New Pournelle interview

Glenn Reynolds interviews Jerry Pournelle, at PJTV.

Compare and contrast: Tom Snyder interviewed Jerry Pournelle and Durk Pearson, back in 1979.

Star Trek, Phase II

Really new adventures. All for love, no money. Thanks to Moe Lane, who explains a bit more.

Animals that live without oxygen

"It's life, but not as we know it, Jim!"

"O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!"
"There are more things in Heaven and earth …"

Deep under the Mediterranean Sea small animals have been discovered that live their entire lives without oxygen and surrounded by 'poisonous' sulphides. Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology report the existence of multicellular organisms (new members of the group Loricifera), showing that they are alive, metabolically active, and apparently reproducing in spite of a complete absence of oxygen.

Rand Simberg says, "Pretty cool. What does this say about prospects for extraterrestrial life?"

Could these be survivors from the Archaean, before photosynthesizing plants gave Earth its oxygen-rich atmosphere? (Not likely, but considering the next paragraph …)

This month's Analog has a related story, "At Last the Sun" by Richard Foss. It must have been written before this discovery was announced.

Update: Author Richard Foss has stopped by to comment that he did indeed write the story months before the discovery was announced. It's a good 'un, so go ye forth and buy that Analog.

Sorry, you just said something that does not mean what you thought it did

8 Phrases That Don't Mean What You Think They Mean

Say what you mean, mean what you say. Be a truthful speaker.

"Truthful speakers" are characters in a novel. Don't look for them in Washington.

A lot of fun for the Tolkeinish nerd

Kate Nevpeu's re-reading of The Lord of the Rings. At the rate of a chapter a week, or fortnight, depending on Kate. I have read this many times, but never discussed it with such focus.

Jack Vance has written a memoir

Steven Hart writes about Vance, and about this book, This Is Me, Jack Vance (Or, More Properly, This Is "I").

Too many favorite Jack Vance stories to name them all.

There is some more discussion here. The Vance Integral Edition has already become a rare item.

Free concert, second set

"Hey There, Cthulhu" by Eben Brooks. An antidote to the wholesomeness above.



A little bit this, a little bit that. Fair and balanced.

Thanks to Lynn at Violins and Starships.

Possibly interesting to bloggers

If I could manage to dig out my old copies of Richard Geis's wonderful magazine, The Alien Critic, later Science Fiction Review, I might be able to find an article by E.C. "Ted" Tubb called "I have just cleaned and oiled my typewriter, which was a wild and crazy thing to do." Or something a lot like that.

If you own a typewriter, take it to the typewriter shop. If you can find one. Trying to do the maintenance on it yourself will lead to all the problems Tubb described in that piece. Mostly, you'll use the wrong kind of oil and put it in all the wrong places, where it will attract molecules of dust that had not even existed prior to the oil application, and which will be the grit that gums things up even worse than they were before.

I have not owned a typewriter for decades. So this is about something else. [Will you just get to the point, for crying out loud?]

I backed up the blog. [Oh, so that's it.] Now I have about 200 MB on my local hard drive, the whole thing, pictures and all. It felt like a daring thing to do. But I may do it again, on another computer. And then I might copy the whole mess to a CD. Don't try to stop me. When I get an idea in my head, I'm gone.

The tool I used was Httrack. It took about half an hour over a fairly quick DSL connection. But now I have a copy of all my wonderful, important words and pictures [Stop that chortling in the peanut gallery!] that is not in the cloud, but right here. It got everything but a couple of the Javascript widgets on the sidebar, and I can browse it locally just the same as online. Comments and all, yes, comments and all.

Now if I could only remember to back up the local disk.

Secret origin revealed: the shallowness of Paul Krugman

He read Isaac Asimov's Foundation books, loved them, and failed to understand them. Understood about the first twenty percent or so, the setup of Hari Seldon's idea of psychohistory. If he'd been paying attention through the rest of the stories, he would have seen that psychohistory was doomed to fail.

This explains much.

TigerHawk has the story, and the comments.

And Ramesh Ponnuru has something to say.

