200 words on love and the inescapable nature of death :
They came to rest just short of the solar shock.
“We’re here, my love. It’s the system that I told you about, the one with the twin suns. One massive and orange, the other small and white. Spinning around each other in an eternal dance of ferocious beauty. Their light spreading out through clouds of proto-planetary dust. Like a hazy sunset over the harbor where you grew up. Frozen in time. Beautiful and mysterious.
Give it a scant few billion years and it’ll all firm up. There’s enough for two, maybe three planets. All in the habitable zone. Any luck and they’ll be just like yours. Green, wet, alive. You won’t even be able to tell the difference. It’ll be just like home. Promise.”
In the cold nothing of space, his tears freeze against his cheeks.
“I’m sorry. I’m so, so very sorry. My people can be anything, do anything, fix anything. Anything…anything but death. Death is always the intractable thing.”
He spreads his arms, and she slips away from him for the last time.
“They will wrap you up and hold you forever, they are my proxy for what I wish I could do.
I love you.”
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go hug my girlfriend.
The country’s highest court said that the woman — whom it didn’t identify — had failed to demonstrate any connection between experiments at the CERN collider outside Geneva and the apocalypse.
The Federal Constitutional Court in the western Germany city of Karlsruhe threw out the woman’s appeal because she was “unable to give a coherent account of how her fears would come about.”
Especially math that dips its toes into pools filled with terms like “chance to” and “infinite”.
Now, the Drake Equation was postulated to solve the Fermi Paradox, which wondered why the universe was so damn quiet.
I feel that I might have left you with a bit of a notion that the equation itself was completely worthless. Which, technically, it is. But, if you flip it over and look at it backwards, it tells us something very, very important.
It tells us that none of those numbers in the equation are zero.
And how does it tell us this? By the simple fact that we are around to think up the damned thing in the first place.
The equation is a multiplicative equation. Each variable is multiplied by a previous variable, and so on and so forth down the line. If any of those numbers were, in fact, zero, then we wouldn’t exist.
If you know a little bit about probability, then you also know that if you are dealing with data points numbering into the trillions, that the odds of getting a single positive return are so highly improbably, they are nearly impossible.
The Drake Equation won’t ever tell you what it is supposed to. But, it will always tell you something else.
“Dammit, Crack a window! Bad enough in here without you adding to it!”
Carl laughed his hacking smoker laugh and pushed one of windows open. The clack and roar of a moving train poured in.
I went back to picking through the pile of oddly shaped instrument cases, looking for bag 112. It belonged to some touring orchestra person. Specifically, a touring orchestra person that died in the train privy not two hours ago.
“What’s the stiff’s story, anyway?” I called to Carl, who was digging through his own pile of misshapen luggage. “Heard he was a baffoon player or somethin’.”
“Tha’s bassoon, you twit. Sss! Sss! Not Fff! Ah! Gotcha!”
Carl suddenly appeared at my side, hoisting a rectangular case over his head. “Found it!”
The weak latch gave out, and the case flapped open, spilling wooden tubes covered in metal bits, small glass jars and a leather syringe kit.
We stood frozen, staring at the drugs.
In a single motion, Carl tossed them out the open window.
“There’s enough embarrassment in livin’. Folks don’t need more of it after they’re dead. Let the poor bastard keep whatever dignity he had left.”
I’m moving, so I don’t have time to sit down and beat on my novel like I want to, so instead I decided to pick out a few FastFictions to keep the gears from seizing up.
There are supposed to be systems in place to monitor them through the whole process. To make sure that something like this could never happen.
This was one of those one in a million sort of accidents. Something with Karen, something with the system, something with both of them. Who knows. In the end it doesn’t really matter.
Investigators from the insurance division said her brain activity was just a few points above where it was supposed to be. Still within parameters, but for Karen it was apparently enough to make the difference between deep sleep and a waking nightmare.
In the tube it would’ve been like sitting in a pitch black room, unable to feel the floor. The sheer weight of the nothingness crushing down on her.
After centuries of being trapped in the dark, the brightness of the future must’ve been too much for her mind to take.
When she stood there on the edge of the roof, gazing out over the twisting lights of the city basin, her willowy body barely hidden under a light blue medical gown, something in poor Karen just broke.
