Overview

Reading Log For 1998

ARTIFICIAL LIFE

A Report From The Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology (1992)

Paperback

Vintage Books, New York

– 1998.1

7: In silico “life” defined on a continuum which includes such inanimates as cars or the economy.
9: According to Farmer and Belin (342):

“Our uniqueness will lie in the ability to create our own successors.”

54: The computer game of “Life” was invented by John Horton Conway in the 1960s.
158: The Genetic Theory of Natural Selection by R. A. Fisher gives a mathematical theory of evolution.
159: Genetic Algorithm (GA) was coined by John Holland.
182: More N-iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma examples from Axelrod and William Hamilton:

Infantry troops in WWI trench warfare had unspoken agreements not to shoot.
Tolerance of male birds when hearing songs of other male birds.

TALES OF THE WANDERING JEW (1991)

Edited by Brian Stableford

Read entirely on 1998.2.20

Hundreds of stories have been written about the Wandering Jew, including a 1933 movie.
The story was first written down in the 13^th Century.
A Romantic poem, The Undying One (1830) by Caroline Norton.
Lew Wallace (author of Ben Hur) enjoyed Salathiel (1827) by George Croly so much that he wrote his own story on the subject, Prince of India (1893).
Makes an appearance in the post-holocaust A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ (1959) by Walter M. Miller.
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a story, A Virtuoso’s Collection.
Stableford is not a big fan of the MY FIRST TWO THOUSAND YEARS (1929) series by George Sylvester Viereck and Paul Eldridge, saying that they were intended to be merely salacious.
Robert Buchanan wrote a poem entitled The Wandering Jew: A Christmas Carol (1893) where the character meets a person who he believes to be Ahasuerus, but is actually Christ, condemned by the crimes committed in his name.

The Wandering Jew by Rudyard Kipling

“If you go once round the world in an easterly direction, you gain one day,” said the men of science to John Hay.

The Mystery of Joseph Laquedem by A. T. Quller-Couch

100:

We did not, of course, touch upon any religious question—indeed, of his own opinions on any subject he disclosed extraordinarily little: and yet as I reached my bedroom that night I told myself that here, behind a mask of good manners, was one of those perniciously modern young men who have run through all beliefs by the age of twenty, and settled down to a polite but weary atheism.

The Wandering Christian by Eugine Byrne and Kim Newman.

THE INVINCIBLE ADAM (1932)

George Sylvester Viereck and Paul Eldridge

Hardcover

1998.3.16 – 1998.3.21

Last in the trilogy of MY FIRST TWO THOUSAND YEARS (1929) and SALOME (1930)
The “autobiography” of Kotikokura
He represents the spirit of youth.
Twenty years after the interview with Cartaphilus, Lord Kotesbury goes on trial.
Early history involves the Great Ape, Allatu, ears, and Adam’s apple.
110 -111: Mammon (money) is the only God everyone worships. Gold is good.
342: In 1284, he became the Pied Piper.
423: Cartaphilus says a bold statement for 1932:

“Kotikokura, let us disprove the idea of Salome that the creation of Jahweh, the creation out of mud, out of the earth, is doomed! He who has learned to stand upright, will yet learn to climb to the stars!”

The Soviet Union did not turn out the way they expected.

MADAME BOVARY (1857)

Gustave Flaubert

– 1998.4.17

Charles Bovary: Doctor who married Emma.
Emma Rouault-Bovary: Bored housewife. Never had fun at the Vicompte’s ball.
Monsieur Rodolphe Boulanger of La Huchette: Womanizer. Has first affair with Emma. Says they will run away. When he chickens out, Emma gets brain fever.
Léon: Talks to Emma. Goes away for three years. When he returns, they have an affair.
Homais: Apothecary (chemist). Receives Legion of Honor.

CRITICAL PATH (1981)

R. Buckminster Fuller

– 1998.5

My biggest suggestion for reading Fuller: FEAR HYPERBOLE.
It’s a good thing I didn’t read this as a kid. I might have accepted his asinine ideas in addition to his good ones.
xvii:

All the strengths of all great politics and religion and most of business are derived from the promises they give of assuaging humanity’s seemingly tragic dilemma of existing in an unalterable state of fundamental inadequacy of life support.

9: He makes the argument that whales and chimpanzees devolved from inbreeding atoll-dwelling humans!
17: He thinks the bronze age started in Southeast Asia. Later, when he describes a computerized model globe outside the U.N. building, he recommends tracing the migration of humans—from Southeast Asia. Part of this is based on a New York Times front page in 1977.
26: Perhaps all babies are born geniuses, but the false assumptions of adults erode this. The education system should be replaced with TV video tapes.
27: Typical nonsense quote:

Mind possibly may serve as the essential, anti-entropic (syntropic) function for eternally conserving the omni-interaccommodative, nonsimultaneous, and only partially overlapping, omni-intertransforming, self-regenerating scenario—which we speak of as “Universe.”

36: The Eratosthenes map from 200 B.C. has edges. He thinks this proved that ancient people had circumnavigated the globe.
History of economics in a chapter called “Legally Piggily”.
80: WWI leads to the income tax.
86: The “dream cars” of the 1920s were just that, only superficial changes between models.
86: The bad hog market of 1926 meant that banks took farmhouses, which turned out to be worthless.
152: On God stuff: Because the laws of Nature do not contradict each other, God exists. Not a very good argument.
This would not stand up to Heisenberg and Gödel.
“radiation is always less effective than gravity” Typical wishful thinking.
He completely misunderstands the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
In 1930 Einstein published “Cosmic Religious Sense - The Nonanthropomorphic Concept of God”
“Ever Rethinking the Lord’s Prayer”
He might be able to argue that God is all-knowing and all-coordinating, etc. (by definition), but why all-concerned? Why would God be concerned?
154: Dymaxian World Map projection.
173: “Sunset” should be called “Sunclipse” and “Sunrise” should be “Sunsight”.
178: He proposed a 200 ft geoscope opposite the U.N. building.
192: Suspects that “Big Oil” is behind the nuclear buildup. They know that they will run out of oil, so they want to make the government support nuclear research.
208: Proposes a water channel from the Himmailayas to India.
Many of his hankerings for efficiency would be useful in space, where it would be critical.
230: The Class of 1966 is the first generation to be raised by TV and radio, which have more authority than parents.
232: They have loyalty to all humanity, rather than to the U.S.
235: Highly idealistic college age youth are unwilling soldiers for the other side which wants to stir up discontent. He was there, so perhaps he should expand on this.
263: People should be paid not to drive to work. Gasoline costs millions in “real” dollars. If we made everyone a billionaire, we couldn’t spend it all:

They will each discover for themselves that the greatest luxury in the world is to be able to live unencumbered while able to get any information you wand in split seconds and any desirable environmental condition you want in a day.

Could this be considered prescient for before the Internet?
Another good idea is connecting world power grids across the Bering Strait to transfer electricity during non-peak hours.
293: Engineering recommendations to Brazil center around making a network of small airports.
320: Proposes an arcology called “Old Man River City”.

ON AGGRESSION (1966)

Translated from the German by Majorie Kerr Wilson

Paperback

Bantam Matrix Edition, New York

– 1998.5.22

69: Jewish and Moslem law against pork may have stemmed to avoid trichinosis.
140: Erich von Holst removes the brain from a minnow, so it no longer has the inclination to return to school. Others follow it;

By virtue of its deficiency, the brainless animal had become the dictator!

