Told Ya

 

One of the technical issues that I will be forcing into a scifi world will be the place that the “ship” goes on its colonization run.  One of the issues that I felt I needed to deal with is the simple fact that when you leave town (the Sol system) you don’t want to have to go dodging things on your way out.  So I figure that since the ecliptic is sorta crowded, you will need to leave the Sol system heading galactic north or south.

So I asked the research associate that Elon has let me use and started asking questions.  When I asked about leaving south, I got nada.  But North was more interesting

what is the closest g-type star that is approximately (=/- 20 degrees) 90 degrees south of the ecliptic

The closest G-type star approximately 90 degrees south of the ecliptic (±20 degrees) is **Alpha Centauri A**, located at a declination of about -60.8 degrees, which is within the specified range (90 ± 20 degrees south). It is a G2V star, roughly 4.37 light-years from Earth.

Well, I suppose this should be shelved on the “been there, done that” shelf.  I would say that a large minority of scifi space travel ends up going to Alpha Centauri for science-based fiction.

Let me digress.  My personal fenceline between science fiction and science fantasy is the “actually doable using known technology” fenceline.  I always thought that James T. Kirk and Han Solo weren’t science fiction characters, they were fantasy characters, no different than Harry Potter shouting “expelleramus” (or whatever the little whiner shouts). 

Now, just to be clear here, I will probably jump that fence a couple of times as I proceed. But the next little while is going to come up with a way to stay on this side of the fence for the most part.

another reason not to want to publish on substack

 

Maybe laboring in obscurity is the way to go.

https://matthewgasda.substack.com/p/writers-diary-2a2

In a way, I think that idea of writing to make money terrifies me.  I realize that folks gotta eat, but I can’t say that writing to make money has any appeal to me.  Granted, if someone were to send me some nickels, I most certainly wouldn’t turn up my nose, but it wouldn’t be the reason I would write.

Let me give you some background concerning where this is coming from.  In the mid ‘00’s my two sons were the age where Harry Potter was huge.  Harry Potter was a brilliant book to bring kids into the act of reading.  They were enthralled (their mother was appalled, she being of the whacked out christian flavor) and they read the books and wanted to go to the movies and live the Potter life.  I indulged them.

But as the number of books mounted and the story evolved and my sons became teenagers in sync with the books, I stopped reading because dealing with two teenagers was annoying enough. Having a book accurately depicting the hormonal imbalances and angst of teenagers was not a place I wanted to visit.  So I stopped reading at book four and let them deal on their own.

Fast forward about twenty years and I figure, what the hell, I might as well finish the last three books.  I am on the last book now and overall I think that the first three were great and then tapered off progressively.

I am glad Rowling made her money and she deserved all the credit.  The books were a great bit of storytelling.  Everyone loves sniping at them, but truthfully, all I get from the sniping is a taste of sour grapes.  

She tells a good story.  Isn’t that enough just by itself?

I am writing because I enjoy sitting down with my coffee in the morning and reading the world's weirdness and then pecking away at this diary.  If it suits me, I spend time thinking about the stories that I want to tell and trying to create vignettes that tie together into a bigger story.  

Now I am hoping to create a novel using all these disjointed written pieces into a bigger piece.  When (if) I manage, I will try to get someone to buy it because I can alway use a better quality of whiskey.  But that isn’t the goal.  I have enough and I am content.  If I start thinking that my writing is worth something, then I stand a good chance of being discontent.  

More on Writing

 

Gray and yucky…’nuff said

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There isn’t a new idea anywhere in the world of literature.  The “new” ideas that peddled off today have always been there.  Maybe you just haven’t read the idea yet, but it is there and will come and bite you should you publish a work and someone else reads it.

So I asked “Grok” to look into this for me, mostly because I don’t need a “correct” answer, I just need a decent approximation:

How many new novels of any genre and any publication format were published in 2024?

