From the Books: "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

 Richard Feynman was an American physicist who contributed greatly to the field of quantum mechanics, eventually winning a Nobel Prize for his work. He also worked on the atomic bomb project and wrote a number of books about his colorful life and his views on science and technology, and in his time he was nearly as well-known a scientist as Carl Sagan. Toward the end of his life he notably served on the panel that investigated the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, most notably bringing focus to a hypothesis that a failed O-ring seal led to the shuttle's demise--a hypothesis which went on to become the generally accepted idea of the disaster's cause.

Feynman's memoir Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) is a collection of anecdotes from Feynman's life, drawn from recorded conversations he had with a friend, Ralph Leighton. The book is a fun, entertaining, and lively look at various episodes from Feynman's life, though there are sober moments throughout, such as Feynman's experiences with the educational system in Brazil, which is the passage I quote below.

But we'll return to Feynman in a moment. First, though, the thing that made me think of this passage at all.

I recently saw a video on social media, shared by someone who has an axe to grind with the way arithmetic is taught to children these days under the guidelines of the "Common Core" curriculum. The video was a split-screen of a multiplication problem. I don't recall the exact problem, but it was something along the lines of 36x52.

On the left side of the video, there was a teacher and she was teaching her students (who we never see, so I have no idea what age group or learning level she was teaching) to solve this particular problem. Having never undergone the Common Core pedagogy, I can only summarize it in unfair terms: she was saying things like "OK, we start by figuring out how many groups of tens we have, and then we draw a big box so we can start to group it all together." But on the right side of the video, someone (we don't see who, we only see their hand holding a pencil) solves the math problem using the method familiar to probably most people: "2 times 6 is 12, put a 2 down here, carry the one, 2 times 3 plus the one we carried, put a 7 down here...." And so on. The person on the right whips through the calculation and has the answer before the teacher on the left has even started processing through the problem.

The point of the video, obviously, is to show how much more obviously superior the "old" way of teaching arithmetic is to the "new" way. Of course, anyone looking at this knows, or should know, that the video is utterly dishonest. Showing a person who has developed a proficiency on one hand is not remotely an indictment of showing someone teaching the thing on the other, for one thing. For another, I can remember by grade school math classes, and I can tell you with a high degree of confidence that the proficiency demonstrated by someone just whipping off the correct answer using the "Multiply the ones digit, carry the tens digit, multiply the tens and add what was carried, lather rinse repeat" method did not come as a result of a few minutes' instruction by a math teacher followed by an hour of doodle time. We spent days on that shit, and we got to take home page upon page of homework problems to practice the concept: "All right, we've spent an hour doing multiplications, so tonight do problems 1-50 in your workbook."

(An honest admission: more often than not I did enough problems to assure myself that I knew what I was doing, and then I blew off the rest. This strategy was not always successful, in several ways. First, I got caught by teachers not having done all the problems; second, my self-assessment as to my grasp of the material was not always as accurate as I hoped.)

A fair version of this video would show a teacher doing the Common Core method on one side and a teacher actually teaching the old method on the other, but I strongly suspect that wouldn't be as compelling, would it? Or maybe an adult doing the problem who learned via the Common Core method versus an adult who learned via the "old" method...but I expect that wouldn't be all that interesting, either. As always it would boil down to who was faster with math. I knew plenty of kids who weren't very fast doing sums in their heads, versus others who could glance at a problem and tell you the answer without even opening their pencil box. Again, this would not demonstrate anything at all.

(As I've been working on this post, this Sunday's Calvin and Hobbes repeat from many years ago managed to be relevant here:

Yes, that's what it felt like.

But here's the thing with the Common Core method as I understand it, versus the "old" method (and I promise we're getting to a book excerpt eventually): the "old" method was a teaching of a rote algorithmic process to arrive at an answer. You learned multiplication first by being drilled until you know all your single-digit products: 7 times 9, 4 times 5, et cetera. Then you used those to work through a process that would give an answer. That's what an algorithm is, after all: a sequence of steps that, executed correctly, will yield the same result, each and every time. Kids in my day were being taught algorithms to complete multiplication assignments.

Today, though, it's clear to me that the idea is to teach a more conceptual approach, a way to think about what numbers are, what they mean, and what is actually happening mathematically when one does multiplication. (Or division, or whatever.) We were taught a process whereby we could calculate 36 times 52, but it appears to me that kids today are being taught what it means to multiply 36 by 52. Those are not the same thing. In my day, the "conceptual" stuff would come into play with annoying word problems ("Suzie has to give one toothpick to 52 kids every day for 36 days, how many toothpicks does Suzie need?"), but even that was more an applicative thing than a conceptual thing.

