THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
11/14/08 -- Vol. 27, No. 20, Whole Number 1519
El Honcho Grande: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
La Honcha Bonita: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
THE WALDORF CONFERENCE (announcement)
mY cOmplaint (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Answers to Last Week's Titanic Math Problem (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
The Ruckus About Pluto (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Titanic (letter of comment by Taras Wolansky)
The Case for Caution (letter of comment by Ian Gahan)
This Week's Reading (REALITYLAND, SMILE WHEN YOU'RE LYING,
THE LAST THEOREM, and A POCKETFUL OF HISTORY)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: THE WALDORF CONFERENCE (announcement)
On November 22, 10PM-midnight PST, KPCC will broadcast "The Waldorf
Conference", co-written by sometime-contributor to the MT VOID
Daniel M. Kimmel, along with Arnie Reisman and Nat Segaloff. "On
November 24, 1947, the most powerful men in American film met in
New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel to decide how to address the
House Un-American Activities Committee Communist witch-hunt. 24
hours later they emerged, having created the Hollywood Blacklist.
'The Waldorf Conference"' dramatically speculates on what went on
in that room."
It will also be available over the Internet for a week following
the broadcast at http://www.scpr.org/programs/latw/. [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: mY cOmplaint (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I remember in chemistry class in high school we were discussing
acidity and alkalinity. The measure of this is the pH.
You mean "capital-P-small-h?"
No, it's "small-p-capital-H."
What if it starts a sentence?
It's still "small-p-capital-H."
But that doesn't make sense. That is not how English works.
This isn't English, it's chemistry.
Chemists still need English if they want to communicate.
It's still "small-p-capital-H."
But that is not how we capitalize in English. If you capitalize
anything at all it is the first letter.
"That's just how it is."
So that was it. That opened the door. Somebody who later was big
at Apple must have seen that. Now we have iPods and iPhones and
iTunes and eHarmony and who knows what else. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Answers to Last Week's Titanic Math Problem (comments by
Mark R. Leeper)
Evelyn gave the table of casualties on the Titanic
Women/Children Men Total
First 6% 69% 40%
Second 19% 90% 56%
Third 53% 86% 75%
Crew 13% 78% 76%
[Note: This data has been challenged by a reader. See Taras
Wolanksy's letter of comment.]
I asked for each of First Class, Second Class, Third Class, and
Crew, what proportion, to the nearest percent were men? For each
of First Class, Second Class, Third Class, and Crew, what
proportion, to the nearest percent were men who were casualties?
These are actually simple mixture problems.
In First Class, Second Class, Third Class, and Crew, the proportion
that were men was 54%, 52%, 67%, and 97%, respectively.
In First Class, Second Class, Third Class, and Crew, the proportion
that were men who were casualties was 37%, 47%, 57%, and 76%.
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: The Ruckus About Pluto (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I recently got into a discussion with an older science fiction fan
about Pluto. He had brought it up jokingly saying the ninth planet
was now supposedly no longer a planet. I guess that the correct
term now is "planetoid." I could tell from the way he was talking
that he was not happy that it no longer was a planet. A lot of
people are unhappy about the new classification.
Now I knew this was an emotional issue for some people. There were
protests when it was announced that Pluto would no longer be
considered a planet. So what is a planet, I asked my friend.
Well, he said there was a technical definition. What is the
definition of planet? He did not know exactly. I did not say this
to his face, but if he is not sure that Pluto fits the definition
of a planet and is not even sure what the definition is, why does
it bother him that Pluto does not fit the technical conditions of
being considered a planet? The answer is obvious though. He
almost certainly was taught very young that there were nine
planets. And from a young age he might have been able to list
them. For science fans that is sort of like the A-B-C Song. Young
kids with a science orientation can rattle off the names of the
planets in order of smallest to largest orbits. It is not the
planets going outward from the sun since Pluto has a strange orbit
and is now or was recently nearer the sun than was Uranus.
But being able to rattle off the names of the planets is more a
number trick than actually knowing the planets. You can probably
list the people in your family youngest to oldest or oldest to
youngest. No problem. But try rattling off the names of the eight
planets in the opposite order and it will go noticeably slower.
(And the alphabet song is almost no help at all in listing the
letters of the alphabet in reverse order.) But any kid with a
science orientation does know the names of the nine planets as we
were taught them, and some of us feel a little betrayed that Pluto
was demoted to a planetoid. The question really centers on what
actually is a planet. To those of us brought up on Donald Duck
comic books or on Flash Gordon serials a planet is like another
country where things are different. Another dimension is the same
sort of thing as another planet. It is a place to set stories. I
don't mean to imply everybody who thinks Pluto should be a planet
is so unsophisticated, but that is how a lot of us start. I think
few people could tell you what a planet really is and why
astronomers no longer count Pluto.
