In case of fire

My one patentable idea today:

A case, mounted on the wall, glass-fronted. Stencilled on the glass: "In case of fire, break glass"...

In the case: a coupla coathangers and a bag of marshmallows.

Yeah, I got a million of them.

Yer one of them Enlightenment thinkers, aincha?

In the company I keep, it seems I can't avoid the topic of post-modernism. Find myself reading Butterflies and Wheels' notes section pretty much twice weekly, at least, wherein the lovely and talented Ophelia Benson and her esteemed associate Jeremy Stangroom regularly take on epistemic relativism (not to mention certain related and equally flagrant abuses of reason certain purveyors of pseudoscience regularly commit). I usually drop in on David Brin's long rambling thing on modernism, post-modernism, the Enlightenment and just about everything else about half as often. And Holly Messinger, of course, who has her own occasional complaints on the subject, I read more frequently than any of them.

It was Holly, actually, who got me started on this particular post. Reading my comment that I found the plot in my current literary millstone (The Manuscript That Would Not Die) a bit too linear for my tastes, she took it upon herself to warn me away from any annoyingly pretentious post-modern non-resolution resolutions in the area of the climax of the thing. A warning, it must be said, she composed most eloquently.

I was able to assure her there's really no danger of that. I mostly like to know when a story's over, thank you very much, and preferably not just by my encountering the back cover. I'm pretty sure I mostly learned my storytelling techniques from such sophisticated and pretentious literary practitioners as nightclub comics doing racy standup, an awful lot of pulp fiction, and kids telling fart jokes in grade school. And very few of those were much for that non-resolving story line thing (there's one exception I can think of, actually, in the standup routine category, and actually it's pretty funny—remind me to tell it to you some time—though I digress). So yeah, the stuff I do does have a way of ending pretty clearly, no fear.

Somewhat more seriously, I've my own beefs with post-modernism, both within and without literature.

Without literature, I'd put myself firmly in the camp of those (Ms. Benson, maybe? I don't want to put words in her mouth) who mostly think that post-modern ideas about the significance of context to observations might be useful things to keep around, but anyone taking this so far as to suggest this implies there is either (a) no tractably knowable objective reality or (b) actually no objective reality is probably either (1) incredibly silly, (2) sadly deluded, (3) grinding an axe for a pseudoscience, or (4) all of the above.

More to the point: my one actually complete degree is in Biology (a subject I studied almost entirely out of love for the material, I might add; I'm terribly old-fashioned that way), and we were taught pretty much from day one that context is pretty durn important to observation. Hell, read any paper in any major journal, and it's usually about half establishing context (or, more technically, describing the experimental conditions), so the observations might actually prove repeatable. So it seems to me good empirical science has pretty much always got that context is important, and while yes, post-modern ideas about the pervasiveness and invisibility of certain assumptions might be useful toward understanding why science investigates what it does, the bleating hordes who natter that 'Western science' is parochial, or racist, or blinkered, or just terribly arrogant make me wonder if any of them have ever actually read any real research.

My message to these folks: yes, I get we all have our contexts, all make assumptions shaped by those. Yes, we get they're hard to notice, sometimes. Kinda knew that, already. But thanks for the insight anyway.

Now: got anything else?

No?

Alrighty then. Next.

Beyond these goobs, of course, there's the out and out apologists for unreason, hiding behind postmodernism's flag. You can't live long as an atheist without encountering at least one slackjawed evangelical preacher who insists his firm belief in an invisible sky fairy is somehow 'post-modern'... or justified because post-modernism sez there's no reality anyway, so he can believe whatever he durn well wants, thank you very much... Or somesuch rot.

True story: one of these I met, attempting to answer my ridicule of his rhetoric, responded to me with the line: "You're such an Enlightenment thinker"... as though, apparently, I was gonna take this as an insult or something.

Hardly. Me? An Enlightenment thinker? Awwww. Thanks. But I bet you say that to all the heathens, don't you?

