THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
05/01/09 -- Vol. 27, No. 44, Whole Number 1543
El Honcho Grande: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
La Honcha Bonita: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Apologies
News From Prehistory (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Bill Nye, Science Guy and Atheist Corruptor of Youth
(comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The One-Deck Shuffle (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
THE GRAVEYARD BOOK by Neil Gaiman (book review by Joe Karpierz)
Hiding in Plain Sight (letter of comment by Tim McDaniel)
Lifecycle of a Star (letter of comment by Frank Leisti)
Sense of Wonder (letter of comment by Frank Leisti)
This Week's Reading (LITTLE BROTHER, THE LAST CHINESE CHEF,
THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN, and THE RIVER OF DOUBT)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: Apologies
Apologies for the lateness of last week's MT VOID--blame it on the
town of Amherst (MA). I had planned on sending it out from my new
netbook using the town's free Wifi, but every page I went to said
there was a certificate problem, so I waited until I got back to NJ
that evening to send it out. [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: News From Prehistory (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
We now know from skull CAT scans that the raptor dinosaur
Deinonychus had remarkable vision. In Nevada bone-hunters have
confirmed this by finding Deinonychus nests in which they were
apparently stockpiling poker chips. Hard to believe. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Bill Nye, Science Guy and Atheist Corruptor of Youth
(comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Bill Nye the Science Guy is the friendly popularizer of science
known for his humor and his bow ties. He presents a friendly,
likeable image for science. But now he has turned mad dog and is
viciously corrupting our youth. It happened in Waco, Texas, last
week when he told an audience that the moon actually did not
generate any light of its own and only reflected the light from the
sun. Can you believe that? Well, Genesis 1:16, of course,
explains that: "God made two great lights--the greater light to
govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night," but
Godless science has its own version. Several good church folk in
the audience became enraged and marched out, one yelling, "We
believe in God!" I guess Texas schools need to teach children that
there are competing points of view as to whether the moon lit up
under the astronauts' feet.
Also in the news is that Texas Governor Rick Perry is saying he
thinks his state should secede from the Union. After an incident
like this one above I really think they should. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: The One-Deck Shuffle (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Every once in a while I get an inkling that more time has passed
than I had realized. I was helping a high school boy with his math
homework. The problem was to determine the probability that a card
picked at random out of a 52-card pack would be a Queen or a Club.
"Okay," I said, "what is the probability that it is a club?"
"I don't know."
"Well how many clubs are there in a deck?"
"I don't know."
"Well, how many suits are there?"
"I don't know."
"Well, what are the suits?"
"I don't know."
"What are the red suits?"
"I don't know."
"Well have you ever seen a deck of cards?"
"No."
"Really?
"No, I've never played cards."
Well, back when I was his age kids were supposed to pretend not to
know playing cards very much. It was considered mostly a wasteful
pastime. Perhaps a course in probability like this one would
mention them. But you would never bring a deck of cards to school.
After all, some people gamble with decks of cards. Of course
everybody knew about cards from their non-academic lives. Even if
you only played gin and solitaire, you at least knew about a deck
of cards. I had never run into someone who did not know anything
about a deck of cards. There are lots of games that can be played
with a deck of playing cards, so it really is a very versatile, if
low-tech, entertainment device.
But of course we are living in a different age. For my generation,
cards were at best considered an idle time activity. You might
play with them on a long summer Saturday afternoon, but it was a
decadent pursuit. They were a pastime. Kids don't have pastimes
anymore. What they have is videogames. Kids don't play solitaire
any more--they pound their way through videogames. But it never
occurred to me that kids might be growing up without ever playing
cards. Somehow you don't think that there might be people whose
entertainment might vary so much from ours. A game like gin rummy
is probably as obsolete and dull to today's kids as Cribbage or
horseshoe toss was to us.
But our parents must have gone through something similar. I know
about 1960 or so we used to think it funny when in English class
when there would be exercises in our textbook that said "write two
paragraphs about your favorite radio program." Nobody in the class
had a favorite radio program. In fact the kids just barely knew
that there was such a thing as a radio program. By 1960 radio
drama had mostly died. They might listen to music. They might
even listen to a particular disk jockey. But there were not many
who actually had something resembling a radio program they listened
to. The radio was a source of current music, not of drama. The
teacher said the obvious thing, which was to write instead about
their favorite television program. But technology had changed what
was the popular form of entertainment. By 1960 it was obvious to
all that our English textbook, at least in this minor way, had
become outdated and no longer matched the real world.
