Consilience

Nano quadrotor swarm hints at the robotic air force of the future | The Verge

2012-02-01T11:10:00.000-06:00

Nano quadrotor swarm hints at the robotic air force of the future | The Verge:

'via Blog this'

"Lisa with Child" is still doing well

2012-01-27T02:16:00.000-06:00

Yesterday my Writers of the Future story picked up a nice mention in a review by Claire Deming over at Science Fiction and Other Odysseys. Which I was very glad to see, as even after spending the past twelve months working hard on several very intense projects that are going out the door this year, I still a have a very big soft spot for that sweet little short story.

"Lisa with Child" story illustration by Tyler Carter

I've certainly been wanting to do more writing in the world of "Lisa with Child" for some time now. So much so that on a Saturday three weeks back I cranked out 4000 words of a followup story in three hours, when I was supposed to be taking time off from writing. Those 4k words are probably about half of the total story, which follows Lisa and her sixteen-year old, hyper-genius daughter Kim as they attempt to track down a rogue, weaponized artificial intelligence. At stake is the sanity of thousands of mind-hacked humans as well as the unique, symbiotic mother - daughter bond that Lisa and Kim share. That and Kim's somewhat turbulent relationship with her human mother Karin--the retired CIA officer from the first story.

More notes from the publishing singularity

2012-01-20T18:11:00.000-06:00

Apparently Powell's Books here in Portland and the famous Tattered Cover in NYC will be among the first to have the print-on-demand Espresso Book Machines in their stores.

This is a technology I've been curious about ever since hearing that its parent company, Print on Demand, acquired liscencing access to publisher Harper Collin's backlist last year. It takes 5 - 8 minutes to print out a paperback, compete with full-color cover art using an Espresso Machines, so this device and its access to large network of titles could be a huge boon to independent bookstores with their limited shelf and warehouse space.

Another potential boost for the indies: Here in the US, Barnes and Noble continues to look an awful lot like a corporation that is preparing to file for Chapter 11 a year or so down the road by spinning off its revenue-earning Nook ereader into a separate business entity, closing its flagship Seattle store, laying off employees across the board, and reducing shelf space in remaining stores along with its overall long-term inventory. If that's what actually plays out, we would be left with a print-selling landscape that consists of independent bookstores and Amazon, as well as online ebook retailers like Google Books, Nook, the struggling iBookstore, and clunky the Smashwords.com.

Also of interest in recent publishing industry events: Confessions of a Publisher: We're in Amazon's sight and they're totally going to kill us.

As an emergent print publishing powerhouse, Amazon is a mixed bag. Great at present, but potentially troubling for authors in just a few years down the line. By currently offering million-dollar advances and aggressively recruiting talent with their new book-publishing imprint, they are reversing a thirty-year trend of authors making less and less money from declining advances and royalty checks. Then there is the self-publishing ebook model where authors take home 70% of the selling price, pre-tax, which is very exciting even as it offers it's own unique set of self-promotion and business-management challenges for writers and other creative content producers.

The potential downside of course is a world in which Amazon is ascendant. Will a company that has allowed some of its distribution warehouses to be run with a ruthlessness towards employees typically found in Charles Dickens novels still be treating authors well if it becomes a near monopoly? Hopefully the low cost of entry into the field and ability of authors to found or move to competing online retail services will act as a check on reduced pay schemes.

Amazon's current setup is one that may very well allow hard-working writers to make a middle-class living off their work, so I'd like to see it continue into the future. Especially as traditional publishing industry has failed to pay its writers or even its staff memebers a living wage for several years now.

Narrative and the creation of coherency in human thought

2012-01-16T11:45:00.001-06:00

This is something I have wondered about for many years. How do the pre-conscious pathways and signal processing modules in our brains fuse the steady stream of disjointed sensory information and evoked memories into a coherent story for our consciousnesses to make decisions within? Especially given the many gaps within those merging flows of inner images from the past and perceived entities in the real time external world.

via Big Think.

The Call

2012-01-09T00:50:00.001-06:00

Cover art for my contribution to Steven Savile's forthcoming Viral series. Mayhem, ugly choices, and an iron-willed CIA officer who finds himself on a slippery moral slope.

Melancholy but pretty

2012-01-05T11:51:00.002-06:00

Somehow while looking for Portlandia clips yesterday I came across this sad but beautiful production of Gideon Freudmann's "Denmark" by the The Portland Cello Project.

Portlandia

2012-01-05T11:42:00.000-06:00

I'm three episodes into watching Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen's parody series about life in Portland, now that it's out on Netflix. So far, I've got mixed feelings. One on hand, it's a good send up of several of the city's subcultures, whose members can often be pretty amusing to those of us on the outside.

Especially amusing when those ironically self-aware, self-criticizing individuals get un-ironically passionate or even wholly obsessed with the defining theme of their niche culture, be that vegan-ism, bicycle culture, the arts scene, etc. And while Portlandia largely ignores the vast bulk of middle- and working-class white Americans and East Asian and Latin American immigrants who make up the majority of metropolitan area's population, it occasionally does chronicle their interactions with the hipsters, egotistical artists, and bi-polar foodies who are Portlandia's focus. Generally middle America comes off better or at least slightly saner in these exchanges.

The other-hand downside of the show is that the whiny obnoxiousness of some of the characters is heavy handed at times. So far Portlandia has dished out a number of real gems as far as laugh-inducing sketches, but it's also had several moments when the show's introspective ubanites have gotten so bitchy or shrill over problems with life in a first world urban utopia that it's required a a fair amount of self-discipline not to fast forward through to the next scene. Also, there a couple of sex sketches (fully clothed) that come off as more creepy than comedic.

While it's been hit or miss, I'm hoping the show finds its stride and improves during its second season. Every city needs some gentle poking at to avoid taking itself too seriously, and Portlandia has nailed its namesake with several moments of parody and good-humored absurdity worthy of Armisen's alma mater, Saturday Night Live.

What I am un-ironically and passionately attached to after watching the show is Washed Out's "Feel it all Around" track, used in Portlandia's opening credits. That's getting a lot of time on my play lists at the moment.

Oh, yeah. That whole happy people thing.

2012-01-03T13:49:00.001-06:00

I forgot to mention one of the most important personal reasons why I am such a fan of Azumanga Daioh and by extension Questionable Content. And that reason would be that both works are great depictions of happy people, which is a normally a nightmare for writers to pull off. After all, if you've got happy protagonists, where's the plot tension and drama going to come from? How in the hell do do you keep the readers hooked when nothing world shaking is at stake?

That's a tough one. Especially for someone like me who likes to write about the worlds of espionage, international conflict, exploration, and big picture philosophical questions that have real-world implications in the form of technology and social upheaval set at the turning points of history. Drama and scene tension come cheap in those environments.

Happiness though, how do you get the readers to buy into that crap? This an important question because scenes of happy characters can play several useful roles in good drama. If you can construct a story opening that causes the readers to share the characters' joy or contentment, then the readers have something at stake when events threaten to go off the rails and end the characters' happiness. If that happiness is lost, then there is something worth struggling for to restore it.

But that's a rather cheap and obvious use of happiness. Something marginally subtler is to use scenes that evoke happiness or contentment to leaven a dramatic plot with moderating emotional pauses. It's good to give both readers and characters a chance to catch their breath every so often. Too much drama and tension can be mindnumbing after awhile, which is a consistent problem with many would-be Hollywood blockbuster films. Many an otherwise promising action film falls apart for me when I find myself feeling numbed after forty minutes or more of spectacle and adrenalin.

George R.R. Martin is someone who is good at using pauses of contentment to moderate the bleak emotional landscape of his Song of Ice and Fire series. Sometimes he does this with moments of genuine deep happiness created by a character's relationship with the people around him or her, but more often he evokes a feeling of nice animal contentment through a good use of food. Trenchers of hollowed out bread filled with stew, crackling capons, garlic infused snails, and plum-sauced suckling pig all provide much needed moments of relief while remaining engaging for readers.

Something subtler still is to use moments of happiness to carry out character development. Which is about ass backwards from the way that character development is normally handled, using moments of doubt, crisis, decision, and the threat of terrible failure. The use of happiness as a transformative instance is harder to pull off, which is one reason why writers normally avoid going that route. However, the successful realization of happiness as a catalyst of change or the crystallization of past choices can be uniquely engaging and possess its own flavors of intensity.

But how to evoke happiness in readers though the characters?

A consistent solution to this in Questionable Content and Azumanga Daioh is through humor. This can take the form of jokes and funny storytelling done by the characters, as well as minor pratfalls or even a little absurdity in their thoughts and actions. Though the latter takes a light hand to pull off without killing any sense of sympathy for the characters.

All too often when writers (over-educated, over-read silly creatures that they are) think of absurdity, they think of Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. Shortly thereafter they typically veer off into realms of plot where the characters are gruesomely simplified parodies of the complex beings that humans are. And when politics gets in the mix, stereotypes and gross cliches are often not far behind.

Fortunately, there's no need to go that kind of extreme to evoke absurd humor. Especially when looking for humor that makes a character feel more rather than less human.

After all, humans are filled with unrealistic inner hopes, day dreams, silly aspirations, and are prone to exaggeration when boasting. Hell, they even strive for hyperbole deliberately sometimes when telling funny stories and jokes or deliberately having mild fun at their friend's expense. All of which are bonding moments both in real life and for characters who exist only in ink or pixels and in the perception of writers and readers.

snrk

2012-01-01T19:47:00.000-06:00

For my first post of the year I was going to do a rare political rant and air my thoughts on issues from last year like Occupy Wall Street and some very negative structural changes that we've made to our economy and government here in the US over the past fourteen years. Then I came across the most bizarre mash ups of an 80s pop music piece combined with a character from one of my favorite absurdist and slice-of-life anime, Azumanga Daioh.

I like Azumanga for a couple of reasons.

One is that it has some wonderful absurdist humor in it, but remains very sympathetic to the female characters who are its focus. Another is that some of those same characters process the world mentally in ways that are very different from the norm, but which give them unusual insights into the nature of events and their relationships with their friends. Lastly, it's one of the primary sources of inspiration for my favorite slice-of-life webcomic Questionable Content.

So politics sometime later this week or next. In the meanwhile I've got more commissioned and on-spec projects than I can shake a stick at.

The patient year in music

2011-12-31T10:51:00.000-06:00

Music was somewhat more mild and introspective for me this past, which probably comes as no great surprise given that this was largely a year of waiting. Namely the long wait for employment while hunting for a post graduation job. A wait which gradually gave way to a busy self-employment schedule as any sort of a normal job failed to materialize, but more and more copywrite and paid literary gigs came in through the door.

As laid back and philosophical as the music was, it still tended to stay on the brighter of the emotional spectrum.

The seasonally migrating Portland, Oregon and Marfa, Texas based YACHT turned out one of my favorite albums for this orbit around the sun with Shangri-la.

Meanwhile the more ambient and chill strains of electronica have continued to fill up a larger and larger part of my playlists.

The discovery of musician Jan Jelinek thought the release of the now famous video of International Space Station footage defenitely helped with that move further into realm of ethereal sounds with some faint, bop-era jazz sensibilities.

All of which has been an enormous professional boon. Spending eight to twelve hours per day behind the keyboard writing has meant that I've needed to find some healthy stimulants to help maintain focus and task-concentration for extended periods of time. Ambient music with a steady, low-grade kind of intensity and no distracting lyrics has filled that need perfectly. Well that and a lot of espresso and tea.

Meanwhile, attention-grabbing and distracting music has generally stayed on the brighter side of sound as well. In that vein, The King is Dead by Portland-area band the Decemberists introduced several good tracks.

Some of which do a fantastic job of evoking atmosphere and sensory impressions.

A placeholder for the music post!

2011-12-30T12:21:00.001-06:00

A good friend just reminded me that I haven't done a yearly musical post, which is something I normally post on this blog during the holiday season. So consider yourselves forewarned that one is on the way. It wasn't a peak year for great music, but there were still a number of good tunes that made it all worthwhile.

Home again

2011-12-28T23:01:00.001-06:00

After a two-day holiday celebration that turned into a wonderful five-day mini-vacation, it's time to put the headphones on and get back to writing.

In that vein, a fantastic YouTube video that combines the brilliant French science fiction film Immortel (Ad Vitam) and Massive Attack's equally lovely song "Dissolved Girl".

Merry Christmas, all

2011-12-24T23:27:00.001-06:00

"Nature mourns' N Korea leader"

2011-12-22T11:28:00.000-06:00

BBC News - Kim Jong-il death: 'Nature mourns' N Korea leader:

'via Blog this'

What's truly scary in life? Living in a place where mourning for national leaders is mandatory.

Personally, I'm happy to see the 'Dear Leader' exit stage left much the same way I feel that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot leaving this life helped to improve the world. The year I spent not far from the Intra-Korean DMZ came at the tail end of the great famine on the other side of the border. Conditions in the North were so dire that during those twelve months some 400+ North Korean citizens defected across one of the most heavily mined military frontiers on the planet.

For all of those fortunates who made the crossing there were many who died along the way. Some were killed by mines or natural hazards; others shot by their own nation's military. Then there was those who fled into north China where they faced uncertain futures hunted by the Chinese police and haunted by the prospect of forcible repatriation to their homeland and interment in one of their country's many gulags.

A terrifying possibility that hundreds of thousands of North Korean refugees continue to face.

The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag

The future of air combat vehicles

2011-12-20T17:42:00.002-06:00

Defense Tech.org has an article up about the the Navy taking delivery of two of Northrop Grumman's X-47B unmanned aerial combat drones to assess their capability for making carrier-style landings and take offs.

Image via Defensetech.org.

The X-47B represents a line of fighter evolution that we should have been pursuing this past decade rather than dumping billions into the badly overpriced Raptor and F-35 Lightning programs. However, rather than looking at aircraft designed to counter a specific threat or drones capable of outmaneuvering and out-loitering any manned vehicle, the Air Force went on a frenzied, capability-driven spending spree seemingly set up to produce a gold-plate combat vehicle.

All of which helped to drive an out-of-control price-spiral that killed the Raptor well before its production run was complete and may still tank the Lightning. The icing on the cake is that these aircraft could also be obsolete in less than a decade faced rapidly increasing capabilities of drones.

Are drones capable of going head to head against manned planes in air combat at this time? No. But their capability to maneuver and identify and engage targets has been advancing at Moore's-Law rate in recent years. The DARPA Grand Challenge provides an instructive example of this rate of increase. In 2004 none of the competing, land-based vehicles succeeded in navigating the dessert course and completing the race. In 2005 nearly all of the entrants surpassed the old course's requirements, and since 2007 subsequent non-DARPA unmanned vehicle races have seen new generation of vehicles mastering far more difficult courses in increasingly complex environments.

Not that I think humans will be out of the air-to-air business completely in the foreseeable future. One thing that has had me concerned for sometime is that the US' unchallenged dominance of the electromagnetic spectrum cannot last forever. At some point, and likely not all that far off, someone will be able to contest control and interfere with communications between land based operators and unmanned aircraft. So air-to-air UCAVs will have to possess a capacity for autonomous air-combat maneuvering, and it will be a good idea to have a manned, high-performance platform capable of following the drones into the battlespace to exercise direct human command and control via line-of-sight communications.

