Please Help Peter David

One of my favorite authors of SF, fantasy, comic books, and tv had a stroke. Peter David is witty. He is intelligent. His plots are well written and his dialog is snappy.

But medical bills get pretty expensive, even with co-pays. Especially at the beginning of a new year.

Here is How You Can Help Peter

Carnations in my locker

Every day I try my best to make the world a little happier than I found it.  If I can make someone smile, I feel like I have done something OK.  


Valentine's Day is rough for a lot of people.  Actually, so are Thanksgiving and Christmas.  I try especially hard from November through February to give that random moment of laughter, joy, or happiness. I have done this for years.  In high school I used to keep carnations in my locker to hand out to people if they looked sad.


I screw up a lot, though. Sometimes people misread my intentions.  Sometimes I make things worse. Sometimes I just plain do the wrong thing. 


I did that this time. With more than one person.  I saw friends who were stressed for one reason or another and I decided to try to change that.  But I did the wrong things and now several people I care about are frustrated with me.


It is possible that I might not have done these things if I had not been sleep deprived.  I do not know. I just know that right now, I am feeling very stupid and I wish that I had done things differently.


Between that and bad news on the health front from both my sister and my grandmother, it has been a challenging week for my good spirits.


I hope that I can regain them.  I do not like being down.

Extrovert. Introvert. Me.

     I washed and rinsed my bowl in the hot, sudsy water and then put it in the rack to dry before moving on to the spoons.  I idly began to wonder why I have more than one bowl.  More than one spoon.  More than one plate.
     I have lived alone for the better part of eight years now.  I moved out of Ohio in 2004 and into a new life in New Mexico.  Yes, there were a few months in 2005 where I lived with someone else, but for the most part, I have been living alone.  Moving to my current position in the Chicago suburbs has not changed my roommate status.  But that is not a reason to consider cutting down the number of plates, bowls, cutlery, and the like.
     No, the fact that I never have guests is the reason.
     What are my plates, but a vain hope that someone will spend the night? What are my glasses but a reminder that I drink alone?
     I sometimes say that I do not date because of my schedule.  And there is some truth in that.  Rotating shifts take a lot out of me.  I do not always have the energy to go out and meet people.  And the women that I meet are not always into the idea that during evening shift week, I am completely out of phase with a normal 9-5 schedule and during owl & transition weeks, I am somewhat zombified. Not to mention the fact that there are two weekends every five week rotation where I am working 25 hours out of 48.
     But again, that is not the whole reason. After all, I could probably find someone if I tried.
     No, it comes down to this. I have grown accustomed to solitude in my apartment.  The idea that someone might come over actually fills me with anxiety.  Excitement, certainly.  But anxiety nonetheless.
     My living room is cluttered and my bedroom looks like a cyclone hit it.  The way to my bed is less a path than an obstacle course.  Yet, I have memorized it and can maneuver it in pitch darkness. My apartment is small and cramped and I do not have places for all of my stuff. To make it presentable, I need to buy so many things.  But since I have no plans of inviting anyone over, there is no reason to buy them. It is a cycle and I do not know if I can break it.  I do not know if I want to break it.
     I used to think that I would have guests.  Friends.  Dates.  Colleagues. That was long ago. I like people.  I truly do.  That is why I go out dancing. Why I cook for my coworkers.  Why I juggle in public and ride my unicycle.  Why I occasionally go out and play games with coworkers. I like to make people smile.  I like to make them laugh.  I like life.  I do not always like to be alone, but it has been so long ... I am no longer certain that I can be a good host.

Tall Tale

If I were going to write the story of my birth, I would probably put in something momentous and poetic.  Something like the following scene.

