In truth, the Scots fought mostly among themselves and against the English, both of whom were already familiar with the sound of the pipes and therefore not very likely to find it frightening. Worse, the pipes suffer from the "inverse-square-law" problem: because the sound radiates in all directions, its intensity drops off very rapidly with distance. What's deafening at ten feet is pleasantly melodious at twenty and almost lost in the background noise at a hundred.

So where did the legend of the pipes as psychological weapon come from? Part of it could be association. The Scots had earned a reputation as formidable warriors, and the sound of the pipes meant the Scottish fighters were close behind. It's not the sound itself that's terrifying; it's what the enemy knew was coming along with the pipers. It's also possible that on one or two occasions during the imperial period, some native peoples (who'd never before heard the pipes) actually were startled by this unfamiliar shriek and fled. By the time the people learned that the sound of the pipes couldn't hurt them, they'd also learned to fear the bullets and cannon that came with the pipes. Thus are legends born.

While the bagpipe's reputation as a terrifying sonic weapon seems largely myth, modern technology is creating real sound weapons. The US military has this thing called an "LRAD" (Long Range Acoustic Device, which strikes me as one of the most unimaginative names ever), which they've supposedly used in Iraq. It's supposed to be a non-lethal crowd-control device, making a sound that drives potential rioters to disperse. The Pittsburgh police used one of these during the G20 protests last month, though the results were mixed (Jon Stewart quipped that the anarchists are probably using the LRAD's sound as their ring tone by now).

While the LRAD appears pretty crude (it just emits a loud and unpleasant noise that seems to make people move away), it does display some important advances over the bagpipe. It's a lot louder, and it focuses its sound in a narrow beam, so it should have a much greater range than the bagpipe.

So, as I work on The End of the Song, in which both bagpipes and a more advanced "sonic weapon" play important roles, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about where this kind of technology might go, what might happen if it fell into the wrong hands, and how it might be countered. Stay tuned...

Takin' Care of Business

2009-10-12T08:20:00.001-07:00

In celebration of its tenth anniversary, Twilight Times Books, publishers of The Last Protector (and many other fine volumes) is running a sale from now through November 15th. Print editions of The Last Protector and other books are available for 30 to 50 percent off cover price. So, if you've been thinking about stocking up and giving a copy to all your friends, now is the time! Just follow this link to the TTB website.

Analyzing Dorothy

2009-09-21T07:37:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about Dorothy lately. Dorothy as in The Wizard of Oz. The girl who's transported from a stretch of Kansas so dull it's filmed in black-and-white, to a Technicolor land of wizards and talking scarecrows and tin men... and who, through her entire adventure in this magical land, never wavers, not even once, from her purpose of getting the hell out of Oz and back to Kansas.

There's something strange about this girl, methinks...

I understand she had good reasons to not linger too long in Oz--she had responsibilities to the farm and her family, particularly Auntie Em. But still, never even one second thought about her obsession with going back to the land of sepia-tone? That's just plain weird.

At the other and of the spectrum you have Futurama hero Philip Fry, who wakes up in the year 3000, looks out the window of the cryogenics lab, and realizes that everyone he's ever known is long dead. After thinking for a few seconds, he high-fives the air and yells, "Whoopee!"

Between these extremes we find a whole genre of fiction, going back at least as far as the Odyssey and most likely farther. The patterns are simple: main character is transported via a Plot Device (a cyclone, a malfunctioning space drive, a rift in the space-time continuum, whatever) to an exotic and different world. Then, he/she either (a) fights and struggles to get back home (whatever "home" may be), or (b) discovers the reason he/she was brought to the exotic world, and carries out a Quest (this often ends with the hero being returned home against his/her will... until the next adventure). Stories succeed or fail on just how believable the characters' responses to landing in Oz (or Barsoom, or the Future, or whatever) are--if the characters are fighting their way home, do they have a good reason to prefer Kansas to Oz? If they've chosen to stay, do I, the reader, agree with the decision to abandon whatever they left behind?

And if they're debating "should I stay or should I go?" do they sing as well as The Clash?

You Don't Hear That Anymore

2009-07-19T13:40:00.000-07:00

(on the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, July, 1969)

I'm old enough to remember the Apollo program, and the way people used to say, "Darn it, if they can land a man on the moon, why can't they _________ (fill in the blank with whatever pressing issue you'd like to see solved) ?" It was a good question, because going to the moon is a big and difficult task, something worthy of a great nation. If we could do the one, why couldn't we do the others? And in fact, we did a lot of those things; the Sixties saw a lot of important reforms passed: Medicare, civil and voting rights legislation, the "Green Revolution" that fed a good chunk of the world's people, the beginnings of environmentalism, and more. We weren't always fully successful, but we attempted a lot of hard things and made a lot of progress during those years. Maybe it's unfair to say that the nation accomplished these other things because we were going to the moon, but the fact that we were going to the moon proved we could do Hard Things, and it left us with no excuses for not doing the other Hard Things if we thought they needed to be done. All we had to do was make the commitment. Years later, Jim Lovell emphasized this point about the Apollo program--it required only commitment, no miracles: "We just decided to go," said Lovell. And so we went.

People rarely say "if they can land a man on the moon, why can't they...?" these days. Because, of course, we can't land a man on the moon. We haven't landed a man on the moon since 1972, when Tricky Dick Nixon drove a stake through the heart of arch enemy John Kennedy's dream. NASA now says we might get back in another dozen or so years (though it only took them eight years the first time), but given the sorry record of the Space Shuttle program, it's hard to take that promise very seriously.

'Tis a pity. Right now, we also seem unable to do much about our dismal outsourced economy, rising unemployment, forty million without health care, and so forth. Maybe if we could still say, "if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we create some good jobs here in the U.S.A.?" or "if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we get this health-care thing fixed?" or "if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we put those Wall Street fraudsters who crashed the economy behind bars where they belong?" we might just find ourselves able to take some effective action.

Alas, we can't put a man on the moon anymore. And, judging by the daily news, we can't do the other things either.

Thanks Are In Order

2009-06-15T18:57:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday the pipe band I belong to, the Tunes of Glory, took first place in the Grade 5 competition at the Milwaukee Highland Games. Whoopee! In the picture at right, I'm leading the third column as we march out. You can watch a very nice video of our performance here:

YouTube: Tunes of Glory Milwaukee June 6 09

Now, before we all get too excited, let's keep in mind that Grade 5 is sort of the "plankton" level of the competition bagpiping food chain. There are four levels between us and the likes of the Scottish Lion 78 Fraser Highlanders. Nonetheless, it's a pretty exciting event, especially since it's the first time I've been part of the band when it won a competition.

And it's sorta strange to think that none of this would have happened had it not been for a couple of my former managers at Lucent: my old boss Gus, and former CEO Rich McGinn. Gus presented me with a kilt at a promotion party in the spring of '01, and after that, every time I wore it in public I'd find people asking me, "Do you play the bagpipes?" In time, I came to realize this was code for "Are you Scottish?" which was in turn code for "Why the #$%! are you wearing a kilt?" McGinn, of course, presided over the company as its stock fell from the stratospheric heights of the Tech Boom to its eventual position in the neighborhood of Deer Nuts (i.e., under a buck). This led to the "Five and Five" early-retirement buyout of July 2001, which gave me the free time I needed to go out and learn piping. So, to the two managers who led me into bagpiping, a hearty "thank you."

Aren't unintended consequences great?

Life Imitating Art, Or Something Like That

2009-06-15T18:08:00.001-07:00

If you've read The Last Protector (and if you haven't, you may want to click the Instant Gratification link and buy a copy before reading the rest of this sentence), you know that a big part of the story revolves around old computer records that nobody can read anymore. It takes time--time the heroes don't always have--to find the storage media, build the necessary devices to actually read it, crack the encoding scheme and see if there's actually any "there" there. My inspiration for this part of the book was my own experience with computers--it seemed that I was constantly having problems with obsolete data storage. We'd migrate from eight-inch to five-inch to mini-floppy disks, each time discovering there was some piece of essential information that existed only in the obsolete format. Then there was the mad scramble to find a machine somewhere in the lab that could still read these old disks.

So I was more than a little amused when I came across this Associated Press news video:

YouTube: McMoon

NASA has re-discovered the images made by the Lunar Orbiter project back in the 1960s. Thousands of reels of magnetic tape had somehow escaped the dumpster and are now being digitally processed into absolutely stunning images... in a lab set up in an abandoned McDonalds. How's that for "Stranger than Fiction"?

