Category: Science Fiction / Fantasy

Cold Fusion, Again

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https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.07245v2

Cold nuclear fusion is real!  But it’s also extremely lame.  Apparently when deuterium gas is put in contact with solid palladium metal the gas can find its way into the crystalline metal structure and fill voids in the lattice of palladium atoms and the structure of the metal lattice can somehow shield the deuterium nucleii from each other’s positive charges in order to fuse into a helium atom (²H + ²H → ⁴He).

Unfortunately, the rate of fusion is so low that it’s barely detectable.  And if energetic means such as lasers are used to enhance the rate then the energy balance is extremely poor with much more energy put in to speed up the reaction than is produced by the fusion reaction.  As a practical energy source this would be described by the technical term “lousy.”

But all is not yet lost.  The authors of the paper speculate if three separate accelerating processes are employed simultaneously there is the potential to produce the forty orders of magnitude improvement needed to make cold fusion a useful energy source.

Forty orders of magnitude.   Hmm.  That’s a lot of orders of magnitude you know.  That’s 1040.  That’s a really, really big number.  If I had 1040 pennies I’m pretty sure it would form a black hole of pennies.  It’s a lot.

So somehow they think they can increase the fusion rate that much?  Hmm.

So I really like the idea of cold fusion.  The fact that you can take palladium and heavy hydrogen at ambient temperatures and somehow get a nuclear reaction that produces really clean energy is extremely appealing to me.  It sounds like what E. E. “Doc” Smith used as his source of energy for interstellar flight in the “Skylark” series of space operas.  It’s amazingly exciting.  But  1040 anything is a lot.  So I’ve decided not to hold my breath or invest heavily in the technology or rip the oil burner out of my basement just yet.

The good thing about cold fusion research is that you don’t need billions or even hundreds of millions of dollars to work on it.  You don’t need magnetic containment to avoid your nuclear plasma from eating through the metal walls of your reactor.  And you don’t need giga-watt lasers to blast a pellet of boron hydride or anything else that would break the budget of any second world nation.  It can all be done in a lab with all the stuff found in MIT or even Brooklyn College for that matter.  So I’m all for research into this avenue of science.  After all twenty years ago cold fusion was declared a hoax and that turned out to be wrong.  Who knows what else they’ll find.  Maybe if you use alloys of several of the platinum group elements the geometry of the spaces in the lattice will make the process run at some phenomenally faster rate.  Maybe not 1040 times faster but something reasonable and that would be enough to throw the whole thing into the range of practical applications.  But to reiterate I won’t be holding my breath.

But it is something cool to think about.  Or even write into an sf story!  But instead of palladium I’m going to make it tantalum.  It’s just cooler.

That’s Entertainment

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Over the course of three thousand years of western civilization, storytelling has transformed from an oral tradition of poet/rhapsodes reciting mythological epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey at religious festivals to information age books read on an electronic page or listened to from an audio-file.  I find it interesting that the Greek epic poems are approximately the same length as a typical modern novel, something between one and two hundred thousand words.  Reciting the whole poem at a festival would take up week’s-worth of listening.  That’s comparable to the time it takes to read a book.

Now for shorter subjects, the Greeks had the drama.  A play by Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides was just an hour or two of the viewer’s time.  Pretty similar to a Shakespearean play and interestingly enough, the amount of time that a motion picture usually takes to watch.

Does this mean that human beings inherently absorb story telling in these lengths of time?  I can’t prove that assertion but you know, a three-hour movie starts to get to be a bit much for one viewing.  And a four-hundred-page book better be damn interesting or it also begins to wear out its welcome.

So maybe our entertainment has been standardized to suit our mental, emotional and physiological parameters.  Humans have a limited attention span.  We also tire after a certain amount of time sitting or standing watching something.  Also, hunger, thirst and the realities of hydraulic pressure eventually force us to interrupt even the most fascinating entertainment.  To ameliorate these considerations, movie theaters are equipped with a snack bar and restrooms.  But dramatic interest will begin to flag by the third hour.

So, I’d say we’re programmed for these lengths of entertainment products.  Whether it’s Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or The Lord of the Rings at some point you either come up for air or you fall asleep.  And similarly with a book.  There have to be chapters or groups of chapters that allow for the reader to put the book down and come back to it later.  It needs a punctuated progression.  The action must go through a series of starts and stops.  It needs a rhythm to the action, a flow.  And if the rhythm isn’t right, the story doesn’t work because the reader is jarred out of the spell of the story.