But first, we need drones, or at least to maintain a fleet of manned aircraft. With a gaping Raptor-sized hole blown open in its future inventory and its current fleet rapidly aging, I'm very surprised that the Air Force hasn't started its own UCAV program. Or at least begun purchasing reasonably priced, improved versions of proven platforms like Boeing's stealthy F-15SE Silent Eagle to fill in the near-term shortfall of manned fighters as many already stressed, high-performance air frames move into their third decade of service.

Boeing F-15SE Silent Eagle, Boeing Press Release Kit via Wikipedia

Serial Experiment Lain

2011-12-19T22:47:00.000-06:00

Yes it feels a little 90s at times, but Serial Lain remains an interesting and in places non-linear tale of a young girl's uneven and rough cybernetic ascension to godhood--or something close to it.

Still busily cranking away on my various writing gigs...

2011-12-17T10:19:00.003-06:00

But in the meanwhile, a bizarre video mash up of Calvin and Hobbes snowmen and Akira Kurosawa from some folks in North Dakota. For all you cinephiles out there.

Voyager 1 Speeds Toward The Brink Of Interstellar Space : The Two-Way : NPR

2011-12-14T18:47:00.000-06:00

Voyager 1 Speeds Toward The Brink Of Interstellar Space : The Two-Way : NPR:

'via Blog this'

DNA: The next big hacking frontier - The Washington Post

2011-12-09T17:18:00.000-06:00

DNA: The next big hacking frontier - The Washington Post:

'via Blog this'

BBC News - Undersea mountains march into the abyss

2011-12-06T16:26:00.000-06:00

I'd always thought that underseas mountains plunging ever so slowly into subduction zones would act as sticking points and make subduction zone earthquakes worse. Apparently the opposite is true.

BBC News - Undersea mountains march into the abyss:

'via Blog this'

Sad lonely blog

2011-12-06T00:11:00.001-06:00

Here it sits, neglected for these few weeks while I write and write elsewhere. But that's OK, because my daily fiction word count is on a roll. I've had a few 10,000 word weeks, not counting freelancing work

In the meanwhile, some science fiction writing music with a heroic bent: Genre Playlist.

I used to avoid listening to music while writing, but given how much time I spend in front of the computer these days its become something of a necessary stimulant at times alongside tea or espresso drinks. Music without lyrics generally works the best, as it provides the highest ratio of motivation vs distraction.

Beautiful HD time lapses of Oregon's skies

2011-12-01T12:09:00.001-06:00

Some lovely time lapse feeds of the skies over Oregon's deserts, coastline, and volcanoes.

By Uncage the Soul Productions.

Neanderthal Neuroscience

2011-11-20T18:25:00.000-06:00

An article on Savante Paabo's updated gene- and fossil-based model for the spread of Homo sapiens out of Africa and across Eurasia.

Neanderthal Neuroscience | The Loom | Discover Magazine:

'via Blog this'

I love reading about cosmology, quantum mechanics, and geology, but out of all the branches of science the interestection of genetics, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, primate studies, and anthropology that we call evolutionary psychology is by far the most fascinating.

The publishing singularity has arrived

2011-11-17T17:32:00.001-06:00

Borders is gone. Meanwhile Barns and Noble is apparently closing its flagship Seattle store and beginning the process of selling fewer books in favor of more book-related merchandise in its surviving outlets. A shelf-space reduction of 50% by according to some reports. At the same time Target and Walmart are also slashing book-selling shelf space in their stores.

Back at the ranch, indie book stores are seeing increased Post-Borders sales.

In cyberspace ebook sales continue to climb. Amazon has unveiled its $79 Kindle, and the print-on-demand Espresso Book Machines network has just gotten access to the backlist of a major publisher. We seem to have hit a tipping point towards...

Towards hard to say.

We're certainly in new territory here, and despite futurism being a mug's game, I'll take a stab it predicting where we're headed. Because, you know, science fiction writer.

Prognostification:

Paperback sales will continue their slide as e-ink ebook readers continue to come down in price. Multi-day battery lifespans and easy-on-the-eyes e-ink will remain the biggest determiners of which e-readers swim and which ones sink. Also, at some point quality color e-ink will allow tablets to became the primary venue that most of the global middle class reads magazines and possibly even books on. In fact, I'll be surprised if tablets don't eventually replace dedicated e-readers entirely in another two decades if not sooner.

In the nearer term, once we see $20 e-readers I'll be surprised if paperbacks survive outside of nostalgia-targeted novelty runs and print-on-demand services.

The surviving shelf space in major book retail chains (if there are any) will increasingly go to pricey ($20-$30) mass market hardbacks from established best selling authors. A niche market in hardbacks for critically acclaimed works or books with cult-hit status may eventually thrive on the margins, just as hip record stores peddling vinyl do.

Actually, I kind of like the idea of hardbacks as the new vinyl. However, that niche only model will probably only happen if the major physical retailers go under in a worst-case scenario for traditional printing. That seems less likely than a hybrid future ink / ebook future to me.

Indiebook stores will continue to stay afloat through a combination of used book sales as well as in-house print-on-demand kiosks like Espresso Book Machine. Or at least if I were an independent I'd be putting serious skull sweat into figuring how to make print on demand work for me at a profitable enough margin.

Indie stores seem to offer a kind of book buying experience that a significant segment of the book-buying public enjoys. Particularly in rural America. Here in the Pacific Northwest it never ceases to amaze me how each small town supports at least one bookstore, several of which seem to sell both new and used.

It's also possible that indie book stores will become social spaces where people go to mingle, peruse, and download ebooks at. I know, it sounds strange, but even in the present day in which the lion's share of PC videogames are downloaded with gamers never owning a physical copy of their purchases, some brick and mortar locations have become destinations for younger gamers to socialize and download games purchased online while at home.

Amazon will of course be the titan that dominates the book selling world primarily with ebooks, hardbacks, manuals, and some paperbacks. Barns and Noble will likely continue on in the role of on-line little sister, though she may eventually be overtaken or even eaten by tech-savvy Google or Apple.

Overall I expect to a constellation of online book retailers like Google and Apple to orbit Amazon for sometime to come. Smaller indie ebook outlets like Smashwords will likely go under.

Why. Because the larger outlets will have to tackle the major challenge of ebook buying: Separating out promising literary gems from the mass of poorly written, badly edited works that make up the present bulk of ebooks. Amazon already appears to have begun this buy with it's indie books page that showcases books by independent ebook authors. Review blogs and online magazines will likely play a major role in this process.

In fact, I'm surprised that Amazon doesn't already have an online magazine that highlights promising self-published authors on its site...

They totally had me at "ghost mountains"

2011-11-17T16:58:00.000-06:00

BBC News - Gamburtsev 'ghost mountains mystery solved':

'via Blog this'

The coolest thing on the internets today...

2011-11-15T03:03:00.001-06:00

...by far!

Thank you NASA.

Stumptown with fall leaves

2011-11-14T18:19:00.001-06:00

A pleasant Sunday morning spent hiking along the east bank of the Willamette at the height of fall.

Marvin Black

2011-11-11T19:01:00.001-06:00

The older I get, the more I think of my paternal grandfather on 11/11. Marvin Black served as an Army 1st Cavalry Division scout on some of the horrific battlefields of the WWII South Pacific theater. He then came home to live a life as one of the most fundamentally decent human beings whom I've known.

Another sad sign of the times

2011-11-10T00:42:00.000-06:00

Alabama's 'Rocket City' Hopes For Another Boom : NPR:

'via Blog this'

Ashfall Yellowstone novel

2011-11-09T14:40:00.000-06:00

Well. In a wry chain of coincidences someone else has just published a novel about an eruption of the Yellowstone volcano. It's titled Ashfall. The protagonist's name is Alex.

It look's like it's an impressive work. The author, Mike Mullin, has drawn a lot of five-star reviews over at Amazon.

It's a let down for me, of course. I'd been hoping to be the first writer to put out a novel about a cataclysmic Yellowstone eruption, and I've been using the short-and-punchy title "Ashfall" since writing a short story version back in 2009, not long after winning in Writers of the Future.

Still, this could ultimately be a very good thing for my novel, now under the working title Ashlands: 2040. It's entirely possible that it will be help spark an interest in works about Yellowstone.

I'm very much looking forward to picking up a copy of Mullin's Ashfall. His take on a Yellowstone event is certainly different from mine. Rather than an adult military science fiction treatment centered on an expedition and the long-term aftermath, he's gone for a young adult approach with a teenage boy who lives through the event and is struggling to survive in the days and weeks following the catastrophe.

Currently I've got one-and-half chapters to write and then three more to revise before Ashlands is finished.

Amendment 29 to the US Constitution

2011-11-09T11:57:00.000-06:00

1. The designated National Volcanic Emergency Evacuation Area shall be administered as Unorganized Incorporated Territories of the United States under the terms set in the National Emergency Reorganization Organic Act of 2032. The Great Plains, Rocky Mountain, and Upwind Territories shall be Organized at such time as at least 5,000 persons shall have inhabited a Territory for two consecutive years.

2. The Congress and the President shall recognize the suspension of State Government within the National Volcanic Emergency Evacuation Area only upon the Application of the Legislatures of the affected State, or should the Decennial Census find that the population of that State has fallen below 60,000 fulltime residents during the evacuation period.

3. The President shall direct the Armed Forces and Federal Law Enforcement Officers to administer law and to ensure the public safety within the Jurisdiction of a State within the National Volcanic Evacuation Area only after a recognized Suspension of State Government has taken place.

4. Congress shall make no New States or reapportion the boundaries of Suspended States within the National Volcanic Emergency Evacuation Area during the duration of the emergency.

5. At such time as the population within the former Jurisdiction of any Suspended State within the National Volcanic Emergency Evacuation Area reaches 60,000 inhabitants the Congress, the Courts, the President, and Fellow States shall recognize the sovereignty of that State and the validity of that State’s Constitution as written at the time of suspension. Elections under that State Constitution shall be carried out immediately.

Gray days and foggy nights in PDX

2011-11-07T17:06:00.001-06:00

While I'm on the topic of Portland, I've had Sleater-Kinney's "Entertain" stuck in my head for the past few days.

An interesting maneuver element on the cultural terrain of the counter-insurgency battlefield

2011-11-01T12:35:00.000-05:00

In new elite Army unit, women serve alongside Special Forces, but first they must make the cut - The Washington Post:

'via Blog this'

Putting on my tech blogger / copywriter hat for a bit...

2011-10-31T14:18:00.000-05:00

I've been fortunate that I've been able to get in some good quality, paid research time recently as freelance technology and business writer for a series of articles on technology startup funding.

While I could happily (even gleefully) throw up dozens of links to interesting information sources on tech startups and the chaotically evolving world of startup financing, the two links below to Y Combinator founder Paul Graham's essays on running a startup and the current state of venture capital in IT are the best written summary essays that I've come across, if you have an interest in these topics.

"How to Start a Startup"

"The New Funding Landscape"

Columbia River Gorge - Rainy day photos

2011-10-30T19:37:00.003-05:00

One my favorite "we are living in the future" web comic moments

2011-10-26T14:44:00.000-05:00

Questionable Content: New comics every Monday through Friday:

'via Blog this'

A confession from a dark place in the human soul

2011-10-26T14:13:00.005-05:00

[irony]

Living here in the hipster capital of the world I occasionally feel the unholy urge to see if it's physically possible to smack the ironic 70s-style mustache off the faces of passing hipsters.

It is an impulse that I am not proud of, and I am looking for a twelve-step program that treats this condition.

[/irony]

In the meanwhile:

This mustache-inspired anger is also a source of deep shame because I truly enjoy a fair amount of the music that hipsters and indie kids listen to.

Our finite perception, for the time being

2011-10-19T13:37:00.000-05:00

Our brains have evolved to deal with issues at our own scales: mates, rivers, apples, rabbits, and so on. Our brains simply weren't built to understand the fabric of reality at the very small scales (quantum mechnics) or the very large (the cosmos). As Blaise Pascal put it, “Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”

~David Eagleman via Boing Boig

I'll add a short caveat to Pascal's observation about our lack of ability to see the quantum void of raw potential or the scope of the universe on the cosmological scale. We are equally incapable of seeing these realities, at this time.

The brains we have today are the augmented apparatuses that our children and their descendants will have tomorrow. Even as we learn about how the minds our brains generate are limited by the constraints of biology and our evolutionary history, we are developing the knowledge base and the technologies to push back the organic boundaries that constrain our comprehension.

Not that I'm preparing to publish a military science fiction novel about this or anything...

Technology Is One Path Toward Sustainability | Orion Magazine

2011-10-17T11:39:00.000-05:00

An interesting look at the very real environmental crises confronting us and why First World environmentalists have been unable to successfully fix these problems over the past past few decades.

Technology Is One Path Toward Sustainability | Orion Magazine:

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I don't agree with the authors' characterization of current environmental beliefs as an "ecotheology." Most adherents are demonstrably secular in their outlook. I do, however, agree that an almost puritanical anti-technology zeal on the part of environmentalists whose lives embrace technology and all-too-often negative attitudes towards their fellow human beings have contributed the ongoing failures to tackle problems like global warming. That and a willingness to destroy the livelihoods of indigenous people or blue collar workers without creating effective alternative forms of employment, as was the case with much of the timber industry here in the Pacific Northwest during the spotted owl debate of the 1990s.

All of which is a great tragedy. Even as global climate change is helping to drive numerous local crises around the world and threatens to inflict much greater misery on the lives of billions, the issues have become highly politicized here in the US. Sadly, much of the working class and many in the developing world have come to see environmentalists as a threat to their ability to feed themselves and their children.

Of super volcanoes and the Old West

2011-10-12T12:13:00.003-05:00

"It is odd, to watch with which feverish ardor Americans pursue prosperity, and how they are ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get to it.

Americans cleave to the things of this world as if assured that they will never die, and yet are in such a rush to snatch any that comes within their reach, as if expecting to stop living before they have relished them. They clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight.
…
Death steps in in the end and stops him before he has grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes him.

At first there is something astonishing in this spectacle of so many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance. But it is a spectacle as old as the world; all that is new is to see a whole people performing it."

~Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835

Public domain image via Wikipedia

To create a future I've been on a trip through the 1800s. Not a deep immersion in books and film, but more of a refresher survey to look up interesting events and concepts to help with generating a sense of place and atmosphere for the Post-Yellowstone super volcano novella I'm writing. Or more accurately, to create the feel of a unique time period in which the circumstance of human life and behavior differ from our own in strange and exotic ways.

It's a pioneer story on one level, crossing the wastes of snow and silicate volcanic ash in the Midwest and Great Plains towards a distant goal, so I've been going back to stories of the westward migration. And since I'm looking for tension, drama, and a tragedy to triumph over, I'm revisiting the history of the Donner Party.

Watch the full episode. See more American Experience.

In some ways all of this is about creating an underlying matrix of tensions to generate an atmosphere of unspoken impressions. For example creating the feeling of a lawless environment in which there are human predators and there are people who have banded together around common ideals or necessities to create a community. Then there is the sense of isolation. A feeling of a frontier and beyond that a vast wilderness that is a setting for both hopes and nightmares. Also, a sense of vast physical space, remoteness, and threat of natural hazards from an austere environment that is both beautiful and deadly.

