MySpace repost: "SciFi/Horror of Rudyard Kiping"

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Oct 24, 2009
currently reading Horror and Fantasy of Kipling

Well, to give the full title of the collection, The Horror and Fantasy Tales of Rudyard Kipling, including, "The Phantom Rickshaw", "With The Night Mail", "At the End of the Passage", "The Strange Ride of Morrowbia Jukes", and "Mark of the Beast".

Yes, this is the same Kipling who wrote the Jungle Book, which is quite different from the Disney animated film.


And yes, Kipling is well-renowned as a rascist and an imperialist ( I haven't made an informed opinion myself, and poor Kipling can't defend himself. Attacking the character of the deceased seems cowardly to me). I agree with other critics that that alone should not be held against his writing. His stories should be weighed according to their own merit.


Anyway, I was most interested in a single story, "With the Night Mail", subtitled "A Story of 2000 AD". I was rather suprised to learn that Rudyard Kipling wrote some sci-fi.


I have read it, although I have yet to read the other "tales" and it was an interesting read. Speculative as expected, rather than science-based, it nonetheless earns the title science fiction. Instead of a 'space opera' though it was a 'stratosphere opera'.

I will follow with further analyses of the more straight-forward psychological and suspense stories at my next blogging. I've never really read horror at all and I'm distinctly repulsed by horror movies, so we'll have to see.

Until next time...

MySpace repost x2: "Star Trek Destiny"

Nov 18, 2009
dissatisfied with my Destiny


Well, the Destiny trilogy is turning out to be rather disappointing. The first two books were better, I think, or rather they are all equally good but are ... disappointing in hindsight. That's all just my personal opinion, by the way.

(spoilers)

I am sick of the Caeliar. Sick of Erika Hernandez. Sick of the Borg being blown away too quickly. Sick of nobody significant dying. Sick of the way the author seems to have read waaaay to many comic books. Maybe that's one of the downsides of a trilogy: if there is a weak point it starts to seem intermidable. Or when something is fun and interesting, it's like ice cream, too much of a good thing gives you a belly ache.

I will grant the author, David Mack, a few bravos. His rendering has been pretty lively overall, and the confluence of the various story threads is quite complex. He brought in a few Zaldans, and mentioned Rhandaar, all of which is good. (Where are my Betelguisians?) His interplay of Federation President Bacco's politics was a lot of fun for me.

On to some of my gripes:
1) I don't think the Hirogen should have blood. I didn't see it in Voyager (that I recall) and that was even when they were hacked up and shot by bullets.
2)Why give his new race, the Takarans, such powers, and such a lengthy treatment? I personally think all those regenerative and anatomical traits properly belong to the Hirogen. Such time was spent on the treatment that could have been better spent on further developing one of the other many races. (okay, I partially rescind my gripe: I just googled Memory Alpha and learned Jo'Bril from TNG was our first intro to this species. Mack was indeed fleshing out a known species whose regenerative hardiness had been established, although I still think he overdid it. And his downplay of the Hirogen still irks me terribly)
3) When Mack uses an Andorian female as a main character, leading a stike team against the Borg, IN THE DARK, he doesn't play up their special senses, which are very well established within the post-Nemesis books. Specifically, Andorians should be able to sense a body presence even within the dark and energy dampening feild.

Okay, I have plenty of others, but let me get on with this.

Just for curiosity sake, let me list the major superpowers recognized by Bacco's Presidency: Klingons, Romulan Star Empire, Imperial Romulan State, Gorn, Breen, Tholian, Ferengi, Talarians, [Tzenkethi], and Cardassians. (The reason I list Tzenkethi in brackets is because, in the book, they never actually showed up. To someone not familiar with the books, the dual representation of the Romulans may present a suprise, as well as the Gorn. IN THE BOOKS, the Gorn Hegemony gained a bit of recognition starting with an ally during the Dominion War. I still prefer the term Gorn Star Kingdom, as used is the Starfleet Academy video game, but that's neither here nor there. The double Romulans come in after a lot of chaos and civil war and rebellion following the whole Shinzon insurgency, which is more from the books than the canon, but is rather implied by Nemesis.) The Talarians are a suprise to me (other than their single appearance in TNG, I know of no other entries).