You may be wondering what this post is about.  It’s a transcription of an internal dialog I’m having with myself.  I’ve been rereading my story and some sections seem choppy to me.  Some of the transitions from one chapter to another just don’t flow.  So, to make myself feel better I’m imagining Homer sitting in his office in downtown Mycenae and wrestling with the transition between the story of the cyclops Polyphemus and the Island of Aiolos.  He’s plucking the strings of his lyre and thinking, “This Aiolos story is really boring compared to all the excitement of the cyclops.  It needs something to punch it up a little.  Maybe I can include some more man-eating giants again.  No, wait, that’s stupid.  There can’t be man-eating giants on every island.  That’s just lazy.”  I totally feel for him.  The epic poetry-listening public is easily jaded.  They demand good writing (or singing).  Ah, the vicissitudes of the epic Muse Calliope.  Like all females, she is fickle.  Well back to the grindstone.

Nature Finds a Way

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In this creepy world we live in where children are targeted by “educators” to redefine their genders and pushed away from the behaviors and activities that they enjoy it’s hardly surprising that things like adventure books for boys have essentially disappeared.

Of course they’ve vanished.  All the authors are women and they have to toe a very definite line if they want to be published.  You can’t have adventure for boys.  You can’t leave the girls behind.  You can’t even have them following along.  They have to be in charge.

So, boys stopped reading books.  Instead, they went to superhero and Star Wars movies.  So, what did the movie studios do then?  They hired female directors and studio bosses and turned the Jedis into girl-bosses and turned Captain Marvel into a girl, of course.

So now the boys are giving up on superheroes and concentrate on video games.  And of course, the game manufacturers are feminizing and queering the video games.

You see the pattern.

Now, there is the flip side of this progression.  First the book industry began to fail when the publishing houses dictated a leftist and feminine slant to books.  No one bought their books.  Now the movie studios are foundering because even their summer blockbuster superhero movies are tanking.  If the video game makers succeed in eliminating the things that males enjoy in video games, they will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

So far, the trend in entertainment has been all in one direction; female.  And the trend in their fortunes has also been all in one direction; down.

Well, I think that is beginning to end.  There is a development in the world of entertainment that seems to be diverging from the pattern.  And it even involves elements of each of the media I mentioned above; books, movies and video games.  And it involves the part of social media that I found the least promising; “influencers.”

Apparently teen-age boys and young men are finding community inside the YouTube channels of influencers who write fan fiction around some popular video games.  These sites have tens and even hundreds of millions of viewers.  And the clout that this kind of following produces even allows these influencers to have their stories turned into movies.  Think about that.  Some guy who writes plots around some popular first-person sci-fi video game can get a movie made from his stories and it has a built-in audience of millions.

Look at how this short circuits the whole woke female industrial complex.  You avoid the woke publishing industry, woke movie industry and woke video game industry by tapping into a ready built audience of young men and boys looking for adventure and violence.  As Jeff Goldblum’s character, Dr. Ian Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, “Nature finds a way.”

I find this both fascinating and encouraging.  These kids have broken out of the feminist struggle session hell of modern entertainment and escaped into the wild.  That is an immensely encouraging thing.  And if it continues to advance it will wipe out the alternative.  No one wants to see Girl-Boss Jedi Knights making the universe safe for middle aged lesbian Jabbette the Hutt.  No one will pay to see She-Hulk bust out of her clothes and rampage through Manhattan’s theater district to catch a performance of Hamilton.  No boy wants to play a video game where his character has to be in drag.

Of course, the powers that be may try to squelch this latest attempt at non-feminist entertainment.  But at this point even Google is probably seeing which way the entertainment dollar is moving (and where it’s not).  I could be wrong but I think there may finally be a reaction brewing in the entertainment world.  And it might be that the future isn’t female.

Stop the World and Let Me Off

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Okay, it’s enough.  I’ve watched my last screaming progressive video.  It’s not fun anymore.  And I’m good with the Trump cabinet picks and his agenda.  Honestly, that’s his problem.  He’s responsible for avoiding weasels and psychopaths.  That’s what we hired him to do.  Every once in a while it will be interesting to note how that’s all going.

I will admit I’m watching very intently the madness in Ukraine.  Apparently, the neo-cons running the war have decided to start WW III before they are physically dragged out of office.  And, I assume this is also the case for the Pentagon.  So, I can’t say I’m done with Ukraine because it’s not done with us yet.  But I restrict my attention to a few daily checks on some YouTube channels that cover the war.  So, until the mushroom clouds blossom over Dunwich I’ll take a watch and wait approach.  Which is about as much as I can logically hope to do.

