A Should-Be Household Name: Russell Ohl

He invented solar cells and developed semiconductor doping. Why is he less famous than, for example, Joe DiMaggio?

Should-Be Household Name #2: John Montgomery

The Music of the Spheres

Click through for the music of the spheres! It's pretty cool but it would be more interesting and less pleasant if the tones were less arbitrarily assigned, as they seem to be. Maybe based on a log of the mass or diameter of each planet to try to keep it within the range of human hearing (unlike the natural tone of supermassive black holes). Maybe they could get David Cope's AI to do it. Plus, as they have it, the solar system sounds too much like a casino for comfort. I felt like asking Saturn to comp me for a martini.

It occurs to me that Kepler's original work on the geometry of the solar system spent lots of time showing how it could be compared to musical chords. He (and Newton) might be horrified at the brusqueness of how the r-squared law of gravitation was re-derived as an exercise by Bayesian inference last year.

Reading original sources in science and philosophy is interesting for many reasons. One of them is that you can see how presentation styles have changed especially in terms of what is now considered extraneous. Plato in particular has a lot of superstitious gravel along with the gold nuggets; good thing there aren't people who demand that we take literally every last sentence in Republic.

The Postman Isn't That Bad

Yes, and I thought Battlefield Earth was fun too. Maybe I'm more tolerant in general, or maybe speculative fiction people are a small enough slice that the broader public's tastes won't align with ours; who knows. For what it's worth, David Brin thought it captured the spirit of his book. No, it still doesn't quite get where it was going, but it's better if you take the film for what it was trying to be. To inject a pretentious note, this was one of John Updike's main rules for reviewing fiction, and it's true in any medium. If you pick up an Elvis record, and form an opinion according to classical music rules, you're wasting everyone's time. (In general if you consume things trying to like them, you live a better life. True with wine, true with movies; I wish more people would figure it out.) There are a lot of ideas if you pay attention, though they're subtle enough that they're maybe better rendered in writing than on screen - the barbarian general who maintained the trappings of civilization (making paintings - of himself; Shakespeare quotes about violence, understanding history well enough to see that he was at the head of a feudal system) with the protagonist serving as a nucleus of law and order just by doing something as glitterless as delivering messages reliably.

Importantly: like Lord of the Rings, this movie made me mad that I'm not out in the mountains where it was filmed. I haven't spent nearly enough time in Oregon and Washington. And I've spent a lot of time there. The scenery alone is reason enough to watch it so you can plan your next road trip.

It may just be that it was too damn long (2h59m). There was no one on the set with the stature to stand up to lead actor and screenwriter and tell him some scenes shouldn't be in; same in the editing room for which ones could be left out. Star Wars Episode I is another example.

Final note: I knew I'd heard antagonist Will Patton (General Bethlehem) somewhere before. I listened to Al Gore's The Assault on Reason on CD, read by Patton (whose performance I thought was the best in the movie). Once I realized the previous source it was an odd juxtaposition: the neo-Ostrogoth with the voice of an environmental spokesman.

How Much Variation is There in the Wattage of the Earth's Crust?

It certainly seems like there have been more large earthquakes in the last few months than usual. What's the standard deviation for seismic joules per month or year? I posted about this on my outdoors blog here. What I'd really like to see is an animated GIF of the USGS California earthquake map. Like this:



[Added later: Turns out they do have such a page, which can be found here. It rocks]

This one is just a 2-shot animation over 6 days. Granted 2 data points isn't great, but I'm not going to take a shot every day and make a new GIF. It looks like the quakes around Mexicali and El Centro are a) getting smaller/less numerous and b) migrating northwest, both of which match what has been happening.

So what about it, USGS? Can't you automatically make a 1-month loop animation like Unisys does with weather satellites? This might provide researchers with valuable insights. I shot an email to the webmaster at the USGS site. [And they responded, and they are doing it. Thanks guys!]

We Should Aim at Making Space Travel Economically Self-Sustaining Now

The Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an alliance of businesses and organizations, just endorsed the President's current vision for space exploration. That's not the interesting part, at least to me. The interesting part is the Federation's stated goals: "to promote the development of commercial human spaceflight, pursue ever higher levels of safety, and share best practices and expertise throughout the industry." Shouldn't economic self-sustainability trump everything else? If space flight pays for itself, it will continue. If it's an expensive amusement park ride, it won't.