Idoru: The disconnect between fiction and reality

2011-10-05T11:57:00.004-05:00

I first came across the virtual idoru concept in the William Gibson novel of the same name.It turns actual software idoru's are a lot less sexy and a lot more bubbly than I had realized.

*Sigh*

Oh well. One day we will get the frighteningly attractive robotic overlords that we deserve, rather than schoolgirl A.I.s singing about their famous love of vegetable juice.

10 Building Materials from the Future | Translucent Concrete | Materials Chemistry | InnovationNewsDaily

2011-09-28T13:50:00.000-05:00

The futurist in me still goes still gets emotional over these kinds of articles. Me and my entirely non-ironic sensawunda.

10 Building Materials from the Future | Translucent Concrete | Materials Chemistry | InnovationNewsDaily:

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"Kill Your Fears"

2011-09-21T21:38:00.001-05:00

Been listening to track 10, "Kill Your Fears," for much of the day, and I'm still not sick of it. The song falls somewhere between Chill and Trip Hop. OK, so it's more Trip Hop than Chill, as embarrassing as it is to fess up to that. Still, really good groove music. We'll see if the rest of the album grows on me. Give it a listen and see what you think. The New Alphabet by mike hoffman

Public readings

2011-09-21T14:17:00.001-05:00

I need to go to more book readings. I never realized before last night how much fun they could be.

Yesteday it was reading by Steampunk / urban fantasy author Cherie Priest and two of her friends--authors Mark Henry and Richardson--at the gorgeous Mcmenamin's Kennedy school. The event was moderated by the award-winning Mary Robinette Kowal, and laughter filled the venue during Priest's reading--a section from her most recent urban fantasy work which was essentially twenty minutes of dick jokes, all deftly executed in the context of her character's snarky conversation.

I know, dick jokes. Really.

Well, yes, but as previously mentioned, well-execute and totally appropriate to the characters.

Unfortunately I've never been able to get into Priest's Clockwork Century steampunk novels, despite trying. It's a shame as obviously a lot of readers have, so we'll call that a personal failing on my part.

The Red Report series, however, is one I will be picking up.

I know, I am a weak person, but I can certainly use a good literary-driven laugh now and then.

World Trade Center photojournalism essay

2011-09-12T17:05:00.002-05:00

9/11: how the twin towers were built

I was originally going to skip writing anything about the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. It's still an event that in many ways is too immediate and raw, even after a decade.

It was certainly an historic moment with a tremendous negative impact on my life.

Then I came across a beautifully put together BBC photo essay on the construction of the original World Trade Center towers and their Post-9/11 replacements. That helped. How things are made often serves as a restrained emotional entry point into a topic for me. It encourages a more philosophical view towards implications rather than a recall of emotion and first impressions.

Emotions and immediate reactions are of course messy things and often hard to capture in words.

Because of my circumstances on that tragic day in September, I don't really have a definitive moment to recall in which I learned of the towers' destruction. Instead there were a series of clues that something was wrong.

My then girl friend and I had spent the day at a modern art museum named Louisiana, roughly an hour by train north of Copenhagen in Denmark. I had left the military thirteen months earlier, after three fantastic years spent living in Germany with a short stint in the Balkans. I was very much looking forward to spending much of the rest of my life in Sweden with someone I loved.

Sadly, it wasn't to be after that day.

The awareness of something wrong first came when walking across down town Copenhagen in late afternoon on our way back to Malmö, Sweden. The day was beautiful, and earlier we had taken advantage of sunshine to lie outdoors on the grass at the museum and enjoy the view of the blue, shimmering Öresund straight between Denmark and Sweden. I don't remember the content of the conversation, but I most certainly recall the tone We were both young and in love, though drawing near the summer of full adulthood in our late twenties.

As we walked across bustling downtown Copenhagen, bubbles of bright English burst continually to the surface around us on the sea of nasal twangs and partially swallowed vowels that is the Danish language to my ears. The most common phrase, complete with distinctive American r's was, "World Trade Center."

At first I thought it was one of those pattern recognition things. A friend mentions the word blue in a conversation, and you hear blue continually around you for the rest of the day as your brain searches the environment for that word and related concepts.

Then two American teenagers walked past in the opposite directions, one of them saying "well if you build something like it then it's only a matter of time until someone hits it." It was delivered in the tone of an expert with all the certitude available to us at that stage in life when we are experts on all things.

My first thought was that something like the 1993 February truck bombing had taken place, which had damaged one of the towers' parking structures and killed a handful of people.

Just over a month earlier while on my way to Sweden, I had sat in a Lufthansa jetliner on the tarmac at Newark looking at the twin towers across the Hudson River. I had felt grateful then that neither structure had come down six years ago, imagining the kind of devastation that would have taken place.

It wasn't until the two of us arrived back in Sweden that I had my first hint of how bad things had gone on the far side of the Atlantic. In place of the normal handful of customs officers for the entire train station there were six or seven lined up, watching all of us who disembarked form a single train at Malmö, and they were all frightened.

On a city bus my girlfriend listened to the news playing on the radio and said that it sounded like something major had happened in New York. We arrived back at our tiny 1930s-built brick flat in one of the city's predominantly immigrant neighborhoods, and the first image I remember on her giant 1970s television was of the first tower's collapse.

My initial thought was the horrified realization that someone might be nuked in retaliation for this. At the height of the workday those towers would hold around 50,000 souls.

Whatever their aesthetic shortcomings, the twin towers were marvels of engineering worth every penny of their construction costs on that tragic day. If the death toll had been in the tens of thousands and comparable to an attack with a weapon of mass destruction the long-term consequences could have been far worse for everyone involved. Perhaps one of the most important acts of leadership in those first days afterwards was Mayor Giuliani's refusal to speculate about a casualty count.

For about fourteen days there was great deal of sympathy in Sweden. It felt nice to know that in the face of such an inhuman evil that decent people would reach out to make such very human connections. Then after two weeks it was like someone flipped a switch.

When going out to dinner at friends I began to hear accounts related in frighteningly gleeful tones of how many Afghan civilians had been reported killed by American bombs, supposedly rending the United States every bit as criminal as the Taliban or al-Qaeda. The bombings, according to my hosts, were driving the Afghans closer to Bin Laden's people, the US was only involved to drill for oil or to build that still famously absent pipeline across Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean.

It was a quick descent into what I normally describe as the acid bath of petty hatred that characterized much of the next three years spent in Sweden. I took me a year to fully realize what I had stumbled into. Below the the surface of the innocent 1990s had lurked a cultural reservoir of Vietnam-era memes that many Western Europeans born after World War II use to define the US as the opposite of their own societies in all things.

Ten years on now and it feels like a lot of history has flowed by under the bridge that is life. One of the wars that came about in 9/11's aftermath is quickly winding down, the other looks like to do so as well, though if it's for good or for ill it is still far to early to say. Personally, I have deep worries about leaving Afghanistan during this stage of the war.

Here at home, the prospects for the immediate future look bleak given the damage done to our economy and a number of unwise structural changes that we made to it over the past eleven or twelve years. Still, it does feel like the chapter of life most directly influenced by the events of September 11th is drawing to a close as other historic forces take center stage. We are no longer dealing with the event that ended the Post-Cold War period, but rather cascading secondary effects that have taken on their own lives, as well as the continuation of other historic forces like the emergence of China as a global power.

Part of what gives me this sense of closing and even a feeling of hope for the future is the sight of the new World Trade Center buildings going up. They look gorgeous, the business plan behind them is practical, and the memorial for the fallen is the kind of tranquil public space for remembrance that memorials should be.

All of this came out of a process that was divisive and contentious.

While the past decade certainly split the country and produced divisions on a scale we haven't seen since the late 1800s, there is hope that we may be able to similarly salvage some good from it and undo much of the material damage done.

I've spent much of the past past few weeks working on a project about the American Declaration of Independence for a client. It's involved a lot of reading about Continental Congress where that Declaration was written as well as the constitutional convention that followed over a decade later. Both were contentious and provoked fierce arguments and wounded feelings, but both also produced works that despite their flaws have proven durable and provided us with a wealth of good over a span measured in centuries.

Love letters

2011-09-11T13:25:00.001-05:00

Historians spend a lot of time reading through dry and humorless documents. Many of the most reliable sources we have available to us to reconstruct the past do not make for light reading. Tax records, the tedious minutes of long, boring meetings, accounting files, journal entries written by influential people obsessed with recording the the minutia of the weather or plant life rather than the major historic events that they were enmeshed in, and so on.

But there are most definitely times when the opposite holds true and we find ourselves with a wealth of material that takes us into the hearts and emotions of people lived long before us but loved in much the same way we do. In US history the collected letters of John and Abigail Adams (the second president and second first lady who were deeply involved in American Revolution and subsequent events) are one of the most valuable and pleasurable bodies of primary source documents to read through.

Forty years of abiding affection, insights, wry commentary, teasing, references to classical culture, art, philosophy, and religion, as well as much talk about the leading figures and the events of the day.

John writing to Abigail not long before their wedding:

Oh, my dear girl, I thankheaven that another fortnight will restore you to me—after so long aseparation. My soul and my body have both been thrown into disorder by yourabsence, and a month or two more would make me the most insufferable cynic inthe world. I see nothing but faults, follies, frailties, and defects in anybodylately. People have lost all their good properties or I my justice ordiscernment.

But you who have always softened and warmed my heart,shall restore my benevolence as well as my health and tranquility of mind. Youshall polish and refine my sentiments of life and manners, banish all theunsocial and ill natured particles in my composition, and form me to that happytemper that can reconcile a quick discernment with a perfect candor.

Believe me, now and ever your faithful

Lysander

BBC News - Japan six months after tsunami

2011-09-11T12:49:00.000-05:00

An excellent narrated photo essay on a tsunami-devastated farming community on Japan's northeast cast, and the struggle of the people there to rebuild their community as well as its way of life. Wonderfully well done.

BBC News - Japan six months after tsunami

The Post-911 Soldier | Kit Up!

2011-09-09T23:34:00.001-05:00

An interesting look at the Post-9/11 evolution of the infantryman's loadout over at kitup.com.

The Post-911 Soldier | Kit Up!

A monkey named Schadenfreude

2011-09-01T08:50:00.003-05:00

In hindsight, I wish that I had named a monkey Schadenfreude. The various species of monkeys and varieties of rhesus have a spectrum of personalities much as humans do, and there were a few for whom Schadenfreude would have been a perfect fit.

BBC News - Magnetic mysteries of Earth's Core

2011-08-31T09:50:00.002-05:00

Crystals that are kilometers in length! Nested realms of elemental purity. Epochal storms of world-altering consequence!

Who needs fantasy! The extremes of physics generate environments and material behaviors bizarre enough to rival any system of fantastical magic or metaphysics.

BBC News - Magnetic mysteries of Earth's Core

Yeah, yeah. I know. Fantasy is fun because you can apply the fantastic and sublimely bizarre to the human world. And that certainly works better for storytelling purposes than applying the kind of heat and pressure to people that generate the wonderfully odd realms that exist beneath our feet.

So maybe it's not so odd that science articles like this always leave me wanting to write fantasy that draws on the fantastic behaviors and strange realms that science articles and journals describe.

Tim Powers via Cory Doctorow off William Gibson's twitter feed

2011-08-29T09:53:00.013-05:00

‎"Literature is hostile to ideology. It doesn't have answers, but gives rise to inadvertent questions"

~Tim Powers

I love that statement. I've loved it ever since I first heard Mr. Powers utter it at the Writers of the Future 26 workshop in LA a year ago.

Photo courtesy of Author Services

I love it despite the fact that it's probably more an ideal than a reality.

Obviously people do and have used literature to advance ideological agendas. Even a fast glance at current day literature quickly reveals that "literature" itself has become a genre that for better or worse is dominated by the left. One in which sub-par individuals struggle and fail, and then fail again, and end the book in an enhanced state of despair.

The same polarization is true of much of genre fiction. Certainly much of the science fiction has slid sharply to the left since the 1990s.

I suspect that the present marriage of literature and ideology is one of the ultimate factors that has helped drive a wedge between literature and the general public. At a time when reading already faces stiff competition from a variety of stimulating alternatives like the internet, picking up a novel is like being clubbed over the head with the big stick of humorless indoctrination. Much of science fiction these days oozes progressivism to the point of that I often feel that I'm drowning in cynicism and self-analyzing irony and post-colonialist anti-imperialism.

The remaining fraction of science fiction--for me--has becoming increasingly militarist and intolerant over the past decade. It often seems as though there is precious little literary space left over for the moderate majority who value science, empiricism, and issues that transcend the limited scope of ideologies.

No wonder the largely ideology-free genres of fantasy and young adult speculative fiction have continued to grow and thrive even as science fiction has seen its sales stagnate. Though that is likely to change as more and more established writers make the switch to young adult in order to cash in on its popularity.

Ideology will likely choke off YA just as it's helped to smother science fiction.

Aside from its soul-killing lack of humor and warm human passions, the short-lived appeal of ideologically driven writing can block a book from becoming a classic. Oh, it might be called a classic by like-minded critics or members of an establishment invested in the same side of the ideological spectrum, but it will not be a great story that ordinary readers pull off the shelf again and again to reread.

Go back and look the famous books associated with the ideological movements of the 20th century from social realism to left-leaning post modernism. You may find that a surprising amount of the 'great novels' and the politics they advocate feel very dated and rather silly. And they are rarely ever read by anyone aside from lit majors enrolled in university courses.

My favorite example of ideological silliness is from a few years back when I came across a series of 1950s right-wing tracts and novels in a used bookstore. These works painted a picture of the US Army of the time as dominated by the Soviet Union, and its generals and colonels being fully prepared to aid in launching a communist coupe in the United States.

Yes, for real. Apparently nearly two decades of working for the FDR and Truman administrations was enough to make the military suspect in the eyes of a segment of the American right.

Prior to that, my favorite example of dated ideological zaniness in writing was a set of papers, plays, and novel excerpts from a college class that looked at the 1960s. In that collection, several authors during the period railed against the impending execution of a plan to transport millions of black Americans and leftist dissidents to concentration camps that were even then being built in the countryside.

Yeah.

Future generations will think much the same of our present day, politically polarized novels and written political works.

Ideologies are at best black-and-white photos of a complex, colorful and evolving world. They may be useful to generate a common understanding among a large number of people and to instill the motivation necessary to act as a group, but they carry a heavy, heavy cost in simplification and erroneous suppositions.

It's often amazing to look back in time through the printed word and see the glaring failures of reasoning and the appallingly bad predictions that tens of millions of human beings embraced as truths because of an acceptance of this or that ideology. Especially when looking at the horrific consequences of totalitarian ideology on the fascist right and communist left.

We should question our ideologies. We should question them often, be they left wing or right.

That necessity to question is part of what makes Tim's statement so powerful for me. That second sentence "It doesn't have answers, it gives rise to inadvertent questions."

Looking back both as a historian and a reader, it's very clear that more often than not writers do not have the answers the world needs. The solutions to the major dilemmas of history since the industrial revolution have arisen as a matrix of competing forces from activists, soldiers, statesmen, scientists, and engineers.

Looking back, our present day world simply does not appear in works of literature. Even in science fiction we came up amazingly short on predicting the shape of our current reality and technology base. As a profession and even much more broadly as a species we writers and humans lack the faculties needed to track trends more than a couple of years into the future.

