California launching its own satellite to fight climate change

Pic is of a French satellite, found here.

California is taking action on climate change while others aren't.

Or as Governor Jerry Brown succinctly put it: "With science still under attack and the climate threat growing, we're launching our own damn satellite."

Both the state and its governor have been the butt of many jokes, and justifiably so in a few cases, however this move shows initiative and inspiration on more than one level.

Once in space, the satellite will be able to specifically identify and monitor sources of climate pollution. This would allow for targeted regulatory practices. Good thing too, as California has experienced many of the more severe effects of climate change firsthand, such as drought and wildfires.

This move also emboldens private space enterprises. Planet Labs, the outfit launching the satellite, was founded by former NASA engineers. Even if you're someone still holding on against all reason on the truth of climate change, perhaps you can at least be appreciative of the expansion of private space launches.

While a hopeful move, I believe it's important to remember that the satellite itself won't "fight" climate change. Not exactly. The data it will harness and send back will be invaluable, true. That alone is not enough. We must then act in order to stop the environmental process, or at least slow it down. I guess this is where the cynic in me thinks the satellite will ultimately allow us a bird's eye view of our own extinction.

Now there's a plot to write. It would be a series of log entries by a human in orbit, each entry recording the acceleration of climate change, remarking on the visible changes to the atmosphere and the planet itself (e.g. rising tides and swallowed coastlines, widening deserts.) What would the reactions of this last human be? Anger? Resignation? "I told you so?" Maybe this person chose orbit to live out their final days, having grown tired of talking to the brick walls of fellow people. Are there any final artifacts of the human race on that orbiting space station? Please tell me they're a case of beer and season one of Sanford & Son (catch the joke?) Anything of humanity stored in the station's computer?

"I must scream but who would listen?" HAL says...


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Sarcastic robots: A rhetorical analysis

So there I was last weekend, watching Super Sci Fi Saturday Night like I always do.

I was also live tweeting along with my fellow fans, like I always do.

Sometime during Buck Rogers, amid all our usual MST3K-style jokes, someone tweeted a good question:

"Why are robots so often written as sarcastic wise-crackers?"

The tweet was in reference to Twiki, of course (pictured above). Voiced by Mel Blanc (voice of Bugs Bunny and myriad other cartoon characters), Twiki's lines are written to come across as the comic relief of the program, sounding either crotchety and warmly caustic (only way I have to describe it) or serving the purpose of groaner one-liners. Groan though we might, he's the only member of the cast to make the others laugh. Not even Buck can pull that off, even though he tries.

Twiki is not alone. In fact, there's another sarcastic robot right in the Super Sci Fi Saturday Night line up. The Robot, as a matter of fact, from Lost in Space.

More often than not, the Robot delivers lines a flat, serious tone. Sometimes the tenor mismatches the words of the statement and hilarity may ensue (numerous examples, go find them yourself). Towards the end of the series however, a dry sarcasm creeps into his dialogue, particularly as a means of dealing with the irascible, nigh insufferable, Dr. Smith.

Then of course there's R2-D2.

The running gag among Star Wars fans is that Artoo is actually the most sarcastic and foul-mouthed droid in the galaxy. We just can't hear what he's saying. The typically gnathonic C-3PO does, and has from time to time said, "You watch your language." In Empire Strikes Back, when Threepio is more or less in pieces, R2 beeps something at him.

"Of course I've looked better!" Threepio snipes back.

Seems logical to infer that R2-D2 said, most sarcastically, "You've never looked better."

Why do we do this? Why do writers in science fiction repeatedly instill a sarcastic, metallic tongue in the mouths of our 'bots? Not always, of course. There are plenty that aren't funny, but the trope does appear common. Why?

Comedic effect is the obvious answer. Somebody needs to bring cheap laughs and relieve the tension while the hero of the space opera fights the good fight. True as that may be, the tendency to instill wisecracking and sarcasm in our mechanical creations goes beyond the fictional into the real. Just like Siri for example, and the eye-rolling jokes she's programmed to kick out.

The rhetorical device may be there not simply to make us laugh, but to put us at ease. I would argue that it serves as a verbal, textual means to lead us out of the "uncanny valley."

The "uncanny valley" is a concept in robotics that deals with the robot's appearance. If a robot has the obvious appearance of a machine, such as the ones we've looked at thus far, we are not troubled by the device because it doesn't look at all human. If a construct is completely human in appearance, such as the Replicants of Blade Runner, we don't even know the difference.

Anything in between is just a little too strange and weirds us out. That's when we arrive in "the uncanny valley." A real-life example may be...