It’s a bunch of variables strung together by an astronomer named Frank Drake. The idea it is that if you know the numbers that plug into each of the variables, you can solve out the number of intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy, the Milky Way.
The numbers break down like this
R*= The rate of yearly star formation in our galaxy.
fp = The percentage of those stars that will have planets.
ne= The average number of potentially life supporting planets that those stars will have.
fℓ = The percentage of those planets that will develop life.
fi= The percentage of those kinds of life that will develop intelligence.
fc = The percentage of those intelligent lifeforms that will go on to develop a civilization with advanced enough technology to be noticed by another civilization.
L = The length of time those intelligent civilizations broadcast that noticeable signal.
And lastly, the solution is…
N = The potential number of civilizations in our galaxy that we could communicate with.
Now all of this was thought up to answer a very simple question with a overly fancy name.
The question is this: If the galaxy, and thus the universe, is so damn big – where the hell is everybody?
The name for this question is the Fermi Paradox. It’s named for Enrico Fermi, one of those mad bastard scientists of the 20th century who was responsible for the atomic bomb. The question came from a casual discussion Fermi was having with some peers back in the 1950s. It, like most great question that smudge the line between science and philosophy, was a simple one with incredibly deep and far reaching implications. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, and potentially thousands of billions of planets orbiting them. Surely, with those odds, more than one planet won the cosmic lottery and grew life that could reach out to the stars.
Yet, for all our shouting out into the night, both intentional and inadvertent, no one has shouted back.
Now, there are lots of theories why we haven’t seen signs of anyone else out there, and most of them are not completely crackpot. The galaxy is big, and even if there was another intelligent civilization on the other side of the galaxy shouting things out like we are, odds are we, the human race I mean, would die before those signals ever reached us.
You also have to consider time. The variables in the equation are continuous, and continuously changing. Civilizations could be blooming and then dying off before we event transition from the bronze age to the steel age. Think about how close we came to annihilation during the Cold War, now imagine that scenario acting itself out across any number of worlds with less favorable results.
There are an unlimited number of minor variables that can factor into the equation, too. Things like the potential of a civilization to exterminate itself with war, the likelihood a civilization to die because of a cosmic accident such as a star going nova or a meteor impact, essentially anything with the chance to end a civilization that is not factored in those seven original variables.
Ultimately, you run into the same problems volcanologists and meteorologists have in attempting to make a workable predictive model. That is, one of scale. In order to build an accurate mathematical model of prediction, the only way to ensure true accuracy would be to rebuild the universe itself as your equation.
Which makes the Drake Equation, as Frank Drake himself put it, little more than a way for us to organize our ignorance.
Still, it’s a rather fun way to organize our ignorance, though.
An update to yesterday’s bit about the Chilean earthquake, straight from NASA:
The Feb. 27 magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile may have shortened the length of each Earth day.
JPL research scientist Richard Gross computed how Earth’s rotation should have changed as a result of the Feb. 27 quake. Using a complex model, he and fellow scientists came up with a preliminary calculation that the quake should have shortened the length of an Earth day by about 1.26 microseconds (a microsecond is one millionth of a second).
Perhaps more impressive is how much the quake shifted Earth’s axis. Gross calculates the quake should have moved Earth’s figure axis (the axis about which Earth’s mass is balanced) by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters, or 3 inches). Earth’s figure axis is not the same as its north-south axis; they are offset by about 10 meters (about 33 feet).
By comparison, Gross said the same model estimated the 2004 magnitude 9.1 Sumatran earthquake should have shortened the length of day by 6.8 microseconds and shifted Earth’s axis by 2.32 milliarcseconds (about 7 centimeters, or 2.76 inches).
Gross said that even though the Chilean earthquake is much smaller than the Sumatran quake, it is predicted to have changed the position of the figure axis by a bit more for two reasons. First, unlike the 2004 Sumatran earthquake, which was located near the equator, the 2010 Chilean earthquake was located in Earth’s mid-latitudes, which makes it more effective in shifting Earth’s figure axis. Second, the fault responsible for the 2010 Chiliean earthquake dips into Earth at a slightly steeper angle than does the fault responsible for the 2004 Sumatran earthquake. This makes the Chile fault more effective in moving Earth’s mass vertically and hence more effective in shifting Earth’s figure axis.