It's a pity his school librarian didn't give him some Heinlein.

Captain Stargood

This is a lot of fun. Here's the trailer:


More at Captain Stargood dot com, naturally. Not suitable for kids! Thanks to Kevin MacLeod at Incompetech, who did the music.

Something about this reminds me of Captain Video. I was a big fan, back when. (Ha! Not very big, at age 5 or 6.) My favorite bits were the "exterior" shots of the spaceships. The Galaxy and Galaxy II were good-lookin' rocket ships. They were miniatures, of course, but pretty darn good ones. There are a few shots of some of those miniatures at the bottom of this interview with Harry Persanis, who worked after school for the effects studio. The Internet Archive has a couple of episodes. Because most of the DuMont network archives were destroyed, those two are a fair proportion of all that remain.

When Edward met Buffy

Edward Cullen and Buffy Summers, that is. Video.

"Dreams with Sharp Teeth"

That's the name of a biographical documentary film on and by Harlan Ellison. I just caught it on the Sundance Channel, and it will be shown a few more times in the coming week. The DVD will be released on May 29th. I would imagine the point of the multiple showings is to stir up some interest in the DVD. It worked; I have pre-ordered it from Amazon. It looks like there are enough extras on the DVD to make it worthwhile (as opposed to just saving the main film on the DVR). Full list at the Amazon page.

Plenty of Ellison talking; some partial readings; archive film of old interviews and appearances. Reminiscences of youth in Ohio, being a target of bullies. He describes how a child cannot explain the irrational to an adult: but there is no logic to bullies picking on someone. "Why you? Well, why in fact not me?" And the awful feeling, "like an icicle jammed into my chest," when his mother said, after one such attack, "You must have said something to get them angry." An early exposure to the problem of evil, and the futility of attempting to rationalize it.

All this and a lovely yet unobtrusive score, composed and performed by Richard Thompson on acoustic guitar, with some multitracking.

Update: Michael Totten, posting at Instapundit, has linked to an excerpt on YouTube. There are more.

Welcoming our new ice overlords

Geoengineering. (via Reynolds.)

Now they're talking about geoengineering. What happens when an adherent of Ehrlich is appointed to a position of responsibility power? Turn the siren up to eleven! We got global warming, it's catastrophic, TURN THAT GLOBAL THERMOSTAT DOWN! Honestly, some of these people think a hangnail is a catastrophe. I wonder if John Holdren knows anything about the Dust Bowl of the 1930's. Maybe I'll send him a copy of The Grapes of Wrath.

Back in January, I said:

some of the alarmists are calling for geoengineering schemes to supplement ineffective CO2 reduction schemes. "Climate scientists: it's time for 'Plan B'." The survey on which the first piece is based: "What can we do to save our planet?" This approach could get seriously dangerous. None of these scientists exhibits any concern about the possibility of triggering another Ice Age.

Are these people mad?

Well, they might just be monumentally incompetent and stupid, perhaps venal. If that's any comfort. But they are in power now. Yes, I know that I don't have the degrees that they do, the credentials. But I don't have the vested interests, either.

Triggering another Ice Age. Think about it.

Update a few minutes later: Andrea Harris makes a Fritz Leiber reference.

And another: Even the Greenies don't like it.

(NaturalNews) Of all the hare-brained ideas about climate change I've heard in the last few years, this one takes the grand prize: John Holdren, the new science advisor to President Obama, is actively considering radical geoengineering ideas in order to halt global warming. One such idea now being discussed with the Obama administration involves -- get this -- launching enormous amounts of pollution particles into Earth's upper atmosphere to block the sun's rays and "chill" the planet.

Let me explain why this is one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard. And keep in mind this is not about the debate of whether global warming is even real or not, since that's a different article altogether. This is about the short-sighted stupidity of even considering polluting the atmosphere in order to protect us from the CO2 pollution we've already dumped into the atmosphere.