     "Did you see that," she asked my father.
     "See what."
     "That star. Sirius. It flashed for a second."
     "Right, Nancie. Whatever you say." Dad was humoring her.  They had already lost a child in a premature birth.  And though everything seemed to be fine this time, he was naturally cautious and far more concerned with loading everything into the car to take to the hospital than with his wife's imagination.
     "No, really Nelson," she insisted! "I think that the Dog Star winked at me!"
     On the drive to to hospital, she talked about dogs.  She talked about the dog and cat that she and her brothers had owned as a child and how the cat had defended the dog from another dog.  She talked about the fact that the Chinese New Year was coming soon and that it was going to be the Year of the Dog. She talked about loyalty and friendship and that she hoped their child would be like a dog in those ways.
     During the labor, she had the doctor open the drapes of the hospital window.  She hoped to see Sirius.  Light pollution and an overcast sky made that unlikely, but she remained hopeful.  
     I have been told that the labor was relatively short, but intense.  I do not know.  I was not exactly the best witness to the event and I certainly have no memory of that.  I know that these were the days before fathers were in the room for the birth, so he waited outside in the Waiting Room.  So I have no one to confirm or deny what Mom has told me.  She says that as the doctors pulled me out, the clouds parted.  Orion, Canis Major, and Canis Minor all shone through the window.  She says that Sirius seemed alive that night, and that it's light shone right on me.  She says that I opened my eyes, and reached for that star ... until the doctor smacked my bum and made me scream.


     To my knowledge, none of those things are true.  Let me re-phrase that.  This story was never told to me.  My mother does love astronomy and would recognize the above constellations and stars.  They are all visible in early January. My father would react like that to Mom's silliness.  I was born in Dayton, OH. Light pollution could have made viewing those stars difficult.  I was born at the end of the Chinese year of the rooster and just before the year of the dog.
     So, this story contains many facts, but to my knowledge, the actual events did not happen.  But the personalities are correct.  And I can easily imagine it happening.
     I have been told that I am very nearly a tall tale, like Davy Crockett, Johnny Appleseed, Mike Fink, or John Henry.  Things like that would fit in quite well with the weird stuff that really happened to me.  Like being mugged by mimes.  Or meeting Elvis in a blizzard outside of Memphis.  So I think that I shall choose to believe that it is true, although not factual.

Mount St. Helens, 30 years ago - The Big Picture - Boston.com

Mount St. Helens, 30 years ago - The Big Picture - Boston.com

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Ada Lovelace Day 2010

She deserved better than this ...

Ada Lovelace Day 2010: "

This Ada Lovelace Day post was actually written a few years ago when I was trying to get a documentary about the following woman commissioned. These are the ‘notes’ I wrote about her as reference for the proposal. It’s not written with flair (I’m full-time mummying a 10 month old at the moment!), but the underlying story is, I think, rather powerful.

“I treat my wife as an employee whom I cannot fire.”- A.E.

Mileva Maric was born on December 19, 1875 in Titel in what is now Serbia, but was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Even in primary school Mileva’s teachers noted her academic abilities. At 7 years old she was reading, doing maths and fluent in both her native Serbo-Croatian as well as German.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire’s rules forbade the high school education of girls, but her father, determined to give her the opportunity for an advanced education, received special permission to send her to the Royal Classical Gymnasium (High School) in Zagreb. Mileva, an ethnic Serbian, became one of the first women in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to be educated in a school alongside boys.

After two years in Zagreb, she left school with the top marks in physics and mathematics and moved to Switzerland to finish her education, as it was one of the only places in Europe that accepted female students in higher education.

Mileva enrolled as a medical student in the University of Zurich in 1894. After two years of medical studies, she decided that she was more interested in physics so moved to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School (ETH) and joined Division VIA which trained students to be mathematics and physics teachers. Apart from Mileva there were four male students in the class. Along with Mileva only one other student was specialising in theoretical physics, Albert Einstein.

After a year she went to Heidleberg for one semester in order to study under Professor Philip Lenard. Albert and Mileva were exchanging letters at this point, and in one she wrote about a lecture she had attended on the relationship between the velocity of a molecule and the distance traversed by it between collisions. After this letter, this topic would be relevant in Einstein’s studies and is discussed in one of his three famous papers published in 1905.

The University of Heidelberg did not allow women to graduate, so Mileva returned to Zürich. She and Einstein started working and studying together. She took notes when he couldn’t attend class and as she was better organised, she planned both of their studies. It was during this time they fell in love.

Mileva quickly became devoted to Einstein, sacrificing her studies as well as her friends as he began to demand all of her time. They often preferred to study on their own rather than attend lectures. In 1900 they had to take exams, Mileva fails hers, Einstein only just passes with the second lowest mark in the class. Einstein suggested she retake the exam the next year. She would never, however, graduate.

In late spring 1901 Einstein went to Italy to visit his family, Mileva stayed in Zurich preparing for her exam. In May they meet up in Lake Como for a few days. A few weeks later she learns she is pregnant. In July, she fails her exams again.

