A Blast from the Past

M&M the millennial couple!

Here is a photo of a photo, taken by one of my bros from one of Pere's photo albums.  She is still every bit as beautiful as then.  I, on the other hand....





It seems like only yesterday.

H.G. Wells Did Not Like Metropolis

In a review of the movie in the New York Times, 17 April 1927, he wrote:

It gives in one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own.

It is a German film and there have been some amazingly good German films, before they began to cultivate bad work under cover of a protective quota. And this film has been adapted to the Anglo-Saxon taste, and quite possibly it has suffered in the process, but even when every allowance has been made for that, there remains enough to convince the intelligent observer that most of its silliness must be fundamental.

Possibly I dislike this soupy whirlpool none the less because I find decaying fragments of my own juvenile work of thirty years ago, The Sleeper Awakes, floating about in it.

Capek's Robots have been lifted without apology, and that soulless mechanical monster of Mary Shelley's, who has fathered so many German inventions, breeds once more in this confusion.

Originality there is none. Independent thought, none.

The remainder of the review can be found here: erkelzaar.tsudao.com/reviews/H.G.Wells_on_Metropolis%201927.htm

Food for Thought

You've always wanted to hear a chef talk about how the "calcium reacts with sodium." 

Bibber, Swigger, or Tippler?

Wine, Beer, or Spirits?

This was on Strange Maps

My old history professor John Lukacs used to describe the border of the Roman Empire thusly: "On one side were Latins, and light, and wine.  On the other side were Germans, and darkness, and beer."  You can pretty much still see that border in modern preferences for wine and beer.  In Roman times, of course, vineyards prospered much farther north ("The Roman Climatic Optimum") and again during the medieval Optimum than they do in today's chilly times. 


But if you look closely at Western Poland, you can also see where wodka gives way to beer and... it's the old German border from pre-WW1: East Prussia and Silesia!  Except for the irruption of beer-swigging Slavs into the western Balkans and of Saxons into England, the wine-bibbing region is still basically the old Roman Empire.  Note beer-swigging Transylvania between the upper and lower jaws of wine-bibbing Romania. 

Beer drinking is the cereal belt of Europe.  North and east of there, grains don't grow as well, and distilled spirits like vodka become the tipple of choice.  The Ukraine ought to drink more beer, though.

The Benefits of Youth

One of the benefits of youth is the ability to go to sleep anywhere at any time:

This is Important

If you go to buy UP JIM RIVER on Amazon, you will find this: www.amazon.com/Up-Jim-River-Michael-Flynn/dp/0765322846
together with a link to "tell the publisher I'd like to read this book on Kindle"

Apparently, Macmillian, of which Tor is a part, has balked at the $9.99 price for Kindle books, that it is not enough to recoup the costs of buying the rights from the authors, editing, and publishing it.  In retaliation, Amazon has pulled all it's "buy" buttons from all Macmillan books.  All of them.  Nancy Kress' new book is out in the cold, and Amazon is hinting that UP JIM RIVER may not be available until November.  A misdirection: the book will be published in April as a really truly *book*.  Amazon apparently thinks that if you can't get it through their proprietary Kindle, then you don't deserve to have it in any form; and the helpful link is to get you to put pressure on the publisher.  Is Amazon getting too big?  Should the government break it up?  Meanwhile, you can get it on Barnes and Noble: search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp

Meanwhile, I have changed all the links in the book covers to the left to B&N.

Update

After a weekend snit, Amazon has thrown in the towel. 

Charlie Stross' Diary:  www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/
Go down to "at 16:01 on January 30, 2010" and start reading up. 

Scott Westerfeld here: scottwesterfeld.com/blog/

John Scalzi here: whatever.scalzi.com/2010/02/01/all-the-many-ways-amazon-so-very-failed-the-weekend/

All of whom aI like one of Mr. Westerfeld's comments: Amazon, if you are going to blacklist an entire publisher (one-sixth of all US books) don't pick the one that  published the vast majority of SF books, because they will blog you dead.  

Chance and Causation

Demons from the Vasty Deep

In the  previous post, we looked at the question of how can something immaterial [gravity] could affect something material [matter]. This generated much discussion in the LiveJournal version of this blog.  Check out the comments here.

This was bound up in the problem of whether gravity is a substance, composed of matter and form, that swims outward from a mass (like sperm, perhaps) to attract other masses.  But if gravity were a substance, then a gravitating body would lose mass over time as the gravitational fluid left the body.  It would also be hard to explain how the gravitational fluid pressing out would attract other masses in.  Also, since gravity is produced by all matter -- and that included "energy"; even light rays have gravity -- then gravity to the extent it consisted of matter, would have gravity.  [And this gravity would have its own gravity, ad inf.] 

The modern vision of gravity as a warping of space-time by the presence of mass -- a particular state of the Ricci tensors -- is no less problematical, since space and time, under general relativity, have no objective existence themselves.  We are faced with the problem of how a material thing [matter] can affect an immaterial thing [space-time]. 

In neither case do we have a problem saying it does.  We just don't know how it does it.  Recall Newton's words: "we have explained the phænomena of the heavens ... by the power of gravity, but have not yet assigned the cause of this power."  The Aristotelian answer is that gravity is not a force, per se, but a natural property of matter itself.  (Einstein is more in line with Aristotle.)  Thus, to ask how an immaterial concept like "gravity" could cause the motion of "matter" is akin to asking how a mental abstraction like three-sidedness could cause a real life triangle.   

Newton also noted the difference between gravity and mechanical forces: "This is certain, that [gravity] must proceed from a cause ... that operates not according to the quantity of the surfaces of the particles upon which it acts (as mechanical causes use to do), but according to the quantity of the solid matter which they contain."  That is, it doesn't matter how big a surface area is attracted; it only matters how big the attractor is.  This is a hint that gravity is not a force in the same sense that being hit with a hammer is a force.

This led, by insensible increments to the denial of causation itself, with the usual invocation of quantum mechanics, and the conjuring up of Chance from the vasty deeps. 

Now the claim that quantum theory involves uncaused effects is seldom backed up with an example of one of these uncaused effects.  Sometimes people say: Particles can appear from nothing!  But this conflates the meaning of "nothing" with the meaning of "zero."  When pressed, the admission is that particles come from fluctuations in the quantum state of the vacuum energy.  In which case, there is not nothing: there is vacuum energy; there are quantum states. 

Then, too, I am told by my physicist friends that quantum mechanics consists of many equations and these equations work out to with precision.  This could not be if there were no causation at the quantum level. 

Now, what about CHANCE, that great bugaboo that is sometimes invoked to deny causation.