THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
07/24/09 -- Vol. 28, No. 4, Whole Number 1554
C3PO: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
R2D2: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Acknowledgement (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Turning on a Dime--Or Getting Your Dollar
Playing with Units in Physics (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Mangal Pandey (Letter of comment by Taras Wolansky)
A DOG OF FLANDERS (letter of comment by James E. LaBarre)
Time Travel (letter of comment by Wendy)
This Week's Reading (BORGES ANTES EL ESPEJO)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
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TOPIC: Acknowledgement (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
This week's MT VOID is brought to you by the Pre-Owned-Humvee
Owners Exchange.Buy a used Humvee today. Humvee: It's not a car.
It's a defense system. [-mrl]
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TOPIC: Turning on a Dime--Or Getting Your Dollar (comments by
Mark R. Leeper)
What happened to General Motors was a tragedy brought about by the
suddenness of the changing environment economic environment. Can
you really expect an industry that had been making cars since the
early twentieth century to shift gears so fast to more fuel-
efficient cars in those three short decades since the mid-1970s? I
don't remember any President talking about changes being needed in
the auto industry before Jimmy Carter. If Truman had mentioned
something about it the industry might have had a chance to swerve
in time. But we didn't even have an energy crisis until 1973.
[-mrl]
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TOPIC: Playing with Units in Physics (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
When I was maybe ten or eleven years old my brother talked at the
dinner table about the physics he had learned in school. They had
talked about Albert Einstein's famous equation linking matter and
energy, E=MC^2. Well, it did not make sense to me. You could use
different units for the numbers you put in. C was the speed of
light. That is 186,000 miles per hour. But you would get an
entirely different number if you used different units. If light
goes at 186,000 miles per hour, that is the same as 272,800 feet
per second. But wouldn't you get a different number if you plugged
in 272,800 feet per second instead of 186,000 miles per hour? Of
course you would, I was told. But the units would change also and
you would still get the same answer. The numbers would change but
so would the units. I gave some thought to this. One mile a
minute is the same as sixty miles an hour. One had a number of
only one and one had a number of sixty, but the units were
different and that compensated for the difference in the numbers.
That got me interested in the units of physics. Frequently on
standardize multiple-choice tests in physics and chemistry they
would give your four possible results for a calculation, but only
one would have the right units. Knowing that you could eliminate
the wrong answers (or sometimes most of the wrong answers) without
doing any calculation.
The units seem like such a simple thing, but the units of a physics
formula almost tell a story. I had heard that the faster you drive
a car the more your fuel efficiency drops. How do you get the best
trade-off? Suppose you want to measure a car's performance
proportional to its speed and its fuel efficiency. I might be
willing to travel at half the speed if I could double the fuel
efficiency. You would want to multiply the speed and the
efficiency together. So you multiply together the miles per gallon
figure by the miles per hour figure. And what units would you put
on that.
(miles/gallon) x (miles/hour) = (square-miles)/(gallon-hour)
Can that unit make sense? Yes. You take two identical cars and
put them on a flat plane. One starts at the starting point and
travels north at a fixed rate of speed until it has used up one
gallon of gasoline. You have an identical car start at the same
starting point travel east at the same fixed speed for one hour.
They will have driven two paths perpendicular to each other. In
other words they have swept out two adjacent sides of a rectangle.
Take that rectangle and measure its area. The area of the
rectangle will be the car's performance.
Now are the units really correct on E=MC^2? This would say:
energy=mass*(distance/time)*(distance/time)
Is that really what we think of as energy? Well, take some matter
with mass, say a meteor. It has been moving through empty space
for a long time. Now Newton says that left to its own devices it
will neither speed up nor slow down. It will have a mass and a
speed (or distance/time) and it will get those free from the
universe and the initial conditions. Mass times speed is not
really changing much. But it is getting all the speed it has from
its beginning conditions. If you want it to speed up you apply
some force to it. Force is mass times acceleration. Its
distance/time is increasing. At what rate is it increasing? Well,
it goes from one distance/time to a larger one in a certain period
of time. So its acceleration is distance/time/time. In fact, the
force you gave it is what it took to give that much mass that much
acceleration. Twice the mass would have cut the acceleration in
half. Energy or work is defined by a physicist as "moving
something against resistance." Force times distance is work or
energy. So just looking at what the units represent we get:
energy=distance*force
energy=distance*mass*acceleration
energy=mass*distance*acceleration
energy=mass*distance*speed/time
energy=mass*distance*distance/time/time
energy=mass*(distance/time)*(distance/time)
So the proper units of energy would be those of mass times speed-
squared. The energy of a piece of matter is its mass times a speed
squared. And this speed turns out to be the speed of light.