Has anyone done even 30,000'-view type proposals for commercially viable space operations? Zero-G manufacturing, towing in an asteroid for iridium? Yes, it's neater to send people instead of computers into space, but people break more easily and cost more money. And yes, the ultimate far-future goal should, as the Spaceflight Federation states, to get humans into space, and to settle bodies besides the Earth as insurance against existential threats, but it has to begin with economically sustainable activity.

[Added later: Tyler Cowen and Charles Stross both try to answer what the smallest population is that could keep us as wealthy as we are. Cowen thinks that even a world with a billion residents would be 15% poorer (presumably on a per capita basis) than our current world. In other words, a billion isn't enough to sustain our current standard of living even on a planet that has an atmosphere and water. Can we really expect that substantially fewer people can sustain just the bare essentials for survival on Mars, which would include technologically complex equipment? Until you get that basic sustenance, other colonies are necessarily dependent on Earth for their survival. Not surprising, since we haven't even sustainably colonized Antarctica yet, even with air and water.]

Doing My Part for Science Fiction

Now that we're living here in 2010, I like to walk around saying things like: "Well, back in the twentieth century, we didn't anticipate the impact of information technology!" Bonus points if I remember to refer to it as the TwenCen or something. Now I just need to find someone who was frozen in ice in the 50s to be my foil.

Also, when I refer to my neighborhood I call it my sector.

I wonder what science fiction will be like in the distant future. I've been looking for Charlemagne-era fantasy novels and haven't found any yet.

Rendering the Alien

According to Gregory Benford, rendering the alien well is the holy grail of science fiction. I think he's right; in his Ocean of Night series, one character tells a family member that "The thing about aliens is, they're alien."

But there's a lot of science fiction around, and the sense of creepiness, other-ness, or sheer marvel that writers try to pack into their extraterrestrials starts to seem contrived when you've run across it one too many times. These efforts typically fall into one of the following patterns, starting with the least unlikely.

- X-Files approach: never filling in the gaps, making only eerie, creepy suggestions around the edges.

- The biochemist's approach: it's a lot of work to dream up an alien constitution that bears any scrutiny but it's rewarding to idea-oriented readers. A personal pet-peeve in speculative fiction is the use of an omniscient viewpoint, so that the reader knows what's going on but the characters don't, and you have to spend the waiting for them to catch up with you. Readers can sometimes be annoyed at this alien-rendering for the a similar reason; that is, even though the characters and reader are simultaneously discovering what makes the aliens tick, the author clearly knows all about it and you become impatient getting gradual fed bits and pieces of what is obviously from the start a coherent whole.

The Lovecraft approach - The alien's body/ship/language reeks of wrongness in a way that disturbs any unfortunate humans whose poor nervous systems dare look upon it!

The transcendental, or reverse Lovecraft approach - The aliens are superintelligent and hail from a benevolent civilization, so that the merest brush with them results in being healed, or becoming benevolent oneself. Much is made of tears being shed upon the enlightenment that comes from contact with higher planes of mathematical beauty, etc. etc.

The highly evolved earth animals approach (also known as intelligent gerbils, also known as lazy) - pick a species on Earth and extrapolate its beliefs, behaviors and civilization if it were to evolve to sentience. Larry Niven is allowed to get away with this with the kzin, but that might be about it. Note that there are plenty of really weird living things right here on this planet but this approach almost invariably uses a mammal-equivalent, and the ones that aren't mammals are at least tetrapods.

The ridge-headed alien approach - I forgive television series like Star Trek for doing this to stay within the constraints of a budget, but if you're writing a book where it costs you the same (zero) to make up an original alien or a bald-headed guy in a silver robe, and you take Baldy, shame on you!

I Like Data Dumps in Science Fiction

We read science fiction for speculative ideas. This is probably true for most fans of the genre. I like the data dumps. I like the future histories and the descriptions of alien biology and explicative monologs of technology. For most science fiction, passages involving interactions between characters or the background of the protagonist is like plot in porn.

