Je T’aime, Petite Croissant
Posted on | February 26, 2010 | 1 Comment
Like clockwork, every morning at 8:30, amid the wafting scent of olive ciabattas and glazed panini, Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin moan and groan as they engage in simulated sodomy. My representative sample is not exact and there was most certainly no double-blind study involved, since I don’t arrive to the bakery at the exact same time every day, but nevertheless the frequency with which I purchase pastry and yogurt to the sound of buttsecks is unsettling. Is that like a wake-up song on a local radio station? Or do they only have a single approved CD that they play incessantly hitting the sexy spot every hour on the half-hour mark? If so, I can only pity the poor employees and perchance hatch a plot to exploit them manchu-candidate style.
On a croissant-related note, it would seem that a few major news sources from the west have caught up to the fact that with Constellation now dead, it would seem that the sole player left in the race to return to the Moon is China. This is a situation intriguing from multiple points, not the least of those ideological – China is one of the surviving sociopolitical systems of the sixties still kickin’ it with the same intensity. The western capitalism vs. Soviet communism dichotomy went to the shitter and morphed into a tangled undecipherable mess where ideologies are all over the place. China, along with similar-minded but resource-wise inferior states like North Korea, is the type of country where doing something for the prestige of it or simply to use it as a focal point for national unity would seem to be a valid motivation. Sort of panem et circenses for the early XXI century. Other countries are poking around up there as well, but none of them seem to be moving towards sending canned-monkeys into the Moon’s gravity well, and the fact that they are mostly neighbors with China and therefore, like all neighbors, in rather, ahem, delicate relationships, makes potential cooperation unlikely.
Of course, the Chinese themselves are in no hurry. Western media is grappling with ill-translated and even iller-understood proclamations from Chinese officials, trying to decipher whether the Moon-shot was canceled, planned not to happen, or simply not on the schedule yet. For the moment a recurrence of the space-race is highly improbable, since China is taking things one step at a time – first conduct unmanned exploration, and then see about getting men up there, and then see about building a permanent moonbase, all of this while in the west we seem to be obsessed about collecting reasons why sending people into space is not going to happen. While I’m not holding my breath (ten+ years would be one hell of a bout of apnea) and am fully aware that most space opera and even most hard-SF flies straight out the window when considering the realities of living in space, it would seem that it is not yet time to forget the idea of monkeys in space. Even if it might be time to forget the idea of western democracy conquering the final frontier.
Tags: china > constellation > ideologies > moon > moon mission > moonbase > Science > space exploration
Not a Sparrow Shall Fall
Posted on | February 16, 2010 | 1 Comment
And wouldn’t you know it, nigh on four years ago, Brad Pitt purchased the rights for himself to play the central character of the Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz. Having not read it at the time, I failed to notice this tidbit, but now cannot help but wonder how he will handle the surprise buttsecks bit. Oh? Whazzat? Spoilers? Don’t worry, the buggering comes in early and so the spoilage is minimal.
The book? Whew. I’ll skip the brief plot overview – Jesuits in space, making first contact, yaddayadda – and instead poke around its intriguing mix of almost credible verisimilitude and ultimate naïveté (gotta love those diacritics). I am having a really hard time delineating the two. After all, one of the subjects of the book is the constant dialogue on whether the events at hand are the work of divine will or mere random happenstance. If the former were true, there can be no quarrel with the seemingly improbable coincidences and slight utilization of handwavium, though the question of Epicurean theodicy would weigh heavily upon such a deity, as indeed, it does throughout the book’s framing for the prodigious flashbacks.
Should, however, the latter be the case, the flashbacks themselves become troublesome, with their attempts at imagining a viable method of interstellar travel and extraterrestrial life and civilizations falling just a pinch too short, thereby all the more to poke the discerning and scientifically minded reader in the eye (much akin to a slight, but unwavering toothache). This weighs heavy on segments of the book wherein the plot does little to advance, opting instead to linger on so nearly plausible yet entirely unfeasible technical details – a true crime for such a weighty tome.