142 - 143:

This horrible recrudescence of the ancient mechanisms of flocking behavior occurs in mass panic. I was once an unwilling witness of the sudden emergence and rapidly snowballing effect of this process of dehumanization, and if I was not drawn into its vortex it was only because, thanks to my knowledge of flocking, behavior, I had seen the approaching danger sooner than others and had had time to guard against my own reactions. To me there is small pride in the memory; on the contrary, no one can put much trust in his own self-mastery who has ever seen men more courageous than himself, men fundamentally disciplined and self-controlled, rushing blindly along, closely huddled, all in the same direction, with eyes protruding, chests heaving, and trampling underfoot everything that comes in their way, exactly like stampeding ungulates, and no more accessible to reason than they.

144:

Just as in human society there are business partners who work happily together but would never think of meeting outside office hours, so there are in many animal species individual ties arising only through a common interest of the partners in a shared “enterprise.” The anthropomorphizing animal lover will not be pleased to hear that in many birds, including some that live in lifelong “matrimony,” male and female have no interest in each other’s company unless they have a common function to fulfill at the nest or in the service of the brood.

148:

In nature we find not only that which is expedient, but also everything which is not so inexpedient as to endanger the existence of the species.

150: Railways carriers are a good place to study territoriality and acquaintanceship. People will cover empty spaces with their coats and bags for strangers, but suddenly become polite to people with the merest acquaintance.
230:

It is a curious paradox that the greatest gifts of man, the unique faculties of conceptual thought and verbal speech which have raised him to a level high above all other creatures and given him mastery over the globe, are not altogether blessings, or a least are blessing that have to be paid for very dearly indeed. All the great dangers threatening humanity with extinction are direct consequences of conceptual thought and verbal speech. They grove man out of the paradise in which he could follow his instincts with impunity and do or not do whatever he pleased. There is much truth in the parable of the tree of knowledge and its fruit, though I want to make an addition to it to make it fit into my own picture of Adam: that apple was thoroughly unripe! Knowledge springing from conceptual thought robbed man of the security provided by his well-adapted instincts long, long before it was sufficient to provide him with an equally safe adaptation. Man is, as Arnold Gehlen has so truly said, by nature a jeopardized creature.

233: Heavily armed carnivores (such as wolves) have inhibitions from killing another member of the species with one stroke.
260: Ukrainian proverb about going to war:

“When the banner is unfurled, all reason is in the trumpet.”

SPACE (1982)

Hardcover

Random House, New York

– 1998.6.23

A fictional work revolving around the “Solid Six” Astronauts of the Gemini and Apollo programs.
The major WWII battle of Leyte Gulf makes Captain Grant a hero, and later a senator.
Stanley Mott searches Germany for the rocket scientists of Peenemünde.
John Pope becomes a test pilot at Patuxent River (Pax), then an astronaut.
Randy Claggett is a fellow Solid Six who dies in Apollo 18 while on a (fictional) trip to the “dark” side of the moon with black astronaut Paul Linley (Gawain Butler’s nephew).
96: Football worship. When asked if a character is “bright, good man?” the response is that “He’s a football player,” so I guess that answers it.
This book tends to vacillate in its view of women as either strong and independent or totally helpless.
98: On Rachel:

her lovely blond hair and elegant figure would ensure a good marriage.

Yet Penny Pope becomes an important mover in D.C. (she’s a Republican, of course).
100:

The test of a woman is how she organizes space.

Cynthia Rhee is a reporter who wants to sleep with all the Solid Six to get the real story of the astronauts, not the storybook version.
Senator Grant’s wife falls for the alien conspiracy theory of Dr. Leopold Strabismus, who later becomes a TV evangelist.
Later, a religious fundamentalism sweeps the nation. In one example, pressure is put on park rangers to stop referring to natural wonders as being millions of years old.
Nobody in Fremont trusts Roman Catholics or the Irish.
419 - 420: The Flat Earth Society doesn’t trust photos from space.
Mott tries to have an intelligent commission on life in the universe, but it turns into a religious shouting match. He believes in the Big Bang and all, but still clings to God.
He falls into two traps:

That we need religion for morality (though he debated homosexuality á la Leviticus)
Aha! Who created the Big Bang?

I suppose the overall theme of this book is that people tend to believe what they want despite the evidence. Also, the end of Apollo leads to an anti-science movement.
Even more important are the arguments over Apollo. Should it be manned? Earth orbit rendezvous of Lunar orbit rendezvous? Dieter Kolff predicts that the decisions made have doomed his rockets to a short-term circus. Dieter had some good ideas for “real” space exploration such as space telescopes several (10) AUs away from each other for an extremely large base-line.

MOONRISE

Book One of The Moonbase Saga (1996)

Paperback

Avon Books, New York

to 1998-07

While a modern version of THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS (1966) by Heinlein is very welcome, Bova went overboard with the Soap Opera elements.
Still it has some redeeming qualities:

VTOL Clipperships allow easy space access and high speed transcontinental service.
Nanotech enables easy Lunar construction, though they can be used as weapons.
Nanotech leads to anti-science hysteria and religious fascism.

GAIN (1998)

Hardcover

Farrar Straus Giroux, New York

1998.7.2 – 1998.7.3

Lacewood (IL?): Home of Clare Chemical.
Laura Bodey: Real estate broker. Gets cancer. Reluctantly joins class-action suit against Clare International.
Don: Laura’s ex-husband.
Ellen: Daughter.
Tim: Teenage son. Into computers. Uses settlement money as capital for computer program to predict enzyme action.
Clare made its fortune on “Native Balm” soap with the tag line:

“The Red Man never worried about his skin . . . Why should you?”

319: Theory on cancer based on ring-shaped molecules with chlorine in them get taken into the tissue of women, where the body turns them into long lasting xenoestrogen, which signals the reproductive system to start massive cell division.
354: After the funeral, they discover post-it notes all over the house:

Maybe a hundred color-coded notes, throughout the house. All the things none of them knew how to do. They sold the other house, his father’s, and moved back to the one with all the instructions.

Clare slowly transformed into worrying more about consumer-oriented packaging, advertising, etc.
I thought Powers gave a fairly objective view of large corporations, rather than making them out to be evil entities. They aren’t purposely wasteful or hurtful. After all, that would be bad for business.
321: War thriftiness:

By collecting a billion pounds of fat and supplying a good 13 percent of needed grease, the country’s housewives saved the soap industry. Ladies! the radios teased. Get your fat cans down to the grocery store!

345 - 348: Detail about how al the parts of a disposable camera come together; as a metaphor for mortality:

A nurse’s aide throws it out, prior to the next occupant. For the entire engineering magnificence was designed to be pitched. Labor, materials, assembly, shipping, sales markups and overheads, insurance, international tariffs—the whole prodigious creation costs less than ten dollars. The world sells to us at a loss, until we learn to afford it.

Such a wonder has to be cheap enough to jettison. You cannot have a single-use camera except at a remarkable price. Buy it; shoot it; toss it. As mundane as any breakthrough that seemed our whole salvation once. A disposable miracle, no less than the least of us.

