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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
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Complex Numbers A complex number is expressed in the standard form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is defined by i^2 = -1 (that is, i is the square root of -1). For example, 3 + 2i is a complex number. The bi term is often referred to as an imaginary number (though this may be misleading, as it is no more "imaginary" than the symbolic abstractions we know as the "real" numbers). Thus, every complex number has a real part, a, and an imaginary part, bi. Complex numbers are often represented on a graph known as the "complex plane," where the horizontal axis represents the infinity of real numbers, and the vertical axis represents the infinity of imaginary numbers. Thus, each complex number has a unique representation on the complex plane: some closer to real; others, more imaginary. If a = b, the number is equal parts real and imaginary. Very simple transformations applied to numbers in the complex plane can lead to fractal structures of enormous intricacy and astonishing beauty. ![Merit Badge in Quill Award
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| https://www.thoughtco.com/write-the-perfect-personal-essay-3858745 The assignment is really quite easy, it's about you after all, so this is your opportunity to shine! The darkness does not shine. The darkness broods. And maybe smoulders a little bit, but mostly broods. I always hated writing essays. Probably that's why I went into engineering instead of pursuing a liberal arts degree. No... wait... that was the money. 1. Understand the Composition of an Essay The five-paragraph essay form was the bane of my high school existence. Well, that and jocks. Well, mostly jocks, but also the five-paragraph essay form. It was especially bad when I had to write one in Latin. Semper ubi sub ubi, et non illegitimati carborundum. 2. Find Inspiration and Ideas Ever see one of those "how to draw" sketches? Like, "How to draw a puppy." 1. Draw an oval for the body. 2. Draw a smaller oval for the head. 3. Fill in the minor details to make it look like a puppy. That's what I think of whenever someone urges me to "find inspiration." Like it's that easy. I can't draw worth a damn, so I get stuck on Step 3 and it ends up looking like a Jackson Pollock puppy. I can write well enough, I think, but... "Find inspiration and ideas." Yeah... right. You know what I noticed today? My deck is covered with leaves. I can either let them sit there, or I can rake or blow them off. If I let them sit there, eventually a wind will come by and remove them, or they'll rot away. If I remove them, more will take their place and I'll have to repeat the chore; it's still fall. That's the extent of my inspiration and ideas for today: justification for being lazy. (As an aside, it's both heartening and disheartening that this section of the linked article recommends doing something I've been doing for a while, the "core dump" I outlined two entries ago. Heartening because someone else thinks it's a good idea. Disheartening because it was MY IDEA DAMMIT.) 3. Freshen up Your Grammar My grammars are dead, you MONSTER. Oh, wait, that kind of grammar. Well, that's always been pretty easy for me. That and spelling. This is despite my predilection for incomplete sentences in blog entries, which, in my defense, I know I'm doing; I use them in an attempt to strike a conversational tone. Several years back, I heard a teacher - an actual, real-life, primary school teacher - say that she doesn't teach spelling or grammar, because "spelling and grammar checkers will take care of any mistakes." No wonder so many people can't tell the difference between "its" and "it's," or "there," "their," and "they're." Fuck off, teacher - spelling and grammar checkers still don't catch those kind of errors, and now they're ubiquitous. The errors, I mean. Not checkers. Damn pronouns and their ambiguous antecedents. 4. Use Your Own Voice and Vocabulary No, this is a really bad idea. Well, they're right about active vs. passive voice, but to me one of the great things about writing is being able to stretch one's vocabulary, learn new words, and figure out new ways to use old words. You know what I haven't used for 30 years or more? A thesaurus, that's what. I don't even know any synonyms for thesaurus. Unfortunately, this shows in my writing. My weakness isn't spelling, grammar, or punctuation (though I know those are not perfect), but repeated words in my first drafts. They're hard for me to catch, since I wrote them in the first place. Since I suck at editing, they tend to stay there. 5. Be Specific with Your Descriptions This... well, this is actually good advice for writing anything. 6. Be Consistent with Your Point of View and Tense So is this. Goddammit, get back to stupid shit so I can snark on you. 7. Edit, Edit, Edit Ah, that's better. There is such a thing as overediting, you know. Even if my spell checker doesn't recognize the word "overediting." Anyway, I'm not one to give editing advice. But I know an ad for EssayEdge when I see one, and this is an ad for EssayEdge. Seriously, does everything have to be a freaking commercial? 8. Read And if you've gotten this far, a) congratulations and b) you already know to do this. Fortunately, blogging is usually utterly distinct from the personal essay format, at least for me. Here, I'm just trying to make jokes and a point. I'm not trying to sell myself or prove how clever I am (though, to be fair, I am rather clever - at anything except selling myself). If people like it, great; I appreciate that. If not, oh well - I can't please everyone and I quit trying a while back. In any case, I'm fine with improving my skills and learning new ones, but if I'm forced to write in a certain format, it feels like work. And I'm allergic to work. Now, to get back to brooding... |