My father, who taught mathematics in college, got frustrated a lot of the time when students would arrive in his collegiate classes with good algorithmic skills but little ability to conceptualize just what it all meant in terms of mathematical concepts. In calculus classes he'd ask "What's the derivative of x," and students would say, "Oh, the derivative of x is [insert whatever the derivative is]." Then he's ask, "Good! Now what does that mean?"

Crickets.

And that is where we get to Dr. Feynman. One of the chapters in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman relates Feynman's experiences in traveling to Brazil to see science education in action in that country, which at the time of his visit was just starting to really develop. Here is Dr. Feynman:

In regard to education in Brazil, I had a very interesting experience. I was teaching a group of students who would ultimately become teachers, since at that time there were not many opportunities in Brazil for a highly trained person in science. These students had already had many course, and this was to be their most advanced course in electricity and magnetism--Maxwell's equations, and so on.

The university was located in various office buildings throughout the city, and the course I taught met in a building which overlooked the bay.

I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which the students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the question--the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell--they couldn't answer it at all! For instance, one time I was talking about polarized light, and I gave them all some strips of polaroid.

Polaroid passes only light whose electric vector is in a certain direction, so I explained how you could tell which way the light is polarized from whether the polaroid is dark or light.

We first took two strips of polaroid and rotated them until they let the most light through. From doing that we could tell that the two strips were now admitting light polarized in the same direction--what passed through one piece of polaroid could also pass through the other. But then I asked them how one could tell the absolute direction of polarization, for a single piece of polaroid.

They hadn't any idea.

I knew this took a certain amount of ingenuity, so I gave them a hint: "Look at the light reflected from the bay outside."

Nobody said anything.

Then I said, "Have you ever heard of Brewster's Angle?"

"Yes, sir! Brewster's Angle is the angle at which light reflected from a medium with an index of refraction is completely polarized."

"And which way is the light polarized when it's reflected?"

"The light os polarized perpendicular to the plane of reflection, sir." Even now, I have to think about it; they knew it cold! They even knew the tangent of the angle equals the index!

I said, "Well?"

Still nothing. They had just told me that light reflected from a medium with an idex, such as the bay outside, was polarized; they had even told me which way it was polarized.

I said, "Look at the bay outside, through the polaroid. Now turn the polarois."

"Ooh, it's polarized!" they said.

After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn't know what anything meant. When they heard "light that is reflected from a medium with an index," they didn't know that it meant a material such as water. They didn't know that the "direction of the light" is the direction in which you see something when you're looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words. So if I asked, "What is Brewster's Angle?" I'm going into the computer with the right keywords. But if I say, "Look at the water," nothing happens--they don't have anything under "Look at the water"!

[Feynman has several more experiences like this, after which he is to give a talk to students, professors, administrators, and government officials about his year in Brazil's science education system.]

The lecture hall was full. I started out by defining science as understanding the behavior of nature. Then I asked, "What is a good reason for reaching science? Of course, no country can consider itself civilized unless...yak, yak, yak." They were all sitting there nodding, because I know that's the way they think.

Then I say, "That, of course, is absurd, because why should we feel we have to keep up with another country? We have to do it for a good reason, a sensible reason; not just because other countries do." Then I talked about the utility of science, and its contribution to the improvement of the human condition, and all that--I really teased them a little bit.

Then I say, "The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate that no science is being taught in Brazil!"

I can see them stir, thinking, "What? No science? This is absolutely crazy! We have all these classes."

So I tell them that one of the first things to strike me when I came to Brazil was to see elementary school kids in bookstores, buying physics books. There are so many kids learning physics in Brazil, beginning much earlier than kids so in the United States, that it's amazing you don't find many physicists in Brazil--why is that? So many kids are working so hard, and nothing comes of it.

Then I gave the analogy of a Greek scholar who loves the Greek language, who knows that in his own country there aren't many children studying Greek. But he comes to another country, where he is delighted to find everybody studying Greek--even the smaller kids in the elementary schools. He goes to the examination of a student who is coming to get his degree in Greek, and asks him, "What are Socrates's ideas on the relationship between Truth and Beauty?"--and the student can't answer. Then he asks the student, "What did Socrates say to Plato in the Third Symposium?" and the student lights up and goes, "Brrrrrrr-up"--he tells you everything, word for word, that Socrates said, in beautiful Greek.

But what Socrates was talking about in the Third Symposium was the relationship between Truth and Beauty!