Gross said the Chile predictions will likely change as data on the quake are further refined.
I really can’t help it if the last bit makes me snicker a bit. I feel like the people at NASA are saying this:
SOMETHING BIG HAPPENED! SOMETHING DEVASTATINGLY, AMAZINGLY, MIND-BOGGLINGLY HUGE!…and we’re going to ride it for press while the headlines are still hot. Besides, who cares, we could be making up these numbers and you’d have no way of knowing. High five! We’re the top of Reddit, Digg, Wired today! Nerd hat-trick!
It does make you think, though. Just how far has the Earth’s axis and rotation shifted over the years? Maybe the whole damn thing’s flipped itself over a few times along the way.
Almost unrecognizable, isn’t it? It takes a moment before you realize that you’re looking at the Pacific Ocean.
And you’d probably never know what you were looking at unless some one gave you a clue. I thought it was this year’s El/La Nino map.
That’s the NOAA energy model for predicting tsunamis after the 8.8 Richter scale quake that hit Chile this Saturday. In terms of magnitude, that quake is the fifth largest in the last 100 years, and one of the largest in recorded history.
The Richter scale is funky in that it is an exponential scale. Going up a whole number is doubling in magnitude. So, a 2 is twice the magnitude of a 1, and a 7 is sixty-four times the magnitude of a 1. To give you a point of reference, the Haitian quake last month was a 7.0. So, this quake that hit Chile was almost four times as powerful as the initial quake that rocked Port-au-Prince, and almost two hundred and fifty six times more powerful than a quake that registers a 1 on the Richter scale.
For all our hubris and chest thumping at our achievements, it gives me pause to think about the sheer force that nature has at its disposal. And not even intentional, willful force. An earthquake is just the planet scratching an itch, like a horse twitching its flank to chase away a biting fly. It is not my intent to anthropomorphize our planet. There is nothing behind this, no hidden plan, just stone slipping against stone.
Stone slipping against stone and generating the force of one point two million atomic bombs.
The first observation is that vast bulk of the growing wave of hacking going on is economic. It’s a transfer of wealth from those that have it to those that have the technical chops to take it (it’s a process that’s very similar in nature to what global financial elites are doing to the rest of us — with similar levels of complexity and secrecy). James Fallows came to roughly the same conclusion in his recent column in the Atlantic magazine. This is the bleeding elephant in the room. The transfer of wealth being accomplished this way is massive and growing daily.
Fair warning from line one, this video has some anime tits in it. Well, hentai tits, if you want to be genre-specific. They are only up there for a half second or so, three times in total, over the course of the video, but I just wanted to put that out there before you people started griping.
Anyway.
This video is called Akihabara Majokko Princess. It is directed by McG, a mass media agent provocateur let lose by the global media concerns to kill our brains. His oeuvre, as you can see, is a questionable, if not prosecutable one.
Which makes his most recent endeavor a puzzling one.
Quick note: that video might get taken down because of previously mentioned cartoon mammaries. Google it if it vanishes.
Yes, that would be Kirsten Dunst bouncing around in the Akihabara district of Tokyo dressed like a reject from an acid tripa fetish love doll an anime character to her own version of The Vapor’s “Turning Japanese”. Now, normally I’d shrug and move along after watching this. But there’s one niggling catch to this. You see, the mad king of Japanese pop art, Takashi Murakami (the guy behind “My Lonesome Cowboy” (that link is soooooo NSFW)), is running an exhibit at the Tate Museum in London called Pop Life, Art In A Material World. And McG has some how managed to get himself rolled into it. And that music video? That’s his entry.
Which gets me thinking. Maybe I’ve missed something here. Maybe McG wasn’t just swiping a song that had a surface level reference to Japan. Maybe he picked that song because he was re-imagining the masturbatory implications of the song in terms of the Japenese cultural obsession with the fantasy world of anime. And maybe, beyond that, he’s trying to make a statement about how the West’s attempt to assimilate this otaku culture is also masturbatory and self-gratifying without doing anything to advance our own culture.
Which in thinking these thoughts makes me think another:
I hate myself for giving McG this much credit.
I’ve decided that I’m going to tell myself that Murakami just told him what to do and that McG is incapable of creating something multilayed and interesting.