Both of their families were strongly opposed the idea of them getting married- after all Einstein was Jewish and Mileva was a Serb. Mileva left Switzerland to stay with her family in order to have the baby.

Their daughter Lieserl was born in 1902. Little is known about the life of this first child; it is generally believed that she was given up for adoption though there is some speculation that she died after a bout with Scarlet Fever.

At this time Einstein has been offered a job in the Patent Office in Bern. His university marks were too low for him to get a job in academia or even as a high school teacher.

Mileva and Einstein married in January 1903, ignoring the objections of their families. They continue their work on scientific theories together. When asked by a friend why she did not insist on more of the credit for their joint work, Mileva replied, “We are one stone; Ein stein.”

Their son Hans Albert was born in May 1904. Just before Mileva and Einstein’s second anniversary, the Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded to Marie and Pierre Curie.

Einstein writes to Mileva, “How happy and proud I will be when the two of us together will have brought our work on the relative motion to a victorious conclusion!”

In 1905, Einstein publishes the Special Theory of Relativity. It has been said that that Russian physicist Abram Joffe saw an original manuscript signed ‘Einstein-Marity’ (Marity being the Hungarian version of Maric’s surname) implying that the papers originally credited Mileva. Others claim that it was simply Swiss custom for men to add the maiden name of their wife to their own name. Still others claim that Abram Joffe has been misquoted.

Their second son Eduard is born in 1910. By 1911, Einstein is so famous that he has distanced himself from his family, even stopping their “nightly physics discussions”.

In 1912, Einstein starts having an affair with his cousin, Elsa Löwenthal. On his 34th birthday, he gets a card from Elsa. That evening, Mileva is absent from a party. The next day, friends call on Mileva. Her face is bruised and swollen.

In 1914, Einstein received an offer from Berlin to join the University there and accepted. Mileva was unhappy with the move as Einstein’s cousin Elsa lived in Berlin. By this point, Mileva and Einstein have a marriage in name only. In one of his letters to her he writes down a list of demands

1. You must

-clean my laundry.

-make me three meals daily.

-make sure that my sleep and work rooms are always tidy, in particular the desk- which is for my use only.

2. You must do without all personal relations from me, as long as their maintenance for social reasons is not required. In particular you must not expect that

-I stay at home with you.

-I go out or go away with you.

3. You commit yourself expressly to accept that:

-You will receive neither tenderness nor any reproaches from me.

-You must stop speaking to me immediately if I request it.

-You must leave my sleep and/or work room immediately without contradiction, if I request it.

-You commit yourself to not lower me, neither by words nor by actions, in the eyes of my children.

Mileva decided to move back to Zurich with their sons. On Einstein’s demands she eventually agreed to a divorce on the condition that, should Einstein be awarded the Nobel Prize, she should receive all prize money.

The divorce was granted in 1919. Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921 and handed the prize money over to Mileva who used the award money to support their sons. During her last years Mileva lived a secluded life in Zürich. When she died she was buried in the Nordheim Friedhof Cemetery in Zurich. Her grave is unmarked.

In accordance with Albert Einstein’s last wishes his personal documents were deposited with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It contains hundreds of letter between him and Mileva. Some letters do suggest that Mileva made contributions to his most important publications, but was not acknowledged as co-author.

Whatever the reality of these claims, Mileva was, in Einstein’s own words, an “equal and who [was] as strong and independent” as her husband was. She was a victim of her time, tormented by her brilliant yet unused intellect, and betrayed by the man she loved.

"

What alien worlds orbit our nearest star? - space - 29 January 2010 - New Scientist

Wow! Wouldn't it be great if we found out that there are earthlike worlds in the habitable zone there?

What alien worlds orbit our nearest star? - space - 29 January 2010 - New Scientist

mixed up - shaken, but not stirred

Mixed-handed children more likely to have mental health, language and scholastic problems | ScienceBlog.com

When I was a boy, just starting school, the system tested me to see into which hole they could make me fit. There were intelligence tests. There were physicals. There were tests of every size, shape, and color. And among those tests were tests of my handedness.

I liked to write with my left hand. I still do. I can write with my right, but left feels correct. On the other hand, I throw baseballs and play guitar with my right hand. Juggling two balls in one hand is easier with my left than my right, but when juggling three balls in two hands, my right is better at catching than my left. As the doctor said even back then, I have mixed dominance.