The thing is I have had this really hard life, you know. I have
had much bigger disappointments than finding out that I was wrong
about Pluto being a planet. My response is just to wonder what is
a planet and why doesn't Pluto qualify.
Well, a planet has to have enough gravity to be roughly spherical
and it has to be in orbit around the sun. So far Pluto is a planet
in good standing. But then there is the question of mass. If a
body does not clean up its orbit it is not allowed to be a planet.
And Pluto has been a bad boy and has not been cleaning up its
orbit. A planet goes around in its orbit and its gravity picks up
debris. Well, I hate to be a tattletale, but Pluto has not been
cleaning up its orbit. It doesn't have enough mass to do that.
You see the existence of a ninth planet was predicted by Percival
Lowell based on perturbations to Uranus's orbit. Lowell said that
there was a big mass out there that was influencing Uranus. Lowell
looked for it, but it takes a lot of time to find such things,
particularly with the crude tools that were available in the early
1900s. Lowell died in 1916, convinced that there was a ninth
planet out there somewhere. In 1929 Clyde Tombaugh was hired by
the Lowell Observatory to look for the predicted object. He had a
new device called a "blink comparator" that helped him better to
see moving objects. Tombaugh looked and there really was an object
near where Lowell thought it should be. The object was supposedly
the missing planet--then called Planet X. A schoolchild suggested
the name Pluto, for the god of the underworld. The astronomers at
the Lowell Observatory noticed that Pluto starts out with the
initials of Perceval Lowell and so Pluto was officially our ninth
planet.
As time went by it was discovered that there were errors in
Lowell's calculation. Uranus was not the mass Lowell thought it
was. There was no large massive object. And Pluto just did not
have the mass that Lowell predicted. In fact Lowell had wrong
information on the mass of Uranus and its perturbations were not
from another planet at all.
Pluto was an ice ball from what we now know to be the Kuiper belt.
That is this big ring-cloud of ice and rock that is generally
outside the orbit of Neptune, 4.5 to 7.5 billion kilometers from
the sun. That is about 30 to 50 times as far from the sun as we
are. This one ice ball just happened to be in the right place at
the right time. It was mistaken for Lowell's predicted planet,
which really did not exist. The situation is sort of like what
happened to Cary Grant in NORTH BY NORTHWEST. Pluto is the George
Kaplan of the Solar System.
But perhaps unused to the sudden attention it kept it real identity
secret and let us play with the idea of Rocky Jones landing on it
and finding space pirates. But it is not big enough to clean out
its orbit. We now know that while it is unusually big for a Kuiper
Belt object and in the game of cosmic billiards it ending up
considerably sunward of most of its mates, it is really an
unwitting fugitive from the Kuiper Belt.
Most of us grew up with this nice orderly view that the solar
system was a star with nine planets orbiting around it. That is
neat and simple. Well, even our solar system is not so neat and
simple. It is a large collection of objects from being as big as
Jupiter to as fine as dust. There probably are things big enough
to be planets further out. We have found a chunk three-quarters
the mass of Pluto out at 130 billion kilometers out. We could
probably easily be missing a chunk the size of Mercury that far
out. The concept we previously had was that the solar system was a
nice orderly comprehensible collection of a few objects and that
school children could memorize everything large enough to be called
a planet. That simplicity fed our egos probably in the same way it
fed our egos that the Earth was the center of it all. I think we
now know that the solar system is just a big collection of junk
loosely held together by the gravitational force of the sun. It
has no more order than the dust I sweep up from my garage floor.
Yes, there are some bigger objects, but they are just part of the
detritus of what happened to be there. It is not simple, and
school kids cannot memorize the entire set of large and important
objects that are there.
I have to say that given my druthers I would still have it be a
planet, but I must be grown-up about this. If it is not a planet,
it is not a planet. And I am mature enough to say that even if it
is an ice ball from the Kuiper Belt there is no reason that Rocky
Jones can't find space pirates on it. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Titanic (letter of comment by Taras Wolansky)
In response to Evelyn's comments on Titanic in the 11/07/08 issue
of the MT VOID, Taras Wolansky writes:
The statistics on TITANIC survivorship you reported conflicted with
my recollection ("a man in first class had a better chance of
surviving that a woman in third class, 'women and children first'
notwithstanding") so I checked them up online.
In fact, "third class women were 41% more likely to survive than
first class men." See http://www.anesi.com/titanic.htm for the
official casualty figures. 46.06% of women in third class were
saved, against only 32.57% of men in first class. (The difference
between movies and reality!)
Among the crew, 86.96% of women survived, against only 21.69% of
men. In fact, crewmen made up almost half (46%) of all the
casualties. [-tw]
[Peter Rubinstein sent the same figures.]
