Papa Joe's Blog

The Buzzard Ramjet

2012-02-11T11:41:00.001-05:00

As I pointed out in a previous post, the stars are very far away. Astronomers use light-years as a unit of measurement of the distance between stars. Since light travels at 186,000 miles per second, a light-year is 586, 569, 600, 000 miles. The nearest star is around four light years away, 2, 346, 278, 400, 000 miles. The fastest current spacecraft can travel at 158, 000 mph. It would take over 1600 years for it to reach the nearest star. Does such distances mean that spacecraft human or robotic will never launched to another star system? It does seem daunting. But technologies have been proposed which might make such a trip possible.

In 1960, Robert Bussard, a physicist suggested a spacecraft designed as shown in the illustration. The way that it would work is that the scoop in the front takes in hydrogen which is fed to a nuclear fusion reactor to supply a high-speed exhaust. In this manner the vehicle would avoid having to carry a large amount of fuel which would add to its mass. A typical region of interstellar space contains about one atom per centimeter.

The Buzzard Ramjet as it is called has major problems as far as implementation with our present technology. One is that the scoop would need a frontal collecting area of 10,000 square kilometers. A 10, 000 km² scoop made of the thinnest Mylar would weigh 250, 000 tons. One way around this problem is to ionize the hydrogen ahead of the spacecraft using a powerful laser, allowing a relatively small collector which generates a powerful magnet. In this manner the scoop could be mesh. However, there are additional problems. For additional details, see David Darlings Interstellar Encyclopedia. It also suggests possible solutions.

Another web site with good explanation of the Buzzard ramjet is Nation Master Encyclopedia. In this article is says that spacecraft accelerating at 10 m/sec² could reach 77% of light speed in one year. Once it reached that speed, propulsion would no longer be need until it approached its destination, at which time it would need to decelerate.

Seattle Science Fiction Museum

2012-02-04T08:32:00.003-05:00

My daughter lives in Seattle, Washington. One of my favorite things to do when I visit her is to go to the Seattle Center, which contains a science museum, the space needle, an IMAX theater and above all the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. The fun starts even as you approach the building, which looks as though it was built by aliens. Also, if you arrive by monorail, the track goes through the building.

The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame is one of the two public science fiction museums in the world (along with Maison d'Ailleurs, a science fiction museum in Yverdon-les-Bains (Switzerland). The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame was founded by Paul Allen and Jody Patton and opened to the public on June 18, 2004. Members of the museum's advisory board include Steven Spielberg, Ray Bradbury, James Cameron, and George Lucas. Among its collection of artifacts are Captain Kirk's command chair from Star Trek, the B9 robot from Lost in Space, the Death Star model from Star Wars, the T800 Terminator and the dome from the film Silent Running. The X Prize trophy is currently on display in the museum's lobby.

The museum is divided into several galleries with a common themes such as "Homeworld," "Fantastic Voyages," "Brave New Worlds" and "Them!" Each gallery displays related memorabilia (movie props, first editions, costumes and models) in large display cases, posters, and interactive displays to sketch out the different subjects. "From robots to jet packs to space suits and ray guns, it's all here."

The Hall of Fame was founded as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1996 by the Kansas City Science Fiction and Fantasy Society and the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. There you will find listed all your favorite authors of the past and some present and other notables in the world of science fiction.

One of my particular favorites in the museum is the case that contains copies of some of the old pulp magazine that were prevalent from the 1920s to the 1950s. I cut my SF teeth on those magazines.

Science Fiction in Pulps, E-Zines, and E-Books

2012-01-28T09:01:00.002-05:00

When I was young and first started reading Science Fiction, most genre fiction was published in what were known as "pulp" magazines with titles such as Amazing Stories, Thrilling Wonder, Astonishing, Fantastic, Planet, Terror Tales and Unknown to name but a small sample. They had garish brightly-colored covers, usually featuring a scantily dressed woman in some sort of peril by a Bug-Eyed-Monster or a robot with a spaceship in the background. They were printed on 8 ½ by 11 blotting paper and were about an inch thick. The interiors were filled with marvelous stories written by such legends as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke to name but a tiny fraction of authors whose careers started with the pulps.

In addition to the stories, they contained art by Earl Bergey, Virgil Finley and Chesley Bonestell and many other great illustrators. They had fact articles and massive letter columns where the fans argued about everything faintly associated with their favorite genre. Although they paid their contributors little in the way of cash, they were a great place for a genre author or artist to get published. If they were very good and lived long enough for the paperback explosion, many graduated into the world of published books where the real money was.

But sometime in the nineteen fifties, the pulps disappeared to be replaced by paperback books and smaller slicker magazines such as Analog. But these medium were more expensive to print. As a result, their editors were less likely to take a chance on new authors. In order for a genre author to get published, he or she had to be known from the pulps or be exceptionally gifted. Hence, from the late fifties to the nineteen nineties it became more and more difficult for a new author or artist to break into the publishing world.

In the nineteen nineties, a new method of publishing came into being due to the Internet and the prevalence of computers in people's homes. It was Electronic or E publishing. As it turned out, the electronic magazines or E-Zines returned to the days of the pulps. Although they paid even less (many pay nothing) than the pulps in terms of today's dollar, a new author, if he or she was any good at all, could finally get a break and get his or her stories published.

The same holds true of the E-Book publishers. Most of print publishing is done by a few major publishers who are mostly interested in publishing books by celebrities and well-known authors. Most will not even accept a manuscript from an unknown unless it arrives through an agent. Ah, but since publishing E-books and print-on-demand is a cheaper process, budding authors have a much better chance of getting published.

Mind Control

2012-01-21T11:05:00.002-05:00

One of the most frightening themes in science fiction and fantasy is that of mind control, that your mind could be manipulated to make you perform actions against your will. In SF this is usually done with some sort of gadget that is implanted in your body. In fantasy, mind control is performed by the controlling being such as a wizard, vampire or demon by mystical means.

Apparently the SF version is already available. It is done by brain chips. In 1970, Jose Manuel Rodrigues Delgado, a professor of physiology at Yale University, pioneered an electronic device that can manipulate the mind by receiving signals from and transmitting them to neurons. At present brain chips are used to treat such conditions as epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, paralysis, blindness and disorders.

Delgado, however, was performing experiments that were more dramatic than anything done today. He implanted radio-controlled electrode arrays in various animals and even humans. He showed that he could control subject's minds and bodies with a push of a button. For the most part his work has been forgotten, but he is alive and living in San Diego.

Between 1952 and 1970, Delgado implanted electrodes in twenty-five human brains, most of whom were schizophrenics and epileptics. He showed that stimulation of parts of the brain could cause a physical reaction. Patients were made to perform such actions as tightening a fist or shaking the head from side to side by applying small electric currents to certain areas of the brain. Delgado also induced such emotions as rage, lust, hilarity and fear.

In one experiment he caused a macaque bully in a cage with other monkeys to be pacified when a lever was pushed. One of the female monkeys learned this and would press the lever whenever the bully tried to molest her. (Author's Note: In the future, will such a procedure be done on bully school children?)

One troubling aspect of Delgado's experiments is that they were supported by the Office of Naval Research. Some conspiracy theorists believe that the CIA was involved. Delgado countered any claims of mind control by saying that brain simulation can increase or decrease aggressive behavior, but not direct it at a specific target.

Currently many people suffering from certain brain malfunctions have chips implanted in their heads that stimulate certain areas of the brains by wireless communication to the chip. Whether this technology will be expanded to actually control human beings to act according to another person's will is yet to be seen. It is certainly a frightening thought.

Most of the information for this post came from an article in the October, 2005 Scientific American entitled "The Forgotten Era of Brain Chips" by John Hogan.

Macho Women in Science Fiction

2012-01-14T11:01:00.003-05:00

I know there are a lot of strong women in science fiction, probably more than in any other genre – and I love them. Here are some of my favorites.

My number one favorite was Riply in the Alien series. Here was a woman who had everything. She was smart, tough and courageous. In Alien, she stood up to the weak captain of the ship in attempt to prevent the man infected with the alien from boarding the ship. She was the only one aboard who realized the danger. In Aliens, we see a softer side in her relations with the little girl, Newt, who was a strong female character herself. In Alien 3, she had to face tough prison inmates as well as the alien creatures and had to sacrifice herself to prevent the horror from brought to earth. And in Alien Resurrection, she became part alien herself.

Second on my list of favorite macho women was Lara Croft in the movie version of the game, Lara Croft, Tomb Robber. Angelina Jolie was perfect for the part, smart, sexy, athletic and tough. I hope they make a third Lara Croft movie with her in the lead.

My third favorite strong woman is not from the movies but from a book. She is Kithryn from the Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. Kithryn is young student sent back to the middle ages only to find herself in the time of the Black Plague that killed a third of the population of Europe. Ill herself from a pandemic in her own time, she manages to cope as the people around her die horribly, and she is unable to return to the place she needs to go to return to her own time.

Fourth is Zoe Graystone from the SyFy canceled TV series, Caprica. In the show, she is the daughter of high-tech scientist-entrepreneur Daniel Graystone or I should say the virtual copy of the real Zoe Graystone, who is killed by a terrorist suicide bomber boy friend early in the plot. She leads a tough life inside a PC virtual world as well as the mind of a warrior robot invented by her father.

Fifth is Morgan Le Fay (AKA Morgaine) in the Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Morgaine is a priestess fighting to save her matriarchal Celtic culture in a country where patriarchal Christianity threatens to destroy the pagan way of life. Morgaine is a strong woman who has unique gifts and responsibilities at a time of enormous political and spiritual upheaval as she is called upon to defend her heritage against impossible odds.

Sixth and Seventh were the main female characters in the TV series Lost, Kate Austin, Juliet Burke and Sun-Hwa Kwon. All three showed their self reliance in a hostile environment without loss of their femininity.

Of course, the main characters in my own novels are strong women, Morgaine the Demon Witch and Raven Lenore, Psychic Investigator.

I also enjoyed several strong female characters in Dark Shadows, the old TV paranormal soap opera.

Of course it was hard to choose. There are so many strong women in genre fiction. In my own novels, Morgaine the Demon Witch, her rival Melody Trent, and my favorite of characters I've created, Raven Lenore, Psychic Investigator.

Who are your favorites?

Galactic Empires

2012-01-07T15:52:00.002-05:00

One of the most prevalent themes in science fiction is the galactic empire. Star Wars and Star Trek (and all their spin-offs) take place in a galactic empire; Isaac Asimov's Foundation series is about the decline and fall of a galactic empire. My novel Pawns of Tomorrow is about a galactic empire based on a chess game. To ensure a certain amount realism to the story, I did research about our own Milky Way galaxy. What I found out was that a galaxy is a hell of a big place.

To illustrate: The NASA space probe Voyager 2, traveling at approximately 93,000 mph, took twelve years to travel to Neptune. If this same space vehicle were to travel to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, it would take it over 370 years to reach it. Okay, but that's reality. Let's assume that we have a starship capable of faster than light travel (impossible according to scientists). How much faster? Let's say it can reach Proxima Centauri (4.22 lightyears away) in four days. Pretty fast huh. That's one lightyear a day or fifteen lightdays per hour. Okay, now let's say we want to travel from one end of the galaxy to the other. The galaxy has an estimated diameter of 100,000 lightyears. The trip would take 100,000 days or almost 3,000 years.

In galactic terms, 100 lightyears or even a 1000 lightyears is in the neighborhood. As a result, even with FLT (faster than light) speeds, our empire could not be very large. Even then, travel from one star to another would take a lot of time, a hundred days (over three months) to go to a stellar system a hundred lightyears away, a thousand days (over three years) to go to a system a thousand lightyears away.

Another problem is that electronic communication between systems would be impractical. A message sent to a planet 100 lightyears away would arrive in the next century, a 1000 lightyears away, in the next millennium. So our galactic civilization would need to resort to communiqués sent by starship. It would be like the days around Columbus' time with sailing ships.

Another thing about the galaxy is the sheer number of star systems. There are 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Let's say that only a thousandth of them contain habitable planets. That means that the rulers of the galactic empire would have to administer 400 million planets each of which contained over a billion humanoids. What an administrative nightmare.

In my novel, my galactic empire spans part of the Orion spiral arm of the galaxy. An alien empire of approximately equal technological ability, based in the Perseus arm, declares war on the Orion's. But such a war becomes a tactical and strategic game of complexities. For example, most star systems don't even know that the empire is at war, some within the empire's borders don't even realize that there is an empire. It makes for some interesting situations.

Natural Language Processing

2011-12-23T11:19:00.001-05:00

If you were going to design an android, one of the most important abilities it must have is the ability to understand human speech, at least to the point where it could understand the commands you give it. It would also be nice if it would talk back to you. To be able to communicate with your computer in a normal conversational way would also be a good thing. You may have also noticed that lately, when you call certain businesses, you don't necessarily have to press buttons to enter information to their automated answering systems. Some allow you to speak the required information. All these artificial intelligence tasks fall under the province of natural language processing. Other tasks that require natural language processing are translation from one human language to another, transforming text to speech, answering questions, and retrieving information.

Natural language processing is the study and software development associated with the automatic generation and understanding of natural human languages. Natural language generation software converts information from computer data bases into normal human language. Natural language understanding software converts human language into forms that a computer can understand and manipulate.

One of the earliest systems, called SHRDLU, used a restricted world of blocks. It used a small restricted vocabulary to manipulate blocks of different shapes and sizes on a computer monitor screen. Because it worked extremely well, researchers were excessively optimistic about developing natural language software. However, it turned out that in the real world, language processing was much more difficult than supposed.

Some of the problems are: Ambiguity. For example when it is not clear which word in a sentence an adjective or adverb is modifying. Some strings of words can be interpreted in many ways. In spoken words, sounds that represent successive letters blend into each other. Some written languages, such as Chinese and Thai, do not signal word boundaries. Many words have several meanings. The grammar for natural languages is ambiguous. Typing errors, speech irregularities and OCR errors. Some sentences don't literally mean what they say.

Many of these problems have been partially or wholly solved, but artificial intelligence experts still have a long way to go before you can have an intelligent conversation with your computer or friendly robot.

I note with interest the various web sites with talking heads called chatbots. I urge you to visit one of these sites to learn what a natural language artificial intelligence artifact can do. A popular one is called The ALICE Chatbot Foundation.

Recipe for Disaster

2011-12-11T11:32:00.002-05:00

Contrary to the propaganda put out by Fox News and the Tea Party advocates, it is not government that is driving our country into becoming a third world land. One of their favorite sayings is that large corporations and wealthy people are "job creators." Nothing could be further than the truth. For example, in the first ten years after Wal-Mart came to Iowa, that state lost 555 grocery stores, 298 building supply stores, 161 variety stores, 158 women's apparel stores, 116 drug stores, and 111 men's apparel stores. Now such huge retailers have multiplied all over the country. In addition, most of the products sold are made in countries outside the United States. And we wonder why unemployment is so high.

Because government does not regulate polluters effectively, mainly due to obstructionism and lobbying by the advocates for big business, especially big oil, there are less than 4% of our original forests left, there are over 100,000 synthetic chemicals in commerce of which only a handful have been tested for human health impacts, and 4 billion pounds of toxic chemicals each year. Forty percent of the water in waterways in the US has become undrinkable.

We are our own worst enemies. With 5% of the world's population, Americans consume 80% of the resources and create 80% of the waste. If the entire world consumed as much as Americans, we would need three to five planets to sustain us. The average person in the US consumes twice as much as he or she did fifty years ago. We see more advertisements in one year than people saw in a lifetime fifty years ago. We spend three to four times as many hours shopping than our counterparts in Europe do. Average house size has doubled since the 1970s. Each person in the US makes 4.5 pounds of garbage a day, twice as much as we did 20 years ago. And for every one can of garbage a household puts out, 70 cans of garbage was required to make the junk we throw out.

Artificial Intelligence

2011-12-03T08:34:00.002-05:00

In many science fiction stories, there are electromechanical devices, robots and computers who are at least as smart as human beings and sometimes smarter. But, what is the reality? Is it possible to build a machine that "thinks" as well or better than a human being? Or is this simply an impossible dream and will never happen? If artificial intelligence (abbreviated AI) is possible, how close are the computers of today towards that goal?

Like most questions of this sort, it depends upon the definition of artificial intelligence. There is no consensus even within the AI scientific community. Elaine Rich in her book, Artificial Intelligence, defines it this way: "Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make computers do things at which, at the moment, people are better." One good example of something that fits this definition is chess playing. Once it was thought that people who played darn good chess were such geniuses that no machine could ever beat them. Perhaps they are. But in 1997 the supercomputer Deep Blue beat the world chess champion, Gary Kasparov. Nonetheless, chess aside, Gary Kasparov can do many things that Deep Blue cannot. A chess program go only do one thing well, and that is play chess. It is like an idiot savant.

A better definition of what we would expect from an AI is as follows: "Artificial intelligence is the part of computer science concerned with designing intelligent computer systems, that is, systems that exhibit the characteristics we associate with intelligence in human behavior." This quote is from Avron Barr and Edward A. Feigenbaum's book, The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence. But what are these characteristics? In the book, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter, Hofstadter gives the following "essential abilities for intelligence" (by the way, I highly recommend this book, which is entertaining as well as informative):

"To respond to situations very flexibly."

"To make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages."

"To recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation."

"To find similarities between situations despite differences which may separate them."

"To draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which may link them."

The problem is that the abilities, such as those listed above, that are easy for human beings, are very difficult to program into a computer. Nonetheless, progress has been made. Some areas of research where machine intelligence has come a long way are:

Expert Systems: Software designed to act as an expert in a particular area of expertise, for example, an income tax consultant. I happen to use one of these every year to do my taxes and believe me, it's a lot better than trying to make sense of the U.S. Tax Code yourself.

Natural Language Processing: Software that understands and/or generates a natural language such as English. Translation software also fits into this category. I have more to say on this subject below.

Speech Recognition: Hardware and software that understands human speech. I've noticed that lately that many automatic phone answering services now use this technology.

Computer Vision: Hardware and software that can interpret visual images.

Robotics: A robot is a machine that can perform manual tasks that previously were performed by a human being, such as vacuuming a rug or assembling automobiles or dancing. I have Rhomba vacuum which does a tolerable job, but sometimes get stuck under low hung furniture.

Computer Assisted Instruction: Teaching machines. This was kind a fad for a while, but doesn't seem to be used much anymore.

Automatic Programming: Software that can create other software.

Planning and Decision Support: Software that aids planning.

Expert Systems

"An expert system is a class of computer programs developed by researchers in artificial intelligence. In essence, they are made up of a set of rules that analyze information (usually supplied by the user of the system) about a specific class of problems, as well as provide analysis of the problem(s), and, depending upon their design, recommend a course of user action in order to implement corrections."

I got this definition from Wikipedia in an article that gives a good introductory explanation of this branch of artificial intelligence. For a deeper understanding what is meant by an expert system, you may want to read the article. I'll try to summarize as briefly as I can.

The idea behind expert systems is to provide help usually provided by an expert in a particular field, such as software troubleshooting or diagnosing an illness in a medical patient. Three features of expert systems are rules of thumb, fuzzy logic and a data base of solutions. When an expert in a field, such a physician, goes about solving a problem, such a determining what ails a patient, he or she usually has several rules-of-thumb that he or she uses. Depending upon the answers to key questions about the problem, the expert knows what the solution is by applying a rule of thumb. For example, suppose a patient complains about frequent severe headaches. After asking questions about the headaches and other accompanying symptoms and perhaps performing some tests, the doctor may determine that the person is suffering from migraines and prescribe pills. In expert systems, these rules of thumb are coded into the software.

Fuzzy logic is logic based on approximations rather than formal logic. It takes into account such vague statements as "almost," "nearly," and so forth, and manipulates them to come up with an approximate answer. For example, if a patient asks how much pain he or she is in and replies "not so much," this is considered less pain than "it hurts terribly." Certain conclusion may be drawn by which answer is given.

Expert systems also usually have large data bases which can be readily accessed using the rules of thumb and fuzzy logic.

Anyone who has gone to a software web site and used their self troubleshooting system has used an expert system. Computer and video games also use expert systems.

In my novel, The Isaac Project (available at Renaissance Pageturner Editions, http://www.pageturnereditions.com), the core software of the artificial intelligence being developed is an expert system.

Natural Language Processing

If you were going to design a humanoid robot, one of the most important abilities it must have is the ability to understand human speech, at least to the point where it could understand the commands you give it. It would also be nice if it would talk back to you. To be able to communicate with your computer in a normal conversational way would also be a good thing. You may have also noticed that lately, when you call certain businesses, you don't necessarily have to press buttons to enter information to their automated answering systems. Some allow you to speak the required information. All these artificial intelligence tasks fall under the province of natural language processing. Other tasks that require natural language processing are translation from one human language to another, transforming text to speech, answering questions, and retrieving information.