But what we can do is ask the questions that need to be asked. If we cannot deliver an accurate model of tomorrow, we can look at the trends and issues of today and say "what if?" through our characters and the plot dilemmas they face. We can take timeless human problems and try to show them in the new context of the near future, even if we dress up the setting as a far future. We can also attempt to depict worlds with competing ideals and ideologies that have strengths and weaknesses, rather than one human mental model that is right and another that is wrong.

If we can not do a good job of telling people what to think, we can ask questions that will get them to think. Questions that will help inspire both today's and tomorrow's activists, soldiers, engineers, scientists, and statesmen.

Literature that provokes people to answer question cannot be friendly to any ideology that seeks to explain the world in simple terms. Literature that is hostile to ideology is empirical in nature or at least Socratic on a level accessible to its readers.

Maybe Tim's quote ought to read "Literature should be hostile to ideology." Maybe it's an ideal to aspire to. An urgent ideal in this myopic, polarized age of ours.

Certainly looking over my collection of books from the past thirty years, my favorites are the ones in which the characters and the choices they make do not fit neatly into dogmatic categories. These are books that continue to be good reads years after their publication because they are hostile to ideology. They refuse to embrace any creed of the ideal. Instead they show people armed with flawed memes and incomplete bodies of concepts doing their best to make their way through one crisis point after another in an imperfect world.

The dancer and the artist at the end of the age of beauty, on the edge of the age of war

2011-08-25T10:05:00.009-05:00

An interesting article via Arts and Letters Daily about the dancer Jane Arvil (Jeanne Richepin) and the painter Toulouse-Lautrec at Moulin Rouge during the close of the late 1800s. It captures the roles of two visual artists in depicting the stresses of a historic transition point -- a time when the tensions of the Industrial Age began to boil over into armed conflict. A time when social mores rooted in rural agricultural traditions and the restraints of poverty were corroding in an urban environment with a rising middle class and elites interested in the stimulation of the exotic, the disturbing, and the complexities of stylization over realistic representation.

Being a visual species with highly developed visual cortices in our brains, much of our historical development often ends up captured in images or expressive motion.

Public domain photo via Wikipedia

Building a continent

2011-08-23T17:37:00.014-05:00

So, the East Coast shook today, from the Carolinas to Boston and all the way up into Canada. For someone like me who grew up in the American West, that's quite an impressive and worrying reach for an earthquake to display.

Typically, quakes on this side of the Rockies rarely spread destructive effects more than a few dozen miles away from the epicenter. A fact that reflects the composite, fused-together nature of the American West.

USGS image via Wikipedia

Believe it or not, about a-third of our continent is a fairly recent assemblage -- a jammed together, welded collection of ancient arcs of volcanic island chains, micro-continents, long-dead mid-ocean mountain ranges, and uplifted sea floors. All of these swept up and fused by the westward drift of North America and the halted suduction process of shards of oceanic plates.

The heart of our continent is a vastly old shield of thick basement rock -- sometimes referred to as Laurentia -- that roughly stretches from Greenland to Texas and from Eastern Nevada to the eastern slopes of the Appalachians. Overlaying it are patches of accreted sedimentry rock and layers of sediment

Aside from its stressed and distorted border regions, this stone cap is for the most part continuous. Hence the far reach of earthquakes inside this geologic province, with few West-Coast-type faults to redistribute the energy among.

Which is not to say that the area is completely free of major earthquake-producing faults.

USGS image via Wikipedia

Around 750 million years ago, tectonic strain wounded Laurentia as the forces involved in the breakup of the Rodinia supercontinent tore at the North American cranton.

The New Madrid Seismic Zone

USGS image via Wikipedia

The resulting rift has been the source of a truly far-reaching and powerful (7.0 to 8.1) chain of historic earthquakes. Earthquakes strong enough to damage buildings in Washington, DC and ring church bells in New England. That, and to generate destructive waves on the Mississippi large enough to leave some witnesses with the impression that the river had reversed course for a brief period of time.

Along with those historically documented quakes are prehistoric seismic events that have left plenty of geological evidence throughout the region. These signs of course hint at the potential for eventual events that will impact as us as society here in the US, and perhaps leave a lasting impression in our culture at some future date.

Such is one of the many the potential seismic impacts of how our continent was assembled.

The daily volcano cam

2011-08-18T12:07:00.004-05:00

One of the first things I check when on the net in the mornings. Just 'cause, you know, the mountain could have moved closer to the city over night.

USGS image, public domain

Well, truth be told it's more for the sense of infinite that comes from looking at mountains in the early morning. That and a reminder that there are forces and priorities that dwarf and will outlast the concerns, conflicts, and petty worries of day-to-day life.

One of those small concerns that has been worrying at me is a sense of disappointment from not being able to attend Worldcon in Reno this year. I'd really been looking forward to attending the premier convention for genre writers in my hometown for some time. Alas, trying to make a freelance living in an economy where college graduates are enduring a level of unemployment on par with that of the Great Depression did not allow for it.

What really sucks is seeing picture of my hometown posted on blogs by my neo-pro peers as well as by established writers in the genre whom I've met. I was looking forward to seeing many of them again for the first time in a year, and I was certainly looking forward to hanging out with the Portland contingent.

That said, this is definitely one of those disappointments that falls under the heading of petty sorrows that fall by the wayside when looking at the mountains. It's also a petty concern when looking at the plight of other graduates who either haven't had any kind of an income since 2007 or are stuck working part time minimum wage jobs with heavy student loans hanging over their heads. Going to school on the GI Bill allowed me avoid accumulating any significant debts, which was no small trick in a time in which we have shifted the burden of financing higher education from the states to students and their parents.

It's also small because I do have work. I'm slowly accumulating clients and creeping back up towards being able to pay the monthly bills. And I'm doing so through writing, which is a reward in and of itself.

Speaking of, I really should be doing paid work that I have qued up for today rather than blogging...

Bizarre videos

2011-08-16T11:36:00.005-05:00

Sadly, because of the many demands of post-graduation survival in the current economy, spending time on the internet reading interesting articles and hunting for good music and bizarre videos has taken a hit. Especially since it's a challenge just to get in good writing time. Still, there are moments here and there in which I still manage to stumble across entertaining bits of strangeness.

Strangeness like feudal Japanese rap videos.

This'd make a completely kick ass science fiction sound track

2011-08-14T12:43:00.003-05:00

You might be able to tell from the state of this lonely blog that I've been on a writing binge this summer. A lot of hours immersed in SF and techno thriller territory. At the same time I've been spending a lot of time parked in front of the computer doing freelance business writing work on commission. So, it's been productive couple of months, thought not much of a summer in any traditional sense. But such are the necessities of survival in the Great Depression II.

At any rate, aside from caffeine, I use music as a stimulus to maintain my focus and motivation during long stints behind the keyboard. The above track has been one of the summer's best songs for me, so I thought I'd share it. That and like the title says, it would make for an awesome addition to a soundtrack for a slick genre film.

Ah ebook formatting

2011-07-28T13:32:00.005-05:00

Sigh. We authors should be transform doc files into digital book files the wave of a hand.

Yeah. Like anything is ever that simple.

The past twenty-four hours have felt like I've spent it beating my head against the brick wall of file conversion. This is still very much a field of cobbled together hacks, lesser-of-two-evil choices, and arcane html tricks that are furtively bartered among practitioners like spells of black magic between bloody-handed necromancers.

And it's all served up on a steep learning curve for non-coders.

That said, it's also kind of fun in a puzzle-solving / research kind of way. Like any other software issue there is a lot of time spent trawling message boards looking for solutions and comments, as well as half-baked guesses, moments of intuition, and rigorous experimenting designed to isolate variables.

I haven't had this much fun applying rules of thumb and coming up with alternative lines of problem-solving investigation since I was a shade tree mechanic working on my first car, a 1967 Ford Mustang.

The skinned knuckles and grease under the nails are always worth the gnoetic "ah ha!" moment of hitting on a promising idea and the exultation of success when it actually works.

Responsibility

2011-07-20T12:21:00.002-05:00

“Congress consistently brings the government to the edge of default before facing its responsibility. This brinkmanship threatens the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veterans benefits. Interest rates would skyrocket, instability would occur in financial markets, and the federal deficit would soar. The United States has a special responsibility to itself and the world to meet its obligations.”

~Ronald Regan

When I was child during the 1980s, many of the science fiction novels that I enjoyed were premised on a catastrophe sometime in the decades around the year 2000 destroying or radically changing society as we knew it. It was pretty much an accepted trope or genre convention at the time, one that William Gibson helped to break with in Neuromancer.

I am often struck by the sensation of "we are living in the future" when I think back to the speculative fiction novels of my childhood. Sometimes because the future is much more futuristic that we could have foreseen. Sometimes because aspects of our our present reality match those foreseen or or guessed at by authors who lived and wrote decades ago.

It would be a shame though, if the catastrophe trope actually came to pass. While I enjoyed the thought of society rising from its ruins or a setback with a clean slate, of a culture or a nation being reborn in a more rationalized form, the evolutionary approach to change is much kinder, and in my view, realistic. The accumulation of gradual innovations resulting in a moment of profound developmental change more often than not leaves a lasting legacy of goodness. Catastrophe on the other hand--what ever its opportunities--often results in as much scaring as improvement. Those scars are frequently a burden left for following generations to unravel.

Mt Hood photos

2011-07-20T12:17:00.001-05:00

Photos of a sunset in the Columbia Gorge country

2011-07-19T14:11:00.005-05:00

Bizarre videos and the ever-evolving Republic of Korea

2011-07-19T00:08:00.004-05:00

It's been fourteen years now since my twelve months in the ROK, and it's fascinating to watch that country change bit by bit each year via the internet. Especially when something like this video comes along.

I won't say that a girl could have been stoned to death then for wearing a short skirt or shorts like in this video, but the repercussions would have been ugly. When I was there in 1997, the sexual revolution was only just kicking off.

How do I know this? More than one younger Korean in his or her early twenties used exactly that turn--"sexual revolution"--to describe what was happening in their country. They quite consciously evaluated those event in comparison with the sexual revolution of the 1960s that had played out in the West.

At any rate, a young woman showing as much flesh as these ladies would have been in for a whole lot of public scorn back then. That and if their families did not cut them off, they would have still had a difficult time finding anyone to marry them.

Or maybe not. Individual allowances must always be made of course, and changes were already underway then.

It's also amazing for me how much more media- and culture-centered South Korea is now. Back in '97 it was still very much a place where things were made. It was a country focused much more on industry and farming. However, they quite deliberately caught both the IT wave of the 1990s as well as set out to create a world-class entertainment sector.

The story--as I understand--was that the president of the ROK was floored after watching Jurassic Park back in 1994. He asked a minister how much the film grossed, and upon hearing the figure, promptly ordered the creation of a Hollywood style film industry.

I wonder what it's like these days be a young American visiting the Land of the Morning Calm. It must be entirely different with the threat of imminent war gone, and a people experimenting with the possibilities and pitfalls that an economy of affluence offers.

Photos of a gray and beautiful day on the Oregon Coast

2011-07-18T19:30:00.001-05:00

Happy Fourth!

2011-07-04T10:52:00.003-05:00

I seem to be on blog hiatus this summer. Mostly due to the push to put a package of a short story, novella, and novel up on Amazon and other digital publication sites. That and simultaneously launching a career as a freelance writer for hire. Regular updates with original written articles should resume next month.

In the meanwhile, happy 4th!

A changing world

2011-06-26T13:42:00.000-05:00

The first gray whale in the Atlantic since that species was hunted to extinction there. One more sign of changes to come as the Arctic begins to spend its summers almost entirely free of ice.

Whale's odyssey sheds light on climate change - World news - World environment - msnbc.com

A house of living rooms

2011-06-24T10:46:00.005-05:00

Fellows Writers of the Future 26er Laurie Tom has put her Grand Prize-winning novelette Living Rooms up on Amazon as a $0.99 ebook. It's a story of magicians and rooms with a life of their own, in which a woman fights to make a house a home on an emotional and metaphysical level while fending off her father's murderous rival. Buy it and see why a panel of famous science fiction authors including Orson Scott Card, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Mike Resnick made this their unanimous pick for the Golden Quill.

Old worm won't die after 2008 attack on military | Reuters

2011-06-17T01:24:00.001-05:00

As the worm turns...so to speak

Old worm won't die after 2008 attack on military | Reuters

Back from the country...

2011-06-12T22:35:00.005-05:00

That and working hard on completing the post-apocalyptic Yellowstone techno thriller novella. I'm planning on doing a series of interesting supporting articles that will discuss topics like the whys and hows of supervolcanoes, as well as biotechnology and specific neurobiological aspects of augmenting human intelligence once I've released the ebook versions of "Lisa with Child," Ashfall, and my novel Phase Line Escher later this summer in.

In the meanwhile, recent photos of the Gorge:

Also in the meanwhile, the Mountain Goats will be playing a small club a few blocks down the street from where I live. I need to figure out how to get some cash to see that show :)

Snapshots I Brought Back from the Black Hole by K.C. Ball | Lightspeed Magazine

2011-06-07T22:48:00.000-05:00

Fellow Writers of the of the Future 26 alumni KC Ball has a really cool story about love and the physics of black holes up at Lightspeed Magazine. Moving and illuminating

Snapshots I Brought Back from the Black Hole by K.C. Ball | Lightspeed Magazine

Check it out. It's free.

Amazing volcanic photos and footage from Chile

2011-06-07T00:25:00.001-05:00

Chile volcano causes ash cloud and lightning tears the sky apart | Mail Online

These photographs--beautiful and at the same time almost apocalyptic--are going to make for some good aesthetic motivation when it comes time to revise my Post-Yellowstone techno thriller novella. At the moment I'm having it critiqued and getting some very useful feedback.

Human flight

2011-06-04T10:25:00.003-05:00

Human beings as gliders, flitting across and skimming by the stony cliff faces of glacier-carved valleys that are thousands of feet deep. The mind numbingly awesome footage starts at about one minute in.

Quick thoughts on religion

2011-05-26T16:51:00.011-05:00

So, while I'm on the topic of religion via the previous post, I thought I'd discuss why I'm not an atheist. It certainly seems to make me a bit of an oddity in the Portland writing community, and has earned me more than a couple of odd looks during conversations.

There was certainly a time when I was moving towards atheism during my mid twenties. Not just atheism, but the snobby practice of that mode of thought, in which rejecting the concept of god serves as the foundation of intellectual stature.

At the time it seemed justified. Many believers in my early life had not provided particularly good examples of behavior. Particularly with regards with failing to practice what they preached. Then there is the historical fact that religion certainly has its blood-soaked side. One that I had already become aware of in my teens.

Village of Muslim Albanians located in the mountains that form the natural border between Macedonia and Kosovo. It was 'cleansed' by the Serbs in 1998.

It was briefly seeing the aftermath of that same dark side in Kosovo in late 1999 and early 2000 that jolted me off that course.

I had an epiphany while riding in a Humvee gun turret late at night and watching a stream of refugees several miles long crossing back over the mountains from Macedonia into Kosovo. Most of them appeared to be in their forties, fifties, or sixties. They were on foot in subzero temperatures, and carrying either their possessions or goods that they had bought in Macedonia in flimsy plastic shopping bags. They had at least ten miles behind them, and many more still to go.