Evelyn responds:
The figures Wade gave were:
Women/Children Men Total
First 6% 69% 40%
Second 19% 90% 56%
Third 53% 86% 75%
Crew 13% 78% 76%
The figures http://www.anesi.com/titanic.htm gave are:
Women/Children Men Total
First 3% 67% 40%
Second 11% 92% 56%
Third 58% 84% 75%
Crew 13% 78% 76%
These are pretty close. Note, however, that Wade combines women
and children into a single category, while anesi lists them
separately. (I have combined them in the table to give an apples-
to-apples comparison.) Because only 34% of the children in Third
Class were saved, that makes Wade's percentage for the combined
category lower than anesi's.
The statistics are therefore consistent. I was actually comparing
the rates of women/children in the various classes as opposed to
comparing women versus men. [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: The Case for Caution (letter of comment by Ian Gahan)
In response to Mark's comments on caution in the 11/07/08 issue of
the MT VOID, Ian Gahan writes:
Some comments regarding "The case for caution". I too remember the
Y2K issue and hearing commentators afterwards telling everyone that
it was a lot of fuss about nothing. The fact that virtually nothing
happened was that all round the world software developers were
frantically rewriting software to prevent the problem happening. It
turned out that we were all very successful. But guess what, we all
get to go through it again in twenty-nine years time (2038) when
Unix hits its date wrap round.
Regarding anthropogenic global warming, forget it, it is not
happening, even the IPCC (the UN bunch of "politicians" behind the
scam) now refer to it as "climate change". CO2 does not cause
warming. Current increasing CO2 is a result of the end of the
little ice age. CO2 rises around 800 years after warming starts.
Yes, mankind is adding to the level, by approximately 2%. The
world has been getting colder for the last ten years and will
continue getting colder for at least the next twenty years.
I sincerely hope that you are wrong about nothing happening the
same way twice, otherwise bang goes the scientific method. :-)
[-ig]
Mark responds:
I am not sure that the scientific community is anywhere near
declaring that global warming is not created by people. If you
like to follow the debate a good web site is Climate Debate Daily
at http://climatedebatedaily.com/.
As for the scientific method I am not saying that the overall
outcome will not be the same. I am just saying it will not
happen exactly the same way twice. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
REALITYLAND: TRUE-LIFE ADVENTURES AT WALT DISNEY WORLD by David
Koenig (ISBN-13 978-0-964060-52-4, ISBN-10 0-964060-52-3) is what
appears to be a reasonably honest look at the rise (and to some
extent fall) of Walt Disney World, the Florida mega-complex.
Koenig does a good job conveying the obsessive nature of everything
at Walt Disney World. For example, at the beginning employees at
the hotels could not accept tips (this soon changed), security was
handled by Disney staff, who decided whether or not to call local
law enforcement (this also soon changed), calling every
dissatisfied guest to try to placate them (ditto), and so on. In
fact, the book can be summed up as a long recitation of Disney
decisions that seemed like good ideas at the time, but turned out
to be mistakes. So far as I can tell, the management of Walt
Disney World (post-Walt) always thought that they knew better than
the entire industry what should be done--and were usually wrong.
One more example: when Space Mountain opened, no one was allowed
to refer to it as a roller coaster. The result was that people
expected a placid ride past space vistas and were often not happy
with the results, which included bumps, bruises, wrenched backs,
lost items, etc.
Of course, the public had its flaws as well. While real injuries
were sometimes sustained, there were also attempts at scams.
"Sometimes, the accusations were pure fiction, just someone trying
to make a quick buck off the big corporation. One guest claimed
she was injured by a brick that fell from Cinderella Castle.
Impossible, Disney easily illustrated, since the castle has no
bricks; it's a fiberglass facade. Another woman claimed the
Hydrolator chambers at EPCOT Center's Living Seas pavilion
descended so fast, they damaged her eardrums. Disney merely
demonstrated that the pseudo-elevators only give the illusion of
descending and actually let the guests off at the same elevation as
when they entered." [page 142]
REALITYLAND is definitely worth reading if you are interested in
the whole tourist mega-industry in the Orlando area. However, fans
of Walt Disney World may find themselves somewhat disillusioned by
all the backstage information.
REALITYLAND is definitely worth reading if you are interested in
the whole tourist mega-industry in the Orlando area. However, fans
of Walt Disney World may find themselves somewhat disillusioned by
all the backstage information.
And speaking of the travel/tourist industry, in SMILE WHEN YOU'RE
LYING: CONFESSIONS OF A ROGUE TRAVEL WRITER by Chuck Thompson
(ISBN-13 978-0-8050-8209-8, ISBN-10 0-8050-8209-3) the author seems
to have two purposes. First, he wants to convince the reader that
everything they read from established "travel writers" is hype--and
overwritten hype at that. The first example he gives is:
"Renaissance funhogs, brace yourselves: This trip, combining three
days of mountain biking with five days of whitewater rafting on the
Colorado
River, may be the tastiest pairing since chocolate and
cabernet. It takes you straight into the heart of Canyonlands'
high-desert rock garden, defined by the goose-necking canyons of
Green and Colorado and an almost hallucinogenic symphony of spires,
buttes, mesas, hoodoos, fins, arches, and slickrock."