Without warning, the building to David’s left erupts in flames. Glass explodes out from the windows as the fireball rolls upwards, encircling the building like a bonfire halo. Then the building to his right explodes, then the one behind him, in a blink of an eye, the busy row of storefronts has become a hellish inferno. The banner, its support lines burned away, floats gently downward in the rain. David opens his mouth to scream, but no sound will issue forth.
That’s Endeavour coming home from STS-130 last night. Probably the last night landing for an orbiter ever, unless something goes horribly wrong. One hundred and thirty orbiter missions down, only four left to go. The whole space shuttle program shuts down in September of this year. Leaving the United States, as I’ve pointed out, completely reliant on other nations for transport to space. This is, without a doubt, one of my greatest disappointments in this modern world.
I get a lot of questions as to why this is so important to me. “Put a man in a house before a man on the moon”, etc. And yes, social concerns are important…but they are also deceptive because of their immediately apparent return on investment. Issues of space exploration are akin to having a retirement account that you are putting money into when you are a teenager. The total benefit seems negligible, and the time when the investment will be used is many, many leagues beyond the edge of your vision. There will be a great return at some point, and a return that ensures your continued existence, but it might as well be a fantasy for as far away it is.
Think of it like this. Oceans and rivers and lakes, all aquatic ecosystems, are kept alive by motion. The water cycle keeps fresh water moving in, and photosynthesis infuses oxygen into the water as it moves. If the whole thing were to stop, then everything would die. The oxygen would rise to the surface of the water and dissipate back out into the atmosphere. It is only because of this regular motion that this doesn’t happen. The Earth is like a body of water that’s stopped flowing. Ever so slowly, but steadily, what we rely upon for life is escaping us. Eventually, this world won’t be able to support us, and that’ll be the end.
Space exploration is a way to keep that from happening. You lessen the load on this planet, and you spread the species around. Even if we were to suddenly start living in harmony with the planet, but never found a way to escape it, we’d still be vulnerable to meteor impacts and the unavoidable expansion and death of our sun.
I’m gonna let Carl Sagan take me out on this one:
Look, all I’m asking is for you to just have the tiniest bit of vision. You know, to just sit back for one minute and look at the big picture. To take a chance on something that just might end up being the most profoundly impactful moment for humanity, for the history… of history.
It is snowing outside, big beautiful flakes that are sticking to everything but the ground. I am inside eating the last of the leftover chili from the Superbowl (#whodat).
2010 has gotten over those awkward first few weeks and is now in full stride. I expect by the time I finish this bowl, I’ll look up and find it is now half way through April, and well into July by the time I leave work today.
Ten years ago at this time I was a senior in high school, just accepted to college. I’d filled out a one page application to Savannah College of Art and Design back when they were desperate for bodies. I was prepping for my final AP exams. Of which said college would only accept credit for one of the dozen or so that I took and passed. I think any day now will be the decade anniversary of when I was dumped, for good, by the girl I’d been dating since freshman year. She would be the first, but sadly not the last, girl that I spent an extended amount of time with who decided they preferred internal genitals to external genitals.
I honestly don’t remember what my dreams were at that point. Something along the lines of running my own gaming company, a thought which now scares the ever-living shit out of me. Mainly because I now know that the actual act of running a game studio has next to nothing to do with creativity, and nearly everything with being able to sell out your best friend if it gets you another two points on your quarterly earnings sheet. I’m sure living in some place that I’d never been to was part of the deal, probably out in the blasted hellscape of Los Angeles.
But that was all ten years ago. Things are different now. You couldn’t pay me to live anywhere near LA, and I got out of the video game racket before it claimed my life. But not before it had already taken large parts of my liver and sanity. I’m working for a quirky little design shop in this bizarre small/big town that is more real than any other place I’ve lived. Any dreams of giving interviews to reporters who are confused about my new video game have long since been boxed up and put away with my comic book collection. They aren’t things that I don’t love or won’t fess up to, but simply things that I don’t need on a daily basis. I’ll occasionally drag them out of the closet and flip through them, but for the most part my life doesn’t need them to get by any more. Oddly enough, I’m still using the degree I got from SCAD. Bachelor’s of Fine Art in Interactive and Video Game Design. I got it to make video games, instead I’m building websites and social media networks. The wonderfully talented people I’m around make the pretty, and I make the pretty work. Not a bad deal all in all.