Some of the problems are: Ambiguity. For example when it is not clear which word in a sentence an adjective or adverb is modifying. Some strings of words can be interpreted in many ways. In spoken words, sounds that represent successive letters blend into each other. Some written languages, such as Chinese and Thai, do not signal word boundaries. Most words have several meanings. The grammar for natural languages is ambiguous. Typing errors, speech irregularities and OCR errors. Some sentences don't literally mean what they say.

Catch-22s of our Economic System

2011-11-27T10:34:00.003-05:00

Sometimes when I read some of the silly statements that are written about economics, even by so-called experts, I have to wonder. Mostly, I feel that very few look at the big picture. For one thing, they write about such things as "labor" or "business" or "consumers" and so forth as though these things did not consist of human beings and were somehow not related to each other.

Basically economics consist of supply and demand. If you are selling a product or service, the price you will get for it depends upon whether prospective buyers want or need the product; that is the demand. The other factor is the amount of the product or service available. The price goes up when demand is high and supply is low. It goes down when demand is low or supply is high. A good example of this is in my field, writing. The demand for written material is fairly high, but sadly too many authors are producing more than can be sold. So, for most authors, prices for their books and e-books are low compared to the effort put into their production.

The other basic tenet of economics is that profits are based on the monetary value of the quantity of items sold minus the cost of producing the items. For example, if I sell ten widgets that sell for a dollar a piece and the cost of making those widgets including overhead expenses and advertising is ninety cents, my profit is one dollar.

This brings me to the first catch-22 of the free market economy. One of the largest expenses for most manufacturers and retailers is labor costs. As a result, many businesses will cut costs by laying off people and moving their base of operations to a country where laboris cheaper. The catch-22 here is that employees are also consumers. With no salary they cannot afford to buy stuff. If many businesses cut costs in this manner, former employees (consumers) can no longer afford to buy what is offered, and you have a recession. That is why the "trickle down" theory of economics does not work. You may reduce taxes for corporations, but what good does the extra money do if nobody is buying their products?

There is a truth that says, "money goes to money." Supposedly, in our economic system everyone has an equal chance to become wealthy. This is ridiculous. People who have money to begin with have a thousand times better chance of becoming wealthier or at least staying rich than a poor person has of even becoming mildly well off. The poor have less access to education, don't have connections to people who can smooth their way through life, and are less likely to even get employment since many are minorities who are discriminated against. Also, they are usually unable to present themselves to a prospective employer in a manner that a middleclass or rich person can.

Many conservatives advocate taxing the wealthy less and giving less to poor people. This is a recipe for economic disaster. Very wealthy people must make a real effort to spend their money; usually they save most of it to pass on to their heirs or use it to gain power. Poor people and many middle-class people, on the other hand, spend every penny they can lay their hands on and usually go into debt. Spending is what drives the economy, not saving.

Even those who advocate a free laissez faire economy don't believe their own propaganda. When a large bank or corporation is on the brink of failure due to bad policies by the people who run them, they are the first ones to cry to the federal government to bail them out, with the claim that such-and-such company is too big to fail.

Another catch-22 of the corporate economic system is that the people who run large corporations are out for their own profit even if the stockholders suffer in the long run. They cook the books and use various schemes to make the company seem as though it is making money even when it is really losing it or making bad investments. Thus their huge bonuses and golden parachutes are ensured. Most of these people came up the corporate ladder not by their ability to manage but by their ability to play office politics.

The final and most important catch-22 is the monopoly power of large banks and corporations. They and their lobbyists have the ears of the people in government, Democrats as well as Republicans. In a sense, they are the government. Politicians need their money to get reelected. Large corporations own the media. They hire the best propagandists in the world, the Madison Avenue advertising firms.

We should listen to the words of Thomas Jefferson, the greatest of our founding fathers:

"Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor."

"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny."

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

Why Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics Won't Work

2011-11-19T11:00:00.002-05:00

In Science Fiction, the Three Laws of Robotics are a set of three rules written by Isaac Asimov, which most robots that appear in his fiction must obey. Introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround," the Laws state the following:

A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

If we could actually build robots who are intelligent enough to be self-aware, would these laws actually make sense. I propose not. Take the first law. In the first place, how could the robot tell a human being from another robot that looked like a human being or from a hologram of a human being. You might say, so what. As long as the robot cannot harm a human being or anything that resembles a human being, that is all to the good. But what if a humanoid robot or hologram and a real human being are both in danger. How would the robot know which one to save? As far as that goes, if two human beings are in danger at the same time, how does a robot know which one to save. (Note: this exact situation is shown in the movie I, Robot. In the movie the robot made the wrong choice.)

For certain uses, a manufacturer would not want to apply the Laws in that order. For example, suppose the robots are to be used for military purposes. In this case, the Laws built into the robot might go something like this:

A robot must obey the orders given to it by his superior officer.

A robot must protect its own existence, and those of other soldier robot, except where such orders conflict with the First Law.

A robot may only harm those human beings or robots designated as "The Enemy," by its superior officer and only if not under a flag of truce, surrendering or designated as "Prisoners of War."

In my novel, The Isaac Project, the situation of the military wanting to change the Three Laws provides part of the conflict in the book.

One error that Isaac Asimov made was that he assumed that the intelligence of the robot would somehow be in its electronic circuitry. Actually, we know now that the intelligence of a robot would more likely be in its software. This changes the situation quite a bit, since software can have errors in it that are not always detected during testing. Also, it can be modified. Depending upon how the software is installed, it might be subjected to viruses, worms, and other sorts of malicious software tricks by unscrupulous hackers, such as our computers are now.

What is Gravity?

2011-11-12T16:56:00.001-05:00

One of the most familiar forces is also the most mysterious, and that is gravity. In general, gravity is the force that pulls together all matter (which is anything you can physically touch). The more matter, the more gravity, so things that have a lot of matter such as planets and moons and stars pull more strongly.

The amount of matter in something is called its mass. The more massive something is, the more of a gravitational pull it exerts. As we walk on the surface of the Earth, it pulls on us, and we pull back. But since the Earth is so much more massive than we are, the pull from us is not strong enough to move the Earth, while the pull from the Earth can make us fall flat on our faces.

In addition to depending on the amount of mass, gravity also depends on how far you are from something. This is why we are stuck to the surface of the Earth instead of being pulled off into the Sun, which has many more times the gravity of the Earth.

Most of us know the effects of the mysterious force called gravity. However, the question 'what is gravity' is not easy to answer, because we don't really understand what this force actually is (if it is a force at all).

What we do know about gravity is mostly due to the work of three men, Johannes Kepler, Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Kepler worked out the details of how the orbits of the moon and planets can be described mathematically. This is known as the Kepler laws of planetary motion, but it does not answer the question 'what is gravity'.

Newton, reportedly while observing an apple falling from a tree, got an inspiration that allowed him to work out how the force of gravity can be described mathematically. It later became apparent that there are some scenarios where Newton's mathematical description does not quite hold, but it still the simplest way of describing gravity. It does however also not answer the 'what is' question. Newton was uncomfortable with his own theory of gravity. He said that his theory never "assigned the cause of this power." He was unable to experimentally identify what produces the force of gravity and he refused to even offer a hypothesis as to the cause of this force on grounds that to do so was not sound science.

Einstein later worked out how the force of gravity is not quite a force, but rather an artifact of the natural movement of objects through curved four-dimensional space-time. Einstein reportedly got the inspiration for this imaginative leap in understanding of gravity by contemplating a man falling off a building. Such a falling man would not experience any force while he is falling, at least not before hitting the ground and suffering severe forces.

In his monumental 1916 work 'The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity', Albert Einstein unified his own Special Relativity, Newton's law of universal gravitation, and the crucial insight that the effects of gravity can be described by the curvature of space and time, usually called 'space-time' curvature. The radius of curvature is modified by relativistic factors, by a gravitational time dilation and by a velocity time dilation. This causes the acceleration of a falling object, as experienced by the free falling object to be larger than what Newton predicted.

So, what is gravity? The truth is that at the most fundamental level, no one really knows. This blog only summarizes the basics of Newton's and Einstein's gravity in terms of the gravitational acceleration caused by curved space-time and velocity.

We may have to wait for a theory of 'quantum gravity' to be completed for a better answer to 'what is gravity?' Quantum gravity (QG) is the field of theoretical physics attempting to unify quantum mechanics with general relativity in a self-consistent manner, or more precisely, to formulate a self-consistent theory which reduces to ordinary quantum mechanics in the limit of weak gravity (potentials much less than the speed of light squared) and which limits Einstein's general relativity to large actions (action much larger than Planck's constant). The theory must be able to predict the outcome of situations where both quantum effects and strong-field gravity are important (at the Planck scale, unless large extra dimension conjectures are correct). Although some quantum gravity theories such as string theory and other so-called theories of everything attempt to unify gravity with the other fundamental forces, others such as loop quantum gravity make no such attempt; they simply quantize the gravitational field while keeping it separate from the other forces.

So far, cosmologists, physicists and mathematicians have not arrived at a consistent theory of gravity that melds quantum mechanics with the theory of relativity.

My Top Ten Mysteries of the Universe

2011-11-05T08:15:00.003-04:00

I'm one of those people who thinks too much. I don't just take things for granted. I'm always wondering about things that other people don't think about all. It seems to me that there are many unsolved mysteries in the universe we live in, and that the greatest mysteries concern important stuff. Science gives us partial answers and may someday give a definitive answer to some of the question I pose here. Others, obviously, will never be answered. Different religions, poets and philosophers have given various conflicting answers. You, yourself, may have an opinion concerning what the answers are which may be different from mine. Even your list may be different. That these are really the top mysteries in the universe is only my opinion.

Mystery Number 10. Is Reality All in Our Head. Each of us locked in our own head and look at the universe from our own point of view. What we personally believe is true is true -- as far as we are concerned. That is why it is usually useless for two people with opposing viewpoints to debate some fundamental issue such as the existence of God.

All of science is based on the assumption that there is an objective universe that is the same for all of us. But what proof is there that is true? Philosophers have argued this very point throughout the ages. The greatest of these in my opinion was the eighteenth century philosopher David Hume. He showed in his Treatise on Human Nature that it is impossible for us to determine this in any conclusive manner. He has had his critics, but so far, no one has been able to successfully punch holes in his conclusions.

Mystery Number 9. What is Outside the Universe? Have you ever thought about infinity? Or read what modern cosmologists have to say about the universe? Back a few centuries, people who thought about such things figured that the universe consisted of the earth which was surround by crystal spheres. Astronomers (actually astrologers) of those days never wrote about what was outside the outermost crystal sphere. Then came along Copernicus, Galileo and Newton and the universe expanded somewhat to the size of the solar system and the fixed stars out there somewhere; nobody knew how far. When astronomers gazed through more powerful telescopes and other sophisticated gear, suddenly the universe expanded to billions of light years in size.

But how far did it go? Does it stretch on forever? In the early part of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein proposed his Theory of Relativity. This and other discoveries changed everything. Cosmologists began to think of the universe as a great expanding ball (or some other shape) that had a definite limit.

Okay, that is the current view of our universe. But if our universe is a great ball (or some other shape) curved in the fourth dimension, what lies outside of it? Recent articles I have read about what modern cosmologists and physicist think about the universe speak of "multiverses." I wonder what they are like.

Mystery Number 8. Is Time Travel Possible. Before we went to the moon, space travel was considered impossible, so were speeds higher than the speed of sound, and years ago people would have scoffed that machines could do what our modern computers can or that pictures and sound could be sent through the air. Up until very recently, one thing that scientists and other thinkers were absolutely sure was impossible was travel through time, that is to go to the past or the far future and return. Recently, I've read articles in Scientific American that it may be possible after all, but energy and cost prohibitive. When the Wright brothers made their historic flight at Kitty Hawk, no one could imagine the commercial airlines of today.

Of course, those who say that we will never achieve time travel point out the paradoxes involved with travel to the past. Science-fiction time travel stories have illustrated these, and other hazards of time travel, over and over again.

Mystery Number 7. What Happens to You When You Die? Most people of the Jewish, Christian or Muslim religions would say that you go to Heaven or Hell. In some other religions, it is said that you are reborn in some other form, as an animal or another human being with most of the memories of your past lives obliterated. An atheist may say that you simply cease to exist. Somehow I can't get my mind around nonexistence. None of these possibilities have ever been proven one way or the other in a totally satisfactory manner.

In the first place, it is not clear what "you" are within your physical body. Are you simply a bunch of electrical-chemical reactions centered in your brain, like a program running in a computer? Or are "the you" that thinks about such things a sort of incorporeal vapid thing that people have given such names as "the soul," "the aura," or "the spirit?" If the latter, what happens to this invisible being at death?

Some psychics and others have claimed that they can speak to the dead. Other people have sworn that they have encountered ghosts, which may be what the spirit becomes after the body dies. Are these encounters real or simply a combination of fraud and delusion?

My hope is that my spirit is awakened on an alien planet in the far future such as in Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series.

Mystery Number 6. Is Anyone Out There? The universe is vast. There are billions of stars in our own galaxy itself and billions of galaxies. Somewhere there has to be another species as intelligent and technologically inclined as us. So why haven't we heard from them? Of course, the UFO believers claim that we've been actually been visited by alien beings. The problem is that their proofs of this are not credible in a scientific sense.

Right now there are people who are listening to radio signals from all over the universe in an attempt to hear any that may be coming from an intelligent source. This effort is called SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and consists of listening to radio waves at various frequencies all over the sky. My personal opinion is that SETI is doomed to failure, not because intelligent aliens do not exist, but because of the vastness of space. Unless the aliens were located within a hundred light years or less from us, they would have to have extremely powerful transmitters beamed right us before we would detect their signals,

Mystery Number 5. How Does Intelligence Work? One of the most mysterious organs in our body is the brain. Medical specialists tell us that it operates by electrical currents, which arrive on dendrites, transmits the resulting electrical currents to other connected neurons using its axon. Different types of brain activity relate to different patterns of firing. In addition, such chemicals such as dopamine, seratonin and endomorphines are involved. Beyond that, all that is said about brain function is quite vague. For example, which signals and chemicals are involved as I write this article? No neurologist can tell me the exact the details of this. For example, which neuron fired when I thought the word "neurologist."

For several years now, software engineers and scientists have been trying to make computers intelligent. Their successes have been limited, probably because we don't really know how the brain does what it does.

One thing that always intrigued me is how intelligent animals are, even animals with much smaller brains than ours. For example, an insect can hardly be said to have a brain at all, merely a tiny nervous system. Nonetheless, if I'm sitting at my desk and a fly is buzzing around my head, I can swat at it and wave my hands around, and it persists its pestiness. As soon as I go get a fly swatter, it hides. How does it know that I can kill it with a fly swatter, but that my hands are relatively useless in harming it?

Mystery Number 4. What is Life? Scientists may be closing in on the answer to this one. A definition of life that I lifted from Wikepedia follows: "Life is a condition that distinguishes, organisms from inorganic objects, i.e. non-life objects or dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally. In terms, life is an organism that feeds on negative entropy." The problem here is that some inorganic objects have one or more of these attributes, yet are not living. For example, some chemicals such as sugar can grow crystals under certain conditions. Fire can be said to consume materials and grow thereby. Also, certain primitive organisms, such as viruses, are close to being nothing more than a collection of chemicals.

The thing is, although scientists have concluded that living organisms are simply complicated constructs of chemicals, no one yet has produced an actual living organism artificially. Frankenstein, where are you that we need you?

Mystery Number 3. What is Gravity? Although we are all familiar with gravity since it is what keeps us from flying off this earth in space, what makes it work is still a mystery. Isaac Newton first figured out the laws that govern gravitational effects back in the sixteen hundreds. Since then, no one has come up with a definitive explanation of how gravity does what it does. For one thing, gravity works at a distance although the gravitational attraction between two bodies weakens quite rapidly with distance. Nonetheless, the furthermost galaxy in the universe has some gravitational effect on earth, although quite negligible.

Albert Einstein proposed that a mass produced a kind of dent in space, the larger the mass, the greater the dent. But space is mostly nothing. How can nothing have a dent in it? Other scientists have proposed such explanations as some sort of particle called a graviton. But they have failed to detect such a particle. Hence, concrete evidence for either of these theories is still lacking verifiability.

Mystery Number 2. What is Everything Made of? Back in the ancient times, alchemists believed that matter consisted of four elements: fire, water, earth, and air. The amount of each element in the substance gave it its fundamental characteristics. But later investigators discovered that the so-called basic elements were actually combinations of more elementary chemicals. For example, water consisted of two gases, hydrogen and oxygen. As for fire, it was really a process, not a substance at all. Finally, theorists, such as Isaac Newton, thought that substances that were really elementary, such as hydrogen and oxygen, when divided into their smallest components were composed of hard indivisible bits called atoms. This atomic theory lasted until the twentieth century, when it was discovered that atoms themselves were composed of smaller parts called protons, neutrons and electrons.

But scientists are never satisfied. They found that these elementary particles could be split further into even more elementary particles. And so was born our present quantum theories. The latest thinking on the composition of matter and energy is that everything is composed of some kind of multidimensional loops called "strings." I've read several articles about quantum theory and string theory, but it's so complicated with strange concepts that I wonder whether even the physicists who propose these theories really understand them. Also, from what the articles seem to be saying is that none of these theories are cast in concrete yet. They all seem to have certain holes and inconsistencies in them.

All of which had left me baffled.

Mystery Number 1. Where Did Everything Come From? Now for the big one. Where did the universe come from? According to current scientific thought, the universe began with "The Big Bang" about ten or twenty billion years ago. Fine. I'll buy that. But what caused "The Big Bang?" Some cosmologists think that the universe may reach a certain point in its expansion and then collapse on itself, causing another "Big Bang." Hence the universe keeps oscillating between expansion and collapse. But this still begs the question of where all the stuff came from originally.

Now, I know that a lot of religious folk will say that God created the universe, either as the Big Bang or as a whole a few thousand years ago, depending upon their particular faith. Nonetheless, this still begs the question. For now we must ask, Where did God come from?"

Perhaps the answer lies in Mystery Number 10. It may all be in my head.

Afterward. Some of what I've said about the big ten questions may be inaccurate or said with tongue-in-cheek. If you wish to know what scientific theories are current and what scientists and others really have to say about these questions, tons of information are on the Internet. I also highly recommend Carl Sagan's TV series and accompanying book, Cosmos, as an introduction to these concepts. Although it is a little out of date, it is a good place to start learning about the science of cosmology. A little reading about philosophy would be good too, especially the seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant. Also, there are many histories of science available.

In the future, if I get the urge, I may discuss each of these questions in more detail.

Is It All In Your Head?

2011-10-29T12:05:00.002-04:00

Philosophers throughout the ages have pondered the nature of reality. There is a duality to reality that to this day remains unresolved. There is subjective reality, which is the universe as each individual perceives it in his or her own mind. There is objective reality, which is the universe as it really is outside any perception by an individual. The problem is, no matter how hard we try to get out of our own heads, we cannot. We all see things from our own perspective. That is the reason that on certain subjects, such as the existence of God, people will never agree. For an atheist, such as myself, the idea of God seems simply absurd; the faithful, however, see a universe which cannot exist without a diety. For the same reason conservatives and liberals disagree so strongly. Their world views are "worlds" apart.

For most of us in our every day life, subjective and objective reality are essentially the same thing. We automatically assume what we ourselves view is what is real. We only run into trouble when we come in contact with someone who views reality differently from ourselves. But how do we know what we think is real, is what is actually out there? For example, some people have hallucinations and delusions. But from their point of view, the universe they inhabit is as real as the one we "sane" people inhabit.

There is also the case of dreams. While we are dreaming, our dreams, no matter how absurd, seem real. It is only after we are awake that we realize they are fantasies. But are they? Is it possible that the waking world is the fantasy and our dreams the reality?

That an objective universe exists is one of the basic assumptions of both science and religion. Nonetheless, it remains simply an assumption. There is not or ever can be any positive proof of this. For more definitive discussion of these concepts, read the writings of the eighteenth century philosophers David Hume and Bishop Berkley.

The ideas I've put forth are sometimes used by science fiction and fantasy authors. Two novels that I've enjoyed much which have a premise of the unreality of the objective universe are Ubik by Philip Dick and The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin. In Ubik strange events occur to the protagonist until he finally realizes that he is really dead and his dying brain are giving him illusions. In The Lathe of Heaven, the protagonists dreams become reality.

The House of Frankenstein

2011-10-15T08:59:00.001-04:00

One of my all-time favorite movies is The House of Frankenstein, released in 1944. It was the fifth of a series of movies about Frankenstein's monster and friends. The first was released in the 1930s. It was loosely based (and I mean loosely, they didn't even get the scientist's first name right) on Mary Shelley's novel. The Bride of Frankenstein was a direct sequel. It started where the first movie left off and described the events that occurred when the monster wants a bride. It deviates even more from the novel. In the third movie, Son of Frankenstein, Frankenstein's son returns to the castle to take over. (The son is English. No explanation is given as to why he was raised in Britain. Ah, Hollywood.) In Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, the wolfman searches for Frankenstein's notes in order to cure himself of werewolfism. Finally in House of Frankenstein, everybody's favorite monsters (of that time), the monster, a mad doctor, a hunchback and Dracula, are all together for the first time. The final movie in the series was House of Dracula, whose plot was similar to Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, only it is Dracula who wants to be cured of vampirism.