In the end, though somewhat overlong, the book is quite satisfactory if you set out for a balanced discussion on the merits and place of religion in the world, divorced from both kinds of extreme fundamentalism. I know where I stand on the issue, but “The Sparrow” illuminates an “opposing” side that I can understand and live peacefully alongside, without considering it’s proponents, as is often the case in the real world, somewhat stupid fur uncritically buying into bronze-age bicameral fairy tales.
If however, you are looking for a plotty sci-fi romp around the stars or a light book to flip through on the beach, steer clear. This one makes you think, and pauses frequently to do so itself.
Tags: aliens > book review > first contact > jesuits > novel > seti > sf > sparrow
Life Without Walls
Posted on | February 12, 2010 | 2 Comments
Being an avid SF reader inundated with ideas of the singularity, of alternate planes and modes of existence, I frequently skip over seemingly more mundane cognitive shifts that, doubled-back upon, actually dig really, really deep into our preconceptions. For example, dwelling on the fact that potentially 63% of the total mass in the Universe might lie in the hidden sectors, with a mere 12% of it being actual atoms, and the totality of mass in the Universe is a mere 28% of its total contents (the rest being that dreamily mysterious dark energy stuff), one might think that we are ever so focused on finding non-terrestrial human-comprehensible chemical life in a rather puny segment of the potentiality. There are suggestions that, in these deliberations, scale, or even level of complexity might be used as an extra dimension, not merely as another version of “distance” but an actual dimension to be inhabited by life. There are also imagined worlds filled with life lying within substrates of varied levels of abstraction and “embeddedness” – from Egan’s wang carpet wavefront to Rucker’s denizens of mathematical sub-scaffolding of reality as we know it.
Of course, discussions on just what life is don’t seem to be drawing to a conclusion, but on this issue, I am of the opinion that “when we see it, we’ll know”, and even if we go for a stricter definition, I think the working collection of properties can be named pretty easily: replexity, fidelity, evolvability… either way you go, it’s a finite set of verifiable properties.
Stepping back a bit from the wild imaginarium of frontier thinkers and popping back into reality, an interesting bubble that got popped for me today was the idea of life having to deal with discrete packages of… living stuff. To be more specific – cells. I was pretty tightly locked into a mindset where imagining life of any kind involved thinking of discrete self-enclosed packages of replication, but of course, there is no a priori reason for this other than our being preconditioned by the fact that all life as we know it is cell-based, discrete in nature, with the primordial soup being a mere precursor for “life proper”. However, even as we speak there are people looking into ways to create in vitro artificial chemical life free from this constraint, based on the knowledge that although “… life-as-we-know-it requires membranous cellular compartments, but it can passage through an unencapsulated protoplast form (Kim et al. 2001), and any process for splitting and pooling the “soup” would suffice theoretically (e.g., rock cavities [Robinson 2005], tidal pools, and billabongs).” [source]
Apart from that wonderful word – and oh how “billabong” just bounces around the mouth – the real kicker is that these self-replicating sludgy soups are on a steady path to becoming reality right now, and having actual applications in our everyday lives – the chief among those being aimed at right now are pollution remediation and synthesis of drugs and plastics and, hey, why not, production of a sustainable replacement for naphta. Kickstart a sun-lit pool of sploogie into self replication, add the necessary base ingredients, and just sieve off that A-life diesel.
Hoping, all the while, that we don’t spill some where we shouldn’t and accidentally kick off a ßehemoth scenario, leaving us with no blade of grass. That is, unless it happens all on its own anyway.
Taking the Gentle Approach
Posted on | February 1, 2010 | No Comments
One intriguing perspective shift I was reminded of yesterday was that everything is an event. This does not mean that my having coffee this morning amounts to high drama ranking up there with The Ring Cycle (pick one) worthy of a rapt audience following every minute detail thereof, as many twitterinos seem to believe. It is more an attempted altering of focus by some professional smart-ass or another (Alfred North Whitehead, bless the Google, coauthor of Principia Mathematica, bless the Wikipedia) implying that there are no “things”, but only processes that shift from one form to another, akin to the principle of conversation of energy. Notably, he spoke of the pyramids as being events in time, with a “before” moment, when they were but heaps of rock and potential chemical energy stored in the bodies of the workers that will erect them, and a hitherto undefined “end” when they will crumble to dust or be blown to smithereens to build the brand spanking shiny new Sahara hovercar bypass.