What this Greek scholar discovers is, the students in another country learn Greek by first learning to pronounce the letters, then the words, and then sentences and paragraphs. They can recite, word for word, what Socrates said, without realizing that those Gr eek words actually mean somthing. To the student they are all artificial sounds. Nobody has every translated them into words the students can understand.

I said, "That's how it looks to me, when I see you teaching the kids 'science' here in Brazil."

This, it seems to me, is largely the difference between teaching the "old" way of arithmetic, with its rote memorization of times-tables and all that "Multiply the tens digit, carry the other number into the hundreds column" stuff, and the likely approach to however the Common Core method works. It's teaching what is actually happening in the mathematics, as opposed to teaching a method that can be robotized.

Here's some bonus Richard Feynman content, by the way: Ever wonder how a train stays on the tracks? Feynman answers, and it's not the answer everyone thinks:

 

Wow....

 A fascinating astronomy image today! Behold:

NASA explains:

A spectacular set of rings around a black hole has been captured using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. The X-ray images of the giant rings have revealed new information about dust located in our Galaxy, using a similar principle to the X-rays performed in doctor's offices and airports. 

The black hole is part of a binary system called V404 Cygni, located about 7,800 light-years away from Earth. The black hole is actively pulling material away from a companion star — with about half the mass of the Sun — into a disk around the invisible object. This material glows in X-rays, so astronomers refer to these systems as "X-ray binaries. 

 ... 

In a new composite image, X-rays from Chandra (light blue) have been combined with optical data from the Pan-STARRS telescope on Hawaii that show the stars in the field of view.

Amazing!

Recent Reading!

 It's been a while since I posted an update on books I've been reading, so here's a bit of catch-up!

::  Edge of Sundown is a noir-mystery set in Chicago, by indie writer Jennifer Worrell. A writer who was once a fixture on the bestseller lists for his genre potboilers has spent the better part of a decade in the creative doldrums, until he starts writing what is a marked departure for him: a dystopian thriller in which alien beings are ridding the city streets of "undesirable" elements. But when real-world events start to mirror those in his novel, our hero starts to wonder where the boundary between fiction and reality lies...and that boundary blurs even more when the murders start.

I don't often read this sort of thing, so I was surprised how compelling it was. There is a palpable sense of dread hanging over the story, even as the climax nears, and Worrell really creates a sense of dark place as she explores Chicago's seedy underbelly. Highly enjoyable!

::  For my ongoing project of listening to (and writing about) the music of Jean Sibelius, I figured I should bone up on the composer's life and times. I got a book out of the library, called Finlandia: The Story of Sibelius, by Elliott Arnold. This is an older book, published in 1941 while the composer was still very much alive (and, in fact, Sibelius himself appears to have had input into Arnold's book). As such, the writing style is very much a throwback, and the tone of the book is one of somewhat relentless praise. If you are looking for a critical study of Sibelius and his music, you won't find that here. But I just wanted a readable treatment of the composer's life and times, and this is certainly that. In fact, I found the book valuable for its descriptions of the historical events in Sibelius's homeland, Finland, a country which wasn't even an independent nation when Sibelius was born. Sibelius was a highly nationalistic composer (even if he denied ever using actual Finnish folk material in his works), so this book gives a good sense of the events that shaped Sibelius's attitudes and patriotic fervor.

::  Two rival sea-faring clans try to put their long feud behind them by marrying their two youngest nobles in Daughter of the Deep, a fantasy novel by Lina C. Amarego. The problem is that our heroine, Keira Branwen, is convinced that her new husband, Ronan Mathonwy, is the one who murdered her father. She is expected to push those feelings aside in the name of peace on the seas, but obviously that isn't about to happen, and Ronan relentlessly insists on his own innocence. There's no way that peace between the Branwens and the Mathonwys is going to be easily attained by any marriage, and so unfolds a novel full of character and conflict. I enjoyed this one immensely! Daughter of the Deep is the first volume of a duology called The Children of Lyr, and I absolutely intend to read the follow-up. Recommended!

::  For the Love of Music: Invitations to Listening by Michael Steinberg and Larry Rothe is a collection of essays that ran in the magazine of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, along with that magazine's shorter program notes for specific concerts. As such, the book can be dipped into at will, which I recommend doing. There are chapters on Erich Wolfgang Korngold and on Sergei Rachmaninov and the great Chicago impresario Theodore Thomas, along with many more. The essays are often personal reflections on the part of Steinberg and Rothe, informed by many years of love of and listening to classical music. It's an excellent collection of recent classical music writing.