All of these movies are worth seeing and entertaining. The reason I liked House of Frankenstein best was the acting and the subplots. Note: if you intend to watch the movie, the next three paragraphs contain spoilers.

The film focuses on the exploits of the vengeful Dr. Gustav Niemann, who escapes from prison with his cellmate, the hunchback Daniel, to which he promises to create a new, beautiful body. The two murder a traveling showman and take over his horror exhibit. To exact revenge on Hussmann, who had once caused his imprisonment, Niemann revives Count Dracula. Dracula seduces Hussmann's granddaughter-in-law and kills Hussmann himself, but in a subsequent chase, Niemann disposes of Dracula's coffin, causing the vampire to perish in sunlight. Niemann and Daniel move on to the flooded ruins of Castle Frankenstein, where they find the bodies of the Frankenstein Monster and Lawrence Talbot, the Wolfman, preserved in the frozen waters. Nieman thaws out the two and promises Talbot to cure him from werewolfism. However, in fact he is more interested in reviving the Frankenstein monster and exacting revenge on two former associates than in his promises to Daniel or Talbot. Talbot transforms into a werewolf and kills a man, arousing the villagers.

Talbot is also envied by the hunchback Daniel as both love Ilonka, a gypsy girl. She has fallen in love with Talbot but is the object of Daniel's affection. Daniel reveals Talbot's curse to Ilonka but she is not deterred and promises to help him in fighting the curse.

Things enter a critical stage at night, as Niemann revives the Frankenstein monster and Talbot again turns into a werewolf. Talbot is shot by Ilonka with a silver bullet, thereby releasing him, but Ilonka is killed in the process. Daniel blames her death on Niemann and begins to choke him. The Frankenstein monster intervenes, throws Daniel out of the window, and carries the half-conscious Niemann outside, where the villagers begin to chase them and drive them into the marshes. There, both the monster and Niemann drown in quicksand.

The movie had a superb cast as follows:

Boris Karloff as Dr. Gustav Niemann
Lon Chaney, Jr. as Lawrence Talbot/The Wolfman
J. Carrol Naish as Daniel
Elena Verdugo as Ilonka
John Carradine as Dracula a. k. a. Baron Latos
Glenn Strange as the Monster
Anne Gwynne as Rita Hussman
Peter Coe as Karl Hussman
Lionel Atwill as Inspector Arnz
George Zucco as Bruno Lampini
Sig Ruman as Bürgermeister Hussman
William Edmunds as Fejos
Charles F. Miller as Tobermann
Philip Van Zandt as Müller
Julius Tannen as Hertz
Hans Herbert as Meier
Dick Dickinson as Born

J. Carrol Naish performance is especially good as the lovesick hunchback in love with a gypsy girl, also well played by Elena Verdugo. Karloff and Carradine are also superb. And of course, Lon Chaney, as always, plays the werewolf with sympathy and pathos. Excellent acting by everyone in the cast. They deserved, but never received, Oscars. In fact the movie was panned by most critics. That's why I never listen to critics.

The Alien Movies

2011-10-08T09:30:00.001-04:00

My absolute favorite movies were the Alien series of film. Everything about them was great. Sigourney Weaver was astounding as the tough, brave Officer Ripley. In the first movie, The Alien, the starship sets were as so realistic while watching the movies you felt that you were aboard a real starship. Artist H.R.Giger's design of the alien spaceship and the alien creature itself was superb. The suspense and terror rocked me to the very core. The sequel, Aliens, was as great and in some ways as the original Alien. Although not quite up to par with the first two, the third and fourth films, Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection, in the series were also quite good. The only disappointment was the fifth in the series, Alien vs Preditor, which was a complete bomb. This is the only one that Sigourney Weaver was not in.

Alien garnered both critical acclaim and box office success, receiving an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, Saturn Awards for Best Science Fiction Film, Best Direction for Scott, and Best Supporting Actress for Cartwright, and a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, along with numerous other award nominations. It has remained highly praised in subsequent decades, being inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2002 for historical preservation as a film which is "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and being ranked by the American Film Institute in 2008 as the seventh-best film in the science fiction genre.

Here is a summery of the plot of Alien. It contains spoilers. So, if you haven't seen the film and intend watching it, skip this part of my post. The commercial towing spaceship Nostromo is on a return trip from Thedus to Earth carrying its seven-member crew in hypersleep. Upon receiving a transmission of unknown origin from a nearby planetoid, the ship's computer awakens the crew. Acting on orders from their corporate employers, the crew lands on the planetoid, resulting in some damage to the ship. Captain Dallas, Executive Officer Kane, and Navigator Lambert set out to investigate the signal's source while Warrant Officer Ripley, Science Officer Ash, and Engineers Brett and Parker stay behind to monitor their progress and make repairs. The signal is coming from a derelict alien spacecraft. Inside they find the remains of a large alien creature whose ribs appear to have been exploded outward from the inside. Ripley determines that the signal transmission is some type of warning. Kane discovers a vast chamber containing numerous eggs, one of which releases a creature that attaches itself to his face. Dallas and Lambert carry the unconscious Kane back to the Nostromo, where Ash allows them inside against Ripley's orders to follow the ship's quarantine protocol. They unsuccessfully attempt to remove the creature from Kane's face, discovering that its blood is an extremely corrosive acid. Eventually the creature detaches on its own and is found dead. With the ship repaired, the crew resume their trip back to Earth.

Kane awakens seemingly unharmed, but during a meal before re-entering stasis he begins to choke and convulse until an alien creature bursts from his chest, killing him and escaping into the ship. Lacking conventional weapons, the crew attempt to locate and capture the creature by fashioning motion trackers, electric prods, and flamethrowers. Brett follows the crew's cat into a large room where the now-fully-grown Alien attacks him and disappears with his body into the ship's air shafts. Dallas enters the shafts intending to force the Alien into an airlock where it can be expelled into space, but it ambushes him. Lambert implores the remaining crew members to escape in the ship's shuttle, but Ripley, now in command, explains that the shuttle will not support four people.

Accessing the ship's computer, Ripley discovers that Ash has been ordered to return the Alien to the Nostromo's corporate employers even at the expense of the crew. Ash attacks her, but Parker intervenes and decapitates him with a blow from a fire extinguisher, revealing Ash to be an android. Before Parker incinerates him, Ash predicts that the other crew members will not survive. The remaining three crew members plan to arm the Nostromo's self-destruct mechanism and escape in the shuttle, but Parker and Lambert are killed by the Alien while gathering the necessary supplies. Ripley initiates the self-destruct sequence and heads for the shuttle with the cat, but finds the Alien blocking her way. She unsuccessfully attempts to abort the self-destruct, then returns to find the Alien gone and narrowly escapes in the shuttle as the Nostromo explodes.

As she prepares to enter stasis, Ripley discovers that the Alien is aboard the shuttle. She puts on a space suit and opens the hatch, causing explosive decompression which forces the Alien to the open doorway. She shoots it with a grappling gun which propels it out, but the gun is caught in the closing door, tethering the Alien to the shuttle. It attempts to crawl into one of the engines, but Ripley activates them and blasts the Alien into space. Ripley puts herself and the cat into stasis for the return trip to Earth.

If you haven't seen these movies, you've missed a great treat. Be sure to watch them on the largest screen you can find. I can't imagine what they would be like on IMAX in 3D.

Is Jurassic Park Possible

2011-10-01T08:54:00.002-04:00

Among my movie favorites are the Jurassic Park trilogy. If you recall from the first movie, the dinosaurs were created by mixing dinosaur DNA with frog DNA. In those days, reptiles were considered the closest species to dinosaurs. If the movie were made today, probably they would have used birds. But, anyway, the dinosaur DNA was extracted from dinosaur blood within mosquitoes encased in amber. Actually, even on the face of it, this seemed very unlikely. How many insects encased in amber would you need before you found one that had bitten any particular dinosaur species? The chances would be one in a million that you would find any dinosaur blood at all.

In addition, biologists and paleontologists pooh-poohed the idea that biological matter would last millions of years. Even the original skeletal material in the bones of dinosaurs and other extinct species found has been replaced by inert minerals. Thus, the entire idea of recreating an extinct species that roamed the earth millions of years ago was considered impossible. Until very recently!

In a recent Scientific American article, Mary H. Schweitzer, a paleontologist, using a microscope, wrote how she and her assistant discovered tiny red spheres inside a slice of fossilized dinosaur bone. The slice was from a dinosaur that lived 67 million years ago. Since then, other bits of organic material such as bones, blood cells and claws have survived the ages.

Of course, at this point it is not known whether the organic material contains enough of the original DNA that was in it when the creature was alive. And even if it were, how could it be used to create a replica? But who knows? Maybe in the future some enterprising entrepreneur may open a Jurassic Park.

The Movie 2001, A Space Odyssey

2011-09-24T12:04:00.002-04:00

One of the best science-fiction movies of all time was Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey. Many people nowadays wonder what the big deal was with this movie. They have only seen it on the small screen. With digital special effects in more modern movies, the special effects seem ho-hum. In 1968, in a theatrical release, it was spectacular. I was one of the lucky ones who saw it in Cinerama in a wide-screen theater. It was nothing short of mind blowing.

The film deals with thematic elements of human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and extraterrestrial life, and is notable for its scientific realism, pioneering special effects, ambiguous imagery that is open-ended to a point approaching surrealism, sound in place of traditional narrative techniques, and minimal use of dialogue.

In my opinion such movies as Star Wars and Alien probably would not have been made were it not for the success of 2001. It was the first movie to show that a serious SF film with great special effects could draw a large audience. Perhaps one of the reasons for this was that the Apollo space program and other NASA space probes were gaining popularity. It was only a year later that Lance Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the surface of the moon. Four years later Pioneer 10 had reached the planet Jupiter.

For those of you who had never saw the movie, here is a synopsis (warning, it contains spoilers): The movie starts millions of years ago when a group of subhumans are competing with tapirs and other hominids for food. One morning a tall, thin, rectangular black monolith stands among the rocks. The ape men are excited but touch the object and calm down. By touching the monolith, they have learned to use bones as weapons and tools.

In the next scene the action moves to the near future where travel to the moon is an every day affair. A similar monolith is found on the moon and sends a signal towards Jupiter.

Eighteen months later a manned spacecraft is sent to Jupiter to investigate. Two of the team are awake to run the ship with the aid of an almost human AI called HAL. The other three are in hibernation. Hal announces that there is a problem with the AE-35 unit and it will fail with 100% certainty within 72 hours. The astronauts go EVA to replace the unit. The two astronauts scan the removed AE-35 unit but can't find any defects. Hal suggests putting it back in service to let it fail. Mission Control believes Hal has made an error because their HAL9000 unit, a twin to the one aboard Discovery, finds no flaw in the AE-35. Hal denies any chance of computer error. The astronauts go to a pod to have a private chat and decide to disable Hal's higher functions without disturbing the automatic ship control functions. Hal can see the men through the pod's window and reads their lips. When Poole goes out in the EVA pod, the pod murders him. When Dave uses a pod to recover Frank's body, a computer malfunction alert goes off and the life signs of the three hibernating astronauts flat line. Hal refuses to open the pod bay doors for Dave, explaining that he knows Dave is planning to disconnect him because he was able to read Frank and Dave's lips when they discussed it. He says the mission is too important to allow humans to jeopardize it. Dave releases Frank's body and maneuvers the pod to the emergency airlock hatch. He uses the pod's arms to open the door, holds his breath and jumps over to the ship. Dave goes to the computer room and shuts down HAL.

A much larger black monolith floats in Jupiter orbit,. Bowman leaves the Discovery in another EVA pod and enters a wormhole. The pod ends up somewhere in time and space in a bedroom with luminous white walls and floor and furniture in the style of Louis XVI. Dave ages swiftly until he is a dying old man. A monolith appears and transforms him into a star child.

If all of this sounds sort of mundane, it is because there is no way to describe the marvelous cinematography, special effects, music and emotional impact of the movie.

The idea for the movie was taken from an Arthur Clarke short story, The Sentinel. Clarke also wrote the script.

A sequel to the movie was released in 1984 called 2010: The Year We Made Contact starring Roy Schneider. The plot is based on Arthur Clarke's novel 2010: Odyssey Two.

It is a rather good movie itself, but nowhere as spectacular as 2001.

Traveling Through New England

2011-09-17T09:29:00.019-04:00

There are many places of interest to visit on the coast of New England. Out trip starts in the Hudson Valley of New York State. As we head east through Connecticut, the first place of interest we encounter is Gillette Castle, a mansion built in the form of a castle. The interior is beautiful with many interesting rooms.

Next we head east to the coast and Mystic Seaport. Mystic seaport is a recreation of a New England seaport town of the early 1800s. It includes demonstrations of the types of shops and industry such as a blacksmith shop that would be in such a village. In the bay is a recreation of the type of sailing ship of those days. That is me aboard it.

From Mystic we travel down the coast to The Breakers. Another interesting mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. The picture below the mansion shows the lovely gardens.

Also in Newport, Hammersmith Farm is where John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier were married.

Next we head north to Plymouth, Massachusetts. Here is the original Plymouth Rock.

Here my wife and two granddaughters are aboard a replica of the Mayflower.

We also went whale watching in Plymouth.

Here we are in Salem, Mass. where the famous witch trials took place. A recreation of the trials takes place on the weekends. There are also many shops displaying items associated with witchcraft and other occult stuff.

After leaving Salem, we headed for Cape Cod and Martha's Vinyard.

Driverless Cars and Other New Inovations

2011-09-10T09:07:00.002-04:00

Technology is moving so rapidly now-a-days that it's hard to keep up. Here are some of newest gadgets either in the test phase or already on the market. First off, Google (of all companies) have been testing a car that drives itself. Six specially equipped Toyota Priuses and one Audi TT have logged more than 140,000 miles from San Francisco's crooked Lombard Street to Hollywood Boulevard. They use Google's map technology as well as "video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to 'see' other traffic." (All the vehicles have an engineer in the driver's seat who can take over control at any time).

Even criminal activity using technology has picked up. Now it is easier for counterfeiters to generate fake bills. For this reason, the US Government has decided to improve the latest $100 bill yet again and make it nearly impossible to duplicate (at least for the time being). The most unique part about the future currency is that when the bill is moved from side to side, the new images on the bill will appear to move up and down. When the bill is moved up and down, the image will appear to move from side to side. The expected release date for this new $100 bill will be sometime during the year of 2011.

One of the Air Force’s latest futuristic inventions, the Pain Ray (also known as the Active Denial System), has been designed for effective crowd control measures, similar to tear gas. The “Pain Ray” emits a powerful radiation beam that causes victims to feel a burning sensation and will send people running for cover. The potent beam is strong enough to penetrate clothes and lighter defenses, but it is not quite strong enough to pierce through walls.

A new military rifle called the XM25 is equipped with smart bullets including high explosive burst, armor-piercing, door breaching, anti-personnel and non-lethal. It allows a more options in tactical situations. For example, if prisoners are to be taken, the soldier can switch to a non-lethal round. Or if they need to take out an enemy sniper protected by a building or behind a hillside, an explosive smart bullet can be fired near the location of the enemy.

Most people would not expect a car that can go from 0-60 in under 3.2 seconds to be eco-friendly in the least, but the Porsche automakers beg to differ. This future car concept, the 918 Spyder, is supposed to be one of the fastest (if not the fastest) hybrid electric car on the market. It can teach tops speeds of 200 mph and gets 78 miles per gallon – double the amount most compact cars achieve on a good day.

Microsoft has recently announced an impressive addition to their popular X-Box video game system which will replace the standard controllers. Project Natal, has built in motion sensors that allows users to act out their moves instead of having to press buttons. If you are playing a fighting game (such as Street Fighter) you will actually have to do some physical kicks and punches to defeat your opponent. This new technology is also supposed to be equipped with voice and facial recognition software.

For the past couple of years the world’s top space program NASA has been working on a future design for the very first personal flying suit. The puffin, as they call it, measures to be 12 feet in length with a 15 foot wingspan. The aircraft module would land vertically, allowing for a person to step directly into it and has blades similar to that of helicopters. The puffin concept would relatively light weight and would use electric motors, allowing for high altitudes as well as being ecology-friendly.

I wonder what's next.

Misconceptions About Science

2011-09-03T09:08:00.001-04:00

I don't know whether it's the way that science is taught inour school system, but many people have misconceptions regarding what scienceis and what it does. I believe this may be because most of what is taught inthe lower grades and high school concerns the history of science, theachievements of science and known facts that science has discovered. To me,this absolutely the wrong approach. What science really is, is a process fordiscovering the truth about ourselves, our environment and the universe ingeneral.

Like any human endeavor, to succeed it requires a method andthe proper tools. The method is really simple, it starts with observationsabout the real world, from these observations the scientist forms a hypothesis,next he or she must perform experiments to determine whether the hypothesis isvalid and true. The experiment must be repeatable by anyone using the sameequipment and the same methods.

The tool that a scientist uses depends upon the particularscience one is pursuing and the experiment required to prove or disprove thehypothesis. This may vary from simple observation, such as Jane Goodall hasdone in her study of gorillas, to sophisticated and expensive equipment suchmicroscopes, computers, particle accelerators and high powered telescopes. Theone tool used by all sciences is mathematics. It is the cornerstone on whichall science depends.

Now for the misconceptions. The first one is that any theoryput forth by science is totally correct for all time or is false. Critics ofscience often cite the fact that scientific theory is constantly changing asnew facts are learned and our equipment becomes more sophisticated. We oftenspeak of "laws," such as The Law of Gravity. This is simply amisnomer. There is no such thing as an unmodifable scientific law. Nonetheless,this does not mean the findings of science are not valid. Most of the greattheories are still correct for ninety-nine percent of the cases for which theyapply. It is only a few exceptions that cause theories to be modified.

The second great misconception is that science isanti-religion or anti-God. This is not true. It may show that what has beenwritten in the past in so-called holy books is incorrect, but it neither provesnor disproves the existence of a First Cause or Supreme Being.

People into the occult or believe in ghosts, UFOs, big foot,telepathy, etc. claim that there is a conspiracy by the scientific community toignore the evidence for the existence of such things. They have it allbackwards. It is not up to the scientific community to prove their claims, butthe people who make them to do so. For example, let us say that I claim that aghost is haunting my house. To prove this claim, I need to produce the ghostfor credible skeptical witnesses. At one time, a Professor Rhine claimed thathe had proof that mental telepathy existed in certain people. It turned outthat he fudged the results of his experiments. When others tried to duplicatehis experiments, they did not get the same results.

Another misconception is to blame science for the misuse ofthe technology that results from scientific discoveries. In the first place, scientists seldom knowwhat will result from their discoveries. Most scientific discoveries havebenefited mankind. Knowing more about the universe we live in cannot be a badthing.

How the Internet Changed Everything

2011-08-28T09:44:00.002-04:00

When I first started reading science fiction, around the age of twelve, the world was a different place. A telephone was a black instrument chained to the wall by a cord. Books had hard covers. Computers were a gleam in some scientist's eye. Even science fiction was packaged in 8 ½ by 11 magazines printed on blotting paper with garish covers on them. Getting to the moon was an impossible dream. The only people you considered your friends lived in your neighborhood, and you corresponding with people by writing a letter on paper and mailing it. Only a few people had TV sets and the shows were in black and white. Even the science-fiction writers I read could not guess the changes that would occur in the twenty-first century.

Of all the changes that have occurred since then, none changed our way of life more profoundly than the home computer and the internet. And the changes are accelerating. Who would've ever believed that one could carry around a powerful computer in your pocket? That people would read books on devices that would threaten the print book industry? And who would believe that you could get information on any subject simply by typing in the subject and clicking on an icon labeled Search? Or order any item at the lowest possible price simply by typing and clicking an the back of a gadget that looks like a bug or a mouse?

That people would be in constant touch with people they hardly know all over the world and get all the details of their lives? Or that people would spend hours in virtual worlds? Or that secrecy would come to an end where even the most repressive government cannot control what information their people receive or what secrets are revealed? Or that people would get in traffic accidents because they are typing messages while they drive? That I could talk to my daughter face-to-face even though she lives three thousand miles away? That a gadget in my car would give directions on how to go anywhere as I drive, telling me exactly when I need to turn as I approach the intersection?

And that is only the beginning of the changes that are occurring. Soon we'll have robot servants, driverless automobiles and the ability to speak to our computers instead of having to type or use a mouse. Just recently a video game allows a person to control the action by simply waving arms around. And what about the special effects in movies these days? And now 3D TV sets are available.

The digital age has ushered a new language as well. Here are few of the new words: LOL, FAQ, IM-ing, E-mailing, E-books, download, upload, web site, internet, web page, tweeting, unfriending, writing on a wall, Twitter, Facebook, Google and googling, and on and on.

It's hard to say what will be next. Today's world goes so far beyond the world of my youth that even the most imaginative SF writers of that time could not imagine it.