COUNT ZERO (1986)

Paperback

Ace Books, New York

1998.7.4 – 1998.7.5

Count Zero Interrupt (a.k.a. Bobby Newmark): Pulls a Wilson his first time out. Was testing for Two-A-Day.
Turner: Street Samurai who specializes in “defections” between corporations. Mitchell was to defect from Maas.
Marly: Art dealer hired by Josef Virek to find the sculptor of the “boxes”.
Angie Mitchell: Implanted by her father for not being smart enough. Subconsciously jaunts around as Vyèj Mirak (“Virgin of Miracles”).
The Boxmaker turns out to be a manipulator robot in orbit, run by and A.I. (Neuromancer?). Some Voodoo-like entities are haunting cyberspace. Does Turing know?
Jaylene Slide: Burns Conroy (Turner’s agent) for killing Ramirez.
The series continues in MONA LISA OVERDRIVE (1988)

FIRESTAR (1996)

Hardcover

TOR, New York

1998.7.5 – 1998.7.8

Started out strong, but ended up like another Soap Opera.
Mariesa Van Huyten: Inherits a huge fortune. Intends to put humans into space—to stay. Many (including many relatives and those in her own company) want to stop her. Deathly afraid of asteroid impact. Member of secret “Prometheus” group who share “The Goal”.
Barry Fast: Teacher whose school becomes a charter school owned by Mariesa. Having an affair with a married woman. Tries to help Mariesa relax during difficult times. They marry.
Styx: Manipulated by Mariesa to become a poet. Very resentful.
Ned: Hotshot test pilot. Ends his indiscretions and becomes faithful to his wife.
Chase: One of the students who follows in Ned’s footsteps.
Developing SSTO Vertical Takeoff & Landing RLVs. Have to team up with another company which uses railgun to send fuel into orbit.
Launch from Brazil, hoping the U.S. won’t enact Chapter 35.
Computer nerd Poole hijacks shuttle external fuel tank.
They rent Mir.
Later use ground-based laser to power impulse engine. This was not explained very well.
The author needs to use more numbers to make the story more concrete. For example, are they planning to move an asteroid?
No mention of radiation.
Because the development was all done privately, there is a lack of regulations.
The series continues in ROGUE STAR (1998)

SPACE TRAVELER’S HANDBOOK

Every Man’s Comprehensive Manual To Space Flight (1979)

Hardcover

Sovereign Books, New York

1998.7

Written from the perspective of 2061.
Has very good explanations of Apollo and Soyuz capsules.
Like many contemporary books, it is very optimistic about cost savings from the Space Shuttle.
Excellent explanation of novel propulsion mechanisms, including solar sails.

WELCOME TO MOONBASE (1987)

Illustrations by Pat Rawlings

1998.7

I would like to think this is fairly realistic expectation of what a Moonbase would be like.
The author obviously did not know about high space costs, the fall of the Soviet Union, and discovery of water on the moon.
Written as propaganda for Moonbase, Inc. so it will not mention the drawbacks.
Excellent paintings.
124: Near-Earth Asteroids

Apollo group: cross the Earth’s orbit
Atens: smaller group, orbit between the Earth and Sun
Amor: farther out, cross orbit of Mars and Earth

This would be a good lead-in to the Moonbase saga (MOONRISE (1996) and MOONWAR (1998)). The Far Side (not the “Dark Side”) is to be used exclusively for radio astronomy. Fiber optics are used to reduce interference.

DINOSAUR IN A HAYSTACK (1995)

Hardcover

Harmony Books, New York

– 1998.7.16

This was the first collection of Gould’s essays that I read.
The 2000 vs. 2001 debate was because of Dionysius Exiguus (“Dennis the Short”), a 6^thCentury monk writing a chronology for Pope Saint John I.
During the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the statue of Louis Agassiz fell off a building at Stanford University and landed headfirst in the pavement. He was the last serious Creationist (died in 1873). David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford, is said to have remarked:

“Oh, well, I always thought better of Agassiz in the concrete than in the abstract.”

The myth that Columbus disproved the Earth was flat.
69: Tennyson’s In Memoriam

Section 55

Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams?
So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life;

Section 56

“So careful of the type?” but no.
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, “A thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.

[Man]

Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law—
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—

Tennyson was influenced by the catastrophists who argued the nonevolutionary process of successive creations separated by catastrophic extinctions.
148: Darwin wrote in an 1861 letter:

About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel pit and count the pebbles and describe the colors. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!

173: E. A. Poe only wrote one book that was reprinted in his lifetime, The Conchologist’s First Book. Of course he only put his name on it for legal reasons, and most of it was plagiarized.
Why are illustrations of shells often printed backwards?
249: George Gamow wrote Mr.Tompkins in Wonderland (1940) about relativity and quantum physics.
255: Taxonomy of mammals.
287: The Supreme Court upheld compulsory sterilization of the mentally unfit in 1927, which was the greatest victory for Eugenics.
297: Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890 – 1962) was a founder of modern evolutionary theory. About 1/3 of his 1930 book The General Theory of Natural Selection is devoted to eugenics. He was also convinced that smoking did not cause cancer.
309: The Nazi Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942 was location for plan about Endlösung der Judenfrage = “Jewish Final Solution”.
359 - 376: For a long time Creationists ridiculed the transition of whales from land to water. Recent finding, however, show the transitions quite clearly.
The “Leviathan” of the Bible might have meant crocodile or whale.
377 -378:

As a powerful corrective to this arrogant tradition of natural theology, evolutionists argued, early and often, that nature’s undoubted order is neither benevolent in our terms (but “red in tooth and claw”. . .), not established with us in mind or at the helm. The kind of God implied by nature’s actual composition might not be a deity worthy of our worship.

378: The story of when J. B. S. Haldane was asked about the Creator, and remarked that he had “An inordinate fondness for beetles”. There are about 8,000 species of mammals and about 400,000 species of beetles.
389: A lungfish is actually more related to a cow than a trout because trouts broke away earlier.
410:

We predict that an evolutionary tree built from DNA resemblances should be congruent with the traditional classification based on morphology. Creationists, on the other hand, should expect no such similarity, for God may do as He pleases. Why should entirely different criteria record the same supposedly nonexistent pattern of evolutionary branching? (Of course, one might say that God chose to create with such congruence, but then God becomes meaninglessly omnipotent—that is, so flexible, so available for invocation to achieve any conceivable result that He becomes truly impotent for failure to illustrate any distinctive act that might test the nature of His unique ways and power.)

443: In Greece, ΣΤΑΣΙΣ means bus stop. A moving company of a luggage cart is a ΜΕΤΑΦΟΡΑ = “metaphor”.
Reading this book around the time that the movie Armageddon came out got me to thinking, what if Punctuated Equilibrium is related to the destruction of the ozone layer? If an asteroid impact might lead to more frequent mutations.

MONA LISA OVERDRIVE (1988)

William Gibson

Paperback

Bantam Books, New York

– 1998.7.18

Kumiko: Daughter of Yakuza boss. Sent to England with Swain for safety.
Swain: Given information by 3Jane.
Petal: In charge of her security.
Kid Africa: Dumps the count on Slick in care of Cherry.
Little Bird
Slick Henry: Caught for grand theft auto. Given Korsakov’s treatment which causes loss of short-term memory. Builds robots in Gentry’s factory to cope.
Mona: Prostitute who undergoes surgery to look like Angie Mitchell.
Tick: Cowboy in England and friend of Sally Shears (a.k.a. Molly).
Angie: Now a big Sim/Stim star.
At the end, many characters end up in the Aleph (a deck that approximates the matrix): Bobbie, Angie, 3Jane, Continuity (Sense/Net A.I.), The Finn, and Colin (Kumiko’s portable A.I.).
This was probably the origin of the term “Matrix”, as used in the movie.