Robin Hanson Changes His Mind About Non-Human Intelligence

Hanson is on record as being un-thrilled about attempts to contact extraterrestrial intelligences. I share his position.

But for some odd reason he thinks that people who fear a possible (technological) Singularity are sadly misguided. This seems on its face badly inconsistent. Aliens from another star system are a threat, but an independent AI more intelligent than humans (and with different goals and values) is not? Puh-leeze. At least David Chalmers has the right idea.

[Note: Hanson has responded in the comments to this post. If you are a regular reader of his blog, you know that I am emphasizing this because it raises my status.]

Fahrenheit 451 One Step Closer

Firefighters arrested on arson charges. Almost as ironic as the fact that the version of the story distributed to high school students years ago was heavily censored.

What's With the Moral-Apocalpyse Porn in Conservative-Themed Science Fiction?

Investigating the demographics of our favorite genres is an exercise in introspection: we're curious what our taste says about us, and where we fall on the spectrum with fellow art consumers. This is why William Sims Bainbridges' Dimensions of Science Fiction is on my to-read list.

It's useful to ponder what motivates not just readers, but also writers, and sometimes there are clear motifs that seem to correlate with writers' political leanings, above and beyond any deliberate rhetorical purpose they may have. A theme I'd long noticed in certain types of science fiction books and films is the moral weakening and decline of America, usually illustrated by increasing crime, a faltering standing in world affairs, and the powerlessness or unwillingness of incompetent leaders to do anything about the country's conversion into an amoral hell with cackling half-insane punks and drug-pushers running the streets. These works usually come across as a conservative's "warning fiction".

But there's more to it than that. As rhetoric, the existence of films or books making political and moral viewpoints isn't a surprise. What stands out about this sub-genre is its obsession with describing the decay, in graphic and sweaty detail, often describing specific moments at which all was lost. And as with all pornography typically the plot is filler, and you can tell which part the writer or filmmaker wants to get to. That's why it's so strange that people for whom the moral downfall of America is the ultimate nightmare are so set on so graphically illustrating it; the purpose of the unnecessary detail and intensity and length of these passages or scenes really comes across more as for the arousal of the writer rather than as a well-drawn image making a rhetorical point.

But it's not just "look how hellish this world is" post-apocalpytic shock-fiction, like the movie Hardware or the Deathlands series of novels (of which I had the ill fortune to read two); there seems to be no moral linked to the porn in those cases. Conservative post-moral apocalypse warning-fiction porn owes more to Blade Runner, but adds a fairly explicit political function to the eye-candy (if it has any) that the granddaddy of dark SF films lacked.

Some examples of conservative warning fiction/post-moral apocalypse porn novels and movies:

1. NYPD 2025 - Probably the most overtly political of the pieces I describe here. "It takes a new kind of cop to risk his life on future New York's out of control streets..." et cetera. The Big Apple has become a dangerous sleaze pit where crazed criminals take advantage of soft-hearted incompetents' bankrupt morality and politics. One sequence tellingly finds the protagonist interviewing the source of all evil, a liberal female journalist open with her sexuality (she has a tattoo with an arrow on her inner thigh saying "DOWN WITH MEN". (Reading this in seventh grade, somehow I thought she didn't sound so bad.) In another scene, the ham-handed way that conservatives declare themselves non-racist is on full display - "Look, I'm judging this person by his adhering to proper values, so even though he's ethnicity X, he's okay with me!" - when the protagonist kills a gangster as he's making collection rounds, and is thanked by a Jamaican immigrant who suddenly realizes the bankruptcy of the wishy-washy tolerance that has allowed crime to fluorish. (By the way, if you think the contrived one-dimensionality of the Legion-of-Doom-type conversations between antagonists in Ayn Rand's novels were bad, you haven't seen anything). Judging by the attention it receives online, this book unsurprisingly doesn't seem to have aged well.