Las Vegas

2011-08-20T08:59:00.011-04:00

I visited Las Vegas with my wife and daughter and her family in 1996. Here are few pictures from that trip.
Land of Oz in the MGM Grand

The Luxor

T

Olive Oyl and Brutus

Knights on horseback Treasure Island

The Excaliber

Caesar's Palace

Boulder Dam

Is Anyone Out There

2011-08-13T12:22:00.002-04:00

In Science Fiction, alien races are as common as ragweed in September. Yet, although we've been listening for a while with SETI, so far we have detected no signals indicating a technological advanced race in our galaxy. There may be many reasons for this. We may be listening on the wrong frequency, the signals may be too weak to detect, something is blocking the signals, and so forth. I'm discounting the claims of UFOologists since no credible evidence has shown that an alien race has entered our solar system. Does this mean we are alone in the galaxy? A provocative question. The odds are probably that we are not. So how do we estimate the number of advanced civilizations that actually exist? That's what I intend to discuss in this article.

In the first place, there are a hundred billion stars in the galaxy. That would seem to indicate that the odds were heavily in favor of many advanced civilization existing. The question becomes what is the likelihood of an advanced civilization arising on any particular star system. A radio astronomer by the name of Frake Drake came up with the following formula for estimating the number of advanced civilizations: N = R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L

N is the number of advanced civilizations.

R* is the average rate of star formation. New stars are being born all the time. So the new additions must be calculated into the formula. Astronomical estimates vary from 2 to 20 a year.

fp is the fraction of stars having planetary system. Until recently, this number would be considered to be a low one by many astronomers. Recently, however, they've discovered that almost all stars have planets. Therefore, this number should be about 95%.

So far, we're doing pretty good. It would seem to be a lot of aliens around. But the next numbers whittled the estimate down quite a bit.

ne is the number of planets with a suitable environment that life could come into being and develop. In our own solar system, the only place that we've found is earth. The planet cannot be too cold or too hot. The moons of the outer planets are too cold, Venus is too hot. It must have liquid water. Mars, at this time, is too dry. It had liquid water in the past. Did life develop there and die out? That's what we're investigating now with our probes.

As far as an estimate for ne, all the planets that we've detected around other stars have been gas giants, which cannot possibly sustain life. But that does not mean that small earth like planets do not exist. In fact they probably do, but are too small to detect. Some moons of the gas giants may lie in a habitable zone. Still, out of a hundred billion stars, it would seem to me that at least ten percent would have earth like planets with the right ingredients to form life.

fl is the fraction of habitable planets where life actually came into being. Since modern biology seems to conclude that life would form where the conditions allow it. That would seem to make this number 100%. Not quite. The age of the earth is around 4.5 billion years old. The oldest fossil evidence for life is 3.5 billion years. This may mean that it took a billion years for life to develop. Many stars do not last that long. In fact, at least half expire in much less time. As a result, my guesstimate for this figure would be 50%.

fi is the fraction having intelligent life. This is a tough one. It took about 3.5 billion years for life to evolve into us. Along the way, there were several times when the prevalent life was almost wiped out; some say by giant meteors crashing into earth. What if the dinosaurs had not been wiped out by some catastrophe? Would they have developed intelligence? No one knows. It is very possible that many planets in the galaxy have life forms, but not with enough intelligence to develop sophisticated technology. This must be a very small number.

fc is the fraction having advanced technology. Again, human beings evolved from ape-like creatures around a million years ago. It took us to a million years to develop a technology capable of space travel and radio telescopes. This number is the fraction of intelligent beings having this capability at any given time.

A small digression. Stellar distances are so great that chances are that if we did receive a signal from an alien species, the signal could be as much as 50,000 years old. The aliens who broadcast it might have perished eons ago.

Which brings us to L, which is the average lifetime of an intelligent species. During the 1950s we came close to destroying ourselves in an atomic war. Many believe that we will pollute ourselves to extinction. A comet or asteroid could crash into the earth and destroy us. A terrible unstoppable plague could wipe us out. As you can see, intelligent species can perish. How often this happens is anyone's guess. Once advanced technology is reached, how long does an intelligent species last? Millions of years? Thousands? Hundreds? Tens? Your guess is as good as mine. So far we've managed to survive the twentieth century. Can we survive the twenty-first?

For more information on Drake's equation and the possibility of life in other star systems, go to the web site Astrobiology, which has, among a wealth of information, a calculator where you can plug in various numbers to determine how many possible alien civilizations exist in the Milky Way galaxy using various parameters.

What Would ETs Look Like

2011-08-06T17:39:00.002-04:00

As a long time science-fiction fan, I've often speculated on what an intelligent extraterrestrial being would really be like (if they exist at all). Would they be similar to human beings "with warts" as many movie and TV shows such as Star Trek, Star Wars and Babylon 5 depict them? Or would they be completely different, perhaps big fat grubs like Jaba the Hut, have octopus heads such as the writer H. P. Lovecraft's stories pictured them or have long skinny humanoid bodies, big eyes and no nose as many UFOologists claim? In this blog I'd like to give my opinions based on the latest scientific information.

First let us consider all the diverse types of life that have existed on our own planet throughout the three billion years since life first appeared. In size, living things vary from the microscopic to such gargantuan forms as whales, mastodons and brontosaurus. Life is everywhere, in deserts, seas and forests, even in volcanic vents, arctic climates and underground; each form adapted to its environment. Also, as conditions changed, the forms changed. For example, some animals whose ancestors walked on solid ground have evolved into sea creatures. It would seem then that life on a planet with completely different parameters would evolve into completely different forms. Or would it? Under different conditions, similar types of creatures have appeared. One example is a one horned thick legged herbivore such as Rhinos and Triceratops, one being a mammal, the other a dinosaur.

But what are the chances of a creature evolving that would be as intelligent as us or perhaps even more intelligent? Animals such as dolphins and whales have larger brains and may be as intelligent. Nonetheless, they are not capable of producing technology and probably never will.

The question remains. Would aliens be animals, plants or have characteristics of both? Would they have arms and legs and walk upright as we do? Would they depend upon vision as their primary sense or use another way to gather information about their surroundings? Would they "breathe" oxygen or some other gas?

First let's take a look at how evolution by natural selection (Darwinism) actually works. The basic rules governing whether species arise, live, remain unchanged or become extinct are those of evolution by natural selection as proposed by Charles Darwin. According to Darwin's Theory of Evolution, similar organisms reproduce similar organisms -- a dog reproduces a dog, a dandelion reproduces dandelions and a fish reproduces a fish. Often, the number of offspring are overproduced such that the number that survive is fewer than the number reproduced. In any population, individuals vary with respect to any given trait, such as height, skin color, fur color or shape of beaks, and these variations can be passed on to the next generation. Some variations are favorable, in that they make those individuals best-suited to their environment, and some are not. Those organisms with favorable variations will survive and pass those traits on to their offspring; those individuals with unfavorable variations will die before producing new individuals. Hence they would not pass on their traits. This is natural selection. Given sufficient time, natural selection accumulate favorable or neutral traits so that a new species evolves.

Using what we have learned from life on Earth, what can we say about alien life? While it may be vastly different from life on Earth, it must follow certain universal guidelines dictated by the laws of physics and chemistry. It must consist mainly of some sort of solvent. On Earth, the solvent used by life forms is liquid water. Other chemicals, such as ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide or hydrogen fluoride, could be the solvent in an alien life form.

Living things require temperatures and pressures at which its solvent remains liquid and need energy to remain organized. Most things on earth are powered by sunlight either directly or indirectly. An alien world, in order to sustain life, must have a source of energy, whether it be sunlight or other energy source.

On Earth living things are made of complex, carbon-based molecules that carry out biochemical functions. DNA molecules contain genetic information and direct the formation of other molecules to allow life to reproduce and function. Alien life forms must also have some type of informational molecule. Carbon can form bonds with up to four other atoms, in many shapes, to make many types of molecules. Although silicon is not as versatile as carbon, it can also form up to four bonds with other atoms and has been proposed as a basis for molecules of alien life, if the environment were such that silicon was more abundant than carbon. Alien beings larger than microbes must be multicelled.

The physiological make-up of a multicelled alien must be suited to its environment. Internal systems would be adapted to environmental conditions such as temperature, moisture and gravity. The alien must bring solids, liquids and gases inside its body, distribute them to every cell and remove waste products.

The alien must have senses to obtain information from the environment and respond to stimuli. They must also have the equivalent of a brain and a nervous system to process information. They must also have a means of reproduction of their species.

Alien organisms would probably have similar ecological structures to life on Earth. Population sizes would be limited based on the amount and type of food, predators, disease and other environmental factors. Just as life on Earth, alien life forms would exist in food chains and food webs in their native environment. Life forms similar to plants will create food that other life forms such as herbivores and omnivores will eat. There may be carnivores that eat other animals. Life forms such as bacteria are needed to recycle dead organisms into the environment.

Life of any kind is intimately tied to its environment. The characteristics of the planet would be extremely important in determining the characteristics of the life forms that exist on it..

Now what about the life form we are most interested in, an ET intelligent enough to use and create a high-level of technology? In the long evolution of animal life on earth, some characteristic are universal and appear in many species, such as limbs and eyes. Other characteristics such as hair, hands with fingers, skin coloring, the mechanics of sex, and so forth are arbitrary and appears in some species and not others. One of these are brains with the capability to produce advanced technology. In three and half billion years of evolution, such intelligence has appeared in a species only a couple of million of years ago, a very short time in evolutionary terms.

The design of any animal is toward survival in its environment. These designs can be arrived at via different evolutionary routes. For instance, predators in the ocean have a survival advantage if they swim fast. Consequently many of them have a torpedo shape, simply because this streamlined form gives them a better chance at snagging a dinner or escape being eaten. Dolphins and barracudas look similar in silhouette, although they evolved from very different forebears. Their shapes are the result of convergent evolution.

Some biologists have suggested that the same may be true of humans and extraterrestrial life -- that the human body plan is a good design for an intelligent creature. We have arms terminated by little hands that are useful for writing and using tools. We have two eyes with overlapping vision, which provides three-dimensional views of the world. Such vision aids in the use of tools. The eyes are located high up, which allows us to peer over grass and brush to find a mate, a meal or an approaching enemy. There are many more such traits. Humans, in many ways, are a reasonably functional design for a technically sophisticated creature.

I cannot conclude that humans are the best design (although some people insist that we are not). An intelligent technologically advanced ET may resemble us, but not exactly. After all, an extra set of arms might be useful, as would an eye in the back of our heads. A double spine might allow faster and easier walking, and a few extra digits on each hand could make for better tool use or piano playing. Any technologically advanced ET would probably have some features in common with us (two eyes, instead of one, for instance). Intelligent extraterrestrials may look vaguely humanoid, but no more than vaguely. So, perhaps the TV show and movies have it right. ETs will probably resemble humans with warts.

Maui

2011-07-30T12:04:00.012-04:00

When my daughter married her second husband, his parents, my wife and I were invited along on their honeymoon on Maui. It was a great fun trip. The Hawaiian Islands are a wonderful place to take a vacation. One of the best things about our stay in Maui was the hotel. The lobby was partially outdoors. Across from the front desk was a pond with goldfish and a waterfall.

There is a path that winds its way between the five swimming pools and lovely gardens. This picture was taken on the path.

Here is the view from our room.

The mountains in the picture are volcanic. Next are some scenes driving up them. First is the astronomical observatory. The second is the caldera of the volcano.

And of course there is the Pacific Ocean. One of the fun things to do is to take a ride on a catamaran.

Another is to watch the breakers hit the rocks.

A couple of local men caught an octopus.

And I'll end this with a beautiful sunset.

Seattle Washington 1978

2011-07-09T11:50:00.011-04:00

One of my daughters lives in Seattle, Washington, a great place to visit. The following pictures were taken on one of the trips to visit her. Above is a view of downtown Seattle. The locks are between Lake Washington and Puget Sound.

We visited a Bavarian Village in Leavenworth. Leavenworth was once the center of logging and sawmill industries. When the railroad was rerouted, it became a dying community. To save the town in the 1960s, the community leaders to change the appearance to that of an Alpine village. They remodeled the downtown area into a the illusion of Bavaria. Since then the town has a thriving tourist industry.

And of course, no trip to Seattle would be complete without a visit to Mount Rainier. Here are three pictures taken from different points on the way and on the mountain. In the last three, my daughters are sitting on part of the mountain.

We also visited a game farm where the animals run loose and the people view them from their cars. As you can see, the animals are curious too.

Germany Trip

2011-07-02T17:50:00.012-04:00

In 1976, my wife, daughters and I visited my oldest daughter and her first husband, who was stationed at Kaiserlautern, Germany. My ex-son-in-law and I hired a van, and we toured several interesting tourist attractions. We also took a bus tour of Paris and the French wine country. Here is a picture of the Arc de Triumphe.

We visited with old and new German friends. Here we are enjoying a meal together.

Afterwards we began our drive tour. The first place we visited was Heidelberg. Here is the ruined castle on the bluffs overlooking the Rhein River.

We continued southeast on what is known as the Romantic Road (Romantikstrasse). Here we are standing in front of a wood carving shop in the village of wood carvers. The altar in the local church is beautifully carved from wood.

Here is the beautiful fairy castle built by King Ludwig in 1832 called Neuschweinstein Castle. It is open to tourists to view the gorgeous interior.

Also on the Romantic Road is a medieval walled village.

We also visited the city of Munich. There are two must sees in Munich. The Glockenspiel is a clock on the city hall in the middle of the central square which has figures that appear and march around the clock as it strikes the hour.

The second is The Hoffbrau Haus, famous for its beer and potato pancakes.

We continued our tour by driving up to the Zugpitz, the highest mountain in Germany in the Alps.

Finally, we drove into Austria. There we enjoyed awesome scenery and visited Innsbruck, the site of the 1976 Winter Olympics.

Southern Vacation Trip

2011-06-25T10:43:00.012-04:00

I live in New York State. One year my wife and I visited Florida and other Dixie locations. Here are some pictures of the trip.
The first one is of a swimming pool in a hotel we stayed in at Tampa while attending a wedding.

On that same trip we visited a zoo where the animals roam free.

One year we visited the Kennedy Space Center. This is a place every American should visit at least once in their lifetime.

One of my favorite places to visit is Key West. I loved the pool at our hotel. You could see the ocean while swimming in fresh water. Next to it was a bar with drinks and snacks.

At Key West we visited the most southernmost point of the U.S. On clear days, they say you can see Cuba from here.

We also toured Ernest Hemingway's home. Here is the view from his porch. Hemingway loved cats. He had a special breed which still roam the house and are cared for by the caretakers. One of Hemingway's favorite hangouts was Sloppy Joe's bar.

On the return trip, we visited Stone Mountain in Georgia. This is the south's Mount Rushmore. The hero's of the Confederacy are carved on an enormous granite rock. In addition, there are exhibits of life before the Civil War. At night, a marvelous laser light show is put on.

We also visited a mansion in North Carolina

and Mammoth Cave in Kentucky

Future Cities

2011-06-18T18:15:00.002-04:00

According to an article from World Culture Report, at the beginning of the twentieth century, ten per cent of the world's population lived in an urban environment. Currently, half of the world's population live in cities. Also, there are 59 cities with populations over 5 million, 37 over 7 million, and 24 over 10 million. Six cities have populations over 20 million people: Tokyo 34 million, Cuidad de Mexico 22.3 million, Seoul, South Korea 22 million, New York 21.8 million, and Sao Paulo, Brazil 20 million. If the trend continues, soon most people will live in cities. With so much of the world's population in urban areas, it is interesting to speculate what the cities of the future may be like.

One of the trends in the United States is for cities to spread so that in certain areas there is almost one continuous urban area for long distances. For example, on the East Coast from Boston through northern New Jersey is practically one long city. Again according to World Culture Report, four problems beset cities at this time: high unemployment, inadequately maintained infrastructure, environmental problems and social conflicts such as crime and homelessness. These trends are reflected in my novel of the future, Star Tower. Here is an excerpt. The protagonist, John Huck, has just returned from the space war as a dishonorably discharged veteran.

His weight increased slightly as the pilot fired braking thrusters. There was the fiery descent through the upper atmosphere and finally an increase in cabin pressure that hurt his ears as the ship passed through the cloud layer. He glanced out of his window. From horizon to horizon was Federation City, a million twinkling rainbow lights, some moving, some still. Glowing towers split the sky like a macrogiant's fairy castle. It was so enormous and beautiful, he choked up. The thought came to him that the teeming multitude who lived in this sea of jeweled splendor would never see it like this -- rubies, diamonds, emeralds and topazes for hundreds of miles along the Atlantic shore.

A few hours later he emerged from a filthy subway station and thought how false was that vision from a mile up. If the megalopolis was a jeweled fairyland from the air, at ground level it was a garbage-strewn, dark and dingy, troll cavern. From an ugly gray sky a heavy sulfur-laden rain swept discarded scraps of paper, cigarette butts, orange peelings, wilted lettuce leaves, condoms and other garbage in torrential streams along the gutter. Like canyon walls dark chipped concrete buildings, lower floors covered with graffiti, rose for fifteen or more stories. Huck shifted his bag to his other shoulder. With his head down against the icy downpour, he hurried down the dingy puddle-strewn sidewalk past doorways where shabby women and men huddled from the rain to stare sullenly at each passerby. They stood with arms wrapped around themselves and watched with hopeless eyes the dirty rain that fell into the gutter like their dreams. Others lay curled up or rested their heads on their knees with drug induced visions.

Some ragged children, a lone housewife and one elderly man with an umbrella braved the driving rain. Huck's eyes smarted and his nose twitched from the street's ugly odors, an unnatural fog of smoke, urine, bad cooking and other stomach churning fumes. He wondered how he had survived this awful place before he went to the space academy.

When he reached the more crowded commercial section, he was jostled by filthy, worn men and women some who had with open sores and dark diseased blotches on their faces, stumbled into by those who swayed with vacant drug-narrowed eyes and shoved aside by belligerent bands of youths who laughed at his grimace. He was well aware that these latter would like nothing better than for him to exhibit his annoyance. It would provide the excuse they needed to wield the iron pipes and bars they carried in clenched fists. He also knew that they concealed more potent weapons in their clothing.

But not everyone's vision of the cities in the future is so bleak. During National Engineer's Week, many cities hold a Future City competition. In a national competition, seventh and eight graders compete. Here are some of their ideas: A floating city complete with entertainment, recreation and medical center. A city powered by hydrogen. A domed city on Mars. Cities with environmentally friendly magnetically levitated trains. The things that these participants had to consider were water supply, public and private transportation local and long distance, entertainment and sport arenas, technology center, communications center, waste disposal and permanent open spaces such as parks and recreational facilities.

In my wandering around the web, I ran across two interesting sites. One was called The Venus Project where there was an article about Cities That Think. I have written short stories about a place called Automatia. In Automatia, everything was automated, and robots performed all the menial tasks. Of course, in my stories, when things went wrong, they went spectacularly wrong. In one, a man is trapped in his apartment when the machines stop working. In another, a misunderstood command causes robots to accidentally kill hundreds of people.

The most interesting web site I visited while researching this article was Future Past. It showed how futurists, visionaries, architects and science fiction writers in the twentieth century envisioned the city of the twenty-first. It's a hoot. Visit this site. You'll enjoy it.

Visit to Chicago

2011-06-11T18:00:00.010-04:00

One of my favorite places to visit is my original home town, Chicago. This is a city that has a thousand things to do and is beautiful besides. Here we are entering the city over the Chicago Skyway.

During this particular visit our motel was only a short walk to Lake Michigan. Here is a view from that location, looking south towards the loop.

A must thing to do while in Chicago is to go to the observatory of one of the skyscrapers. Here we are at the top of the Hancock Building.

Another must thing is to take the river and lake cruise which you can catch at Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive.

Navy Pier is fun with its amusement places, street musicians, restaurants, boat tours and a fifteen story tall Ferris wheel.

A great place to bring your kids is the Museum of Science and Industry. The exhibits are hands-on and very educational. It also features a mock trip to a coal mine.

Another great place is the museum complex on Roosevelt Road. It includes the Field Museum of Natural History, a planetarium and the Shedd Aquarium. Here is a scene from the dolphin show at the aquarium.

Another great place to spend the day with your family is LincolnPark. In addition to spacious grassy areas, it has the Lincoln Park Zoo, Lincoln Park Conservatory, an outdoor theatre, a rowing canal, the Chicago History Museum, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, ponds, North Avenue Beach, playing fields, and a very prominent statue of General Grant (and many other statues). Here is a photo taken in Lincoln Park Zoo.

Fad Words, Bad Words

2011-06-04T17:42:00.003-04:00

As a writer I make it my business to be aware of the way words are used. For example, certain words and phrases come in and out of fashion. Last year it was "awesome." You don't hear that much anymore. It's been replaced by "amazing." When I was a young man and a pretty girl walked by, we might say "hubba, hubba." Weird and silly, no? In modern times, it seems that the expletive "f—king" has become an all-purpose adjective with no meaning. I'm kind of sorry that it has become so prevalent. It has lost the impact that it used to have. Not many people are shocked by its use anymore.