::  A sadly necessary book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert looks at the state of science today, in this time of climate change and the threats it poses to the natural world and to human civilization in general. This is not a general look at climate change, but rather an examination of a number of "case studies" in which scientists are working on very specific environmental issues, such as preserving a fish that only lives in tiny pools in caves in the Mojave Desert. In another example, Australian researchers are trying to engineer a coral that can thrive in the hotter oceans to come, hoping to somehow preserve the Great Barrier Reef. She ultimately arrives at the folks who are studying the possibilities of direct geoengineering to combat the ongoing warming of our planet, in such ways as dispersing huge quantities of reflective aeresols into the upper atmosphere, hopefully increasing the planet's albedo in hopes of putting the brakes on continued absorption of solar heat. Who knows if that will work, but the fact that it's being more seriously analyzed is itself an indictment of humanity's utter failure to take any major steps to alleviate the problem. Under a White Sky isn't an optimistic book, that's for sure...but oddly, it's not exactly pessimistic, either. My overwhelming feeling is that we'll just keep not making things exactly better, but just continuing to make things different and figure out how to live with it down the road.

More reading notes to come!

And now, some space art!

 I saw this on the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Flickr stream. It's a cool illustration of the formation of a planet. All that lightning and whatnot is, I must admit, somewhat inspirational as "sensawunda space opera" pictures go.

Description from the photo page:

Five million years might sound like a long time, but it’s a young age for a planet!

 

Hubble studied an exoplanet that’s grown up to five times the mass of Jupiter over a period of about 5 million years.

 

This illustration of the newly forming exoplanet PDS 70b shows how material may be falling onto the giant world as it builds up mass. By employing Hubble’s ultraviolet light (UV) sensitivity, researchers got a unique look at radiation from extremely hot gas falling onto the planet, allowing them to directly measure the planet’s mass growth rate for the first time.

Cool!

Recent reading: Space wizards, zombie apocalypses, reflections of Paris, universes ending, and a LOTR-but-not-LOTR fantasy

 A few more books I've read of late:

::  I can't possibly keep up with the eternal flood of new books that is Star Wars publishing, but I do try to pick and choose the ones that sound good or come with good referrals. Last year, Lucasfilm announced a new project in their Star Wars publishing empire: a new series within the larger overall tale that focuses on life in our favorite galaxy far, far away two hundred years before the rise of the Sith, the fall of the Republic, and the arrival on the scene of a couple generations of Skywalkers. This series is called The High Republic, and it depicts the Republic at is height and the affairs of the Jedi as they act as the guardians of peace and justice and all that.

The High Republic is going to play out in books, comics, and who knows what else (no filmed entertainment set thusly has been announced yet, but who knows what the future may bring, as currently Star Wars is changing directions on an almost monthly basis). It all starts with Light of the Jedi by Charles Soule, and...well, it's not bad, but it's got a lot of room to get better.

Light of the Jedi has to do a lot of heavy lifting: it has to establish the time period we're in, which means that it has to show all the ways this time period contrasts with the one with which we're most familiar. It also has to establish the new threat that the Jedi are going to be facing through all this, which can't be the traditional Sith because canon has already established that the Sith have been gone for centuries and they stay gone until Darth Sidious steps into the open around the time of The Phantom Menace. Light also gives us a lot of viewpoint characters, probably too many, all having adventures that play out over relatively short chapters.

The sad result is that Light of the Jedi ends up feeling overstuffed and underfocused, so that in its attempt to be really exciting it ends up under-engaging. I have to admit that I came close to DNFing this book halfway through, and ended up skimming a lot of the last act. It's a shame, because there is interesting stuff here and it does set up some possibly exciting story possibilities to come. The book does the job of getting The High Republic out of the gate, but it's not the galloping start it should have been.

::  I'm reading more indie books of late, which I should do because I'm an indie author myself, and which everybody should do because there's a lot of great writing out there beyond the world of the standard publishers. I've been following author Anna Vera on social media for a while, and I finally got around to reading her book When Stars Burn Out, a dystopian science fiction novel about the zombie apocalypse and the human response to it.

I freely admit that this genre is not generally my cup of tea, which is to say, it's almost never my cup of tea. But I do enjoy it on a selective basis when it's handled well, and Vera is one of the ones who handles it well. There is darkness and grim death here, because how could there not be, but for once it's not wildly overdone with spectacular deaths just for the sake of deaths (like in, say, The Walking Dead). There are intriguing mysteries and an interesting society of people trying to live without becoming zombies themselves, and the character work is particularly good. Heroine Eos Europa is a fascinating person, and I hope to read more of her adventures soon.