The realization that hit me was this: If religion carries such a heavy cost in wars and periodic bouts of human misery, and yet it is still such a durable and almost universal phenomenon among humans, it must provide some critical utility to our species.

Much mud in Kosovo

Or to put it differently: Religion would not have as lasted as long as it has in this survival-of-the-fittest world of ours if it did not do something profoundly useful. It would not be so widespread--with all but a handful of very recent cultures embracing beliefs from animism to monotheism--if it did not play an important role in getting human beings through life and boosting the functionality of societies.

When I say almost universal, I mean that religious beliefs are a central part of nearly every past and present human culture that anthropologists have documented. Only a handful of very recent states like Revolutionary France and communist nations have attempted to create wholly atheistic cultures. Those societies either abandoned the attempt after tremendous amounts of bloodshed directed at their own citizens, or imploded.

Left to right: Albanian kids, Turkish EOD sergeant, and Macedonian kids at a carwash in Skopje, Macedonia

So whether there is a divinity or not, religion appears to have a tremendous utility in keeping society and cultures going. That and believers certainly seem to be much better at reproducing than non-believers. Making them, ironically enough, much better suited to existence in a world of Darwinian natural selection.

At any rate, this realization and it's sharp contradiction of my existing views was also a good kick in the intellectual pants. It was a reminder of how much I don't know about the world, and also about how much we as a species have yet to learn. In part because we are finite creatures bound up existing only in once place and only at one time. But also in part because this science thing is still rather new in the scope of human history and even pre-history, let alone in geologic or cosmologic time frames. In many ways, we're really just getting started with it.

The final motive for not embracing atheism has been the unfortunate sense of scorn for believers that I've sensed from many atheists. Unfortunately, for a clear majority among those whom I've met while living both in Western Europe and in the States, atheism serves as a strong in-group/out-group exclusion mechanism. It helps to separate who they are and who the "others" are in a way that's just a black-and-white as the delineating beliefs of extremists whom they deride.

That hostility is one of the things that I believe has helped to poison the current political atmosphere in the US. Since the 1960s, it's helped to alienate the New Left and current day progressives from the working class and a significant portion of the middle class. Something that would have been unthinkable fifty years ago when an alliance between the more tolerant Liberals of the WWII generation and the blue collar majority of America formed the bedrock of politics and the foundation of the social contract here in America.

At least that's my take on the matter.

Hence my description of myself as a either cheerful agnostic or a long-lapsed Buddhist (practiced during the 1990s and it still colors my worldview.)

Yet another hell yeah moment

2011-05-25T15:13:00.013-05:00

Former Writers of the Future winner Eric J Stone has won one of science fiction's major prizes this year, taking home a Nebula for his novelette That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made. He's also up for a Hugo at this year's Worldcon in Reno.

This is exciting, both on a personal front as well as for what it hopefully means for the near-term direction of the genre.

Personally, it's awesome because Eric's triumph is the latest in a string of successes for the Writers of the Future 26 circle and its mentors--Eric being one of the latter. It comes hard on the heels my fellow WTOF 26ers Jason Fischer and Tom Croshill recently landing book contracts for anthologies of their short stories, as well as Brad Torgresen winning a reader's choice Anlab award from Analog Magazine for his novella Outbound. That and the Kindle version of Steven Savile's Da Vinci Code-style thriller Silver rocketing up to #4 on Amazon.UK's overall bestseller list.

So these are heady days for both peers and mentors at the moment.

At the same time, the successes of both Leviathan and Brad's Outbound appear to be confirmation of what I've droned on and on about in my People who Used to Read Science Fiction articles. Namely that there remains a large, under-served collection of former and potential genre fans who crave optimistic, ideologically moderate works of original literary science fiction. These are many of the same people who used to make up the backbone of our fan base before literary SF started going south in both sales and cynicism during the 1990s.

It's also good to see that these two works feature protagonists of moderate religious beliefs. Science fiction unfortunately has followed the trend of 'high' literature in presenting a picture of faith in which believers are either depicted as hypocrites or extremists.

In my travels around the world, from East Asia all the way to the turbulent Balkans in the late 1990s, the vast majority of human beings whom I met were religious believers of moderate persuasion. The same holds true here at home in the US.

For me, not only has the presentation of religion in science fiction been fairly non-representative of its day-to-day practice, but I suspect that this largely hostile mode of depiction has been a factor in alienating so many former readers.

For due disclosure purposes, I should mention that I am not particularly religious.
I'm probably best described as a cheerful agnostic or long-lapsed Buddhist in my outlook. Most of my religious experiences in life have come from moments of immersion in natural world--as readers might have guessed from the photos on this blog. My intellectual senses of wonder, awe, and dread are stoked primarily by the explanations of science and the many narratives of human history. The fusion point between those two broad areas--the meeting between the human and natural worlds--is where I sense transcendence with lower primal orders giving rise to new levels of complexity and higher modes of being.

So, here's hoping that we see more moderate religious believers in genre writing. It's not only more representative of the human community, but it also may play an important part in allowing us to recapture our fan base.

Beautiful eruption footage

2011-05-24T17:00:00.005-05:00

Seriously, this Yellowston novella has got me enraptured with all things volcano. Or, well, more so than usual

That and "Grimsvotn." Now that's the kind of name you'd expect for a mountain where hideous dark lords or eldritch entities go to forage world-dominating/world-ending artifacts of unimaginable horror.

Volcanic Eruption in Grimsvotn, Iceland May 21 2011 from Jon Gustafsson on Vimeo.

Meanwhile, all is sunny, spring-like, and calm here in the Pacific Northwest

USGS photo, public domain

Why Did Consciousness Evolve, and How Can We Modify It, Pt. II | Discover Magazine

2011-05-23T13:30:00.000-05:00

A sweeping article on how different sensory modalities have created evolutionary pressures and niches that have shaped the long-term nuerobiological development of our consciousness. Fun, if you are like me and into this kind of thing :)

Why Did Consciousness Evolve, and How Can We Modify It, Pt. II: The Supremacy of Vision | Science Not Fiction | Discover Magazine

A Roman Legion in China | Historic Mysteries

2011-05-18T12:53:00.001-05:00

There's actually some long-standing document and archeological evidence for this, but the recent DNA analysis makes it all the more likely. If it's true, it would solve an interesting two-thousand year old historical mystery about a Roman legion that went missing in action in what is now Turkey around 50 BC.

A Roman Legion in China | Historic Mysteries

This is also one of those reasons that I am such a fan of World History. This school of scholarship focuses on long-duration systems or geological settings like the Silk Roads or the Atlantic Ocean Basin, rather than just single cultures or nation states. Doing so not only reveals new historical dynamics, but also highlights just how interconnected the world is.

Paralyzed student uses robotic exoskeleton to walk at college graduation

2011-05-16T10:09:00.001-05:00

Paralyzed student uses robotic exoskeleton to walk at college graduation (video) -- Engadget

Woot!

2011-05-16T00:53:00.002-05:00

Announcement: Debut Collection by Jason Fischer

This is one of those "hell yeah!" moments. The talented Jason Fischer of the Writers of the Future 26 cohort is now the first of us to land a book contract. And he is totally deserving of it. Aside from the excellent World War Z, Jason's Gravesend novella is the only zombie apocalypse work that I've enjoyed to date. So it's #$%!ing awesome that he's now got an anthology of both existing and yet to be seen Grave Yard zombie stories lined up for hardcover, ebook and trade paperback from an honest to goodness print house.

Cheers, mate!

I'm a sucker for the analytics of the human brain and the mind

2011-05-15T17:59:00.003-05:00

286 Miles per hour for nerve signals traveling in a high priority motor-reflex neuron in the spine--the fastest in the human body apparently.

100,000 miles worth of nerve fibers in the brain sheathed insulating myelin, which boost transmission speeds. The slowest is apparently 1 mph.

1000 times more neural connections than stars in our galaxies.

Truly, we carry a miniature universe within our skulls

Numbers: The Nervous System, From 268-MPH Signals to Trillions of Synapses | Mind & Brain | DISCOVER Magazine

Also, as the author points out, the genes that play a role in the development and operation of our nervous system account for less than 10% of our genomes. That drives home the point that our DNA is much more a general development plan than a blueprint.

Cataclysmic beauty and geologic inundations

2011-05-13T15:41:00.013-05:00

Public domain image by Chris Ralph via Wikipedia

The Yellowstone volcanic hotspot first punched through the North American continent on the Nevada - Oregon border. There it triggered a cluster of caldera-forming "supervolcano" eruptions, which played out over a two-million year period. One of those caldera events entombed a forest of ginko and cryptomeria, which eventually mineralized into stunning black opals.

A surprising aspects of this process is that it wasn't just pebble-sized quantities of wood that mineralized into gemstone, but occasionally whole branches and trunks or even the skulls of snakes and other small animals.

So why a blog post on the supervolcanoes and gemstone trees?

At present I'm grinding away on finishing my first novella as part of a package of works that I will be publishing on Amazon and other digital book sites this year. Ashfall, coming in at around 150 pages, is a near-future techno thriller set in the aftermath of a Yellowstone super eruption that has buried much of the United States under destructive silicate ash and triggered a multi-year, global volcanic winter. Researching for this story has been by turns both horrifying and fascinating.

In a post last year, I discussed how a small supervolcano in Italy may have depopulated much of Neanderthal Europe and opened the way for modern Homo sapiens to expand northward. That and how an earlier Indonesian supervolcano dropped the world into a thousand year volcanic winter, which likely killed nearly 70% of humanity at a time when our numbers were already low. That same eruption buried much of the Indian subcontinent under three meters (nine feet) of ash, which is frightening considering not only the sheer amount of abrasive glass particle ash, but the distance of over a thousand miles that that airborne ash traveled.

Writing the current novella--as well as an earlier short story version of it that drew nice personalized rejections from editors--has been a challenge. In part, because of trying to portray a sense of optimism and human resilience in characters who are faced with what would be a vast, historic catastrophe. Also in trying to answer the question of how we could hope to survive such an event as a functioning technological civilization.

After all, it has been painfully clear in recent years that even catastrophes on a far lesser scale can challenge the world's most advanced post-industrial societies.

Ishinomaki, Japan. Public domain image, US Navy.

Writing about these kinds of massive events is also tricky because anticipating some of the more interesting and subtly destructive effects requires discovering how long-duration geological process can suddenly manifest human-scale effects. For the coast of Northern Japan, one of those effects is a consequence of the continental drift.

As pressure builds between colliding continental and oceanic plates, the coastline is pushed upwards over a span of centuries. Then it sinks in just minutes as that tension is released during a subduction zone earthquake and the ocean plate slides beneath the continent. In the case of Ishinomaki, Japan, that subsidence was four feet, and this coastal city now experiences daily flooding during high tides.

On a non-literary note, that same earthquake-driven subsidence is something practical for us to think about in here in the Pacific Northwest. Our last subduction zone event was just over three hundred ten years ago, and not only are there ghost forests of dead trees (pictures half way down the post) on our coasts that were abruptly dropped into the ocean thousands of years ago, but many beaches in Northern California are now close to twice as wide as they were at the beginning of the 1900s.

The uplift is taking place, and one day those stretches of strand will go down below the waves again in an episode of spectacular geologic violence.

One measured in just a handful of minutes.

Warmly recommended

2011-05-10T12:12:00.007-05:00

http://www.amazon.com/Outbound-ebook/dp/B004ZQRCRE/

"Outbound" is the kind of sweeping science fiction with a thread of hard-fought optimism that used to regularly connect with readers before the genre turned lagely dark and cynical during the 1990s. So it comes as no surprise then that Brad's novelette has drawn popular praise and recently won a readers-choice Anlab award after having first appeared in Analog magazine last year. "Outbound" shares an emotional resonance with works like Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, in which a bright but wounded individual fights through dire circumstances and comes to terms with issues of family and faith--all set against a backdrop of epic future conflict. Available here on Amazon for $0.99 in Kindle Format.

Aside from "Outbound's" intrinsic merits, it's also a real treat to recommend this story because Brad is both a fellow Writers of the Future 26 winner and an author who shares similar views with regards to dragging literary science fiction out from the morass of cynicism and polarized ideology that it has been mired in for two decades now. While I'm preparing to publish a set of works designed to help reconnect the genre with its alienated fan base, Brad is already out front on this path. He has several novelettes in Analog Magazine as well as a forthcoming anthology story collaboration with veteran military science fiction author, Mike Resnick.

http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Mirrors-novelette-Detective-ebook/dp/B004XR4NMW/

Even with his recent successes in traditional publishing, Brad is also experimenting with direct digital publishing by putting up new original genre works on Amazon and other online venues. Among these is his futuristic noir detective novelette "Blood and Mirrors". This gritty mini novel features a synthetic human police detective faced with a case that threatens to drag her back into the hellish sex trade that she was created for.

At $0.99, it's a steal.

Most definitely spring...

2011-05-09T12:23:00.002-05:00

...out here in the Gorge country

The Crisis in Higher Education

2011-05-07T16:15:00.002-05:00

Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education | The Nation

I'm normally not a fan of The Nation magazine, as it sits far to the left of my political views. However this article does a good job of laying out the state of higher education in the United States after nearly three decades of steady spending cuts for state universities.

It certainly reflects the desperate dilemma of humanities grad students that I witnessed the past year when going back to school. That and the near absence of American students in the physics and mathematics departments of American universities.

Fifty years ago this week

2011-05-06T18:57:00.006-05:00

Public domain image, NASA

Fifty years ago this week, my homeland took its first step into space by putting a man into Low Earth Orbit. It's a moment that I'm proud of, both as a citizen of the United States and as a member of the larger human community.

Much of that pride comes not only from the sheer difficulty of mastering manned spaceflight, but also from the contribution to human welfare made by the American space program. From the satellites that track hurricanes and typhoons, to electrical insulation that has greatly improved fire safety, to diagnostic technology used in medicine, the spin-offs from space flight have saved lives and helped to improve the quality of human life around the world.

As I discussed last month upon the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's pioneering flight into space, our future as a species lies beyond the gravity well of our native planet. That, and in learning the skills needed to traverse or even live the vacuum of space, we will master the methods and tools that will let us survive some of the worst Black Swan catastrophes that our universe and homeworld will eventually throw at us here on Earth.

Public domain image, US Navy

Spring comes to the Gorge

2011-05-03T12:20:00.005-05:00

Sun! At last, sun!

Yellow balsam flowers in the sun

Someone decides that she needs to be the center of attention.

Osama bin Laden is killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan - The Washington Post

2011-05-02T00:17:00.003-05:00

Osama bin Laden is killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan - The Washington Post

I have to admit, I'm a somewhat surprised by the emotional impact of this news. On one hand, it sounds like Osama bin Laden has been out of al-Qaeda's command and control loop for most of this past decade--a passive player whose influence waned as he focused primarily on staying alive as a symbol. So killing him may not have much of a major impact on a group that has already found itself under severe pressure and with greatly diminished capabilities for several years now.

On the other hand, seeing that headline on my iGoogle page hit me with a hard sense of closure. Whatever the strategic consequences are large or small, it does feel momentous, and it does feel like the end of an era.

