However, what might turn out to be even more fascinating is just how this story will get twisted and stretched and deformed by the time it reaches chain-mail status… because it will, make no mistake about it, following in the footsteps of such perennial favorite as the Mars being as big as the MOON! once every year and some obscure celestial body bringing us death and DOOM! at least a few times annually.

I know I am stating the obvious when I say that viral media (or any kind of media, for that matter) have repeatedly shown a strong propensity to latch onto the sensational but stupidly wrong, ignoring the (often) common-sense and really simple and everyday true. I’m guessing that postmodern studies that seem to be the rage at media schools have a great deal to do with this epistemological conundrum, trying to instill a sense of there not being an ultimate truth to things, trying to relegate everything to a set of competing, yet equally valid narratives. This is fine, of course, in the context of social studies, the humanities and the “softer” sciences, but it is most definitely not so for hard sciences and engineering, where you actually have clearly defined true and false answers to questions (which, incidentally, is the reason why I never completed my science studies, while flying through the humanities on a wave of flowery prose). Gravity might be a mere rigid phallocentric repressive narrative but I don’t see any postmodernists spontaneously floating up off the ground merely by wishing so.

The whole issue would likely remain an irrelevant academic squabble if it wasn’t for the fact that frequently, it elbows its way into everyday life and kills people. Take the anti-vaccination movement – it fascinates me that something so retarded managed to go global, yet it did. It is worming its way into our neck of the woods, borne on the backs of completely irrelevant issues, such as whether the flu scare and subsequent purchase of flu vaccines was required, or an abuse of state funds. Hell, I never intended to get vaccinated against the flu simply because, well, it’s the godsdamn flu, and I’m a (relatively) young (relatively) healthy (relatively) adult male living in the (relatively) west – if I catch it, I stay at home for a week, eat lots of soup, hallucinate some bizarrities through the fever and that’s it – but it is not so easily shrugged off by the frail and elderly who very easily die of the resultant dehydration and other deleterious effects of that pesky virus.

No matter how narrativised the vaccination issue may be or how controversial the use of funds in purchasing flu vaccines might turn out to be, no one can magic their way out of the bubonic plague, rabies, polio or whooping cough. You can’t treat that shit with the narrative of positive thinking, with chicken soup and warm blankies, or the narrative of homeopathy, mainly because the latter is pure and undiluted (ha!) bullshit. You can only fight those diseases with the cold hard truth of medical science and timely vaccination. After all, even the most hard core postmodernists still fly using the scientific truths of the weight, lift, drag and thrust, not a red-pill-like postmodern defiance of that old colonial phallocentric rigid narrative of gravity.

I’m not sure which one I like more, a possibly immense new discovery that has the potential to fundamentally change our world-view, or a really solid thrashing of pompous-sounding but fundamentally flawed kooky “scientists” trying to displace one of the foundational theories of modern physics by using the very physics they are trying to show as wrong. Unfortunately, the latter are far overwhelming the former, otherwise we wouldn’t need a whole host of websites such as the Bad Astronomy or the Language of Bad Physics to separate the otherwise unintelligible but credible-sounding balderdash from little cognitive gems that get lost in the noise. Although for myself, being a maladjusted asocial (space) bastard, rational discourse is always trumped by good old fashioned poisonous vitriol with a solid scientific foundation, but it seems that good examples of it are even rarer these days.

On a flip side, physicists could really work on their analogies a bit more. Billiard balls and tables kinda suck as an illustration tool for the miracles of quantum thaumaturgy.

In the meantime, things happened and plowing through my RSS feeds I’ve noticed that although everyone and their grandmother picked up on Craig Venter and his synthetic bug – and who-ho, if it wasn’t the talk of the planet for a whole 15 minutes – and some even picked up on the LIFE replicator that turns out to be a horribly fancy glider, but a lot of intriguing stuff seems to have simply flown underneath the radar.

There was news about old stuff, about future stuff, really huge stuff and really tiny stuff. There was some stuff that is so abstruse I forgot why I bookmarked it and now I don’t understand a word from that article. There was also really simple stuff debunking some long-believed myths. There are some potential game-changers and some truly freaky blindsightish stuff, along with a healthy dose of humor nature directed against human pomposity.

So there, I’ve dumped it all. I’ve cleaned out the bookmarks and saved those I intend to use in writing that damn first novel (never), so hopefully I’ve set procrastination loose and the only thing to battle is work. Which, due to my unfortunate predilection for food and shelter, is not likely to go away any time soon.

I will never trust a Boingboing! book recommendation again.

The incessant recommendations for Doctorow’s work are understandable and three books later, I learned to just say no to the self-hyping and avoid the heaps of propaganda layered with shallow plot and even shallower characters. I was intrigued by how they hyped Sterling, again, understandable since he is “Chairman Bruce” and all, but they just kept at it even when most everyone concluded how Caryatids was, frankly, shyte. Having encountered several of Sterling’s post-Schismatrix works, I knew enough already to avoid that book, but like a moth to the flame I just keep getting suckered back in by the shiny boing-beads.

At this point I was seriously wary of their recommendations, so I started cross-referencing them with other sources and, about a year ago, gave Ian McDonald a chance. They kept talking about River of Gods and Brasyl so much that I picked up the former and, to be honest, I was hooked. It was an awesome experience, though the ending did descend a bit into tropeland, but still, near-future India and the juxtaposition of that ancient place and modern technologies seemed like a beautiful execution of the gibsonian quip on how “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed”. Then I tried the “sort-of-prequel/sequel” Cyberabad Days but somehow it just would not hold my attention. No biggie, Brasyl was waiting, and I dipped straight into it, only to be hit by such empty rubbish descending into “news-of-the-week” deus-ex resolution space that I was, frankly, revolted, and a bit of that revulsion even managed to retroactively taint River of Gods.