So, what does that leave for me?  Well, as I’ve been reminded, I’m supposed to finish up that book.  And, lo and behold, I have been doing some work.  I put together a list of changes and additions to round it up and I’m rereading it to find any weaknesses or mistakes in the story.  And I’ve recognized a few.  Connors’ role in Iraq needs to be clarified and justified.  After all mega-billionaires aren’t usually strolling around forward operating bases of a war zone as if it were Silicon Valley.

And I have to inject more personality into my main characters.  This means I have to invent scenarios where they interact beyond strategizing how to pick off evil intelligence officers and their goons.  And, heaven help me, I might even have a relationship break out between Connors and Grace.  It would tie up some loose ends and add to the emotional interest in the story.  And so, I’m looking at those things.  But what I’ve noticed is that when you start a story by the braille method (that is, without a somewhat detailed outline) it’s hard to tack an outline onto it once it’s gotten beyond a certain point.  It’s like an off-the-rack suit that doesn’t quite fit in a bunch of places.  Trying to make it fit requires a lot of alterations.  And some of these alterations feel awkward or rub the author the wrong way because they seem antithetical to the way you originally saw a character or an event.  It’s a very uncomfortable activity.

What it’s made me aware of is that starting a story with a good road map ahead of time is an invaluable asset to finishing the story.  So, the lazy lout in me says, “Well, put this story aside and start another one from scratch with a good outline.  But I know myself too well.  That’s terrible advice.  What needs to be done is to bite the bullet and put in the work and wrestle with the problems until they’re resolved in a creatively satisfying way.  So that’s what I’m going to try to do.

What it will require me to do is put a few hours in every morning to get it done.  And that’s few hours every morning that won’t be devoted to reading the news and political stuff.  Well, I guess the world will survive with me at half strength.  You folks may notice a certain slackness on the site but I guess it can’t be helped.

Anyway, let’s give it a try.

Shatnerkhan VIII Will Have to be Convened

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Shades of Mediocrity!  Mother of Mercy!  Can this be the end of Shatner?  Or at least Kirk?

William Shatner – A Demigod of Bad Acting

Well, here we go again.  You know maybe Trump can appoint Shatner to some kind of ambassadorship to Canada or Hollywood or some other make believe place.  Or maybe Elon can shoot his rotund corroded hulk to Mars as a send-off.

All That Jazz

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So, it turns out I should be a plotter.  Looking at my story from the point of view of character arcs it became obvious that I haven’t even decided on several characters’ outcomes that are pivotal to a satisfying resolution to the plot.  Put succinctly, somebody’s got to die.  And maybe that’s part of the reason why I haven’t moved those character arcs along.  I’ve grown fond of all my main characters and deciding which of them has to die and then writing that outcome is disturbing.  But I do see it has to be done and I’ve begun working out the scenario.

So now I understand why just drifting along on plot can be very problematic for anything more complicated than a short story.  If you have six or eight main characters and another dozen secondary characters, not mapping out what ends up happening to them risks all kinds of conflicts or worse; wasted opportunities for adding interesting content to the story.

I said that writing a death scene was disturbing.  And it is but at the same time it’s interesting to plan how this event will impact each of the adjacent characters.  For instance, it’s not too challenging to have associates and even friends react to a death.  But one of the most likely “victims” has a parent/child relationship with one of the other characters.  That will have to be a developed carefully to produce a satisfactory effect.  So now all of a sudden, my simple dystopian sci-fi book has emotional states like bereavement and anguish.  Who knew?

And a much bigger consideration for being a plotter versus a pantser is how much more important it is if your story is part of a larger series of stories.  If the story doesn’t end with the end of a stand-alone book, then things like killing off characters, even killing off antagonists is much more serious.  If you invest an enormous amount of effort into building up a really wonderful villain then you’d be crazy to kill him off in book one.  Sure, kill off his henchmen; Helmuth and the Tyrant of Thrale by all means.  But Gharlane of Eddore has to last through six or seven books.

And that’s just one aspect of what needs to be coordinated between a series of stories.  Doing that without a map would be very difficult.  And I see that now.  So, I’ll be heading down the path of plotting an outline for the whole story first and then a detailed outline for the first book.  It’ll take a little longer but in the long run it’ll save me a lot of time and it’ll make for better stories.