Exact figures for new novels published in 2024 are hard to pin down due to varying data sources and self-publishing. Estimates suggest 500,000 to 1 million new books, including novels, were published globally, with the U.S. alone seeing over 500,000 self-published titles and 10,000+ from major publishers. Novels likely make up a significant portion, but no precise genre or format breakdown is available.

https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMg%3D%3D_f9b252c2-c814-411f-b181-65bfaacbd7dd

So I am working on a “new” novel in this environment.  The storyline is going to be similar to a set of stories that I have not read.  The characters will be of a stereotype that will bore a lot of people.  The setting will be hackneyed in the estimation of many readers.  The philosophy is established, regardless of which I choose.

But everyone else who is trying to get someone to read their story is operating under the same constraints.

All I have to do is create a good recipe from the same staple ingredients.  Maybe someone will read it, maybe someone won’t.  

Biggus Dickus

 

One of the residuals from my exit from the land of “geek” is my almost indecent obsession about the specifications of electronics.

It started back in the seventies, with an unseemly obsession about the advertised “total harmonic distortion” and “power wattage” of stereo equipment.  It also led to the desire for greater displacement in the realm of internal combustion engines.  It was an enjoyable, albeit expensive, obsession that ended up nowhere and probably saved me from any number of social diseases due to my lack of funds to be earmarked for chasing women with  proven promiscuity.

The age of the computer and my education led me down another path, one leading from from 8086 through 80486 and then to the AMD 64 fueled weirdness that defines my electronic life today.

But truthfully, now that I am old and I find this sort of dick-matching tiresome, I have come to the conclusion that the computers that fill all my needs are of a I-5 vintage with around 8 gb (could probably do with an I-3).  All of the advancement since then isn’t about what I want to do with a computer, but what the computer wants to do with me.

I don’t think that I am alone in this.  Most of the power of modern chips is wasted.  The need for the greater power in chips has been built around the idea of giving the corporations at the top of this odd food chain a continuing revenue stream (which is why they also stop supporting chips).

The “revolution” in the internet and my use of it is going the way of stereos and cars.  

By the way, this is always a great read 

https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs81n/command.txt

sins of the fathers/rewards of inheritances

 

Blue sky day today, already 60℉ and barometer looks to be steady at 30 in/Hg.  Need to walk a little today.

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There are a couple of out of date books that I really think need to be brought back to the thin gruel that is literary output these days.  

The Ugly American By Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer

And

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

I think that these go back to an older time and place that really never went away, except for the fact that the bad guys in these novels won in the real-life mirror world that we inhabit.

I am going to think on my memories of these two books and after pondering for a bit, I might just write a piece on them and the way they dropped slowly out of the discussion as we began to believe that our imperial aspirations were actually coming true

Sources

 

Been gray here for a couple of days, temp is good around the mid sixties or so when the sky is gray, when the sun is out the temps have hit eighty.  Barometer is steady around 30.

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Being a long time reader of sci-fi and fantasy, you start realizing that it is all stories about trying to do something that can’t really be done.  Granted, there is a spectrum to this, there are sci-fi/fantasy novels that are possible should the political will and drive occur (this is where a lot of “hard” SF resides).  The other end of the spectrum is pure fantasy.  Where things that just can’t be are put into play and the characters are reacting to an unknown in a human way. 

Since I am trying to write something a step beyond fanfic (a subject I have to discuss sometime in light of my failed attempt) I need to stake out where my world lies on the spectrum described above.

Books have been written that deal with things (more sci-fi) I am trying to wrestle with.  So lately I have been reading up on asteroids and nuclear pulse propulsion.  In doing so, I have been using the digital card catalog that is currently being fobbed off as “artificial intelligence”.  Overall, I am pretty pleased with the results.

It seems that as long as I ask focused questions, the answers that I get are pretty focused as well.  The answers thus far come with pretty extensive lists of articles to support the answers.  

So, just to give you a hint, the reading list that I think will give an inkling of the “technical” direction my story will take is:

↦Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

↦Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

↦Anathem by Neal Stephenson

↦Universe by Robert Heinlein

↦The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell

I am inconveniencing some ones and zeros over at a different site at Dreamwidth where I will post answers that I get from Grok and/or Gemini concerning specific technical/scientific questions.