I remember the Lunar Orbiter project of the 1960s. Given the technology of the day, the orbiter spacecraft were works of absolute genius--space-compatible high-resolution video cameras were years away, so cameras in space were film cameras. Spy satellites routinely sent film canisters re-entering the atmosphere over the Pacific, to be snagged by airplanes and rushed to the processing lab. Moon probes had no such luxury, so the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft shot film (through a pair of truly powerful cameras), developed it inside the spacecraft, and then transmitted the image back to earth one line at a time via an early version of fax-machine technology. The image data, in the form of an analog signal mapping the brightness of the film, was recorded on big spools of magnetic tape. Those spools of tape survived some four decades with their signals intact (people knew how to make magnetic tape in those days). Just as important, at least one tape drive capable of reading the tapes survived in working order (in TLP, Jape and the gang at Ranger Control aren't so lucky--they have to construct the necessary machines to read 200-year-old data files).

As it turns out, the data stored on the tapes contains much more detail and clarity than the printing systems of the 1960s could handle. With a little digital processing of the tape data, NASA's getting images with much higher quality than we got during the space race. In fact, the Lunar Orbiter images, properly processed to access all the information they contain, are the sharpest, clearest, most detailed images of the moon taken by any spacecraft... ever!

The picture accompanying this posting is the iconic "Earthrise" shot by Lunar Orbiter in 1966 (and re-shot, in color, by Apollo 8 two years later). You can click on it to see a somewhat bigger view--or you can click here to view the full-resolution version on NASA's web site (be warned, it's a pretty big file).

I'm waiting for NASA to release some of the low-angle photos, the ones taken by Lunar Orbiters grazing down to something like ten miles above the surface. Even in the old NASA book The Moon As Seen By Lunar Orbiter these shots are spectacular. In a new digital restoration, I bet they'll be absolutely staggering.

Creating a Fictional Religion

2009-04-14T14:40:00.001-07:00

Those who've read The Last Protector know that a major (not to say the major) plot element is the so-called "Church of Spafu the Friendly Dragon." If you've ever wondered where I got the idea of creating a religion around a cartoon character, or want to read about the joys and woes of fleshing out a corporate-inspired bogus faith, you might want to skip over to Karina Fabian's Faith-Filled Fiction website, which features a two-part essay on Spafuism. The first part describes the process of creating the bogus religion, while the second (which comes after the essay on Saralee Rosenberg's "Big Fat Jewish Blockbusters") gives an overview of Spafuist doctrine.

Y'know, someday I'd like to get back to Ann Arbor and see if the "Good Shepherd and His Flock" stained-glass window featuring the burger-joint mascots looking adoringly upon the Clown is still there... Probably not. Fast-food franchise marketing stuff turns over pretty quickly.

Another Five Seconds of Fame

2009-03-08T19:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday (Saturday) was the St. Charles St. Patrick's Day parade, and as I have for the last several years, I marched with the Tunes of Glory Pipes & Drums. So... when I went to church this morning, people handed me copies of today's Kane County Chronicle:

Would you look at that... the piper they chose to put in the paper is none other than li'l old me. Another five seconds of fame there... at this rate, by the time I'm eighty I'll have gotten the full fifteen minutes that Andy Warhol said we'd all get.

In the accompanying article, columnist Joe Grace talks about how he's never marched in a parade, but dreams of doing so someday. It is an interesting experience--on the one hand, it's fun to see the people on the sidewalk waving and cheering, especially when you get a glimpse of someone you know. On the other hand, there's a lot to think about--playing correctly (and playing the right tune!), staying in step, and not drifting out of position in the group. I have a tendency to take longer steps than most people, which means that if I'm not careful I'll find myself well out ahead of my line--especially if I'm in the front row. In last year's downtown Chicago parade, I got far enough out ahead that another piper grabbed my belt and yanked me back into position--right as we were passing the TV cameras, of course!

It appears we're getting ready to start another tune, which is why I have only one hand on the pipe chanter and am adjusting the bag position with the other. Getting the bag tucked properly under your arm is a bit tricky when wearing the rain cape that was, alas, necessary on this cold and drizzly day.

I don't think the photographer knew me from Adam, and I really doubt that he knew I'm one of maybe two or three people in the band who actually live in St. Charles, but it's kind of cool that of all the people he could have photographed, he chose me. I'd like to think it's because I just look like a "piper," but I suspect the reality is that I just happened to be passing by when he decided to snap the picture.

Unclear on the Concept

2009-02-23T14:38:00.000-08:00

Today we have another classic incomprehensible road sign. I photographed this one while riding the Harley down Phantom Canyon Road, between Victor/Cripple Creek and Canon City, Colorado during the summer of 1995. The sign gives the helpful warning that there may be loose gravel on the road.

Uh-huh... the whole road's gravel, of course. Is there any particular patch of it that the highway department wanted to warn me about?

It's kind of like encountering a "BUMP AHEAD" sign in Illinois, where the roads are nothing but bumps, mile after mile of them. I want to ask, which bump does the sign refer to?

Today's Road Sign

2009-02-16T12:49:00.001-08:00

I saw this while passing through Yellowstone National Park in 2006.

I'm still not sure whether it's just a road construction sign or a deep philosophical statement about the meaning of life in general.

New Piece Up on Projects At Work Website

2009-02-09T07:11:00.000-08:00

The Projects At Work online project management magazine has put up my latest piece, a review of Jerry Weinberg's new book, Perfect Software and Other Illusions About Testing. If you've never visited the Projects At Work site before, you'll need to do a free registration (sigh... is there anything on the Internet that you can read without filling out a registration?). Go ahead... you know you want to...

Perfect Software is a valuable book even if you don't write or test software, because it's really not so much about software or testing as it is about people: why we think we want to test things in the first place, how we see and interpret tests, how we act on their results, and how we mess up. These observations and suggestions are applicable far beyond the world of software. For instance, they could be applied to education--as I was reading and reviewing the book during my slack periods at the high school (I spend a couple days a week as a substitute teacher), I found myself wishing the people who came up with "No Child Left Behind" had read it.

You can read my review of Perfect Software by clicking here.

Yeah, I've Been There

2009-02-03T13:57:00.000-08:00

Friend of mine is suggesting we go to Colorado on the motorcycles this summer. OK, Colorado's a pretty state... where do you want to go? Oh, there? Yeah, I've been on that road; it's pretty...

His suggestion got me to thinking, just how much of the Colorado Rockies have I explored on a bike? So I took my road map and a bright orange highlighter, and traced over the roads I've traveled on my various expeditions. It seems pretty close to a complete set (click on the image to enlarge it).

I first put a wheel in Colorado in August of 1977, coming across from Utah on the way back from the Pacific coast. We camped outside of Glenwood Springs in a dreary rainstorm that continued through the next day (during which we had to sit out a long delay near Vail, because a private pilot had gotten in trouble and was trying to make an emergency landing on I-70). The rain didn't end until we passed through the Eisenhower Tunnel (which was, at the time, a single hole with one lane in each direction; the second hole wouldn't open for another two years)... and then we came down the long hill into Denver in glorious sunshine, whisked through town, found a cheap motel in the prairie town of Idalia, turned on the TV and found that Elvis had left the building for good. A strange and memorable introduction to the state...

My most recent visit was in May of 1999, too early for my own good (but timed to match a business meeting). I rode west out of Colorado Springs, and just west of Wilkerson Pass on US 24, I ran into a snowstorm. Luckily, it was a short one, and it was spring so it melted fairly quickly, and I was able to go on my merry way.

I still don't have the complete set: 13 north of Meeker, 139 south of Rangely, 141 through Gypsum Gap, 491 north of Cortez, 140, 172 and 151 around Durango, and the little stretch of US 40 between Granby and I-70 have escaped... for now. But summer's coming...

Technologies In Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear

2009-01-30T13:21:00.000-08:00

After ordering a cup of the restaurant's strongest tea, Jape pulled a rolled-up sheet of black material from a pocket of his cape and spread it on the tabletop. "Softscroll, activate," he whispered, and within a few seconds the featureless surface came alive, displaying windows filled with words and pictures.

--From The Last Protector

I first wrote about the "softscroll," a futuristic personal computer built into a thin, flexible sheet of plastic that Jape, the time-traveling Ranger, could just roll up and stuff into a pocket, almost ten years ago. At the time, it seemed like a pretty far-out concept. But today, while subbing in the science department over at Saint Charles East, I saw a presentation on nanotechnology, and a part of the new tech being displayed was... you guessed it, "stretchable silicon," which is supposed to lead to such things as a TV that's just a paper-thin sheet of plastic you roll out on the wall, or cell phones that roll up inside a pen, or... yep, a flexible computer.

Granted, the stuff that John Rogers of the University of Illinois has created won't do quite everything the "softscroll" does... yet. And flexible computers aren't on the market... yet (good thing my book came out last May!). But "stretchable silicon" does illustrate one of the problems of writing science fiction: technology is moving forward so quickly that by the time you've written, sold, edited and released a book incorporating a "far-out" new gadget, you may find the gadget isn't very far-out at all! My friend Jerry Weinberg wrote a book called The Aremac Project, which featured a machine that could read your thoughts, and now, just a few years after its release, he's worrying in his blog that technology may have already caught up with him. He advises writers to set their SF books far enough into the future that something like this won't happen. And to get back to nanotech for a moment, it's starting to look like carbon nanotubes may very well make the "elevator to orbit" concept feasible... rendering obsolete all those great SF books in which people fly around in rockets.