This bodes ill for the future...

2011-04-30T10:56:00.006-05:00

How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis - By Frederick Kaufman | Foreign Policy

More and more I find myself worrying that here in the US we've effectively dismantled the financial regulatory systems put in place by the generations that fought World War II--both immediately prior to that conflict and in the years following its conclusion. That system brought us 70 years of economic stability, which stands in sharp contrast to the volatile industrial economy that preceded it. One that had spent over a third of it's time in depressions since it emerged here in the 1870s.

As collateral damage, deregulation also seems to have helped undo or imperil much of the international Post-War system of finance, currency, and trading that our grandparents and their parents built. That series of agreements and assurances was a major factor in eliminating war between the major economic powers as well as a general decline in the frequencies of war overall.

Under that system of trade and finance, it became much cheaper and easier to buy resources rather than seize them. Most importantly, both our domestic regulation of commodities trading and international trade agreements helped to moderate food prices both at home and abroad as an instrument of stability and peace.

And now it's gone.

In tandem with that is the dismantling of our manufacturing base in the US. Shipping factories and jobs overseas this past decade has left us in a situation in which we can no longer even reliably produce or obtain critical medicines .

As I continue to read more and more about the financial crises of 2008 and the three decades of deregulation that made it possible, I've grown more concerned about the coming decades. Looking back now with the benefit of hindsight, I find myself wondering just how many of the most reasonably optimistic scenarios for our future were bound up in that now unraveling world system built by our grandparents and great grandparents.

And now...Mt. Adams

2011-04-29T12:15:00.006-05:00

Photos of the northern half of the pair of stratovolcanoes that straddle the Columbia River Gorge.

It's hard to get a sense of scale for Mt. Adams, even when in its presence. It's 11,000 foot sister, Mt. Hood, would fit completely inside, with plenty of volume to spare.

You almost have to see it from the air or look at it on a map to realize a it has a footprint that could contain a major metropolitan area or small Medieval European kingdom. The tallest peak in this photo is actually a false summit, set well forward of the highest point on the mountain, which is farther to the north.

Between the the storms and wet cold weather of this La Niña year, it's been a pain trying to line up a day when the mountain was actually visible. Even in a normal year this can be something of challenge here in the gray and misty Pacific Northwest. We can go for weeks during the spring without seeing any of these glacier-sheathed spires, which would otherwise dominate the horizons of both major and minor urban areas. And this spring has been a cold and dreary mess.

However, the meteorologist and ocean climate people are saying that the current La Niña thermal osculation in the Pacific Ocean is drawing to an end, and that temperatures should climb back into a normal range. A change that probably can not come soon enough for the inhabitants of the tornado-rampaged Midwest and southern states, this year. The low pressure created by that mass of shifted cold water off the west coast of South America is what's drawn the jet stream south to feed its energy into those amazingly violent storms.

While the month of May will probably just as bad, there's hope that next years tornado season will be milder without the current thermal configuration that's driving this one. And in the meanwhile, I'm certainly ready for some heat and warm weather. One of my favorite aspects of life in the Northwest are the seemingly infinite summer twilights spent walking around the warm city or the countryside, or on porches and rooftops with a book, a beer, or a glass of wine.

The genre vulgarity post

2011-04-25T12:01:00.014-05:00

Well, perhaps less vulgar and more Not Suitable For Work, depending on your tastes.

So, thusly forewarned, it's Hugo Award season again in the science fiction literary community. While cynicism and despair look to continue being over-represented among critically well-received works, there are some bright spots as well genuinely humorous choices among the nominees.

Bright spot: Writers of the Future winner and Utah author Eric J. Stone's excellent SF novelette, "That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made" is on the ballot. So, go Eric! That and congratulations for having made it to the final round with a great piece of writing.

Humorous: The infamous and hilarious video "F*ck Me Ray Bradbury" is up for the Best Dramatic Presentation - Short in the Hugos. Realizing that every blogger and their mother has already posted it, here it is again, in all it's off-color glory.

Because nothing says "I love you internet," like flogging a dead meme.

While we're on the topic of raunchy comedy, I just came across one of the funniest parodies of the show that defined late-night 1990s Nevada on-air culture, and often blurred the line between talk radio and science fiction. Then desert-dweller Art Bell's Coast-to-Coast Overnight AM carved out a distinctive niche of X-Files era conspiracy theories, alien visitations, and paranormal intrusions that had a lock on the minds otherwise sane and sober miners, loggers, truckers, and irrigation valley farmers. It was, I think, a kind of guilty pleasure for many that ranked up there with grocery store checkout-counter tabloids with titles that heralded the birth of Bat Boy.

At any rate, you won't need to have listened to even a single episode of Coast-to-Coast back in its glory days to appreciate commedian Phil Hendrie's mind-blowingly good parody. Though it's also most definitely not suitable for work.

The Business Rusch: Royalty Statements Update | Kristine Kathryn Rusch

2011-04-21T23:26:00.003-05:00

Author Kristine Kathryn Rusch's eyebrow-raising article on how some of the major publishing houses may be underreporting sales of ebooks and print books to authors within the speculative fiction community.

The Business Rusch: Royalty Statements Update | Kristine Kathryn Rusch

This does make me feel better about my decision to focus on putting together a set of good quality works to digitally publish on Amazon.com and other online venues, rather than having spent the past six months fighting to land an agent and break into the world of traditional print. And I can't say that it comes as a complete surprise that publishers may be underreporting or have chosen to leave in place a dated system that by its design low balls figures to their advantage. Or that this is only coming to light now that authors can track and compare sales of their self-published digital works with ebooks put online by publishers. Or at a time when programs like BookScan are enabling authors independently track sales of their books within a number of venues, and then of course compare those figures with what publishers are reporting in their royalty statements. After all, this is an industry that by all accounts makes a routine business practice of holding onto payments for authors right up until just before it becomes possible to sue them in New York State courts--NYC being where most traditional print houses are headquartered.

To be clear, I am not gloating. Eventually, I'd like to have my works in hard copy form on the shelves of brick-and-mortar bookstores like my beloved Powell's in downtown Portland. If book publishers have been underreporting by a factor of ten, however, then there is a strong possibility that coming lawsuits will force publishers to put a freeze on purchasing new novels, and may even see several already struggling large houses go out of business.

While do I think that ebooks will account for the majority of book sales in the very near future, I don't seem them supplanting hard copies entirely. So far the best analogy of the many put forward to date that I've heard is the comparison of the emergence of ebooks and the ereaders like Kindle that have made them popular to the introduction of cheap, mass market paperbacks/pocket books starting in the late 1930s. The paperback did not kill the hardback. Instead it created a new parallel market for writers who could not break into hardcovers, and in introducing a lower-cost book format, it attracted droves of readers who had been reluctant or unable to shell out the full cost of hardbound novel.

Ebooks and digital readers seem to doing exactly the same thing already. Ranging from ninety-nine cents to four dollars, they seem to have made reading an affordable pleasure again. And a guilt free one, even in the current economy. After all, there is a lot less buyers' remorse that goes with spending $2.99 to download a promising looking ebook onto a Kindle or iPad than plunking down $26 for a new novel from a favorite author that is only available in hardbound. And it's a lot easier to be impulsive with that download, rather than having to jump in the car and spend ten minutes in the aisle of a book store staring at that $16 - $26 dollar price tag and wondering if its worth it. And with even paperbacks often clocking in at $10.99, impulsive book buys have been becoming a thing of the past.

So this is certainly mixed news. Good in that it will hopefully fix an industry that may well be cheating intellectual property creators of the money that they are contractually owed. Bad in that even if it does not sound the death knell for a publishing genre that has been struggling for several decades, it may result in a disruption and freeze on buying for sometime to come.

Oh well. Onward to ebooks and digital publishing for us neopros. Glory in the online realm first, then the heady thrill of paper a few years down the road.

Two Photojournalists Killed Covering Battle In Libya

2011-04-21T01:07:00.003-05:00

Two Photojournalists Killed Covering Battle In Libya : NPR

This is definitely a sad one. For me, Tim Hetherington's Restrepo was the only worthwhile documentary to come out of either the Afghan or Iraq wars. I tried watching several over the course of the past decade, and sadly the filmmakers' political views were normally about as subtle as a baseball bat to the face.

There's almost a kind of inverse law that seems to apply to war documentaries. The more a filmmaker insists that his or her work is neutral piece, the further it sits towards one side or the other of the ideological spectrum.

While Restrepo does not always show the US Army in its best light, it does as good a job as I've seen so far of documenting the life of a small group of infantrymen spending over a year in a hazardous combat zone, as well as chaos and confusion of battle and the sometimes bloody difficulties of waging war in a tribal mountain environment where politics are clan based.

So I'm definitely ruing the loss of Herterington and the even perspective that he brought to covering armed conflicts.

Recommendations and happy news

2011-04-19T13:37:00.003-05:00

Fellow Writers of the Future 26 winner Tom Crosshill has an excellent story in this month's edition of Light Speed Magazine. "Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son" features quantum strangeness as seen through the eyes of a Russian child caught up in a sinister experiment. I warmly recommend it for those who enjoy mind-bending scientific concepts fused with good, human-level storytelling. That and it's completely free online!

Mama, We are Zhenya, Your Son by Tom Crosshill | Lightspeed Magazine

Also, Tyler Carter, the extremely talented illustrator who did the fantastic artwork for my WOTF26 story "Lisa with Child," has won another major award and gotten to make a second trip to Hollywood. This time to meet with A-list celebrities and receive some well-earned accolades for a big accomplishment: Namely winning a Student Emmy for his gorgeous BYU CGI short film, DreamGiver.

Tyler had already interned with two major animation studios prior to this achievement, so it's safe bet that you will be seeing more of his work on the screens of movie theaters in the coming years.

Mt. Adams photographic expedition...kind of...

2011-04-15T13:41:00.013-05:00

I spent a morning spent up in the highlands at the base of Mt. Adams to take some photos of the mountain. Only the volcano decided to hide behind a localized veil of clouds on an otherwise sunny day

So, instead I motored around and took micro shots of the highland countryside while waiting for the clouds to lift.

Still winter in the mountains, while spring has sprung below

At last, the volcano begins to show itself. Big and bulky, Adams creates its own weather systems.

Did I mention it creates its own weather?

Gracile and tapered, Mt. Hood lacks the broad shoulders needed to form large storms. Clouds merely slide around her slender form.

An photo from a few years back. It may not look it from this distance, but Adams is tall and vast enough that Mt. Hood would fit inside with room to spare.

50 years ago

2011-04-12T22:55:00.027-05:00

Our future as a global technological civilization lies in space exploration. The metals and light elements essential to maintaining and expanding our technology base exist in the asteroids of our Solar System on a scale that dwarfs the dwindling amounts that remain reasonably accessible to us on Earth. Ideally, one day the operations of industry will take place in orbit, using resources and power extracted from stony celestial bodies and solar radiation.

Additionally, our continued existence on Earth depends on learning how to live in space.

Specifically within closed systems and robust habitats that will allow us to survive as societies and as unique cultures when our home world and the cosmos throw catastrophes on a mind-numbing scale at us. While the chances of a black swan event like a super volcano eruption, dinosaur killer asteroid, or power-grid destroying solar storm on the scale of the October 1859 event are slim in any given year, the occurrence of such events remain only a matter of time. Adapting some of the technologies and methods of life off-Earth to life on our native planet will allow us to not only live more efficiently, but prepare us to live through many of the worst case scenarios that we will face in the long haul.

I also believe that the future of the human mind waits at least in part in space. The adaptive pantropic biotechnologies required to let us live in environments radically different from those that we evolved in will push us to continue the development of the human body and mind. This will come not just from the expansion of existing capabilities, but also the creation new ones, the sum of which will take us beyond the scope of what we call human nature--this beta version mode of being shaped by the contingent legacy systems of our brains and biology as originally adapted to a world of hunting and gathering and tribal socialization.

Don't get me wrong. I like human nature, and I hope that we not only conserve its best aspects, but that there will always be individuals who chose to stick with its original format, out of sheer stubbornness if nothing else. But it would be a better and infinitely more interesting universe if human nature was only the root of something larger and more wonderful. Certainly something more durable on the timescale of our universe than the brief and flitting existence as a species that we are currently faced with.

Sensory modalities

2011-04-10T22:36:00.017-05:00

I took a drive up the White Salmon River Canyon to shoot some photos of Mt. Adams this past week, and ended up having a unexpected moment of profound silence after climbing out of the car to wait for the clouds to lift off the big volcano (upper left corner in the photo below).

Utterly quiet at first. No bird song, no susurration of wind, no animal cries or even the rustling scurry of small furry things--the mountain clearing and adjoining forest apparently still in the final stage of winter's suspended animation at this altitude. After a minute or two, the nearly subliminal sound of melt water trickling out of nearby mounds of snow grew audible, seemingly ex nihlo from the void of sensory deprivation. After several additional minutes of deliberate listening I registered a distant breeze in the top of the pines in the direction of the nearest highland valley. Then a lower, enveloping murmur of water in motion all around me. Not just the melt from the nearest mounds of snow, but liquid seeping beneath the logged clearing's floor of dry pine needles. Last to join this continuum of expanding awareness was the faint, shifting rasp of those millions of fallen needles as they warmed quickly in the direct sunlight after a night well below freezing. Almost a soft, surf-like roar on the very faintest, lowest edge of hearing.

I'd almost forgotten what it's like to be in such a complete silence, and just how much information there is in the bandwidth of human hearing once the mind has adjusted to it.

One thing I very much miss from the days of being an Army cavalry scout is just how plugged into the environment it's possible to be. We really do use precious little of our in-built physical capabilities when living in an industrial society.

And that's true of other senses as well. One of my favorites memories of becoming aware of just how much we miss in the world around us comes from the train up for a ground invasion of Kosovo during the NATO air war against Serbian forces there during the spring of 1999. While the main body of the armor battalion I was stationed with fought its way through a narrow pass against the Combat Maneuver Training Center's opposition force at Hoensfeld, Germany, we scouts spread out behind the constricted terrain to put eyes on choke points farther along the lines of advance and to check for additional enemy defenses.

After several hours of quietly following a wood line and locating a pair of concealed enemy observation posts, my section sergeant and I came across a narrow point between two forested hillsides that formed a natural defile--a confined passage that would constrict the movement of an armor formation and make an excellent killing zone.

Only there was no one there. Suspicious, we dropped our rucks and crawled carefully through the flora of the defile's southern slope; then studied the slope on the far side. Still nothing. So the section sergeant had us wait, lying in the bushes and staring for several minutes.

And suddenly it was all there. Camouflaged fighting positions, hidden trenches, concealed bunkers, and several dozen soldiers in battle dress eating MREs, performing maintenance, and keeping watch in total silence. It was very much like one of the Magic Eye paintings popular in the early 90s. Only rather than a confusion of pixels that hide a crude stereographic 3D image, the chaotic visual noise of the German forest and hills had yielded subtle man-made patterns of simulated lethality.

As time went on, I grew more adept at seeing what was out in the world before me rather than seeing my expectations of what should be there. Or differently put, seeing the physical world rather than the assumptions that my mind populated it with.