A Subtle Dig

 

Yesterdays walk

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I am a fan of our most JMG’s fiction writing.  I was informed recently by an informed source that his latest foray is NOT young adult fiction as the protagonist is eighteen at the start  (I am leery of this, having raised two sons and comparing that age with the actions/mental attitude of what is categorized as “young adult).  So I might just take a stab at reading about Ms. Maravec’s adventures.

That being said, I want to discuss his representation of a delicacy that I still rely on in my dotage.  The name of my recipe is “pimped out ramen” though JMG may well have a more culturally appropriate name for it.  For some reason, I thought that I had bought a kindle copy of his “Weird of Hali Cookbook” but it isn’t in my library.  The cost of getting old I guess.

JMG wrote of this delicacy in a moderately disparaging manner in “WOH-Innsmouth and WOH-Providence.  I was somewhat irritated by the dismissive tone of his description, but being a bigger person than that, I put it behind me and very much enjoyed the series.

I ran across this today in my reading:  https://x.com/RabidLagomorph/status/1924725776865485013

Now, I agree with a lot of the sentiments here, but there is more to it.  

Ramen is a staple food.  The ½ price brand that he is mocking is one of those “elite” brands that yuppies buy to make themselves think that they better than other folks.  The birds eye frozens are always overpriced, and the price of spam is relatively expensive.

But the theory is sound for the actual meal, the execution presented is more a function of a sleazeball corporation marketing a phony narrative to relieve themselves of stock that isn’t moving.

Pimped Out Ramen

Ingredients

↦ Two (2) packages of cheap ramen noodles (about $0.37 each)

↦ Tablespoon of peanut oil (guess=$0.05)

↦ 1-½ teaspoons of onion powder

↦ 1 teaspoon garlic powder

↦ ½ teaspoon of red pepper flakes

↦ Tablespoon of peanut butter (I am guessing around $0.15??)

↦ 2 tablespoons Soy Sauce (for god's sake do not buy la choy!!!)

↦ 1-½ cups of frozen vegetable (I like the traditional provided they have baby lima beans)

↦ 1 egg

↦ 2 ounces mystery meat (1 jumbo hot dog or ¼ can of spam) (≅$0.25 for the hot dog or $1.00 for the fancy spam, I suppose you could use other meats that are “healthier” and probably cheaper, but in the day, spam was cheap…..now it isn’t.

Directions

First, boil enough water to cook the noodles, when it comes to a boil, cook the noodles (reserve the flavor packets),  and drain. Reserve until after the next step.

Fry the egg in the oil, add all the spices and peanut butter while it is hot, and saute for a minute or two, dump in the frozen vegetables and the chopped up mystery meat and saute until the vegetables get unfrozen.  I am personally ambivalent about dumping in the flavor packets for the last stir.  Sometimes artificial ingredients are damn tasty and they haven’t killed me yet.

When all this is ready to your liking, dump in the drained noodles and mix everything until it looks the way you want, dump it into the bowl, and go eat it on the kitchen table while reading.

Just remember, this is a meal for one.  Serve this at dinner and prepare to be looked at funny. 

Hijacked Words

 

A fence in Kingston

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“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master——that’s all.”

Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”

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There is an imagined certainty when discussing anything of merit.  That language itself is so poorly suited to accurately expressing the things that the inside of our heads refer to laughingly as “reality” is to make most discussions an exercise in futility. 

The italicized statement above keeps coming into my head.  I also read a quick article today over at Slashdot which discusses how a simple change in how a single letter in code (ascii versus unicode) which describes the same letter in a cryptic line of programming code can muck things up .  It is amazing how two different renditions of a word/symbol  (if one can count the cryptic “githubusercontent” as such) can blow up at the code level.

The same kind of thing happens here on the internet when the sincerely concerned attempt to supercharge the transmission of an individual’s night sweats to another.  After all, what good is a fear of something that you have no effect upon unless you can share your internal terror and transmit that fear.