I wonder if this rapid advance of technology, which makes SF gimmicks obsolete almost overnight, is part of the reason fantasy's taken off in the last few decades. Odds are the University of Illinois won't develop your story's central gimmick if it involves magic. Then again, as Clarke observed, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic...

It's Good to Know Where You're Not

2009-01-27T10:14:00.000-08:00

Here's our Highway Sign of the Day:

Where I come from, you don't very often see signs that tell you what road you're not on, but in some parts of the country that's an important thing to know. This sign is (or was; I shot the picture in 1981) on Utah Route 46, just south of its intersection with US 163. I suspect the sign's there because this is pretty empty country, and if you find yourself on 46 (headed for the tiny town of Paradox, Colorado) when you meant to be on 163 headed for Monticello, you may go quite a ways before realizing your mistake.

So what was I doing here? Looking for the empty country; in particular, heading off to see the wild and scenic desert alone on a big Japanese dirtbike that I'd modified for long-distance touring. In other words, I was on something of a fool's errand, almost in the same league as that "Into the Wild" guy who walked into the Alaskan wilderness figuring to live off the land. A breakdown, a bad crash, or just a big error in my trail guide (no GPS or satellite navigation in those days!) would have meant the buzzards would get a bigger-than-usual meal. Looking back, I think I must have been slightly crazy to make this trip. But, obviously, nothing too awful went wrong, and I returned sunburned, bruised and more than a little humbled... and the buzzards went hungry. You can read about the trip, and see some pretty neat pictures, here.

When I was putting this story together, I visited a lot of web sites to make sure I had my facts more or less straight (it has been 27 years, after all). And I found that things do seem to change over time. A landmark that was called "Prostitute Butte" in '81 now sports the more politically correct name of "Lone Rock." I have a photo of a natural arch that doesn't seem to have the same name now that it had then... but it also doesn't look the same, even though it's in the same place. The creek's changed its name, or at least the spelling of the name, and the particular Jeep road I took now seems to be parts of three different Jeep roads... or perhaps it's now a mountain bike trail. And I don't recall having to pay a dollar to cross the last six hundred feet of private land.

Memory is funny stuff. Memories change over time, but reality also changes, it seems.

Winter? What's That?

2009-01-23T13:44:00.000-08:00

I have a sort of tradition, one of those things that's kind of stupid and obsessive-compulsive if you think about it too hard, but something I've managed to maintain anyway for twenty-nine years now: getting out for a motorcycle ride at least once in every month of the year. Most years it's not that much of a challenge; even in the Frozen North that is Chicago, there are several decent days in any given winter month.

Most years, I said. Some years are tougher. Like 2009: the temperature was in the 40s on December 30 of last year, started falling (along with some snow) on New Year's Eve, and in short order we were alternating sub-zero temperatures and heavy snowfall. I was beginning to wonder whether this was the year that my streak came to an end.

Luckily, there was One Good Day in the forecast: Thursday, the 22nd. While temperatures had been in the single digits and teens, the last few days had been mostly clear and sunny, which evaporated most of the snow and ice off the roads (leaving a nice layer of salt, but that's another matter). And the forecast high for Thursday was a positively tropical thirty-five degrees, so I made my plans to haul the nineteen-year-old Harley out of the garage and go for a spin.

Of course, starting a nineteen-year-old Harley that's been sitting in an unheated garage during a long cold snap ain't exactly an easy task. The Evo Big Twin motor is pretty cold-blooded and shows little enthusiasm for cranking, let alone actually running. So I decided on a more subtle approach: at eight in the morning I started up a thousand-watt radiant heater a few feet from the bike, aimed at the engine. Then, recalling how we used to get the old Dodge to start in cold weather back in my college days, I stuck a 100-watt drop light under the carburetor. Around noon, I decided to give her a try. Twist the throttle a couple times to prime the carb, push the button, crank (slowly), crank (slower), catch, sputter... stop. Try again. And again. About the fourth try I realized which step I'd left out of the preparations: pull out the choke, dude! One more try, this time with the choke on. Catch, sputter, sputter some more, run tentatively on one cylinder for a few seconds, and settle down to a fast idle. Hooray!

So there I was, sitting in the driveway next to the snowbanks (click on the picture at right to enlarge it) with the bike more or less warmed up, wondering just where to go. The wet spots, occasional patches of slush and general coating of salt on everything convinced me that this wasn't a good day to head for my favorite twisty backroads. So I contented myself with a ride across the straight, flat state highways, about twenty-five miles each way to Sycamore, where I stopped for about half an hour (oops, make that officially twenty-four minutes, because I only put two pennies in the meter) to warm up. Then, another twenty-five miles back, turning the old bagger's odometer over the Number Of A Hundred Beasts (66600). I even explored a couple roads with modest curves on the way back.

I actually saw one other insane person out on a bike. He had no windshield and no full-face helmet, and was bundled up like the Mummy (or somebody on his way to make an unscheduled withdrawal from the quickie-mart). We exchanged waves, the camaraderie of the lunatics.

Today dawned colder--mid twenties and dropping this afternoon, with an overcast and a prediction that the next several days will be cold, with a chance of snow. Yesterday may very well have been the only decent day for riding this month. Glad I took advantage of it.

The Worst of Both Worlds

2009-01-22T08:27:00.000-08:00

Today's Dilbert strip (click here to read it) really hits home for those of us who worked in Corporate America. In the story leading up to this strip, Dilbert's been given no work to do (because there's no budget), and so fritters his time away creating a profitable internet business. Then the pointy-haired boss fires him for "misusing company resources." And in today's panel, the company seizes the profitable business because it was created on company time. Dilbert, as always, gets the shaft. As usual, Scott Adams captures the essence of Corporate America: the Corporation takes everything and promises nothing. Dilbert has no job security, but anything he creates is property of the company.

It was not always that way. Back when I was still more or less starting out in the technology field, when the USA was still the world's unchallenged leader in technological innovation, a friend and I left the company where we'd helped make the cell phone a commercial product, and went off in search of new challenges (and more money, of course). We took two very different paths.

My friend went to Silicon Valley and became something of an entrepreneur. He worked for several companies, most of which paid in stock options rather than cash. If he had a brilliant idea that made the company enormously profitable, he'd end up filthy rich off his options. On the other hand, if the company went bust (which most of the Silicon Valley start-ups did), he'd find himself with no job and no money. High risk, but also the possibility of high reward. It was a fair bargain, as the success of such companies as Apple, Intel, etc., goes to show.

I, on the other hand, took a job with the Bell System. At the time, the Bell System was a huge, regulated monopoly, and the employment contract was best described as socialist. Maybe even Marxist, in the sense of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." The contract explicitly said that anything I invented while employed at the company (and this could be read to include anything I invented on my own time) was licensed to the company. If I invented something that made a billion dollars for the company, that billion would go into the company's pocket, not mine. (In fact, I did invent something that I'm told generated a billion or so for the company, though in all fairness it took close to a hundred people to actually build the thing.) In return for giving up the right to become rich, the unwritten part of the contract pretty much guaranteed lifetime job security. There was good health care and a real pension plan, so barring some major gaffe like parking in the executive's office, I wouldn't have to worry about food, clothing and shelter for the rest of my life. Low reward, but close to zero risk. In my experience, this too was a good environment for innovation.

But Dilbert's company--like most American companies, including those that formed from the splinters of the Bell System after the 1985 breakup--wants to Have It All: they claim ownership of what the employees invent, but promise nothing in return beyond this week's paycheck. I suspect this corporate attitude is a big part of the reason the good old U.S. of A. is no longer the world's leader in technological innovation (don't believe me? Check out this Tom Friedman column in the New York Times). After all, why take the risk of innovating when somebody else gets all the benefits? I don't have any good answer (yet), but I don't think this country's going to return to it's global leadership position until this problem gets resolved. "High risk, no reward" is no formula for promoting innovation.

By the way, my friend never did get rich from developing technology. But he also invested in Silicon Valley real estate on the side, and this made him enough that he was able to retire in his 40s, move to Northern California and become an environmental philanthropist. Not a bad outcome.

More of Why I Love Computers

2009-01-16T07:29:00.000-08:00

A while back, I posted a couple examples of digitally-created silliness. This morning, another one appeared on the New York Times website:

Only a computer would tell you to "share your thoughts," and immediately add that "comments are no longer being accepted."

Remember the grand old days of science fiction, when you could blow up a computer by posing a simple paradox like "everything I say is a lie, and I am lying to you right now"? These days, the computers not only tolerate paradoxes, they routinely create them.

A Frozen Flood!

