THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
05/13/05 -- Vol. 23, No. 46 (Whole Number 1282)
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
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Topics:
Ideas (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Science Fiction for Socialists
I Did the Math (or The Universe Seen as a Waffle)
(comments by Mark R. Leeper)
SHORT CUT TO NIRVANA: KUMBH MELA (film review
by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (EALING STUDIOS, MURDER IS NO MITZVAH,
and CLASSIC HORROR WRITERS) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Ideas (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Somebody once observed that average people talk about people,
intelligent people talk about events, geniuses talk about ideas.
Why is it then that great literature, the literature that is
written by people like Shakespeare and Hemmingway is really about
people? It gets more literary respect than books about events
like history and current events. The literature of ideas,
including science fiction, gets the least respect of all. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Science Fiction for Socialists
China Mieville has compiled a list of fifty science fiction
novels for socialists, available with comments at
http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/50socialist/full. An
excerpt is also at
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2005/625/625p26.htm.
A small sample, some obvious, some obscure:
Octavia Butler--SURVIVOR (1978): A black American writer, now
discovered by the mainstream after years of acclaim in the
science fiction field. This brilliantly blends science fiction
with issues of colonialism and racism.
Gordon Eklund--ALL TIMES POSSIBLE (1974): Study of alternative
worlds, including an examination of hypothetical left-wing
movements in alternative USAs.
Imil Habibi--THE SECRET LIFE OF SAEED THE PESSOPTIMIST (1974;
translated 1982): Habiby was a member of the Palestinian
Community Party, a veteran of the anti-British struggle of the
1940s and a member of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) for
several years. This amiable, surreal book is about the life of a
Palestinian in Israel (with aliens).
Ursula K. Le Guin--THE DISPOSSESSED: AN AMBIGUOUS UTOPIA (1974):
The most overtly political of this anarchist writer’s excellent
works. An examination of the relations between a rich,
exploitive capitalist world and a poor, nearly barren (though
high-tech) communist one.
Eugene Sue--THE WANDERING JEW (1845): Huge book by radical
socialist Sue, about the adventures of the family of the
Wandering Jew of legend. Symbolic fantasy elements: the Jew is
the dispossessed labourer and his partner is downtrodden woman.
Oscar Wilde--THE HAPPY PRINCE AND OTHER STORIES (1888):
Children’s fantasies by this romantic, socialist author. Marked
by a sharp lack of sentimentality and a deeply subversive
cynicism, which doesn’t blunt their ability to be intensely
moving.
[Pointers to similar lists for other political stances are
welcome. -ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: I Did the Math (or The Universe Seen as a Waffle) (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
Last MT VOID I left on a cliffhanger. In fact, it was the biggest
cliffhanger I have ever left an article on in my whole history of
writing this column since 1978. It was not a cliffhanger for you,
but for me. I had the size of the population of China, the birth
rate, and the death rate. I checked out the old adage that if the
entire Chinese population were marched past a reviewing stand four
abreast that the process would never finish. The birth rate is
claimed to be great enough that you would never run out of people.
I figured a row going past the reviewing stand every two seconds.
Well as Heinlein points out in TUNNEL IN THE SKY, it is not true.
He said that it would take four years, but everybody would pass
the reviewing stand eventually. I assume he meant starting in
1955 when he was writing rather than in the future year that the
novel is set. Last issue I verified that the process would end,
but left myself the problem of calculating how long it would take
using the 2004 CIA statistics for China.
This quickly turns into a nasty differential equation since the
un-reviewed population is being depleted at a linear rate, but
increasing at a rate proportional to the amount remaining at any
given instant of time. I am not sure if I ever could solve this
problem, but I did know last week that I could not. So I
figuratively put a gun to my own head. I do not want to admit to
myself that I have lost the mathematical reasoning power I once
had. It is one of the most valuable things I have ever had, at
least to me. I said I would solve the problem or admit defeat to
the whole readership of the MT VOID.