I kind of wish someone had told me back then that it made me special, "one out of a hundred" as opposed to making me feel bad because I was inconveniencing them by being different. I was consistently nudged into choosing one hand or the other and more often than not, I chose to be sinister rather than dextrous. If I had known that I was "special," maybe I would not have given in so easily.

Then again, I am glad that this study was not known back then. I would not have wanted anyone telling me that I was more likely to have problems with language or mental health. It turns out that language arts has always been one of my best subjects. Not just English, either. Foreign languages come easily to me. And mental health? Yes, I have always been a bit flaky, but I am not a danger to myself nor to anyone else. And as for scholastic problems, the only problem that I had for most of my education was a lack of organization. This is probably due to what was eventually diagnosed as a mild case of ADD, so in that respect the above article might have a point. But still, I wonder ... would I have gotten a degree in physics if my parents had been told that I had the potential for those problems?

Sometimes I think that we tend to over-react to statements like the one in the link to the article above. But then I remember how the science news cycle works and I remember what I learned about correlation as a science student. It is too bad that more people do not study statistics, logic, and rhetoric. Statistics so that we can see how likely (or unlikely) certain things are and how much error there is in our measurements, polls, etc. Logic so that we can see the progression of ideas and poke holes in fallacies when necessary. Rhetoric so that we can speak and write effectively and conversely to avoid being misled by ineffectual discourse.

boingy! boingy! boingy!

Huzzah! I am officially a real employee at Fermilab! Now, I can study at my own pace! I can read for pleasure again! I can cook, play guitar, learn to ride a unicycle, play harmonica in a blues club, write stories, and all of the other wacky adventures that I put aside so that I could attempt to keep this job and get off of probation.

I wonder if I can transfer my old posts from LiveJournal to here? I should try to figure that out.

And I should start playing with the layout here.

But all of that can wait. For now, I shall bask in the fact that I have escaped the chopping block.

Urban Planning from the Ruins

I saw this on David Brin's blog. I just had to send a copy here. I might put up a link to it on my Facebook and Twitter, too.

Urban Planning from the Ruins: "

In the latest issue of Newsweek, President Barack Obama explains "Why Haiti Matters," offering reasons -- from moral to pragmatic -- for Americans to care about that unlucky nation. Indeed, were it possible to wave a wand and transform that hellish place into an upward-rising land of hope, health, education, enterprise and opportunity, while re-planting its ravaged hillsides, who wouldn't?

Lacking magic wands, we have another tool -- money -- in limited amounts. That, combined with ingenuity and goodwill, can take care of some short term things. Stop the dying. Provide food, shelter and basic sanitation. Help the Haitians to restore basic utilities and bury their dead. Repair the ports and roads enough to get commerce flowing again. So far, no arguments.

It's when we start talking about longer-term solutions that the discussion gets clouded by preconceptions, dogmas and real world practicalities. Sixty years after the Marshall Plan proved that foreign assistance can work, some of the time, we still find our best-meant schemes mired by bureaucratic inefficiency, corruption, and unintended consequences. Nor does any political side have a perfect recipe. If the American left has often shown itself to be treacly and naive, the right is already back to its old, cynical sneer, deriding "the failed and discredited utopian fantasy of so-called Nation Building" -- an actual neoconservative mantra, up till the very month that they plunged the U.S. into the most costly, inefficient, corruption-ridden and ill-conceived nation-building exercise ever undertaken.

In contrast to Iraq, Haiti has several traits that make it seem a rather good candidate for national makeover. It is small, nearby, desperate -- and yet peaceful -- enough to be a possible test case. (Our misadventure in Somalia showed how necessary the "peaceful" component is.)

On the downside, you have a near total lack of infrastructure, education or reliable civil law. Still, despite the challenges, suppose we wanted to really accomplish epochal and effective change in Haiti? Aside from humanitarian aid, what endeavors would be most helpful over the long run?


1) Cooking. It sounds simple, even banal. But a major driver of Haiti's tragic deforestation is the chopping of wood for cooking fuel. For years we've seem efforts to offer solar cookers to people in developing nations -- a worthy endeavor, but not very popular among the poor women who need to boil up the rice and bean now -- without spending hours worrying about clouds.

A more prosaic palliative might be to establish communal kitchen facilities all over the island, where families could not only get food aid, but have access to shared, gas-fired stoves and ovens to prepare it. But whatever approach is chosen, we need to be clear about one unintended consequence of food aid. Distributing uncooked rice is tantamount to killing trees.