Part of what made my senses so keen back then was my gradual acclimation to dealing with natural information rather than cultural. Natural information being sensory impressions of the physical world and the short-term, immediate implications of those perceived objects and events. This is an ancient category of data. A primal type that our brains originally evolved to process. It's similar to and overlapping, but different from the abstract cultural information that is social relations, cultural norms, and behavioral expectation.

Both types involve some immensely sophisticated, associative mental modeling, but cultural information is tied into some recently evolved neurobiological data processing modules that generate an awareness of other human beings' perceptions and their potential emotional responses to both present events and possible future situations.

Natural information is a product of modeling the external world; cultural information is glimpse of the inner worlds of others--both as individuals and as groups. Natural information is focused more on the here and now, and only a little on what comes next. Cultural information, meanwhile, is far more probabilistic and goes hand-glove with those simulations of the future that we call reasoning and anticipation.

One negative aspect of my past two years of living in the middle of a large city been the temptation to give up that natural-information level of awareness out of politeness. The urban landscape is obviously a vastly different volume of space from a mountain clearing near the foot of a glacier-occupied volcano. There are a variety of social protocols that govern the very act of seeing in the shared spaces of an urban foot traffic environment. There is a very limited amount of acceptable eye contact with strangers on the friendly streets of Portland, and precious little time in which it's appropriate to take note of another human being's body language, physical proximity, and what they are doing with their hands.

Active sight violates all kinds of social norms. The requisite scanning and the punctuated pauses of deliberate, evaluative gazes make people nervous. The timing is all wrong in the eyes of others, and being so deliberately engaged is a signal in itself.

While active sight can create an almost zen sense of connection to the fluid and ever-evolving environment, it provokes a negative emotional response in bystanders.

As I wrote about last year, learning to transgress social spaces is a learned skill set. It's one that's very much tied into how we conceptualize different spaces and the cultural weight of the rules that we assign to these environments. Those rules and mental models very much affect not just our expectations of what's in those spaces, but how we let ourselves observe those spaces to start with.

Off course some degree of compromise is necessary for a harmonious life in a largely tranquil urban setting, but there are days when it's fun or simply reassuring to put on a pair of sunglasses and really look around to see what's actually out there, rather than the choppy glimpses appropriate to existence in a modern society.

The semiarid eastern Columbia Gorge

2011-04-07T22:51:00.003-05:00

East of the Cascades

A working replica of Stonehenge built at nearly the same latitude as the original. A bit of Northwestern odd that was originally a memorial built for fallen soldiers by a prominent local member of the pacifistic Society of Friends/

Unforgettable – Chapter 1 - Unforgettable: a novel by Eric James Stone

2011-04-07T04:24:00.001-05:00

Hugo nominee and Writers of the Future winner Eric J Stone's free serial e-book experiment. Spies, tradecraft, and an aspiring spook with an unusual talent.

Unforgettable – Chapter 1 - Unforgettable: a novel by Eric James Stone

Recycled 1950s SF strangeness

2011-04-03T17:02:00.001-05:00

Very cool

Short Sharp Science: Brain-computer implant has passed 1000-day milestone - StumbleUpon

2011-04-02T14:50:00.001-05:00

A chip-sized interface implant that allows a paralyzed woman to control a computer

Short Sharp Science: Brain-computer implant has passed 1000-day milestone - StumbleUpon

Locus Online News � Bacigalupi and Watts to Collaborate on Depressing Dystopian Shared World Anthology

2011-04-01T20:14:00.000-05:00

So at least some of the people in the industry do have a sense of humor about how dark and cynical science fiction has gotten. I certainly had good chuckle over this April first Locus 'article.'

Locus Online News � Bacigalupi and Watts to Collaborate on Depressing Dystopian Shared World Anthology

Human thought

2011-04-01T13:00:00.009-05:00

The introduction from the document that I use to keep track of everything I've learned about human thought over the past fifteen years.

The Evolution of Human Thought

“Something beyond our understanding occurs...the transformation of an objective cerebral computation into a subjective experience.”

-Oliver Sachs

“Minds are what brains do.”

-Marvin Minsky

Basic sentience likely arises from a mapping function in which the parallel processes of sight, sound, touch, smell, and feel are woven together into a representation of the external world and internal body[1]. Such an animal consciousness perceives only the timeless continuum of the now, and its first apprehension of the past was the short-term memory system, which holds impressions for just seconds or minutes in the form of electrical currents between neurons[2].

Procedural memory--also known as reflex memory or muscle memory--was the first system of durable memory to arise in our evolutionary history[3]. Procedural memory involves protein synthesis, writing out new neurons or strengthening existing neural connections, thus allowing organisms to learn new physical skills as well as to refine innate reflexive skills passed down genetically in the form of instinct.

Declarative memory arose as a mechanism for storing and recalling two types of information: episodic and semantic. The episodic memory subsystem encodes the autobiographical recall of past situations that have been experienced[4]. The second subsystem, semantic memory, stores conceptual information that is independent of the situation in which it was learned.[5]

Semantic memory allows for the creation of meaning by enabling individuals to remember the abstract commonalities of multiple events, and thus discover underlying relationships. Knowledge of such cause-and-effect dynamics is preserved in the form of ideas and images known as concepts. Not surprisingly words, perhaps the most efficient carriers of abstract meaning, are stored within the semantic memory.

Once written in the declarative memory, experiential and semantic information is not laid out in neat, static lines, but in interconnected web-like networks. The brain by its very layout defines the present by the past, cross-referencing new sensory information with preexisting knowledge as part of a process of constant conceptual association[6]. Much of this takes place within the highly developed association areas of the cerebral cortex, the brain’s outermost layer, which neurologically distinguishes humans from other animals and even our primate cousins.

The ability to create complex association between bodies of conceptual knowledge and processed sensory information allows the forebrain to add a kind of editorial commentary to animal consciousness--one that highlights underlying causes and effects. This may well be the source of human sapience, which includes not only the basic sentient animal awareness of the world, but our perception of complex implications, abstract dynamics, and persistent patterns of interactions among the temporary components of a system, such as a distinctive society made up of individuals who come and go.

Additionally, within the outer cortex, external perception, internal thoughts, and emotional triggers are integrated and balanced to help mold volitional responses[7]. At the heart of this decision-making executive function is the orbital frontal cortex[8] [9]. Situated behind the eyes, and massively integrated into the emotion-mediating limbic system, this specific area helps to shape emotional reactions by inhibiting or modulating such signals[10].

In other words, this area which constructs conceptual perspectives, uses those perspectives to modify our emotional responses. It is also through the association of new and old information weighted by emotion that the frontal lobes help to create a coherent and holistic worldview known as a paradigm[11].

The cognitive constituents of a paradigm are concepts, ideas, and the simulacra models of physical objects[12]. Tangled webs of interrelated concepts, ideas, and simulacra form sub-maps known as fields of knowledge. Each field of knowledge covers an aspect of the world and gives rise to an understanding of that broad area’s far-reaching dynamics. The overall paradigm that emerges from these fields of knowledge is a worldview and meta-model that influences which aspects of reality a person notices.

In the words of the political philosopher Samuel P. Huntington, we use our paradigms to:

1. order and generalize about reality;

2. understand causal relationships among phenomena;

3. anticipate, and if we are lucky, predict future developments;

4. distinguish what is important from what is unimportant; and

5. show us what paths we should take to achieve our goals.

The world-awareness that a paradigm makes possible is tool of unprecedented power, extending our awareness of possible consequences and potential outcomes into the future, as much as our short-term and episodic memories allow us to look back into the past. This has allowed us an unmatched flexibility in fulfilling our survival needs. However, to be fully utilized, this world awareness is accompanied by an advanced awareness of self--a complex and emotionally-driven model which incorporates assessments of personal capabilities as well as needs that must be satisfied. This requirement for a representation of self gave rise to the neurological machinery of self-image[13].

The building blocks of this self-image are schema, which are emotional convictions about capability and self worth. The setting of durable schema is large part of childhood-development. Such convictions are not easily altered or changed, and the lifetime evolution of schema is the core story of personal growth and maturation.

Additionally, self-image is heavily influenced by the opinions of others. Our ancestors evolved in a niche in which their survival was closely tied to their ability to function within a troop, band, or tribal group, and it may be that the network of mirror neurons[14] that run through the emotional limbic system of our brains play a crucial role in giving the views of others a weighty impact on our self-image.

While schema are the unique property of individuals, concepts and ideas can be communicated and shared. The rise of syntax-structured language either allowed or accelerated the process of these memes accruing in common bodies of knowledge and values known as culture[15]. Cultures act as repository of such memetic information, allowing concepts and ideas to be passed down through generations. This has allowed concepts to undergo a multigenerational process of Lamarckian evolution[16]. Bodies of culture (mythos) helped to generate the material stability and intellectual climate that gave rise to the logos: a body of rationally derived concepts.

The fruit of the logos, technology, has impacted the development of human thought in part by creating lives of leisure, the likes of which our forebears could have scarcely imagined. No longer burdened by the struggles of day-to-day survival, the dreams, fantasies, and pursuit of happiness have begun to play an ever-larger role in the lives of the post-industrial world’s inhabitants. Where their grandparents were pragmatists who soldiered through lifetimes of limited opportunities, current generations are faced with the temptations, possibilities, pitfalls, and challenges offered by economies of affluence.

This essay is about the ongoing evolution of human thought--from its biological origins to the distinct religious and secular paradigms that have arisen during its course. It also contains an examination of emotion, as cognition and feeling are inextricably linked in the processes of thought in a very real neurobiological sense. Emotions, in a sense, are the weight of thought as situational awareness, concepts, memories, ideas, risks, and potential outcomes are weighed against one another in the processes of goal setting and decision making. Understanding thought also means understanding the brain, and so we will first examine the organ of thought and the evolutionary forces that shaped it.

The interplay of genes and environment

“Human brains are evolved to be molded by experience…”

-Martin Teicher,“Scars That Won’t Heal: The Neurobiology of Child Abuse”

As animals, we humans are generalists who have adapted to new climates by altering old behaviors or creating new ones. We have established ourselves above the artic circle by innovating new types of clothing, dwellings, tools, and local hunting techniques. Though physically evolved for walking, running, and climbing, we have taught ourselves not only how to fly, but to navigate by stars, and ascend to the moon. We invent new behaviors with a frequency not seen elsewhere in the natural world.

In a sense, we humans embody a paradoxical tension between nature and nurture--between genetically encoded behavior and behaviors learned from our surroundings. We are the product of an animal line of evolution with a physical shape and bodily needs that necessitates a broad spectrum of survival and social behaviors that defines us as a species. We also carry genetic drives and reflexes, which bias us towards specific modes of behavior within that continuum, especially during our earliest years of life. At the same time our lineage has also endowed us with an associative cortex and the innovative behavioral flexibility that this neurological wetware makes possible. Thus rather than a genetically programmed mind, we have guidelines and innate biases as well as a receptiveness to environmental influences. Instead of a complete body of instinctual knowledge, we are predisposed to be meme gatherers, language generators, society creators, and possibly even the intuitive authors of moral systems in order to facilitate group cohesion and the reproduction of our shared genes and memes[17].

The status of our ancestors as omnivores has played a central role in the mental evolution of humankind[18]. Our ability to choose between a wide variety of plants and prey animals presents us with an array of troublesome decisions summed up in Dr. Paul Rozin’s famous phrase, the omnivore’s dilemma. In short, where dedicated carnivores and herbivores spend little if any mental energy on deciding what to eat[19], omnivores such as humans are confronted with a wide array of potential victuals, some of which are nourishing and in times of scarcity may make the difference between life and death. Or, these foods might be toxic, leading to a painful debilitation or demise.

Life as an omnivore calls for analytical intelligence, a keen pallet to detect possible toxins, and a prodigious memory to recall what can and can not be safely eaten. In humans it may have also favored the evolution of language instincts in part as a means of sharing information on both the availability and safety of food types, as well as possibly as a means of facilitating cooperative hunting.[20] As Michael Pollan points out in his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, cultures act as repositories of food lore, often encoding warnings into the very names of lethal foods, like the death cap mushroom.

While gestures likely formed an important component of early human communications about food, the development of speech necessitated significant physiological changes. Our ancestors’ voice boxes elongated into a configuration that permitted greater verbal sophistication, despite the increased risk of choking to death while swallowing food. The speech center of their brains also swelled, and this may have been a key step in our ability to employ complex abstract reasoning[21].

In addition to the choices offered by an array of potentially edible fungi and plants, the ability of our ancestors to eat meat shaped the evolution of our brains. Acquiring calorie-rich flesh, whether from hunting, scavenging, or cracking open bones with basic stone tools to access the nutrient-rich marrow, allowed for the survival of individuals with larger, calorie-intensive brains, as well as supplying a steady source of the vitamin B-12 essential for the functioning of the brain and peripheral nervous system.[22]

Living in hierarchical troops and bands, Homo sapiens ancestors relied increasingly upon cooperation, tool use, and an increasingly complex reasoning ability in order to survive. Autobiographical recall likely grew more complex along with semantic memory capabilities in order to facilitate these intertwined behavior types[23].

A mutation took place, shrinking the jaw and reducing the muscle strain placed on the front of the skull. This cleared the way for the forebrain to increase to the maximum size that the birth cannel could pass.[24] Static-instinctual behavior likely atrophied in favor of the association area’s dynamic analytical abilities, leaving behind a basic framework of encoded motor-reflexes, developmental biases, and emotional infrastructure in neurons and hormones designed to predispose humans towards modes of useful behavior.[25]

However useful, the enlargement of the forebrain carried a high developmental cost. Where many animals can walk and navigate shortly after birth, human infants are entirely dependent on their parents for mobility and feeding as their brains unfold and blossom during the first years of life, setting the stage for our later behavioral complexity and sophisticated reasoning abilities. Along with the need for a long neurological maturation period, our infant bodies require time to grow large enough to support our oversized heads. The emergence of the association cortex also meant evolving increasingly sophisticated emotions to encourage us to use our new capabilities, and so the human limbic system increased in complexity alongside the forebrain.

Additionally, our efficiency as social meme creator-gatherers increased when individuals lived longer, so that they could assemble and preserve complete bodies of memetic knowledge. This meant that the mutation rate slowed in order to retard the development of cancers. Large intelligent mammals with complex communication schemes such as humans, apes, and whales have half of the genetic mutation rate and consequently half the rate of cancer as dogs and other short-lived, socially simpler mammals[26].

Uniquely, we humans appear to be the only primates in which males do not leave their native family band or troop upon reaching puberty. This may contribute to both stability of groups and the long-term accumulation of knowledge. Additionally, we are unique in the degree that we form nested groups--a family that is part of a tribe, which in turn can be a sub-group within an even large social organization.[27]

Little fossil evidence has been uncovered concerning the emergence of symbolic thought and advanced reasoning. Anatomically modern humans have been around for between 100,000 and 200,000 years with brain sizes and shapes identical to those of today. However, extant simple kits of stone tools appear to have remained largely static for most of this period. There is, however, some physical evidence for an abrupt behavioral change around fifty thousand years ago in a wave of symbolic art and new arrays of advanced Paleolithic tools. During this period behaviorally modern Homo sapiens also began to displace or assimilate neighboring Homo erectus and Neanderthal populations in the Near East, Southern Asia, and later, Europe.[28]

One possibility that has been put forward was that Homo sapiens was pushed into a significantly increased utilization of its abstract reasoning abilities not by a genetic change in a small local population, but rather by an environmental or social stimulus that affected the organization of the brains of individuals. One candidate is grammatically structured spoken language.