To me it still seems very strange that as popular as card playing
has been as a pastime, that the younger generation considers it
passe'. Basically cards provide us a way to play games that vary
based on a randomizing element that is the shuffling of the deck.
The shuffling of the deck randomizes the order of the cards and
that randomization gives games their unpredictability and their
element of chance. In the age of the computer we have much better
randomizing algorithms. Variability in computer games still comes
from randomizing elements, but they are pseudo-random number
generating procedures that are faster and more efficient than
physical shuffling of cards. And they can be called on thousands
of times a second. One-deck-shuffle games cannot be nearly as
subtle as a result.
I suspect that there are even now people in the youngest generation
people who would look at a film like THE CINCINNATI KID and wonder
why grown men could get so fascinated by such a technically
retarded game as poker.
But look at the bright side. Whatever game the kids are playing
right now will to their kids be as quaint as Go Fish! is to the
current teens. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: THE GRAVEYARD BOOK by Neil Gaiman (copyright 2008,
HarperCollins, $17.99, 312pp, ISBN 978-0-06-053092-1) (book review
by Joe Karpierz)
Neil Gaiman has been hit or miss for me over the years--mostly
miss. I didn't care for AMERICAN GODS all that much, and GOOD
OMENS (cowritten by Terry Pratchett) did nothing for me. I didn't
read CORALINE, but did see and enjoy the movie (I'm told by my kids
that there were a lot of deviations from the story). I think I've
finally found a Neil Gaiman novel I like.
THE GRAVEYARD BOOK is the story of Nobody Owens, a very small child
who was left in a graveyard when the rest of his family was killed
by the man Jack. Jack was really looking to kill Bod, as he is
called, but Bod is the only one that got away.
THE GRAVEYARD BOOK is clearly inspired by Rudyard Kipling's JUNGLE
BOOK. The child is taken in by the residents of the graveyard, and
Mr. and Mrs. Owens take him as the child they never had. He has a
guardian, Silas, whose main tasks are to be a teacher to Bod and to
keep him safe. We find out that Silas is a member of the Honour
Guard, and he seems to be neither alive nor dead. Silas is very
mysterious, and he and the rest of the residents of the graveyard
admonish Bod never to leave the graveyard; as long as he stays, he
is safe, and he can be protected from the man Jack who is still out
there looking for him.
The structure of the novel is like a collection of short stories,
each taking place a year or two after the previous, and each giving
us a glimpse of what it's like for a young boy to grow up in a
graveyard in the care of its residents. In one chapter, we meet
Scarlett, a girl who comes to visit the graveyard--it's actually a
sort of nature preserve--and meets what she and her parents presume
to be her imaginary friend Bod. It's a very touching tale, as Bod
needs human companionship and gets it for a short time in the
person of Scarlett. He's also not very happy when she has to
leave. In another chapter, we meet Liza Hempstock, the ghost of a
which buried in a different part of the graveyard, but she has no
headstone. Bod feels for her, and goes out into the world to
attempt to procure a headstone for her. He plans to pawn a
valuable piece of jewelry that he has found beneath a grave in the
lair of the Sleer. He learns a valuable lesson about greed and
friendship in this chapter. In another, we meet Miss Lupescu,
another member of the Honour Guard who watches over Bod while Silas
is gone from the graveyard running mysterious errands. Miss
Lupescu teaches Bod different lessons than Silas teaches, and feeds
Bod different food than Silas buys, and Bod doesn't like it. But
in the end, Bod and Miss
Lupescu become good friends.
This is truly the story of a boy growing up amidst fantastic
friends, magic, wonders, and death. It's the story of a boy who
comes to grips with who he is and how he has to deal with that
knowledge. The story deals with a group of men called the Jack of
All Trades and the prophecy of which Bod is a part. We've seen
this kind of thing before in many different places, so it's really
nothing special. What is important is how Bod deals with the
problem with the help of his friends, thus learning an important
life lesson about friendship.