2009-01-09T17:18:00.001-08:00

We had our first "hundred-year flood" in the late summer of 2007, when the Fox River rose about six feet above normal, flooding several houses and yards in my neighborhood. Our second "hundred-year flood" came in June of 2008, and it was a strange one because nearly every day was sunny and dry; all the rain was falling way upstream in Wisconsin. But, again, the mighty Fox was a good five and a half feet above where it should have been. And we had our third "hundred-year flood" in September, when the leftovers of Hurricanes Gustave and Ike combined with a Pacific storm to create three days of heavy rains (and it made for one heck of a radar image).

Now, we're having our fourth "hundred-year flood," and it's the most peculiar of all: a frozen flood in the middle of winter! We had above-normal snow in November and December, so that on Christmas Eve we had something like two feet of snow on the frozen ground. Then, on Boxing Day we began a warm and wet snap that extended through December 30: two days of very warm temperatures (50s and even low 60s, very rare for this time of year) and heavy rain. By Tuesday the 30th, all the snow had melted and run into the river. Then it turned cold again. Under the ice, the river rose and fell and rose again. Right now, it's again something like five feet above normal, nearly at the top of my retaining wall, and has flooded the park, the boat launch, and several yards. Only this time, the flood's in the form of ice. In the picture at right, you can see how the ice is just inches below the top of what is normally a five-and-a-half-foot wall. This is just a few inches shy of the highest level it reached in '07.

Still, I'm in pretty good shape compared to my neighbors. The park and boat launch, for instance, have become a skating rink. And if you look in the background of this photo (click on it to see a larger version), you'll see that the neighbor's boathouse is almost half-submerged--standing in about three feet of water, with a good six inches of ice on top. Things are going to be very interesting when the river goes down and this ice starts to break up and move.

And things are going to be even more interesting for the people living in this house, as it's completely surrounded by a frozen moat!

The river itself is behaving in strange ways. There is pretty solid ice stretching out about fifty feet from the shore (on this side). Beyond that, it goes back and forth between solidly choked with floating ice and wide open flowing water. The ice seems to pile up, moving more and more slowly until it finally stops, and then the huge plug of pack ice moves downstream as a unit. Sometimes big slabs of the stuff stand up on end and roll over with a crunching sound. Ah, life in the Arctic...

The weather forecast calls for a bit more snow, followed by serious temperature drops--by next Thursday we're looking at a high temperature below zero. This combination of high water, swift current and intense cold could lead to some very interesting river behavior. Let's just hope it doesn't end up like the old curse, "May you live in interesting times!"

Was This Thing Programmed in England?

2009-01-06T07:57:00.000-08:00

One of the side-effects of ubiquitous cell phones is that parents have become Ground Control when their kids head off on road trips. If you're a parent of a teen, or a twenty-something for that matter, you know all about this--the phone rings, and it's the fruit of your loins (or a friend thereof), calling from the middle of nowhere and asking how to get somewhere else. Of course, you are expected to figure out just where in the middle of nowhere said offspring are, and then plot a route to the desired destination. And you do, because you're a Parent and that's what Parents do, even if your "kids" are now grown-up and married and living in another country.

In the search for an uninterrupted night's sleep, many parents have looked for the technological fix, buying the kid a global positioning system (GPS), complete with turn-by-turn directions. But even technology can't solve all problems, as a friend of mine reports.

Seems his son was up in the hinterlands of Wisconsin, following the directions of his GPS, when it suddenly demanded that he make a left turn onto a road marked with a very clear "DO NOT ENTER" sign. He wanted to know whether he should obey the GPS or the sign. Now, at this point I could pause for a dissertation on how the kid's confusion over which to obey is a symptom of how we're becoming Tools of our Toys, but for now I'll put that tirade on hold. I want instead to consider just where the kid was when he got mixed up. Seems he was approaching a diamond-style interchange between the state highway he was on and a limited-access divided highway. Something like the one at right:

He's coming in from the west (which is the left side of the picture) and wants to end up going north on the four-lane. But when the GPS is demanding (quite insistently, or so he says) that he turn left at the first ramp--in other words, it's telling him to go north on the southbound off-ramp, into the southbound lane of the highway.

Which got me to thinking: why would the GPS want to send him down the wrong ramp into the wrong lane in the wrong direction? Is it just stupid? Is it in fact telling him to take the northbound on-ramp that's the other side of the bridge? (To this last, I have the answer: no; the GPS wants him to go north on the southbound ramp. We know this because once he passed the ramp, it started re-plotting his route.) Could it be that the GPS was programmed in England, where people drive on the left side of the road? Or, for that matter, China, where people also drive on the left side, and where most of the consumer electronics in the world are currently being made?

Or, perhaps, reality is even stranger. When the kid got to the other side of the bridge, the GPS again started telling him to turn left, this time onto the northbound on-ramp. This leads to the rather frightening speculation that the GPS really has no concept of which way traffic goes on a road. Which would make sense--the software's really just seeing lines connecting dots, and plotting a minimum-distance path between them. Which is why, on occasion, GPS units tell people to turn onto the wrong line--for instance a railroad track, as in this New York Times story. Or, as in this story from Germany, into a portable toilet. Who knows; maybe the "P" in GPS stands for something other than "positioning"?

Blast from the Past!

2009-01-04T14:35:00.000-08:00

The Buell Motorcycle Company celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary this summer, and as part of the celebration their house organ, Fuell, printed a special retrospective issue with a silver cover and lots of pictures and such from the company's history. Including, on the third page, this picture from the 1987 motorcycle show in Rosemont, Illinois. Erik Buell, founder, head designer, president, chief cook and bottle-washer, is on the left, in that nifty (but vaguely out-of-place at a motorcycle show) business suit, explaining the virtues of his new RR1000 motorcycle. (For those who don't know, the RR1000 was a serious sporty-bike, propelled by the short-lived but powerful XR1000 Harley engine. It's one of the slipperiest motorcycles ever released to the public, and just a few years ago one of these twenty-year-old machines, with a newer engine, set a Land Speed Record at Bonneville.)

But who's that guy next to him, the furball in the Sturgis shirt, clutching a poster and a four-dollar cup of Budweiser? Yep, it's me. I'd bought my first Harley about four years earlier, and was by now up to four of them (two Sportsters, both of which I still had, and two FXRT Sport Glides, one of which I'd gotten through the peculiar combination of near-terminal poison ivy and Lamaze classes, but that's another story), and what drew me to chat with Erik was more his involvement in the project that first developed the FXRT. We talked a bit about the Sport Glide, particularly the rather lousy saddlebag latches that were on the first couple years of the bike. Erik gamely tried to redirect the conversation to his new bike, and eventually I was willing to listen to that, too.

As much as I liked the bike, I wasn't willing to buy one. It wasn't the $16,000 price tag as much as it was the dead-end motor (the XR1000 engine was a one-shot project at HD; the future was in the new 1100cc all-aluminum Evolution motor) and the fact that the bike lacked a lot of features I'd need to go touring, such as a passenger seat and luggage. Of course it lacked these things; it was, after all, more of a street-legal road racer, a bike optimized for going around corners very fast. Which was true... but when you live outside Chicago, going around corners fast means you either set up your bike for touring or buy a trailer, because the nearest place with roads even remotely worthy of this bike is more than a hundred miles away. And I don't like trailers. So, as I recall, before I finally shook his hand and headed off for another overpriced beer, I told him "give it the new motor, a passenger seat and some luggage, and I'll buy one."

Eight years later, he took me up on that offer by bringing out the S2T Thunderbolt... which I also didn't buy (though I sort of wish I had, preferably in that bright metallic purple they called "Parkway Blue"). Instead, almost exactly nine years after the Rosemont motorcycle show where I first met Erik, I bought a '96 S1 Lightning... a bike which had no passenger seat (heck, even the rider seat was best described as a "one-cheek wonder") and no luggage. And I took it touring. But that's another story, too.

Another Source of Instant Gratification!

2008-12-17T07:31:00.000-08:00

If you've been slavering to read The Last Protector, but have been determined to do so on your Sony e-book Reader, slaver no longer! Just hop on over to the Instant Gratification section of the Last Protector page, and there you'll find a link to the Sony e-book Store site. Or, if your need is too urgent to click through two links, just CLICK RIGHT HERE. Thrills, adventure, romance, and the world's strongest hair spray are just seconds away!

NaNoWriMo, One More Time...

2008-12-16T13:18:00.000-08:00

I went to the end-of-the-event "thank goodness it's over" party for National Novel Writing Month (the Naperville chapter of it, anyway) over the weekend, and picked up a couple more small insights into the ways in which NaNoWriMo reminds me of software projects I'd worked on (I've written two previous posts on the subject; you can read them here and here).

First, I heard from a few people that I'm wrong to assume they start with a blank piece of paper on November 1 and just start writing like mad. Many, it seems, plan for one or two months (some longer than that). They sketch out characters and setting, come up with plot, maybe even outline the whole book so that they're all ready to start hammering out words when the month officially begins. Hmm. At this point NaNo begins to look a lot like the coding step of a software project done under an old-fashioned waterfall model, doesn't it?