BURNING CHROME (1986)

William Gibson

Paperback

Ace Books, New York
1998.7.x

Collection of Gibson’s short stories (often with coauthors), including the source of the movie Johnnie Mnemonic.

Johnny Mnemonic

1: First line ( In an ignoble post-Columbine incident, some kids got in trouble for posting this on a computer):

I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if the think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible.

The Gernsback Continuum

See MIRRORSHADES (1988)

Fragments of a Hologram Rose

The Belonging Kind by John Shirley and William Gibson

Hinterlands

Red Star, Winter Orbit by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson

See MIRRORSHADES (1988)

New Rose Hotel

This was made into a grade-B movie.

The Winter Market

Dogfight by Michael Swanwick and William Gibson

Burning Chrome

Includes characters and setting from the NEUROMANCER (1984) series.

VIRTUAL LIGHT (1993)

William Gibson

Paperback

Bantam Books, New York

1998.7.22 – 1998.7.24

And now, for something completely different. This series is quite a departure from the Neuromancer series. Many of Gibson’s fans did not like his new direction.
Takes place in 2005, where California is split into NoCal and SoCal (S.F. and L.A. after “Little Grande” earthquake).
Stephen Berry Rydell: Cop turned security guard.
Sublett: Allergic. Raised on Reverend Fallon’s tv-worship. Wears reflective contacts.
Chevette: Bike courier who steals VR glasses. Lives with Skinner on the bridge.
Yamazaki: Graduate student doing research on the bridge.
Republic of Desire: Hacker cell, with members like God-eater
Warbaby
Freddie
Loveless
Svobodov & Orlovsky
“Cops in Trouble” reality TV show.
Shapeley: Cured AIDS by spreading his own benign mutated HIV. Becomes a Christ-Figure.

IDORU (1996)

William Gibson

Hardcover

G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York

1998.7.24 – 1998.7.26

The title refers to Japanese virtual entertainers (Sharon Apple, anyone?)
Rei Toei: Wants to be human.
Chia Pet McKenzie: 14. Sent to Japan by the Seattle fan club of Lo/Rez to investigate the rumor of Rez’s marriage to Rei Toei. Her mother didn’t even realize she had gone. Accidentally smuggled nanotech. Chased by the Russian mafia.
Laney: Skilled in “filtering” information on the net. Tried to prevent the suicide of Alison Shires. Got a job via Rydell.
Yamazaki: Still taking notes.
Keith Alan Blackwell: Security for Rez.
Maryalice: Smuggles for Eddie.
Masahiko: Mitsuko’s brother. Has “responsibilities” in Walled City (a computer construct).
Zona (a.k.a. Mercedes Purissima Vargas-Gutierrez): Chia’s friend from Mexico over the Net. Has congenital disease which makes her too dependent on Zona persona.

DESCARTES’ ERROR

Emotion, Reason, And The Human Brain (1994)

Antonio R. Damasio

Hardcover

G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York

– 1998.8.25

Phineas Gage was a responsible railroad worker who blew an iron rod thought his head. His change of personality was a great blow to the dualistic hypothesis.
anosognosia = condition where you deny there’s anything wrong with you. For example, loss of use of an arm.
264 - 265: Chronic absence of pain.
trigeminal neuralgia (a.k.a. tic douloureux) = pain with neural origin.
His illustrations make about as much sense as Freud’s.
211: Patients with frontal damage undergoing skin conductance test did not “feel” emotion, but realized that they did not express emotion. One patient “knew” that the pictures which he was shown were disturbing, but did not “feel” disturbed.
227 - 228: Brain in a vat.
242 - 243: Hypothesis for “self”:

I propose that subjectivity emerges during the latter step when the brain is producing not just images of an object, not just images of organism responses to the object, but a third kind of image, that of an organism in the act of perceiving and responding to an object. I believe the subjective perspective arises out of the content of the third kind of image.

243: Crick’s hypothesis on consciousness focused on the problem of image making; leaving out subjectivity.
244: Daniel Dennett focuses on high-end of consciousness.
244: As with Gerald Edelman, the author accepts a neural basis of consciousness, despite some differences.
244: William James thought that no reasonable psychology could question the existence of “personal selves”.
248: Descartes first wrote “Je pense donc je suis” (in French) in Discourse on the Method (1637); then “Cogito ergo sum” (in Latin) in Principles of Philosophy (1644). His dualistic hypothesis separates “res cogitans” (thinking from mechanics) from “res extensa” (rest of the body), which is the exact opposite of what the author believes.
249: Descartes’ tombstone reads “Bene qui latuit, bene vixit” from Ovid’s Tristia (3.4.25) = “He who hid well, lived well”.
252:

The truly embodied mind I envision, however, does not relinquish its most refined levels of operation, those constituting its soul and spirit, with all their dignity and human scale, are now complex and unique states of an organism. Perhaps the most indispensable thing we can do as human beings, every day of our lives, is remind ourselves and others of our complexity, fragility, finiteness, and uniqueness. And this is of course the difficult job, is it not: to move the spirit from its nowhere pedestal to a somewhere place, while preserving its dignity and importance; to recognize its humble origin and vulnerability, yet still call upon its guidance. A difficult and indispensable job indeed, but one without which we will be far better off leaving Descartes’ Error uncorrected.

CONSILIENCE

The Unity Of Knowledge (1998)

Edward O. Wilson

Hardcover

Alfred A. Knopf, New York

– 1998.8.30

The author is concerned about the lack of communication between disciplines.
6: Raised a Baptist, he later has doubts:

I found it hard to accept that our deepest beliefs were set in stone by agricultural societies of the eastern Mediterranean more than two thousand years ago. I suffered cognitive dissonance between the cheerfully reported genocidal wars of these people and Christian civilization in 1940s Alabama. It seemed to me that the Book of Revelation might be black magic hallucinated by an ancient primitive. And I thought, surely a loving personal God, if He is paying attention, will not abandon those who reject the literal interpretation of the biblical cosmology. It is only fair to award points for intellectual courage. Better damned with Plato and Bacon, Shelley said, than go to heaven with Paley and Malthus. But most of all, Baptist theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God? Might the pastors of my childhood, good and loving men though they were, be mistaken? It was all too much, and freedom was ever so sweet. I drifted away from the church, not definitely agnostic or atheistic, just Baptist no more.

14: Wilson defines the end of the Enlightenment with the death of the Marquis de Condorcet during the Reign of Terror.
27: Bacon warns against “idols of the mind”.
31 - 32:

The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding. Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.

108: prosopagnosia = where one cannot recognize other people by their faces, but can recognize voices.
108: Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy often develop hyperreligiousity and hypergraphia = a compulsion to express visions in streams of poems, letter, etc.
110: Consciousness deals with brain networks according to S. J. Singer in his quip, “I link, therefore I am.”
129 - 130:

Perhaps God did create all organisms, including human beings, in finished form, in one stroke, and maybe it all happened several thousand years ago. But if that is true, He also salted the earth with false evidence in such endless and exquisite detail, and so thoroughly from pole to pole, as to make us conclude first that life evolved, and second that the process took billions of years. Surely Scripture tells us He would not do that. The Prime Mover of the Old and New Testaments is variously loving, magisterial, denying, thunderously angry, and mysterious, but never tricky.