2. Come Nineveh, Come Tyre - I learned some amazing things about this book while researching it; first some background. I was killing time in Castroville, California (the ugly sibling of Santa Cruz; in 2002 there was still unrepaired damage from the '89 Loma Prieta Quake) and read this book when I found it in a Goodwill, mostly for kicks. The most memorable passage is one where hapless, weak politicians at the U.N. (that conservative bete noir) sign away the U.S.'s future to China and the Soviets. The signing of what effectively was the American surrender document was written in vivid and exquisitely sliced moments. (I read the whole thing in the store so I didn't buy it and can't find it online, but trust me, you're not missing any immortal prose.) It was this novel, and this scene, I had in mind when I started writing this post. So cliched, so melodramatic, so all-downhill in terms of quality after the laboredly literary title. (I should add that all my characterizations of traditional conservative themes in writing and film from the last half century, while often negative, are not always indictments; I share many of conservatism's central concerns, but they haven't often been well-rendered in fiction.)

It turns out this novel was part of a five book series; okay, so maybe, like all sequels, it was worse than the first. How much worse? The first won a Pulitzer. When I started writing this post I never expected that this book (or its series) would ever have been recognized as significant, in any way, even within the genre! I cannot stress how stunned I am by this revelation, but judge for yourself.


3. Robocop - Criminals have taken over a bankrupt Detroit (wait, I thought this was science fiction?) The amoral downfall of America features the studied indifference of business executives after the needless death of one of their own, and the aforementioned madly cackling bad guys victimizing good people apparently for sheer twisted pleasure rather than for any material gain.


4. Judge Dredd - The conservative fear of the decay of big ("mega") cities perhaps raises its head early here; by virtue of humans crowding into giant cities, of course everyone goes bad. In the original work the film is based on there are also nuke-happy Soviets spreading mind-destroying viruses to add to the fun.


5. Demolition Man - This is the outgroup here, because it envisions an attempt at a utopia that, while it's a bit too G-rated and emasculated and claustrophobic for some of its subjects, is certainly far from a full-on dystopia; imagine a world taken over by yoga instructors and 50 year old New Age ladies that sell crystals and hand-made herbal soaps, and you're 90% of the way there. The "warning" of this movie boils down to "look how easy these people are to victimize; to protect them they need a real man willing to beat up civilians to get criminals." When a super-criminal from the modern day (Wesley Snipes) escapes his cryogenic prison, there are extended scenes of his victimization of these hapless neo-hippies. Tellingly, the tone of these scenes seems to make it quite deliberately very difficult not to take the criminal's side. You want Wesley Snipes to beat up these wimpy cops, because they're weak, and they had it coming. This movie always ran together in my head with Judge Dredd; oddly, both feature Sylvester Stallone and Rob Schneider. In his Super Mario Brothers costume Snipes doesn't quite come across as a late 90s L.A. criminal mastermind, but at least he engages in the requisite high-pitched insane cackling while committing nastiness.


6. Freejack - Protagonist Emilio Estevez awakes in the near (bad) future to find a polluted, criminal, humiliated America dominated by Japan. I save this one for last because of the homeless man's monolog to Emilio Estevez, perfectly exemplifying the obsession with illustrating the final, exact moment of humiliation and downfall, symbolic in this case:

Emilio Estevez: (Bumming about the horrible place America has become) Man, if it's come down to this, what's the point?

Homeless guy: He riddles me. The ancient riddle: 'Whats the point?' Have you ever seen an eagle flying back to his home with dinner for the Missus and all the little eagle babies? And he's flying against the wind and he's flying in the rain and he's flying through bullets and all kinds of hell, and then right at that moment when he's about to get back to his nest, he says, "What the fuck, it's a drag being an eagle" and right then two little x's comes across his eyes just like in the old-fashioned cartoons. And he goes plunging down, and down and down and BAM. He's just a splatter of feathers and then we dont have the national bird of America no more. Did you ever see that?

Notice the absence of Heinlein or Poul Anderson or Niven work in this list. All could be characterized as writers of science fiction with conservative themes, but all are at bottom optimistic about human beings, and more importantly, recognize a moral universe outside the United States.

I have no good explanation for why this strange pornographic obsession exists, but I can't help thinking about it. Since the moment of final moral defeat seems to be the absolute worst nightmare of these conservatives, it could be a desensitization issue. That is, if you spend enough time worrying about an abstract event (moral decay), you eventually develop a Stockholm syndrome-like relationship with it, much like adult horror buffs were often the kids who couldn't watch Nightmare on Elm Street movies alone until they were 13.