First off, there's the whole idea that intentionally launching pollution into the atmosphere is, by any reckoning, a dangerous ecological experiment that potentially puts the entire Earth ecosystem at risk. Let's face it, folks: Human beings have proven themselves to be remarkably bad at anticipating the ecological effects of their own actions. The ramifications of such misguided efforts to fight global warming simply cannot be foreseen by any scientist (or group of scientists).

Well, then, there you are.

How much actual power does a science advisor have, anyway? Since his power is to advise and persuade, he'll likely do what the climate alarmists have been doing all along, fudge facts to make his case more emphatic. Like the fellow in the videos linked below.

Yet another update! More on this from Richard Fernandez at PJ Media. In comments, he voices a thought similar to something I have been thinking lately, "Sometimes I think the only function that a blogger can perform is to become a chronicler of the descent into insanity. The issues are no longer Right versus Left; Conservative versus Liberal. To some extent it is a battle between sanity and Looney Tunes."

***

And check this out: A little bit of a debate on climate and energy policy between Marc Morano and Joseph Romm. As near as I can tell, Morano is a political type with no particular scientific credentials, but is well-informed on the issues. Romm, on the other hand, has lots of credentials, worked in the Department of Energy for years, under Clinton, in important positions.

And yet, when they get to talking, Romm is spouting hysterical nonsense, while Morano calmly counters with facts.

So this is the best they can do? This is the "physicist and climate expert?" This person worked in government for years, determining the policies to guide the future of the nation? <sarcasm>I so want the government to take over my health care, build my cars, tell me how much I should be allowed to earn, how much I should be allowed to save.</sarcasm>

From Jerry Pournelle's mail.

Update: Mr. Romm is not happy about how that debate turned out.

Mundus vult decipi

A smart comment by madawaskan at Althouse reminded me of this:
which is the emblem of Dom Manuel, the central figure of "The Biography of the Life of Manuel," a series of novels by James Branch Cabell. The Latin means "The world wants to be deceived."

Or as Joni Mitchell said,

The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in '68,
And he told me: "All romantics meet the same fate someday.
"Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafe.
"You laugh," he said, "You think you're immune,
"Go look at your eyes, they're full of moon.
"You like roses and kisses and pretty men to tell you
"All those pretty lies, pretty lies.
"When are you gonna realize they're only pretty lies?
"Only pretty lies, just pretty lies?"

We've elected a sweet-talkin' ladies' man, and have to hope it does not "come down to smoke and ash."

Literary notes: Jurgen, the best-remembered volume of the Biography, is available on line, with illustrations, from the University of Virginia. Figures of Earth, in which Manuel is the protagonist, is available from Project Gutenberg, as is Jurgen, in Gutenberg's usual text-only format. Some more Cabell links at Virginia Commonwealth University.

This post gets an "SF" tag because I don't want to have separate tags for fantasy and science fiction. Cabell is not a science-fiction writer.

Stimulate with one hand, strangle with the other

Of course you need two left hands. Calling all Moties! Oh, that's it — we've been infiltrated by space aliens from beyond the Coalsack Nebula! (Oh, all right, the Moties have two right hands. So they are mirror Moties, from a parallel universe.)

Regulating industry does not serve to stimulate the economy. If we had people in government with any real-world experience at all, they would realize this.

NY Times:

The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to act for the first time to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists blame for the warming of the planet, according to top Obama administration officials.

The decision, which most likely would play out in stages over a period of months, would have a profound impact on transportation, manufacturing costs and how utilities generate power. It could accelerate the progress of energy and climate change legislation in Congress and form a basis for the United States’ negotiating position at United Nations climate talks set for December in Copenhagen.

That would be a profound negative impact. Where are the nukes? Has anyone explained to these people that while plants take in CO2 and give out O2 during the day, they do the reverse at night? Maybe if we put grow-lights in the forests to keep the plants awake, they could do photosynthesis all the time. No, the Democrats would not like that either. Sleep deprivation is torture. And the electricity would have to come from somewhere. No, wait, we don't need grow-lights — we need space mirrors! No more night! That's the answer. Hope, change, and light. Oh, well, anything to get the space program re-activated. Though I'd rather see a bunch of private enterprise space projects.

