Estimated Earth-Like Exoplanets

F-sub-p is going down all the time, isn't it? If you're interested in this sort of thing, you've a. already read articles like this one and b. you're not that surprised. But then Fermi's question - "Where is everybody?" - becomes more insistent.



Possibilities:

1. They're there, but we don't know what to listen or look for. This is to my mind overwhelmingly the most likely possibility. Sub-possibilities:

1a. Long-distance electromagnetic communication is a temporary local optimum. We're already moving away from it here on Earth. Unless we catch aliens in the middle of their 1920s to 1990s period, we'll miss them.

1b. Once intelligence is achieved, replicators profoundly altering themselves is not far behind. Are you sure you would recognize even your own "descendants" five thousand years from now? Why assume we'll find a species at a similar "level" of development, even assuming such a term can have any meaning outside humans? (Referring to 1a above, it's a little naive to assume the aliens will have 1950s. Don't rely too much on Star Trek episodes of yellow-blooded humanoids which carry the assumption of nearly identical biological and cultural development.)

2. They're there, but we're not seeing them, because they're intentionally hiding. Once introduced into the galactic ecosystem, organisms either try to conceal themselves and effectively disappear, or disappear for real. Unless you happen to catch a newborn intelligence's careless birth cries, you won't hear anything.

3. Maybe replicator chemistry could be common, but intelligence is not. The kind of replicator chemistry that produces representational tissues (experience-generating nervous systems) and therefore tools that allow them to communicate or move across interstellar space might be a fluke. Sharks have been dumbasses for 400 million years and my money is on their not inventing algebra in the next 400 million years. Intelligence is only useful insofar as it helps things reproduce. Or, if intelligence isn't a fluke, a dead end, one solution Fermi did in fact consider. Life on Earth has produced intelligence once, and it's not clear that those organisms which haven't achieved it have any tendency to achieve it.

4. We've only been looking in earnest for a half century. Asking "where are they" is probably like me looking out my window in San Diego in 2010 demanding "if the Earth has glacial cycles, then why don't I see any glaciers in the canyon next to my house? There must not be any glaciers." (Similar idea here.)


In conclusion:

1. We should absolutely not advertise our presence.

2. If designed self-replicating machines are possible, then we should look for those. I predict we will find some in our own asteroid belt and/or Oort cloud. (Shorter version here.)

3. We should be building a fleet of small interstellar probes to explore those exoplanets right now.

Temprano Feliz Dia De Los Muertos

Here's your early 90s metal shot for the day: The Witching, by Meliah Rage, from Solitary Solitude. (Forgive the commercial, if they insert one.) And happy birthday to Chris D. who introduced me to these guys long ago in the Mists of Time, i.e. at the Flying Hills pool on a Walkman.

Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato, 30 Years Later

First off: there's a live action movie coming out in December (good). It's only being released in Japan (++ungood). Join this awesome Facebook group and tell your geeky friends if you want to convince a distributor that there's a market for it in the States. For once I want to actually pay to see a movie instead of shamelessly pirating it,* and they're putting obstacles in my way! After all, preparing for this movie is the whole reason I went back and rewatched, nay, studied the series and why I'm inflicting this blog post on you now.

If you don't already know the great Star Blazers/Uchuu Senkyan Yamato, don't waste your time reading this. It's a late 70s/early 80s Japanese cartoon, and although I'm amazed how mature some of its themes are, I think if you didn't like it as a kid, you're not going to start liking it as a grown-up. A friend showed me Buckaroo Banzai at age 33 and his theory about why I hated it, despite liking other extremely dumb things, is that I'd missed the "critical window", i.e. fourth grade. (Perhaps this is why seeing Ministry for the first time at age 34 was also guaranteed to be a bad experience.) As a further example: the same artist who did Yamato also did Galaxy Express 999, which I think is about the stupidest thing ever. I mean, a frickin train going across space? ("But Mike," you might object, ever the astute reader, "doesn't Yamato feature a frickin WWII ocean battleship going across space?" "That's different.") Which is to say, trust nothing that I say here, except for that sentence. All Cretans are liars.