I encourage speculation: what other species were worthy of inclusion, in your opinion, in a simple imaginary "dream team" of sorts (well, team is a stretch, considering the hostilitiy of the various superpowers). I vote for the Jarada, myself.

Let me just say, in my opinion, I hate using the word "nation" to descibe these, as is current in most if not all recent books. Calling them all empires is innaccurate, and calling the states sounds a bit diminutitve. I would prefer the term "sovereignities" although that is rather clumsy.

P.S. I just checked Memory Beta (11/18/09), a wiki site for non-canon Trek, and it says: "At present the TrekLit universe has entered a period of major upheaval with the aftermath of Star Trek: Destiny and the alternate reality of the new Star Trek movie." Yup, that pretty much sums up the current state of affairs.

P.P.S. Oh, I updated the Memory Alpha wiki site for Zaldans, Rhaandarites, and I think there was something else. What can I say, I'm a bit obsessive.

10:43 AMLike •
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Nov 8, 2009
AMBASSADOR Garak? The ways of Destiny are mysterious

I am currently in the middle of reading Star Trek: Destiny: Book 2: Mere Mortals (what kind of laughable ostentation for a title!). This is a novel set approximately 16 months after the last Star Trek movie, Nemesis.

I am enjoying this trilogy immensely. I finished Book 1: Gods of Night just last week, and I have Book 3: Lost Souls on order from Amazon. I should be a bit clearer; it is a little more than just a trilogy. The arch starts with the book by Christopher L Bennett entitled Greater Than the Sum (or perhaps even father back to Before Dishonor, which I haven't read). Then, from what I've read, the arch continues with KRAD's A Singular Destiny which I may decline reading. Maybe not, if I hear good things. And with KRAD (Keith R.A. DeCandido), it's hard to imagine him not writing a book worth reading.

I have my comments, but I would refrain from too many spoilers. I apoligize for my lapse in protocol concerning Garak, but my grim amusement at the prospect of that unexpected development deserved an immediate response.

Oh, for anyone reading this series, I strongly recommend that you don't read the flashbacks until after you conclude the series. Although I can understand the publisher's reasons for putting it all together, in retrospect the narrative would flow faster AND be more interesting/mysterious if the flashbacks (only in the Destiny trilogy proper) are not explained until afterward, rather than unfolding as they do. If a prospective reader does this, please please let me know how this works out for you. The flashbacks are easily identified by year headings (such as 2381, etc. BTW, the 2300s are non-flashback years, to be read first)

I was really pleased to read a passage where parallax was casually mentioned without any definition to insult my intelligence. That was cool. They are definitely continuing their programme to beef up the Trek novels from their popular conception as "teen novels."

Oh, on the Cardassian novel, Never Ending Sacrifice: I'm not making any plans on reading it. I didn't like the author's previous contribution to the Relaunch, and it sounds like a perifery subject and I won't miss too much to...erm, sacrifice. How about you?

9:36 AMLike •

MySpace repost: "Discovered Science Writer Willy Ley"