Let's look at this for a moment: some forty years ago, Fred Brooks observed that coding accounts for perhaps one-fourth to one-sixth the total effort in a software project. Another quarter-to-third is taken in design and architecture (if the project's being done well), and as much as a half is spent testing and bug-fixing. So, if somebody spends two months before NaNoWriMo planning and outlining (that is, designing), and three months afterward editing (testing and fixing), then producing an actual book that's ready to submit for publication should take about six months. Of course, most NaNo participants admit to banishing all other activities during the month of November, so it might be more accurate to say they get two months' worth of work (at a more "normal" level of activity) done during the NaNo event, which would suggest an overall book cycle of two months planning, two months (at a normal pace) writing the draft, and four to six months for editing and fixing.

So what? Well, probably nothing in the case of NaNoWriMo, as people are just doing this for their own amusement. But perhaps it is a symptom of a human behavior that shows up in projects as well: the tendency to see "the project" as only the stage where something countable is being made, and thereby underestimate its overall size. NaNoWriMo, like the coding stage of a software project, is the part of the iceberg that's above the surface. Perhaps that's why so few NaNo books have made it into print: when participants finish the month of writing and see how much work remains, they just quietly give up. Rather like software projects that get into unit test, only to find out how much work actually remains, and quietly fade away.

Then again, perhaps so many NaNo novels don't ever get through editing simply because their authors aren't interested in editing. Peruse the NaNoWriMo forums, and you'll see a lot of messages in which people are already planning or counting down to next November, already talking about the next novel they're going to write. Rather like people I knew who liked to write code, but didn't particularly like to do design, architecture or testing. Go figure.

So, what's the point? I'm not sure. David Schmaltz thinks I've got enough here for another article, but so far all I've got is a series of observations, particularly observations of similarity. Where's the aha!, the insight, the point? Stay tuned...

The World Turned Upside Down

2008-12-11T12:24:00.000-08:00

Some things in life you just expect will never change. The sun comes up in the east, goes down in the west. Spring follows winter. The Cubs fold in September, and the Bears drive the length of the field, only to stall out on the four-yard line.

And in political scandals, my brother's observation holds: Republicans get into trouble over money and power, while Democrats get into trouble over sex. 'Twas ever thus. Bill Clinton's dalliances in the White House led to his impeachment; George Ryan's bribe-taking landed him in the Big House. Gary Hart's run for the presidency ended aboard the good ship Monkey Business; Richard Nixon's presidency ended with the Watergate break-in.

Of course, there have been a few signs things are getting out of whack--Republican Larry Craig got into a spot of trouble in an airport men's room, while Democrat William Jefferson was found with ninety thousand bucks he shouldn't have had. But Craig didn't actually do anything more than tap his feet the wrong way in the presence of an undercover cop (word to the wise: do not turn on your iPod while in a public restroom), and Jefferson's ninety grand were stashed in a freezer, of all things (a pro like Jack Abramoff would have had that money safely stashed in the Cayman Islands). These could be seen as aberrations, the exceptions that proved the rule. And anyway, the Natural Order of Things quickly reasserted itself as Democrat Eliot Spitzer had to resign as governor of New York after being caught hiring prostitutes, and Republican Ted Stevens was convicted of taking bribes. Ah, reassuring normality...

But now, along comes Ill-Annoy governor Rod Blow-dry-o-vich, he of the expensive hair and more-expensive daily commute, upsetting the natural order of things with a bribery scandal that makes George Ryan look like a Boy Scout. What gives? Is this nominal Democrat really a Republican at heart? Or has the world really turned upside down?

NaNoWriMo, Revisited

2008-12-11T09:31:00.001-08:00

Two whole weeks have now elapsed since I "won" National Novel Writing Month by convincing the automated word counters that I had composed 51,000 alphabetic strings separated by blanks and punctuation. A couple posts down, I compared the NaNoWriMo process to some software projects I've seen (not necessarily successful ones), particularly the emphasis on producing quantity, the intentional avoidance of testing and fixing (that is, re-reading and editing), and the assumption that the quality can be put in later.

Since then, I've had a couple more thoughts about the process. First, I found that I am going to have to do a major restructuring of my NaNoWriMo book if I want to whip it into publishable shape. I organized the major objects (that is, the scenes and chapters) in a more or less chronological order, so the point of view flips around. However, this gives a lot of stuff away too early, and makes it hard to see the characters develop. So I'm probably going to rearrange things, so that the story is told entirely from one character's point of view up through the point where everybody's in the same place together. Then, if I can make it work, I'll go back and catch up the essentials from the other characters' points of view. Hey, if Tolkein could make it work in Lord of the Rings...

Software people have a word for this: refactoring. You've got the right collection of interacting objects, but they're arranged incorrectly. Re-arrange them, adjust the interactions, reorganize the stuff so that it works the way you want it to.

I'm still stuck on the idea that it ought to be possible to write the 50,000 words of NaNoWriMo without simply ignoring quality, though. This leads me to wonder if I could apply the principles of agile software development to a book-writing sprint. The relevant concepts are these:

You build incrementally. Each new addition represents a meaningful new "story."
At all times, the thing you've built is functional. In the case of software, this means that you always have a working system; each addition simply extends the set of things it'll do. In the case of growing a novel, it means (I think) that you start with a simple story or scene, which is a complete tale in itself, but which grows in the telling.
You test continually. Each new feature is accompanied by tests to assure that all the old stuff still works. I think for a high-speed novel, this would require working in teams--I read yours while you read mine, every day.

I have no idea whether this would work, but I think it'd be interesting to try. And it gives me an excuse to attempt NaNoWriMo next year...

How Do Vampires Eat? Depends...

2008-12-01T17:49:00.000-08:00

Between substitute teaching in a high school (at the time the movie Twilight hit the screen) and doing National Novel Writing Month, I've been exposed to a lot of chatter about vampires lately. I think the movie's number one at the box office this week and it seemed as if something like half the NaNoWriMo books involved them in one form or another. People seem to have a romantic attachment to the old bloodsuckers (oddly enough, they don't have the same attachment to leeches, which are arguably more useful than the undead).

I've never been quite as enamored of vampires as characters. For one thing, the physics always baffled me: how can a 150-pound human turn into a 200-pound wolf and then into a three-ounce bat? There's this little thing called the law of conservation of mass. Well, Andrew Fox dealt with this question in his most entertaining book Fat White Vampire Blues. I'm not going to give away the secret, but I will say it's a very satisfying resolution of the physics question.

But now, courtesy of NPR's Science Friday show, we've got a new problem in vampire engineering: fluid flow. According to biology professor and author Bill Schutt, blood is a pretty thin soup--almost entirely water, with a little bit of salt and protein, and no fat at all. Which means that vampire bats (and other creatures that live on blood) have to consume a lot of it. Which in turn means they have to get rid of a lot of water--if Dracula empties his victim's veins, he's going to ingest a gallon of water, which is about four times what an average person excretes in a day. No kidney stones for the undead, I guess, but a major disposal problem. According to Schutt, vampire bats solve this problem by simultaneously feeding and peeing. Well, doesn't that add a little something to the romantic vampire mystique?

However, I've never seen a vampire movie (or read a vampire book) in which the undead unzip before dining, so the question arises: do vampires just possess the world's largest bladders? Or are they all secretly going around in those NASA diapers, the ones that hold a full day's worth of urine?

The answer to that question is, of course... depends.

National Novel Writing Month as a Software Project

2008-11-27T18:20:00.000-08:00

Well, my National Novel Writing Month project crossed the finish line the day before Thanksgiving: 50,000 words in the file (lovingly counted by NaNoWriMo's computers), a beginning, middle and end (lovingly checked by me), and something resembling a plot, characters and setting. In NaNoWriMo parlance, I am a "winner," though all it entitles me to is the little graphic (at right) saying I'm a winner. I'd rather have a nice fat publishing contract... Oh, wait, I already have one of those--and if I'd been paying more attention to what I should be doing, I'd have spent the month promoting The Last Protector. Oh well, writing, especially in a sort of social event context, is more fun.

Okay, so I put fifty thousand words, most of them in more-or-less grammatical sentences, into a document that (I think) tells at least the rudiments of a story. So what? To be honest, I'm not sure myself. Certainly, I don't have a novel here, at least not yet. Maybe not at all. For one thing, a novel is longer than 50K words (The Last Protector weighs in at about three times that). The Shape of Things (my current working title, subject to further change) will need to at least double in size before I consider it worthy of trying to sell.