| Oh no! Here come the asteroids! https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/world-news/three-huge-asteroids-fly-dangerously-... This weekend, three enormous asteroids will make a ‘close approach’ to Earth, NASA has warned. The asteroids - the biggest of which is predicted to measure up to 30 metres across - will whizz past our planet on November 10. At around 14:03 GMT, an asteroid dubbed 2018 VS1 will pass the Earth. This asteroid is predicted to measure between 13-28 metres across - suggesting the asteroid could be five times as tall as a giraffe! Everybody panic! Time to freak out! Also, what if they're actually ALIENS?! Or maybe a tabloid is just trying to generate ad revenue? ...nah, couldn't be. Seriously, though, apparently they're now measuring asteroids in units of giraffe. I guess they used up all the Statues of Liberty. That might also explain why they use both miles and kilometers (as well as meters) in the same article - trying to conserve units. To be fair, a big part of science communication is the attempt to translate mind-bogglingly big or small things into terms we might be able to comprehend. This many Earths could fit side-by-side across Jupiter, and that many Jupiters could fit across the Sun. Kilometers and miles are just fine for measuring most distances on Earth, but astronomers and cosmologists use larger units like AUs, light years, and parsecs (which are a unit of time, not distance, regardless of what Han Solo said; also, Han shot first). People who study tiny things use angstroms or nanometers or whatever. A giraffe is a nonstandard unit of measurement, but perhaps it helps with visualization. It's probably a better unit for measuring asteroids than a cat or a paramecium, unless the asteroid is cat- or paramecium-sized. Actually, the latter would be classified as space dust, not asteroid or planet. People like to smugly tell other people just how insignificant we are. "Look at the universe," they'll say, or something to this effect. "We're barely a speck of dust." Well, compared to the observable universe, we're smaller than a speck of space dust. We're even smaller than an atom, relatively speaking, by this comparison. But it turns out that the smallest particles - smaller than actual atoms; on the scale of electrons or quarks - are close to the same order of magnitude smaller than us as we are smaller than the known universe. In other words, we're right in the middle in terms of size. So maybe not so insignificant after all? Especially since we were able to deduce this fact. Incidentally, going back to the asteroid thing, let's be clear: these may be close encounters from a scientific point of view, but there's zero chance any of these rocks are going to hit the planet. The closest one will miss by roughly the distance to the moon  , or 30 times the diameter of the Earth. A miss is as good as 240,000 miles, I suppose. |
| The more I write, the more I want to write. Honestly, I thought it would be the other way around. I expected that by committing to blogging again after so many years, it would burn me out, run me out of ideas. But the opposite has happened. I should have known better, really. When I'm stuck and I want to write, I do what I call a core dump (because I'm a Unix geek from way back) - take a blank file and just start typing, stream of consciousness stuff, nothing I'd ever show anyone else. It's just to get my thoughts out there instead of circling around in my head, freeing my mind for the task or goal I've set. I don't even worry too much about typos in a core dump, which should tell you something; I don't like to display misspellings and grammar problems in what I write. Oh, I know they get through often enough, but normally I avoid them like the outdoors. Point is, a core dump is a very different thing from a blog entry, but they do have one thing in common: after getting my thoughts out, new ones inevitably pop up. Naturally, I haven't done anything about this yet. The main difference between a core dump and a blog entry is audience. Although I write both primarily for myself, with a core dump, I know that no one will see it (or at least I hope not). With something like this, there's always the knowledge in the back of my mind that someone might actually read it. Maybe even someone I know nothing about. Will I offend someone? Am I revealing too much of myself? Not enough? Will they skim the boring parts, like I do when I read someone else's writing? The blogs I follow offsite are done by people with deep knowledge of a particular field, notably astronomy and biology. I dislike watching videos for the most part, because it's harder to skim the boring parts. I shun podcasts as well; hell, I've never heard a single podcast. I read, and therefore, I write. I also avoid Twatter and Failbook. The latter has turned into something reminiscent of MySpace pages back in the