This brings me to my second topic, bad words. I have to wonder what makes a particular word considered naughty. For example, in the paragraph above, I did not spell out the word "f—king" completely so as to not shock the sensibilities of anyone reading this. What is strange about this is that most of its synonyms such as fornicating, making love, having sexual intercourse, screwing, copulate and so forth are not bleeped on TV. The same is true to references to a part of the female anatomy. Vagina is okay, but c—t is a no-no. I don't know of any bleeped words for the equivalent organ on a man, although there are many slang words for penis, such as dick, prick, dong, wang and willie. S—t is a not allowed, but excrement, manure, poop and so forth are not. Why?

The way all this is handled on TV is ridiculous. Bleeping the word out or replacing it with an innocuous similar sounding word is silly. Everyone knows what is meant; so why not come right out and say it. Most children by the time they are seven or eight have heard the words if not from their parents, from other adult and older children. Many are confused when they are chastised for saying what is commonly bandied about.

Do I use these words in my writing? Sparsely. Only when a character's personality is such that he or she would use such words. In a satire I wrote, I had a character that uses expletives quite frequently, but would not use the actual world but its synonym. He would say things like, "You fornicating so and so." Also, he would chastize other people when they would use the "bad" words.

Drowning in Advertisement

2011-05-21T13:48:00.002-04:00

If you take a ride in the country in Europe, to an American it seems like something is missing. Finally you realize what it is. There are no billboards to spoil the scenery. Nowhere except in America are people inundated with propaganda night and day. What is worse, because we've become so used to being overwhelmed with the stuff, Madison Avenue and others keeps thinking up more ways to get our attention to buy their products.

Take the Sunday newspaper, for example. My paper delivery person struggles under the heavy load of thick bundles of newsprint. After I take out all the ads, about five thin sheets are left and even those have advertisements on them. Every day, when I go to my mailbox, I pull out tons of junk mail, most of which goes directly into the recycling bin. Out of every hour of television being broadcast, twenty minutes is devoted to advertising. And even when no commercials are on, shows like the morning network news are mostly devoted to demonstrating various products or are come-ons for new movies or TV shows. Even theaters that show movies now put on ads before the feature. Video tapes and DVDs contain advertisements.

And the Internet is almost all advertising. When I go to get my E-mail, besides the usual tons of Spam, there are pop-up ads that cover the ads already on the web site. Does that make sense? Now, with everyone having a cell phone glued to their ears, I'm sure someone will find a way to broadcast commercials during lulls in the conversation.

Don't get me started on telemarketers. They invariably call in the middle of a meal. When you tell them that you're not interested, they keep on talking. Then they wonder why you hang up.

Yes, we Americans are drowning in advertising, which inspired me to write a short story called Psychic Pop-Up. Read it. If advertisers could do what the marketeers in my story do, they certainly would.

Psychic Pop-Up

by Joe Vadalma

(First appeared in Planet Magazine, Sept. 2003)

George Slimey was somewhat daunted by Pricella Lucretia, vice-president of sales of the Pharmaceutical Institute Laboratories Ltd., his largest client. She had jet black hair twisted into a complicated bun, a pinstriped power business suit over her overabundant curves, thick red lipstick in a mouth twisted into an expression of contempt and mascara laid on so thick her eyes seemed sunken in her pale skin. There was something almost demon-like about her. She lit up one of her skinny evil-smelling cigars with a gold lighter. She pointed it at Slimey. "What we want are results. Not bee ess. Despite all the money we've tossed down the drain, your ad campaign, flashy as it is, has not done anything for sales on Perkup. In fact, last months sales dropped to their lowest point. This is your last chance, Slimey. Next month we move to another agency."

The product she alluded to was a dietary supplement which was touted as a pill that energized a person, gave them feelings of well-being, ensured rapid weight-loss without dieting or exercise, lowered cholesterol, rid the person of wrinkles, improved sexual performance and slowed aging. Actually, no valid scientific tests except PILL's own lab reports had ever shown that it did any of those things. On the other hand, the side effects were horrendous, dry mouth, palpitations, itchy rashes, stomach cramps, diarrhea, possible blood clots leading to heart attack or stroke. Although it had been hushed up by handing large sums of money to their relatives, two healthy test subjects had died twenty-four hours after taking it. Originally it had been developed as a chemotherapy agent to fight colon cancer. Not only was it ineffective in fighting the disease, the cancer cells actually seemed to spread faster with its use. Also its effect on the patients was devastating; some autopsy results seemed to show that the people who had been taking it, might've died, not from the cancer, but from the product. Since PILL had produced an over abundance of the substance, upper management decided to market it as a supplement.

Slimey rolled his eyes and smiled sickly. "You must give us time, Pricella ..."

"I don't like familiarities from business associates. Ms. Lucretia, if you please." She puffed out black smoke into Slimey's face.

"Yes, of course. I'm sorry. But, as I was saying, we need to get the campaign rolling."

"So you say." Her face became as red and ugly as a lobster with outrage. Smoke from her cigar curled around her head to form horns. When she opened her mouth, her pointed bicuspids seemed extra long, and her tongue flicked in and out like a snake's. "As I said, because you've done well in the past, we're allowing you an extra month. If sales don't improve by a week from today, it's ..." She slid her forefinger with its long sharp nail across her windpipe.

Slimey wiped perspiration from his brow. "Don't worry, Pri... Ms. Lucretia, Slimey Enterprises has never let a client down."

***

After Lucretia left, Slimey called Robert Kissheiny, the account executive, into his office. "Bob, how's everything going with the PILL account?"

Kissheiny smiled pleasantly. "Splendidly, George. Things couldn't be better."

Slimey pounded his fist on the desk. "Crap. That evil female, Pricella Lucretia, was just here." He shook a finger at Kissheiny. "She complained that sales have been awful on Perkup."

Kissheiny's face drooped until he resembled an aging bloodhound. "Oh, Perkup. Sorry George, I thought you meant their other products."

"Look Bob, PILL is our largest client, and Perkup is the product they want results on. I placed you in charge because I thought you were our most competent ad exec. If we lose this client, not only will you be out on the street, but I'll personally see that you never work in advertising again. What exactly is the problem?"

Kissheiny looked about to burst into tears. "It's the product itself, Mister Slimey. Word has sort of leaked out about its ... uh ... less desirable characteristics. We've tried everything to laud its marvelous curative powers. We've run humorous ads on TV day and night -- including, mind you -- during the Super Bowl, put full size spreads in newspapers and magazine, had telemarketers call people at all hours of the day and night, put pop-up ads that are impossible to suppress on all the most popular web sites, and constructed huge billboards on all the most scenic highways. Our salesman have lavished huge gifts on physicians in every major city to recommend Perkup to their patients. We even tried sky writing. Nothing seems to work."

Slimey rubbed his chin. "The trouble is that none of those things actually make the consumer buy the product. Some of our surveys seem to show that people resent saturation advertising for some reason. I don't know what this country is coming to. Anyway, the onus is on you, Kissheiny. You've got to come up with some new ideas. Or else ..." He slid a finger across his Adam's apple.

***

Kissheiny spent the rest of the afternoon at his desk staring out the window, hardly moving except to chain smoke several packs of cigarettes. He knew his career was in the toilet. He'd tried every approach he could think of to sell that poison, Perkup. By next month, there would be no more six digit salary, no more luxury limo complete with driver, no more wood paneled office with its own bathroom and shower, no more thousand dollar tailored suits, no more dates with beautiful models. He'd be back on the streets selling cheap watches out of a suitcase. He racked his brain for some new method to get the public to buy Perkup, but came up empty.

He unlocked the bottom left hand drawer of his desk and slid it open. He stared into it at the items lying there; a revolver, a package of shells for it, and a bottle of Jack Daniels. He took out the whiskey, took a big pull and replaced it. He removed the pistol and shells, slowly loaded the pistol and raised it to his head. Before he could squeeze the trigger, his secretary buzzed him. "Yes, Doris," he said in a quaking voice.

"There's a woman here to see you. A Madam Zolarago. She says she has an appointment, but I can't find her listed on your calendar."

Madam Zolarago, he thought. He'd forgotten that he'd made an appointment with a new psychic. He was a great believer in astrology and the occult and often visited psychics. Quickly, he put the gun away and locked the drawer. "Send her in."

Madam Zolarago was a middle-aged woman on the plump side with enormous breasts, wearing too much jewelry, too much makeup and unfashionable garments. Thick black unruly hair hung to her waist. Dark eyes gazed intensely at Kissheiny in a way that made him uncomfortable so that he had to turn away.

Nonetheless, he rose and put out his hand. "Good afternoon, Madam Zolargo. I'm sorry, but I almost forgotten our appointment. I've had a lot of things on my mind lately."

As she shook his hand with pointed carmine nails like stilettos, she said, "I see that Mister Kissheiny. You seem to be a troubled man. Your aura is very dark."

"You're quite right. Some business problems ..."

She plumped down in a guest chair without being asked. "Perhaps I can help. Although I sense a troubled soul, I see a great light in your future. Sometimes things seem darkest just before the dawn -- as the adage goes."

Her saying that seemed to take some of horror of his situation off his shoulders. Perhaps she was right. What was it that Slimey was always saying? Oh yes. There are no problems, only opportunities. If he could come up with a unique method for getting people to purchase Perkup, he'd be a hero, probably get a huge bonus of stock options. If Madam Zolarago could predict the future, maybe she saw the solution.

After swearing her to secrecy, he told her his dilemma with Perkup.

She placed her fingers to her temple and went into a trance. After a few moments, she opened her eyes. "Yes, that's it. You must see Professor Belial at the university."

"Professor Belial?"

"Yes. He's a friend of mine. You may mention my name. He has something. I'm not sure what it is exactly. But I have a vision. In my vision, I see a look of delight on both your faces when he tells you of his discovery."

Kissheiny became excited. He hoped she was right ... but of course, she was right. After all, she was a medium with an excellent reputation among true believers like himself. "Really? Thank you, Madam Zolarago. By the way, how much is your fee?"

She waved her hand. "I never charge a fee. I simply enjoy helping people. Of course, if you would like to give a donation to my nonprofit organization."

"Of course, of course. How shall I make out the check?"

"Madam Zolargo's Psychic Institute."

He was feeling expansive and wrote the check out for a substantial amount. He felt as though Madam Zolargo had saved his life.

***

Professor Belial's office was in an obscure corner of the university, in a basement actually, after Kissheiny made his way through a labyrinth of corridors, laboratories and stairwells. The room itself was gloomy and a mess. Hundreds of ancient books lined the walls and spilled over onto the floor. Belial's desk was covered with them along with charts, strange talismans, broken pencils and a large magnifying glass. Belial himself, as he stood to greet Kissheiny, was tall with shoulder-length brown hair, a VanDyck style beard and mustache, elf-like ears and the most penetrating eyes Kissheiny had ever seen under bushy eyebrows.

"Madam Zolargo recommended you to me," Kissheiny said after their initial greetings.

"Yes, she told me." Belial's voice was a deep baritone that somehow seemed to fit his sharp features and cruel mouth. "Are you interested in the supernatural, Mister Kissheiny? That is what I do, y'know. Psychic research."

"I am, but she told me that you've made a recent discovery that may help me in my business."

"May I ask what business you're in?"

"Advertising. I'm an account executive at an agency."

Belial stroked his beard. "Yes, I suppose that my discovery could be an aid in your business. I never thought of it in practical terms before. I was simply doing pure research."

Kissheiny brightened up considerably. Perhaps Madam Zolargo had been right. He had been having doubts. "What's this discovery?"

"Are you familiar with the term, human aura?"

"Yes, it's like emanations given off by the soul."

"Actually the aura and the soul are the same thing. But, as you say, it gives off emanations. In people with strong ESP potential, these emanations can be intercepted by them. I have found that these emanations can be amplified to the point that thought transfer or telepathy can be done by anyone through my Psychic Enhancer. Would you like to experience a demonstration?"

"Yes. Of course." Kissheiny felt that this all very interesting, but he wondered how it could help him sell Perkup.

Belial went to a cabinet and brought a metallic box that contained several dials and meters. He plugged it in a wall socket and attached an aluminum band which he placed on his head. Suddenly, a voice in Kissheiny's mind said, "Are you receiving my thoughts?"

"Oh my! That's something. It's as though you were speaking directly to my brain."

"Not you brain, your aura," the voice in his head said.

Belial removed the band and turned off the machine. "Well, what do you think?"

An idea began to form in Kissheiny's mind. "Suppose this enhancer of yours was increased in power, could it direct your thoughts to several people -- at say a great distance?"

Belial twisted his mustache. "I imagine so. I've never tried. It would be an interesting experiment though."

"How would you like to become a millionaire?"

"A millionaire? Surely, you're joking."

"No. If it can do what I think it can do, you and I will be rolling in dough."

Kissheiny put Belial on the company payroll as a consultant. He hired an engineering firm to build a duplicate of Belial's machine only with a thousand times more power. It was ready in a week.

***

Robert Drudge was at his desk shuffling papers from his in-box to his out-box, when a sudden thought came to him out of the blue, almost like a voice in his head. It said, "Want to improve yourself. Get a better job. Take Perkup." Right after work, he went to the pharmacy around the corner.

Oliver Crude and his mistress were going at it hot and heavy in a hotel room. It was taking him a while to get to the point of the whole thing, when suddenly he rolled off of her and cried, "I know what I need. Some Perkup. I'll be back in a little while, baby. There's something I have to get at the drugstore."

Hundreds of similar scenes were happening all over the city. Pharmacies and other stores that sold Perkup were getting more customers than they could handle and soon ran out of the supplement. Orders came into PILL faster than they could be filled. The manufacturing division went to three shifts to keep up. Doctors' offices were jammed with patients with symptoms described in the small print on the Perkup labels. Several seemingly healthy people died suddenly from a mysterious malady that had health officials scratching their heads.

***

Pricella Lucretia flicked ashes somewhere near the tray on Slimey's desk. "Well Slimey, I have to congratulate you. Your ad campaign is finally doing some good. Bring out your contract, I'm ready to sign for another year. In fact, we've got a new product in the works called Zoom which we'll have ready to market as soon as we have the bugs to worked out. We had to fire the head of the research staff. He kept putting out reports that said that Zoom was dangerous even to handle. Can you beat that? What a fool."

"Yes. Good help is hard to get. Some people choose integrity above company loyalty. Not my employees though. I weed out the bad apples quickly. As far as our ad campaign, far be from me to crow, but it was simply a matter of a new approach that I came up with the account exec."

Actually Slimey had no idea how Kissheiny had turned things around. He made a note to ask him soon. He slid the new contract over to Lucretia. She read it over carefully and placed it on the desk to sign. As Slimey handed her a pen, she suddenly put her hand to her head and looked pained.

"What's the matter, Pricella? Aren't you feeling well?"

She grimaced at him. "I've got to see my psychiatrist. Lately I've been hearing voices in my head telling me to take Perkup. I must be having a breakdown." She quickly signed the contract and left the office in such a hurry that Slimey didn't have time to tell her that he had also been hearing voices. I wonder who her shrink is, he thought. Maybe I should see one too. It's the stress of this job. It gets to you after a while.

***

After the success of Perkup, Kissheiny realized what a gold mine he really had with Belial's invention. Any product could be sold that way. People could ignore TV, radio and newspaper ads, hang up on telemarketers and buy antipopup software for their computers, but they could not ignore what was in their heads. He resigned Slimey Marketing and opened a new ad agency in partnership with Belial called Psychic Advertising Industries Network (PAIN for short). When word got around about his success with PILL's premier product, clients by the hundreds waited outside his door to sign up.

At first he kept the Psychic Enhancer a secret, but soon industrial spies obtained the plans. Their employers made incremental improvements to get around patent infringements and began their own mental ad campaigns. Before long, everything was advertised in this manner. This had a disastrous effect on civilization. People's head became filled with slogans and jingles and nothing else. No one could think of anything else but the crazy ads in their brain, which became more numerous, louder and more insane every day.

And that's the true story of how twenty-first century civilization ended -- not with the holocaust of an atomic war, not with a mile long meteor slamming into New York City, not with coastal cities being inundated by the rising of the oceans, not with people gasping for breaths due to pollution from automobiles and industrial plants, but by walking around like zombies unable to think about anything except soda pop, hamburgers, stomach remedies, sexy cars and other products that filled their otherwise empty heads.

Actually, not much had changed from before the Psychic Enhancer came into general use.

The End

How My Morgaine Series Grew

2011-05-17T17:44:00.002-04:00

I thought maybe some of you might be interested in how my Morgaine Series of novels became a series. It started with a song, Dancing in the Moonlight. When I heard that song, I pictured Wiccans or some other new age group in a meadow in the forest having some sort of ritual. I thought, Suppose an ordinary person became somehow involved with such a group by fate, not by choice. So I created Melody Trent, a young widow, who falls in love with a psychic, Michael Ellul. But, who is this Michael? I decided to make him a thousand year old sorcerer who had been granted this extended life by a demon. I figured that Melody should have a rival for Michael's affection, so I created Morgaine Fabiano, a witch. I threw in some other complications such as Isaac the robot and soon I had a novel, which I titled Dancing in the Moonlight.

When I found a publisher for it, it was an E-book publisher, Renaissance E-Books. The publisher thought it was too long for an E-book. She wanted me to split it into two novels, which I did. They became the first two novels in the series, Morgaine and Michael, and Morgaine and Melody.

I was not quite satisfied with the ending. I thought to myself, What is going to happen when Melody ages and Michael remains youthful? It seems like he would disappear from her life after a while. Perhaps he would seek a means to restore her youth so that she would remain his lover and companion through the long centuries. And what would Melody do when he disappears? Hunt for him, of course. Well, she couldn't do this herself, so she hires Raven Lenore, a tough PI and Wiccan (a witch to catch a wizard). And of course, Morgaine has to fit into the story somehow. She returns as demon in order to somehow regain the love of Michael. Mix in a meglomaniac out to steal Michael's robot, and viola, you have Morgaine and Raven, a suspense thriller.

In the next novel, I told the story of how Morgaine became a witch in the first place, and how she met Michael for the first and second times, and from her point of view, why she did the things she did. Alas, this also turned out to be too long and had to be split into two books, Morgaine and Gretchen, and Morgaine and Asmodeus.

As a writer of science-fiction and fantasy, one of the things that's great fun to write about is the end of the world. I used the Book of Revelations of the Bible as a sort of outline plus some stuff from the internet about Armageddon, included the possibility of earth being struck by a gigantic meteorite, threw in Frankenstein, Dracula and various demons, bad guys, aliens and other strange characters. And of course the schemes of Morgaine played a big part. This weird mix became Morgaine and Armageddon.

At that point, I thought I was done with Morgaine and company. But then I thought, With all the strange things that had happened at Moonwood (Michael's mansion in the country), it would make a great background for a haunted house story. So I invented two new characters, a young engaged couple, Tom and Bridget, who were hired as contractors to repair the mansion. Of course, Morgaine and various demons and ghosts make life at Moonwood hell for the couple. I called this book Morgaine and Moonwood. My sequal to this is what happens after Bridget has the baby that she conceived when she was raped by the demon Asmodeus. This was to be the final book of the series and was called Morgaine and Nicholas. Nonetheless, I followed it up with Morgaine and the Necromancer.

Driverless Cars

2011-05-14T18:04:00.001-04:00

I wonder what's next.

Misconceptions About Science

2011-04-30T11:42:00.001-04:00

I don't know whether it's the way that science is taught in our school system, but many people have misconceptions regarding what science is and what it does. I believe this may be because most of what is taught in the lower grades and high school concerns the history of science, the achievements of science and known facts that science has discovered. To me, this absolutely the wrong approach. What science really is, is a process for discovering the truth about ourselves, our environment and the universe in general.

Like any human endeavor, to succeed it requires a method and the proper tools. The method is really simple, it starts with observations about the real world, from these observations the scientist forms a hypothesis, next he or she must perform experiments to determine whether the hypothesis is valid and true. The experiment must be repeatable by anyone using the same equipment and the same methods.

The tool that a scientist uses depends upon the particular science one is pursuing and the experiment required to prove or disprove the hypothesis. This may vary from simple observation, such as Jane Goodall has done in her study of gorillas, to sophisticated and expensive equipment such microscopes, computers, particle accelerators and high powered telescopes. The one tool used by all sciences is mathematics. It is the cornerstone on which all science depends.

Now for the misconceptions. The first one is that any theory put forth by science is totally correct for all time or is false. Critics of science often cite the fact that scientific theory is constantly changing as new facts are learned and our equipment becomes more sophisticated. We often speak of "laws," such as The Law of Gravity. This is simply a misnomer. There is no such thing as an unmodifable scientific law. Nonetheless, this does not mean the findings of science are not valid. Most of the great theories are still correct for ninety-nine percent of the cases for which they apply. It is only a few exceptions that cause theories to be modified.