More important, before I'd be willing to toss a manuscript at a publisher or agent, I'd need to believe it really tells a story, complete with beginning, middle, and end, interesting characters and situations, puzzles and solutions, conflict and resolution, sin and redemption... y'know, all those things that make a novel a novel and not just a collection of unrelated events. And that's a place in which the whole NaNoWriMo philosophy sort of lets me down. The NaNo system stresses only producing a large number of words on a short schedule. The "plan" includes a quota of 1667 words a day; do this for thirty days and you'll cross the finish line on the last day. There's a nice animated display on the website, showing your daily progress. Attend one of the "write-in" events, where people gather to urge each other on toward the elusive goal, and you'll be swept up in "word wars," races to see who can create the most words in a fixed period. Fabulous (your valuation may vary) prizes await!

But what about quality? The words are counted by a machine, and if the machine counts over 50,000, you're a "winner." That's that. Matter of fact, the NaNo pep-talk emails remind the writer to avoid time-wasting things like editing, revising, even going back and seeing if the stuff you wrote yesterday makes any sense at all. "Never look back! November is for writing, you can edit in December." In part, this is a simple technical issue: the only thing the software at NaNoWriMo World Domination Headquarters can actually measure is the number of words you wrote. It can't determine whether those words are put together into actual sentences, let alone whether those sentences fit together to tell a story. (In truth, the software doesn't actually count words; it counts clumps of characters separated by spaces and punctuation. To a word-counting program, "xyzzy" is a word.)

It reminded me of working in the software industry, where I often saw projects that "managed" (and I put the word in quotes for a reason) by setting arbitrary goals (like 50,000 words in a month; or 300,000 non-commentary source lines by four programmers in one year), making a linear schedule (1667 words a day, or 375 source lines per programmer per day), and obsessively counting the one thing they can count (words, or lines that pass the compiler's syntax checks). Testing can be done later; this part of the schedule is for filling up files. Next month (or next year), we'll find out if any of the stuff worked. Or, to be a bit cruder, both NaNo and the software industry seem at times a lot like toilet training: you don't care how much the stuff stinks; all that matters is where, when and how much gets produced (thanks to Jerry Weinberg for that pungent metaphor).

In defense of NaNoWriMo (but not of software projects), I should probably note that a lot of people who take the "50K in 30 days" challenge are people who haven't been taught how to write a long piece, and for whom the greatest challenge is to get past the terror of the blank page. The "never look back, never edit" advice does at least keep writers from spending the whole month re-doing the first two paragraphs in search of impossible perfection. (Of course, there's something to be said for getting the first few paragraphs as perfect as possible--they're the first thing that agents, publishers, editors and often readers are going to look at. If you don't hook 'em here, you won't hook 'em at all, and it won't matter how good the rest of your book is. That's why the opening of The Last Protector got rewritten close to a dozen times.)

Nevertheless, the problem remains the same: just as you can't test quality into fundamentally bad software (though this doesn't stop a lot of projects from trying), I don't think you can edit quality into a crappy novel. Unless your "editing" ends up being a complete, end-to-end replacement of plot, characters, setting, dialogue--the equivalent of the old auto-repair advice to unscrew the radiator cap and drive a new car under it.

I found I couldn't stick to the NaNoWriMo discipline of "never look back, never edit." I kept going back and changing things when I wrote something on page 57 that required a specific setup back on page 35. And then I discovered what wretched crap page 35 was--what was I thinking when I wrote this--and so I rewrote a few hundred words to make them even marginally decent.

Anyway, the experiment in high-speed writing is over for now. I have some loose ends to tidy up, a few stub scenes to flesh out, and then I'm going to put the thing away for at least a couple months. With any luck, I'll be able to concentrate on selling a few more copies of the book I have in print, so that my publisher will want to consider the follow-on book (which I also didn't work on during November because I was doing NaNo, sigh). When I come back to it in February, I'll decide whether it's the seed of a real book or just a dead raccoon in the middle of the roadway.

Speaking of the roadway, perhaps the nicest thing about finishing the NaNoWriMo project yesterday is that I got to spend today out on the road on my Harley. Sunshine, pretty-nice-for-late-November temperatures, and $1.57-per-gallon gas made for a lot more fun than sitting in front of a keyboard sticking words together. (And it's supposed to be equally nice tomorrow. Whoopee!!)

---------------------
CONSUMER ADVISORY: the book advertised for sale on this page was not created using the NaNoWriMo Method. I did The Last Protector the old-fashioned way, lovingly crafting, writing and rewriting every word over a nine-year period.

Halfway There, and Finally Ahead Of Schedule

2008-11-17T13:08:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I hit two milestones in my "NaNoWriMo" (National Novel Writing Month) project: I passed the halfway point (25,000 words written), and for the first time my end-of-the-day word count was above the "scheduled" number of words for this day (that is, at the end of the 16th day, I had 27,400 words written; the schedule says that at the end of that day I needed to have at least 26,667 written to reach the goal of 50K by November 30).

Of course, a fair number of those 27.4K words are probably crap; this is the downside of the whole NaNoWriMo idea. I doubt that many of these written-in-a-month books will be in anything resembling publishable shape by the end of the month. Or the end of next year, for that matter. I'm not making any plans for the thing I'm writing as a part of this event. When I'm done, I'll put it away for a month while catching up on other writing matters (I promised Karina Fabian an article or two on the corporate religion of "Spafuism," from The Last Protector). Then I'll decide whether there's anything there, or whether the month was pretty much wasted...

For the time being, though, I'm just enjoying being ahead of schedule for once...

Four Down, Forty-Six to Go

2008-11-04T10:42:00.000-08:00

I signed up for this "National Novel Writing Month" thing, the object of which is to write a whole novel (50,000 words) in the month of November. Of course, cranking out a book in such a short time almost guarantees the actual writing will be crap, but that's not really the point; the point is to demonstrate that you can slap together a story and get it all the way to the end in a remarkably short time. If the story itself turns out to be good (something you won't know till you reach the end), you can always edit the prose into something that's not crap. Or so goes the theory.

50,000 words in 30 days means a daily average of 1700 words. So, by midnight tonight I should have about 7000 words done if I'm to stay on track. Right now (just before 1pm), I'm only at 4000 words. The weather has not been cooperative, by which I mean it's been warm and sunny and I'd rather ride the Harley or paddle the kayak than sit inside writing. But fortunately, with the demise of Daylight Saving Time on Sunday, I have lots of dark hours in the evening for writing.

Anyway, I thought I'd let anybody who reads this blog know I may not be writing many entries this month. Then again, it's been nearly a month since my last entry, so NaNoWriMo (as it's known) may slip by without even being noticed...

This Is Why I Love Computers

2008-10-06T20:07:00.000-07:00

In this election season, we're pretty used to seeing candidates and their supporters stating utter absurdities as if they were obvious facts, on the order of "the sun comes up in the morning." But as good as the politicos are at deadpanning insanity, they don't begin to compare to a computer. Here, two bits of absurdity I found in the last few days.

First, from the Weather Service. Note Friday's forecast:

Slight chance of nothing? Sounds like my social life.

And then I got this warning from a writers' conference message board:

I think relativity's involved here. It must be that I can post a message every thirty seconds as measured by the bits flying around inside the computer at something very close to the speed of light. Thanks to Einstein's time-dilation effect, that works out to about every ten hours from my (relatively) stationary perspective.

Well, that's one way to shut me up.

Second Part of ProjectsAtWork Article is Now Up!

2008-10-03T04:57:00.001-07:00

The concluding installment of my two-part war story about project failure is now up on the ProjectsAtWork website. Called "How Many Miracles?" it addresses the question of just how many "great leaps forward" can a project need for success and still have any chance of actually working. Click here to read it.

New Article on ProjectsAtWork.com

2008-09-27T07:27:00.001-07:00

My newest article on project management is now up on the ProjectsAtWork.com website. It's called "Old Ware Stories," which is a bit of a pun on both the fact that it's something of a "war story" and the idea that in addition to software and hardware, this project involved a component of "old-ware"--people, systems and processes that had been around so long that they viewed change as "change everything except how we do our jobs." In other words, change everything--without changing anything. It's a story of late-blooming requirements, organizational and personal rigidity, and the effect of geometry and geography on a project's success.

While P@W is publishing this yarn as a "case study," I'll caution that it's not rigorous or objective in the manner of a good university-course case study. It's more a "view from the trenches," or even a view from the one particular trench I found myself in. Other people, in other trenches, might have seen things differently.

Click Here to read the article. ProjectsAtWork.com requires a (free) registration. It's worth it; there's a lot of good project management stuff on this site.

A second installment is coming, and I'll announce it here when it comes out.

Tastes Great/Less Filling?

2008-09-09T20:03:00.001-07:00

Dr. Bob Rich begins his review of The Last Protector by saying:

This is the best fantasy book I have ever edited. Or is it science fiction?

OK, debating fantasy vs. science fiction is kind of like debating tastes great vs. less filling*

But let me propose this simple test, based on the idea that in fantasy the supernatural intrudes into the natural world (gods, demons, spirits, magic and such are part of the story), while science fiction takes place entirely in the natural world:

If something gets destroyed by a lightning bolt from heaven, it's fantasy.