If California and Florida weren't already full, I'd be thinking about moving to a warmer climate. Rather than waiting for it to come to me.

Politics of warming, again

At PJ Media, physicist Frank Tipler discusses the attitudes of the alarmist scientists in What The Caine Mutiny Can Teach Us about Global Warming Scientists: Climate change advocates often argue from "authority" as opposed to examining the facts.

In the Boston Herald, by way of the AP, Harrison Schmitt (who not only walked on the Moon, but also served in the US Senate longer than Barack Obama) says, among other things, "It’s one of the few times you’ve seen a sizable portion of scientists who ought to be objective take a political position and it’s coloring their objectivity." [Here's another link for the same AP story, at Heartland Institute this time, for backup.]

In a response in the HuffPo to Schmitt, Bill Chameides, dean of Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, deploys powerful weapons of argument from authority and sarcasm to demolish the hapless astronaut, or Senator. In combination with disingenuous argumentation and faux naïveté, these are deadly.

Humorous side note: A Herald commenter says

This global warming thing reminds me of the flood of cars with California plates that came into Prescott, AZ when I was a kid back in the 60s. When folks actually believed they knew the exact date of when California was going to fall into the Pacific ocean. Guess we all saw how that turned out. This time around, same people, different topic of doom. These are all subscribers to "It Could Happen Magazine". You know, the one that has all the same junk science stories the Discovery Channel plays every day. Just think how cool it'd be if we could get global warming, a giant comet impact, a super hurricane, and a 1,000 ft. tall mega tsunami to all happen on the same day that Wizard of Oz monkeys fly out of Al Gore's butt. Now that would be something I'd certainly be impressed by!

which reminded me of Free Zone by Charles Platt. In that book, Platt tries to include every sf cliché he could think of. He can't help but miss a few that have been invented since the book came out in 1988; he claims 71. The aliens are invading from space, the robots have time travel, the barbarian hollow-earth dwellers are emerging, the undersea city is rising and it's filled with hostile, intelligent dinosaurs. All at once!

Update: Moldbug weighs in on the attitudes of the alarmist scientists:

The incentive of all federally-funded science is the same: keep your funding, and try to get more. It is not that most scientists are "in it for the money." It is that you cannot be a successful scientist, in this era, without being a successful bureaucrat. As such you respond to bureaucratic incentives, such as the feelings of your NSF program manager.

His mom makes an appearance.

Thinking about time travel,

could it be done, could, should, I, you, do it, I see that somehow I have neglected to link to Heinlein's "All You Zombies —" — the time travel story to end all time travel stories. It didn't, actually, end them; but if people would have read it, it would have. See what I mean about time travel? Gets you all mixed up and leads to confusing the tenses. [Which will remind me, in the next paragraph, to link to Tenser, said the Tensor, a sporadic (as I should be the one to say!) but always interesting site whose title is inspired by Alfred Bester. What the Tensor does with the "unanswered questions" from Slate has me LOL.] I plan to stop doing it, sometime soon. Or late, I can't tell any more.

That discussion must have been in someone else's comments. I went on to say something about Alfred Bester and "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," which leads to Copenhagen interpretation, many worlds, and that darn cat. (And the Tensor song, from Bester's The Demolished Man.)

Recent reading: Avram Davidson, Adventures in Unhistory. Prose so tasty you want to spread it on a muffin. Got to keep the "Selectra Six-Ten" away from the computer, though.

Whose law is it, anyway?

Burke's Law? No, not that one.

Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation: "any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror."

McKean's Law: "Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error."

Skitt's Law: "Skitt's Law, a corollary of Murphy's Law, variously expressed as 'any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself' or 'the likelihood of an error in a post is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster.' The effect is, of course, magnified a hundredfold if the post is in reply to Skitt himself."

By way of a post at Language Log which settles the question of whether we are ignoramuses or ignoramii, and does it without begging the question.