::  I've had Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik on my shelf for years, and I finally got around to it. I have to admit to finding it slightly disappointing. I was expecting a travel book, but it's really not that; it's a collection of essays Gopnik wrote in the 1990s for The New Yorker about his and his family's experiences in Paris when they packed up and moved there. It's all well-written and all, but unlike the best travel writing, Paris to the Moon's essays feel distinctly rooted in a particular time and place, and from a particular vantage point. I felt an odd disconnect while reading it, like perusing the mundane dispatches from someone's life decades ago.

It's not bad, though! Not at all, and if life in Paris interests, there's much here that's interesting. I cite one passage, which I found particularly amusing:

Late last year the French government assembled a committee to choose a name for the vast new stadium that's being built in a Paris suburb. The committee included an actor, and "artiste", some functionaries, and even a few athletes. It took a long time deliberating over its choice. Names were submitted: Some people liked the idea of naming the stadium after Verlaine or Saint-Exupery, and lots of others liked the idea of calling it Le Stade Platini, after Michel Platini, the great French soccer player. At last, late in December, the committee announced that it had come to a decision, and the government decided to broadcast the verdict on television. The scene was a little like the end of the Simpson trial: the worried-looking jurors filing to their seats, the pause as the envelope was handed to the minister of youth and sports, the minister clearing his throat to read the decision to the nation. The stadium that would represent France to the world, he announced, would be called (long, dramatic pause) Le Stade de France. The French Stadium. "Banal and beautiful at the same time," one journalist wrote. "Obvious and seductive. Timeless and unalterable."

I suppose there is something oddly comforting, albeit in a kind of depressing way, in learning that the bureaucratic way of spending a lot of time and money coming to a perfectly boring decision isn't something unique to the United States.

::  Katie Mack's The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) is a book about the end of our universe.

Apparently the current state of science has a handful of scenarios by which our brightest minds think our universe will end, and Dr. Mack has written this helpful, clearly-written, and humorous (given the subject matter) book summing it all up. If you like a bit of science to help back up your low-level existential dread, The End of Everything is the book for you! Yes, there are passages that I didn't entirely understand, but Mack does a very good job of explaining how we came to our current theories of how the universe began, and given our understanding thereof and of how the universe works now, how we might expect it to end. Her ultimate takes aren't terribly optimistic (for ideas on what the end of the universe might look like from the standpoint of sentient starfaring civilizations, Michiu Kaku is the author to seek out), and there's something particularly chilling about what's called the "Heat Death" of the universe, as ultimately the unending expansion of space results in our skies growing ever, ever darker as the stars become too far from us for light to ever arrive. But, as Dr. Mack writes:

In fact, the one thing that all the universe-ending scenarios we've already discussed have in common is that they definitely aren't coming around anytime soon. As far as we can tell from our best understanding of physics, we have at least tens of billions of years before even the most extreme version of a sudden Big Crunch reversal could occur, and no Big Rip could be less than a hundred billion years off. A Heat Death, considered by most to be even more likely, would be so far into the cosmic depths of the future that we hardly have terms to describe it.

So there's that. Of course, she writes this just before sequeing into a chapter about a "Vacuum Decay", in which a bubble of true vacuum forms someplace and expands at the speed of light, destroying everything it takes in as it expands. This, apparently, is a thing that can happen at any time, and since the horizon of the destructo-bubble's edge moves at the speed of light, we'd never know it was coming. For all we know, there could be a universe-destroying bubble right now someplace, expanding toward us at the the speed of light...and depending on where it is, that's how much time we'd have left. So...sleep tight, I guess!

::  Finally, a re-read of a book I liked a lot as a kid. Between 7th and, I think, 9th grades, I went on a huge epic fantasy reading kick. I read a lot of epic fantasy back then, between roughly 1982 and 1986. (After that I fell into spy and espionage fiction in a big way.) In those years, epic fantasy was far more dominated by the JRR Tolkien model than it is now, thankfully. I love JRRT, but wow, did the genre need some new thinking for a long time. Luckily that new thinking has long since arrived and the genre is healthier for it...but for years fantasy novels seemed really stuck in the same trope wonderland, and the biggest title in the post-JRRT swords-and-dwarves-and-elves type of fantasy was Terry Brooks's The Sword of Shannara. I read Sword once, back in my junior-high days (along with its two immediate sequels, The Elfstones of Shannara and The Wishsong of Shannara), but I've never revisited them since...until now. A while back I was shopping at my local Savers store and I found the original three Shannara books in the Used Books section*, so I picked them all up. Last week I finally re-read Sword, and...well, it was like dipping my toes in Heraclitus's river. It's not the same river it was when I was thirteen.