So what do I notice about Star Blazers that I didn't notice as a kid?

1) I remember much of it crystal-clearly - in some cases actual lines of dialogue, or names of planets - but there are whole episodes or scenes which I don't recall at all. Case in point: I remember that they recognized something was strange about the planet Balan because the plants grew toward the ground, indicating no reliance on natural sunlight; I remember Wildstar ridiculing Nova for wishing on a hunk of burning hydrogen and carbon (and thinking that was cool); but I have no memory of Captain Avatar's struggles with his health. The ones I can't remember tend to be character-building sections. It's possible they weren't aired because they were thought by the syndicating networks to be too intense or just too boring, but it's more likely that at five years old I just didn't care about anything that didn't involve the wave motion gun and space fighters.

2) The music has aged very well, even beyond the ubiquitous theme song. (Click here and scroll down for awesome version of it.) Some of it sounds very 70s (the use of guitar wah-pedal and echo effects for creepy or mysterious things, for example) but most of it stands the test of time.

3) I was being funny in my post where I claimed all of the Star Blazers characters were meant to be white. For example: characters sit cross-legged when socializing, unlike Westerners. Cars drive on the left. "Great Island" and "dormant volcano on Great Island" could not more obviously be Honshu and Fuji (and when they show Earth, they zoom in on the northwestern Pacific). In the flashback where the young Derek Wildstar is talking to his brother Alex at the Academy, a clumsy dub leads them to declare their mother made them chocolate cake when it was clearly maki. This I can understand. 1979 America might not have appreciated that a mother could express her love for her oldest son love by sending him raw fish.

However - it says something about anime in general that a Westerner can watch these cartoons and not have the characters' appearance seem foreign to him. My contention is that this style of drawing minimizes differences between Asians and Caucasians, deliberately or otherwise. Note that Nova is blonde. Yamato was made before Japanese women were lightening their hair.

As an aside, I do concede that Sandor is Japanese. He's the smartest and most dedicated guy on the ship, he's extremely cautious and conservative, AND his eyes are noticeably smaller. Wait, you're offended? I'm sorry you lack the nuanced cultural understanding that I have evolved in my travels, and I refer you to Eddie Murphy, who (as in all topics) is a recognized authority on this matter. But in all seriousness, I can't tell you how many times some anime idiot has started lecturing me about some aspect of Japanese culture that according to him (always a him!) I would have trouble understanding as a white person. Living in New Jersey or the San Fernando Valley and being sixteen apparently provides a better education in this regard than one might have expected!


Dessler got himself elected governor of a prefecture. Good for him!
4) Derek Wildstar is an asshole in the first series. I don't mean he has a rebel streak, I mean he's actively a self-centered dick, particularly to his crew-mate Venture, particularly in light of the fact that he's willing to let his pettiness get in the way of saving all life on Earth. Again I never picked up on this as a kid. Watching the series as an adult, the focus on Wildstar makes it seem that Yamato is partially a bildungsroman about him, as he gradually takes on the Captain's role and grows as a leader and moral person despite his doubts about himself.

5) The obvious: much of Japanese film and anime has had to do with the after-effect of getting A-bombed and conquered. And this is not unreasonable; one might expect that your country getting hit with atomic weapons might later effect its psyche and artistic output. Star Blazers clearly fits this pattern, but with more revenge-fantasy than most such works. The Star Force builds an amazingly uber-phallic weapon which, after a great build-up, fires out a stream of irresistible white energy from the great meatus on the bow of the ship, destroying all in its path (the trigger pulled no less by Wildstar himself.) They install this weapon in the flagship of the Imperial Japanese fleet (!), given the ancestral name of Japan, and proceed to island-hop across the galaxy, the whole way fighting the barbarians with strange hair colors** who had attacked the sacred homeland of Earth. Fantasy re-fighting of WWII emerging from the subconscious, anyone? Much like the S on Superman's chest, you would think eventually the Gamilons would eventually resist the urge to engage the Yamato head-on. But then there would have been no wave motion ejaculations to set five year-old kids jumping up and down with excitement during the build-up, as opposed to the 36 year old medical student not wanting to admit to the same jumping up and down. Me? No, of course not, what a ridiculous thing to think!