My Willy Ley "Discovery" - Dec 2, 2009

I have to tell you about an author I have found recently. Willy Ley was a science writer in the '50s and '60s and thereabouts, and very well known in his day as a "rocket man".
He wrote on quite a few other nonfiction subjects, including zoology, archeology, and chemisty. Zoology is how I originally fell upon him, but I am enjoying Dr. Ley's writing so much that I have followed him into realms of science I never would have thought of a pleasure reading.
Currently, I am reading his book titled "The Discovery of the Elements." That's what I was refereing to. The origins of chemisty never occured to me as something I would be reading for fun. This is a book for the novice reader.
Yes, I'm sure a lot of his work is dated, but much of it is the history of science and/or biographical, and that isn't as susceptible to ephemerality (haha, I don't think I've ever had cause to use that word before!).
If you've never read Willy Ley (which I suspect) please consider looking up his "Discovery of the Elements" book. It was at my tiny local library. I realize you may be too busy to read every random book that friends recommend (most people are and I know I am). So, just leaf though and read one page out of the middle. I think you'll see what I mean.
He has a quality that I really, really admire in a scientist. He isn't so "puffed up" about his own surety. I don't see the self-righteous ego that I have almost come to expect. He has a cross European-American background, and that makes his writing the more informative and entertaining. He has a talent for branching into anecdote and tangent without making it so lengthy it seems like the subject has changed. This book, and indeed all his books I've seen, are written in a way that the novice can understand.

Science: Who Mendel really was

As you might know, I am taking a science class thruough Edx.org from MIT Biology professor and acclaimed geneticist E. Lander.

This week, after looking at proteins and enyzmes and molecules, we came to genetics, which is a perfect time to discuss Mendel. It was a really great lecture, and I loved hearing all these biographical tidbits I had not run across before.

I really, really hope I am not in violation of either the academic code nor copyright anything.

