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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Recently the inventor of those pop-up ads apologized for creating them.  I guess he finds them annoying too.  Here’s my take: Many websites offer all kinds of “free services,” so they’ve decided to make money by convincing corporate advertisers that those pop-up ads, especially those targeted to a consumer’s interest, really are worth it.  I guess that’s progress.  We’ve progressed from the carnival quack screaming about his wondrous elixirs; to TV’s screaming used car salesmen (they’re invariably men—they scream the best, Toyota’s ever-present spokeslady notwithstanding); and finally to the internet’s pop-up ads, which now are often videos with people—you guessed it—screaming about some wonderful product they’re selling or recommending (streaming video’s inventor should also apologize!).

I can’t believe any sane person enjoys this.  Millennials love to scream—go to Central Park in the summer to any GMA concert, or to any popular protest event that’s a la mode.  GenXers love to scream at their kids—they have kids now, and the GenXers pandering to their every need has backfired for these paraents.  Baby boomers no longer scream—they lost their voices (and hearing, for that matter) screaming at protests (against the Vietnam War instead of against Wall Street or Israel), rock concerts (lots of dBs there), and their kids (the boomers overly permissive parents too).  I suppose turn-about is fair play.  The internet is so democratic that it screams at all of us, although it can tailor the content of the screams to the audience using all that info about ourselves that we give the data brokers.

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Item: Borrowing v. buying.  I think I’ve talked about this before, but now it’s official: most ebooks you find listed on Smashwords, which already distributes to Sony, Apple, B&N, and so forth, are now available on Scribd.  Maybe in response to this, Amazon has created a new program, Kindle Unlimited, to complement its Prime lending service.  In other words, you can borrow my ebooks through Amazon’s Kindle Prime or Unlimited  (about half of them, the ones in Kindle Select) or Scribd (the other half of them).

Some FAQs: (1) While all my ebooks on Smashwords are covered by the Scribd service, these can’t be in KDP Select, i.e. Prime or Unlimited, because Amazon requires an exclusive for its special programs.  I’ve maintained my Smashwords listings as a service for readers with non-Kindle devices, but so far Smashwords hasn’t produced much movement on my ebooks.  Because of the Amazon exclusive restriction for KDP Select, that’s getting a bit old and it doubles the formatting cost for my ebooks.  I might revise my policy in the future.  (Sometimes I think it would be better to go the open software route and post .epub and .mobi files at my websites as free downloads, asking for a payment if you like the book, but that would require some babysitting that would take time away from my writing.  <sigh>)

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No, this isn’t an essay on parenting.  This post is mostly about competing technological standards that seem often to reduce to X v. Y.  Remember eight-tracks v. cassettes?  Betamax v. VHS?  Blue Ray v. regular DVDs?  UNIX v. DOS?  MacOS v. Windows?  Android v. iPhone?  All clashes between terrible twos, some still going on.  Consider Betamax v. VHS.  The first system was clearly better, but the U.S. basically forced the rest of the world to adopt the inferior VHS.  In the UNIX v. DOS battle, morphed now into MacOS v. Windows, for those not up-to-date, DOS and Windows always seemed inferior but simpler than UNIX, but maybe Apple + UNIX tilts the scale in the UNIX direction.  (I personally liked VAX VMS, but some of you might know what happened to that great OS.)  My take: UNIX always seemed a shrine to cutesy nerdiness, and DOS a monument to Microsoft stupidity.  That’s just me.  You might have a different take, if you bother to care at all.

I won’t touch on the other cases where I’m more an infrequent user and/or never cared enough to go into the pros and cons.  I will state my criterion for one member of a techy terrible two winning out over another: it has to be complex enough that any nerd (I once counted myself occasionally in that category) can get down in the weeds and invent clever stuff while the casual user (I’m spending more time in that category with each passing year) can stay in the trees, reaching for the sky, without having to get down into the weeds.  With that criterion, no member of any of the terrible twos I listed achieves a passing grade.

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