Category Archives: Science and Technology

The Rocket’s Silver Glare

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This past weekend held no particularly good or bad events but rather mundane chores. Saturday, I took my Soul in to have its oil changed, and following that, I visited my local Kaiser facility for joy with needles.

First a maintenance blood draw, to ensure that my arthritis medications still were not destroying my kidneys or liver. This was followed by dual vaccinations: COVID and flu. I ended up with two needles stuck into my right arm and one in my left.

By late evening, I was feeling the effects of the vaccinations, with the muscles around the flu shot quite sore. I slept very poorly that evening. I am one of those persons that toss and turn in their sleep, and every time I turned onto my left the pain woke me up. In addition to that, for about half the night I seemed to be freezing, and the rest of it until morning I sweated in my bedding.

With that poor sleep and with the vaccinations seemingly activating my arthritis, we skipped our customary Sunday trip to the zoo, and I just tried to do as little as possible until finally in late afternoon when the muscles began to stop hurting.

Then came, quite literally, Sunday’s bright point. We had finished dinner, and as I reclined in my easy chair, my sweetie-wife came into the room announcing you could see a launch out the window.

Indeed, a rocket’s contrail, bright and silvery, was growing up toward the south in the darkening twilight sky. The head looked to be moving slowly as it climbed, but that was an illusion of perspective and distance. Because our home had already passed into night with the sun to the west below the curvature of the Earth but the contrail was in full sunlight due to its altitude, the whole thing glowed with what looked like an inner light.

Occasional flashes of brighter white light appeared in the contrail some distance behind the rocket climbing towards orbit. I was puzzled for a moment; was this a first stage breaking up? Then it hit me. This was a SpaceX Falcon Nine launch. Those white flashes inside the contrail came from the booster firing its engines for its return flight. Of course, the landing itself would be below the horizon and invisible from San Diego, but it was quite a thrill to see what we did manage to witness.

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Senator Cassidy: the Man Who Trades Lives for his Career

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer with no scientific or medical training and compulsively deluded by seemingly endless conspiracy theories, is the person Donald Trump, an equally idiotic and deluded man, nominated to be in charge of the nation’s Department of Health and Human Services. Even more than the other toadies, bootlickers, and grifters Trump put into his thieving, petty, and vengeance-obsessed administration, Kennedy represented a clear, dangerous, and lethal threat to the American people. Whether this crank would ascend to such a position of power really came down to one man: Senator William Cassidy, a former physician but loyal GOP foot soldier.

phto credit: Wikipedia

Cassidy, ignoring both his oaths (the one to protect the nation and the other to do no harm), from either naivety or idiocy or plain self-interest, accepted the clear and obvious lies from Kennedy that he would not act on his decades-long crusade against vaccines and voted to give him a power and authority he clearly had no training or temperament for. Other senators, using Cassidy’s former status as a physician as the cover they needed, followed suit, and Kennedy was given the reins he so desperately wanted.

Kennedy’s promises proved as binding as Trump’s, and he launched into his attack on the scientific standards and advancements that have for more than half a century truly saved the lives of countless Americans and people around the world.

mRNA therapies, after literal decades of blood, sweat, and tears of research, came to fruition when we needed them most, during the worst global pandemic in a century, but they hold much more promise than that.

Cancer is not one disease; it is a galaxy of similar diseases that have plagued and stalked humanity since antiquity. One of the most insidious aspects of the disease is its ability to hide from the body’s immune system, escaping detection and destruction until the body itself is consumed and killed. mRNA therapies hold the greatest promise for treating and defeating cancer ever developed, but not anymore. Kennedy killed that research. Maybe China will pick up the ball and run with it. They have the technical know-how and the skilled, college-educated scientists to do so, and then we can rely on the CCP’s good graces and will to share that with dying Americans.

We are diving into flu and COVID season for the winter of 2025/2026 just as Kennedy is destroying the administrative infrastructure that approves and distributes the critical vaccines to save American lives. I myself may have lost the ability to receive the COVID vaccine booster for this year because I have not yet reached 65, so I feel this very personally.

Lives are going to be lost because Cassidy bent the knee, denied the clear and obvious truth about Kennedy, and preferred to safely not “buck the system.” What has he gained from his betrayal of the American people? Are the people who are going to die a reasonable price to have others pay so you can be a Senator for just a bit longer, Cassidy?