noughties, with shit blinking and moving around; it's annoying. And the former is like arguing with bumper stickers. The first I heard of Tweeter was when a friend of mine told me that some guy had rigged his office chair to Twit every time he farted, and nothing I've heard about that platform since then has led me to believe that it's gotten any classier. Yeah, yeah, I know there's an art to writing with a limited number of characters; it's just that, usually, I need more depth. And that's my problem when it comes to putting my own thoughts out there: I lack depth of knowledge on any subject, having spent my life preferring to know a little bit about a lot of things rather than a lot about one thing. The only exception is civil engineering, but that was my career and I don't really want to write about the intricacies of parking lot design. My approach does have its advantages, though; as a writer, I like to make connections between unrelated topics. "Write what you know" doesn't mean to limit yourself to stuff you already know; it's an exhortation to broaden your own pool of knowledge. Sure, there are some topics that attract me more than others, but I try not to miss an opportunity to increase my understanding of something. I've said this before, but there's no such thing as useless knowledge. And my hope is that I make people think - and laugh. |
| I have a friend who is colorblind. I don't mean that in the sense of he pretends to not be racist; I mean that he has the textbook male red-green colorblindness. He gets by just fine, of course; traffic lights always have red on top and green on the bottom. Except in Atlantic City, where the stoplights are sideways - it's a good thing I was driving, then. But it has led to some amusing stories, such as when he described a gray cat as "green." When I was a kid, I had a realization: we have no way of knowing if the color I see as green is the same color as what you see as green, and vice versa. If neither of us is colorblind, we can agree that something is green, but if I could somehow see through your eyes, I might interpret it as yellow or red or some color that I've never seen. This was kind of a throwaway realization for me, but decades later, I saw a post where someone presented this as an epiphany they had while stoned, and the typical response was "...whoa." As if it wasn't something I didn't figure out when I was seven years old and most definitely not stoned. I really should publish my epiphanies more often. Here's one: Creation and destruction are the same thing. Not just two sides of a coin, but the same thing. The only reason we call something one or the other is the value we place on the conditions before and after an event. For instance, consider a tree. You chop it down, destroying the tree - but creating firewood. You burn the firewood, destroying it - but creating warmth and light. Which of the two states you focus on depends only on your perceptions at the time. An argument can be made that creation is locally reversed entropy, while destruction is locally accelerated entropy, and I'd accept that argument to a point, but what about when you destroy a rock to create gravel? If you need the gravel more than you needed the rock, it's creation, even though you've increased entropy in the material. We can't know if my green is your green, though. Maybe someday the technology will exist to allow us to see through another's eyes and hijack their perceptions, but even then, I'd still wonder. It's an untestable hypothesis, for now. But in at least one sense, we know that your green is not my green - because colors also have emotional associations. I think of money, because money is of great importance to me. Maybe you think of leaves and plants. Someone else might think of recycling and environmental issues. Yet another person could associate it with envy; another, with sickness, or mold, or Kermit the Frog. Maybe even all of these things, and more, at different times, in different moods. Possibly the earliest association I have with green was when I was riding in a car with my parents: "Green means go," they'd tell me, which would serve me well when I got my driver's license. Thanks, mom and dad; I never would have figured that out without your wisdom. But I've still never seen a green cat. |
| One important thing about science fiction - and here, I'm talking about real science fiction, not space opera, though that can be fun - is that it gives us a chance to explore the ramifications of certain technologies before those technologies get a chance to be realized in our lives. A common theme in SF when I was young was the topic of cloning. The idea had already been around for a long time, and had in fact been used to great success in plants. Every banana you eat, for example, is genetically identical. But of course, that led philosophers and science fiction writers (the distinction is sometimes murky) to speculate on cloning animals, including humans. And boy, did a lot of them get it wrong. I don't mean wrong in the sense that the writers who predicted flying cars were wrong, but wrong on a basic, fundamental level. Stories abounded of exact duplicates of a human being, down to the last hair and quirky mannerism. Now, I'm not saying that sort of thing will never happen - I wrote a story set in the far future that features this sort of thing - but it's not happening anytime soon. With exact duplicates of that