There may yet also be a bit of "uncanny valley" going on in the "cute" robots of shows and movies I mentioned as well. Twiki can fly a starfighter, R2 can work a computer and pick locks, and in general they are more than able perform many of the tasks once reserved for opposable-thumbed, higher-thinking humans. If so, what else can they do? What else will they be able to do? Will the robots take your job? Can the robot revolt be far away?

The rhetoric of sarcasm disarms such fears. It is present not solely for comedic effect, but to lead us out of the uncanny valley, or perhaps to prevent us from wandering down into it in the first place. "You have a sense of humor, and a feisty one at that. You must be like me. You must be on our side. You must be all right." 

I could be wrong. As the great scholar of rhetoric, Wayne Booth once wrote: "The problem is thus that in judging rhetoric, we cannot escape our own deepest convictions." While "convictions" might be a bit strong of a term, I certainly have an admitted affinity for these mechanical characters and despite their cheese factor, maybe I just want to see something more than entertainment at work, even if influencing the writing on a purely subconscious level.

Maybe the presence is part of the solution, too. True, we can help prevent the possibility of a "roboapocalypse" by teaching AI's philosophy and helping them to adopt high ideals and to mimic the best of human nature while eschewing the worst. A sarcastic sense of human might serve to further "humanize" our creations.

Or give them great one liners to kick out while they're mowing us down.

Bidi bidi bidi.



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Poetry: If Gibson can do it, so can I. Maybe.

I am taking a poetry class.

Yes, you read that correctly. I need another elective for my terminal degree and one of my only real options was Nature Writing. That subject matter is difficult enough for me, given that I am not at all woodsy (activities such as camping and canoeing must occupy certain circles of Dante's Inferno), but its even more problematic than that.

Unbeknownst to me when I registered, a key component of the class is the reading and writing of poetry...something I have never attempted to write.

Daunting to say the least. Aside from the epic narratives of the canon, a few literary poems (THE RAVEN!), and of course song lyrics, I've never been attracted to poems. I've certainly never felt a calling to write them. My mind has opened somewhat upon learning that one of my favorite writers, William Gibson, published a poem in 1992.

How the blazes did I not know this?

Called Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), it is a 300-line poem about nostalgia, memory, consciousness, and how viewing the past is always framed by the present and not the reality of that bygone time.

Of course with it being Gibson, there had to be a connection to technology. The poem came on a 3.5 floppy disk (it was 1992, after all) and after the user opened the file and read it, it would encrypt itself. Gone.

Ephemeral, get it?

I wonder if I could do something similar for class? It could be a mixed-media presentation, where I present a few lines about...I don't know...nuts, twigs, and berries, and piece by piece the words are overwritten with others such as "bandwidth," "assimilation," "upload," "chrome polymer," and "singularity." I'd need to find a coder to pull it off.

A bit much, I think.

The class has actually been good. If the brain is allowed to be flexible, one finds that "nature" encompasses a wide variety of interesting topics for writing.The readings are compelling and my fellow students have been great partners for banter.

As for poetry...guess I might not be too terrible at it.



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What one episode can do

Image from the Star Trek episode, "The Tholian Web," copyright Paramount Pictures.


"It's just a TV show."

I've heard that said in jest and I've said it myself, dripping with smugness and cruelty.

As I've written before, I regret those sentiments and the awful attitude that spawned them. Recently, I was reminded yet once more of just how wrong I was. It happened while watching the original Star Trek, specifically an episode called, "The Tholian Web." It sent me all the way back to the 1980s and my freshman year of high school.

While supposedly "the best years of your life," my high school experience was anything but. In fact, it was downright miserable and I hated damn near every day I had to go. I was the son of a college professor in a rural, agricultural community where football and basketball are viewed as sacred rites, somewhere above confession but just ever so slightly beneath communion, to use a Catholic comparison. Me? I was a scrawny, socially awkward kid who liked books and computers.

It caught on fast that I was no athlete and I had no desire to be. "That's fine, boy," school admins told me before rushing off to dandle their beloved players. "But don't you be inflicting your views on anyone else." I think I got that when I protested having to go to pep rallies rather than class. Why the hell should I be forced to sit in those bleachers or stands and cheer on very same people who beat me up? For no reason?

Yeah. I got your "Bomber pride" right here.

If it sounds like a cliche, well...it is. But these are the sorts of experiences that tend to give people a creative sensibility. So I got that going for me. Which is nice. But I digress...

Like I said, the episode took me back to a Saturday in early March during my freshman year. I was at a school function for one reason or another, hanging with Mel, one of the few friends I had at the time. A small mass of upperclassmen came over to us.