It's close to forty years since I read Sword all the way through, so I don't remember much of it at all from back then, except that I do remember finding it kind of padded back then. Nothing specific, but I definitely recall skimming through chapters I didn't really care that much about. And lo and behold...that happened again.

In Sword you have the Tolkien model almost in its entirety: a malevolent Dark Lord is threatening the existence of everything, while the races of Man (it was the 70s, so yes, it's called "Man"), Dwarves, and Elves don't really get along terribly well. There's a single magical weapon, though, that can prove the Dark Lord's undoing, and it can only be wielded by a specific individual who happens to be a member of a peaceful, pastoral people who live about as far away from the Dark Lord's palace as you can get. A wizard-like figure who is known all over the world for his strange comings and goings arrives to send our young hero on his quest, which after many dangers leads him to a single quest to find the magic weapon. On this quest he is joined by a...what should we call it? A "fellowship"?...helpful team comprising men, Elves, Dwarves, and our hero and his pastoral buddy.

Off they go to deal with the weapon and the Dark Lord, but eventually their "fellowship" is forced to break apart, and the others go off to deal with specific wars and stuff while Our Hero proceeds to his ultimate journey into the Dark Lord's realm, which is a barren desolate wasteland of dust and sharp mountains.

I don't want to sound dismissive, but Sword really really does read like a Tolkien clone for people who wanted more Tolkien but who didn't want to re-read Tolkien for the 80th time. All the tropes are here, with just about all the story beats; what Sword seems most to accomplish is reducing the Lord of the Rings from its 576,000 words down to about 226,000. This isn't always a good thing, as I found it very hard to care about some of the "side adventures" that Brooks takes us on in the back half of the book. We meet a guy named Balinor early on, but we get little of his backstory until much later, which we get right before the book diverts us to his struggles against his crazy jealous brother. I found it nearly impossible to care about any of that.

Ultimately I found Sword a slog to get through this time. Brooks overwrites and overdescribes to an amazing degree, and from a stylistic standpoint, his paragraphs are way too long, sometimes lasting entire pages. And look, I know he wrote this in the 1970s, but still: it's a 726 page book, and our first (and only) female character doesn't show up until we're well past page 400.

I do plan to read the other two books in the trilogy at some point. I remember liking Wishsong most of all from these, and I've also heard that Brooks's various explorations in the Shannara universe after these initial volumes perk up quite a bit. I don't know if I'll go any farther past Wishsong, but...you never know.

* I don't know about anybody else's Savers location, but the Used Books section at my local one almost always has something worth grabbing. I never leave that place without a book or two. Not huge hauls, but there's always something!

I raise a glass to you, Dr. Vishniac

 It's amazing what stories stay with us through the years. Some stick for obvious reasons, but some do not; some just stick all on their own. When I was in fourth grade, more than forty years ago, I watched the first broadcast of Carl Sagan's science show Cosmos. In the fifth episode, entitled "Blues for a Red Planet", Sagan discussed at length Mars and our human relationship with that planet, up to and including the Viking Lander.

In the midst of that episode, while discussing the possibilities for life on Mars, Sagan related a story about a friend of his, a microbiologist named Wolf Vishniac, who developed experiments that a robot ship sent to Mars might be able to perform, testing the soil for the presence of microbial activity.

Here is the excerpt in question. I have remembered this story, the sad story of Wolf Vishniac, to this day. I think of Dr. Vishniac, a man born almost a hundred years ago and dead almost fifty, often when I am reading or thinking about the current state of Martian exploration. On this day, when NASA landed another rover on the Red Planet whose primary mission involves testing for evidence of life, I honor his contribution to the quest for an answer to a simple, but profound, question: Was there ever, or is there now, life on Mars.

"It wasn't a miracle. We just decided to go."

That may be my favorite quote from the movie Apollo 13. Jim Lovell says it to his wife as they relax in their backyard, after all of their guests have gone home from their watch party for the Apollo 11 moon landing. Lovell's amazement at the feat of landing on the moon isn't just at the fact of the location, but that all it took to get there was a decade-plus (well, with a lot of stuff coming before) of applied human ingenuity.