The second great misconception is that science is anti-religion or anti-God. This is not true. It may show that what has been written in the past in so-called holy books is incorrect, but it neither proves nor disproves the existence of a First Cause or Supreme Being.

People into the occult or believe in ghosts, UFOs, big foot, telepathy, etc. claim that there is a conspiracy by the scientific community to ignore the evidence for the existence of such things. They have it all backwards. It is not up to the scientific community to prove their claims, but the people who make them to do so. For example, let us say that I claim that a ghost is haunting my house. To prove this claim, I need to produce the ghost for credible skeptical witnesses. At one time, a Professor Rhine claimed that he had proof that mental telepathy existed in certain people. It turned out that he fudged the results of his experiments. When others tried to duplicate his experiments, they did not get the same results.

Another misconception is to blame science for the misuse of the technology that results from scientific discoveries. In the first place, scientists seldom know what will result from their discoveries. Most scientific discoveries have benefited mankind. Knowing more about the universe we live in cannot be a bad thing.

Graceland Cemetery

2011-04-16T09:07:00.001-04:00

Although it may be strange to some people, one of my favorite things to do is walking around cemeteries. In many of them, a lot of interesting artwork and history is in carved into headstones and mausoleums. I like to read the dates on them and try to imagine the lives of the people buried beneath the ground. One of the most interesting cemeteries in the world is Graceland in Chicago. It is located on Clark Street near my old neighborhood and not far from Wrigley Field. My dad, grandparents and other relatives are buried there.

The thing that is so great about Graceland are the many artistic monuments. Many famous Chicagoans are buried there including Marshall Field (the department store czar), Potter Palmer (owned the famous Palmer House hotel in Chicago), Cyrus McCormick (inventor of the mechanical reaper), and Philip Armour (founded Armour Meat Packing). Graceland was established in 1860 and received a perpetual charter from the State of Illinois. The western boundary (Clark Street) was an old Indian trail.

Now I want to describe some of the more interesting monuments. There is a statue of a vine-covered woman by the grave of Eli Williams, who came to Chicago in 1830 and died in 1881. Next, there is the Statue of Death, a bronze figure entitled Eternal Silence. It marks the burial plot of the Dexter Graves family. The hooded bronze figure is grim and forbidding picture of death. Another interesting statue is at the grave of Victor Lawson. It depicts a crusading knight in armor holding a shield. Lawson was a newspaper publisher. He published the Chicago Daily News (no longer in circulation).

Peter Shoenhoffer, a wealthy brewer, had an Egyptian-like pyramid built over his resting place. The pyramid shaped mausoleum is guarded by an angel and a sphinx. The inventor of the Pullman railroad car, George Pullman, has a large monument with a large Doric column. Beneath the monument, he lies in a coffin covered in tar paper and asphalt inside a concrete block the size of a room. Another Egyptian style tomb is that of Martin Ryerson, lumberman. It consists of a mastaba capped by a pyramid.

What I have described here are only a few of the amazing statues and monuments in Graceland. If you visit Chicago, I rank it as one of the must-see sights of this great city.

Exoplanets Suitable for Life

2011-03-26T09:10:00.002-04:00

Recently astronomers have discovered planets in orbit around most stars close enough to determine whether they have planets. But of all those billions of planetary systems, which have planets capable of supporting life? At present we do not have the technology to look closely at those systems. Of our own solar system, as far as we can tell, earth is the only one capable of supporting life. There are two other planets that might support life. Mars may have supported life in the past, but so far no concrete evidence of this has discovered. Europa, a moon of Jupiter, has a liquid ocean. Perhaps life developed there (if the ocean is water).

So what makes earth unique in the solar system. First, it is not too hot nor too cold to sustain life. Most of the planets and moons further from the sun than Mars are too cold. Mercury and Venus are too hot. Although Venus is not so close to the sun that a temperature within a range to support life is ruled out for that reason. Venus is sometimes regarded as earth's sister planet. Venus is only slightly smaller than Earth (95% of Earth's diameter, 80% of Earth's mass). Because of these similarities, it was thought that below its dense clouds Venus might be very Earth like and might even have life. Unfortunately, we now know that Venus may be the least hospitable place for life in the solar system.

The pressure of Venus' atmosphere at the surface is about the same as the pressure at a depth of one km in Earth's oceans. It is composed mostly of carbon dioxide. There are several layers of clouds many kilometers thick composed of sulfuric acid. These clouds completely obscure our view of the surface. This dense atmosphere produces a runaway greenhouse effect that raises Venus' surface temperature hot enough to melt lead. Venus' surface is actually hotter than Mercury's despite being nearly twice as far from the Sun.

Another factor to support life as we know it is the presence of water. Apparently Mars once had liquid water on its surface, but it no longer does. Another problem with Mars is its thin atmosphere. One possible reason that it no longer has water and air is its small mass. Any smaller planet would likely be completely airless like our own moon.

Hence, it can be seen that although three planets are in a zone capable of supporting life as far as distance from our star (the sun), only one can support life. The other two are too dry. One has an atmosphere that is too thick, the other an atmosphere that is too thin. Thus, it can be seen that planets capable of supporting life are relatively rare. The question is how rare. If ten percent of planets in the galaxy are capable of supporting life, there may be nine billion planet capable of supporting life. If this number is one percent there would nine hundred million; one tenth of one percent , ninety million. That's still a lot of planets capable of supporting life.

What's Beyond the Universe

2011-03-19T09:39:00.001-04:00

Have you ever thought about infinity? Or read what modern cosmologists have to say about the universe? Back a few centuries, people who thought about such things figured that the universe consisted of the earth which was surround by crystal spheres. Astronomers (actually astrologers) of those days never wrote about what was outside the outermost crystal sphere. Then came along Copernicus, Galileo and Newton and the universe expanded somewhat to the size of the solar system and the fixed stars out there somewhere; nobody knew how far. When astronomers gazed through more powerful telescopes and other sophisticated gear, suddenly the universe expanded to billions of light years in size.

But how far did it go? Did it stretch on forever? In the early part of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein proposed his Theory of Relativity. This and other discoveries changed everything. Cosmologists began to think of the universe as a great expanding ball (or some other shape) that had a definite limit.

Here are some thoughts on the matter. Not all of them are mine. According to one viewpoint,. the universe is defined to be everything, including space and time itself. Since the universe includes all space, there can be nothing "outside" the universe.

However, the Big Bang theory changed the view of cosmologists and others who study such things completely. According to the Big Bang theory, the Big Bang was not an explosion in a preexisting three-dimensional space, with matter and light expanding out into empty space from some central point; instead, matter and energy are understood to fill all of space (i.e. "the universe"), and what's expanding is space ("the universe") itself. But, wait a minute, if it's expanding, what is it expanding into?

The Big Bang theory is based on Einstein's theory of general relativity, which explains that gravity of matter/energy causes space-time to curve. The amount of curve depends on the average density of matter/energy throughout the universe, a consequence of this is that the universe as a whole can be curved, with either positive curvature, zero curvature, or negative curvature.

To visualize a closed universe with positive curvature, drop the dimensions by one. Instead of curved three-dimensional space, picture a two-dimensional universe in which two-dimensional space is curved into a sphere, and "expanding space" means that the sphere is blowing up like a balloon while the bits of two dimensional matter on the surface do not change in size. You can see that if you pasted a bunch of bits of paper on a balloon and then blew it up, each bit would see the other bits receding from it. This is what astronomers observe, when they view distant galaxies.

If you made a movie of the balloon blowing up and play the movie backwards, after a while the size of the sphere approaches zero, all the bits of matter throughout the balloon universe get more and more squished together and approach infinite density as the size approaches zero. This is what the big bang is supposed to be. Of course, this analogy forces you to picture the two dimensional surface of the sphere expanding into a third dimension, and our curved three dimensional space is expanding into four dimensional space. The question becomes what else is in the fourth dimensional space? Other balloons (universes)?

Also, if space is curved in the fourth dimension, what happens if you travel in a straight line as far as you could go? Would you return to your starting point? And if the fourth dimension is time, would you return to the point in time when you started your journey?

On the other hand, J. Bruno wrote: "The center of the universe is everywhere, as well as its border but does not exist anywhere." Thus, the universe has a center that exists everywhere and borders that exist everywhere. Think about this. Does this statement violate any physical or philosophical rules or not? If the answer is "not," the universe is and will stay infinite and isotropic.

Not everyone agrees. According to Stephen Hawkins, a black hole transports information to another universe. Another theory hypothesizes that there are many (perhaps an infinite number of) universes outside our own. In fact, one theory is that there is a larger universe of which our universe is only a part, like an atom of something much larger.

There is also the theory of parallel universes in which a new universe is created whenever two or more possible futures occur. That each possibility creates a new universe which is almost identical to the ones parallel to it except in one the change occurred one way, and in the other, it occurred the other way.

Of course, all this brings up the question of what is the universe composed. When we say that space is curved, what is this curved "space" composed of? Nothing? How can nothing be curved? It seems that there are more questions than answers. For more confusing answers and questions, go to any web site on modern cosmology.

Computers That Learn

2011-03-12T08:57:00.001-05:00

One of the great themes of science fiction is the computer that becomes as smart or smarter than a human being although not many novels and movies have been made in which this is the central theme. Off hand I can only think of a couple of movies, Colossus the Forbin Project and HAL in 2001, A Space Odyssey. In most science fiction the thinking machines are robots. At present computers can do many marvelous things, but none can compare with the human brain that makes sense of countless diverse, quickly changing stimuli without effort. Doing what we do with ease is often an impossible task for computers.

Nonetheless, researchers in artificial intelligence are hard at work trying to achieve the goal of computers that think as well or better than a human being. For example, Researchers at the Leipzig Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London have developed a mathematical model which could significantly improve the automatic recognition and processing of spoken language. In the future, such algorithms that imitate brain mechanisms could help machines perceive the world around them. Perception of its environment would go a long way toward achieving true artificial intelligence.

If you've ever had to deal with a voice activated automated telephone system, you probably realize how difficult it is for a computer to understand even simple words. If you speak a little too quickly or slowly, if your pronunciation is not clear, or if there is background noise, the system fails to understand you.

According to Stefen Kiebel of the Leipzig Max Plank Institute, the brain classifies the various signals from the smallest, fast-changing components such as single sound units like a vowel or consonant up to big, slow-changing elements such as the topic. The significance of the information at various duration levels is probably much greater than previously thought for the processing of perceived information. The brain searches for time dependent structures in the environment to determine what happens next. In this way, the brain can, for example, predict the next sound based on the slower-changing information.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers constructed a mathematical model to imitate, in a highly simplified manner, the brain processes that occur during the comprehension of speech. The processes were described by algorithms that process speech at different duration levels. The model succeeded well. In contrast to other artificial speech recognition devices, it could process speeded up speech sequences. In addition it could predict the next speech sound. If a prediction turned out to be wrong, the model detected the error. This indicates that the model represented processes in a way that was similar to the way the brain functions.

This new approach may be the beginning of a truly intelligent computer.

Armageddon in Science Fiction

2011-03-05T09:07:00.003-05:00

One of the most reoccurring themes in science fiction is the end of the world, or at least the end of civilization. It is not surprising since there are many ways that this could actually come about. Also, prophets have been predicting catastrophic disasters from the time men learned to speak to each other. Two popular ones lately are global warming and an asteroid strike. So we have a choice of drowning when the ice caps melt or being smashed to atoms by a big rock.

For a while, when a few people caught bird flu in Asia, pandemics were all the rage. In the latter half of the twentieth century, everyone was betting on an all-out atomic war, but that fizzled when the cold war ended. Recently, I read article about a scientist who said we could all die from a burst of gamma ray radiation from a nearby supernova explosion. As the clock struck midnight ushering in the year 2000, all the computers were supposed go mad because they only had the last two digits of the year and could not distinguish between the twentieth and twenty-first century (which to some people did not start until 2001 anyway.)

Anyway, science fiction authors love to write about Armageddon of one sort or other. Here are some of my personal favorites. There are two by John Brunner. The first is Stand on Zanzibar where civilization is brought to an end because of overpopulation. Overpopulation as threat seems to be no longer in vogue. I guess because there are so many ways of dealing with overpopulation. For example, nuke the excess or give everybody a gun and give them leave to hunt and kill everybody they hate.

The second book by Brunner is The Sheep Look Up which is about pollution. We are pretty certain that is the most likely end that we face.

There are many atomic war novels. These were especially popular during the cold war years. The funniest was the movie Doctor Strangelove, where a deranged general starts world war three because of his erectile dysfunction. I also like the novel On the Beach by Nevil Schute, which was also made into a good movie. In this novel, the last people on earth after an atomic war are living in Australia waiting to die from the radioactivity produced by all those hydrogen bombs going off. Probably my all time favorite about a post apocalyptic world is Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller where a monk finds an artifact from our civilization after civilization has gone back to the dark ages.

One of the more interesting ways that the human race comes to an end is a little known book called The Black Corridor by Michael Moorcock. In this short novel, bigotry runs wild so that everyone kills everyone else that is different from himself or herself. It's a real chiller. I got goose bumps reading it.

Invasions by aliens is another possibility that could end the human race. My favorite is Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, where the invaders look like elephants.

An old movie that's fun is When Worlds Collide where a group of scientists and a chosen few race to build a spaceship to escape from a collusion between earth and another planet. The one thing I never quite understood was where the planet they were headed for was located

I liked the TV miniseries The Stand by Stephen King as the survivors of a pandemic meet up at the cabin of an old woman and go fight the devil in Las Vegas.

Of course there are many more great science fiction novels and stories about the Apocalypse, but those were some of my personal favorites, because they each have a slightly odd slant to the end of the world.

I have written one novel about Armageddon myself. It is called Morgaine and Armageddon and has a lot of stuff in it based loosely on The Book of Revelations of the Christian Bible. If you are interested, it is in E-book format and can be obtained from most online E-book sellers such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Prophet's of Doom

2011-02-26T08:26:00.003-05:00

Recently I watched a program on The History channel in which six "experts" got together to predict the downfall of the United States (and civilization in general perhaps)

in the near future. According to these people, the U.S. and possibly civilization as we know it is on the brink of a major disaster from several sources. It was interesting, but I found that for the most part, their reasoning was completely flawed.

Take the coming oil shortage for example. Okay, at the moment, our chief source of energy is from oil, but it is obvious to anyone who keeps up with technology that there are many ways to obtain energy besides oil. To name a few: biofuel, coal, atomic energy, wind power, geothermal power, solar power, natural gas, garbage, and so forth. Also, by a few easy conservation methods, we could extend the supply of oil by many years. Just recently, I read an article about a tall office building that uses no fossil fuel for either heating or air conditioning and is completely self contained by using solar panels for all of its electrical needs. Also, as the price of oil increases, other methods of energy and conservation will become more popular. Just a year ago, when the price of gasoline shot up to four dollars a gallon in the U.S., high mileage hybrid autos began to sell.

The same is true of water. When clear fresh water becomes scarce, there are many ways of cleaning what we have by such as methods as removing salt from sea water, cleaning polluted water, not polluting it in the first place, etc. I'm sure we'll find a way.

As far as the money crisis goes, inflation and deflation run in cycles. Sure, at times such as the great depression, the recent downturn in the economy, the inflationary period in the 1980s and so forth, it seems that we are the brink of disaster, but things turn around. Much is made of the national debt, but this can be fixed if the politicians really desire it, by either cutting costs in big budget items such as the military or raising taxes on those who can afford to pay them. Or by trying some new ideas such as legalizing drugs and taxing them. This would provide a source of new revenues through taxation and reduce spending on policing. The post office could be privatized.

Then there was this guy Hugo De Gras who believes that artificial intelligent robots and computers will become smarter than humans and take over the world, keeping us at pets. I know that computers can do some marvelous things, for example this Watson beating contestants at Jeopardy, but artificial intelligence has a long way to go before it becomes as smart as people in the ability to respond to unfamiliar unprogrammed situations. And even if it did, certainly we would build in safeguards such as Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics.

The one scenario that was really feasible came from Robert Gleason. He said that the greatest threat was from terrorists using atomic bombs. The knowledge for building such a bomb is readily available, the fissionable material can be easily stolen or bought and the security to guard against such a threat is practically non-existent. Of course, blowing up a major city may be devastating, but it certainly would not bring the United States to its knees.

What I found most troubling about the program was an undercurrent of anti-technology, anti-science to it. For one thing, one of their major assumptions was that the earth is a closed system and that once we run out of some natural resource it's just gone. Hogwash, we have an entire solar system to mine. Or if not, we can find, discover or create substitutes.

I had to shake my head at their solution to the problems they brought up. They proposed that we move out of our great cities and live in small self-contained agrarian villages where all our needs are provided by the local community. In other words, we should return to the way people lived in the middle ages. Are you kidding? Who would want to live like that?

Asteroid Collisions

2011-02-19T09:08:00.002-05:00

In recent years, astronomers, paleontologists and geologists have given us one more thing to worry about. That a large meteor or comet may strike the earth and destroy humanity or at least a good portion of it. If a collision occurred between Earth and an asteroid a few kilometers in diameter, it would release as much energy as several million nuclear weapons detonating simultaneously. This would be enough to trigger a nuclear winter. Those who survived the blast might starve to death as all plant life died.

Recently we have seen a spate of science fiction movies with this theme, and it has been a staple of SF and doomsayers for a long time. How real is the threat? That is the question I intend to answer here. Note: Much of the information I gleaned from a Wikipedia article entitled "Impact Event." The Wikipedia has a lot more information about possible asteroid collisions with earth and other planets in the solar system.

Throughout recorded history, hundreds of minor impact events have been reported, with some occurrences causing deaths, injuries, property damage or other significant localized consequences. An impact event in an ocean or sea could create a tsunami that would cause destruction both at sea and on land near a seashore.

Small objects frequently collide with the Earth. There is an inverse relationship between the size of the object and the frequency that such objects hit the earth. Asteroids with a 1 km (0.62 mi) diameter strike the Earth every 500,000 years on average. Large collisions, with 5 km (3 mi) objects, happen approximately once every ten million years. The last known impact of an object of 10 km (6 mi) or more in diameter was at the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65 million years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs.

Asteroids with diameters of 5 to 10 m (16 to 33 ft) enter the Earth's atmosphere approximately once per year, with as much energy as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, approximately 15 kilotons of TNT. Usually they explode in the upper atmosphere, and most or all of the solids are vaporized. Objects with diameters over 50 m (164 ft) strike the Earth approximately once every thousand years, producing explosions comparable to the one known to have detonated above Tunguska in 1908. At least one known asteroid with a diameter of over 1 km (0.62 miles) may collide with Earth on March 16, 2880.

Objects with diameters smaller than 10 m (33 ft) are called meteoroids (or meteorites if they strike the ground). An estimated 500 meteorites reach the surface each year, but only 5 or 6 of these are recovered and made known to scientists.

The most significant recorded impact on earth in recent times was the Tunguska event, which occurred in Siberia, Russia, in 1908. This incident involved an explosion that was probably caused by the airburst of an asteroid or comet 5 to 10 km (3.1 to 6.2 mi) above the Earth's surface. It caused an estimated 80 million trees over 2,150 km² (830 sq mi) to be knocked over. In my latest Morgaine novel, Morgaine and the Necromancer, this event plays a part in the plot.

Numerous science fiction stories and novels center around an impact event; possibly the best-selling was the novel Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Arthur C. Clarke's novel Rendezvous with Rama opens with a significant asteroid impact in northern Italy in the year 2077 which gives rise to the Spaceguard Project, which later discovers the Rama spacecraft. In 1992 a Congressional study in the U.S. led to NASA being directed to undertake a Spaceguard Survey with the novel being named as the inspiration for the name to search for Earth-impacting asteroids. This in turn inspired Clarke's 1993 novel The Hammer of God. A variation on the traditional impact story was provided by Jack McDevitt's 1999 novel Moonfall, in which a very large comet travelling at interstellar velocities collides with and partially destroys the Moon, fragments of which then collide with the Earth.

Several disaster movies have also been made: When Worlds Collide (1951) dealt with two planets on a collision course with Earth – the smaller planet a "near miss," causing extensive damage and destruction, followed by a direct hit from the larger planet. Meteor (1979) features small asteroid fragments and a large 8 km (5 mi) wide asteroid heading for Earth. Orbiting U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons platforms are turned away from their respective earthbound targets, and toward the incoming threat. In 1998 two films were released in the United States on the subject of attempting to stop impact events: Touchstone Pictures' Armageddon, about an asteroid; and Paramount/DreamWorks' Deep Impact, about a comet.

The prophesies in the Book of Revelation in the Christian bible seem to indicate that part of the devastation of the Apocalypse will be caused by objects falling from the sky. I used this scenario in the fifth book of my Morgaine series of novels, Morgaine and Armageddon.

Whether a catastrophic asteroid collision with earth will occur within our lifetime is problematical. What is certain is that sooner or later, one will strike. Will we be ready to either divert it or deal with the consequences?

