"To Deepen into Art..."

The Despair of Thomas Disch

Thomas M. Disch, the late SF writer (poet/critic/...), once told Jody Bottum that part of the reason he quit writing science fiction was that, to deepen it into real art, "I would have to be like Gene Wolfe and return to the Catholicism that I barely got away from when I was young -- and I can't do that, of course."

That "of course" is heartbreaking. Bottum commented that Disch "never escaped his escape from Catholicism." And there is something to that. It's a sort of intaglio, defining oneself by what one is not; and one cannot help but be reminded of holes and gaps left unfilled. His suicide was a tragedy and a loss to literature in general and SF in particular. He was once called "the most respected ... and least read of all modern first-rank SF writers." He ought not have been.

Eifelheim reviewed

by Joseph Moore at Yard Sale of the Mind:

Glad to say I’ve finally gotten a chance to read Michael Flynn‘s excellent book Eifelheim, which had been sitting in the pile on the floor near the bed for some number of months now.
In a nutshell: Good book. Go read it.
In addition to great storytelling and loveable, warty characters, what makes this story of alien first contact excellent is the sympathetic treatment of 2 mysterious peoples: medieval villagers and space aliens.

Humility prevents TOF from quoting further. See link for details.

This is Science!

Careful what you say!

On Gwyneth Paltrow's blog, appropriately named goop, one finds the following insights into natural science:

I [Gwyneth Paltrow] am fascinated by the growing science behind the energy of consciousness and its effects on matter. I have long had Dr. [Masaru] Emoto's coffee table book on how negativity changes the structure of water, how the molecules behave differently depending on the words or music being expressed around it. Below, Dr. [Habib] Sadeghi explores further.

Said Dr. Sadeghi explains:

Japanese scientist, Masaru Emoto performed some of the most fascinating experiments on the effect that words have on energy in the 1990’s. When frozen, water that’s free from all impurities will form beautiful ice crystals that look exactly like snowflakes under a microscope. Water that’s polluted, or has additives like fluoride, will freeze without forming crystals. In his experiments, Emoto poured pure water into vials labeled with negative phrases like "I hate you" or "fear." After 24 hours, the water was frozen, and no longer crystallized under the microscope: It yielded gray, misshapen clumps instead of beautiful lace-like crystals. In contrast, Emoto placed labels that said things like "I Love You," or "Peace" on vials of polluted water, and after 24 hours, they produced gleaming, perfectly hexagonal crystals. Emoto’s experiments proved that energy generated by positive or negative words can actually change the physical structure of an object.

Getting all Emoto-nal

It's difficult to argue with such hard science experiments as that; so be careful what you say around the office water cooler. Molecules can not only be selfish (as is the case with genes) but can also grow depressed or elated depending on what they overhear or (in Emoto's case) read. Well, science marches on and all that.



Meanwhile, much anxiety is expressed over creationists, a group of people anxious that their beliefs should be accepted as Really Truly Science!™  None of the Taste-Makers in Late Modern Society would be caught dead associating with their ilk and will mock them as "science-deniers" (rather than more truthfully as "science wanna-bes"). They are about as dangerous as anyone outside the Iron Gates.

Folks like Paltrow, however, are already within the gates, and her occult beliefs are accepted at all the best salons and cocktail parties and will circulate through the minds of all the bien pensants along with the vague notion that it has all been "proven" by pukka "scientists."

But surely even liberal as well as conservative devotees of reason can join hands on this tripe. The Real World™, TOF regrets to inform, isn't actually like that.

America's Next Top Model -- Part VI

Now that we know how to measure our Xs (and Ys) we need to select units on which we will make the measurements not only for the model baseline and calibration, but also for the input data used in running the model later.

The Eighth Uncertainty: Cheery Picking

On rare occasions, we can measure every item in the population, but more usually, we have to select a sample. This is the third pitfall in data collection. Sampling error and sampling bias could be the subject of entire books -- and have been! TOF's favorite for non-statisticians is A Sampler on Sampling, by Bill Williams, a man whose middle name he has always wanted to know. Other books of a more grimly technical nature include Deming, Sample Design in Business Research (Wiley Classics, 1990), Cochran, Sampling Techniques (Wiley, 1977), and Deming (again), Some Theory of Sampling (Wiley, 1950). TOF directs Faithful Reader's attention toward "sources of error in sampling surveys" and similar topics.

We Can Only Hope The Prom Theme Was Meant Ironically

E Pluribus Unum

Yesterday was the Feast of Pentecost, sometimes called 'the birthday of the Church.' In the Acts reading is a role call of the places from which the Jews and converts to Judaism had come, and the more geographically savvy among us recognize that the list runs from east to west. There are two odd points: the Cretans and Arabs are mentioned separately, and Greece is not mentioned at all. But what in those days had Athens to do with Jerusalem?

Speaking of all nations, among this week's weekday feasts is the commemoration of St. Ephraem,a/k/a 'the Harp of the Holy Ghost, who was a Syrian writer of hymns (among other things), last week included the commemoration of St. Charles Lwanga and Companions, who were Ugandans martyred by the king of that country.

The writer Michael Novak once wrote:

Ratzinger noted, there are certain creative energies and intuitions that Christianity can bring to secular society. Christianity, after all, is by now found in all nations on earth, and it numbers among its baptized members one-third of all people on earth. It is a fount of practical knowledge about other cultures. .....

Down through the centuries, the Catholic Church has learned much from successive secular orders. From the East it learned a sense of the great mystery and transcendence of God—a more mystical and contemplative cast of mind. From the ancient Greeks it learned to love reason, proportion, and beauty. From the Romans it learned stoic virtue, universal administration, and a practical sense of law. From the French it learned the upward flare of the Gothic and the brilliance of idées claires and rapid wordplay. From the Germans, metaphysics, formidable historical learning, and metahistorical thinking. And from the Anglo-Americans, a dose of common sense and a passion for the religious liberty of the individual conscience. 

-- "Remembering the Secular Age"

On the High Frontier

A story of mine that appeared in Analog (Apr 92) is on the STORY PREVIEW page, link in the left margin. It will stay up for a couple weeks.

"On the High Frontier" was an early effort, a cowboy yarn set in space -- long before Firefly came along, we might mention. It's pretty much a Tall Tale and has nearly every gol-danged cliche you can shake a stick at. I added one to this version that was not in the original.

 Publisher's Weekly had this to say when it appeared in The Forest of Time and Other Stories:

In his introduction and charming endnotes, Flynn reveals an impish sense of humor that leaches into the stories. ""On the High Frontier"" is the space opera to end all space operas, a wild western hardwired with the argot of cyberpunk that gleefully subverts every cliche of the subgenre. Any author who can nudge readers in the ribs with a line such as, ""Many a spacer has come to grief with his ship tuckered out megaclicks from the nearest gas cloud,"" and make them envision a Gary Cooper type saying it with a straight face, is worth his weight in cybercash, and then some.

There is a wink aimed at the original "Eifelheim" in the passing reference to Nagy hypospace. 

Have fun. Or not. It's up to you.