The human presence in space hasn't quite gone according to the plan my six-year-old brain thought it would, way back when I first became aware that space wasn't just some grand cosmic realm where the mysterious stars lay; it was just a gigantic place of which we were a part, and we humans could simply go there. When I was six, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that within a short time--thirty years? forty? fifty, tops!--we'd have permanent space stations, the first moon bases, and maybe even the makings of a colony on another planet, maybe Mars. Of course, it didn't go according to plan, did it? Nothing big ever does.

We humans lost a bit of focus on space, and we made some choices that weren't obvious or perfect, and we have proceeded in fits and starts. As we lost the Cold War impetus that drove so much of that initial development, an impetus of which I was unaware when I was six, it seemed that we lost a lot of focus. The space shuttle was initially exciting but it became less and less so, until one of them exploded; then it settled back into routine until another one failed on re-entry. America had a small space station, that didn't last long; the Soviets had one that lasted a bit longer. Then a bunch of countries got together to build the "International Space Station," which is somehow both amazing and...well, it seems just a bit small to the part of me that still dreams in the same way that I did when I was six.

But it can still be exciting. We got a big reminder of that today, when NASA and SpaceX teamed up to finally succeed in launching a rocket carrying American astronauts into space. Ever since the shuttle was retired, Americans have been hitching rides with the Russians. That may be good from an international cooperation standpoint, but America still needs its own launch capability if it's to maintain a presence in space, and the SpaceX rocket has seen increasingly promising results for the last few years. No longer are multi-stage rockets just dumping their spent stages to fall into the ocean; not only are the stages recoverable, but they actually land on their own power to live to fly another day.

Today, America returned to space under its own power. Maybe I'll get to see those moon bases and Mars colonies yet!

Here are a few screenshots I took from my phone as I watched live streaming coverage of the launch this afternoon (and really, how amazing a sentence is that?):

Just over a minute into flight.

At left, the second-stage engine firing; at right, the first stage's re-entry rockets firing.
More than any aspect of this launch, this blew my mind.

They briefly lost the signal from the ship where the first stage was to land, alas!
But they got it back to show the first stage having successfully landed. At right,
our astronauts in their capsule.

Second stage separation.

The second stage falls farther and farther behind. Ahead, Earth orbit and ISS rendezvous!

The faces of accomplishment

Here's what people look like when they've just landed a spaceship on Mars.










This is a hell of a thing. Well done, NASA!

Wow.

That is all.

The Auroras of Jupiter, captured by Hubble.

April Showers bring May...Apples?

So a few weeks ago I was hiking with The Dee-oh-gee (at Sprague Brook Park in Colden, NY) and I happened across this strange-looking plant:


Odd little thing, innit? I'd never seen anything like it, to my recollection.

A week or so later, I'm hiking with the Dee-oh-gee (at Knox Farm State Park in East Aurora, NY), and I happened across an entire crop of those little plants:


And then yesterday, I'm hiking with the Dee-oh-gee (at Chestnut Ridge Park here in sunny Orchard Park), and I happened across another crop of those things, even bigger now.


Well, a helpful Instagram user has come to my rescue! They are "May apples", or podophyllum, so named because the flower that generally blossoms from these plants in May that become fruits later on. May apples grow in large colonies, with the 'plants' actually sprouting from a single root that has spread beneath the ground. That's why I'm seeing large patches of these things, when I spot them in the WNY woods.

Wikipedia indicates that they are poisonous, but this article indicates that the fruit can be eaten, albeit with preparation and quantity in mind. I'm not sure if I'm quite that curious, but still, a bit of learning is useful -- especially when it's something that I've been observing on my own!

A brief planetary perspective

Venus and Jupiter, as seen from out back at where I work. Such a wonderful universe!

Wow.

That is all.

(Watch it in fullscreen if you can.)

Huh.

Now here's something I didn't know octopi could do....

Happy birthday, Dr. Sagan!

Carl Sagan was born this day, in 1934. Today we honor him, and the Cosmos from which he sprang!

And this old post of mine, in which I excerpt Dr. Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot, as he discusses the legacy of the Apollo moon missions.

Snapshots from Ithaca

This weekend The Wife and I made our annual getaway to the Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival, and we had a great time as always...although the festival itself wasn't quite like it usually is, owing to the fact that Ithaca is in the midst of tearing apart its pedestrian mall to rebuild it (in truth, the infrastructure there was looking a bit long in the tooth, and I look forward to seeing what things look like when it's done). I know that pedestrian malls aren't thought of very highly anymore, but Ithaca is a small enough city that they are able to pull it off -- it's all of three blocks, and there's plenty of parking and lots of nice businesses to frequent.

