As a writer, I love words.  Sometimes I love a particular word because it’s mysterious.  “Eldritch” is an example.  You can understand its meaning from context when you combine it with “light”—it just looks spooky and sinister.  Because English is spoken in so many places, an author can give local color to his prose by choosing particular words (often not consciously).  I love the sound of “scarpered”—it just sounds like someone in a hurry to leave town.  When my beta-reader knew what it meant but still objected to its use in one of my books, I went on a search to find out how I’d picked it up.  Turns out it’s very UK-ish—sort of like “forthwith” and other words where I love how they trip off the tongue.  I’d picked it up from Ian Rankin (love his Inspector Rebus books), so my beta-reader was right and made a good catch.  Unless it occurs in dialog associated with a character who’s from the UK, or who’s trying to sound like a person from the UK, it isn’t quite appropriate in American prose.  Still love the sound, though.

“Troglodyte” is a word that looks and sounds good too.  It’s a fun word.  If I remember correctly, it originally means “cave dweller.”  (The origins of English are well mapped out in David Crystal’s The Stories of English—a lot of fun if you’re into that kind of thing.)  The word is more conventionally used to mean “deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned.”  Ergo, this long segue is just leading up to my main topic: There are anti-science troglodytes among us who are challenging science with their far-out beliefs and attacking scientific progress at all levels, some even funding campaigns against science.  Ironically, many of these same troglodytes are using science and technology as tools to further their anti-scientific agendas.

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[I apologize to my friends on Facebook, where I usually share these posts.  Facebook has made it impossible to share.  You can follow me on Google+.  I recommend cancelling your Facebook accounts and creating Google+ accounts, if you haven’t already.]

While drone surveillance and attacks and Special Ops are a better military solution than “boots on the ground,” there’s no doubt that ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorist groups will only be defeated if the countries affected wage effective war against these militant Islamic groups.  The key word is “effective.”  Remember that ISIS received a big boost when poorly trained Iraqi forces ran for their lives, often in their underwear—equipment left behind, much of it American, is now in ISIS’ hands.  That has to stop.  Western presence is justified there for equipping and training local forces so that these fiascos aren’t repeated.

That said, the West isn’t doing nearly enough to hurt these groups where it’s most effective—financially and personnel-wise.  I’m reminded of World War Two where indifference, peaceniks, and anti-Semitic sentiments conspired to give Hitler a free hand in Europe.  We don’t need another Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, but we shouldn’t bury our heads in the sand either and hope Islamic nations will destroy the extremists in their midst without our help.  The recent Twitter action, for example, while a good start, is a drop in the bucket.  The West needs a concerted effort to stop all finances flowing into the illegal insurgent groups.  Funds must be frozen and their propaganda machine must be dismantled.  We can be good at that, and it’s the least we can do.

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[Note to readers: this is my second post on the ebook revolution.  In the first, I spoke to the advantages of ebooks over pbooks, but I didn’t mention the one potential advantage considered here.  Enjoy!]

I’ve been an avid reader all my life, but I sense that there are fewer of us with each passing decade.  That’s a unisex statement.  When most people are just struggling to make ends meet, sometimes with more than one job, raise their children, and stay healthy, time for any entertainment can become scarce.  But gender differences also influence the statistics.    Women readers outnumber men, a positive development if you assume that this means that (1) men are sharing more in household duties, and/or (2) all the modern gizmos we have free up more leisure time for women, and/or (3) women are now socially and economically independent enough to enjoy quiet moments reading.  It’s a negative development if it means that men are so addicted to computer games, streaming video, porn, or sports that sitting down to read a book is the last thing they’ll do.  The idea that reading is something you had to do in school can make for a quick exit from a rewarding reader’s life almost as fast as math as well, for both men and women.

Let me posit that the ebook has the potential to change some of the negatives non-readers feel toward reading.  While I’ll not be quick to experiment (I’m a traditional reader and writer), I know this potential exists.  Even established writers like Deaver are experimenting.  I’m not applauding his writing a novel in reverse (that’s just a strange and ungainly way of presenting the written word, of course), but his release of an audio-only book is interesting. It doesn’t go far enough, though.  An ebook gives an author many opportunities for exploring multimedia.  In particular, sight, sound, touch, smell, and the written word can be blended together in a single story.  Who knows?  Maybe we can add an odor app or a touch app to ereaders and tablet computers.  I don’t know how many times I’ve written a gunfight scene.  Even if the gun has a silencer, the sound is a better description than simply writing pfft!  The odor of gunsmoke could be added too.  In my new Mary Jo Melendez novel, there’ll be a fire scene.  Heating up your ereader or tablet, adding the crackle of flames, and including the odor of a burning room could make that scene come alive.