Trope-Shuffling in Fiction

Supposedly a grad student somewhere did his or her thesis on Nora Roberts (I would love to link to it but can't find it). On surveying the voluminous work of Ms. Roberts said grad student noticed a number of common structural patterns: one of them was that the protagonist kisses the love interest for the first time after the same percentage of the book has elapsed. Learning this, you're left with the feeling that Roberts could just be doing a find-and-replace with character names and dropping in the odd paragraph of location description. ("In September Darcy smelled the air along the New England coast turning crisp..."-CTRL-H-"In October Jessica's boots crunched in the first snowfall around their little Rocky Mountain cabin...")

There are two reasons this post is not an attack on Nora Roberts. The first is that people are obviously getting something out of reading her novels, and if I could make what she does writing romance novels, I sure as hell wouldn't be sitting here writing blog entries for free. The second is that in my old age I'm getting picky about science fiction because it's more and more obviously doing the same thing. I'm not complaining that the genre has changed for the worse - it's that readers have access to more material, and more organized criticism of that material. This is why structural awareness of art, and structural approaches to creating it (whatever term you use for that) inevitably emerges in highly literate societies. (As a long aside: speaking of structural awareness in literature, have you noticed all the works like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or that Kerouac meets Lovecraft stuff, or techno-thriller meets space opera meets cyberpunk? You can't help but wonder what this means for genres or literature in general; there's a fine line between deliberate genre-cross-fertilization and parody, if it exists at all. The mid-90s to early aughts saw a burst of ill-remembered experimentation between metal and other forms of music, driven both by the stylistic dead end metal found itself in as well as a desire for broader recognition by music fans in general. Spot the difference.)

The bottom line: the more of a genre you're exposed to, the more obvious the underlying (identical) patterns and themes become, and more and more much of it seems like a find-and-replace exercise, even though the authors may not realize it themselves. If you're dubious, go here and click around for awhile (but come back and finish the post). It's a nice Wiki of science fiction concepts. Eldritch abominations, stellar empires, intelligent gerbils, all things which seem interesting and "cool" in novel settings - until you see multiple specimens of each concept isolated and under glass. Put them in a card deck and shuffle, connect these still frames with some fairly automatic narrative, voila! Science fiction story. In a way it doesn't even seem as clever as David Cope's program in the post I wrote before this one. The absent aliens don't always reveal themselves on page 183 as is claimed with Nora Roberts, but they still make an appearance in the same sort of pattern. There is a finite number of themes in any genre, including speculative fiction, and they get rearranged in different stories. Understandable; new ideas are hard to find, and even harder to read. After considering this, it might not seem so strange that a technical journal article with just one explicitly-presented novel idea is so dense. By analogy: throughout my twenties, I used to visit hospitals all over the country for my job, and I was amazed at how hard they were to navigate, and how you never get any better at it; you don't realize how similar are the floorplans of most buildings, and how much you rely on that, until you're in a large and unique building.

This post doesn't purport to be a revelation from a world-weary fiction consumer that there's no such thing as a new idea (that idea sure isn't new at least.) There are, but you have to dig; and in a way I'm sorry that I've finally stored up enough data that I can no longer avoid noticing the patterns. I imagine this will be happening to younger and younger people as time goes on, as media becomes more prevalent and available and sortable.

Genre fiction will always be guilty of trope-abuse to some degree; otherwise it wouldn't be genre fiction. But some are worse than others, and fantasy has always been one of the guiltiest. The evolution of fiction is about turning more and more of the traditional elements of literature into variables instead of constants, and speculative fiction finally brought even setting into play. That's why fantasy always seemed like such a wasteful genre to me - a speculative fiction author is free to build whatever world he or she wants to, and the fantasy author takes that opportunity and puts a character into a re-named early medieval Europe, complete with the looming columns of a recently fallen empire. Yes, I know, people like sword-fighting, so it sells; fine for them. Not everybody wants to spend their finite minutes skimming repeatedly through the same duel.

This might be why in our dotage, sf fans eventually move to things like Borges or Barth (although Wolfe and Delany also force some number-crunching). What do you really get out of a find-and-replace-the-names kind of piece except temporary amusement? It's possible and preferable to learn something about the real world through fiction and even to exercise your critical thinking and problem-solving muscles.