199: Proof of Hardy-Weinberg principle ( which I already encountered in GENETICS AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (1937) by Theodosius Dobzhansky)

p + q = 1.0
(p + q)² = (1.0)²
p² + 2pq + q² = 1.0

248: Wilson frames a debate between a transcendentalist and a skeptic. The empiricist concludes with:

“We can be proud as a species because, having discovered that we are alone, we owe the gods very little. Humility is better shown to our fellow humans and the rest of life on this planet, on whom all hope really depends. And if any gods are paying attention, surely we have earned their admiration by making that discovery and setting out alone to accomplish the best of which we are capable.”

278: Wilson says we are becoming a new species, “homo proteus”.
The book ends with a warning about the dire consequences of overpopulation.

CHILDREN OF THE MIND (1996)

Orson Scott Card

Hardcover

TOR, New York

– 1998.9.3

Like the end of XENOCIDE (1991), this was a horrible, horrible book. However, I suppose it is consistent: IF you believe in the human soul, then there must be psychic connections, telepathy, etc.
A wonderful new transportation technology is developed (in hours) based on “understanding” Brownian motions.
From a plot standpoint, though, he relies far too much on deux ex machina.
It’s kind of like the transporters in Star Trek. If you acknowledge their possibility, then replicators must naturally follow.
So it logically follows that if you have a powerful enough computer, you can be instantaneously transported anywhere in the universe (with any relative velocity). They used this method to intercept the M.D. Device. Don’t bother worrying about cosmic radiation while flying around space in a cardboard box!
He hasn’t really considered the potential of transferring momentum, etc. If this were possible, it should be possible to create a perpetual-motion machine.

A HAPPY DEATH (1937)

Albert Camus

Translated from the French by Richard Howard

Hardcover

Alfred A. Knopf, New York

– 1998.9.7

Although finished in 1937, this semi-autobiographical work was not published until 11 years after his death.
Mersault is introduced to a cripple named Zagreus. After discussing life and death, Mersault shoots him (more like assisted suicide), takes his money, and cruises Europe.
75:

He wanted to crush himself into that mud, to re-enter the earth by immersing himself in that clay, to stand on that limitless plain covered with dirt, stretching his arms to the sooty sponge of the sky, as though confronting the superb and despairing symbol of life itself, to affirm his solidarity with the world at its worst, to declare himself life’s accomplice even in its thanklessness and its filth.

102: Title phrase:

And with pain and joy, their hearts learned to hear that double lesson which leads to a happy death.

116:

He had been unfair: while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given here too little. He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love—first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

144:

But before losing consciousness, he had time to see the night turn pale behind the curtains and to hear, with the dawn and the world’s awakening, a kind of tremendous chord of tenderness and hope which without doubt dissolved his fear of death, though at the same time it assured him he would find a reason for dying in what had been his whole reason for living.

CLIMBING MOUNT IMPROBABLE (1996)

Richard Dawkins

Illustrations by Lalla Ward

Norton Paperback, New York

– 1998.9.13

6: Defines designoid (“design-oid”) as things that look “designed” but are products of natural selection.
68:

We are accustomed to seeing a computer model as a simplification of the real world. But there is a sense in which computer models of natural selection are not simplifications but complications of the real world.

97: Macro-mutations do happen. Example of a frog with eyes inside its mouth.
Chapter 4: Flying in birds probably evolved from running, not gliding.
99: Quote from Blind Watchmaker: “however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.”
164: Computer simulation of evolution of a fish eye.
195: Mountain diagram of various types of eyes.
159: Ultra violet view of a flower.

SEMPER MARS

Book One Of The Heritage Trilogy (1998)

Ian Douglas

Paperback

Avon Books, New York

1998.9.18 – 1998.9.19

The U.S. Marines, facing disbandment and obsolescence, find a new mission: protecting U.S. archaeological interests on Mars. The Cydonia “face” is just the tip of an alien culture, including bodies of early homo sapiens.
In order to keep its sovereignty, the U.S. has pulled out of the U.N. decades sooner. Tensions escalate to all-out war when the U.N. decides to suppress information from Mars.
30 - 31: Global warming has caused the sea levels to rise. The only solution is the wholesale industrialization of space, including solar orbital power stations and Mars technology.
This book was very realistic (except for the “face”) in technology and politics. Eventually the superpowers will have to face up the rest of the world over consumption. Although I wish I could say the U.S. would never go to war with every other country on Earth, recently it’s been a whole lot harder to disbelieve in the possibility.

THE FALL (1956)

&

EXILE AND THE KINGDOM (1957)

Albert Camus

Translated from the French by Justin O’Brien

Hardcover

The Modern Library, New York

– 1998.9.20

The Fall is the story of Jean-Baptiste Clamence (not his real name) who used to be an altruistic (though lecherous) lawyer in Paris. Now he unloads his sob story at a Dutch bar called “Mexico City”.
74:

If I had been able to commit suicide and then see their [his friends’] reaction, why, then the game would have been worth the candle. But the earth is dark, cher ami, the coffin thick, and the shroud opaque.

77: Analogy to a lion tamer:

If, before going into the cage, he has the misfortune to cut himself while shaving, what a feast for the wild animals!

107: Whenever he mentioned God during court, his clients became anxious:

Whence it was but a step to conclude that I invoked the divinity in proportion to my ignorance.

Was it that he witnessed a woman jump off a bridge that pushed him over the edge? Or was it his experience in a POW camp in Africa?
The short stories of Exile and the Kingdom where hard to follow and/or seemed pointless.

MICROSERFS (1995)

Douglas Coupland

Paperback

ReganBooks, New York

– 1998.9.23

It’s basically about a search for identity. I just thought it was great.
A group of Microsoft coders leave Seattle (and Bill!) to start ‘OOP!’ in Silicon Valley. OOP! is like a lego set for software.
Dan: His diary. Computer password is “hellojed” after his brother who drowned.
Karla: Was very thin. Her parents called her stupid. Falls for Dan.
Bug Barbecue: Comes out.
Abe: Stays at Microsoft for a while, then bails them out with C-A-P-I-T-A-L.
Susan: Goes from Barbie to Chyx.
Todd: Into body-building. Meets Dusty, and they have a child.
Ethan: Marketing. Though he never did get those investors.
Michael: Very zen. Falls in love over the net with BarCode (a.k.a. Amy).
Anatole: French.
Dan’s dad gets laid off from IBM. His mom has a stroke and the novel ends with them using facilitation to communicate.
186:

You just can’t compete with the dead. It would be easier if I had another brother or a sister, but I was born after the Pill.

259: When told that any multiple of 6, minus 1 is a prime number:

All work STOPPED immediately as everybody set out to prove its validity.

PALE BLUE DOT

A Vision Of The Human Future In Space (1994)

Carl Sagan

Full Size Paperback

Random House, New York

– 1998.9.29

Excellent pictures including maps of moons.
38: On the Anthropic Principle:

But essentially the same laws and constants are required to make a rock. So why not talk about a Universe designed so rocks could one day come to be, and strong and weak Lithic Principles? If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers.

123: The Creation Story is 7 days long and there are 7 days in the week because ancient people could follow the 7 visible planets.
259: The solar sail was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s idea.
316: Sagan suggests intercepting an Earth Crossing Asteroid (ECA) at perihelion! That’s the worst place to to it!
He points out the dangers of interception technology. Someone could try to purposely cause an impact. Why bother? There are much easier ways to destroy the world.
318: It would only take 60 megatons to get asteroid 1991OA to impact in 2070.
391: The sun creates a gravity lens at a radii of 550 AU. A radio telescope there could resolve a continent at a nearby solar system or a few AUs at a distance to the nearest spiral galaxy.

THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (1991)

William Gibson

Bruce Sterling

Paperback

Bantam Books, New York

1998.9.30 –

Set in an alternate 1855 London where steam-driven “engines” (invented by Babbage) run credit and government records.
Lord Darwin obviously wasn’t afraid to publish in this history.
Lord Byron wages guerilla warfare on Lord Wellington’s Tories to become Prime Minister. His Radical Party hunts down the anarchist luddite Shelley.
The British take their science very seriously. The Savants are the new upper class. Museums abound.
YMAA = Young Men’s Agnostic Association
Captain Swing: Leads a revolt from India Company docks after most of Parliament leaves due to the Stink.
Florence Russell Burtlett: A murderess.
Lady Ada Byron searches for the Modus, a system to win at gambling.
Edward “Leviathan” Mallory: Found a Brontosaurus in Western U.S. Hunts Swing with his brothers. Holds a stack of cards from Ada Byron.
Oliphant: A “journalist” who is really an intelligence operative. Sends Fraser to guard Mallory.
John Keats: On the cutting edge of kinotropy.
Sybil Gerard: Daughter of a Luddite. She witnesses the attempted assassination of Sam Houston and steals his diamonds.
It is already possible to erase one’s identity.
The “irony” is that the people who “should” be writing poetry are programming computers, but don’t they amount to the same thing?

CONTACT (1985)

Carl Sagan

Hardcover

Simon And Schuster, New York

– 1998.10.10
Paperback:

This is one of the few instances where the movie is better than the book (especially the end).
Ellie Arroway: In the book, she is more interested in her personal appearance.
Kitz
S. R. Hadden: Invented a TV tuner that omits commercials. An upgrade tunes out preachers.
Palmer Joss: “Evenhanded” with science and religion.
25: Quote from Skeptical Essays I (1928) by Bertrand Russell:

I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I must, of course, admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system; since both are at present faultless, this must weigh against it.

135: A line from Joss that made it into the movie:

“Are we fundamentally happier? Or do the scientists bribe us with toys, with technological trinkets, while they undermine our faith?”

143:

“The man is scared stiff,” Ellie said. “His perspective is narrow. He imagines the Message is going to be unacceptable biblical exegesis or something that shakes his faith. He has no idea about how a new scientific paradigm subsumes the previous one. He wants to know what science has done for him lately. And he’s supposed to be the voice of reason.”

155: One of the Soviet scientists points out that “Head over heels” is backwards.
163: Quote from Euripides in Hecuba:

Do we, holding that the gods exist, deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the world?

172: Responding to the idea that God can do anything:

“Anything you don’t understand, Mr. Rankin, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it.”

173: Ellie claims to be a “Christian” because she thinks Jesus was a good teacher? Was he? See ELMER GANTRY (1927).
174: Joss argues that without God, there is no purpose.
231: Hadden invents Adnix and Preachnix using “context” technology. The absence of advertising is an alternative. If products were really different, there would be no need for ads.
287: Hadden:

“You see, the religious people—most of them—really think this planet is an experiment. That’s what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poling, messing around with tradesmen’s wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can’t say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why can’t the gods leave well enough alone? All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God didn’t want Lot’s wife to look back, why didn’t he make her obedient, so she’d do what her husband told her? Of if he hadn’t made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would’ve listened to him more. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn’t he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why’s he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there’s one thing the Bible make clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He’s not good at design, he’s not good at execution. He’d be out of business, if there was any competition.”

“You look at human history and it’s clear we’ve been on our own.”

313:

“In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work.”

414: We need a space radio telescope on the other side of the sun. They could resolve something the size of the Earth at the center of the Galaxy.

DIRK GENTLY’S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY (1987)

Douglas Adams

1998.10.10 – 1998.10.15

An electric toaster toasts bread. Along a similar vein, an electronic monk believes.
Gordon Way: Works for a computer company. Is killed by the Monk and becomes a ghost.
32:

He believed in a door. He must find that door. The door was the way to. . . to. . .
The Door was The Way.

Good.

Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn’t have a good answer to.

150: Dirk:

“Come. . . let us go. Let us leave this festering hellhole. Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”

This book involved a 4 billion year old alien ghost, a time-travelling house, an immortal Professor, a horse in a bathroom, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

MOONWAR (1998)

Ben Bova

Paperback

Avon Books, New York

1998.10.16 – 1998.10.17

The U.N., influenced by the Yamagata Corporation, attempts to take over Moonbase. While the invasion was successfully repelled with no weapons, the ending was a bit unsettling:

Joanna Stravenger-Brudnoy worked out a merger with the Yamagata Corporation.
The President of the U.S., the U.N. Secretary-General, Seigo Yamagata, and “Omar” Rashid all conspired or allowed this to happen. It’s not clear who all knew about the suicide bombers. Nobody was implicated.
The ideas behind the New Morality are still alive and strong.
Seigo will probably be cured of cancer (with nanotech) even though the suicide bombers killed Zimmerman, the person who invented the technology.
Where is the independent media? Only a few “suits” seem to be able to enact an entire news blackout. Which is a cautionary tale for today's trend for media consolidation.

GENERATION X

Tales For An Accelerated Culture (1991)

Douglas Coupland

Illustrations by Paul Rivoche

Paperback

St. Martin Press, New York

1998.10.17 – 1998.10.24

Andy, Dag, and Claire are friends.
Dag likes to deface cars that are expensive and/or annoy him.
5: McDonald’s recently (2003) tried to sue to keep this out of the dictionary:

MCJOB: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.

BRAZILIFICATION: The widening gulf between the rich and poor and the accompanying disappearance of the middle class.

EMOTIONAL KETCHUP BURST: The bottling up of opinions and emotions inside oneself so that they explosively burst forth all at once, shocking and confusing employers and friends—most of whom thought things were fine.

CLIQUE MAINTENANCE: The need of one generation to see the generation following it as deficient so as to bolster its own collective ego: “Kids today do nothing. They’re so apathetic. We used to go out and protest. All they do is shop and complain.”

ANTI-SABBATICAL: A job taken with the sole intention of staying only for a limited period of time (often one year). The intention is usually to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity such as watercolor sketching in Crete or designing computer knit sweaters in Hong Kong. Employers are rarely informed of intentions.

“And as we were walking toward the elevator, I could feel everyone in the office shooting jealousy rays at me. It was such a bad scene that I could just imagine everyone thinking ‘who does he think he is?’ I felt dishonest. Like I was coasting on my foreignness. I felt I was being excommunicated from the shin jin rui—that’s what the Japanese newspapers call people like those kids in their twenties at the office—new human beings. It’s hard to explain. We have the same group over here and it’s just as large, but it doesn’t have a name—an X generation—purposefully hiding itself. There’s more space over here to hide in—to get lost in—to use as camouflage. You’re not allowed to disappear in Japan.

“But I digress.”

Remember Earth clearly. What one memory will you take with you?
63:

MENTAL GROUND ZERO: The location where one visualizes oneself during the dropping of the atomic bomb; frequently, a shopping mall.

POORCHONDRIA: Hypochondria derived from not having medical insurance.