So did I solve it? The answer is 7970 days or 21.8 years. (You
can refer to the last issue to get the statistics I used.) How
did I come up with that figure, you may ask (but I doubt it)? You
can skip down a couple of paragraphs if you are really not
interested. As an aside, I do notice people shy away from
mathematics and it seems to me that people, especially the media,
assume that the general public is ignorant of mathematics. If
they are announcing on the news that a record high prime number
has been found (on they rare occasions that they would announce
that) they explain very carefully that a prime number is one that
is divisible only by itself and 1, like 5 or 7. Then five minutes
later they will be reporting sports and throwing around terms like
"a touchback to the end zone" and will assume everybody knows just
exactly what that is. I will not be so insulting, but you can
skip the next paragraph if you like.
In solving the problem I pretended I already knew the function
that was the size of the population over time and looked at its
properties. I expressed it as an infinitely long polynomial that
I think was called a Taylor Series. The constant term is just the
population at time zero, in other words the current population.
By saying it has the above properties I can come up with another
Taylor Series that should be equal to the first one. But by
equating the two series, knowing the first term of the original
series tells me the second one. Knowing the second term tells me
the third one, and so forth. But what good does this do me? It
is still an infinitely long polynomial. I could never plug any
values into it. Well, it turns out that the terms quickly
represent adding in smaller and smaller amounts of time. Quickly
you are dealing with hundredths of seconds, then a few terms
farther out thousandths, and then millionths. The answer I am
looking for is not that precise. The terms become negligible. I
can have a finite polynomial that very, very closely represents
the number of un-reviewed people. I put six or seven terms into a
spreadsheet program--enough to give me an approximation within a
tiny fraction of a second--and then started plugging in numbers
until I found where the population was just about zero. That is
in 7970.090 days. Of course things are not that precise.
Incidentally, I think this is the kind of calculation that
Professor Barnhardt is doing on his board in THE DAY THE EARTH
STOOD STILL. Klaatu tells him to use variation of parameters (a
standard technique in differential equations) and substitute an
expression. That reproduces the first order term (like I did).
The terms after that Klaatu says are "nearly negligible." I went
a few terms out before they were negligible. That was a real
mathematics problem they used in the film and one not greatly
different from mine, in the solution technique. I wonder if an
alien race really would have the same techniques for solving
differential equations.
Barnhardt asks the next question, "Have you tested it?" That is a
very interesting question also, since the mathematics can predict
things about the universe that simply are not true. Most people
would consider it is the mathematics that is at fault. I guess
that as a mathematician (of sorts) I take the view that it is the
universe that is lacking. Just yesterday I was discussing with a
friend this very issue. We had recently discussed tachyons,
theoretical particles that travel faster than the speed of light,
but my friend points out that there probably are no such things in
the universe. You can describe matter that goes faster than light
and see what its properties would be like and that mass is an
imaginary number. Whether it exists in the real world is another
matter. But what the mathematics predicts is possible often turns
out to be true.
At the moment I see it like pouring batter in a large waffle iron.
You may or may not have had enough batter to reach to the
edges, but wherever the batter reaches it will have the same
regular pattern of squares and you can predict where those squares
should be. If the batter just does not go that far, those
predictions may not apply to the waffle, but they were not really
wrong. It is just true that the batter did not slop far enough in
that direction. Mathematics is like the waffle iron and the
universe it like the waffle. The mathematics defines the
structure of the universe and as far as it goes the universe
follows that structure.
The universe may or may not have created tachyons. Maybe the
batter of the universe slopped far enough in that direction, and
maybe it did not. If it did slop that far, it will follow the
rules defined by the mathematics. The structure of the waffle
iron is more regular and perfect than the waffle made on the iron.
The waffle may be irregular and imperfect in its boundaries, but
as far as it goes it will have the regular pattern of squares.
Similarly the universe, as far as it goes, will follow the order
of the mathematics.
Postscript: A longtime friend, Dan Cox, had the clever insight to
do the Chinese March problem like a loan interest problem where
the principle is the population, the rate of people walking past
the review point is the rate at which the loan is being paid, and
the growth rate is the rate at which the remaining principle is
accruing interest. Doing that he could use standard formulae.