Language, Metal and AI Composers

I'd long ago heard of David Cope and never got around to checking him out, but didn't realize he was using software to compose. (The article has samples). If you're already familiar with Cope you can skip this excerpt:

The best way to replicate Bach’s process was for the software to derive his rules — both the standard techniques and the behavior of breaking them. Cope spent months converting 300 Bach chorales into a database, note by note. Then he wrote a program that segmented the bits into digital objects and reassembled them the way Bach tended to put them together...[The computer program] produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created.

So what it looks like from this brief review is that Cope's software inducted patterns from Bach's ouvre, determined what "rules" Bach was following, and then turned around and produced more work based on those rules. This is the first point from this article that fascinates me. For years, a back-burner idea I've had as a fan of the metal genre is to write a program that does exactly the same thing with metal riffs, if not entire songs. (Metallica fans: did you have your heart broken trying to get into Trivium after they were supposedly writing old-school Metallica songs? Me too. If Trivium and Metallica won't do it, maybe Skynet will. Blackened Part II would be a good song for Skynet to play on Judgment Day.) What's stopped me is I would have to know something about programming to do it, and I haven't set aside time to learn enough PERL or Python or whatever would be the best language for the project. Maybe Cope will share his software.

A second point of interest is that one of the problems that Cope ran into was that there was structure - rules subject to (more difficult) induction - below the structure that he initially examined. It would be like trying to predict the movement of the stock market entirely from its behavior, and nothing else; yes, it does have some predictable behavior patterns over time (despite what fundamentals fundamentalists will tell you) but not enough to make a decision entirely based on (despite what the technical snake oil salesman will tell you). If you're only looking at "short-term" melody, I imagine you'd run into the same problem. As a result, Cope's software was reproducing Bach melodies, but there was something missing:

Yet as Cope tested the recombinating software on Bach, he noticed that the music would often wander and lacked an overall logic. More important, the output seemed to be missing some ineffable essence...For hundreds of years, musicologists had analyzed the rules of composition at a superficial level. Yet few had explored the details of musical style; their descriptions of terms like “dynamic,” for example, were so vague as to be unprogrammable. So Cope developed his own types of musical phenomena to capture each composer’s tendencies — for instance, how often a series of notes shows up, or how a series may signal a change in key. He also classified chords, phrases and entire sections of a piece based on his own grammar of musical storytelling and tension and release: statement, preparation, extension, antecedent, consequent.

That Cope must necessarily have generated a systematic notation for all these qualities is exciting enough, but of course "reducing" art to such a system will offend more than a few. Forgive the condescension in my attempt to summarize the way the objections from artists usually go: "But like the human spirit, art triggers emotions and is forever unprogrammable and free! You shouldn't try to describe it systematically!" (Translation: "I am not consciously aware of how I do what I do or why I am reacting so strongly. This obscurity of motivation is useful, because as long as this is the case it can not be easily taught or replicated by others, and therefore the status afforded by my rare ability is secure.")

But this approach is generalizable outside music. One of the reasons I find Cope so interesting is that his work in discovering the non-superficial patterns in Bach recapitulates an issue in linguistics: the rules of grammar and morphosyntax have received the most scrutiny so far, but there is clearly more to language than that (think of the rules of rhetoric, the logical development of a topic, and lots of other things that we have no reason to think computers are yet anywhere close to automating). This ability sometimes breaks in humans with other cognitive disruptions. Single sentences from schizophrenics are usually completely coherent, but look at a few dozen strung together, and you notice that something isn't connecting. You can even measure this electrically: wire a healthy person up to an EEG, and when she uses non-content operator words (linguistics nuts-and-bolts, for example, prepositions in English) you can tell by the electrical activity in her brain she doesn't have to work as hard as when she retrieves content words like tree or Korea. But tellingly, in schizophrenics, the linguistic operators are just as hard to pull up as the content words. (And there's another project I haven't yet done: look at speakers of languages with complex topic-marking systems that anticipate the content and function of coming sentences, like Washoe, and see if schizophrenic speakers have more trouble with those markers than healthy speakers. Granted, these days I probably can't find many schizophrenic first-language Washoe speakers so I'll have to go looking elsewhere.) Since Cope was eventually able to pull out the patterns that make Bach Bach, no matter how obscure they initially were, his approach doubtless has applications to pattern recognition in general, in language and elsewhere.