"Got a joke for you," one guy told Mel.
He cupped a hand to Mel's ear, leaned in and whispered. One of the other troglodytes turned to me with a smile I'll never forget and said, "It's a good joke."

After hearing it, Mel rolled his eyes while the others laughed and went away.

"Was that about me?" I asked Mel.
"Yes," he answered. "But when they do that, I stick up for you."

Just a joke. Didn't stop it from haunting me all the rest of the day. The fact that the incident happened at all drilled holes into me, slicing and cutting until years later, I would have no choice but to steel myself and fight back, taking it out on all the wrong people. But that's another story.

I just could not get past the fact that so many people disliked me. What was more, even if they knew what it did to me, it likely would make no difference. For if it would, they wouldn't be doing it in the first place. I must, for whatever reason, be worthy of all this animosity.

All of that tossed and roiled in my brain as I went home at the end of the day. There was nothing else I could do except what I did every Saturday at 4pm: watch Star Trek.

Yeah like I said, this could not be any more cliche.

The episode was called "The Tholian Web." In it, the Enterprise comes across the Defiant, a sister ship of the fleet. The latter ship is found drifting dead in space. The usual suspects of the Star Trek cast beam over and find that the crew of the Defiant is missing. This is due to the fact that the area of space is a border zone between dimensions and the Defiant is slowly slipping into it. The Enterprise folks decide to high tail it out of there, but Captain Kirk gets left behind, falling into the other dimension.

Spock is therefore in command, and he immediately begins efforts to get his friend and their Captain back. Things go from bad to worse as ships full of aliens called Tholians arrive, accusing the Enterprise of intruding in their territory. They begin to wrap the Enterprise in an energy web, imprisoning it. Spock can't catch a break because not only is the Captain missing in transdimensional space, not only are they under attack from hostile aliens, the crew is revolting against his his "all logic, no emotion" style of leadership in this crisis, particularly the hotheaded Dr. McCoy, who second-guesses all of Spock's orders.

While this episode does not rank high among fans as there is a good deal of cheese present (come on, which episode of ST:TOS is free of it?), I think it might actually be my all-time favorite one. Yes, it's sentimental for me, as the episode came at just the right time and acted as a balm, taking my mind from my present circumstances to someplace fantastic, ameliorating the slings and arrows from my thoughtless peers. It's more than that, however. In a weird, meta way, it felt like Judy Burns and Chet Richards wrote that episode just for me, just for that very moment in my life. One scene in particular gave me that impression.

Since Kirk was presumed dead, Spock and McCoy had to watch a video Kirk left behind for them in the event anything should anything happen to him. In it, Kirk tells them both to...essentially...cut one another some slack. He explains to McCoy that Spock is facing the most difficult decisions of his career and that he must be quietly straining and struggling beyond belief in that moment. Spock, on the other hand, should temper his logic with the human insight that McCoy could provide. Once the video ended, both men stood in silence for a time. Until...

McCoy: Spock...I'm sorry. It must be difficult.
Spock: What would you have me say, Doctor?

Later, I would remember this moment when a cooler head told me that much of what is taken as malice is actually born out of ignorance. That, and the fact that everyone is fighting a battle we know nothing about. Be kind. Advice I should have followed more often in my life. In that moment, however, I saw that scene written as holding the promise that two people in conflict could come to understanding if they just had the merest glimpse into one another's heads. Somewhere, there was hope.

That, and I did have at least one or two good friends like Mel, a wonderful guy that I should have spent a lot more time with when I could've. "I stick up for you." Those words of his still mean a great deal to me.

"Just a TV show"?

It comes from the written word...and few things can change you like the written word.

And it may come from the most surprising and unsuspecting of places.



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11 ways humanity could go extinct

What better way to kick off your weekend than considering human extinction?

I'm aware that it's been "kind of a thing" around this blog, but I just happened upon this article.

Yes, yes, it's a "listicle" and the title "11 Extremely Likely Ways Humans Will Go Extinct" is phrased in a most Trumpian manner, but the selected scenarios bear examination.

All the usual culprits are on the list: nuclear war, global pandemic, and asteroid impact, are perennial threats. Overpopulation is yet another serious factor to consider, while alien invasion is most unlikely. 

There are, however, two entries that don't get as much air time on ESE. One is the risk of supervolcano. One sits just underneath Yellowstone park, and when that caldera goes...you can imagine. Last decade, one volcanic eruption in Iceland wreaked havoc with airline travel over the Atlantic. The Yellowstone Caldera would cover the breadbasket of America in ash.

Then there are black holes. They were once thought to be stagnant, but it now seems that those monsters can roam about the universe, consuming whatever comes into their path. Fun, huh?