Many would say this is natural and, like so many simple ideas, obvious. However, many would also say that life is natural, however, life itself is an attempt at staving off this “natural” procession of things, at the voracious expense of external energy sources (the Sun, geothermal vents, gajillions of chemical reactions, you name it, life eats it in one way or another). Occasionally, in attempting to beat entropy, elements of multicellular life take a wrong path and turn into unkillable parasitic cells that ultimately destroy their own host, therefore kind of kicking themselves in the arse. I’m talking about cancer here, of course, and continuing the line of thought from the previous post, the fact that most cancer treatment techniques thus far focus on forcibly killing that which cannot be killed, making these treatments sort of like a zombie hunt. You may be Shiva incarnate with the shotgun, but the more widespread the initial infestation, the lower your chances are of getting ‘em all before one of them gets you.
A team of researchers seems to have taken an alternate approach, and they are making serious headway. Instead of taking a bullet to each of the cancer cells, they are trying to learn the language of these buggers, so as to be able to tell them: it’s okay, you can rest now… and thereby making them stop struggling and quietly give up the ghost like any good cell should. To me, this appears to be the right way to shoot for immortality – not trying to preserve everything untouched and unharmed, like fiddling with telomeres and oxygen absorption and whatnot, but simply getting the old and broken bits to die quietly, while making new, healthy and fresh bits grow to replace them.
Now, admittedly, the article I linked to is a horrendous hodgepodge of biochemical jargonatry worthy of a special prize for being impenetrable, one that anyone spending their days absorbed in translation, writing, ukulele strums and general farting about can’t even begin to fathom, but why this is not making the headlines in a more digestible form while Steve Jobs’ burp of a tablet has everyone in hypnotic thrall is beyond me.
I guess that’s humans for you.
“Hey, we will cure cancer!”
“Meh.”
“Hey look! Shiny beads!”
“Woooo…”
I May Yet Live Forever
Posted on | January 22, 2010 | No Comments
Well, I refused to rip that last one out, despite stern admonishment from my General In Satan’s Army. They made me lose two, and to be honest, they were giving me hell back there, creating a nyarlathothepian gnarl of twisted flesh about them. I’m likely better of this way, though it did hurt like all hell. What appeared through the haze of anesthesia to be a pair of white-clad silverback alphas in a fit of murderous rage chipped away at my skull-bone for an hour until they got every last shard out, along with a splash of extra bone and about a bucket of gore.
Unrelated side note: they tell you it won’t hurt a bit, that it’s just a small pinprick until the drugs kick in, and then it goes numb all over. They lie. It hurts like a motherfucker. They shove that needle in about a dozen places around your gums and fill something that most definitely was not a bodily cavity of any sort prior to their pumping it full of anesthetic, which in turn probably does something to the pain, but if it was meant to kill it, they were throwing rocks at the godsdamn Borg Cube. So yeah, it hurts, and hurts quite a lot, not even counting the next two days of hazy, throbbing blur best spent watching the first two seasons of Eureka back-to-back.
But enough reminiscing – point is, I refused to have my remaining wisdom teeth extracted and was promptly chastised for this by several people – including said General – only to be promptly vindicated by Japanese researchers. It turns out, the little bugger still hanging in there could potentially keep me alive and fully-toothed for ages to come thanks to novel methods of extracting stem cells from wisdom teeth. They are already kicking in with some basic dental applications, and I’m guessing “new teeth from wisdom-stems-cells” are a technology that will be ripe just when I will need it most – some 15 years from now.
Considering the fun little fact (wildly overlooked in the news) that they are starting to efficiently kill/remove relatively large tumors without them metastasizing (yes, I know it mainly deals with breast cancer, but any sufficiently immobilizable body part can undergo a similar procedure), the medical profession seems to be on the right track to keep us alive forever.
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- yep, it's Armageddon, right outside our building. Hope the windows hold and pass the rum. #
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