sort, all sorts of ethical and existential questions get raised, not the least of which is the attempt to define the word "I." It's a simple word, just one letter, and in our normal frames of reference the pronoun has a simple, singular referent. Analogy: You have two thumb drives. You copy your budgeting spreadsheet from one drive to the other, and make changes to one of them. Then your SO goes looking for it to check if you have hookers and blow as line items somewhere. Which one was the original, and which the copy? They both exist, in the sense that binary information can be said to exist. Well, animals are a great deal more complex than a budgeting spreadsheet, and we simply aren't anywhere near the level of technology required to treat them as such. No, in the real world, cloning is essentially asexual reproduction - you don't end up with a fully-formed Minerva, but with a zygote, then an embryo, then a fetus, then a baby, with all of the life-support requirements that these stages have. It's no different from having a standard baby, except that it got all of its genes from you, and not from you and your hookers-and-blow-budgeting SO. (Okay, there are differences involving telomeres and possibly environmental changes to genes, but I'm not a biologist so we'll ignore them for this discussion.) The result is, basically, your identical twin - only several years younger. But wait, there's more. Check this out.Nearly a decade ago, on December 22, 2001, scientists at Texas A&M University announced the birth of CC, the world’s first cloned cat. CC, as in Copy Cat, has the same DNA blueprint as her genetic mother, Rainbow. So, like identical twins they share the same genetic code. That means everything’s the same—their looks, their mannerisms, their…. But wait. Okay, they named the clone Copy Cat and I have some faith in humanity restored because of that. A closer view in color reveals they don’t actually look identical. In fact, technically they’re not even the same color. Rainbow, with her spackling of orange mixed in with patches of black accentuated by a white belly and legs is calico while CC, who has no orange coloring at all, is a tiger-tabby. The article goes on to explain that no, they don't have the same mannerisms, either. An animal clone, then, is clearly a completely separate entity. There is no fuzzy boundary on the pronouns; the two cats are distinctly different. That article is obviously old now, which means the cats involved are almost certainly ex-cats and that the technology has advanced since then - but I've heard absolutely nothing to convince me that "cloning," as we know it, is anything other than a type of asexual reproduction. The important takeaway here is that, even if the technology is there to do that with humans, if you were to go out and get yourself cloned tomorrow, there'd be a new entity born about nine months later (probably to a surrogate mother), and the only question would be whether that entity is your sibling or your offspring, or both - and even that is hardly a new conundrum if you live in, say, Alabama. Point is, it's not "you," and you have no say over it beyond, possibly, parental rights and obligations. We already know what to do with a new life; we've been doing it since long before you could call us "human." (I'm not a lawyer, either, but this is the ethical argument, not the legal one.) Now, there's a somewhat related question, one that's also been done to death in science fiction - that of artificially grown organs or limbs that could potentially be used as replacement parts. I think I've already established that we can't use clones for that because they are individuals, at least not without their consent (and if you think such consent would be invalid, consider how many people have donated a kidney or part of a liver to a compatible recipient). Short answer: This is not an ethical question. Long answer: We're not talking about a separate, conscious, living entity here, but a collection of cells grown in a vat (or whatever medium they use these days). No central nervous system, no thoughts, nothing to have thoughts with, and not even the potential to become an independent organism. I will add one more thing, as food for thought (pun absolutely intended). But it's a little squicky, so if you're squeamish, stop reading here. ... Still here? Fine. You were warned. There's a persistent cultural taboo in most societies against cannibalism. There are good reasons for that, it's not just a matter of "eating people is icky," but I won't go into them now. Still, in extreme situations, people have been known to violate this taboo: The Donner party, for example, or that soccer team or whatever that crashed in the Andes. You do what you have to in order to survive. So here's the ethical conundrum, if you can look at it without the weight of cultural baggage: what's the actual difference between consuming human flesh to survive, and accepting a donor organ to prolong your life? I mean besides the method by which you get the meat into your body, which to me is a distinction without a difference. As I see it, the cloning thing is settled ethics. The organ donor thing also seems to be settled by everyone else, but I don't really understand why people get weird about cloning and not about organ donation. Feel free to discuss. |