“Most ‘scientists’ are bottle washers and button sorters.”

— Robert A. Heinlein

So here in the land of the internet, people spend much time and effort trolling for scraps and clues for their fears to support their night sweats.  There is a lot of high quality “panic ore” out there.  Mostly the information is partially distilled, with information pulled out of larger datasets and presented as universal when, in fact, it presents a conclusion that the entire study cannot support.

I am not saying that there aren’t serious problems raging around.  There are some that can be addressed, there are some that are out of our control and we will simply have to adapt to.  But unless folks sit down and look at the entire (nearly overwhelming?) sets of overlapping data, there can be nothing useful done.

So, before you start bandying about the “snarl words” like extinction and collapse and fascist and nazi, please remember these words are just there to stop your thinking.  The more unpalatable thoughts that these words mask are things like change and adaptation and what we have to do on a societal and individual basis to make our way through the maze of not especially palatable realities that these words disguise.

Building

 

Ugly, but I like it

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One of the reasons that I have been noodling around with the inappropriately named AI “Grok” is that it sure makes getting the current consensus about things in the realm of science much, much easier.  I am not saying, by any means, that what it is giving me is “true”, but it does a pretty fair job of putting together a decent idea of what constitutes the current most-favored-hypothesis.

I feel even more relaxed because I am not going to use the information to give you tiresome lectures concerning the state of the world or the ethics of people that I don’t know.  I am using it to construct a world which I can populate with stories that are, at best, embryonic inside my cranium.

So I am piggybacking on all the pictures and data coming back from the rovers and orbiters beavering away around Mars.  What brought this on was a reread of Edgar Rice Burroughs “John Carter of Mars” books.  Now there are folks out there who will sneer at the “outdated” view of Mars, but all that does for me is make my eyes hurt from rolling them, we are talking about made up worlds here folks and when E.R. Burroughs was doing his scribbling in 1917, the scientists were thinking of Mars as a dying world with canals.

So I am spending my time reading up and thinking about things that will have no real effect on my life.  It is pleasant.  Martian ensolation, surface ionizing radiation, martian axial tilts, magnetic fields and other such foofooraw are being merged into a world that doesn’t quite exist.  Even worse, I am setting the time about 13,000 years ago, so the world is long gone.  

I suppose that this time I decided to spend a little time creating my own non-existent world rather than copying someone else’s answers.  I am now trying to redeem myself by going through the bother of world creation.

I am thinking that I will have a basic idea of my fantasy version of Mars 13,000 years ago in the next couple of weeks, it won’t be complete, but it will be a beginning that I can work from.

Now I get to populate it with Gods and people.  I have some very preliminary ideas here, but I am going to wait until I get the world built before I fly them there.

Worth Trying

 

The picture above is the current state of my cider.  I figure to give it another couple of days before I bottle it.

When you look at the goop on the bottom, that is a mixture of blackberry crud and yeast poop (and dormant yeast spores) that remain after the good juices have been used up.

I am thinking of going to pick up a three more cartons of apple juice.  ( from a commercial restaurant store and each carton yields a gallon of juice)

What I am thinking is that after I bottle the cider, I will add the three (3) cartons of juice to the crud (formally referred to by the cognoscenti as "lees") top the fermentor with water and use the yeast that is there to ferment the juice added.

Might be an abject failure, but might yield a cider with a little more color and just smidge of blackberry flavor.  

Just thinking

Search Engines (Continued)

 

Fall Colors (Yes, I know that it is spring)

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Taking up my conversation from Saturday, again, I am going to be be discussing the idea of artificial intelligence and its limitations.  Here is the punchline that I will be using as a springboard to this continuation:

Overall, what grok gave me was approximately equivalent to what I would expect from an average freshman at a small state college.  

Now, for those of you who have had the experience of grading such things (for me, three quarters of being a TA back in the eighties and one quarter of covering for a sick professor at the local community college in the early 2000’s) you need to know that this is at best, an awkward and singularly unrewarding experience.