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At the end of ABC World News one evening last week, Kip Thorne made an appearance.  Seems he was a consultant for the new movie Interstellar.  The subject, of course, was FTL (faster-than-light) travel, what you need to visit other star systems in subjective times less than several hundreds of human generations.  Seemed Thorne was proposing wormholes (Deep Space Nine, anyone?).  While most sci-fi authors (including myself) just write a few words of pseudo-scientific technobabble and then get on with the story, I guess the director of Interstellar wanted to put some fancy ribbon around the technobabble.  I’m sure Prof. Thorne did a good job.

Generations of grad students have struggled with Einstein’s general theory of relativity.  The “classic texts” are Weinberg’s more experimentally grounded tome and the much longer differential geometry-oriented tome written by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler (yes, that same Thorne).  Both were creatively and simply titled Gravitation.  Between the two, you had more than enough information to solve any problem on a PhD qualifying exam related to that subject, assuming you had learned the material well, of course.  Feynman’s simpler and less mathematical introduction in some of the first editions of the second volume of his famous lectures could be used to get in the mood, so to speak (Feynman did the same with his introduction to quantum mechanics in Vol. 3; with a bit more material, it’s a better introduction than any you’ll find elsewhere).

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I still have a copy of Benoit B. Mandelbrot’s The Fractal Geometry of Nature sitting on my shelf.  That 1982 hardcover edition is $31.90 on Amazon now.  Surprisingly, there is a 2010 Kindle edition, priced at $45.06, technically an eTextbook.  I say surprisingly because the original had many graphics pages.  I guess you’d better have a Kindle Fire or some other color tablet; you won’t see much on the Kindle paper white.  The coffee-table size of the original must have made the Kindle edition difficult too.

That said, I wonder how many millennials know what a fractal is.  Computer science types of all ages might, because displaying fractals is often a programming exercise (best seen on the high-res monitors found with graphics workstations).  However, even for them, fractals might seem akin to the much simpler Lissajous figures—very intriguing graphics, but so what?  Graphics artists might be familiar with fractals as an option when portraying landscapes like mountains and so forth.  The origins of these computer applications can be found as wow-content in Mandelbrot’s book.

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I’m amused by the euphemistic phrase “climate control.”  Have we become so politically correct that we can’t say “don’t poison the environment” or “don’t kill Gaia”?  Even the latter phrases don’t put the blame where it belongs.  The very liberal NYC mayor Bill De Blasio is calling to reduce the Big Apple’s greenhouse gases by 80% by 2050.  That’s laughable not only for the date but because NYC’s contribution represents one little drop in a huge ocean of pollution in the Northeastern U.S.  Every wee bit helps, I suppose, but the city and its people don’t produce most of the greenhouse gases and pollution.  It’s industry.  Our slogan should be “control industry’s excesses.”  But industry likes the phrase “climate control” because it avoids blame.  It wants people to forget that it’s industry that’s destroying the planet.  De Blasio is a nincompoop falling into industry’s trap.  But what else is old news?

NYC might be producing tons of garbage and polluting waterways with sewage effluent, but industry is the culprit for that and other pollution as well.  Has been, is, and will always will be, unless controls are enacted to lower greenhouse emissions.  I don’t want to hear any whining about the cost.  Sure, we want to make this reduction as painless as possible—heaven forbid that we use a few millions out of the many billions industry makes in order to clean up the planet it’s made into a dirty mess!  Industry is naïve.  Do they think they’ll still be making these billions when the world’s population is starved of oxygen and simmering on the polluted planet that’s fast becoming another Venus?  Greed obviously has no foresight, no appreciation for future problems in its haste to roll in the dough.  Industry lives for the present, not the future.  It doesn’t give a rat’s ass about human beings, let alone the environment.