Once they get to Iskandar, they blow up Gamilon, which it turns out they were going toward the whole time, in a Campbellian twist to the whole affair. One could think of the Comet Empire*** as the Russians, the new enemy to fear after the homeland has been rebuilt. This kind of national-historical allegory is most often done for Star Trek with the Klingons as Russians, the Romulans as Japanese, etc. The Romulans are more interesting as pseudo-Japanese than the Neemoidians of Star Wars, who just sound Japanese. Someone should do a table. Who else have Americans been besides Gamilons?

6) And speaking of that, the influence of Star Trek is obvious now - the ship as a character in its own right, the uniforms - but I'll credit Yamato with having more character development than Star Trek. The fact that the technology wasn't always 100% reliable made it more interesting too (which is also why I liked Enterprise better than any of the other series. That and T'Pol.)

7) The first series sorta kinda passes the Bechdel Test. For a science fiction cartoon in 1979, you have to admit that's not bad. Nova and Starsha have a conversation alone, a few lines of which involve Starsha's future on Iskandar and whether she'll come back to Earth with the Yamato - but that's right before they shade into talking about her love for Alex Wildstar, hence the qualifier. I do have to admit I find it strange that there are really only two female characters in the series, and they bear a strong resemblance to each other - on which fact the characters themselves comment.

8) In one episode the Yamato captures a Gamilon pilot. As Doctor Sane examines him, he reads off vitals and hematology statistics, declaring that they're identical to a healthy human's data. I had just finished taking hematology when I re-watched it and wouldn't have understood the information without looking it up before, so I found it funny (and impressive) that they included such technical information in a program mostly watched by kids.****


View Larger Map
The real resting place of the Yamato.

All in all, positive or negative, it's still the best cartoon ever made. I noticed how many of what I'd thought were at least unique combinations of science fiction ideas in my own stories (not yet published of course) were directly inspired by Star Blazers. The moving planet at the center of an empire destroying everything in its path, for example. Even the spaceships I drew all over my notes in junior high were really just Yamato rip-offs, whether or not I realized it.

Returning to nostalgia-media like this is often instructive, because we can compare our reactions then and now to see how we've changed. (The best beer I ever tasted was at the finish line of the Big Sur Marathon. It was a Sierra Nevada IPA, which I hate, but my body was thrilled with anything made of carbs and liquid. Experience is an interaction of self and environmental input, and sometimes when the experience changes, it's not because input changed, it's because self changed.) But when the comparison is done from childhood to adulthood, the modern experience is usually disappointing - watching the old Transformers sure was - the psychological equivalent of going back to an old playground and seeing how much smaller everything is, and how actually, it wasn't the most inherently wonderful place in the world. Visiting the Reagan Museum will have the same effect on an 80s kid who has gradually become less sympathetic with the social conservative agenda. That said, I still liked watching Star Blazers again.

Admittedly doing this kind of auto-system-restore on yourself is also a bit masturbatory. In the long run, who cares? Now that we're swimming in media, those of us so inclined can also drown ourselves in nostalgia. Only in the modern era do we have enough time off from running from tigers to sit around pointlessly trying to tie back together obscure fleeting bits of our temporal lobes, as if trying to stave off some eventual cognitive Big Rip.


*It's amazing how fast my moral position on intellectual property changed when I left consulting and went back to being a thrifty student. Once I'm practicing medicine a similar reverse-shift is no doubt in store.

**By the way, why do the Gamilons only become blue a few episodes in? Will there be a how-the-Klingons-got-their-ridges continuity-fixer in the live action movie?

***When I get old I want to grow my eyebrows into my hairline, like the Comet Empire guy.

****I don't like the implication from Dr. Sane's character that all doctors all bumbling alcoholics. I'm not bumbling. I'm never so drunk on the job that I can't complete a procedure.

Play D&D, Meet Fast Women, Go to Hell

Jack Chick does it again with another hilarious comic - this time about Dungeons and Dragons!