I do not believe in a life after death or some divine judgment for our actions while here on Earth, but I wish there were. Kennedy is deluded and stupid; he is like a rabid dog. But you are neither, and you knew the choice you were making and the price others would pay for it.

You, Senator Cassidy, are evil.

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That Elon Conspiracy Theory

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There are those who question why Elon Musk, the wealthiest man on the planet, put so much time and effort as a special employee of the government into the ludicrously conceived ‘DOGE.’ He was never, much less easily, going to find 2 trillion dollars in waste and fraud in a federal budget of about 6.8 trillion dollars. What he has cut is funding for things he did not approve of and that seemed to threaten him in some way. (See which Inspectors General were fired.) Tesla stock and sales for the current calendar year have severely fallen with some markets seeing declines in car sales for nearly 80 percent. the actions taken by Elon do not seem wise for someone wanting to hang on to their wealth.

One theory, backed with no real evidence, is that gaining access to so many sources of data from within the government was Musk’s real goal. Musk’s entry into the A.I. space with ‘Grok’ is a little behind his competitors and the theory suggests that such a vast trove of data would be an asset in Musk catching up.

Along those lines I have seen one curious data point.

Last year before Musk had access to the data, such as from the Library of Congress, I asked Grok to summarize the plot of my novel Vulcan’s Forge. I have done this with several A.I., some created lies, inventing plots while others responded with answers that they did not access to that information. None have ever actually provided a synopsis. Grok in 2024 invented a plot that had absolutely nothing to do with my novel.

This year, in the last few weeks, Grok now provides a short synopsis with not inaccuracies, getting plot, characters, and themes correctly.

Did Grok get my full manuscript from the library of congress?

I have no real evidence of that, but it certainly gained access to the text, which I never authorized.

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We Hope George A. Romero was Wrong

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In March of 1972 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics launched a pair of space probes bound for the planet Venus. One of those probes suffered a failure of either an engine quitting too soon or not producing enough thrust. Either way was the probe failed to escape orbit about the Earth and has spent the last 53 years in an inclined and eccentric orbit that has very slowly degraded. Sometime tomorrow, May 10th, 2025, it will pass too deep in the Earth’s atmosphere, lose too much velocity, and return to its planet of origin with the very solidly built lander possibly surviving all the way down to impact.

What does this have to do with Pittsburgh filmmaker George A. Romero?

While Romero directed 17 feature films before his passing in 2017 and was involved in both film and television projects, he is best known for the creation of the modern cinematic zombie with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead.

In Night the recently deceased are reanimated to attack and consume the living. The film, with a budget of about the same value as a single episode of the original series of Star Trek, focused on a disparate group of fractious survivors attempting to outlive a siege of the dead there are moments here and there where the larger world of the story is revealed. One of those moments provides a usual bad scientific ‘explanation’ for the plague of ghouls. (It’s worth noting that the word ‘zombie’ is not uttered in what many consider to be the birth of the modern zombie genre.) That explanation is that a Venus probe returning to Earth with a strange and unknown radiation has ‘activated’ the brains of the dead causing them to reanimate. Later movies in the series would ignore that origins of the monsters preferring no solid answers, but the original film remains with its foreboding prediction of death from returning probes that had been bound for Venus.

Of course, there is no danger of zombie and the end of the world from the old piece of communist hardware returning to Earth, but I find the coincidences amusing.

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Vernor Vinge, Rest In Peace

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I do not often post about the passing in notable people here. While there are artists of all arts that I enjoy, admire, and are fans of, I rarely feel any great emotional tug when they pass. Losing a parent at a young age can impress upon you with great force the truth that everyone dies.

I do want to make a note of the passing this week of SF author Vernor Vinge. He was a celebrated author, often credited with popularizing the concept of the technological singularity, the point where advancements in technology change humanity so completely that what exists on the other side is incomprehensible to those before the event. The reason I am making this post is not because of his talented writing, his impact on the field, or even his influence on the wider culture but because I had the good fortune to have met him on a few occasions.

I cannot say I knew him. Sharing a few panels at local SF conventions is not enough to truly know a person, but I was acquainted with Vernor.\

He was a kind man, a local celebrity who did not throw that weight around at conventions. Even away from the dim spotlight of small local conventions he remained a friendly and approachable person. Our paths crossed at San Diego’s airport once as he was flying out to an eclipse and my sweetie-wife and were departing for a convention. The time we shared before boarding our flights was pleasant and affable.