2) Reward self organization. Infrastructure projects and jobs should flow toward those neighborhoods that manage to organize themselves to better benefit from the aid. For one thing, this is the simplest way to bypass corrupt national officials, relying instead on simple metrics, right there on the ground. For another thing, it would leverage upon islands of enthusiasm and competence, without imposing any preconceptions upon HOW the locals organize themselves. (See an article in the LA Times about such neighborhood committees, already in motion.)

However they do it - via communes or coops or by working with local landowners, those that remove the trash and set up kitchens and have work crews ready for labor every day, and who present a fait accompli structure that can be relied upon, those should get top priority.
The lesson would spread.

3) Empower law and civil society. Go look up the work of Hernando de Soto (not the explorer, but the radical economist-reformer). The nation of Peru instituted his plan to get the people clear title to their land, so they can then improve or borrow against it. The resulting surge in the market economy proved that left and right could work together, when not trapped in idiotic dogma, resulting in a boom in Peru. Peru's reform laws should be instituted in Haiti, with the one proviso that they be translated into French.

Unfortunately, right now is the very time when those with property rights in Port-au-Prince are most likely to be bought out, cents on the dollar, by Haiti's own oligarchs. (See a silver lining to this, below.)

4) Take advantage of the quake. Now, with the capital city in ruins, is the time for urban planning in Port-au-Prince.

Sure, those words sound pathetically sixties-ish. But I am not talking about utopian nit-picking, meddlesome zoning regulations or over-specifying architecture -- (though there are modern alternatives to cinder-block construction that could be cheaper, faster and much more quake resistant... and this would be a good time to start setting up firms over there, trained in these alternative methods.)

No, what I mean by "urban planning" is the very basics. Core essentials that are utterly pragmatic and that would best be done now, at the very moment that Port-au-Prince lies shattered.

As soon as people are being fed and all the children are safe, even next month, corridors and rights of way should be laid down and razed -- wide swaths stretching from the port to downtown, to the airport, and to the factory zone.

Yes, superficially it sounds horrible -- plowing aside the tottering shops that still stand along such broad paths. But the benefits -- to all Haitians -- would be overwhelming. If done well, such corridors would allow very cheap installation of the organic elements needed by a modern city, the circulatory, pulmonary, lymphatic, nervous and other systems of a future, healthy metropolis. I'm talking about mass transit, sewer, water, fiber-optics, gas, electricity, sewers...

ALL of these services are fantastically expensive -- in nations like the U.S. -- primarily due to right-of-way costs and having to insert and maintain them through already-existing streets. The actual conduits themselves (rails, sewer pipe, water pipe, optical fiber) are fairly cheap, if laid down in a linear fashion. (Commuter trolley lines can be established aboveground at first. But if the land-siting is done right, a trenched subway can go in, later, at trivial added expense.)

Combine this with the laying down of several grand boulevards and parks, and you could have the makings of a great and impressive city, rising from the ashes, drawing commerce and (even more important) proud confidence among its citizens.

Note that this needn't be done rapaciously. e.g. imagine if the poor and displaced got shares in the soon-to-be valuable plots that front upon these new boulevards, and first-options at the resulting apartments. Is such fairness really likely, especially in Haiti? Of course not. Already the country's few-dozen elite, oligarchic families are swooping in -- partly to perform beneficent acts of noblesse oblige, and partly to seek opportunities within the chaos. If my suggestion were undertaken entirely on the oligarchs' terms, with elites owning all the utilities and boulevard frontages, excluding even the people who used to live there, it would be a travesty.

But travesties are normal for Haiti. In this case, at least there'd be boulevards, parks, utilities, sanitation, trolleys fiber-broadband, WiFi and commerce. The elevated people could then engage in politics -- the torts and rights and wrongs -- later.

Anyway, what if foreign influences leaped onto this project first, with strong intent to insert fairness as a priority? Note that a single billionaire could, right now, offer to do this in Port-au-Prince. His share, downstream, could be worth billions, without incurring any bad karma because, with just a little care to note who lived where, the chief beneficiaries would still be the poorest citizens of Haiti.

And the result... making money by increasing the value of a city that becomes a wonder and source of pride for all... would seem worth pondering.

...a collaborative contrarian product of http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/ (site feed URL: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/atom.xml)

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