I still have dreams, but they are less obscene and outrageous. Finish my book, self publish it. Complete a collection of ROCK! with my girlfriend. Buy a house with her. Never take her for granted. See Istanbul before I’m thirty. Never stop reading. Always make my friends feel like they have some one they can trust. Always been the person they can trust. Never stop being just desperate enough to do something that seems more than just a little crazy. Never let the world beat me down. To never, ever, ever stop thinking new things and wondering if they could possibly be.
Ten years. Seems like a lifetime. But it is only just one part of it. Lots more ahead than behind.
The flashback has grown, like a malignant cancer, across the storyscape of my novel. Good, healthy pages that were set aside for use in telling the present story have been perverted for use by this flashback sequence. At nearly twenty pages now, it encompasses nearly a tenth of the goal length of the book.
And that’s just flat unacceptable.
So, I think it is time to take scalpel to the unchecked growth and cut it out. The idea for a flashback was sound, but I think I ended up getting too specific, giving too much away. I was killing the mystery, slowly and without dignity.
It is time to bring my mind and the reader’s eye back to the present. Now that I know what happened in the past, I can leave clues for the reader to infer what happened. Let them fill in the bits so I don’t have to write them.
I’ve been reading quite a bit more in the last few weeks than I have in the previous months. I felt my brain getting soft in a post-holiday binge of video games and other novelties. I included some young adult fiction in my reading, and the cleanliness of the prose really appealed to me. The editorial knife had cut all the way down to the bone and sinew, taking some meat with it, but leaving the story with just the basics it needed to function. Keep it simple, keep it clean. Two things that I can same I’m guilty of not doing.
For Monday, I think I’m going to rebuild my roadmap for the novel. It was one of the things that I lost in the Great Harddrive Collapse of 2009. Well, that and the finished script for THE PINEAPPLE PRIMARY. I’ve still got it in my head, but it is much looser, and I think if I’m going to stick with the serialized aspect of MAGICTOWN, it is a must to have strict guidelines that must be adhered to.
I like the story. I understand the characters now. I just have to put things back in order and hold the leash tighter.
IDG News Service – An upstart Trojan horse program has decided to take on its much-larger rival by stealing data and then removing the malicious program from infected computers.
Security researchers say that the relatively unknown [Spy Eye toolkit] added this functionality just a few days ago in a bid to displace its larger rival, known as Zeus.
The feature, called “Kill Zeus,” apparently removes the Zeus software from the victim’s PC, giving Spy Eye exclusive access to usernames and passwords.
Zeus and Spy Eye are both Trojan-making toolkits, designed to give criminals an easy way to set up their own “botnet” networks of password-stealing programs. These programs emerged as a major problem in 2009, with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation estimating last October that they have caused $100 million in losses.
…..
With its “Kill Zeus” option, Spy Eye is the most aggressive crimeware, however. The software can also steal data as it is transferred back to a Zeus command-and-control server, said Kevin Stevens, a researcher with SecureWorks. “This author knows that Zeus has a pretty good market, and he’s looking to cut in,” he said.
Turf wars are nothing new to cybercriminals. Two years ago a malicious program called Storm Worm began attacking servers controlled by a rival known as Srizbi. And a few years before that, the authors of the Netsky worm programmed their software to remove rival programs Bagle and MyDoom.
Spy Eye sells for about $500 on the black market, about one-fifth the price of premium versions of Zeus. To date, it has not been spotted on many PCs, however.
This, of course, is all being done by the Russians. Which reminds me of all those lines in Gibson books referring to “Russian black ICE”. It is amazing when you that that just two decades ago you could trade a pair of Levi’s 501 jeans for a human life in the Balkans, and now they are this slowly churning cauldron in which the most advanced and dangerous information technologies are being developed. They’ve already shown they are more than capable of blasting the networks of former Soviet satellite states of the face of the Internet whenever they start to get a little too uppity in the face of Mother Russia.
Nerds in Russia, commanding slave armies of sleeper computers. The future is rather strange, innit?
My name is Zachary Whitten. I live in Memphis. I work at Combustion. I make the pretty things on the Internet work. I drink. I plot and I scheme. I occasionally write things that will probably never see the light of day.