(There are standard formulae. Where calculating money is
concerned people quickly lose their aversion to mathmatics. Some
of my students who don't under the meaning of the fraction 5/4
know that five quarters makes $1.25.)
Dan at first got a much smaller length of time. Since his
technique is very different I thought it might be a problemtask
finding out which of us was making an error. I quickly saw that
he was assuming that 20,000 Chinese could march past the viewing
post point in an hour and I was assuming only 7200. When I plug
in his rate in my calculation (aren't spreadsheets wonderful?) we
vary by 10 days in 7 years. At the slower rate we are off more
days, but it is in 21 years. Since I am getting the lower figure
it could be because I am compounding instantaneously and he is
compounding once an hour. His reply is at:
http://www.geocities.com/markleeper/coxmarch.txt [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: SHORT CUT TO NIRVANA: KUMBH MELA (film review by Mark
R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Probably the biggest human event in the world is the
Hindu festival Kumbh Mela in India. This is a pilgrimage of
somewhere between 20 and 70 million people attend on immense get-
together and form many, many temporary communities with tens of
millions of people each doing their own thing. Filmmakers
Maurizio Benazzo and Nick Day cannot hope to give the viewer an
understanding of the event. There are probably thousands of
different interpretations of what is happening. But the film
gives an amazing feel for the complexity and diversity of such a
massive event. Rating: high +2 (-4 to +4) or 8/10
The story is told that thousands of years ago there was a truce
between the gods and demons so that both could cooperate to make
Amritha Manthanam, a nectar that would give both the gods and the
demons immortality. But gods and demons do not cooperate for
long. They fought in Heaven each wanting the urn of Amritha.
And fighting over the urn it spilled four drops on the ground
below. The drops fell on four places in India: Prayag, Haridwar,
Ujjain, and Nashik. If humans go to these sites and bathe in the
waters they can partake of some of the magic of the Amritha. So
pilgrimages are made to these places, first one, then another in
a cycle. The pilgrimage this time is to Allahabad (a.k.a.
Prayag) at the convergence of the Ganges and the Jamuna rivers.
Legend has it that the river Saraswati also converges here. It
is referred to in literature and myth, but nobody has ever seen
it. Even for a country with a billion people an event that
attracts a minimum of 20 million people would be a major affair,
yet it is one that we hear of very little in the West. For
comparison the Pope's funeral brought one million people in Rome.
And this convergence of people is pure confusion. Pilgrimages
like the Haj of Islam are much more coordinated. Kumbh Mela is
much more like an immense street fair.
Perhaps one reason that this event is so unknown in the West is
that it obviously would be nearly impossible to explain to
Americans in one or a million sound bytes. You have the chaos of
people chanting, mystics sermonizing, and theatrical plays in the
street and in theater. Fakirs lie of beds of spear points. One
man wraps his genitals around a horizontal bar and invites people
to balance and stand on it. It is claimed that he can pull cars
with it. One man offers to put his free medicine in people's
eyes to stop tearing and to cure cataracts. India is apparently
not a land that is rich in skepticism. Dozens take him up on it
and go away rubbing their smarting eyes. One man has held his
arm up in the air for twenty years. The arm has become withered and
thin. He says, "God has given me a degree in willpower."
Elsewhere in the crowd, kids type on computer keyboards. One
person says that of course they have Yahoo and Hotmail. It is as
if not just centuries but millennia have come crashing together.
Everywhere there are sights, noise, music, and smells.
Filmmakers Maurizio Benazzo and Nick Day travel around the
pandemonium, documenting what they see. They interview western
visitors, Indian visitors, mystics, and gurus. They tell him
that Japan specializes in electronics, the US is expert in being
rich, and Indians are the world specialists of spirituality. Our
guide though all of this is usually Swami Krishnanand, a guru in
eyeglasses who explains as far as it is possible what is
happening to two western women and to the filmmakers. The two
women are not part of the crew but are Americans who have come
independently to see the huge celebration. We are told that 80%
of the self-proclaimed gurus are really fakes, but how does one
decide who is in the other 20%? As the various experts and holy
people explain themselves the viewer is shown many different
aspects of Hindu philosophy. Generally the feeling is that they
have found a truth that the West is only seeking. One guru named
Ramanant Puri tells us that in America nobody has the time to sit
in one posture for three hours, so they miss enlightenment.