And on a completely unrelated topic, today I reduced the number of videos I watched of Kamala voters barking at the moon to three.  Well, everything’s relative and I think that’s pretty good progress in kicking the habit.  I remember in 2016 I watched the Hilary shriekers all the way through December and still couldn’t get enough of it.  Now it’s starting to get boring.  Maybe with Trump in the White House we’re all ready to move on from all of this jazz.

October Viewing – 9

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October Viewing – 9

So, this being October 30th and tomorrow a really long work day, it’s a pretty good bet this will be the last “October Viewing” of the year.  A good friend who has been following this series of posts proposed the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” movies as a good subject.  And we both liked how it sort of dovetails with the whole woke Democrat pod-people meme.  You know, how they speak like lifeless automatons and point and shriek if you reveal yourself not to be one of them.

Now my friend felt that even the two reboots were good subjects for the post.  But as in all things I am conservative.  So, let’s harken back to the 1956 original in all its black and white splendor.  Dut, dut, dut daaaah!

Spoiler alert!  If you want to avoid knowing the plot, skip to the boldened text below to just get my opinion.

Sturdy character actor Kevin McCarthy (no, not the politician!) stars as Dr. Miles J. Bennell.  He’s a small-town doctor in the fictitious California town of Santa-something-or-other.  Miles is puzzled to find that several patients are claiming that their friends and relatives have been replaced by visually identical individuals that lack any emotion.  One case is a young child claiming his mother has been replaced.

So, Miles and his girlfriend Becky and their friend Jack and his wife “Teddy” begin investigating a very strange series of occurrences.  Jack finds what looks like a human body but with very indistinct features, almost as if acid had burned away the facial features.  Shockingly, over time the “body” begins to take on Jack’s features.  And more of these bodies begin appearing.  Eventually they learn that enormous seed pods are the source of these transforming “bodies.”

And soon the two couples discover that the great majority of the townspeople are pod people.  The distinguishing characteristic of pod people is a complete lack of emotion in their voice and actions.  While pursuing an unsuccessful attempt to broadcast this alarming news to the rest of the outside world, Jack and Teddy become “podified” and so Jack provides the exposition to Miles and Becky to explain exactly what the hell is going on.

In his sedate pod-man voice Jack explains that spores floating through outer space landed on Earth where they grew into the pods.  If a pod is placed near someone (how near?) and that person falls asleep the pod will absorb the person’s memories and appearance and somehow disintegrate the real person and replace him.  Jack tries to convince Miles and Becky that the procedure is painless and all for the good.  Miles and Becky decide not to cooperate and run away.  They try to escape from town.  But they have to pass through a crowd of pod-people who are loading up trucks with seed pods for delivery to the surrounding towns.  They try to act like pod-people by being emotionless but are given away by Becky’s scream when she witnesses a traffic accident.  Women!

The pod people chase after them but the couple successfully take refuge in a cave that was conveniently around when they needed it.  But when Miles goes out to scout an escape route Becky falls asleep and by the time Miles returns, she’s fully podified and sounds the alarm to the rest of the wooden-faced pursuers to catch Miles.

Sleep-deprived Miles runs in a nightmarish state and ends up in another town trying to warn people on the highway about the pod people.  Of course, they assume he’s nuts and drag him to a hospital where he tells his story to the skeptical doctors.  But just at the end of his story an emergency room worker reports that a traffic accident with a truck full of giant seed pods has produced casualties in the ER.  And so, the doctors get to work calling in the FBI!

Dunt, dunt daaah!

End of the spoiler alert!

So, as you can see this is a hum-dinger of a paranoid’s dream come true.  They’re all out to get you and they’re all monsters.  And the emotionless pod-people are a pretty good stand in for the swarms of antidepressant-doped leftists that walk the Earth all around us and can only summon energy when they point and shriek to their cohort about the presence of some normal human in the immediate vicinity.

And this is the modern horror story.  If you add a violent angle with the imposters capable of becoming murderous creatures like in John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” then it’s doubly frightening, especially with the modern special effects available.

But even this old-fashioned cinematic portrayal hits home by showing the confusion when familiar surroundings aren’t what they seem.  And when the truth is doubted by everyone except the growing crowd of pod-people who are coming after you then panic results.  Yep, a perfect nightmare scenario.  It does resemble the current state of our world too.  But I’ll save that for a current events post.

A Modern Prometheus

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Got home real late but have tomorrow off so I’m cudgeling my brains for a good topic.  And since I’ve been running my series of horror movie reviews for October, I considered finishing off the Universal monster movie triumvirate by reviewing Frankenstein.