Armageddon

2011-02-12T09:36:00.002-05:00

Is it just me, but doesn't it seem that horrendous disasters have been more frequent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? The twentieth century saw a world wide flu epidemic, two world wars, the holocaust, mad dictators who murdered millions, the invention of the atom and hydrogen bombs, the brink of a full scale nuclear war, famines in Africa, pollution, global warming and much more, not to mention natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes. The first six years of the twenty-first century are not starting out much better.

Could it be that the End of Days is at hand? Prophets have been predicting it for a long time. How can we know when it near? Here is my interpretation of Christian Bible prophetic sources related to current events.

The Bible contains many prophecies about the future. The New Testament in particular talks extensively about the return of Jesus Christ to this earth. This is usually called his "second coming." The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 24, is devoted to this topic, as is much of the book of Revelation, and Thessalonians 4:16-18.

One day the disciples came to Jesus and were given a private briefing regarding the signs before his return and of the end of the age, Jesus replied: "Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, 'I am the Christ, ' and will deceive many. You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains. Matthew 24:3-8

Did this predict the two world wars, the famines in Africa and the many disastrous earthquakes in the past hundred years?

There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea.

Is this about the recent spate of hurricanes?

Then they will deliver you to tribulation, and will kill you, and you will be hated by all nations on account of my name. At that time many will fall away and will deliver up one another and hate one another. Many false prophets will arise and will mislead many.

I don't know about the first part, but doesn't it seem that there are a lot false prophets around. Preachers who pretend to be Christian but preach hate. Recently a famous televangelist told his listeners to pray for someone's death and later stated that a certain dictator should be assassinated. I haven't heard of any exceptions or clauses to the commandment "Thou shalt not kill."

Mark 13:14-28: But when you see the abomination of desolation standing where it should not be then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. And let him who is on the housetop not go down, or enter in, to get anything out of his house; and let him who is in the field not turn back to get his cloak. But woe to those who are with child and to those who nurse babes in those days! But pray that it may not happen in the winter. For those days will be a time of tribulation such as has not occurred since the beginning of creation which God created, until now, and never shall. And unless the Lord had shortened those days, no life would have been saved; but for the sake of the elect whom He chose, He shortened the days. And then if any man shall say to you, Lo, here [is] Christ; or, lo, [he is] there; believe [him] not: For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders, to seduce, if [it were] possible, even the elect. But take ye heed: behold, I have foretold you all things. But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. And then shall he send his angels, and shall gather togetherhis elect from the four winds, from the uttermost part of the earth to the uttermost part of heaven.

Could the references to "the stars of heaven shall fall" be a reference to the collision by a giant meteor or comet that astronomers say is inevitable. In 2004, a small near-Earth asteroid (NEA), made the closest approach to Earth ever recorded. The object, designated 2004 FH, was roughly 30 meters (100 feet) in diameter and passed just 43,000 km (26,500 miles, or about 3.4 Earth diameters) above the Earth's surface on March 18th at 5:08 PM EST. On average, objects about the size of 2004 FH pass within this distance roughly once every two years. Most of these small objects pass by undetected. This particular close approach is unusual only in the sense that scientists knew about it.

A recently rediscovered 400-meter Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) is predicted to pass near the Earth on 13 April 2029. The flyby distance is uncertain and an Earth impact cannot be ruled out. The odds of impact, presently around 1 in 300, are unusual enough to merit special monitoring by astronomers, but should not be of public concern. In all likelihood, the possibility of impact will be eliminated as astronomers track the asteroid.

If an asteroid between 30 - 400 meters actually strikes earth, how much damage would cause? It is estimated that the object that leveled forests in Tunguska, Siberia in 1908 was of this scale. Imagine if it hit a populated area.

If an asteroid of size 200 meters hit the ocean (which covers 70% of the Earth), the tsunami would inflict catastrophic destruction of coastal cities and substantial worldwide human casualties along coastlines. An asteroid of one kilometer size striking the Earth would cause a dust cloud which would block out sunlight for at least a year and lead to a deep worldwide winter, exhausting food supplies. The latter is what caused the dinosaur extinction, as well as other major extinctions in geologic time scales. Two hundred meter asteroid hits, far more common than the one kilometer or more strikes, do not show up much in geologic histories since over time their craters are obliterated by erosion.

On March 23, 1989, an asteroid with a kinetic energy of over 1000 one-megaton hydrogen bombs (i.e., about 50,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) was passed very close to Earth. It was discovered by equipment that uses new technology. Named 1989FC, this asteroid was detected after its point of closest approach. Astronomers discovered it had passed as close as it did only after they calculated its orbital path backwards in time. This event brought near Earth asteroids into the political arena.

Luke 21:20-24: But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then recognize that her desolation is at hand. Then let those in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are in the midst of the city depart, and let not those who are in the country enter the city; because these are the days of vengeance, in order that all things which are written may be fulfilled. Woe to those who nurse babes in those days; for there will be great distress upon the land, and wrath to this people, and they will fall by the edge of the sword, and will be led captive into all the nations; and Jerusalem will be trampled underfoot by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled.

Just think about what is happening in the Mideast these days, and the prophesy seems to refer to current and possible future events in that region. Also note the following prophesy:

Ezekiel 38: 5-7: Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet: Gomer, and all his bands; the house of Togarmah of the north quarters, and all his bands: [and] many people with thee. Be thou prepared, and prepare for thyself, thou, and all thy company that are assembled unto thee, and be thou a guard unto them.

Ezekiel 39: 1-6: Therefore, thou son of man, prophesy against Gog, and say, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, I [am] against thee, O Gog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal: And I will turn thee back, and leave but the sixth part of thee, and will cause thee to come up from the north parts, and will bring thee upon the mountains of Israel: And I will smite thy bow out of thy left hand, and will cause thine arrows to fall out of thy right hand. Thou shalt fall upon the mountains of Israel, thou, and all thy bands, and the people that [is] with thee: I will give thee unto the ravenous birds of every sort, and [to] the beasts of the field to be devoured. Thou shalt fall upon the open field: for I have spoken [it], saith the Lord God. And I will send a fire on Magog, and among them that dwell carelessly in the isles: and they shall know that I [am] the Lord.

Although there is some disagreement among scholars exactly which modern nations this refers to, all the nations in the area where these ancient nations existed in Ezekial's time have mostly Muslim populations today, the extremists of which hate Israel and wish it destroyed.

Joel 3:14-15: The sun and the moon grow dark, and the stars lose their brightness

Matthew 24:29 The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky

Mark 13:24 But in those days, after that tribulation, The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven

These verses seem to refer to nuclear winter, a condition caused by great clouds of dust to form that block out the sun for years, which in turn would cause plant life to fail. This condition could come about from either a full-scale nuclear war or a collision by a large asteroid.

Despite all of the above, the prophesies may not be referring to our modern era at all or may be referring to some future period. After all, Jesus told his disciples, "The lord of that servant shall come in a day when he looketh not for him, and in an hour that he is not aware of."

The sixth, seventh and eighth E-books in my Morgaine series are about a fictional Armageddon. They are Morgaine and Armageddon, Morgaine and Moonwood and Morgaine and Nicholas.

Fairies, Elves and Dwarfs

2011-02-04T11:14:00.001-05:00

There are many web sites devoted to these tiny creatures, many of which have beautiful illustrations. Fairies and elves permeate children's and some adult fantasy literature. But, what I always wondered is what are these creatures really, and how did the legends about them get started. So I looked into the matter. Faerie is very ancient and predates Christianity by several millennia. Moreover it exists, and has existed, in varying forms, in many countries all over the world.

According to Wikipedia, an elf is a mythical creature of Germanic origin which survives in northern European folklore. It is believed that they originated as a race of minor gods of nature and fertility. Elves are often pictured as youthful-seeming men and women of great beauty living in forests and other natural places, underground, or in wells and springs. They have been portrayed to be long-lived or immortal and they have magical powers attributed to them.

The actual origin of fairies is not clear. Various experts believe that they are nature spirits, the dead, elementals, pagan deities and so forth. The fairy tradition in literature began in the 1380s, with Chaucer and Gower. In their eyes, the fairies are a vanishing race, partly frightening and partly comic. However, the fairy mythology contains a consistent set of beliefs, that fairies and elves dance in rings, live in hills, are ruled by a queen, and so forth.

In northern England, elf is retained as the usual word for beings in the modern period, the Romance fairy being rejected. This may well be the result of Scandinavian influence. Scandinavian influence is certainly present in those place names which refer to dwarfs. Mythological dwarfs are found in northern England and Scotland place names, due to the Norse influence.

In Wales fairies or elves are called the "Tylwyth Teg." According to one authority, the fairies were men and women of mortal flesh and blood, and that the later superstitions are a mere echo of tales which first were told of real beings. There is a tradition of a race of beings who, in the middle of the sixteenth century, inhabited the Great Dark Wood (Coed y Dugoed Mawr) in Merionethshire, and who were called the Red Fairies. They lived in dens in the ground, had fiery red hair and long strong arms, and stole sheep and cattle by night. There are cottages in Cemmaes parish, near the Great Dark Wood, with scythes in the chimneys, which were put there to keep these terrible beings out.

A theory in Wales is that the Tylwyth Teg are the souls of dead mortals not bad enough for hell nor good enough for heaven. They are doomed to live on earth, to dwell in secret places, until the resurrection day, when they will be admitted into paradise. Meantime they must be either incessantly toiling or incessantly playing, but their toil is fruitless and their pleasure unsatisfying. A variation of this general belief holds these souls to be the souls of the ancient Druids Another variation considers the fairies bad spirits who were thrown over the battlements of heaven along with Satan, but did not fall into hell, but landed on the earth instead, where they are permitted to tarry till doomsday.

The Icelandic version, know as Huldre Folk in the Scandinavian countries, states that Lilith was washing her children when God spoke to her. In her fear she hid the children that had not been washed yet. When God had asked if these were all her children, she replied, "Yes." He decreed that those she had hidden from him would be hidden from man. Lullabies were sang to babies so that Lillith would not hear them cry, as it was lore she would take them to replace her own children that she lost.

In Devon, pixies are thought to be the souls of unbaptised children. That faeries were the heathen dead, not good enough for heaven, but not bad enough for hell.

The modern concept of Faery and faeryland can be attributed to Shakespeare, especially from the Midsummer Night's Dream.

On type of elf that is peculiar to the Irish is the leprechaun, which is a solitary creature avoiding contact with mortals and the whole fairy tribe. He pours all of his passion into the concentration of carefully making shoes. A leprechaun can always be found with a shoe in one hand and a hammer in the other. Most leprechauns are ugly, stunted creatures, not taller than boys of the age of ten or twelve. But they are broad and bulky, with faces like dried apples. They have a mischievous light in their eyes and their bodies, despite their stubbiness, usually move gracefully. They possess all the earth's treasures, but prefer to dress drab. Usually gray or green colored coats, a sturdy pocket-studded apron, and a hat, sometimes green or dusty red colored. They have been know to be foul-mouthed, smoke ill-smelling pipes called 'dudeens' and drink beer (or is it Guinness) from handy jugs. Leprechauns guard the fairies' treasures. Although, they hide the treasures well, the presence of a rainbow alerts mortals to the whereabouts of gold hordes. If a mortal catches a leprechaun and sternly demands his treasure, he will give it to the mortal. Rarely does this happen. Occasionally, especially after a wee too much Guinness, he will offer a mortal not only a drink but some of his treasure.

Angels

2011-01-30T09:35:00.003-05:00

In art, angels are depicted as beautiful women, sometimes men, with wings. Is this what they really look like? Many people are under the impression that angels are the souls of humans, especially those who are saintly. Is this true? Or a fallacy? It is said that Medieval scholars argued about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin. What's the answer? Does everyone have a guardian angel? Does anyone? Are there evil angels? Are Satan and demons fallen angels? What the heck are angels, anyway? I hope to answer these questions with this article. My source is the Catholic Encyclopedia at New Advent.

The word "angel" stems from the Greek and Latin words for messenger. Literally, an angel is a "heavenly messenger." According to the article in the Catholic Encyclopedia, angels are spiritual beings intermediate between God and men. They are God's attendants and messengers. They function as His assistants. In the Bible they are usually sent to earth to bring messages to mankind.

In Jacob's vision, they are depicted as ascending and descending the ladder which stretches from earth to heaven. This would seem to indicate that they do not fly and hence have no use for wings.

According to the article's interpretation of the Bible, it implies that each individual has its "tutelary angel." This may mean the same as a "guardian angel," but it seems that there is some dispute of whether each individual has a guardian angel. An angel may also intercede with God for a person. The angels may also aid God in administering the material world.

Apparently there is a hierarchy in heaven. Cherubim are God's ministers. There are also beings called Seraphim. There is a mystic seven who stand before God. And there are Archangels. Exactly where each fit into the hierarchy is not clear. St. Gregory the Great wrote a treatise on the hierarchy which you can read in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

How many angels are there? The closest we get to a number is the word "prodigious."

Yes, there are bad angels, and Satan is their leader. Also mentioned in the Catholic Encyclopedia article are Behemoth and Leviathan.

In the Book of Revelation of the Bible, angels play a major role in this prophesy of the End of Days. In my fantasy series, the Morgaine Chronicles, these angels appear in Morgaine at Armageddon, whose plot is very loosely based on passages in The Book of Revelation.

My Love of Fantasy and Science Fiction

2011-01-22T08:51:00.003-05:00

I loved these genres since I was very young. My parents were great readers and so I became one too. I loved to go to the local library and browse through all the wonderful books. I liked books about pirates and the usual fairy tales. When I was seven, something wonderful happened to me. It was the movie "The Wizard of Oz." Back then, it was shown in theaters. On the big screen, it was wonder of wonders. After that I began to buy Oz books, of which there were many, not only by Frank L. Baum, the creator of Oz, but by his successors, Ruth Plumly Thompson and John R. Neil (who by the way was the illustrator for all three authors).

The next good thing happened when I was in the third grade. I came across a book about an imaginary trip to the moon and the planets. That hooked me on science fiction. I read everything I could find about space travel, time travel and so forth, mainly the comic books, Superman, Captain Marvel, Planet Comics and so forth. When I was twelve, I discovered the pulps, eight and half by eleven magazines with garish covers and printed on thick cheap paper. These contained stories by such greats as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg and so many more.

About that time I also saw the movie "House of Frankenstein" with such a great cast, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr., John Carridine and Glen Strange. It's still one of my favorite movies. Although billed as a horror flick, it's really science fantasy. Speaking of movies, a few years later my favorite movie of all time came out, "2001, A Space Odyssey," which I saw on the wide screen. Believe me, it is stunning in the theater. Since then, there has been "Alien" and its sequels, all the Star Wars movies, Star Trek and its spin-offs, Jurassic Park and its sequels, etc., etc. We're living in my idea of paradise as far as movies go.

And then there are the books. I have so many favorite fantasy and SF authors that I could fill this page with their names.

From a love of these genres I decided to try my hand. The results you can buy at Renaissance Page Turner Editions, Fictionwise.com, Amazon and other online book sellers.

Isaac Newton, Alchemist

2011-01-15T09:29:00.000-05:00

One of the lesser known facts about Sir Isaac Newton, the man who is credited with formulating the theory of gravity, is that he was an alchemist. Although he wrote over a million words on the subject, after his death in 1727, the Royal Society deemed that they were "not fit to be printed." The papers were rediscovered in the middle of the twentieth century and most scholars now concede that Newton was first an foremost an alchemist. It is also becoming obvious that the inspiration for Newton's laws of light and theory of gravity came from his alchemical work. As a practicing alchemist, Newton spent days locked up in his laboratory. Some say that he succeeded in changing lead into gold.

Newton's private papers and alchemical treatises indicate that he was motivated by a notion that alchemical wisdom extended back to ancient times, that the Hermetic tradition -- the body of alchemical knowledge – had originated in the mists of time and to have been given to humanity through supernatural agents. Newton translated the Emerald Tablet, a famous alchemical work by Hermes Trismegistus. He also believed in keeping his alchemy principles secret.

Right now I'm writing a new Raven Lenore novel that deals with alchemy.

Angels

2011-01-08T11:13:00.005-05:00

Angels

In Jacob's vision, they are depicted as ascending and descending the ladder which stretches from earth to heaven. This would seem to indicate that they do not fly and hence have no use for wings.

How many angels are there? The closest we get to a number is the word "prodigious."

Yes, there are bad angels, and Satan is their leader. Also mentioned in the Catholic Encyclopedia article are Behemoth and Leviathan.

FAQs concerning Santa

2010-12-25T11:44:00.001-05:00

Note: All this information was taken from various web sites at random. In some cases the answers agree and sometimes they don't. I would take anything here with a grain of salt. Happy Holiday, which ever one you celebrate in midwinter, whether you believe in Santa Claus or not.

Who is Santa Claus?

Santa Claus (also known as Saint Nicholas, Saint Nick, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle or simply Santa) is a character in various cultures who gives presents to children on a particular day in December (usually Christmas Day but not in all countries).

Father Christmas is a well loved figure in , and is now interchangeable with Santa Claus, though the two had quite different origins. The term Santa is as widely used and understood by English children as Father Christmas.

Santa is based on a historical figure, Saint Nicholas, a bishop who once lived in a country that was located in present-day Turkey. His claim to fame was that he gave presents to the poor.

What is the origin of this legendary figure?

The modern Santa Claus is a composite character made up from the merging of two different figures.

The first is Saint Nicholas, a bishop of Myra, a province that is now in Turkey. Nicholas was famous for his generous gifts to the poor, in particular presenting three impoverished daughters of a pious Christian with dowries so that they would not have to become prostitutes. In Holland, Belgium, Austria and Germany, he is portrayed as a bearded bishop in canonical robes.

An early folk tale, originating in the Germanic states, tells of a holy man (sometimes Saint Nicholas), and a demon (sometimes or a troll). The story states that the land was terrorized by a monster who at night would slither down the chimneys and slaughter children (disemboweling them or stuffing them up the flue, or keeping them in a sack to eat later). The holy man tricked the demon with blessed or magical shackles (in some versions the same shackles that imprisoned Christ prior to the crucifixion, in other versions the shackles were those used to hold Saint Peter or Paul). The demon was trapped and forced to obey the saint who ordered him to go to each house and make amends, by delivering gifts to the children. Depending on the version, the saint either made the demon fulfill this task every year, or the demon was so disgusted by the act of good will that it chose to be sent back to hell. Yet other versions have the demon reform under the saint's orders, and go on to recruit other elves and imps into helping him, thus becoming Santa Claus.

So, depending on which legend you believe, Santa is either a saint or a demon, perhaps a combination.

Why is his sled pulled by eight reindeer?

Some elements of this part of the tradition of Santa Claus can be traced back to the Germanic god Wodan. Santa's appearance is similar to some portrayals of this god, who brought gifts in the winter season and rode a flying horse through the sky. (The horse had eight legs, corresponding to Santa's eight reindeer.) Saint Nick's white horse was probably transformed into eight sleigh-pulling reindeer by the famous poem/story by Clement Moore, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas." Moore gave the eight reindeer their names. Although legend has it that Saint Nicholas climbed on rooftops to drop money down the chimney, Moore decided the reindeer could fly to the rooftop. Maybe this was because the Right Jolly Old Elf had short legs and was unlikely to scale walls.

Why is he called Santa Claus?

When the Dutch still owned New Amsterdam, the city that later became New York, they brought the Saint Nicholas legend with them to North America. The name Santa Claus is derived from Sinterklaas, their name for the mythical character based on the saint. In Europe, the date of celebration is December 6, the supposed birthday of Saint Nicholas, called by the Dutch, Sinterklaasavond ("Sinterklaas Eve") by the giving of presents.

In Washington Irving's History of New York, Sinterklaas was Americanized to "Santa Claus" but lost his bishop's apparel. He was pictured as a thick bellied Dutch sailor with a pipe in a green winter coat. Irving's book was a lampoon of the Dutch culture of New York, and much of this portrait is his joking invention.

Why does Santa wear a red suit?

Santa Claus has appeared in various colored costumes as he gradually became amalgamated with the figure of Father Christmas. Red became popular after he appeared wearing a red suit on a Christmas card. His horse was converted to reindeer and a sleigh, the black Petes (which were in fact slaves) were converted to elves, and the date was moved forward a couple of weeks to coincide with Christmas.

The persona of Santa as most of us probably think of him today, as a larger than life grandfatherly figure in a fur-trimmed red suit, was largely the creation of artist, Haddon Sundblom. He was commissioned in 1931 by the Coca-Cola Company to produce ads that would picture St. Nick promoting their product. This was not a new idea. Santa had been used as an advertising tool since stores had first proclaimed themselves as "Santa's Headquarters," as early as 1841. On the day before Christmas that year, J.W. Parkinson of Philadelphia had a real "Criscringle" descending a chimney above the door of his shop to the amazement of all that passed by, especially the children.

Why does Santa give gifts to children?

Gifts were exchanged in the Roman ceremonies of Saturnalia, the festivities of solstice, the origin of most of our Christmas celebrations. We know the exchanging of gifts best from the three magi mentioned in the Bible. Christmas really became widely popular during the last century and is now really holiday celebrating commercialism.