[-mrl]
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TOPIC: Mangal Pandey (letter of comment by Taras Wolansky)
In response to the comments on Mangal Pandey in the 07/10/09 issue
of the MT VOID, Taras Wolansky writes:
I'm afraid Mark slightly misread my last. It was Mangal Pandey's
single-handed attack on his British officers that I called
"disorganized and ineffective", not his legal defense in his court
martial. That he attacked those officers without knowing if his
fellow soldiers would back him suggests that, as he later
testified under oath, he may not have been entirely in his right
mind.
And, in fact, the other sepoys supported him hardly at all, with
the result that he succeeded in wounding just one officer before
he was arrested (after an equally bungled attempt to shoot
himself) and was hanged a few weeks later. (This all took place
before the beginning of the Indian Mutiny.)
There's another possibility. As a soldier and a Brahmin, Pandey
belonged to what is often called an "honor culture". If he felt
that his personal honor had been somehow injured, then the attack
itself might have been the point, regardless of any prospects of
success (as in a duel). That might also explain why the other
soldiers "remained mute spectators", as Wikipedia puts it. In
this view, Pandey had a personal point to make; encouraging other
soldiers to mutiny was merely an afterthought. [-tw]
Mark replies:
I think you are taking your interpretation of the events from the
British accounts which today even the British themselves doubt.
Prior to the struggle for independence the British always
misunderstood the Indians and dismissed them as being much less
than they were. Very much later no less a figure than Winston
Churchill dismissed Mahatma Gandhi as simply a "half-naked
fakir." That was his assessment in a time somewhat more
enlightened than during the time of the Sepoy Revolt. Which is
all to say I trust neither side to be giving the whole truth.
That was what I was saying.
I may indeed have misread your comments, but if so I did on at
least three readings. [-mrl]
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TOPIC: A DOG OF FLANDERS (letter of comment by James E. LaBarre)
In response to Mark's review of A DOG IN FLANDERS in the 07/17/09
issue of the MT VOID, James LaBarre writes:
To add a bit of an SF twist to this, if your readers don't already
know, Theodore Bikel played both Worf's adopted father in STAR
TREK THE NEXT GENERATION, as well as Rabbi Koslov (Susan Ivanova's
Uncle Yossel") on BABYLON 5. [-jelb]
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TOPIC: Time Travel (letter of comment by Wendy)
In response to Hugh McGuinness's comments in the 07/17/09 issue of
the MT VOID, Wendy writes, "I recommend the book REPLAY by Ken
Grimwood, about a man in his mid-life crisis dying and getting
"reborn" into his own eighteen-year-old body. (The amazon.com
page review has some spoilers.) [-w]
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TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Traditionally, I save my articles about Jorge Luis Borges for
August. (I have no idea how this tradition got started.) But I
actually have another one that is a two-parter, so I figure I'll
start early.
Having read many of the books published in English about Jorge Luis
Borges, I figured the time had come to branch out, so I decided to
try BORGES ANTES EL ESPEJO by Jorge Mejia Prieto and Justo R.
Molachino (ISBN-13 978-970-732-133-5, ISBN-10 970-732-133-4), in
Spanish. It was probably the best possible choice to start with,
being only 180 pages, and consisting almost entirely of one- or
two-paragraph quotes by or about Borges.
Some random samples (all translations are mine, which is why I am
giving you the original Spanish as well):
Borges talks about how he and his sister had invisible friends when
they were young and, "Finalamente, cuando nos aburrimos de ellos,
le dijemos a nuestra madre que habian muerto." ("Finally, when we
were bored with them, we told my mother that they had died.") [page
17]
Perhaps an early example of Borges's playing with the concrete
versus the figurative can be found in Jose Angel Valente's comment
of Borges's thoughts when he was a boy on buying items: "Pero si el
objeto que el nino desaba adquirir costaba mas de un peso y menos
de dos, cual era de las dos monedas de un peso la que el
comerciante le cambiaba?" ("But if an object that the boy wanted to
acquire cost more than one peso and less than two, which of the two
one-peso coins was the one that the cashier gave him change from?")