Finally, the article is just as much about the reactions to Cope's work as about the work itself. He's made many people unhappy; in particular I was surprised by Doug Hofstadter's reaction. One can understand the completely practical concern that composers have enough trouble making a living through their craft now, and if eventually There's An App For That, so much for getting paid for manual composition, or at least what will be seen as the pre-industrial inefficient cottage industry of composition. But of course, that's not what motivates most of the furor; what does motivate it is the usually-unstated influence of the persona of a work's producer on people's appreciation of the work. I think most people - not just artistic rubes like me but even professional critics - are dishonest with themselves about the major role this plays in their appreciation of arts of all sorts. For example: who would give a rat's ass about this amateurish impressionist piece unless you knew a chimpanzee painted it? The basic truth of perception is that human minds don't have separable sense channels, and one of those inseparable channels is from episodic memory. That is to say: when you watch a crow flying and hear its call, you don't have to "decide" to integrate the sight of the crow with the sound of the caw; the integration of inputs happens prior to your conscious experience of it, and it's not subject to deliberation. (Don't get too excited about this; in fact your nervous system is also integrating motion, distance, color, and the edges of surfaces in your vision, to the extent that we're still not quite sure how we actually see objects, instead of separate colors, edges, movements, etc.)

But our experiential world is built from sight and sound, and from associations from prior experience. Do you like steak? Imagine that you have a steak dinner with a friend. After the meal, he gets up from the table, walks outside the restaurant to hail a cab, and is run over and killed. Suffice to it say your next steak will not be as enjoyable. But in the set of chemical equations that sum up to cause "perception of eating steak", it's not the steak that's changed, it's you, and (importantly) the change is not even in your taste buds, but in your central nervous system. The same rule that applies to food applies to art. Van Gogh's work is probably somewhat interesting to begin with even if you don't know anything about its creator. But how many people have stood before Starry Night and tried to banish all thoughts of its ear-splicing creator's inner life from their minds? If we're dishonest that this is part of our experience of appreciating art, then of course we'll be disturbed to discover that the notes in a composition were arranged by a computer. A simple blinded listening test might settle the question of to what degree computers can compose beautiful music. If prior experience about people's ability to protect these kinds of beliefs from the truth is any guide, then the people seemingly most confident that computers can't compose will certainly be the ones least likely to agree to such a test.

But this is exactly why Cope's critics should calm down. The composer as part of the work isn't going anywhere. That's why people read the linked article and some even write blog posts about it. The melodies Cope's software produced - that is, that Cope produced - didn't leap from Chaos into our ears fully-formed. They exist because of the passion and hard work of the composer. I'll definitely be listening to more of his work, and of course, part of my enjoyment will come from appreciation of Cope and his accomplishments.

First Interstellar Mission by 2025

People have put money on the following proposition at Longbets.org:

"The first true interstellar mission, targeted at the closest star to the Sun or even farther, will be launched before or on December 6, 2025 and will be widely supported by the public."

What do you think? I certainly think this should be true, but I'm not confident that it will come to pass.

Note that longbets is a one-to-one wager site, not a futures market; those are cool because lots of people can get in on the action.

Were There Earthquake Lights in Chile?

Here is an excellent USGS document on earthquake lights. Sky- or ground-associated earthquake lights have been reported preceeding earthquakes by an hour or so. A man reported the sand at Ocean Beach in San Francisco glowing in the pre-dawn darkness an hour before the 1906 quake struck (and of course I can't find the reference). One of the earliest good documentations of earthquake lights were the Matsushiro earthquakes in central Japan in the 1960s (right over the North American-Asian-Philippine Plate Triple Junction). Want to see for yourself? These weird rainbow clouds appeared over Sichuan in the hour before the quake there in May 2008.


People have reported weird lights preceding the Chile quake, although the only footage I've seen so far is here, and I'm betting it's just transformers blowing up, like these in Peru from 2007. (Notably, they're during the quake.)

(Note that these observations in no way support the tinfoil-hat-wearers who blame the Chilean earthquake and everything else on "HAARP". Were the earthquake lights in Japan HAARP too? What about in San Francisco a century ago? I guess those earthquake lights were from aliens trying to blow up the Earth.)