The figure of Father Christmas (Santa Claus or Sinterklaas) is based on Saint Nicholas (270 - 310), the bishop of Myra. As mentioned previously, Saint Nicholas, clad in red and white bishop's robes and riding on a donkey, bestowed gifts on children. Saint Nicholas became the patron saint of children. During the Middle Ages, many churches were built in his honor throughout Europe. The anniversary of his death, 6 December, became the day to give gifts, especially to children.

Why is Santa Claus's workshop located at the North Pole?

Children naturally want to know where Santa Claus actually came from. Where did he live when he wasn't delivering presents? Those questions gave rise to the legend that Santa Claus lived at the North Pole, where his Christmas-gift workshop was also located.

In 1925, since grazing reindeer would not be possible at the North Pole, newspapers revealed that Santa Claus in fact lived in Finnish Lapland. "Uncle Markus", Markus Rautio, who compared the popular "Children's hour" on Finnish public radio, revealed the great secret for the first time in 1927: Santa Claus lives on Lapland's Korvatunturi - "Ear Fell"

The fell, which is situated directly on Finland's eastern frontier, somewhat resembles a hare's ears - which are in fact Santa Claus's ears, with which he listens to hear if the world's children are being nice. Santa has the assistance of a busy group of elves, who have quite their own history in Scandinavian legend.

Over the centuries, customs from different parts of the Northern Hemisphere thus came together and created the whole world's Santa Claus - the ageless, timeless, deathless white-bearded man who gives out gifts on Christmas and always returns to Korvatunturi in Finnish Lapland.

How did elves become part of the Santa Claus legend?

Mythologist Helene Adeline Guerber presents a very convincing case tracing Santa to the Norse god Thor in Myths of Northern Lands:

Thor was the god of the peasants and the common people. He was represented as an elderly man, jovial and friendly, of heavy build, with a long white beard. His element was the fire, his color red. The rumble and roar of thunder were said to be caused by the rolling of his chariot, for he alone among the gods never rode on horseback but drove in a chariot drawn by two white goats (called Cracker and Gnasher). He was fighting the giants of ice and snow, and thus became the Yule-god. He was said to live in the "Northland" where he had his palace among icebergs. By our pagan forefathers he was considered as the cheerful and friendly god, never harming the humans but rather helping and protecting them. The fireplace in every home was especially sacred to him, and he was said to come down through the chimney into his element, the fire.(Guerber, H.A. Myths of Northern Lands. New York: American Book Company, 1895, p. 61)

Even today in Sweden, Thor represents Santa Claus. The book, The Story of the Christmas Symbols, records:

Swedish children wait eagerly for Jultomten, a gnome whose sleigh is drawn by the Julbocker, the goats of the thunder god Thor. With his red suit and cap, and a bulging sack on his back, he looks much like the American Santa Claus. (Barth, Edna. Holly, Reindeer, and Colored Lights,The Story of the Christmas Symbols. New York: Clarion Books, 1971, p. 49)

Thor was probably history’s most celebrated and worshipped pagan god. His widespread influence is particularly obvious in the fifth day of the week, which is named after him – Thursday (a.k.a. Thor’s Day).

It is ironic that Thor’s symbol was a hammer. A hammer is also the symbolic tool of the carpenter – Santa Claus. It is also worth mentioning that Thor’s helpers were elves and like Santa’s elves, Thor’s elves were skilled craftsman. It was the elves who created Thor’s magic hammer.

Does Santa really have a wife? When did they marry?

In the 1930s Alice Leedy Mason wrote a poem entitled Jolly Old Santa Claus that was told to her four grandchildren. It features a white bearded Saint Nicholas living at the North Pole with his wife Mrs. Claus. Santa Claus has an army of helpful at the North Pole to help him make presents, open letters, and bake cookies. A Christmas tree room is featured with brownies creating ornaments. The poem ends with Santa arriving home with the brownies at Christmas Eve and falling asleep with a cup of hot chocolate.

Another web site claims that her name is Jessica Mary Claus. No explanation was given as to how this was discovered.

No one seems to know when they got married. Perhaps they are living together without a formal marriage.

Does Santa have any biological or adopted children of his own?

Apparently not.

There are probably a lot more questions that you may have regarding Santa, but that's all the time I had to research this important topic. There are plenty of web sites that claim to give the straight skinny about him. Too bad that don't agree with each other.

Our Pagan Winter Holiday

2010-12-18T09:05:00.001-05:00

My wife and I are pagans. Thus, our winter holiday celebrations differ a bit from your Christian ones. The festivities really start in November when we sacrifice a large bird and eat it garnished with bountiful products of the Nature goddess, such as cranberry sauce, several types of vegetables followed by such pagan favorites as pumpkin and apple pies.

Before dinner we give thanks to Zeus (sometimes known as Jupiter) for all the good things in our life.

Then on the following day (known as Dark Friday), we get up early in the morning and stand outside the doors of a mall or other commercial enterprise to rush in grab at bargain prices the items we need for the Saturnalia Holiday, such as brooms, Cheetah pets, and other occult items.

On the eve of the Saturnalia, we attend the Temple of Apollo, where we drink the blood and eat the meat of a sacrificial lamb (not really blood and lamb meat, but red wine and cookies blessed by the Apolloian priestess). We decorate our homes with lights, candles and ornaments and hang up such herbs as mistletoe (which is supposed to bring love).

The center piece is the Yule tree dedicated to the god Bacchus which we decorate with lights and other ornaments.

Before we send the children to bed, we tell them about the god Woden who rides his white horse with eight legs through the night delivering gifts to children. Woden is a jolly overweight god with a white beard, a red suit who lives in the far north with elfish helpers. Sometimes we take out our Book of Shadows and read the story of Mithra. The goddess was born in a cave and adored by shepherds who offered the first-fruits of the harvest to her. Animals and important travelers also came to the cave to worship Mithra.

After the children open their gifts from Woden on Saturnalia morning, we sacrifice another bird in honor of the Phoenix, the bird that rises out of its ashes, and feast on it. Afterwards we exchange gifts and toast each other and the gods. Sometimes we sing hymns to the gods or dance in a magic circle. Saturnalia is good time for friends and relations to get together.

Happy Holidays everyone, whether you celebrate Christmas, Saturnalia, Hanukah, Kwanza, or some other Winter Solstice holiday.

2001 The Movie

2010-12-11T09:30:00.002-05:00

One of the best science-fiction movies of all time was Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey. Many people nowadays wonder what the big deal was with this movie. They have only seen it on the small screen. With digital special effect in more modern movies, the special effects seem ho-hum. In 1968, in a theatrical release, it was spectacular. I was one of the lucky ones who saw it in Cinerama in a wide-screen theatre. It was nothing short of mind blowing.

For those of you who had never saw the movie, here is a synopsis (warning, it contains spoilers): The movie starts millions of years ago when a group of subhumans are competing with tapirs and other homids for food. One morning a tall, thin, rectangular black monolith stands among the rocks. The apemen are excited but touch the object and calm down. By touching the monolith, they have learned to use bones as weapons and tools.

In the next scene the action moves to the near future where travel to the moon is an every day affair. A similar monolith is found on the moon and sends a signal towards Jupiter.

If all of this sounds sort of mundane, it is because there is no way to describe the marvelous cinematography, special effects, music and emotional impact of the movie.

The idea for the movie was taken from an Arthur Clarke short story, The Sentinel. Clarke also wrote the script.

A sequel to the movie was released in 1984 called 2010: The Year We Made Contact starring Roy Schneider. The plot is based on Arthur Clarke's novel 2010: Odyssey Two.

It is a rather good movie itself, but nowhere as spectacular as 2001.

The Fourth Dimension and Time

2010-12-05T09:46:00.002-05:00

You've probably heard it said that the fourth dimension is time. This idea is especially popular with science fiction authors when writing time travel stories. But what does this mean? And what are the implications?

Forgetting about time for a while, in ordinary life we deal with three dimensions: left-right, forward-back and up-down. What this means is that every material object and every location in the universe can be described mathematically using only three numbers. When we measure a material object, its width, length and height are called its dimensions. If we want to describe the location of an airplane, we give its coordinates as latitude, longitude and altitude. Longitude is the distance from an imaginary line cutting through Greenwich England, latitude is the distance from the equator and altitude is its distance above the earth; in other words, the three dimensions of its location. For objects located on the surface of the earth, only two dimensions are required since altitude is not considered because from a human viewpoint, the earth is a relatively flat surface as long as we don't consider such features as mountains and tall buildings.

In mathematics, the number of dimensions is shown by a superscript. For example, a cube two inches at each dimension can be said a 2³ inch cube (a two cubic inch cube). A two-inch line is a one dimensional object and can be written as 2¹ inch line. A two-inch square drawn on a sheet of paper would be 2² inch square (two square inch square). This also shows that objects of one, two or three dimensions can be illustrated by simple drawings or models. But, what about an object with four or more dimension? They can be shown mathematically by using superscripts (sometimes called powers) of 4, 5, or any number. But how do you illustrate such an object? For example, in a fourth dimensional object, how do you show a dimension at right angles to the other three?

Before I attempt to give an answer to the questions in the last paragraph, let's consider the attributes of objects in the lower dimensions. Imagine an infinite flat surface. On this surface, there is a line of infinite length. Let's say that there are number of points that live on that line. They can move left or right on that line but have no concept of the other dimensions. A point can never pass another point. Another race living on the surface are the Flatlanders. They can move left-right and forward-back but have no concept of up-down. A Flatlander could take one of the points and move it through the mysterious second dimension and put it on the other side of a fellow point. However, to the Flatlander, the line is an impassable barrier.

Now, as a three dimensional being, I have magical properties to the Flatlander. If I put my five fingers on the sheet of paper, the Flatlander sees me as five small blobs. If I remove a flat object into the third dimension, I can reverse it. The Flatlander first sees the object disappear and then returned reversed, an impossibility from his standpoint. I have other powers that Flatlanders are in awe of. I can appear and disappear within a closed space. I can see inside objects, including the Flatlanders' bodies. I can pick up a Flatlander and carry him across the barrier line. From this you can see that a fourth dimensional being would have similar extraordinary powers in our three dimensional world.

To get back to the question of illustrating a fourth dimensional object, we can show a three-dimensional object in two dimensions by opening it up. For example, a cube has six surfaces. If we unfold these surfaces into the form of a cross, we show the cube in two dimensions. The equivalent fourth dimensional object is called a hypercube and consists of eight cubes connected in four dimensions. If we unfold this into a three dimensional object, we would see eight cubes, four stacked on top of each other and the other four attached to one of the cubes in the stack, one on each side.

Now it is debatable whether time is actually a fourth dimension. But, for sake of argument, let's assume that it is. The implications of this are threefold. One is that all time, past, present, and future exist together in some way and that what we consider time passing is really only our traveling along a fourth dimension from past to present to future. It also seems to imply the possibility of travel in the reverse direction from the present to the past or speeding up our travel forward into the future. Thirdly, from the foregoing you can only come to conclusion that the future is predetermined, since it already exists and cannot be changed.

If you could view the fourth dimension (if it is time), you would see yourself extending to the point where you were born in one direction and up to the point of your death in the future. The same is true of everything around you. If not too distant in the fourth dimension, you could view any object from the point of its origin to its dissolution and all the changes that occurred to it.

Now a person who could travel into time would have some of the powers of a fourth dimensional being. He could appear in a locked room simply by going back in time when the room was not locked. He could disappear and appear somewhere else. He could predict the future.

In a previous paragraph, I stated that if time is the fourth dimension, our future is predetermined. This would also hold for the past. Thus, a time traveler who went to the past would not have a choice. He would by necessity have to have arrived from the future at the exact time of his arrival. This implies no free will, that even our thoughts are predetermined. To get around this problem and other paradoxes involved with time travel, one must conjecture other dimensions in which one can travel at right angles from not only to the usual three but from the fourth time dimension. This introduces the concept of parallel time.

The concept of parallel time is that starting from the beginning of the universe, each moment introduces infinite possibilities and each possibility exists somewhere (possibly in a fifth or higher dimension). So, if I go back in time and prevent my mother from meeting my father, two universes exist, one where I did not prevent my parents from meeting and one where I did. When I return to what I consider my own present, I actually return to a different universe from the one where I started from, one in which I was never born.

I hope this essay throws a little light on a confusing subject.

Why Asimov's Three Laws Won't Work

2010-11-27T09:49:00.001-05:00

A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

A robot must obey the orders given to it by his superior officer.

A robot must protect its own existence, and those of other soldier robot, except where such orders conflict with the First Law.

A robot may only harm those human beings or robots designated as "The Enemy," by its superior officer and only if not under a flag of truce, surrendering or designated as "Prisoners of War."

In my novel, The Isaac Project, the situation of the military wanting to change the Three Laws provides part of the conflict in the book.

New group for writers and readers of science fiction

2008-11-13T12:19:00.006-05:00

Some of you who read my blog may be authors or readers of science fiction, fantasy, paranormal fiction and/or dark fiction. I have started a group for authors and readers of these genres. Authors may promote their works at any time. Readers will find what's new in these genres and may comment on the books they've read or post anything having to do with these genres. To get started, click here

The Invisible Minority

2008-11-09T11:21:00.002-05:00

With the election of an African-American president, a women as a vice-presidential candidates, and another almost achieving the presidential candidacy, it would seem as though bigotry and prejudice were on the wane However, it is not dead by a long shot. In California a referendum against gay marriage was passed. Since 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Moslems (and even Hindus) have suffered from bigotry. Bigots against many groups still exist.

Nonetheless, there are minority groups that suffer extreme prejudice that are not usually mentioned even by the so-called enlightened press except in a derogatory way. What groups am I talking about? Atheists, agnostics, the simply non-religious and pagans. In what ways are we non-believers in an almighty god discriminated against? Well let's take the sentence I have just written, by convention, the word "god" since it refers to the god of Christians and Jews is usually capitalized as though their god was somehow better or more important than other gods. If I would have referred to a pagan or Hindu god, it would not be capitalized.

One of the big ways that we non-believers are put upon is that we, as a group, are not allowed to be elected to public office. Oh, there is no law that states specifically that an avowed atheist or agnostic cannot run. But in every election, there is a litmus test. "Does the candidate believe in God?" is a question that is always asked. If the answer is no, the candidate has no chance in hell of being elected. In this last election, Senator Dole aired a TV ad that accused her opponent, Hagan, of taking "godless money" at a Boston fund raiser and linked her to an atheist group called the Godless Americans political action committee. The ad ended with a picture of Hagan and a woman's voice over saying, "There is no God." Hagan,who is an elder in her Presbyterian church and a former Sunday school teacher, responded with a lawsuit and her own ad, declaring, "I believe in God." The critics of the ad panned it because it was untruthful, not that calling someone an atheist was not derogatory. In fact Hagan is suing Dole as though she had said something really nasty.

What about TV? How many atheists, agnostics, and pagans have you heard being interviewed or otherwise allowed to state their views? Not many. Yet religious leaders such as televangelists, Catholic bishops, and the pope are given a lot of air time. Several cable channels are devoted to religion propaganda, but none devoted to the secular viewpoint. In dramatic shows, when a bad person becomes good, it is because he or she has a religious awakening. If a person loses his or her faith in religion, that person becomes despondent and unhappy and confused until they get their faith back.

It is axiomatic that religious people are good, kind and happy, while the non-religious are evil, cruel and unhappy. Really?! I am an atheist and consider myself good, kind and happy. There is nothing missing from my life as the religious propagandists claim.

The truth is that for all their prattling about love your neighbor, it is the fanatically, and some not so fanatical, religious that preach hate against other religions, gays and other groups. Many wars past and present, including the current ones in the Mideast, have been sparked by religion. In the middle ages, people were tortured and burned at the stake for having dissenting opinion with regard to the prevailing religion.

"One nation under god" is in the pledge of allegiance to the United States. "In god we trust" is on the money we use. Before it was banned, children were required to pray in a public school. Religious groups are working hard to reinstate this. In some public schools, unscientific philosophies such as "creationism" are taught as science.

How about taxation without representation? Priests, ministers, owners of religious property and so forth do not pay taxes, while the non-religious have to take up the slack. Since an atheist is not likely to be elected to public office, this is not about to change any time soon.

Yet there are very few groups working to end this bigotry and discrimination of the non-religious and pagans. We are truly an invisible minority.

Leaders, Do We Need Them

2007-12-03T12:16:00.000-05:00

You've probably heard it often enough through your life such remarks as: "What we need is someone who is a leader," "Our program builds leadership," and "He was a great leader." I suppose for people who are not self starters or who cannot operate effectively unless told exactly what to do or are too lazy to put effort into making decisions, a leader is a necessity. But think about it, for most things, the majority of people get along pretty damn well in their daily lives without being told what to do. When organizing a group effort, most of the time people can reach a consensus fairly rapidly.

It seems to me that people who strive for leadership roles are egoists who think that they know better than other people how to run things. There is also the motive of having power over others. In addition, in most societies, leaders are honored and rewarded.

In my view so-called "leaders" do more harm than good. The stronger the leader, the more arbitrary and dictatorial are his or her decisions. Think about some people who were considered great leaders, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Ghenghis Khan, Julius Caesar. It is power hungry leaders and their sheeplike followers who make war, order genocide, and oppress people.

Of course many organizations in a modern society are organized hierarchically. I believe this stems from the olden days when emperors, kings and religious leaders who organized according to a military standard. In a hierarchical organization power starts from the top and propagates downward. This gave the power hungry the ability to lord over others. In today's world, this also holds true, although in democratic countries such as our, the leader's drive for absolute power is somewhat tempered by other forces.

But the truth is that most organizations would probably run as smoothly without a leader. It is the much maligned bureaucracy who keep the organization going. When important decisions had to be made, they could be made by experts after due consideration, perhaps in committee.

New Gas Saving Devices

2007-08-30T18:54:00.000-04:00

In a time of soaring gasoline prices, carbon dioxide emission that are causing global warming and calls for less dependence on foreign oil, we need to think about devices that use fewer oil product. I've discovered a few that do not require gasoline, ethenol, hydrogen or fuel made from coal. Most of these devices have the additional advantage that they increase muscle power and aid in reducing unwanted weight. Here they are:
The Engineless Lawn Mower.

Unmotorized Air Conditioner

Gasolineless Snow Thrower

The Leg Powered Transport

Un-Car Grocery Carrier

Gasless Clothes Dryer

Who Is Papa Joe

2007-08-27T11:10:00.000-04:00

I call myself Papa Joe. But who is Papa Joe? First I'll give you the bio I usually send to publishers and then expand on that. For more information about my novels and anthologies plus some free stories and serials, go to my web site at http://papajoesfantasticworld.com

I've loved science fiction and fantasy from the time I learned to read. My hobbies, besides writing, are traveling, adventure game playing and do-it-yourself projects. Before I retired, I was a technical writer at a major computer manufacturer. Several short stories of mine have been published in E-zines, and I've sold a series of dark fantasy novels called The Morgaine Chronicles to Renaissance E Books. These novels may be purchase from Renaissance's Page Turner Editions, http://pageturnereditions.com or at Fictionwise E-Books http://www.fictionwise.com . Renaissance has also published three collections of my short stories, The Sands of Time, Mordrake's Apprentice, and Hearts Among the Stars: two SF novels, Star Tower and The Bagod and a dark fantasy called The Laws of Magic. Mundania Press http://www.mundania.com has published The Book of Retslu, a humorous fantasy.

I was born and raised in a working class neighborhood in Chicago. My love of reading stems from my parents and grandparents, who were all avid readers. As a child, one of my favorite things was hanging out at the library or browsing in flea markets for books I could afford. One day my parents took me to see a most wondrous movie, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It made me a believer. From that time on, I read every Oz book I could get my hands on. I also loved comic books, especially the ones in the SF genre, Planet Comics, Superman, Captain Marvel, etc. I also liked mathematics and science, especially astronomy.

When I was twelve or so, I discovered the pulp magazines. They had garish covers and were printed on blotting paper, but the insides were marvelous. Even the letter columns were interesting. In these magazines, and the slicks and paperbacks that followed a few years later, I learned to love such writers as Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg and so many others. About that time I decided I wanted to write in the genre, but never got started until many years later.

I was drafted into the army at the end of the Korean War and was sent to Germany, where I worked as a microwave repairman. Also, I married a girl who went to the same high school as I did, who I met at a party after I graduated high school. We've been married over fifty years now. We have four wonderful girls, ten grandchildren (most whom are adults now) and one spunky six-year-old great-granddaughter.

For most of my working life, I was a technical writer for a major computer firm. I learned many things there about computers, about writing and about people and corporations. I lived the Dilbert cartoon. Because of my work, my wife and I moved to a small town in upstate New York where the manufacturing plant was located. We still live there, although the company has since closed the plant.

In 1993, I retired. That's when my fiction writing career started. First I sold a few short stories to E-zines. (I use "sold" loosely. I've seldom got a paycheck .) Then I sold a novel to a POD publisher and another to an E-zine publisher. The pay is meager, but I enjoy writing so much that I'd probably do it even if they paid nothing (which is the standard with most E-zine publishers).