Finally, of course, Bod must leave the graveyard, and thus he
learns yet another lesson: we must leave the things of our
childhood behind and go out into the world and make something of
ourselves.
This is really a terrific little book. I believe that it deserved
the Newberry Medal that it won. It's a terrific book for young and
old alike. I highly recommend it. However, it's not clear to me
that it belongs on a list of Hugo nominees. It's not that it's YA,
and it's not that it's fantasy. It just doesn't feel to me like it
belongs with Hugo nominees and winners of the past. But go read it
anyway--I think you'll enjoy it.
Next up, SATURN'S CHILDREN by Charles Stross. [-jak]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Hiding in Plain Sight (letter of comment by Tim McDaniel)
In response to Mark's comments on hiding in plain sight in the
04/03/09 issue of the MT VOID, Tim McDaniel writes:
In re yours of the 3rd inst. on "Hiding in Plain Sight".
A "one-time pad" encrypts characters by (for example) XORing a
different random integer for each character. If each key integer
is used at most once, and if the integers are truly random, then it
can be proven to be unbreakable. Before computers, the drawback
was in generating as many key units as characters that you'd ever
want to send, and in distributing the keys to the field.
The key must be truly random, not pseudo-random as on many
computers. In cryptography, patterns can be fatal.
What Mark described was not a "one-time pad", but looks like a
variant of "running-key cipher". The Wikipedia article for that
notes, "Perhaps surprisingly, the security is usually fairly poor",
for several stated reasons.
My amateur impression from reading David Kahn's THE CODEBREAKERS is
that the two most famous signs of a crackable system are calling it
unbreakable, and citing the number of possible combinations.
[-tmd]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Lifecycle of a Star (letter of comment by Frank Leisti)
In response to Mark's comments on stars and hydrogen in the
04/24/09 issue of the MT VOID, Frank Leisti writes, "Fortunately,
when the hydrogen is used up in a star, the helium is then
converted to higher order elements all the way up to iron, which
unfortunately, starts to use more energy than it makes, shutting
down the nuclear furnace of the star and allowing gravity to force
things together. Depending on the size of the original star, this
star can either expand as it is doing this, shrink down to white
dwarf, neutron, magnetron, or with a supernova explosion which
creates much higher order material (into the radioactive material
ranges), it could become a black hole. [-frl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Sense of Wonder (letter of comment by Frank Leisti)
In response to Mark's comments on the sense of wonder in the
04/24/09 issue of the MT VOID, Frank Leisti writes, "On the Sense
of Wonder, I recall from my youth, reading in comic books a form of
advertising which showed the difference of presenting science in
the classroom. One part of the competition was a person simply
leading the class in a standard transfer of knowledge--teacher to
student. The other part was a person who, with their presentation
had a hands-on activity for the students to learn from. It was
obvious which developed the greater sense of wonder." [-frl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
LITTLE BROTHER by Cory Doctorow (ISBN-13 978-0-7653-1985-2, ISBN-10
0-7653-1985-3) is a Hugo nominee. It has gotten a lot of good
reviews. I thought it was awful.
First, the basic premise: Marcus is a sixteen-year-old hacker who
gets caught up in a DHS sweep after a terrorist attack in San
Francisco. After he is held incommunicado for a week and
psychologically tortured, he is released, but becomes the leader of
a movement to reverse the Orwellian tactics of the government.
(It's no accident that his handle at the beginning is "w1nst0n" and
that the novel is called "*Little* Brother".) Doctorow is in the
forefront of the current "personal freedom" movement, and his
agenda is showing--not just showing, in fact, but lit up with
searchlights and announced with air raid sirens. I have in the
past accused Heinlein of being unsubtle, but I realize now that
there were whole new levels.
But there are other problems. I'm all in favor of a well-written,
well-placed info-dump, but this book seems to be almost a third
info-dump. (Someone claimed that Doctorow wrote this by stringing
together a lot of his "Boing-Boing" columns with a minimal plot.)
Most of the characters seem fairly thin--I realize that this is a
YA novel, but even so....
The odd thing is that many of the things that I object to in LITTLE
BROTHER I loved in Neal Stephenson's SNOW CRASH. I assume it must
be the writing style. Stephenson tended to isolate his info-dumps
via the character of the Librarian, rather than have the narrator
pontificate, and his characters were more complex. It's odd, I
suppose, that there should be so much similarity between two books
that are at opposite ends of the spectrum for me, but there you
have it. I really expected to like LITTLE BROTHER, but it was a
massive disappointment.