JAPANESE MINIMALISM: The most frequently offered interior design aesthetic used by rootless career-hopping young people.

VOTER’S BLOCK: The attempt, however futile, to register dissent with the current political system by simply not voting.

111:

AIR FAMILY: Describes the false sense of community experienced among coworkers in an office environment.

120:

TELE-PARABLIZING: Morals used in everyday life that derive from TV sitcom plots: “That’s just like the episode where Jan lost her glasses!”

135:

BLACK HOLES: An X generation subgroup best known for their possession of almost entirely black wardrobes.

139:

2 + 2 = 5-ISM: Caving in to a target marketing strategy aimed at oneself after holding out for a long period of time. “Oh, all right, I’ll buy your stupid cola. Now leave me alone.”

143:

PERSONALITY TITHE: A price paid for becoming a couple; previously amusing human beings become boring: “Thanks for inviting us, but Noreen and I are going to look at flatware catalogs tonight. Afterward we’re going to watch the shopping channel.”

171:

TERMINAL WANDERLUST: A condition common to people of transient middle-class upbringings. Unable to feel rooted in any one environment, they move continually in the hopes of finding an idealized sense of community in the next location.

Dag’s dream is to open a hotel in Mexico.

LIFE AFTER GOD (1994)

Douglas Coupland

Paperback

Pocket Books, New York

1998.10.17 – 1998.10.24

You are the first generation raised without religion.
182:

The stations talked about Jesus and salvation and I found it was pretty hard listening because these religious types are always so whacked out and extreme. I think they take things too literally and miss too many points because of this literalism. This had always been the basic flaw with religion—or so I had been taught, and so (I realized) I had come to believe. So at least I knew one thing for sure that I believed in.

The radio stations all seemed to be talking about Jesus nonstop, and it seemed to be this crazy orgy of projection, with everyone projecting onto Jesus their antidotes to the things that had gone wrong in their own lives. He is Love. He is Forgiveness. He is Compassion. He is a Wise Career Decision. He is a Child Who Loves Me.

RIVER OUT OF EDEN

A Darwinian View Of Life (1995)

Richard Dawkins

Illustrations by Lalla Ward

Paperback

BasicBooks, New York

1998.10.25 – 1998.10.26

The person who made notes in my copy of this book is obviously a cultural relativist.
67: Douglas Hofstadter coins the word “sphexish” for an inflexible, mindless automatism after a member of the differ wasp.
70: The “I cannot believe that so-and-so could have evolved by gradual selection” idea is called the Argument from Personal Incredulity.
In regards to the relationship between wasps and orchids (who mimic wasps to prompt cross-pollenization), just remember how easy it is to fool wasps.
96:

nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

105: If we reverse engineer a cheetah, its purpose seems to be killing antelopes. But an antelope appears to be created to escape cheetahs.

ROGUE STAR (1998)

Michael Flynn

Hardcover

TOR, New York

1998.10.30 – 1998.11.2

Unlike FIRESTAR (1996), this book just didn’t go anywhere. The only excitement was at the very end, but it was hard to tell what was going on.
83:

Forrest grunted to himself. So, the Rock was made up of rock. If that constituted a Big Surprise, geologists should get out of the house more often.

196: When Thomas Jefferson was told about a meteorite in New England, he found it easier to believe that a Yankee professor would lie than stones fell from the sky.
311: Medieval chronicles report 5 bright flares from behind the moon on 18 July 1178, probably what made the Giordano Bruno crater.
A Neural Net is not referred to as an A/I, but as an A/S = “Artificial Stupid”, which is very applicable.
Good last line:

Finally, Nacho spoke.

“This is not the same planet we left.”

Forrest shook his head. “We are not the same men who left it.”

Are aliens altering NEO (Near Earth Object) orbits?
Some political points to be taken from near-term science fiction:

Russia take the Serb side in another Balkan war.
SDI in space can start a war, especially on a U.N. station.

ISAAC ASIMOV’S MARS (1991)

Paperback
Ace Books, New York
– 1998.11.6

Collection of 9 Short Stories.

“Live From The Mars Hotel” by Allen M. Steele:

A group of astronauts make it big with an acoustic band. The “suits” manage to screw it up.

“The Difficulties Involved In Photographing Nix Olympica” by Brian W. Aldiss

Two soldiers photograph Olympus Mons from the ground.

“The Great Martian Railroad Race” by Eric Vinicoff

Two “competitors” build a railroad on Mars. It’s what the frontier is all about. Thousands of Chinese and Irish get their own farms.

“All The Beer On Mars” by Gregory Benford

“Agreed. No tourists, no prisons.”

“Deserves a beer.”

96: “Svoboda” means “Freedom” in Russian.
The search for life leads to. . . a Russian probe from 1971.

“Mars Needs Beatniks” by George Alec Effinger

Self-explanitory.

“Green Mars” by Kim Stanley Robinson

A group of 300-year olds climb Mount Olympus.
Roger gets close to Eileen, who doesn’t remember him from their youth.
He spent his life fighting terraforming (Reds vs. Greens). The irony is that he is one of the very few who haven’t lost his early memory, but his life was wasted. The idea of new life eventually makes him give in.
218: Saxifrage moss?

SHAMPOO PLANET (1993)

Douglas Coupland

Paperback

Pocket Books, New York

1998.11.4 – 1998.11.12

Tyler’s hippie mom, Jasmine, separates from Dan after he writes “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” on her forehead.
Tyler’s Euro-fling, Stephanie, shows up and they take off for L.A.
Not a very remarkable novel.

POLAROIDS FROM THE DEAD (1996)

Douglas Coupland

Paperback

ReganBooks, New York

1998.11.12 – 1998.11.13

Random encounters with Dead-heads.
122: While discussing the James Rosenquist’s painting “F-111”

We emerge from our mother’s womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us.

152: Outside restaurants are shaded at the request of customers because anti-depressants cause photosensitivity.
Commentary on Brent Wood community.

MOVING MARS (1993)

Greg Bear

Paperback

TOR, New York

1998.11.15 – 1998.11.25

Mars was colonized with cooperative families, Binding Multiples, but had a false start with unification.
Casseia Majumdar and Charles Franklin were among two student protesters.
Casseia was called to be the temporary Vice President during a second transition.
Charles was working with the Olympians on “tweaking descriptors”, at the cutting edge of quantum physics.
Heavy reliance is placed on nano-machines and information-carrying viruses. People need to be “immunized” before going to big cities.
83: All habitable stations are required to be surveyed and inventories yearly in order to be placed on charts for emergencies.
Casseia met Orianna on her journey. While still a teenager, Orianna has experienced so much. Is she self-actuated or just spoiled?
People do sims for entertainment. Do they under-rely on real experience?
Robots (arbeiters) are everywhere. Are they the reason that there doesn’t seem to be an underclass (or Third World)? This could have been explained better.
A.I.’s are treated (more or less) just like people. But why would a true A.I. go to work immediately after being “grown”. They seem a little too smart, and are given far too much authority.
There was very extensive life on Mars in the past.
The whole concept of instantaneous transmutation and moving large bodies (entire moons and planets!) falls too easily into the same trap of other sci-fi writers:

Asimov’s I, ROBOT THE ILLUSTRATED SCREENPLAY (1978) FTL transportation
Heinlein’s THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST (1980) free travel anywhere/when
O. S. Card’s XENOCIDE (1991) instantaneous A.I.-aided teleportation.