With its complex structures, and its ability to facilitate symbolic thought and communications through words, grammatically structured language stimulates complex neuronal organization within the cortices associated with verbal communications, semantic memory, and conceptual associations.[29] In other words, the mental strains of acquiring and using of natural language may have been what pushed our ancestors into full sapience as individuals[30].

As symbols embedded with conceptual meaning, words allow humans to internally manipulate and externally communicate large numbers of concepts with a speed and efficiency seen nowhere else in the natural world. Words effectively allow us to rapidly string together and communicate dozens of concepts in grammatical structures without having to dwell on each of those concepts.

While humans and other hominini also made use of internal visual images in the act of thinking, the addition of words facilitated a world-altering increase in our capacity for symbolic thought. The impact of adding audio words as complex conveyers of concepts in a visually oriented species likely opened novel avenues of thought, even as it complimented the existing visual-based imagination and reasoning.

Assembling consciousness: Functional components of awareness

. . .

Footnotes

[1] The brain’s parietal lobe—which appears to orients us in space and time—may play a key role in shaping this consciousness. One of its roles appears to be the filtering of internal information from the continuum of sensory inputs. From there, the brain appears to use specific sets of neural pathways to process information that has been tagged as referring to the self. Information pertaining to other humans and objects within the environment travels though a different set of processing paths. Differentiating between external and internal information may be necessary for an organism to experience basic consciousness, as self. A seizure of the parietal lobe has been cited as one possible biological explanation for the mystic’s experience: a state of consciousness in which the barriers between self and the universe are dissolved, and the subject experiences all of existence as an undifferentiated unity. Additionally, the differentiating between external and internal information may be necessary for an organism to experience basic consciousness.

[2] This system of memory--essentially currents flowing between sets of neurons—may have first evolved so that an object or a threat would not vanish from awareness the moment it passes out of direct sight or hearing.

[3] Procedural memory appears to be stored within the hippocampus, the declarative in the more recently evolved cerebral cortex.

[4] Procedural memory may provide clues to individuals whose ability to create new autobiographical memories has been destroyed by neurological trauma, as happened with the fictional protagonist of the film Memento. Dr. Oliver Sachs describes a real life patient who had also been left unable to recall anything in his life after the removal of a brain tumor, in the story “The Last Hippy.” After several years in a hospital, the sheer familiarity for moving around the ward—perhaps captured by procedural memory—allowed the patient to recognize that he had been there for some time as well as recalling the names of those whom he met and frequently interacted with after his operation. Oliver Sachs, An Anthropologist on Mars (Alfred A Knopf, Inc, 1995).

[5] The semantic memory likely has its origins as a specialized system that stored information on the basis of relational location in space, as opposed to autobiographical system’s time-based organization.

[6] This is likely a part of the neurological function known as working memory. Working memory allows the brain to temporarily store information in an easy to manipulate, active form. It components are the mechanism of focus and attention, visual imagination, and audio imagination. It’ is experienced in our consciousness as comprehension and the awareness of reasoning.

[7] In other words this fusion of conceptual knowledge and inner thoughts interfaces with emotion, and might well be the wetware system that generates conscious emotion-modifying perspectives.

[8] Interestingly, this area appears to exhibit a great deal of variation between individuals, both in humans and in other primates.

[9] The limbic, anterior cingulate cortex also plays a crucial role in supplying motivation. Patients with damage to this area display little or no signs of volition, and those who recover from injuries in this cortex report having experienced an utter lack of motivation to take self-initiated action or to respond to events around them. In the words of neurologist Antonio Damasio the anterior cingulate cortex is a location within the brain where “…the systems concerned with emotion/feeling, attention, and working memory interact so intimately that they constitute the source for the energy of both external action…and internal action….” Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (Penguin Putnam, New York, New York, 1994), pgs, 71-74.

[10]The inhibitory/modulation processes are a function which can obviously be impaired by alcohol or various narcotics. Also, some neurologists classify the orbital frontal cortex as a part of the limbic system due to the high degree of integration between the two areas.

[11] This should not be taken to mean that the orbital frontal complex is the site of our consciousness. Memory is distributed in various regions of the brain, and sensory information is processed in discrete cortices. Awareness may be a series of synchronized parallel process which generate simultaneous representations of external events and internal states. As such, consciousness may arise from cross talk between the various cortices and nuclei that are active during such a representational process. These representations in turn, may be composed of patterns of firing potential within circuits of neurons, which when fired as a group cause a sensory cortex to generate or reconstitute an image or sensation. Or they can cause physical movement by activating a motor cortex. Such depositional representations are proposed by neurologist Antonio Damasio in his book, Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, pgs. 94, 102-105

[12] Simulacra are the autobiographical and muscle memory recall of physical objects and their properties

[13] The need for self image may have also given rise to the internal narrative voice heard within ones mind. Or this inner voice may have been a means of harnessing the spoken to word to serve as a medium of thought, creating an unprecedented power to solidify vaguely sensed abstracts into concrete concepts. One explanatory hypothesis for schizophrenia is that the internal voice of the mind is a fusion of several sub-voices that represent the various functions or inputs of awareness. The breakdown of a timing mechanism may cause the various sub-voices to fall out of sync, thus creating a perception of the component voices as irresistible or near-irresistible external speakers, despite having an internal origin.

[14] Mirror neurons fire when an individual observes the actions, expressions, or experiences of another, causing the watcher to experience an echo of the observed person’s emotion or physical sensation. Such a sympathetic experience may help in creating emotional interpersonal bonds, as well as with imitating performed actions, and play a role in self-contemplation. As one scientist notes "…mirror neurons may enable humans to see themselves as others see them, which may be an essential ability for self-awareness and introspection.” Broken Mirrors A Theory of Autism, Lindsay M. Oberman and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran (Scientific American Reports: Special Edition on Child Development, September 11, 2007) pg. 25.

[15] Various troops and bands of monkeys and apes appear to develop unique bodies of grooming practices, social gestures, and forging techniques. Thus it can be argued that culture in predates both humans and syntax-structured languages. Early primate memes were passed on by imitation and non-verbal instruction rather than the spoken word. Additionally, language as we know it may have evolved out of a combination of gestures and cries.

[16] Lamarckism is the idea and an organism passes on characteristics to its offspring acquired during its life time. An example of this is that if an animal builds strength through exertion, it will pass this strength genetically to its progeny. While widely discredited in modern evolutionary biology, Lamarckism has enjoyed something of a resurgence when applied to memes, in that these mental replicators are actively modified by the thinkers who hold them, and then passed along thus changed.

[17] MIT linguist Noam Chomsky has famously proposed a set of innate grammar rules to explain how children intuitively language and commonalities of human languages found around the world. Harvard biologist Marc Hauser proposes a similar inherent set of drives that encourage humans to develop moral systems, just monkeys have been observed to display propensities towards fairness or reciprocal altruism. While I personally believe both men’s hypotheses to be correct, Hauser’s 2006 book Moral Minds presents insufficient evidence to successfully argue his claims.

[18] Among other physical traits shaped by our place as omnivores are our jaws and teeth, which allow us to process both plants and meat. Additionally, the ability to control fire may have allowed the intestines and jaws of our ancestors to shrink considerably, as we no longer needed such muscular mandibles and extensive guts to process an all-raw diet. Our largely vestigial vermiform intestinal appendixes appear to be a non-functional holdover from their era of larger intestines, and may have allowed our ancestors to digest uncooked leaves. Individuals born with out appendixes suffer no ill effects or drastically reduced digestive capabilities. The taming of fire also affected our species’ development by vastly expanding the amount of plants and animals that could be eaten, as cooking broke down many of the toxins, bacteria, and structural features that prevented us from consuming many types of flora and fauna. Finally, this reduction of the jaw its need for an extensive infrastructure of tendons and anchor points may have been key in allowing our foreheads to expand, becoming less slopped in order to accommodate a large cerebral cortex.

[19] The most famous example of the impact of a single-food, low-thought diet is that of the koala. These mammals apparently went from eating a varied diet, to dinning exclusively on eucalyptus leaves. As a result, natural selection worked against the species’ large, calorie intensive brains, resulting in a congenitally atrophied, minimalist brain, which occupies only 60% of the cranial cavity--the rest of the skull’s internal volume being filled with fluid.

[20] The evolution of the both language instincts as well as the elongation of vocal cords may well have not been driven by any single use, but rather its broad spectrum of usefulness. If this was the case, then it’s possible that increasing lingual prowess may have become a driver behind the evolution of multiple human traits. Unfortunately we do not have direct fossil or genetic evidence that describes the emergence of syntaxial language.

[21] Broca’s area: A region in the frontal lobe that generates articulated speech.

[22] Not surprisingly, omnivores such as primates, rats, and bears tend to be among the most curious and intelligent types of species in terms of learning and problem solving. Dolphins with their complex cooperative hunting behaviors are also highly intelligent. Also remarkably bright are elephants, who have varied diets, complex social hierarchies, and whose migratory range requires a good memory of water and food locations for survival during lean years.

[23] The semantic memory may have evolved from a distinct spatial memory system designed to store information about objects in the context of location (space) rather than in the temporal order of autobiographical recall. This system then may have then taken on the additional function of storing general knowledge of positive and negative stimuli independent of any single situation and therefore common to multiple occurrences. Such a general recall of factors that are independent of any one situation would be useful for making predictions during novel scenarios.

[24] Rather than being the products of entirely novel mutations, it is possible that phenotypes (traits) such as a small jaw, flat face, and enlarged brow on a proportionally large skull are actually juvenile primate traits that are retained in adult humans. Some types of neuronplasticity in the human brain may likewise be extensions of early-life neuroplasticity from when the brains of fetal, infant, and juvenile primates undergo extensive genetically driven development along with intense periods of organization driven by external learning and socialization stimuli . One possible example of this is the ability of human children to rapidly and intuitively acquire complex syntaxial languages up to around the age of sixteen. This linguistic plasticity of the brain is why def children achieve the best integration of cochlear implants that are implanted early in life, preferably prior to the acquisition of languages. The retention of juvenile characteristics in adults is known as neoteny.

[25] More on the specifics of this later.

[26] Princeton University’s long-running Amboseli project has found similar rates of aging among baboons during its multi-generational observation of populations of yellow baboons. It is possible that our fellow primates who depended on collecting large bodies of learned food gathering behaviors as well s the locations of seasonal food supplies are similarly long lived.

[27] Nested groups can take place among other primates in unusual conditions of confinement. The author worked with a large group of three hundred and sixty Japanese snow monkeys living in a three acre corral at the Oregon National Primate Research Center in Beaverton, Oregon. The overall group structure consisted of five ranked families with both internal hierarchies and a structure of dominance between the families.

[28] Physical evidence exists in the form of a finger bone and accompany gene sequences that a hominid species contemporaneous to H. sapiens and H. neanderthalus lived on the Eurasian continent. The Denisovans appear to have contributed to human genome, which genes being found among modern ethnic Melanesians on the Melanesia islands.

[29] A hypothesis advanced by Philip Lieberman of Brown University argues that it was the fine motor control developed for walking upright that permitted the emergence of syntax speech. Speech, walking, and motor functions are regulated by shared neurological circuits located in the subcortical basal ganglia region of the brain. If this hypothesis is true, then the usefulness of upright mobility was a strong factor in rise of language, and should be counted as a key evolutionary force in our mental development. That said, the emergence of bipedialism in hominini is not fully understood. Potential factors that may have contributed to its development from knuckle walking quadrupedialism include enhanced cooling by exposing less surface than quadrupeds area to direct solar heating—especially important for species with large, heat-generating brains; increased efficiency in long distance travel over extant primate knuckle walking, including the ability to follow wounded prey over long distances; the ability conferred by increased height to spot ambush predators at greater ranges.

[30] Unfortunates who do not learn a syntaxial language prior to age sixteen when the brain’s final stage of linguistic plasticity shuts off , commonly suffer deficits in abstract reasoning for the rest of their lives. At a clinical level language is very much recognized as a force that pushes the brain to develop to the advanced state of organization that is accepted as the normal range of reasoning abilities in adults.

Consilience

Nano quadrotor swarm hints at the robotic air force of the future | The Verge

"Lisa with Child" is still doing well

More notes from the publishing singularity

Narrative and the creation of coherency in human thought

The Call

Melancholy but pretty

Portlandia

Oh, yeah. That whole happy people thing.

*snrk*

The patient year in music

A placeholder for the music post!

Home again

Merry Christmas, all

"Nature mourns' N Korea leader"

The future of air combat vehicles

Serial Experiment Lain

Still busily cranking away on my various writing gigs...

Voyager 1 Speeds Toward The Brink Of Interstellar Space : The Two-Way : NPR

DNA: The next big hacking frontier - The Washington Post

BBC News - Undersea mountains march into the abyss

Sad lonely blog

Beautiful HD time lapses of Oregon's skies

Neanderthal Neuroscience

The publishing singularity has arrived

They totally had me at "ghost mountains"

The coolest thing on the internets today...

Stumptown with fall leaves

Marvin Black

Another sad sign of the times

Ashfall Yellowstone novel

Amendment 29 to the US Constitution

Gray days and foggy nights in PDX

An interesting maneuver element on the cultural terrain of the counter-insurgency battlefield

Putting on my tech blogger / copywriter hat for a bit...

Columbia River Gorge - Rainy day photos

One my favorite "we are living in the future" web comic moments

A confession from a dark place in the human soul

Our finite perception, for the time being

Technology Is One Path Toward Sustainability | Orion Magazine

Of super volcanoes and the Old West

Idoru: The disconnect between fiction and reality

10 Building Materials from the Future | Translucent Concrete | Materials Chemistry | InnovationNewsDaily

"Kill Your Fears"

Public readings

World Trade Center photojournalism essay

Love letters

BBC News - Japan six months after tsunami

The Post-911 Soldier | Kit Up!

A monkey named Schadenfreude

BBC News - Magnetic mysteries of Earth's Core

Tim Powers via Cory Doctorow off William Gibson's twitter feed

The dancer and the artist at the end of the age of beauty, on the edge of the age of war

Building a continent

The daily volcano cam

Bizarre videos

This'd make a completely kick ass science fiction sound track

Ah ebook formatting

Responsibility

Mt Hood photos

Photos of a sunset in the Columbia Gorge country

Bizarre videos and the ever-evolving Republic of Korea

Photos of a gray and beautiful day on the Oregon Coast

Happy Fourth!

A changing world

A house of living rooms

Old worm won't die after 2008 attack on military | Reuters

Back from the country...

Snapshots I Brought Back from the Black Hole by K.C. Ball | Lightspeed Magazine

Amazing volcanic photos and footage from Chile

Human flight

Quick thoughts on religion

Yet another hell yeah moment

Beautiful eruption footage

Why Did Consciousness Evolve, and How Can We Modify It, Pt. II | Discover Magazine

A Roman Legion in China | Historic Mysteries

Paralyzed student uses robotic exoskeleton to walk at college graduation

Woot!

I'm a sucker for the analytics of the human brain and the mind

Cataclysmic beauty and geologic inundations

snrk