Our discussion group read THE LAST CHINESE CHEF by Nicole Mones
(ISBN-13 isbn, ISBN-10 isbn), with the plot about a woman who is
investigating a claim about her deceased husband and meets a
Chinese American who is the son and grandson of great Chinese chefs
and is going to compete in a cooking contest. I found the long
discussions of the philosophy and practice of Chinese food far more
interesting than the mystery or romance plot, so for the benefit of
those who want to read only those parts, they are on pages 26-28,
34-54, 63-69, 76-80, 95-99, 122-136, 148-150, 152-155, 165-170,
183-195, and 228-242.
THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN by Simon Winchester (read by David
Case) (ISBN-13 978-0-7366-5160-8, ISBN-10 0-7366-5160-8) is about
the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary and its greatest
volunteer, but also about the history of dictionaries, the American
Civil War, and a variety of other digressions. The professor is
James Murray, the editor of the project. The madman is Dr. W. C.
Minor, who contributed thousands of quotations for the project--
while confined in Broadmoor Asylum for having committed a murder
while insane.
There are a few unexpected lessons to be learned. While Murray
satrted the project, he estimated it would take two years to
produce the first volume; it took twenty. All his other estimates
were equally off. But the fact is, if anyone had realized how long
the project would take, they never would have undertaken it.
And Murray also helped, merely by thinking about the process. The
editor had volunteers reading from a list of books, sending in
quotations for whatever words they thought worthwhile. Copying the
quotations in a standard format took a long time, and often words
were skipped that would have been useful. Murray took a two-step
approach. He *indexed* each book in a booklet, jotting down all
the words that might be of use, along with the page number, and did
this in such a way that it was in alphabetical order. When he had
a few of these, he wrote Murray, explaining his method, and asking
what words Murray could use quotations for right away. Then he
needed merely to look them up and copy those quotations. This
meant he was not wasting his time copying quotations for words that
would not be worked on for years, while Murray struggled with other
words than he could help out with.
I recommended this for anyone who is interested in either the
English language, or managing large projects.
And speaking of large projects, THE RIVER OF DOUBT by Candice (read
by Richard Ferrone) (ISBN-13 978-0-7393-2303-8, ISBN-10
0-7393-2303-2; book ISBN-13 978-0-7679-1373-7, ISBN-10
0-7679-1373-6) is about yet another example of why accurate
planning is important. After losing his bid for the Presidency in
1912, Roosevelt went to South America, supposedly to travel down a
reasonably well-known river. The person organizing the expedition
selected most of the principals without really thinking it through.
For example, he chose as the quartermaster on the jungle trip a man
whose only experience in exploration was an Arctic polar
expedition--and a failed one at that!
And then when the expedition got to South America, they somehow
decided to change their plan from a relatively safe river to the
River of Doubt, a completely unknown river in a region supposedly
inhabited by hostile tribes. To some extent, this decision was of
the magnitude of the Donner party's decision to take the short cut.
I have already reviewed Roosevelt's account, THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN
WILDERNESS, of the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition to map what was then
called the "River of Doubt" (Rio da Duvida), was renamed Rio
Roosevelt, and then later renamed Rio Teodoro. As I noted, "his
descriptions of the land, the animals, and the plants are first-
rate, but he does somewhat gloss over some of the hardships of the
expedition, in specific the illnesses. I suppose perhaps it was
considered 'unmanly' to complain of malaria, blood poisoning, and
so on, but the result is a slightly incomplete picture of the
expedition." Millard corrects these omissions, talking at length
about Roosevelt's injuries and illnesses, including that he was so
incapacitated at one point that he told the others to leave him
behind with a vial of morphine he always carried on expeditions for
just such a situation. (They didn't.)
This book is a good read on its own, but is even better when read
in conjunction with THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS
http://tinyurl.com/TR-brazil. My review can be found at (at
http://www.geocities.com/athens/4824/rev-r3.htm#brazilian.
[-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Paradoxical as it sounds, many intellectuals
prefer life in the mud to life in clear water.
-- Martin H. Fischer