Pilot Baba tells the camera, "The West is missing the inner
journey. They know so much about science and inventions, but
they are missing discovery--self." Elsewhere the camera shows us
the visit and speech of the Dalai Lama.
The viewer is given a heady overload of ideas, images, and
sounds. The film reaches its climax as the Naga Baba, lifelong
nudists for Shiva, go running into the Ganges. Their presence
purifies the water for all to come into the river.
The documentary is nearly as bewildering as attending the
festivities would be. This is a film for people who are
attracted rather than repelled by culture shock. This world is
like an alien planet and its people show that even if it is a
small world after all, in this world there are people very
different from us and even very different from each other. And
what they believe is even further different. Benazzo and Day can
not hope to convey understanding of the event. They probably do
not understand it themselves. They can only give a feel for the
incredible mélange of humanity that comes together for the Kumbh
Mela and convey a little of the sensual overload they must be
feeling. I rate SHORT CUT TO NIRVANA: KUMBH MELA a high +2 on
the -4 to +4 scale or 8/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Charles Barr's EALING STUDIOS (ISBN 0-520-21554-0). Okay, that
doesn't seem like much of a review, but frankly, with a book like
this, either the title will tell you that you want to read this
book, or (more likely) have you asking, "What is Ealing Studios?"
(Or perhaps even "What are Ealing Studios?") If you don't
already know something about what is one of the greatest British
studio, this book will probably not appeal to you. So this is
more like a "Hey, this book is out there for those who are
interested. You know who you are." (But be prepared for
disappointments when you want to watch a lot of the films
mentioned--they're not readily available in the United States.
Of the sixteen I looked up in Netflix, they had only three.)
MURDER IS NO MITZVAH (ISBN 0-312-32506-1) edited by Abigail
Browning has twelve crime stories on Jewish themes. (The subtitle
describes them as "Short Mysteries about Jewish Occasions", but
that is not at all accurate.) Of these, I had already read three
in MYSTERY MIDRASH edited by Lawrence W. Raphael's MYSTERY
MIDRASH: "Bread of Affliction" by Michael Kahn, "Kaddish" by
Batya Swift Yasgur, and "Mom Remembers" by James Yaffee. In
addition, both have stories by Ronald Levitsky, although not the
same one. This overlap indicates to me that either these stories
are classics or that the pool of possible stories for a Jewish
mystery anthology is fairly small. "Mom Remembers" is from 1967,
so it may be a classic, but the other two are a bit too recent
for that claim yet. The stories are generally good, which is not
surprising when you realize that eleven of them were previously
published in either "Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine" or "Alfred
Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine". (The twelfth, "The Jew's
Breastplate" by Arthur Conan Doyle, is apparently in public
domain, not a Sherlock Holmes story, and not all that good. It
is probably included on the basis of the cachet that Doyle's name
has, and it is at least centered around a Jewish object.) I
think that MYSTERY MIDRASH is marginally better than MURDER IS NO
MITZAH, but if this is more available to you, it's a reasonable
choice.
Harold Bloom's CLASSIC HORROR WRITERS (ISBN 0-7910-2201-3) has
chapters on Ambrose Bierce, Charles Brockden Brown, Henry James,
J. Sheridan LeFanu, "Monk" Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin, Edgar
Allan Poe, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Bram Stoker, and Horace Walpole. Each chapter has a brief
biography, "critical extracts", and a bibliography. The critics'
comments are obviously more meaningful if you are familiar with
the authors and their major works, so this is more for someone
who is already somewhat knowledgeable about 18th and 19th century
horror fiction than for someone looking for an introductory work.
[-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Life is one fool thing after another where
as love is two fool things after each other.
-- Oscar Wilde