If and when such things are possible, it will probably require vast amounts of energy to teleport small quantities under well-scrutinized laboratory conditions.
The political and social background was interesting. Too bad the ultra-tech had to muck it up. Bear also makes the same mistake as Bova in MOONWAR (1998) where the ending isn’t given enough treatment. In this case, they don’t actually “Move Mars” until page 489 out of 500. It seemed to be just tacked on to the end. I know denouement is not supposed to be too long, but 2.2% is not enough (for Moonwar, it was 492/510 = 1.8%). Their editors must have put a lot of pressure to keep them at about 500 pages. I’m not saying that they should use a “formula”. In fact, if Bear did wanted to be innovative, he could have Moved Mars half way through and then dealt with the repercussions of that.
It was a cop-out to never even know who the enemy was. What was their motivation?
If I’m going to read 500 pages, I expect to know some background, and see some real plot resolution.

DOOMSDAY ASTEROID

Can We Survive? (1996)

Donald W. Cox, Ed.D.

James H. Chestek, P.E.

Foreword by Robert Zubrin

Hardcover

Prometheus Books, New York

– 1998.12.8

Rather than NEA, they prefer the term COTE = Celestial Object Threatening Earth.
Includes a little about the history of discovery and the “dinosaur crater”.
They are critical of a committee’s recommendations, specifically that ground-based telescopes should look at midnight skies. They have a very good point, that we would not see an asteroid coming from toward the sun. They plotted some orbits to support their case.
Suggest space-based “Humble” telescopes.
149: Rule of thumb: The amount you can steer your probe toward or away from your destination is the product of the mid-course correction velocity you applied multiplied by the time remaining before you arrive at your destination.
165: The DV which a neutron bomb might impart on a 1 km-wide comet; 20 Mtons would deflect 2 m/s. The the impulse is applied 2 months before impact, it would be deflected 1.5 Earth radii.
They establish that we need SSTO. Suggest using and NEO for transport to the asteroid belt. Its orbit should be altered for an integer period of one year.
228: This is the most irrelevant part of the book, the life on an asteroid space-station. They explain why it must be democratic, etc. This is a lot of the same Utopian gibberish as Marshall Savage (THE MILLENNIAL PROJECT (1994)). It’s more just a fantasy of how they want to live.

BULLY FOR BRONTOSAURUS (1992)

Stephen Jay Gould

Hardcover

W.W. Norton & Company, New York

– 1998.12.12

11: His type of popular writing is technically known as “vulgarism”.
59: The QWERTY keyboard arrangement is so ubiquitous because it was the least efficient arrangement. Typing too fast would cause early typewriters to jam.
149: Wings could have arisen for thermoregulation. Small wings have little aerodynamic effects.
176: The “Standard” model of horse evolution is a misnomer. A typical diagram is incorrect because it includes dead-end species that are not ancestors to modern horses. Includes a more exact diagram with correct branching.
184. French spiritualist Mesmer (as in “Mesmerism”) was big in the 1770s. He was debunked by Benjamin Franklin and Lavoisier.
213: Abbott H. Thayer made a “crazy” theory that flamingoes are pink so as not to be seen against a sunset. However, he did realize that animals are lighter on the bottom for countershading; to look 2-D. He overextended, and tried to explain everything as camouflage.
295:

Darwin delighted in Bates’ discovery because he viewed mimicry as such a fine demonstration of evolution in action. Creationism, Darwin consistently argued, cannot be disproved directly because it claims to explain everything. Creationism becomes impervious to test and, therefore, useless to science. Evolutionists must proceed by showing that any creationist explanation becomes a reductio ad absurdum by twists of illogic and special pleading required to preserve the idea of God’s unalterable will in the face of evidence for historical change.

319:

Intelligence is too complex and multifaceted a thing to reduce to any single dimension.

319 - 320: The idea of the Strong Anthropomorphic principle invokes probability. However, this is really a useless measurement because we have no sense of context.
327: Tolstoy on Darwin as dying. Kropotkin thought Darwinism leads to cooperation.
343: “Whiggish History” = judging historical figures by modern (and non-applicable) standards.

THE CASE FOR MARS

The Plan To Settle The Red Planet And Why We Must (1996)

Robert Zubrin

with Richard Wagner

Paperback

Touchstone, New York

1998.12

The Mars Direct plan is the cheapest way to get to Mars by using In-Situ propellant production. The return ship will be fueled and checked before the astronauts leave Earth.
Each mission leaves a hab (habitat module) for later missions. By accumulating modules on Mars, we make it the second safest place in the solar system for astronauts, reducing later risk.
George H. W. Bush’s plan for Mars was very bloated. Many at NASA might find Mars Direct “too” inexpensive, as their own programs become less relevant.
Recommends a crew of 4, with no dedicated pilot. Artificial gravity is a must.
110: (V₀ + DV)²= V_e²+ V_h²= V_r² , where

V₀ = velocity of spacecraft a lowest part of departure orbit.
V_e = planet escape velocity (e.g. 11 km/s for Earth, 5 km/s for Mars)
V_h = hyperbolic velocity
V_r = reentry velocity

163: Timekeeping; recommends a New “Martian” s, m, h such that 24 Mars hours = 24h 39.6m. This would make navigation easier. This is at odds with Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Timeslip” idea from RED MARS (1993).
166: Calendar; the 12 signs of the Zodiac for Martian year.
230: “triangle trade”
253: Terraforming; Partial pressures.
271: Equations
277: Proposes three different Mars models: “J. F. K.”, “Sagan”, and “Gingrich” (contests and prizes)
While SSTOs are not required, they could be made to work just as well.

SKUNKWORKS

A Personal Memoir Of My Years At Lockheed (1994)

Ben R. Rich

Leo Janos

Paperback

Back Bay Books, Boston

1998.12

F-117s were the exclusive aircraft over Baghdad on the first night of the Gulf War. I did not realize this.
51: Kelley Johnson’s 14 rules.
Carter canceled the B-1 because he knew that stealth made it obsolete. Reagan was campaigning on bringing it back. Carter considered giving candidate Reagan a secret briefing on the topic, but never did. Once Reagan beat Carter (for being too soft on defense), the B-1B was revived.
The SR-71 was going to be and air-to-air interceptor.
The Navy did not want stealth ships because of the small crew compliment. Officers need lots of sailors to order around in order to get promoted.
96: F-117s were not used in April 1986 to bomb Kaddafi. and look what happened.
169: Kelley researched a hydrogen airplane. When the design was insurmountable, Kelley returned the funding to the government.
324: Why build the luxury model?
327: President Johnson switched called the RS-71 an SR-71 in a speech. Rather than admit a mistake, lots of money was spent to change the name.
Idea for large dirigibles for mass transportation. They would be safer than tankers.

COMET (1985)

Carl Sagan

Ann Druyan

Hardcover

Random House, New York

1998.12

50: Newton’s works on the comet of 1680 included observations from Patuxent River.
62: Apollonius of Perga was a mathematician and astronomer in 3^rdCentury B.C. Alexandria.
205:

On first hearing where babies come from, many of us express a certain skepticism. Often what is being described does not correspond to the listeners’ own observations. Compared to storks, angels, and cabbage patches, the machinery seems unwieldy and improbable. But no matter how implausible the story may seem at first, there is a reasonable consensus among knowledgeable individuals on the matter. Direct experience eventually converts even the most committed skeptic.

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