But Camera Girl was watching the Yankees World Series game and since they were down 0-3 in the series and would be eliminated if they lost tonight, I didn’t have the heart to refuse her control of the tv.  As it worked out, New York had an orgy of hitting including a grand slam to take the game 11-4.  There was much rejoicing by Camera Girl but I think she understands that no team has ever come back from an 0-3 deficit to win the Series.  But let her enjoy the moment.

As for Frankenstein, at its core Mary Shelley’s book is another meditation on the Renaissance civilization in Europe substituting science for God.  Well, since Renaissance civilization lately seems to be in full retreat, maybe God is sending his reply.

But properly considered, the idea that Man has replaced God with human intelligence is sort of laughably ridiculous.  Every time we are told that biologists have cracked the code that will allow us to cure cancer or reverse aging or turn men into women and vice versa, our efforts are shown to be abysmally inadequate.  We talk about uploading our consciousness into the internet to allow us to live forever but we don’t even know what consciousness is or for instance, how a memory from our childhood persists throughout our lives, or even whether it exists in one brain cell or many.

And when we consider the unimaginable size of even the portion of the known universe that we’ve already observed, the idea that we can become like God should quickly evaporate from our minds.  From my point of view, the fact that we exist separated from even the nearest star by about twenty-four trillion miles of empty space make me feel like we are an experiment locked into a terrarium that we can’t escape from.

Of course, maybe escaping from our ant farm is part of our testing.  Maybe on one of the planets in the Centauri system is a message in English or Proto-Indo-European saying, “Well done.  Now here is a clue to get you to level three.”  Maybe God has a sense of humor and he wants to let us in on the joke.  Maybe some day he’ll give us a book that explains why we can’t avoid childhood cancer, endless war, telemarketers and Joy Reid.  Maybe after we die suddenly everything will make sense and we can stop worrying about the war between men and women, type two diabetes and the national debt.

Well, tomorrow is my last chance to review Frankenstein.  I better get some sleep so I’ll be ready to report truthfully on the incomparable acting skills and technique of Boris Karloff and Colin Clive.  On second thought maybe I should just concentrate on the cool noises and flashing lights in Henry Frankenstein’s electrical glassware display in Germany (I mean Hollywood).

October Viewing – 8

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Tonight, I got around to rewatching “Sleepy Hollow.”  This 1999 movie starred Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane, a New York City lawman whose scientific methods were too advanced for 1799.  He is sent upstate to solve a string of murders that all involve the victims being left headless.  Christina Ricci stars as Katrina Van Tassel the daughter of a prosperous businessman whose family is at the center of the ring of murders.  And, of course Katrina is Ichabod’s love interest in the movie.

Spoiler alert; skip down to the last paragraph to avoid spoilers and just read the recommendation.

What we learn is that, just as in the Washington Irving stories about Sleepy Hollow, the countryside is haunted by the ghost of a Hessian soldier that was killed during the American Revolutionary War.  The Hessian lost his head during a battle with the Americans and his spirit has haunted the neighborhood ever since.  In our story, the Hessian (when he has a head) is played by Cristopher Walken.  And when he doesn’t have a head, well, who knows?

Being a man of reason, Ichabod disbelieves the stories about the ghost and claims the murders were the result of human efforts.  He claims this until he actually sees the Headless Horseman kill a couple of townspeople.  But once Ichabod recovers from his shock, he determines that he will investigate the ghost and figure out a way to end the string of murders.

And after most of the prominent townspeople are murdered, Ichabod realizes that the horseman is controlled by someone inside the town who understands black magic.  And that turns out to be Katrina’s stepmother (naturally).  There is a showdown and Ichabod figures out how to turn the horseman against the witch and save Katrina from being decapitated by the head-lopping Hessian.

Sleepy Hollow was a Tim Burton film and so it is no surprise that the look of the film stylishly captures the eerie, misty atmosphere of this dark fairy tale land.  The movie is always at least half comedy and Depp is very good as the always squeamish but determinedly, reluctantly brave man of science doing his best to solve the mystery and save his love interest from a gruesome fate.  While this tongue in cheek approach does not allow the movie to ever frighten us, it does succeed (in my opinion) in entertaining the audience.  The special effects around the character of the horseman aren’t quite up to the current state of the art CGI standards.  Nevertheless, his scenes are very well choreographed and look splendid.  The supporting cast do a creditable job of moving the plot forward one severed head at a time.  I’m going to recommend this movie to anyone who likes fantasy and the supernatural.  Here’s a natural pick for October viewing.