The best explanation for earthquake lights so far (but it's still not great) is ultra-low frequency (ULF) electromagnetic radiation generated by plate motion. That I know of no one has a coherent model to explain how it works or originates, especially since even empirically a) lights and large earthquakes don't always occur together, and b) electromagnetic anomalies don't always occur in high activity areas. Parkfield, California (where all the parallel Northern California faults split off from the San Andreas) is probably the most seismically active place in the Lower 48, and when an acquaintance went there to record with his field rig, he got nothing.

Empirically, the ULF connection has arguably been reinforced by the Vogel Study, a set of observations in 2001 of what was almost certainly a man-made phenomenon near Toppenish on the Yakama reservation in central Washington State. The report is worth reading. Essentially, the reservation fire department kept getting calls about fires from people at who saw lights at night. These lights turned out to be lights in the sky rather than burning hillsides. This was costing the reservation money, so they called in the team that wrote this report to figure out what was going on. What these observers picked up were ULF signals, almost certainly of artificial origin (look at how square the wave forms are), modulated both by amplitude and frequency. Entirely on a lark because I had read this study, a few summers ago I drove through the area and until I actually went there I didn't look at the map too closely. It turns out Hanford Nuclear Facility and Yakima Firing Center are nearby, in one of the possible directions from which the signal was coming. Without getting all tinfoil-hatty, the Federation of American Scientists maintains a document supposedly from the EU Parliament about a U.S. surveillance network called ECHELON which supposedly has operations at Yakima Firing Center (see page 52). One problem is that while these ULF emissions were detected, there were no lights detected during the observation period. It's still interesting that the lights were seen at this location, and that there were ULF signals detected.

Since the lights sometimes precede earthquakes and could conceivably help us avoid future loss of life, this phenomenon requires closer study.

Do We Already Have a Grand Unified Theory?

If we do, it's a non-mainstream one; yes, that usually matters, in terms of speed of acceptance. Burkhard Heim and a few disciplies claim that he resolved the inconsistencies between relativity and quantum mechanics. The math is beyond my poor power to evaluate it but doing a "social meta-analysis" of Heim's behavior, he certainly doesn't fit the standard physics crank profile as developed by Pascal Boyer, first and foremost because Heim developed a new calculus for his theory. (Most cranks can't get past algebra). John Reed abandoned his exegesis of Heim's work after locating some obscure defintions that Reed claims show Heim's work to be circular. Dröscher and Hauser appear to still be developing Heim's ideas; start here for constants and notation.

Repeat Miller-Urey with Silanes

See proposal at halfbakery.org.

David Brin and Robin Hanson: Shut Up With The Interstellar Messages Already

More criticism of self-appointed messengers to the stars, from David Brin and Robin Hanson. We know how well contact has worked between members of the same species right here on Earth - imagine Chumash graduate students on the shores of pre-contact California saying, "Hey, we should build big signaling fires in case there are any foreign people sailing up the coast in big ships, to make sure they don't miss us." And the potential problem we face is of a whole different order. The Chumash faced conspecifics with better technology. The problem we're talking about now is the appearance of great white sharks or microorganisms with better technology. Is this paranoid? One objection is "no one/nothing will hear it anyway, so stop worrying." Then why are they wasting taxpayer money on these little exercises in the first place?

To be perfectly clear, the argument here is not about the implausibility of life elsewhere in the universe; it's quite the opposite. By all means we must continue exploring space and looking for life, and this includes SETI, and even sending interstellar probes out in our lifetimes. But if you believe in the possible of sentient life elsewhere in the universe, and you accept natural selection as the path by which life arises, then there is no room for argument: these messages should stop immediately.

Timeless Wisdom

The words of Sam Eagle are categorically true.

Happy 2010! HAVE YOU CHECKED THE ORBIT?

Forget global warming. Let's hurry up and send a mission to Europa before it starts to melt from Jovian warming. We can attempt all the landings there we want, don't worry about it. Anybody who obeys messages from the Monolith is a PUSSY. If you already know how to hit things with bones then you're done.

You are a smart blog reader...you will know what to do.