First problem is the use of the language and words.  Freshman really haven’t spent that much time writing and when faced with a 1,000 word essay, they see it as comparable to an assault on the south face of K2. The results tend to confirm the abilities of the individuals in the class and, as a slap to the new-generation educators out there, the results also conform with the ancient apostasy of “grading on the curve”.

In the dark past of my undergraduate days, the majority of professors graded on the curve (5%=F, 10%=D, 50%=C, 10%=B, and 5%=A) though there was differences in the ratios, with changes in curve shape to allow for more people to pass as time went on.

From my limited experience, the results being presented by Grok seem to parallel the easy curves.  The easier the question, the more the curve becomes right handed with more good results.  The harder the question (more controversial), the further the quality of the answer skews toward the left side (with higher quality being on the right). 

Most of the complaints about AI is asking it to come up with a decent web search for a difficult question and then write the answer in a manner that agrees with the questioners preconceptions.  People love AI when it spews back an answer that agrees with the way that they already think.  Kinda like grading undergraduate papers, anyone doing this unpleasant task gives good grades to the students that parrot back the instructors beliefs.

Intelligence...ehhhh...depends

 

Artsy fartsy

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So I finally caved and went to check out the foofooraw concerning this whole AI thing that has folks all riled up.  I went in with some preconceptions.  The first preconception is the idea of “machine intelligence” is probably significantly less than the advertising agencies masquerading as “Tech Titans” want you to believe.

So mostly I went in and asked specific questions:  Subjects like carrying capacity and oil use and fertilizer use.  The results really don’t seem to be all that different than using a decent search engine.  

First I need to discuss the “platform” that I used.  I used Grok, not because I did any serious research, but because its owner pisses off people who amuse me immensely with their histrionics.  I seriously doubt that other competitors in this will give any “better” answers to my basic queries.

Second, I am not going to publish the results here, if this kind of thing interests you, go and play around with it yourself.  All I am going to discuss is what I think of the results.  

Simply put, when I search a subject using the google search engine with add "udm=14" which strips off the AI from google search, I get a string of links which let me look at other folks websites which will purportedly answer my question.  This is what I am used to.  It has worked pretty well for the past twenty years.  I really have no complaints.  

I posed the same question to grok, and I got back a 2300 word essay with footnotes (links) summarizing what is out there.  The links are pretty damn close to what the udm=14 gave me and actually was more pleasant to work with.  For the question “Calculate Earth's carrying capacity for humans”, it actually offered several fairly exhaustive studies with a not-at-all terrible condensation of the data available.

Overall, what grok gave me was approximately equivalent to what I would expect from an average freshman at a small state college.  

Under the Streetlight

 

Been a while

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More and more I am getting exasperated by the narrow focus of folks evaluation of their environment and surroundings.  The internet, in all of its glory of immediacy and fear does not in anyway contribute to the individual mental health.

What set off this rant today is the current pearl-clutching going on around the idea of “microplastics”.   Now, I am not saying that the issue of microplastics is a trivial issue.  The truth of the matter is that, simply put, Neither I nor anyone else can make predictions on the long-term (or for that matter, short term) effects of these on the human or animal population.

Now, some of you will start shouting that the research dates back to the sixties, nope, that dog don’t hunt, the research was done using old tech and was mostly concerned with material science.  Around 2000 came the first inklings that this was a problem in the environment, and only around 2021 did the pearl clutching become endemic with this as a focus.

Look, I am not saying that they are good for you, and I am certainly not saying that they aren’t a problem.  But good lord, look around you!  There are so many risks to human health that cataloging them would take a month.  I have no idea what the effects are other than the current bull market in articles announcing microplastics as the latest flavor of armageddon.

I wonder just how much microplastics can be reduced and the source of microplastics in food/water for human consumption?  Is there a source that should be avoided?  Just how ubiquitous is it in the environment?  What is the excretion profile? What levels in the body actually create a health risk.  