"So people knew somehow there was something very important about the
information that was transmitted, and you couldn't help but notice familial
resemblance.
So for thousands of years, people wondered about familial resemblance.
Folks being folks would make up explanations for it.
The ancient Greeks were very big on philosophizing, not so much on doing
experiments.
And so they had all sorts of philosophical explanations for this,
that particles from all over the body would come together
into the seminal fluid.
Sort of some kind of pulling operation and collecting information from the
body that would somehow go into the seminal fluid.
Most of the Greek theories were relatively sexist because it was the
male that was transmitting the information, and the female was
permissive to all of that.
Indeed at some point, people could later, many hundreds of years later,
looked at microscopes and even thought they could see little people in the
head of the sperm, little homunculi.
It's amazing what you can convince yourself you can see.
Broadly speaking, since heredity didn't follow incredibly simple laws,
the general view was somehow information was
combined from both parents.
Eventually the female parent ends up getting involved in this too, even if
not in the early Greek theories.
Information was combined from both parents and blended in some way, and
it was kind of mushy beyond that, exactly what that meant, by blending
inheritance.
So today, what we're going to do is talk about the origins of a real
understanding of heredity.
But it's important to know that for 2,000 or more years, people were just
completely confused about this thing.
And to understand that, we need to know the origins of Mendel.
Now, in biochemistry, we started by meeting Buchner.
Buchner, I bet most of you have never heard of before.
Amazing biochemist, you haven't heard of him before.
So my job with Buchner was to teach you about him and
what his problem was.
With Mendel I have exactly the opposite problem.
You've all heard of Mendel.
You learned about Mendel in high school, and probably kindergarten, and
things like that with the peas and the big As and the little As.
And everybody's been exposed to Mendel.
And I have to unteach you about Mendel first.
Mendel, I've got to say, I'm a geneticist.
Mendel is one of my real heroes.
Mendel is not who you think he is.
You think, it's always told that Mendel is this lone monk off in a
monastery in Brno in what is today the present Czech Republic.
And you're wondering, what is a monk doing performing scientific
experiments in the city of Brno in the middle of the Habsburg Empire?
And like, what's going on, cooking these peas for his fellow monks for
long periods of time?
You have to understand the origins of Mendel.
The origins of Mendel go back to the age of exploration.
They go back to the 1500s, when Europe sends out ships across the world.
And people come back with all sorts of strange new plants and animals.
And people begin cultivating them, and breeding them, and people get very
interested in breeding experiments, in part because of all these new
varieties, new species that are coming in from the new world.
Then there's another incredibly powerful reason why people care about
breeding at this time, and that is economics.
Europe goes from being lots of isolated little villages, not really
communicating much with each other, to building road networks.
To building commerce across cities and villages, and countries.
And it becomes more and more economically viable, economically
rewarding to make a better apple.
If you made a better apple in your own little village, you might sell it to a
few other people.
But in fact, if you could make better plants and better animals, and you had
an economic distribution system, you could get returns on investment for
improving agriculture.
So there was a powerful positive force of economics at work there as well.
So people begin to start thinking about these things.
In England, there's a lot of work on breeding better and better fruit trees
and better sheep.
A guy called Blakewell produces the Dishley sheep, which
produces great meat.
And he becomes very famous for his sheep breeding skills.
Now, on the continent of Europe, sheep were not about meat.
That wasn't what you really wanted the sheep for.
What the European continent wanted sheep for was wool.
Everybody knew that the Spanish had the best wool sheep.
Spanish sheep produced the best wool.
But of course people who are growing sheep for wool across Europe, they
wanted Spanish sheep.
And so they imported Spanish sheep, but the Spanish sheep didn't do so
well in some of these other environments.
And so people began crossing the Spanish sheep with the local sheep to
make sheep that still had good wool, but somehow survived better in the
local environments.
And there was breeding going on in France, and going on in Germany.
But the place that perhaps cared most about wool, you might imagine, was the
center of the textile industry, which was Moravia in the Habsburg Empire.
And the capital of Moravia then was Brno.
They cared a lot about wool.
And so people in this area, in the city of Brno, began to organize
scientific societies and discussion groups to talk about, how could we
make breeding better?
More scientific?
There was a guy called Andre, Carl Andre in 1806, organized the Moravian
Society for the Improvement of Agriculture, Natural Science, and the
Knowledge of the Country.
And he drew up a whole program of scientific development, emphasizing
the importance of basic and applied research in the natural sciences.
And in one of these kind of over the top civic booster kind of speeches, he
writes in his program that the significance of this kind of work on
better breeding may someday be as important as the work of Copernicus
and Newton.
And that some day the world may be as grateful to some son of Brno as they
are to Newton and to Copernicus.
Pretty kind of florid, over the top kind of prose.
But Andre lays out this whole program there, and he gets other people
interested in it.
And this guy, Hempel, five years later, begins writing about these
things and making programs.
And he says, look, we've got to understand the laws of hybridization
and how they really work.
And we're going to have--
he says we're going to need really scientific people to do it.
He says--
he even tries to characterize the kind of folk we're going to need.
He says, "we're going to need a researcher with a profound knowledge
of botany and sharply defined powers of observation who might with untiring
and stubborn patience grasp the subtleties of the experiments, take a
firm command with them and provide a clear explanation," he writes in 1820.
Well, around this time, Andre had organized a group called the
Enological and Pomological Society.
The Enological and Pomological Society, right around this time there,
very interested in plant breeding.
It has its first president, who's the president of it for about the first
seven years.
When he dies, a new person takes over, CF Napp takes over the Enological and
Pomological Society.
Now, that's not a full time job, doing this.
He has a full time job.
His full time job is he's the abbot of the Augustinian Monastery in Brno.
And he begins to decide to have his monastery work on breeding.
So he goes off looking for scientifically trained monks.
Looking for months with backgrounds in math and physics.
He's looking for MIT kind of monks.
And so he's off looking for these people, and who does he find?
STUDENT: Mendel.
PROFESSOR: Mendel.
Mendel is no accident.
Mendel is the result of economic forces and scientific forces, and
civic planning and an understanding of scientific research that culminates in
this monk that you think is this isolated guy standing in his garden in
the monastery.
No.
He's the product of a biotech incubator.
This was a biotech incubator going on in the middle of Moravia.
That's Mendel."


Link to an English translation of Mendel's original paper!
http://www.mendelweb.org/Mendel.html

Good science - 1908 early geneticist

I am really enjoying hearing about the history of science in my EdX class I am taking.
My grades and performance isn't too impressive, but I am taking the class for fun, not credit. Although if I pass I will value the certificate they offer.

But today's lecture on early genetics had a passage that really impressed me, and I love hearing scientists speak about good science.