Who ever said the natural world was a friendly place? Who ever said humanity must last forever?

People always say "I don't want to talk/think about these things", but how much of our popular fiction centers on extinction? Maybe instead of extinction, I should say, "end of the world as we know it"? Writers love it, what with Walking Dead and the entire glut of zombie apocalypse variations of the past decade or more. My writer's mind is actually wandering more towards something like the film Oblivion. The world is over, but aliens use the leftover husk of our planet as a "Botany Bay" for their undesirables. Got a space pirate? Send them here.

Through the prison planet walks a space ninja....seeking enlightenment...

Yeah, I should probably kill any thoughts of writing that. The pure stupidity of such a tale could cause human extinction by sucking away our remaining brain cells. It's not like we have many left at this point.

Many years ago, I might've been all right with any of these extinction scenarios coming to pass. I certainly thought about them in the wake of SJC closing. But since those angsty twenty-something days, I've been lucky enough to fall in with people I love and things are going very well.

Let's see what we can do to put this off for a while, shall we?

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The Voynich Manuscript

I have something of a new fascination.

A year and a half ago, during the sad and loathsome days of a closing college, I taught an English class called Language, Grammar, and Society. We ended up creating our own language. It was incomprehensible to anyone but us. We wrote messages with it in"tapestries," including all manner of weird art.

I wish I would have known about the Voynich Manuscript during that class.

I found out about the manuscript while sifting through The New Yorker, finding this excellent article by Reed Johnson. Ever since, I've been hooked as the strange book seems to be this "perfect storm" of subjects that fascinate me.

It is a book written in a thus far indecipherable language, save for a paltry few words in Latin.

An exact date for the manuscript is difficult to ascertain, but the vellum has been carbon dated to the early 15th century, 1401-1438. It likely came from what is now Italy and the book gets its name from Wilfrid Voynich, a rare book dealer who bought the manuscript in 1912.

It gets weirder.

There are illustrations inserted through out the unreadable text. They depict bizarre plants and flowers found nowhere in nature. There are glyphs that resemble zodiac or occult symbols, there are diagrams of what appear to be constellations or positions of planets, and there are strange creatures, a few resembling dragons.

This thing makes both Yellow Submarine and Naked Lunch look lucid. Given my tastes, I hope you know, gentle ESE reader, that I mean no disrespect to those works of art by any means. I'm simply saying they are not the most...accessible of creations. Nevertheless, I ask myself the same questions after reading any text:

Who wrote this?
Why did they write it?
What is their primary message?

One possibility is it is a guide to herbs and herbal remedies. Another is that it is a late Renaissance grimoire, composed by someone who fancied him or herself a sorcerer, an alchemist, or another such variety of occultist. Looking over the pages, I can't shake a gut-level similarity I sense between this book and the Malleus Maleficarum, a guide for hunting witches (really it's a book designed to persecute and even execute women), a text I taught at my previous college. As fabricated as that book was, so too might the Voynich be a hoax, In fact, there are those who blame Voynich himself, saying he created the book Why write it in code? Perhaps so that the occult author's secret spells would remain known only to the author. One should also consider the very real threat such an author would faced at that time in Europe. If this writer were truly practicing a faith other than Catholicism, they would no doubt be called a witch and dealt with customarily. The book's meaning may be deliberately obfuscated out of self-preservation.

Note the cross in the left hand of the upper, naked woman. Lord only knows what's raining down on the second woman.

All the secrecy and danger, of course, begs the question: why write it down in the first place? Why would you want to take the chance of getting caught with something so heretical during such times?

Then again, perhaps it's not really "code." Is it possible that somehow this really is in a language hitherto un-encountered in human history? Even if it was read and written...maybe even spoken...among a small group of people, do we still consider a language? Several times there have been claims from someone who "cracked" the case, but each call of triumph seems to result in no soap. I guess even Alan Turing was unable to decipher its meaning. So many, many questions...

Seriously...why would someone write this book? It's one of those things that by all logic it should not exist, and yet there it is. I suppose that's one of the reasons that lends at least a few camps to believe it's likely a hoax, a sort of highbrow prank.

I'm surprised Dan Brown hasn't jumped on this one. Maybe that's his next mega-buck fluff in the pike.

Speaking of the conspiracy-minded, I've come across a few comments from those who, and you knew this was coming, believe the book to be of alien origin. Or at least inspired by otherworldly visitation. The plants look weird because they are, indeed, not of this Earth. They are from Mars. The language is unreadable to our eyes because it was not created by humans. It is Martian. This all plays nicely into the theory that, however misguided, states that humanity originated on Mars and migrated to Earth in the dimmest moments of the past.

