Posted on
by

<RANT>

Okay. For all you holier-than-thou smarty-pantses out there, here’s a question. If an average-sized couch cushion were to hit a brick wall at 15 mph, would you think at first glance that the brick wall might be damaged?

I thought not.

So leave me the FUCK alone with your judgmental snippetiness about how YOU would have aborted the launch (let alone how you would have even seen the insulation incident they only saw on video LATER) and how could I even THINK that maybe Mission Control didn’t think they had sufficient reason to effectively waste a large chunk of what little funding they had because “human life was on the line.” Human life is on the line every time you get in your car, but that doesn’t stop normal people from driving to work. (No, I’m not normal. Thanks for asking.) Human life is on the line every time a new medication gets sold to any demographic outside who it was originally tested with, and it’s a hell of a lot more people at risk, with a lot less knowledge of what they’re getting into, than the seven people on board the shuttle. Yes, it was a tragedy. Yes, it was technically preventable. And yes, hindsight is 20/20. So, as I said, get off your high horse. There’s too many of those around lately and it’s getting hard for a good objective fact-finding scientist to breathe.

</RANT>

Posted on
by

It’s taken me two days to collect my thoughts enough to write about this. The loss of the orbiter and its crew hit me as a complete shock on Saturday, and I immediately started checking CNN and press releases. On the web. Not on TV. I remembered watching the Challenger footage over and over, and I remembered watching the World Trade Center footage over and over, but I couldn’t bring myself to look this time.

Barely a week ago I had been looking at mission photographs on NASA’s website. I knew the faces of the crewmembers. I had been looking for a photograph they had taken of a rare atmospheric phenomenon which was described in a newspaper article, but which hadn’t been included with the article. I never found it, and figured it would be posted later. Now I wonder if it was actually transmitted.

In the summer of 1992 my family went to Florida. We spent several days at Disney World and several days at Cape Canaveral. Two things that struck me the most were how much the old Mission Control looked like classic Star Trek, and the Astronaut Memorial. On Saturday I pulled out my photo album from that trip, and wondered where the next 7 names would be added.

Once the shock started to wear off, I started wondering about the future of space flight. And that’s when the fear and anger set in. Fear that we might abandon space flight entirely. Anger at a public that no longer cared, at a government that steadily cut support for space exploration.

The shuttle is our only ticket into space right now. The fleet was intended to last a decade or so, but all of the proposed replacements have been shut down as too costly. Can you imagine what would happen if all commercial airplanes were the same model, and an accident could ground the entire fleet for up to two years?

We’re like sailors who only know how to make one kind of boat, and after a few trips to a far-off island have decided not to stray far from shore. We haven’t been to the moon in 30 years. Think about it: 30 years. I’m nearly 27 and no one has set foot on the moon since before I was born.

The one bright spot in all this is that there is talk of renewing our commitment to space. And with that news I’m encouraged to hope that the problem that caused the disaster may be found and resolved in months, not years, that the space station crew may be able to remain on board with new supplies, or at least come home in a more comfortable ship than a Soyuz capsule. This hope may turn out to be in vain, perhaps even on both counts, but I prefer it to the fear.

The Columbia crew has one over on the Challenger crew: they made it into space. Heck, they have two: they completed their mission. I don’t know how much of their data was transmitted back and how much was going to be collected in person. But if I had to choose between dying just before getting into space or just after spending two weeks up there, I know I’d choose the latter.

Posted on
by

I’m beginning to understand why someone would jump out of a bathtub and go streaking through the streets with a fantastic new idea. Recently, in the shower, my brain decided it wanted to write a graphic novel. The day after, it worked out a genetic explanation of channeling in the Wheel of Time universe. If you haven’t read any Robert Jordan, or if you don’t know basic genetics, this won’t make a huge lot of sense. If you’ve read some but not all, be warned that this explanation contains information you may not have reached. None of it is serious, but if you’re a fanatic about not being spoiled, watch out. I’ll break the article before I get into speculation that people might not have heard or want to hear.

Here’s my model. There are three factors controlling channeling ability: whether you can do it, whether you have the spark or can learn, and how strong you are. Strength and sparkiness don’t seem to be related, and neither seems to be related to sex. What I propose is that basic channeling ability is a recessive, sex-linked trait. There are variations of a gene on both the X and Y chromosomes, X’ and Y’ to borrow from Katherine Kurtz, that enable awareness of, respectively, saidar and saidin. In order to channel, someone has to have this variation on both their sex chromosomes. So an X’Y male can’t channel, but an X’Y’ can. X’X women and X’Y or XY’ men can’t even sense the Source. The elegant part of this is that it explains why men who can channel or learn can sense when a woman is channeling: they have the X’. It also explains why channeling-capable men can only tell other men can channel when they do it, while women have an easy time telling when other women can channel (sensing other Aes Sedai, seeing the glow, knowing who’s sparky), since they have double sensitivity to saidar.

Sparkiness is easy compared to that. It seems to be a simple dominant-recessive or absent-present allele situation. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say there are two possible places on non-X-or-Y chromosomes that the allele (call it “spontaneity,” S for absent and s for present) can appear. If someone has one, and all other genetic markers are in order, he/she is a learner; two means he/she has the spark. This makes for a very easy Punnett square giving about twice as many sul’dam as damane.

I won’t address strength, since it’s not a black-and-white issue and probably involves a lot of genes that most people just don’t use, not having the right matchups in spontaneity or sensitivity. However, I do want to look at what happens when you examine a few special families…. Continue reading →

Posted on
by

Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen a number of articles in places like Time Magazine about how popular culture is abandoning science fiction for fantasy, usually tying it into either pessimism about technology and the future (“Where’s my flying car!”) or nostalgia in a post-9/11 world. They generally cite the enormous success of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings as compared to, say, Star Trek: Nemesis.

Bull.

You want to know why fantasy is doing so well these days? Someone finally made some fantasy films that were good. What did we have before? Dungeons and Dragons. Krull. Sure, there were a few bright spots like The Princess Bride, but if you look at the IMDB’s Top 10 rated fantasy films there’s not one between 1980 and 2000 – and that includes The Empire Strikes Back and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

And somehow all of these articles ignore the box-office success of Spider-Man and Attack of the Clones. Somehow I expect The Matrix Reloaded is going to do just fine, despite the supposed failure of sci-fi.