Let's see, if every post with an error drew a post which had an error, which then of course would draw another post, which would also have an error, oh my! The next thing you know, all the pixels would be used up, and the Internet would implode, leaving nothing but email and a few listservs. Good for the old carbon footprint, I suppose.

I know why this post has an "SF" tag. Do you?
Update: Answer in the comments.

Browner appointment is "an arrow aimed at the heart of the American economy"

That line's from Bird Dog, at Maggie's Farm. And it's memorable. I can't get it out of my own head, anyway. Mr. Obama appears to have drunk all of the Al Gore-ian environmental Kool-Aid. The Bird Dog links to a WSJ article: "Mr. Obama is stocking his energy shop with the greenest of greens who want to move fast on a very aggressive climate agenda. Here come the carbon busters."

Moonbattery has this charming picture:


Glenn Reynolds links to John Tierney at the NY Times, who asks, "Does being spectacularly wrong about a major issue in your field of expertise hurt your chances of becoming the presidential science advisor? Apparently not, judging by reports from DotEarth and ScienceInsider that Barack Obama will name John P. Holdren as his science advisor on Saturday."

The reports appear to have panned out, and colleagues at Woods Hole and Harvard, and some other people in Massachusetts, are excited.

Ron Bailey says that "In his salad days, Holdren was a paid-up member of The Limits to Growth club.… Near the beginning of his career, Holdren introduced with his colleague, perennial population alarmist Paul Ehrlich, the concept of the I=PAT equation. Human Impact on the environment is equal to Population x Affluence/consumption x Technology. All of which are supposed to intensify and worsen humanity's impact on the natural world. In the past Holdren has adhered to the common ecologist's disdain for insights from economics in helping solve environmental problems." [Typo in Ehrlich's name corrected by me.]

More Holdren at Solve Climate. And Luboš Motl isn't being coy: "John Holdren is the ultimate example of the pseudointellectual impurities that have recently flooded universities and academies throughout the Western world."

So Browner and Holdren are Deep Greens. Will they be having policy meetings with Paul Watson to determine the optimum method for bringing the world population down to a "sustainable" level, maybe one billion or so? That's a lot of Soylent Green.

In the meantime, the world is growing colder. Are we are getting closer to Fallen Angels all the time? Let's have enormous, expensive, economy-killing programs to stop the Earth from warming, when in fact the Earth is cooling.

Maybe we need to throw another log on the fire, as our ancestors did long ago. (via, via)

Here previously: Energy is the sine qua non of civilization, or even merely taking out the trash.

Update, Dec 24: a follow-up from Tierney: "My post on John P. Holdren’s appointment as presidential science advisor prompted complaints that I was making too much of Dr. Holdren’s loss of a bet to the economist Julian Simon about the price of some metals. But that bet wasn’t just about metals. It was about a fundamental view of how adaptable and innovative humans are, and whether a rich modern society is “sustainable.” Dr. Holdren and his collaborator, Paul Ehrlich, were the pessimists."

Update: Original source of the picture.

Should I be reading Cracked more often?

Or, What, more tentacles?

Back in the days when magazines were actually printed on paper, I remember Cracked was a lame imitation of Mad (the real thing, accept no fershlugginer substitutes). Now, on the Web, come articles like this one: 7 Terrible Early Versions of Great Movies. (Not for kids! Rated R for unnecessary bad language.)

Hollywood is full of screenwriters moaning about how the studio ruined their original vision. But what we never hear about is the opposite side of the tale, where some truly horrific piece of writing gets turned into an awesome film.

In fact, it turns out some of your favorite movies started out as truly awful screenplays that somebody had the good taste to rewrite before the cameras started rolling.

Which movies? Oh, let's see, Star Wars, Spider-Man, Alien … here's the original Alien concept, if you believe it:


Not sure I see the problem. Squamous, rugose, possibly, um, eldritch? Might be more Lovecraftian than stf-nal, yet a fair number of Lovecraft's stories were sf, strictly defined. I like the way the two lower-most tentacles fold into Don Martin-style hinged feet.

I saw this at Ace of Spades. Maybe I'll just keep reading Ace, and let him notify me when there's something good at Cracked.