| I don't respond well to motivation. This isn't some manifestation of Oppositional Defiant Disorder or whatever the fuck they're calling mule-ass stubbornness these days. At least, I don't think it is. It's just that none of the usual tricks work on me. Motivational messages, I've found, fall into two broad categories: ass-kicking, and ass-kissing. Think of the former like a stereotypical drill sergeant. It's something like reverse psychology: "You're weak and you'll never amount to anything." It's usually meant to get you to prove them wrong. It doesn't work on me, because my response to that is something like, "You know, you're right. But so what?" For the latter, the ass-kissing, I think of the classic kitten poster where the poor feline is about to fall off a branch. "Hang in there." No, I think I'll let go and give up; it's easier. Whoever did that to a cat - even if it's only a matter of taking its picture rather than helping it - should be put in the same predicament. But mostly, I think, it's a matter of comedy. Drill sergeants aren't funny. Cats hanging on by a thread are the polar opposite of funny. And that's where demotivation comes in. These are messages that appear, on the surface, to be the opposite of motivating. But that's what makes them funny. Couple the message with what would, in other contexts, be an inspiring image, and you get comedy gold. I'm not going to explain it any further, because the First Rule of Comedy is that if you have to explain it, it's not funny. You either get it or you don't. And if you don't, you're weak and you'll never amount to anything. But hey, hang in there.  |
| The noughties were a strange time for me. I have a hard time letting go of the past. I've said it before, but all the "living for the present" rhetoric doesn't ring true for me; by the time you register something as being in the present, it's already in the past. "Noughties" was my coinage, by the way. No one else seems to know what to call the first decade of the 21st century. Nothing else fits, so "noughties" it is - any year of the format 200* gets shortened to 0* and is, therefore, the noughties. It never caught on, partly, I think, because I'm utter crap at self-promotion. (Yes, I know that decades begin at the year ending with 1 and end 10 years later at the end of the year ending with 0, but popular usage works otherwise, so I'm sticking with that.) But I digress. By 2004, my mother had been gone for five years, and my father was effectively gone, though it would be another four years before his body joined his mind. I was married, but otherwise adrift - I'd quit my job of 15 years and gone to work for someone else in the same field, but the change was still a difficult thing for me. Having always had a thing for writing, it was in that year - 2004 - that I joined Writing.com. I don't know how it is for other people, but for me, whenever I told someone that I wanted to write and get published, they'd look at me like I was an alien. Or maybe they just felt pity for me, because getting published might as well be winning the lottery. Or they just figured there's no way an engineer can also be a fiction writer, possibly for reasons I touched on in my entry about knowledge and creativity a few days ago. Thing is, I didn't have that problem here. Mostly everyone else on this site is in a similar situation - loves to write, isn't exactly Stephen King. I learned stuff about writing. It's a mad, complicated process that it's impossible to get perfect at. As with cooking, there's always something more to learn, something else to incorporate. But that's not why I stuck around. I stuck around because I made friends. I'm not going to list them here, because, inevitably, I'll miss someone and they'll feel left out. But you know who you are, especially if I've met you in person. Hell, I've traveled all over the country and beyond meeting WDC people. There are experiences I'd probably never have had without the people I've met here, including sampling wines in California, seeing the final Space Shuttle launch (sort of), and staying in a house in England that's older than my country. And I'm happy to add new experiences and people to the list, especially if you buy me beer. |
| There was a football game tonight. I live close to UVA, close enough that I can hear the announcer and the music. Sometimes, even the crowd. When I do, I know two things: 1) I'm staying home; the streets are a goddamn mess. 2) Things will be crazy later. It doesn't matter whether Virginia wins or not; people get riled up either way. Just now, sitting on my deck freezing my ass off, I heard firecrackers. At least, I hope they were firecrackers. Not much in the way of gun violence in Charlottesville; just the occasional white supremacist coming in from out of town to run us over. I like my deck. I'll like it better when it gets replaced, if I can ever get someone to commit to giving me an estimate for the work. Right now, it's aging and weathered, but it serves its primary purpose, which is letting me sit outside while still being mere feet from a portal to the great indoors, where it's warm. Oh, lovely. Now there are sirens. There are two times I can guarantee hearing sirens around here: just as a storm begins, and after a football game ends. It rained here, earlier, and the air still smells of wet decay. I think, judging from the odor when the breeze shifts a certain way, that one of my cats brought me a present again, but I'm not going to root around in the dark looking for a