If the same thing gets destroyed by high explosives, it's science fiction.

Case closed. For now, at least...

----------------

*Tastes great vs. less filling: Of course, if we're talking about "light" beers, the answer is "neither"--most "light" beers are pretty devoid of flavor, and so over-carbonated that you inflate like a balloon after a couple.

More Stuff Moved, and Another Deleted Scene

2008-09-08T21:06:00.000-07:00

I moved a bunch more stuff today, and now there's actually an organization of sorts to this site. This page, danielcstarr.blogspot.com, is my actual blog. Then I've got a few one-entry blogs, danielcstarr-lastprotector, danielcstarr-tech, danielcstarr-bikes, danielcstarr-beer, which contain links to stuff about the book, my writings on project management and software, my motorcycle adventures and my favorite beverage. Then there's another pseudo-blog that's just a collection of pages containing stuff like the deleted scenes, biographies and such. With any luck, I've actually figured out how to organize this stuff.

But enough about the mechanics of maintaining a web site, on to some fun stuff. There's a new deleted scene out there, a rather silly disco song. Probably a good thing I cut it from the book, but fun to sing, especially after a few beers. You can read it (and sing along) by clicking HERE.

Movin' In...

2008-09-06T18:27:00.000-07:00

Because Google's decided to migrate users of their Google Pages service to the new Google Sites, which doesn't seem to quite do what I want, I've been in the process of moving my stuff from there to a collection of blogs here. So, all the posts below this one were actually brought over, and so while they're all officially from September 6, the titles contain the dates they were actually added. Of course, I still have a ton of work to do, moving over stuff related to my software and project management writings, and the rest of the deleted scenes from The Last Protector, but I think I see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Oh, wait, that's a train headlight...

9/2/08: A RUBBER DONUT PLAGUE?

2008-09-06T18:24:00.000-07:00

I've got a simple page-hit counter on this page (it's that little number at the bottom of the page), and I've seen a strange thing the last few days: most of the hits to this page have been coming from the page in which I describe my technique for replacing the rubber engine-mount isolators on my old tube-frame Buell. I have no idea why this is happening, and I don't collect anywhere near enough information to actually figure out who's looking at the page or why, so it might be nothing more than a statistical cluster. Or, perhaps, there's some sort of plague out there, all those bad rubber donuts? If you've got a clue, drop me a line at danielcstarr (at) gmail.com.

8/20/08: ON HUMAN ADAPTABILITY, AND OTHER GREAT MYTHS

2008-09-06T18:23:00.000-07:00

I finally got off my duff and wrote up a "war story" article for the ProjectsAtWork website. Look for it to be published in September (I'll add a link at that time). It's partially about the lengths people will go to in order to preserve their comfortable way of working... even if it means falling well short of the project's goals.

Writing this piece got me thinking about the great myth that we humans spread from Africa to occupy the whole planet because we're so adaptable. We must adapt well, the thinking goes, since we live everywhere from tropical jungles to Arctic tundra, from sea level to mountaintops.

But in truth, I don't think we adapt very well at all. We can't grow fur, let alone grow and shed in a cycle matched to the weather (something many dogs can do). We burn in the sun, freeze in the cold, dry out in the desert. Drop a naked human into the Arctic, or the desert, or onto a mountaintop, and he's dead within hours. Physically, we're pretty optimized for 60-90 degrees Fahrenheit, not too dry, not too wet, and we really don't do too well outside that environment.

The real secret of our so-called "adaptability" is our trick of taking little bubbles of our native African savanna environment with us. The igloo in the Arctic, the lean-to in the jungle, the air-conditioned shopping mall in Phoenix--these are all examples of how we take little micro-environments with us. So is an astronaut's space-walk suit, of course--or the Shuttle or Soyuz capsule, and the Space Station both are visiting. Or, more prosaically, the respirator that a farmer wears when heading inside the composting silo (where there is typically too little oxygen to support life) to do a repair.

We're not above stealing from other, better-adapted creatures, of course--one of the first things we did when we headed into the colder regions was to borrow the fur from native animals. Heck, once we ate him, that polar bear didn't need his fur anymore.

The furthest extreme of our adapt-the-environment-to-our-comfort habit is the good old science fiction concept of terraforming. Tinker with the atmosphere of Mars, add a little carbon dioxide to trap heat, and in a few centuries (or so it goes in the stories) you've got an earth-like planet where people can stroll about without those uncomfortable space suits and respirators.

All of which leads me to an alternate formulation of this whole global warming issue. The "Gaia hypothesis," hopelessly oversimplified, says that all life on earth fits together to form a single organism, which adapts itself and the planet to be more conducive to life. Well, what if global warming isn't just an accident or the product of corporate greed? What if it's the human species unconsciously altering the entire planet to expand the range in which we're comfortable? Not to say it's working all that well, given the expansion of deserts and coming submergence of coastlines. Then again, if Siberia were to become a comfortable grassland like the Great Plains of North America, it might represent a significant expansion of our range. Who's to tell? I guess we'll find out if we live long enough. And it might make for an interesting SF story...

7/28/08: OF THINGS THAT WENT AWAY...

2008-09-06T18:21:00.000-07:00

My sister-in-law came over yesterday, with a copy of The Last Protector, and asked me to sign it. Of course, I wanted to write an appropriate note above the signature, and since Marj is big into sewing, embroidery and the like I figured I'd put in a reference to a scene on page 56 where Scrornuck (for those of you who have just joined us, he's the hero of the story) gets out needle and thread to patch a rip in his kilt following a battle. But when I looked, I found the mention of sword-swinger-as-garment-worker was gone, apparently snipped out in one of the many passes I made through the manuscript to remove "unnecessary" words. Oh well...

Speaking of deletions, I've put another entry on the deleted scenes page. When I first sold The Last Protector, Scrornuck had a friend in his home land, a guy named Schaughnessy. Somewhere during the edits, Schaughnessy went away, a victim of the need to keep the book down to a reasonable length. But I liked the character, even if there wasn't any good reason to keep him in this book, so I've put his two scenes on the website. Enjoy! (Note 9/6--still haven't moved all the deleted scenes. Give me a few days, please!)

7/15/08: FREE, AND WORTH EVERY CENT

2008-09-06T18:20:00.000-07:00

We Struggling Authors are always looking for a free, or at least cheap, way to push the product. One of the most obvious and simple is to stick a plug for the book into the signature line of your email messages. Seemed an obvious thing, several people recommended I do it. And so, a few weeks back, all my emails started sporting this line at the end:

Action! Adventure! Romance! And the World's Most Perfect Beer Container!
All this and more in Daniel C. Starr's Debut Novel, "The Last Protector"
NOW AVAILABLE from Twilight Times Books
Visit http://danielcstarr.googlepages.com to find out more

Now, I can't say I've seen a huge increase in website traffic since putting this ad into my email. More interestingly, since adding the signature-line ad, I've had three different people reply to my messages by asking, "by the way, can you send me a link to your web site?"

So much for advertising. Or, maybe I've just learned something about the engineering mind, as all three of these people were engineers...

7/7/08: ON RESEARCH, SF, AND BEER

2008-09-06T18:18:00.000-07:00

I was doing more research for the Beers of Grand Taupeaquaah page, trying to resolve the question of whether the "Heavy Red Lager" consumed in the book is more closely approximated by the Irish Red from Carlyle Brewing or the McCarthy Red from Emmett's Ale House (don't you wish you could drink beer and call it "research"?). And this led me to revise the entry for "Batatat's Stout," naming two different beers--one to describe Batatat's on tap, and another to describe it when served up in the World's Most Perfect Beer Container. This in turn led me to research how the "widget" cans used by Guinness and others work, and to ask myself just how the Batatat's container manages to chill and churn the beer, and then automatically dispose of itself when emptied.

This is a problem about writing "science fiction," or what I sometimes call "technological fantasy," versus "pure" fantasy--if I were writing pure fantasy, I could just explain it away as magic. But if it's SF, there has to be a mechanism, and preferably one that doesn't violate too many laws of nature too blatantly. It's OK to have a little BS, like the "hyperspace" or "warp drive" of space-travel stories, because you can always say that while we haven't discovered them yet, nobody's proven they're impossible. On the other hand, you don't want to set your story on a helium-filled balloon floating in the atmosphere of Jupiter, because what we already know about Jupiter (its atmosphere is 80 percent hydrogen and 20 percent helium) tells us the blimp would sink like a rock. Oops.

So, back to the Batatat's container. Is the thing even possible? Well, let's see... the stirring-up thing is obviously not too hard, since it's a product already. As for cooling the beer, decompressing a gas (or better yet, letting a gas that's been compressed to a liquid state flash back) generates a lot of coldness, so that might be part of the system. Cornstarch-based "biodegradable" plastics which just sort of crumble away to dust already exist, as do "smart" materials which can change their properties on command. Stir in a little nano-technology... yeah, I think I can make this work.