The full tract in all its goofiness can be found here.

There are problems with Mr. Chick's tract, not least of which that in his fantasy world a) there seem to be many females involved with playing D&D, and b) that players of paper-based RPGs is not exactly an exploding demographic in 2010. If this is how Satan is tempting children, then he's stuck in the 80s. Also, please tell me where the hot witch ladies are who are playing D&D so I can go play D&D with them right now. They certainly weren't around in my middle school. Unless you count TGP's mom. ZING!

Also: when the bad deity has Peter Cullen's voice, he can't be that bad.

Space Battleship Yamato Not Coming to U.S. Theaters?!

I'm about to lose my shit over here.



I have seen some ugly rumors that Yamato won't be on the big screen in the U.S. The fact that the promotional website doesn't have an English version supports this.

If this is true then I think we're gonna have a problem.

So stop all that fighting global warming and hunger shit and do something important for once: helping to bring Yamato to American theaters! Here's the group on Facebook. If enough people sign up, small independent (i.e. cool) theaters may carry it. Tell your nerdy friends to show their support. Because if you're reading this blog you have nerdy friends.

Age and Gender Plot for Music Tags

Source: Last.fm blog

Young and male are in the top right corner. As are Metallica, Slayer, and Iron Maiden, the awesomest bands ever. Not surprisingly my tastes are younger than my body (consistent with the text analysis of this blog), although I do like the Yellowjackets (admittedly haven't listened to them in years).

One obvious observation: the lower right is blank, and size corresponds with numbers of mentions. This suggests that people talk about music less as they get older, and that older women don't talk about it at all. I definitely listen to less music than I did even 5 years ago.

This may be consistent with the observation that music is unique among types of art in that people, especially young people, use music to define identity and community, sometimes to the point of physical violence against outsiders. You don't see riots with surrealists fighting impressionists or gothic and Victorian architecture fans wearing T-shirts to advertise their loyalty and lifestyle. No specific hairstyle has ever been associated, to my knowledge, with being a fan of futurist sculpture. Where music is concerned, aggressive marketing certainly feeds the communities and identities relating to pop music but it doesn't create the tendency to begin with.

Consequently, my hypothesis is that strongly-identified musical subcultures are a form of signaling identity. Support:

- Music is more important to people below 30, especially teens and late 20s) who are still forming their identities

- Music fades from prominence in people's lives at exactly that time in life when people get married (no need to signal to mates) or have careers that define them more concretely

- The types of music that most attract young people contain lyrics that allude to, or performers that appear to engage in, a fantasy lifestyle that the music fan does not actually engage in (rap and crime, metal and evil, girl-pop and being a princess, etc.)

- Music is less important to women across all ages; women don't rely on active signaling for mate finding to the same degree that men do.

- Genres of music that are good for signaling must be exclusive of social values at large. No young male music fan wants to follow a band that dresses and acts normally and respectfully and mundanely, no matter how good the music is.

That we do see this behavior with some genres of pop music certainly says something about aggressive marketing, but again, we still don't see the "mannerist lifestyle" being marketed, or even twelve-tone serialism for that matter. There is something about popular music that makes it uniquely well-suited to forming subcultures around - the listening experience is passive, can produce strong emotional responses, and as mass-market art, the works tend to be less nuanced than other types of music. If some other art meets these same requirements I would argue that the same thing will happen, and maybe it already has with anime.

LBNL Scientists Model Supernovas

Astrophysicists from Lawrence Berkeley Labs (and other contributors) have a paper in the Astrophysical Journal about their model which allows them to model supernovas much more accurately. Of additional interest in the story is that if you read this TIME article about it, you would believe that it was Princeton and Princeton only that had put in all the effort (read: coding) to make the model work. Word has it that LBNL wrote the code and basically held their hands while Princeton were doing this work, and only found out about the TIME article second-hand once it was published.