dead mole or whatever it is. And it's getting colder. At least there are no bugs right now. When I sit out here in the summer, it's warm, which I prefer; but bugs crawl, fly, and hop all over the place. Few bugs appear this late in the season, but it's cold. If I'm lucky, there's one or two days in the year when I can sit outside and be warm but not plagued by arthropods. Maybe I can get a firepit installed with the new deck. Preferably one that works off the city gas lines, because I'm lazy. There are some advantages to being outside, I suppose. It helps me keep in tune with the seasons, for starters. While I don't much like fall or winter, they do help me appreciate spring and summer more. I live in a city, but it's a kind of suburban area of the city with actual plots of land, and my backyard is all trees and nature so I don't have to go up to the Blue Ridge to freeze my ass off. Mostly, though, I can enjoy a cigar without stinking up the house and pissing off my housemate. I think if I didn't spark up a stogie every once in a while, I'd only be outside long enough to walk to and from my car. Soon, it will be too cold even for that, and I'll spend all my time inside, where I belong. This outdoors shit is for the birds - and even most of them have the good sense to fly south for the winter. |
| "Did you know that butterflies taste with their feet?" No, but I knew that butterflies taste horrible. That's one of those things that you can only learn from experience. Oh, you can say it all you want, but unless you've actually zipped down the road on a bicycle, mouth wide open to gasp in the sweet spring air, only to suddenly have your cakehole suddenly filled with old shoes, industrial waste, aluminum, and ground fingernail, you probably think butterflies are magical flying flowers or something. To be fair, there might be good-tasting butterflies out there. I know that some birds discriminate between the various species of fluttering insect, so, presumably, there are some that are delicious - at least to those birds. I have no desire to find out for myself; my taste buds exist for the primary purpose of discerning certain nuances in beer, wine and scotch, few of which sound particularly appetizing to the uninitiated. "This fine single-malt has deep flavors of oak, leather, peat, tobacco, and iodine." The challenge is to translate that into a phrase that might actually sound good to someone who's never had the transcendental experience of actually sipping whisky. Scotch aficionados, on the other hand, would be all over that. Periodically, most writers have to be reminded to use other senses besides sight and hearing. One exercise from NaNo Prep comes to mind: "Describe a setting. Use all five senses." The result usually reads like an exercise in using all five senses, but it's good practice anyway. Problem is, we don't have five senses. This is just one of the many lies they tell you in public school and, I presume, private school also. Well, not really a lie, actually - it's just that kids aren't exactly good at nuance and subtlety. One of them accidentally eats a butterfly, and it's all "Yuck! Hork! Patooey! Gross!" with no stopping to experience the full range of sensory experience on their tender palate. The five "classic" senses - sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch - are really all just touch. Different specialized cells in the tongue and nose pick up on compounds released from the butterfly - or whatever - that brush against them. Hearing is the interpretation of rapid pressure variations in the air (or water); the sound waves tickle our eardrums, and a Rube Goldberg contraption of bone, muscle, and nerves interprets the result. Sight is similar, only with photons instead of sound waves. It's all, ultimately, touch. Moreover, we have other senses than the classic five. A sense of balance, unrelated to the "touch" we learn about in school, is also unrelated to hearing - most deaf people can balance just fine - but relies on organs in or near the ears. There's the sense of proprioception, which is a fancy word for knowing where parts of your body are in relation to each other; you can raise your hand over your head, out of sight, and not lose track of it (we tend to take this one for granted, but it's a legitimate sense). Some other animals have different senses, leading me to wonder whether a butterfly is actually tasting with its feet; perhaps it is smelling, or maybe it's using a sense we don't have a word for because we're not butterflies and our perception is thus limited. Sharks have at least three senses that we don't have, including the ability to sense electric fields, a feature shared with some other fish. Bats famously have hearing that's so sensitive that it might as well be sight for all practical purposes. Even common domestic cats (otherwise known as Our Overlords) have a sense that sort of combines taste and smell. So yes, it's a good idea to feature the underutilized senses in writing. But if, like me, you're a fan of fantasy and/or science fiction, the real fun comes in making up different senses and attempting to translate them to our limited experience. How, for example, would you describe the sight of a species whose visual organs can detect different sections of the electromagnetic spectrum? Hearing that exceeds our own range of vibrational wavelengths? An eel following an electric current? The taste of a recently-discovered moon? I know when I write, I tend to be movie-like - sights and sounds, with other senses mostly just available through dialogue or inference: "Ewww, what died in here?" Or a description of Our Hero's face twisted up after swallowing a shot of gin. I should probably work on that. |