We are dealing with a book on Brazil, which is sort of a red flag right off the bat, as if the author decided to make the rounds of third-world overpopulated countries and dig into the local stereotypes for fun and profit. I fully expect him to do either Mexico City or Hong Kong next, followed by Johannesburg (although he might opt for a different city in Africa, due to the unexpected success of District 9). To boot, he then throws in subplots unfolding in favelas and on beaches, involving football goalies and a young lass effectively utilizing capoeira in self-defense… the shriek of “steeeereeeeeeotypeeeeee”  was already deafening, even without the other subplot involving a 19th century missionary priest in the jungle and a godawful play on the simulation argument that was already done (and as far as I’m concerned, overdone) by Robert Charles Wilson several years ago…

His insisting how capoeira was such an effective means of fighting simply kept poking me in the eye throughout, wrecking my suspension of disbelief and making it obvious that we are dealing with an armchair tourist writing about something he does not, in fact, know. I guess he was going for “flashy” instead of effective, since he could have went with a different stereotype there, sticking with a very Brazilian and very effective martial art – Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, but I guess sweaty dudes humping on the floor makes for crappier mental images than a lithe pixie doing spinning hand-stands with flashing knives in hand.

So McDonald ended up tainted by a miasma of armchairism, and from now on will warrant a far more careful approach to his works, even though his style did have me hooked (yes, I love unnecessary flourishes and wordplay). I sat down by the keyboard, opened up the admin panel for Screaming Planet and typed the title to this post, then the phone rang, or someone asked me something, or some urgent work needed to be done and that was that, until I fell prey to the hype once more and picked up Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigialupi. Biopunk! Dystopia! Book of the year! They dang well got me, particularly with that nifty cover with the elephant (megodont… whatever) and zeppelins and whatnot.

A hundred pages in and I was not hooked at all. Quite the opposite, the book was boring me to death, and not because of a lack of action (although, in fact, nothing really happens in the first hundred pages or so, bar a brief industrial accident), but the sheer pretentiousness of it in slogging through a poorly constructed world reeking of inconsistencies and stereotypes was seriously breaking some deals. The shifty great white hunter liberating a Japanese hypergeisha from slavery to a local crime lord, battling a Thai muay-thai fighter and struggling with an (also) shifty yet wizened old Chinese man who thinks of all foreigners as “foreign devils”… it just goes on.

The true problem is that books like these are being touted as the pinnacle of the genre, “literary” books ripe for the mainstream. Awards (or at least nominations) are being tossed at them in troves for seemingly being worldly and dealing with “other perspectives”, yet these books are nothing more than poorly thought-out travelogues of white people working with second or third hand information on cultures they never actually experienced (or at best, experienced as tourists). Despite most people teaching humanistics in academia these days being pretentious tossers, these writers, and those heaping accolades at them should sit down for a good helping of Colonialism 101, in order to avoid embarrassing outbursts such as the recently controversial column by Norman Spinrad in Asimov’s, claiming that on the one hand, authors writing of alien cultures as outsiders is colonial, yet writers assuming that they can write from perspectives inside other cultures is not. This may be so with cultures that are made-up and therefore we can have no ways of verifying whether they are doing a good job, but with cultures that are real, when one detects cracks in the veneer regarding aspects one is intimately familiar with (such as the aforementioned case of capoeira), this brings the credibility of the entire book and the author in serious question.

As the good old saying goes, “fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

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.

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.

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.

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…”

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.

When the dust settled after the New Year and Christmas frenzy, one of the things I noted is that there were a total of three greeting cards in my work email and two on my private account. Rewind to last year – all active inboxes are overflowing with kitchy sparkles and humorous photoshop collages. For a moment I was stumped – am I that much of a cranky hermit that a single-handful of people cared enough to spam me? But Facebook dispersed this notion, with hordes of the sparkly and the humorous arriving in the form of applications, wall posts and private messages. That’s when I realized.

I’m all alone here. Look! Tumbleweeds!

E-mail? Why, that’s a business communication/document exchange tool. Even my mom transitioned to IM and I myself am guilty of switching all my link-sharing activities, pokes and peeks, even writing godsdamn book reviews (that should rightly belong here) to the Twacebook ecosystem. Yes indeedy, it is convenient. But then, I do not want to give up this spot. Not just yet. It feels cozy having my own private domain, with my own private WordPress, with my own private FTP space, and my own private three and a half readers.

So, the Internet shifted. It is not just private communications and holiday greetings. Despite them being announced as the second coming of Jebus and the end-all cure-all for democratizing media production, apparently, at least 95% of all blogs are abandoned, and those that remain are mostly, let’s be honest, not blogs, but news sites.

I may clock in at under one post per month, but this place still does not qualify to be abandoned, so yay me! I’m one step above the hordes of angsty teens writing lengthy journal entries on what they had for lunch and how much they hate their parents and getting bored of it after a month. What an accomplishment! They all moved on to Twittering about the rage, while leaving bloggery to us old farts. The subtitle of this place feels vindicated.

Now I just have to hang in there until blogging stops being merely passé and becomes vintage.