Finally Saw a Space Launch

A spy satellite on top of a Minotaur vehicle, launched last night from Vandenberg AFB, exactly at the start of the launch window. (What's interesting about this satellite is it's apparently the first one designed to spy on other satellites.) I watched from Refugio Road just southeast of the tunnels near Gaviota, which is ~25 air miles from the launch site. From that distance the vehicle was not obvious but the stage separations were quite clear (I think you can kind of see one in the time lapse photo below as a slight bulge and then narrowing near the top of the arc as it tilted west out over the Pacific). A low crackling rumble became audible just about 2 minutes after the launch (from 25 miles!); much more suspenseful waiting for that than counting seconds between lightning and thunder.

I've been wanting to see a launch for years. Finally!



Image at Gant Daily

That's It, Just Read Boing Boing

That's it. If you want to see how our species will be exterminated, just go read Boing Boing, I don't have to re-post them any more here. It's like every 50th article now. Boing Boing posts should have a a tag called "Mike's Singularity nightmares coming true exponentially faster". Here are the cyber-insects already. They're dumb so far, but they can fly now.

And you can print them. In stranger eons, there will be no Great Old Ones, only Tiny New Ones.

What Did I Tell You. It's Little *Flying* Robots You Should Be Scared Of

Listen, I warned you all, I really did. But no, everyone thinks that the evil Singularity monsters will look like the grinning red-eyed Terminators. No. Nothing so clumsy. They'll be little, and they'll fly. And they can already take our beer. See? It may already be too late. (H/T Boing Boing.)

To Help You Talk Like a Pirate - Pirate Metal!

And it's Scottish pirate metal. Behold, Alestorm:



Thanks to Scott in my class for the reminder of this important day and H/T to Friendly Atheist for the metal. And I'm having trouble deciding if the artists intend this to be taken seriously.

Ant Mills and Intelligence

Ant mills are all the rage in the blogosphere the past few days. Ants get locked into a pattern of following each other in a circle, and their little ant nervous systems don't have the plasticity to break the loop. A hymenoptera halting problem?



Like you, I watch this with pride and think "Look at those stupid ants. I'm so glad humans have no cognitive foibles or blind spots which cause us to follow each other into oblivion!" Never mind that these particular ants are milling in the ruins of a once-great civilization. One solution to the Fermi Paradox: because any nervous system will have such failure modes, intelligence is in fact an evolutionary dead end, and only fecundity matters.

Singularity Watch: Teaching Robots to Lie

I don't know what these guys are thinking. Maybe they're trying to create a new enemy for the Autobots: the Politicons. ZING!

Doomsday Vault for Animals

The Norwegians already had a Doomsday Vault for plants, but as it turns out right here in San Diego there's one for animals. Now that doesn't mean you can go eating condors and Siberian tigers now.

Habitable Exoplanet Discovered by Mid-2011?

That's the prediction in a forthcoming PLOSOne paper. Wow. H/T Tyler Cowen. Note that habitable doesn't necessarily mean oxygen atmosphere to these authors; understood that they want to build a model based on frequency and distance-from-star at which planets are being discovered, and there's no data to put in the model anyway. Still, an atmosphere is important if you want to call a place habitable.

More importantly: let's say it's August 2011, and it's happened. What government is going to justify spending money to send probes there? None of us is going to live to see the data. I hope we go, but there's a whole different kind of political problem between watching a moon landing, and watching probes slip off into the interstellar darkness forever, at least from the viewpoint of those currently living.

Cast Iron Crow at Slim's in San Francisco, Sunday October 3rd

There will be metal. Make sure you get your tickets by the 30th here.

Recall that if you have the chance to see CIC and you don't, I will punch you.

Blog Ratings

Analysis software is usually pretty pointless and low-resolution (if it's not completely non-random), but like many people my narcissism got the better of me. So I used this site to analyze the writing style of all my blogs, all of which came across to the analysis software as male, mostly age 66-100 (I'll take that as a compliment about my learnedness), with tone half-and-half academic or personal (are these the only two settings?). All were considered "upset". Is this the ONLY setting? I don't exactly use my cognition blog to complain!

Which one of these was not like the other? This blog, my most immature, which rated age 18-25. Must be all the scifi and metal. Besides, you're here reading it aren't you? TOTALLY NICE DUDE.