It is strange, perhaps, that such a kind and seeming decent man created one of the most chilling and evil cultures in literature. The Emergence from A Deepness in the Sky and their viral form of slavery frightened me in a manner rarely found from pages of text. The book and those villains were so compelling that I was unable to resist reading it on the bus home from work, despite the intense motion sickness reading on a moving vehicle provoked.

Vernor was talented, kind, and he will be missed.

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From Soulless Monstrosity to Nerd Rapture

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds‘ reinterpretation of legacy characters from the original series has certainly intrigued me. I find I am most fascinated by the new version of Nurse Christine Chapel. Jess Bush’s portray of this Christine, along with a more detailed and varied backstory and motivation has placed her as one of my favorites in this new series. No slight to Mrs. Barrett-Roddenberry, she was given precious little to work with in the original series. Beyond pining for Spock her role possessed no character.

Except of course for episode eight, or seven depending on how you count them, season one What Are Little Girls Made Of?

CBS StudiosFirst aired in October of 1966 the episode centers of the Enterprise searching for the lost humanitarian scientist Dr. Roger Korby, coincidentally the fiancé to Christine Chapel. It is revealed that Korby has discovered the ruins of an ancient and now vanished civilization and from their remaining technology can produce android nearly indistinguishable from humans. He has a nefarious plot and by the end of the episode is defeated and revealed to be an android himself. Fatally injured he had used the technology to transfer himself into a mechanical body a process with which he expected to create practically immortal humans. Kirk and Christine are horrified by the revelation that Korby had been a machine the entire time. When Spock arrives with a rescuing security team Kirk informs him that ‘Dr. Korby was never here.’

It is an interesting question when did our attitude toward ‘uploading’ ourselves into machines change?

What Little Girls are Made Of spends no time debating if Korby is in fact still Roger Korby. Once it is shown that he is a machine his pleas that he has remained himself fall on the deaf ears of Kirk and Chapel. The premise of the episode is that his actions, plotting to replace people until his android society is too advanced to resist, are accepted as proof that he was never Korby ignoring the simple fact that people change. Or that five years of isolation can unhinge even the strongest of minds. Only the fact that he is a mechanical machine instead of a biological one is enough to ‘prove’ he was never Korby. A machine person will always, at that time, be regarded as a soulless monstrosity.

Today the concept of ‘uploading’ yourself into a tireless and immortal machine housing is pretty much a technological rapture, a promise of eternal, blissful life for the those with faith in the Disney Studioslimitless capability of the computational sciences. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier neither Rogers nor Romanov, or the audience for that matter, question if it really is Dr. Zola addressing them from the vast computer banks at the end of the film’s second act. It is simply accepted that with advanced enough super-science of course a person, the entirety of them transferred into another receptacle. Zola’s monstrosity was a product of who Zola was and not from the mechanical nature of his afterlife.

I wonder when did that state change occur in out collective thinking? When did we accept that it is our memories and sense of continuity that defines the ‘real’ us?

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Series Review: Light & Magic

Disney+ unveiled a new documentary recently Light & Magic a series exploring the history of the groundbreaking special effects house Industrial Light & Magic (ILM.)

Founded because no studio effects department was capable of meeting Lucas’s vision for his upcoming space opera Star Wars, ILM quickly became the industry’s premier special effects

Disney Studios

company, producing the special and visual effects not only for Lucasfilm’s productions, Star Wars, Indian Jones, but also the company others turned to when they needed outstanding effects for their films.

While it is important to remember that this documentary series is produced by a studio closely tied to ILM and its products and therefore cannot be considered unbiased there is at least some dirty laundry and less that admirable moments shared in the show. The episode steps us through ILM’s life chronologically from its founding as a rag tag group of artists who dared not dream of real cinematic heights to the creation of the defining effects of our time, CGI.

Light & Magic streams on Disney+.

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Science and Science Fictional Thoughts

Recently, I’ve been thinking about star and star system formation a lot.

The basics, I understand it, runs something like this.

1) A large cloud of gas, the remnants from previous stellar explosions, begins collapsing under its gravitational attraction.

2) Angular momentum spins faster compressing it into an accretion disk. In the disk denser clumps begin gathering and forming the seeds of planets.

3) Most of the cloud is pulled to the center forming a massive body whose center becomes more and more compressed raising the temperature.