I'm not sure this is approved for me to post (off a YouTube video lecture), but I am going to anyway, and hope I don't receive consequences.

PROFESSOR: Section 2.
Fruit Flies and the Linkage.
To explain what resolves this, I have to tell you about one more person.
There's another really interesting person, a guy called Thomas Hunt
Morgan, who spends decades as a naturalist and an embryologist.
And he studies all sorts of different kinds of critters.
And he's fascinated by everything in the natural world.
And he has one of these labs where he kind of works on everything.
All sorts of crazy things are going on.
And when this whole Mendelism stuff comes back, he's interested in the
Mendelism stuff too.
But he is really an experimentalist.
He doesn't go in for this high-faluting theory.
Morgan is not a theory guy.
He's a data guy.
He's very suspicious of all this talk of factors and things like that.
In fact, Morgan begins to do genetics work in his lab, not to study
Mendelism, but to study evolution.
He starts crossing fruit flies together.
He starts about 1908, crossing fruit flies together in the hope that he's
going to discover evolution happening in the lab, new forms coming up.
We know it's going to be new mutants.
But that's not what he was looking for originally.
He's looking for these kinds of new forms.
And I know that in 1908, when he was beginning to do this work, he was no
believer in this whole chromosome business.
I actually found an article he wrote in 1909 that tells you what kind of a
skeptic he was.
He says "In the modern tradition of Mendelism, facts are being transformed
into factors at a rapid rate.
If one factor will not explain the facts, then two factors are invoked.
If two factors prove insufficient, now three will sometimes work.
The superior juggling sometimes necessary to account for the result
may blind us, if taken too naively, to the commonplace that the results are
so excellently explained, because the explanation was invented to explain
them." Just like what we talked about.
That was exactly what was bothering him.
"We work backward from the facts to the factors and then presto, explain
the facts by the very factors that we invented to explain them." That is a
good skeptical scientist.
He says I love your high-faluting theory over there, but
I'm not buying it.
And he's off making fruit flies.

Here a great link provided by the class. This is an excerpt of a Nobel speech in 1907 by Eduard Buchner.

JHW: HR Blacklisting: The Future

In my Job Hunt Woes series, I saw this and just had to share:

http://www.cracked.com/article_20322_6-ways-companies-are-secretly-screwing-job-applicants_p1.html?wa_user1=1&wa_user2=Weird+World&wa_user3=article&wa_user4=feature_module

The future is here, and it's really dark, and probably getting darker. Legal protection is no protection at all when it comes to things like this.

having fun: Intro to Biology, Dinosaurs, and more

These last few days are being fun, including an MIT Biology class I signed up for FREE online (edx.org), a book on dinosaurs that has proven to be suprisingly stimulating, and a discovery in cooking.

The MIT Bio class just started this week, and so nothing heavy yet. I signed up just for kicks. It has already proven kick-worthy. It has taken a lesson from the history of science, the discovery and description of enzymes (via study of the yeast fermentation puzzle of the 1890s) and climaxing in the scientist Buchner's Nobel lecture in 1907, available online.

For many people, I suppose that isn't much of a climax. For me, it's pretty cool. I love these sorts of "history of science" stories.

Next, I have been reading "Ultimate Dinosaur" edited by Byron Preiss and Robert Silverberg, and written by several respectable authors. I was suprised and pleased to find that this book is both fiction and non-fiction, written by several respectable authors, and well-crafted in a manner that is clear which is which. It is a collection of essays and short stories, alternating genres in a manner easy on the reader. I was also pleased it had subject matter for a more mature reflection. You see, the cover seemed to suggest a kid's book. The fiction writers write fiction, and the scientists write science. What a refreshing book.

Okay, in my cooking, I love it when I find a quick recipe that actually is quick and easy and cheap. A cheap box of mac 'n cheese, cooked in 12 minutes, using the butter it calls for, with or without milk, and the Stove Top stuffing stirred in right before serving. Easy, but very good!