| Ever wonder if knowledge inhibits creativity? I have. I remember once when I was a young child, there was an illustration in a children's book that featured a night sky through a window. I don't remember the context or anything else about the book, but I do remember a crescent moon and stars against a dark blue background seen through the classic rectangular grid of a double-hung window. Or I might be remembering some details wrong. Memory is like that. But what I am certain of is that there was a stylized star between the horns of the crescent moon. "That can't happen," I told the teacher, or babysitter, or caretaker, or whatever. "The moon is still there; it's just dark. It would block the star." Okay, I probably didn't use a semicolon, but you can't know that for sure, because I spoke it, and it's not like I would have vocalized the punctuation. "It's just a drawing," the adult explained. Or something to that effect. That's the first time I remember using knowledge I'd gained to revoke someone's artistic license. I've done it countless times since then, most often when some science fiction show depicts the asteroid belt as a dense field of tumbling rocks. In reality, the view from any given place in the asteroid belt might feature one or two extra points of light, but is otherwise identical to the view from, say, the other side of the moon. Asteroids are widely separated. If they're not, they turn into smaller asteroids which then become widely separated. The result is barely even a hazard to astrogation, and you're not going to be able to use it to lose the bad guys who are chasing you. And yet, such a depiction immediately conveys "asteroid belt" to the viewer, just as stars - misplaced or not - and a crescent moon on a dark blue or black background says "night." Knowledge is like a labyrinth, in a way. A really big and convoluted one. Fixed, but with dark, twisty corridors and branches that lead nowhere, but must be traversed anyway. It has a floor, and walls, and a ceiling, and even adjoining spaces might be miles apart as one traces one's path. It occurred to me recently that the idea of such a maze might have even been inspired by the naked human brain, with its lobes and crevices - the brain, of course, being the container of knowledge. The classical labyrinth housed the Minotaur, a bull-man chimera with a penchant for munching on humans. The Minotaur never made sense to me, either. Even if you allow for divine intervention or genetic engineering, the circulatory, muscular, nervous, lymphatic, and other bodily systems of human and bovine are simply incompatible. Not to mention that, in its classic depiction as a human figure with a bull head, its teeth would be that of a ruminant: dull, flat, and entirely unsuitable for chewing on any kind of meat - long pig or otherwise. If the labyrinth represents knowledge, the Minotaur would have to represent ignorance. Fake news. Unfounded fears; the monster in the shadows. Illusions. Theseus had to a) defeat the Minotaur and b) escape the labyrinth. For the first task, he had a sword. Swords are extremely useful for such things, but only if you know how to use them. For the second task, he had a ball of string helpfully provided by some chick who probably realized that, while Theseus could have simply marked his path with the sword so that he could follow the marks back out, doing so would reduce the sword's effectiveness at its primary task; to wit, turning the Minotaur into prime rib. I think that part of the story was put in there to illustrate that Cretan women were smarter than Athenian men. But I digress. It occurs to me that Theseus could have accomplished both tasks if, instead of a sword, he'd carried a sledgehammer. Go in, find the Minotaur, bash it between the horns, and then knock down some walls. But I suppose that would be cheating. Hang on, though - isn't creativity all about cheating? Did Alexander the Great cheat when he used his own sword to cut through the tangle of the Gordian Knot? Did Captain America cheat when he knocked down the flagpole to earn a ride in the Jeep? As I mentioned above, two adjacent spaces in a labyrinth could be very far apart if one traverses the maze like a good little lab rat. But let's give the lab rat some supplies - say: a) a chocolate-chip cookie; b) a paper clip; and c) a toy truck. Rats are both smart and creative, so can our Theseus-rat MacGyver his way out of the labyrinth? This is where creativity comes in. It turns out that each chocolate chip is actually a concentrated block of C-4. Go to a wall, press one of the chips to it, stick one end of the paper clip in the chip, attach the truck's ignition to the other end, and use the starter motor on the truck to ignite the explosive. Boom. No more wall. Step through, see another wall. Pull out another chocolate chip. Repeat as necessary, and you're out. As a bonus, you can even eat the cookie when you're done. And maybe even the truck. There, now - just because something is absurd doesn't make it impossible, you know. Especially if you're a rat - or a writer. |
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