4) When the temperature and pressure get high enough the star ignites and blows out the last vestiges of the cloud. Leaving a star and forming planets.

I have questions.

As the cloud compresses into a star but before fusion starts hoe dense does that gas get? Do we get atmospheres of pressure reaching from the core out to the orbital distances of the future planets? Would it be dense enough for aerodynamic forces? Do we potentially have dense enough gas that there is effectively an atmosphere between the soon to be star and it’s forming planets? Could electric charges build up in this massive cloud producing planet-sized or large lightning bolts?

When the fusion starts how fast is that process? Is it thousands or millions of years between ignition and having a star or is much shorter and explosive? What sort of pressure is generating in the remaining cloud as a blast wave that sweeps through the emerging star system?

Welcome to the late-night thoughts of a science fiction writer.

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Pluto and Our Sexual Politics

16 Years after its reclassification as a minor-planet discussion of Pluto as a planet can still kicked off spirited, heated, and intense debate. The faction that defies the International Astronomical Union’s classification in 2006 can be quite passionate about Pluto’s status as a planet even though the vast majority of that group are not astronomers or scientists. By and by they are laypeople and Pluto’s status as a planet or minor planet makes no material difference in any of their lives. Their paycheck, home equity, or personal freedoms are utterly unimpacted by the IAU’s decisions and declarations and yet they can be most vocal in defending that ‘Pluto is a planet!’

Of course, they never researched, observed, or studied Pluto. As children that learned that the Solar System has nine planets and talk of Kuiper Belts, or Trans-Neptunian Objects is uninteresting but the fact learned in grade school that there are nine planets these are their names became a foundational fragment of knowledge and something that undercuts something learned so completely as a child is on some level unsettling. Even if that fact has no bearing on their self, identity, or well-being.

A key simplistic fact we all learn as children, and one that is essential to many in their self-identification is that people are either boys or girls. There are no other categories, and like Pluto’s status as a planet, there is no doubt in the classifications, the declaration is the definition.

Unlike the debate surrounding Pluto the boy/girl classification is critical to many people’s sense of self. The classification of either girl or boy defined the roles one is expected to assume, the course of one’s life, the goals and objectives ones is expected to pursue, and can dictate everything from the clothing someone wears and the words they use to the nature of their loves and bonding commitments.

Is it really surprising then when the simplistic worldview imparted to children is redefined with new and enlarged with concepts such as trans or non-Binary that these expansions are met with fierce resistance, a resistance that is no more grounded in ‘fact’ or ‘science’ than those insisting that Pluto remains a planet simply because they were told this as a child? Particularly when so much of what so many people think of as their self-concept is tied to those first formative years when their classification was given and the course of their life ‘determined.’

None of this excuses the hatred, persecution, and prejudice that is heaped unjustly upon those who do not slot neatly into childish categories. To insist that everyone must live wholly within a category of either boy or girl with hard impermeable boundaries is as rational and defying of reality as to insist that that every has either Black hair or blond ignoring that everything nature does is a continuum, a spectrum, and the difference between girl and boy is as slippery as the difference between planet and not-planet.

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Genre Blender

 

Genres are cool and useful guides to what a story is about. If I tell you a story is a horror you know that you should feel tense and unsettled as it unfolds and perhaps even after it is over. If it is a romance, you will hopefully feel joy and fulfillment by the end. When two genres are combined then something truly wonderful and magical is possible. Alien the movie that launched countless imitations artfully blended science-fiction with horror, it was by far not the first to do so but its unparalleled quality elevated it above the material that had come before. My own novel Vulcan’s Forge is a combination of colonial science-fiction and 40s styled film noir.

I have started in on a short story blending two genres that are wildly different and I hope I have the skill to pull it off even halfway decently, forward-looking science-fiction and tradition oriented folk horror.

Folk horror is a sub-genre of horror fiction that fixates on isolated usually rural setting and communities where the old ways are not only now forgotten but are usually embraced and practiced with zealotry. Where strangers confronted with unknown customs and filled with derision for these communities often meet untimely fates. A perfect example of this style of horror and one of my favorite films is 1973’s The Wicker Man.

I think science-fiction, with its emphasis on the new, the novel, and the future makes for an excellent contrast with folk horror with its dedication to tradition, custom, and the wisdom of the past. I hope I can do justice to moth forms.

 

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