But first I'm gonna have another beer. Research, you know.

6/26/08: FROM THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR

2008-09-06T18:16:00.000-07:00

Movies play them over the credits. DVD's don't make it to the store without 'em. What are they? Deleted scenes! Believe it or not, I wrote a fair number of words that didn't make it into the final book. Some didn't make it because they just plain stunk, but others were pretty good (or at least I think so) but got the ol' heave-ho for such practical reasons as keeping the book from being too heavy to fit in your carry-on bag or too long to read in a lifetime.

Well, if it's good for a DVD, it's good for a book (besides, I spent a lot of time and effort writing 'em, maybe you'll enjoy reading 'em). Click HERE to go straight to my collection of deleted scenes... and don't worry if you haven't yet read The Last Protector. The deleted scenes collection is 100% spoiler-free (though they might not make a whole lot of sense if you haven't read the book yet). Enjoy!

6/9/08: MORE MOMENTS OF FAME

2008-09-06T18:08:00.000-07:00

Yep, a couple more minutes of fame for me and my book:

First, a review and interview in the May 18 edition of the St. Charles East High School student newspaper, the Xray. I was pleased that my book got more space than the review of Grand Theft Auto IV (though I admit GTA probably sold more copies in the first five minutes than The Last Protector will in the next year). Click on the image to the right, and you should be able to read the review. Many thanks to Wade Chimerofsky for reviewing the book (at a time when it was 153 loose sheets of paper inside a cover).

And the Daily Herald, one of the big Chicago/Suburban papers, published a nice little article about me and the book in its Tri-Cities/Kaneland edition on Sunday, June 8. The article also appeared in the on-line edition, and you can read it by clicking HERE. Thanks to Dave Huen of the Herald for mentioning me in his column, and thanks to Joan Arterberry-Zavitz for letting Dave know I exist and am interesting enough to justify a few hundred words.

OK, neither of these publications is exactly the New York Times, but at my place in the publishing food chain, I'll take what I can get.

5/29/08: WHAT BEER WAS THAT?

2008-09-06T18:06:00.000-07:00

If you've read The Last Protector (or the excerpt that appears on the Twilight Times Books website), you've probably noticed that Scrornuck Saughblade is something of a beer lover. Takes after his creator, he does...

So I got to thinking, just what beers from this world might have inspired the fictional Batatat's Stout, or Black Sunday Lager? There wasn't an easy answer, as there are a lot of candidates--and I haven't come close to visiting all the microbreweries in the country! But, for a first shot, pay a visit to the Beer Tent, and see what I've found so far...

BUY THIS BOOK--IT'S PATRIOTIC!

(In honor of April 15)

If you've just gotten that Economic Stimulation Package check from the government, and you want it to do the absolute most it can to help the US Economy, consider spending part of it on a copy of The Last Protector. It's printed right here in the good ol' USA, and the royalty checks will come to me, right here in the Heartland of Illinois. And, as a special bonus, I promise to spend at least some of the money I make from this book on parts and supplies for my old Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

3/25/08 (updated 4/13/08): IT'S REAL. WOW...

2008-09-06T18:02:00.000-07:00

The postman brought two packages yesterday. One contained a pair of shoes for formal bagpiping performances, but the other... one hundred fifty-eight six-by-nine-inch sheets of paper covered with words, with a very nice cover wrapped around them. In other words, a pre-publication proof copy of The Last Protector.

Wow. It's actually a book. After eight years in which I saw this story only on a computer screen or as typed pages in an envelope, I can finally hold a real live book in my hand, turn the pages, and read it.

I wonder if I'll like it...

Update (4/1/08): Proofing is done. I found twenty-some typos, which is not too bad for a book of this length. A surprising number of them were missing words, which seem to be related to a word-processor quirk: when I select a phrase to revise, if I move the mouse just so, the word processor (to avoid embarrassing a certain large software company, I'll avoid mentioning it by name) silently adds one word to the beginning of the selection. And if I don't notice this, when I type the revised phrase, I end up losing a word. Oops.

Oh yeah... I did like it.

Update (4/14/08): Proofing the proofed copy is done. Of course, I found that I'd introduced one new mistake when correcting the previous ones, because I didn't read the whole compound sentence carefully enough. Oops. It's a small error, maybe even unnoticeable, so we're going to leave it in the very first press run. The second press run will have it fixed, so those first few copies will become Valuable Collectibles. Right? Right??

THE PHILLY STEAK SANDWICH RULE (and other adventures in cover art)

The print edition of The Last Protector now has a cover! There's a back cover, too, with some nice words from another author. But most importantly, it obeys what I'm calling the "Philly Steak Sandwich Rule" of fantasy/SF cover art: a good cover is like a Philly Steak sandwich: all beef and cheese! Or, to put it another way, all a fantasy/SF cover really needs is a hero with a big sword and a heroine with big... umm... attributes. The picture is by John Kaufmann, the overall design is by Ardy M. Scott, and the endless fussing over the precise placement and shape of letters and such is by me.

IN THREE HUNDRED WORDS, PLEASE...

Part of the fun of seeing my first novel go to press is learning about the publishing business. Last Friday's lesson concerned the "title data sheet," which is used by book distributors to help convince your local bookstore that they should carry my Magnum Opus. This would seem to be a straightforward exercise: summarize the book, make up some bullet points for marketing, and I'm done. Except... this thing's actually used to help sell books, so I can't really just blow it off, and this is a 150,000-word story that I'm trying to explain in a synopsis of 175 words or less, which only requires eliminating 99.883 percent of the words. But that's the easy part. Next comes the three bullet points, each of which must be under 25 words. I took a shot at it, and wound up with points that were not so much bullets as BB's. Sigh. Couple more drafts, couple more revisions, and I finally got three bullets... though I still think one of them's only a .22 caliber. And finally... the summary, in a whopping 50 words! This is the point where I start agonizing over whether I really need little words like the, an, and so forth.

Suffice it to say I got the job done. But I probably labored as hard on the 300 words of the "data sheet" as I did on any 300 words I've ever written.

2/3/08: I HAVE A FAN CLUB?!

2008-09-06T17:59:00.000-07:00

Week before last, my first hour physics class informed me that there is a page up on FaceBook called "Mr. Dan Starr Appreciation Society." What, methinks, an online fan club? For little ol' me?

Some of the full-time teachers advised against having a look, on the grounds that they don't necessarily want to know what their students are saying about them. But I'm just a sub, which means I don't hand out grades, so I figured nobody'd be saying anything really bad about me. Besides, if I'm brave enough to ride a Harley while wearing a kilt (and yes, I've done this), then I'm brave enough to see what's on the "Appreciation Society" site.

Of course, I don't have a FaceBook identity, so I had to get some help from my daughter, a senior in college and an expert on social networking sites. She found the "Appreciation Society" in a few minutes, and it was all rather flattering: over 120 members, some of whom said some very nice things. Plus links to the pipe band's website and the Twilight Times Books site (a lot of the students ask when they can buy a copy of the book. I tell them that I really hope it'll be out before the end of the school year).

There was one small complaint, though: one guy recalled how I'd described Nalia, the book's heroine, as a "medieval Hooters (tm) girl." And so he was more than a little disappointed when the book cover he saw on the Twilight Times website just featured this skinny guy. No voluptuous girl in sight. What happened? Well, the answer is that the book is coming out in two versions: electronic and print. The Twilight Times site is displaying the e-book cover, by Kurt Ozinga. The print edition is getting a different cover, a wrap-around scene by John Kaufmann. It's not officially "done" yet (there are adjustments to size, title placement and other stuff that can't be done till the type is set and the total page count is known), so I can't show the whole thing yet. But... here's a little taste. That more to your liking, guys?

1/25/08: FEELING LIKE A CAN OF SOUP

2008-09-06T17:15:00.000-07:00

My first article for Projects At Work, Choosing Your Armor, was reprinted in the summer of '06 by Personal Excellence magazine. They didn't pay anything (though they did give me a couple free copies), but they did give me the chance to be published in the same glossy pages as Zig Ziglar and John McCain. Perhaps something will rub off.

The publication included a wee bit o' condensing, though. Well, more than a wee bit. The original article came in at just over 2000 words and began with what I thought was a pretty cool story. Personal Excellence condensed it to just over 600 words and having it share a page with an article about how to vary your workout (which, alas, was not written by Ziglar or McCain).

Here's what it looked like when they were done:

You can't read it, of course. Blogger does this thing (a throwback to the days of 64K dial-ups?) where it scales all pictures in posts down to something under 400 pixels wide. You'd think by now that they'd allow pictures to just display at full size... but you'd be wrong. Anyway, if you click on the image, it should appear at full size, and then you can read the 600 words of the article that "Personal Excellence" kept.

I hope.