Here's Me Launching a Nuclear Missile

...or at least turning the key in a preserved missile silo, and of course it's a two-person operation.


More below. The missile is (I believe) a Titan. You can see this either just south of Tucson (where these were taken), or in South Dakota off I-90. You can find the full album here.




Here is a hanging hallway. Besides the security to get into the place (duress codes, plus alphanumerics which changed every day and had to be burned after being read) the most impressive bit was the engineering of the silo itself. Because they expected nearby nuclear explosions, to minimize the effect of the shaking inside the silo, everything in the silo is suspended from the top, rather than being built into the bedrock around the shaft (which would be rocking and rolling post-nuke).



The business end of a rocket, camera inside the nozzle.

Now THAT, Sir, is a Deathlands Collection

Look at this goddamn picture:

Eat your heart out TGP. Behind that stack of Deathlands books is a whole other set of Deathlands books. I mean holy Key-rist on a hard roll. That anyone would admit to owning all of them but one (!) is amazing; the guilty party is none other than a certain Vancouver resident who goes by the alias of M'Aliceand was my nemesis in this tale of epic battle. I took about 600 pictures on my recent swing through the Pacific Northwest and Canadian Rockies and this might be the most excellent one.

The Hot Alberta Metal Scene. Seriously.

Who knew Calgary (and Lethbridge, and Edmonton) had such an awesome metal scene? People in Alberta, that's who. Having just returned from the Great White (or at this time of year, green) North I must spread the word. Last week I was in Alberta, mostly in Jasper and Banff National Parks, so when I passed through Calgary I unfortunately didn't have time to take in a show. But the writeups in the local free papers were many. Of the names I gleaned, here are a few stand-outs:

Akakor - Hot technical Death metal! Imagine a heavier more metally Dillinger Escape Plan. Personal favorite track, Perceived to Be.

Enceladus - Described as Lethbridge power metal (a south Alberta city). I'm partial to showboating neoclassical stuff with melodic vocals (e.g. Symphony X) so I dig these guys too, although they could do with better vocal production and mixing. Check out the other bands at their CD release party. (No offense to Lethbridge, in fact congrats to Lethbridge, but how can San Diego not have a scene like this?!?!? If it does please direct us all to the right resources.)

Mark of Cain - These guys are slightly more technical than average and are helping move death metal past the point of trying to out-shock and out-gore the next band. Plus they like robots, and anyone who combines science/fiction and metal is making the world better.

JJS3 - Fun pentatonic neo-hard rock bordering at times on doom-metal. (Though from the Yukon rather than Alberta. Is there death metal in the Yukon? I spend too much time wondering if there's anything about certain cities that contributes to the musical style aside from contact with other bands; maybe in a massive territory like YT with only 30,000 other people the population density is too low to get really angry.) I find myself listening to Warrior Warrior repeatedly. The guitar tone and style reminds me of Crysknife in some ways, along with the simple arrangements and catchy melodies.

Kataplexis - Perpetual Apathy is my fave. Technical bordering on black death metal.

Striker. Excellent! Imagine Black Tide meets Hammerfall; ergo, not at all like the 80s hair band the name makes you think of. Check out "F*ck Volcanoes", an ode to that unspellable Icelandic eruption this summer, musically given the full serious-minded operatic hard rock treatment, but lyrically, er ah, not: "F*ck volcanoes! Spewing shit into the sky / Stupid assholes, Iceland why don't you go die / F*ck volcanoes, you're seriously killing my buzz / Motherf*cker." Believe it or not, it works! You will also smile when you listen to "The Keg That Crushed New York".

Divinity's record is called The Singularity, which is also a good union of metal and sf. I would say they're a slightly less grating Meshuggah, but you can hear the influence, even in the vocal style. About time for a generation of Meshuggah-influenced bands to appear.

Also check out Ominosity and Viathyn.

I don't know about you but when I find an excellent metal scene in an unexpected part of the world and I'm checking out their tunes I'm like a kid opening presents at Christmas. Enjoy!