Anyway, moving on: within literature, I guess I'm not far from Holly's camp. Though I'd say: I've read the odd piece with some arguably post-modern trappings that uses them to good effect. Brunner's mighty Stand on Zanzibar, to my mind, though it probably predates much of the 'fashionable nonsense' (thank you, Butterflies and Wheels) that is current post-modern literature, certainly does marvellous things with multiple points of view. But overall, my feelings about post-modernism informing art are much the same as are my views of a lot of other such once overly-fashionable movements: that most of these consist of nothing more than a few clever and only occasionally useful ideas taken vastly too far and promoted immediately to dogma.

So sure, there's a work or two out there that proves the idea can lead to good art, but suddenly, if you're not 'post-modern', or can't at least stamp it somewhere on the dust-jacket, you're not hip or something... Which, mostly, leads to a lot of really, really bad art, entirely overwhelmed by the weight of the ideology that drives it.

So, responding to that movement, I guess all I have to say is, umm, thanks, but I can live with being unfashionable, thank you.

I mean, hell, you should see the way I dress.

Anyway. That's all (except to say to all of you noticing my nattering about being overly busy inevitably comes on the same day I write three or more blog entries, yes, my time management and prioritization are incredibly bad, and thanks for noticing).

Finally, in case anyone's wondering, and like I told Holly elsewhere: my concerns with the linearity of the manuscript's plot were entirely with it being a bit too predictable, nothing more. Will ends nice and neatly, and almost certainly will whatever else I might do to it. Just like any good campfire story's supposed to.

Big science, big risks

Found myself unsurprised to hear GreenPeace was less than thrilled to hear the Iter project is actually enroute to breaking ground in France.

I'm split on this. A bit sympathetic to the folk pointing out there are probably better immediate ways to spend ten billion Euros, if the immediate goal is cleaner power, yes. And there's little doubt in my mind that anxieties about how fusion technology might be used to enrich materials for nuclear weapons are quite well-founded. It's one of those aspects of human nature. If it can be used to make stuff to blow stuff up, seems to me, sure, it probably will be.

That said, nuclear fusion, long-term, has promises I figure make it so very worth pursuing. Done even poorly, the waste products are vastly more manageable than is the case with fission—with half-lives that make it much more practical to design and maintain programs for storage until they're benign. Done better, the waste could be close to nonexistent.

And at its fundamental level, the basic principle seems so very sensible. The thought that you can take a little mass and convert it directly to useful energy a la Einstein's most famous equation—and that the mass used can come from one of the most plentiful atoms in the universe, that's got the kind of elegant simplicity about it which, it seems to me, makes it madness not to look seriously into it.

It might also, though this is getting a bit ahead of things, get better still. I mean sure, there are a lot of stray neutrons to contend with in current designs (another problem which will generate waste products, and possibly a too-convenient way to make materials for bombs), but who's to say it's really so unmanageable? Theoretically, I'm hearing that it's not—that materials can be come up with that can take the flux without becoming too rapidly radioactive, and even when they do, the half-life is, again, probably manageable disposal-wise. So it seems to me getting hung up on that is short-sighted. Nothing about the basic process, I suspect, requires it be a long-term problem.

So reading the environmentalists' opposition, I find myself thinking it's a bit knee-jerk. As in: this is atomic power, and that's bad. So no, let's not go there.

I completely agree with them on fission. Always have, and have had the odd argument with folks pointing out that at least that technology doesn't have an impact on carbon emissions. The half-lives of the by-products just aren't manageable, given any kind of knowledge of human history. When what's left over is that dangerous, for so long—longer, remember, than most mass human civilizations have tended to survive—producing them strikes me as a really bad idea. I mean, bad with a hubris that's nothing less than staggering. And the very nature of the fission process—setting off a reaction that wants more than just about anything else to take off exponentially—has always struck me as playing with fire.

But fusion isn't fission. And just because it isn't economical today, doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to make it so. The economy is right there, staring back at us from fundamental equations. And, though this might also prove to be hubris, making it reality might prove even less trouble than we think.