I have to spend some time writing about the difference in discovery of a potential problem and the actual description and characterization of the problem and the actual risk profile.  People want a “fix” to the problem once and for all.  In the real world of living things adapting to the environment around them, all that you can do is attempt to lower the odds against an individual.  But that is a statistical thing; if you lower the odds for 90% of the population, but raise the odds for 10%, is that actually a win?

New Leaf

 

Have no clue what this is!

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I suppose that my ongoing angst about writing is somewhat due to my semi-convalescence.  On Tuesday, I went into the V.A. and the podiatrist did an exquisite little procedure called a release tenotomy to partially fix my fucked up old infantryman feet.  It seems to be almost finished mending and the toe is now straight(er?) but I laid around yesterday to allow it to heal a touch and will increase walking today to start getting some mileage again.  

Walking is my way of turning off my brain. By reducing this action yesterday I went into the “dwelling on my inadequacies” mode and started overthinking this writing hobby of mine.  Mostly I was dealing with my very ambivalent views on whether or not I like other people reading the shit I write.

So this little bit of writing is the start of something that will be saved until next Tuesday.  I am starting it today because I need to think about what I write about and cut through the rambling a bit more than I usually manage.  

Timing and pacing

 

Gotta Get out more to get better pictures.

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I think that I have to figure out my relationship to sitting down every day and writing and my desire to occasionally have someone read it.  I think that I have a heaping portion of dissonance concerning my relationship with the small number of my readers.   I hope that people read what I have to say, but I cringe when I think of getting comments back.  Reading comments is a spectrum kind of thing.  When I read my Wednesday favorites (JMG and Aurelian) I am impressed by their patience with questions and statements that are, at best, poorly thought out.  But there are gems in the comments as well.  So my reticence for having people comment really has no rational basis.

I do also think that frequency of posting might have something to do with this kind of thing.  I enjoy sitting down every day and telling the world to get off my lawn.  But maybe that isn’t the way to approach the idea of publishing my thoughts.  My buddy M goes a completely different way, he manages to sit down and write whole books and then self-publish something every year or so.  I can’t say as this way appeals to me, but I think I will ponder it for a while.

I will keep using my place at Dreamwidth for the day to day mental meandering.  I’ll probably keep backing things up over at Blogger because Google might be around in ten years.  I have watched too many small-time ISP’s and service providers go belly up to not worry about this.  I hope for the best for Dreamwidth, but hopes have been dashed in the past.

I have to ponder the Substack thing.  I think that Substack is the preferred vehicle for the PMC and the poseurs.  Oh granted, there is some quality over there, but a whole bunch of the time it seems to be a place where market-share of readership can best exploited, and to tell you the truth, I am kinda sick of the over-commercialization of just about anything.  

I do think that I need to spend more time and more discipline trying to come up with serious pieces.  I think that the diary-style format that I have used in the past at Blogger and Dreamwidth is good for my mental health, it isn’t exactly a storehouse for what I consider wisdom.  Maybe I will ponder only using my freebie account at Substack to publish longer pieces that I have spent more time on.

One way or another, I am going to keep writing, one way or another I will figure out my relationship with commenters and what are my expectations.    

Grok-ing

 

My piece of the Great Wall

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So, I have gone over to the dark side I suppose.  Yesterday I went and played with the evil wizards platform to rape our minds and make us unwilling dupes.  Yep, I asked a couple of questions to Elon Musk’s “Grok” Artificial Intelligence.

First, it appears to me that the word AI is sort of stupid.  From what I can tell, the answers Grok gave me on specific issues seemed pretty solid.  The program gave me some pretty nebulous parameters about how it was approaching the questions, gave what appears to be as close to a consensus answer as it could manage, mentioned some caveats, and gave a set of links where I could check the data.

Overall, for the questions I was asking (carrying capacity, and fertilizer production and usage) the answers were pretty vanilla and did address the problem of ranges given by different sources.

Overall, it seems to be doing the work of a pretty good librarian.  So far in my queries, I see that it can give me a quick overview but the bulk of the work is left to me to review the sources and come up with my own conclusion.