All great stories...but that's about it.

As I said, I'm a newbie to the Voynich Manuscript. As such, I'm afraid I don't have much to offer that would be insightful. I can, however, assure you I will be reading more and posting more.

For the moment, I really like this theory from XKCD:

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Nanotechnology and religion

Even though I'm no longer teaching Core 10, I have found a way to work transhumanism into the coursework at my current institution.

This of course will include covering nanotechnology.

In English, we teach rhetorical analysis. This means taking a text and discerning what a writer is saying and what strategies and evidence are present in the text to support the writer's point. There are of course a diversity of opinions on a subject such as nanotechnology, which in addition to its timeliness, makes the subject fitting for such an exercise. It is yet undetermined whether it will happen in my present class, but several objections and otherwise cautionary claims in Core 10 came from the sector of religion.

I was reminded of this by an article in The Guardian (which I once wrote for, yes I'll keep plugging) called Nanotechnology and Religion: a complex relationship.

I'll say.

The article opens up by referencing a science fiction book that envisions a panel of Muslim scholars considering whether or not it would be right to eat a slice of bacon constructed by nanotechnology. After all, the bacon is not carved from that unclean animal, the pig. It has been built atom by atom by nanobots. Does that obviate the objection in dogma?

"The story may look like a joke, but it shows how the capacity of nanotechnology to manipulate atoms may change the material world in such a way to raise religious questions," says Chris Toumey, a cultural anthropologist at the University of South Carolina. He wrote the paper Seven Religious Reactions to Nanotechnology. I'm going to read it eventually. Honest. Just a little busy right now. But I digress...

Indeed, as much as someone of a more secular bent might be inclined to *eyeroll* at religious objections, the objections bring with them concrete concerns. Note that the bacon example entails a bacon slice assembled atom by atom. That advanced level of nanotechnology is the power of creation itself. If you can make and remake matter in any combination you choose, it's hard not to see that as God-like. What are the implications? Much as I might have longed for it, as I'm guessing so many of us have at one time or another, I am spiritually afraid of holding the power of God.

There are ramifications for ourselves in other regards. Transhumanists such as Kurzweil proclaim one of the benefits of nanotech to be longevity. A human body infused with nanotechnology may contribute to lifespans previously undreamed of. This may come about via nanotech-assisted cell regeneration or nanobots in the bloodstream destroying loathsome life such as cancer cells before they even fully form. That latter thought keeps me warm at night. And yet there are religious questions associated with immortality, or even prolonged lifespan.

That is among the many other questions.

From The Guardian article:

"Catholics relate the issue with classical bioethics problems: will new embryo diagnostics coming from nanotchnology lead to abortion? Will nanomedicine respect human dignity, even when health conditions deteriorate up to a point where euthanasia could be considered?

Non-Catholic Christians express their concerns about human hubris: for example, one author compares nanotechnology to alchemy, warning about the dangers of "total control over nature in the ability to transmute any substance into any other". Muslims take a very different path: rather than debating whether nanotechnology is right or wrong, they discuss who has the authority to make a decision. The question is casted in terms of ijtihad, the Islamic procedures for issuing legal rulings. Jewish writers frame the debate in the narrative of the Golem, This is a human-shaped creature assembled by men with religious or magic powers, whose behaviour can be beneficial or dangerous, in different stories: the baseline is that technology can improve creation, but this comes with a burden of responsibility for humans."

The Golem! Wow. I was thinking of Frankenstein's monster, but I suppose that's more of a secular metaphor.

What might atheists say? Does one need religion in order to see a need for weighty consideration before opening the floodgates on all things nanotech? Just see Robert Oppenheimer's quote about "going after something technically sweet and worrying about the consequences later" (paraphrased). I've been looking to see what Christopher Hitchens might have said on the subject, but have been unsuccessful at finding any writings or interviews that cover it. I didn't choose him because he spoke for all atheists, rather I just know he was a prolific writer and speaker, thus I might have stood a better chance at locating an essay. I wonder if nanotechnology might have allowed him to feel less powerless in the end. 

One might also be curious of the reaction from the more fundamentalist wings of the various major religions. Who can tell? The only certainty is that there will be one. Rhetorically, fundamentalism is a response to modernism. When life changes and technology advances, there will always be a subset of the population that views the changes with distrust and clings to black and white thinking.

This all bleeds with potential for thought, debate, and just general chewing over, far more than what this mere blog post allows, what we might call a "genre constraint" in comp/rhet studies. 

As I've always done, I'll let you know what the class says.



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