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I was recently encouraged by NASA’s decision to use Space-X and Boeing to send astronauts to the International Space Station.  You might say, “Well, you’re a sci-fi writer, so I’m not surprised!”  Yes indeed, I have written a few sci-fi stories.  I also write suspenseful thrillers and mysteries.  Only one of my stories takes place on ISS (The Secret Lab), so I don’t have any particular agenda.  In fact, I’ve conjectured that the Chinese will make it to Mars first (see Survivors of the Chaos).  Cancelling the Shuttle Program only convinced me more.

I’m encouraged for two reasons.  The first is that it’s high time capitalism goes into space.  I’m talking good capitalism here, the kind that improves products and services and increases the inventive spirit through healthy competition.  Changing the slogan “We have to beat the Russians to the moon!” to “We Space-X engineers and scientists have to beat Boeing’s” is a positive development.  The more competitors, the merrier, I say, as long as there are enough oversight and control to keep things like o-ring mishaps to a minimum (does that company still exist?).

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Continuing our discussion from Tuesday about rampant commercialism, I find Apple annoying.  Contrary to many people’s opinions, they’ve become like a Wall Street bank—too big to fail!  It would have been enough that they tried to control the ebook business to turn me against them, but I’ve disliked them for years.  Starting with the old toaster MACs, they’ve never made a computer that I like.  Of course, in my old day job, powerful UNIX workstations were required, but I still had to make presentations.  Between Microsoft and Apple, my cursing vocabulary became extensive—in several languages, mind you.  It was the opposite of trying to crack a walnut with a sledgehammer.  I needed the latter and Apple just couldn’t deliver.  Still can’t.

Now that we’re on iPhone 6, I suspect that the geeky gadget lovers are having paroxysms of delight and orgasmic gizmo-dreams.  Who knows?  Maybe that iPhone has more computing power than those old workstations, but that’s comparing Apples to oranges.  Modern servers and workstations still make anything Apple makes about as useful as William Shatner’s tricorder—flashy but fake.  It’s all window dressing, even the apps.  That goes for Samsung smart phones too.  (I’m an equal opportunity kibitzer.)  You own of these, you’re a slave to your apps.  Just try to combine their functionalities or add new functionalities.  Just try to read all those sliding icons (tiles, in MS 8.1 terminology) when you’re on the beach.  And just try to make your data secure—some Hollywood starlets found out the hard way that it’s not.

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I suppose this could be interpreted as a follow-up on last Tuesday’s post.  People minimize the onslaught of commercials by using DVRs and streaming video now, but commercial interests still bombard everyone with commercials.  Pop-up ads on websites, especially those with video and sound, are only a small part of the problem.  Theaters, struggling to compete in this internet age, bombard us with commercials too—many of them are the same ones you see on TV.  It’s not enough that you have to mortgage your house to buy your candy and popcorn.  They sell advertising time too.  (I don’t buy anything at concession stands anymore.  If I can’t smuggle in trail mix or a fruit bar, I go without.  Eating distracts from the movie anyway.)  Facebook is even selling political ads.

Some commercials are entertaining if you only see them once.  Being bludgeoned by them over and over again is a bit like an eternity listening to that stupid song “Frozen” (unlike many American businesses, my writing business isn’t a Disney subsidiary—I can tell you the truth about their crappy songs!).  Even worse, on our local stations, commercial X is played at the beginning of a commercial break and then again at the end.  Any cuteness—pets and kids are common—becomes stale (cuteness is over-rated anyway).  Any cleverness also becomes stale.  Make sure all the knives and guns are safely under lock and key because you’ll soon become suicidal with this torture going on.

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Recent history, let’s say 1950s on, hasn’t been kind to our stupid foreign policy mantra that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” especially in the Middle East.  We created the Shah in Iran as a favor to the Brits, toppling a democratically elected regime there, and we’re still paying for it.  We armed al Qaeda to fight the Russians in Afghanistan, and we’re still paying for it.  We “saved” Iraq from Saddam Hussein, who, for all his faults, held all that country’s factions together.  Dubya, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, in their greedy little minds, only saw dollar signs from Iraqi oil.  They really did nothing to contribute to democracy or a stable government there.  And we’re still paying for it!

While my last post on this subject encouraged Obama to bomb the hell out of ISIS everywhere possible, including Syria, and a second beheading only underlines the need to stop these mad dogs, it’s high time we rethink our foreign policy mantra.  Its corollary seems to be “When you choose friends that way, watch out!”  Yes, air strikes are needed against ISIS now.  No doubt about it.  But there are other priorities to worry about.

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