Thompson's goal in this is to convince the reader that travel
writers--and the sorts of vacations they promote--are not to be
trusted. They are too insulated from the destination, too
controlled, and so on. This goal is somewhat undercut by what
seems to be Thompson's other purpose: to tell the most hair-raising
stories about his travels that he can. While he claims to be
trying to convince readers that the Philippines is the friendliest
country in the world, I can't help but feel that telling a long
story of how a bus trip left him standing on a deserted country
road at 3:30 in the morning to change buses, and that while waiting
he was approached by eight men with machetes soliciting him for gay
sex, saved only by the sudden (and fortunate) arrival of the bus--
well, this story is not going to get Americans traveling to the
Philippines in droves, and certainly not on trips involving
independent bus travel.
Not everything he says is accurate. For example, he also claims
that you can recharge dead batteries by rubbing them briskly on
your pants leg for a minute or two, and this may make them last as
long as an hour or two. While resting the battery may help it
recover slightly, and heating it by rubbing may add a little more,
one cannot actually recharge a battery this way.
But once in a while, he does get it right, such as when he writes,
"Spicy Is Almost Never Spicy: In the United States when they tell
you it's spicy, it's not spicy. In the rest of the world when they
tell you it's spicy, there's a 20 percent chance it's spicy. In
Thailand when they tell you it's spicy, it's going to taste like
someone showing a blowtorch down your throat for the next twenty-
five minutes."
I wanted to like THE LAST THEOREM by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik
Pohl (ISBN-13 978-0-345-47021-8, ISBN-10 0-345-47021-4)--I really
did. I've been reading Clarke and Pohl since Hector was a pup, and
was hoping for the old magic. Plus of course it was about
mathematics, and that's pretty darn rare. Alas, either their
writing or my tastes have changed. What is wrong? Well, first of
all, there's an awful lot of expository lumps. And there's an awful lot of
convenient occurrences and coincidences. And of
course Sri Lanka is great and the United States isn't. And I
cannot say that I find either the mathematical or the socio-
political premises very likely.
A POCKETFUL OF HISTORY: FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF AMERICA--ONE STATE
QUARTER AT A TIME by Jim Noles (ISBN-13 978-0-306-81578-2, ISBN-10
0-306-81578-8) is, among other things, an example of subtitling
gone wild. The book itself is a historical grab-bag, telling the
history behind each state's design, starting with Caesar Rodney and
ending with King Kamehameha. Sometimes Noles is hard-pressed to
write his chapter; of South Carolina's design, he says, "South
Carolina is another state that ... relied on an amalgamation of
symbols for its quarter design--and created a difficult task for an
author left to craft a chapter about a bird, a flower, and a palm
tree." He is not always positive: "At the risk of irritating
Michigan's nearly 10 million citizens, it is difficult to ignore
the obvious: Michigan's state quarter ... is perhaps the most
boring of the bunch." Depicting the outline of the state and the
Great Lakes system, it is described by Noles as a "cupro-nickel-
plated hydrogeography lesson."
Since a lot of the history or meanings on the quarters was familiar
to me, I found some of the stories about how the choices were made
more interesting. Iowa had to reject the suggestion of the
Sullivan brothers when it was decided that a row of their heads was
too close to the "busts or portraits of any person, living or
dead." Full-figure images such as Cesar Rodney and George
Washington were allowed, but I would think Mount Rushmore on the
South Dakota quarter violates the "no-busts" rule. And there is
still some dispute on whether the astronaut suit for Ohio violates
the rule against portraying living persons, since arguably it is
supposed to be either John Glenn or Neil Armstrong. The bison
appears on three coins (though only as a skull on one of them).
Lincoln and Washington each appear twice. Only one Native American
appears, and only two actual woman (i.e., not Lady Liberty or the
Spirit of the Commonwealth). Two states claim the Wright Brothers'
achievement, and two the space program. And as Noles said, "[It]
is difficult to find a more bitter piece of irony than New
Hampshire's decision to depict the fabled Old Man of the Mountain"
in its design--within three years of the quarters' issuance, the
rock formation had collapsed into a pile of rubble.
As I said, how the choices were made and why is at times more
interesting and revealing than the straight history behind what is
being depicted. (And I can't help but feel that there will not be
a similar book about the Presidential dollars--there is nothing
notable about them. The portraits of the Presidents are not
particularly notable, and the reverse does not have anything
representing something distinctive to that particular President.)
[-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions
from insufficient premises.
-- Samuel Butler