[page 22]
I must admit that sometimes I found that I had initially
mistranslated something--and I liked it better that way. "Me lanzo
a esta aventura el 'Sartor restartus' ('El remendon remendado') de
Carlyle, que me deslumbro y dejo perplejo." I initially read this
as "I threw myself into the adventure of 'Sartor Restartus' ... by
Carlyle, that put me to sleep and perplexed me." But it *actually*
says, "I threw myself into the adventure of 'Sartor Restartus' ...
by Carlyle, that dazzled me and perplexed me." [page 26]
Weeks ago, I commented on Borges's comment on politicians: "Creo
que ningun politico puede ser una persona totalamente sincera. Un
politico esta buscando siempre electores y dice lo que esperan que
diga. En el caso do un discurso politico los que opinan son los
oyentes. mas que el orador. El orador es una especia de espejo o
eco de lo que los demas piensan. Si no es asi, fracasa." ("I
believe that no politician can be a wholly sincere person. A
politician is always looking at the voters and says what they want
him to say. On the case of a political discourse it is the
listeners whose opinion is expressed more than the speaker's. The
speaker is a type of mirror or echo of what others think. If this
is not so, he loses.") [page 43] Both this quote, and the title of
the book, are reflections (!) of the importance of mirrors in
Borges's work. I have commented on this at length in my reviews of
LABYRINTHS and A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY.
Borges even comments on his recurring symbols: "Ah, los
laberintos! Ah, los simbolos! Al final de cada ano me hago una
promesa: el ano proximo renunciar‚ a los laberintos, a los tigres,
a los cuchillos, a los espejos. Pero no hay nada que hacer, es
algo mas fuerte que yo. Comienzo a escribir y, de golpe, he aqui
que surge un laberinto, que un tigre cruza la pagina, que un
cuchillo brilla, que un espejo refleja una imagen." ("Ah, the
labyrinths! Ah, the symbols! At the end of every year I make
myself a promise: the next year I will renounce the labyrinths, the
tigers, the knives, the mirrors. But there is nothing to be done--
it is something stronger than me. I start to write and, suddenly,
up pops a labyrinth, or a bright knife, or a mirror reflecting a
face.") [page 118]
In CONVERSATIONS WITH JORGE LUIS BORGES, Borges explains why he
wrote only short works: "I think what I want to write, but, of
course, they have to be short pieces because otherwise, if I want
to see them all at once--that can't be done with long texts. ...
I want to see at [one] glance what I've done ... that is why I
don't believe in the novel because I believe that a novel is as
hazy to the writer as to the reader." In BORGES ANTE EL ESPEJO he
is quoted as having said of novels: "Soy demasiado perezoso para
escribir novelas. Para hacerlo hay que utilizar muchos rellenos.
Antes de llegar at tercer capitulo me sentiria tan aburrido que
nunca llegaria a terminarla. La novela es una supersticion de
nuestro tiempo, como lo fueron la tragedia de cinco actos y la
epopeya. Es verosimil que desaparezca. Puede haber una literatura
sin novelas de cuatrocientas o quinientas paginas, pero no sin
poemas o cuentos." ("I am too lazy to write novels. In order to do
that, I would have to use too much 'stuffing.' Before getting to
the third chapter I would be so bored that I would never manage to
finish it. The novel is a 'superstition' of our times, as was the
tragedy in five acts and the epic poem [earlier]. It is likely
that it will disappear. One can have a literature with novels of
four hundred or five hundred pages, but not without poems or short
stories.") [page 109]
Borges also talked about how he tried to write as simply as
possible; I wrote about his statements and how they do or do not
apply to other authors in my comments about H. P. Lovecraft in the
10/31/08 issue of the MT VOID. [-ecl]
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Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
I am a part of all that I have met.
--Lord Alfred Tennyson