So I guess I'm saying: good for Iter. Big science, big risk, sure. But one worth taking.

Unhealthy obsessions

Realized recently I'm becoming increasingly obsessed by my fiction.

No, it's not an exaggeration. Find myself mulling edits, characters and plotlines quite continually, these days. And this is actually a bit of a problem, given as I've a full-time and not undemanding career, and a wife and two kids, both young enough to be full-time work themselves.

It's probably partly the 'forbidden fruit' syndrome. No time for this, a lot of other obligations, so of course I'm gonna wanna concentrate on the one thing I probably shouldn't be concentrating on nearly so much. Probably, if I were a full-time writer, I'd be obsessing about something else entirely. I'm perverse that way. It's my experience that a lot of people are, true, but I'm beginning to think I might be a more extreme case than most.

Have this idea in my head if I get a certain manuscript which has been hanging on my conscience back to a state where I can get it back into queries, maybe I'll feel enough of a sense of accomplishment I can start caring a bit more about the rest of my life for a while. But I only hope that's true. Honestly don't know.

Really is something a bit narcissistic about this, I know. Ain't like this should be becoming the most important thing in the world. It's only a manuscript, fer cryin' out loud, and there are a lot of those around...

Ah well. Gotta be me, I guess.

The good news: Holly very kindly gave me some pretty useful criticism on a substantial portion of it, and the one structural thing that had been hanging up edits I've now resolved, so, theoretically, at least, it could be done pretty quickly, again.

Who knows. In another week or two, I might even be able to pretend to have a social life again.

Breakthrough

Had a brainwave re a certain stubbornly unsatisfactory element of a certain stubbornly broken manuscript just recently. One of those 'Eureka' moments. And one which should allow me to get the damn thing back into one piece, with the edits to be done again much less structural, more technical. Finally. After much pain. Etc.

No, I can't really go on about it here. Too much to explain, and explaining's probably kinda a bad idea even if it were interesting to anyone else, since it does concern one of those little twists in fiction that make the whole thing a lot more fun but only if you don't know what's coming (or, at least, are forced to guess). Jes' crowing, because I feel I need to, right now.

Hallelujah. About damn time. Etc.

Installation files are being copied to your computer

... and, at about the same rate, sediment being deposited on the ocean floor is being compacted to form shale.

The servers carrying the installation stuff are a mite slow today.

Bob makes me laugh

After the first two hours, as the flight attendants began feeding us for the third time, I began to wonder if Air Canada had abandoned the transportation industry altogether and decided to open a chain of extremely realistic failed-aircraft theme restaurants, to be positioned randomly around runways across North America, committed to force-feeding their customers while providing sullen incompetence in two languages.

— Bob Harris, Traveling again

While I have actually had relatively non-agonizing flights on Air Canada, Harris' bit captured the low end of the spectrum with grace and beauty. And made me laugh so hard my coffee came out my nose. Go. Read.

Rumours of my death

... are also greatly exaggerated. But I have really been run ragged last few days. Blogging? What's that? I ain't got time for that.

Good stuff: was able this weekend to declare as reclaimed a piece of the lawn recently lost to weeds. Managed to get clover pretty well established in what had been a thoroughly difficult spot soil-wise despite the heat. I absolutely love what that stuff can do even in crappy, glacial soil annoyingly low in organics. If you can just keep the miserably barren stuff moist long enough for the leaves to start to spread and hold some of the moisture down on their own (which, yeah, can be hard), it's incredible what happens. This ain't so much gardening as terraforming.

Also good: the little guy's getting really strong. Can hold himself up on his forearms, though he hasn't worked out that rolling over thing, yet. And he likes to hold his weight on his legs, too, though he's far from being able to balance on his own.

Also also good: the not quite as little one is reading fairly independently now. Smart girl.

Not so good: I've got a ton of paperwork to catch up on. Really getting out of control. Some folks dream of getting rich so they can retire to a tropical island. Me, I just wanna be able to afford someone to do all this crap for me. That would be the life worth living.