Anyway, it all started with a trip to a knitting supply store just outside of town, which is one of the nicer yarn shops we've found in our travels of such. The Wife ended up with a small pile of yarn to add to her stash:


Then we were off to downtown, where our first order of business was lunch at Waffle Frolic, a restaurant that we absolutely adore. This is their counter.


Since The Wife went on a gluten-free diet last year, we were thrilled to discover that Waffle Frolic has GF waffles. Even better, though, was that we learned that they also have GF fried chicken, so that we were both able to have waffles and fried chicken, which is one of the finest of all food combos. I never heard of it before a few years ago, but I am seriously in the tank for waffles and fried chicken, folks!


Next was some shopping and milling about. As I said, the Festival usually takes up the entire pedestrian mall, but this time it was sequestered mostly to either end of the mall, so there was more walking than usual, which was fine. There's food and lots of crafts, with a great deal of stuff available that is made by local or regional artisans. I am increasingly a fan of buying things that are locally made, and if I can buy it directly from the person who made it, then that's fantastic.

Now this was funny. There's a comics store there that I usually go into, more to find something to bring back for The Daughter than for myself (I love comics, but I find that they tend to be wildly overpriced, which is why I tend to exclusively rely on the library for comics reading). Looking through the wares, I found a case with some toys and action figures and the like inside, and on top was this giant model of the starship Enterprise, in my favorite design that ship has ever sported:


As soon as I took the photo, though, the owner was right there to give me a tongue-lashing for taking photos in his shop. He went on some rant about the need to control or limit the technology, now that everyone has access to photography. I honestly did not understand the point he was making -- is he worried about people using iPhone cameras to scan comics pages in his store so that they don't have to buy the comics? It's not like any of the stuff in there is his intellectual property, and besides, many times I've chosen to go into a business or store because someone posted a picture from within and said, "Check out the cool stuff this store has!" Weird. He also pointed to the "No photographs!" sign that maybe I should have seen...but the sign is above the door in the back of the store that leads to their back room, it's about the size of an index card, and it's taped to a wall that is also covered with all manner of comics-related posters and artwork. I offered to delete the photo, but he said that wasn't necessary. I bought a little TARDIS for The Daughter -- it has a little light on top -- but I think I'll be foregoing that shop in future trips to Ithaca. If he doesn't want word getting out that he has cool shit in his store, then I'm happy to oblige.

Nice model, though.

On a happier note, the lack of pedestrian traffic in usual areas meant that I got to actually get up close to one of the Sagan Planet Walk markers! This is a public art installation in Ithaca, honoring the memory of Carl Sagan (one of my eternal heroes), in which stone markers are placed throughout the town in such a way as to constitute a walking tour of the Solar System, with the distances between the markers proportionally accurate to the distances between the planetary orbits. According to the website for the Planet Walk (associated with the Ithaca Sciencenter), the markers for the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are in temporary storage (with temporary signage indicating their location, so that the Planet Walk is still possible). But I got to pose with Jupiter. Yay, Jupiter!


Finally, I visited my favorite used bookstore, Autumn Leaves. I only bought a couple of books this time -- I'm trying to cut down my book acquisition until such time as we acquire more space for book storage, which will involve moving -- but I always love going in that store. It's bright and open and airy and inviting. And in their storefront window, they had a mannequin, attired thusly:


It's like they knew I was coming!

All in all, a lovely trip, and I'm sad it's over. There are two places I'd like to live on this world, other than right here. One is Toronto. The other is Ithaca!

All that is, or was, or ever will be....

EDIT: Video link replaced.


The Neil DeGrasse Tyson/Ann Druyan helmed sequel to COSMOS, which airs in 2014, has a trailer. I love everything about it, right down to the updated "spaceship of the mind".

Now to find out when exactly it starts airing, so I can spend the preceding thirteen weeks rewatching the original COSMOS....

Godspeed!

As much as I mentally inhabit the world of a science fiction future where spaceships are everywhere, there's something to be said for launches that look like this (photos below the page break):

Return to Earth

Astronauts returning from the ISS looks like this:


















Well done!

(Sorry for the lack of a whole lot of content this week...there's a lot going on at Casa Jaquandor this week, so my focus is on keeping the pedal to the metal on Princesses II: A Clash of Princesses.)

Taking a break from writing about fictional spaceships....

...here are some photos, from a NASA FLickr stream, of an actual real spaceship launch. Specifically, the Antares rocket, developed by a private company. I think that the human future in space will depend in great part on private enterprise, and also that the future of the human economy will depend on our future in space.

Plus, there's still something awfully thrilling about a rocket launching for space.










Space still beckons!