Tag: Douglas adams

Space Junk

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Are you aware of the problem of Space Junk?

In a nutshell, it’s this:

We are good at sending things into space.

We are less good at returning them safely and responsibly to earth after their usefulness is at an end.

So we have sent thousands of satellites into orbit, and … okay, brief detour. Look, space is big, okay? (Really, mind-bogglingly big, to quote Douglas Adams.) Big like the ocean is big, except bigger, and seemingly infinite. Except not infinite, because only the part of space that’s particularly close to Earth is particularly useful to us most of the time. So even though space feels infinite, the part of space that we are using is decidedly, well, not.

(If you’re interested in such things, this site is pretty cool.)

So. We have sent thousands of satellites into orbit, but because space seems so big, we haven’t been particularly arsed about what happens to these satellites when they break down or when they serve their purpose or for whatever reason stop functioning or are no longer needed. “Just let it float away out there,” we seem to have told ourselves, “it won’t matter. Space is big.”

Which is true, until you consider that those thousands of satellites are, each of them, travelling at upwards of thousands of miles an hour. Which is, uh, really fast. And as you will remember from high school physics, even a tiny, insignificant object traveling at a speed that’s, uh, really fast, can do significant damage to your precious vital organs. (This is how guns work and why Americans love them!) Or to our precious space satellites.

Space is mostly empty, but it’s not all empty, and there are always bits of rock from distant asteroids or shards of ice from passing comets or celestial teapots from philosophy classes whizzing around out there, and occasionally, one of these tiny little things will hit another tiny little thing out in space with a force like a couple hundred pounds of TNT. This turns the little things involved into even smaller little things that then fly off, themselves at thousands of miles per hour, to smash into other things. (If you saw Gravity, you saw this effect in action, to horrifying results!)

This effect can cascade quickly. A satellite smashed by a meteor scatters its guts across low-earth orbit and takes out several other satellites, which scatter their guts and … you get the idea. Experts believe that, if not somehow dealt with, the resultant chain reactions will eventually all but prohibit travel in space for satellites, let alone people — to go into space would be the equivalent of stepping into a galactic shooting gallery.

And how do we deal with it?

The answer right now seems to be a collective shoulder shrug with a lot of uncomfortable throat-clearing.

This is, to put it bluntly, a problem.

And it’s a perfect metaphor for so many of the problems facing society today. Our blind rush to one-up each other, to get those satellites up there without worrying about how to safely get them down again, is literally choking the skies to the point that nobody can use them.

I don’t have a solution for this. But I learned about it several years ago and every now and then, I think about it, and it worries me. I just thought you ought to know about it, too. So I don’t have to worry alone.

Space Junk, Space Debris, Orbits, Space, Universe

As if all of us didn’t have enough to worry about.

Caveat Pre-Emptor (Or, Why It’s Okay to Brag a Little)

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So, like, I’m a writer, right? Or at least, I’m trying to be. I aspire. Along with the legions of others.

And once in a while, and I do mean a good while, somebody will ask me “how’s it going?” Or, even more rarely, the subject will come up for the first time and they’ll ask “what are you writing?”

And before I can even properly formulate my response, the caveats start flooding out of me like the air from a punctured tire. “Well, I haven’t been making the kind of progress I’d like, but —”, or “you know, I really haven’t been working on it for very long, so —”, or “I don’t have the time to really focus on it, and —”, or, you know, fill in the blank with whatever disclaimer is handy. I’m basically telling the person that whatever it is isn’t really up to standards (mine or theirs or some imaginary person’s? WHO KNOWS, I DON’T), and it’s basically just me noodling around on the page like that lame guy who knows three chords but pulls his guitar out at the party anyway.

All of which, I should point out, is true. I mean, I’d like to be making more progress, but THIS STUFF IS HARD. I really haven’t been working on it very long — writing in general for maybe three years, this project in particular about a year, all told — but that’s because THIS STUFF IS HARD and I only recently decided to take it on. And I don’t have the time to really focus on it, because THIS STUFF IS HARD and it takes a ton of freaking time and I have, you know, a job, bills, a family, etc, etc.

Damn, I even caught myself doing it when I was doing a little journaling the other morning. In a bit of personal writing, from MYSELF to MYSELF, meant for absolutely nobody else’s eyes ever, I put an asterisk on a statement of accomplishment. (I’d been for a run in the morning, and thanks to a nagging injury, my pace wasn’t exactly what I’d prefer, so I hemmed and hawed — again, AT MYSELF — about the fact that I got out there and ran my morning miles.)

Something — something deeply rooted and insidious like the fungus at the heart of an ancient elm — makes me shy away from “bragging”. Somehow, to talk about a thing I’ve done seems too much like grandstanding, like a ploy for accolades, like fishing for compliments. No, it’s even worse than that — I have this thing where I can’t stop thinking and analyzing. And because I’m always analyzing (especially when it comes to my own efforts and the stuff I create), I know, deep down in my bones, that what I’m doing is a far cry short of the best stuff out there, that it probably won’t appeal to the average person, and that therefore any horn-tooting about it would be very much amiss. Something about pride and falls and all that.

But you know what? It’s exactly because THIS STUFF IS HARD that it’s worth bragging about. Getting it done, regardless of the quality of it, is worth tooting my own horn, I think. I mean, just to put it in perspective: how many people out there didn’t run a 5k with their dog (in the rain!) before the sun even cracked an eye to reach for the snooze alarm? Almost all of them. How many people didn’t pen the last words of a draft and start the long, thankless process of editing their novel? Almost all of them. How many people didn’t carve time out of their lunch hour to itemize the entire plot of their story on notecards strictly for the purpose of mapping it out and seeing it better on the re-write? Pretty much all of them.

Almost all of them might sound like an exaggeration, but it’s really not. I’m reminded of a passage from Douglas Adams explaining that the population of the universe is essentially zero. How does that work, you ask? Owing to the staggering amount of empty space, the amount of space that has people in it compared as a ratio to the amount of space that doesn’t gives a value so infinitesimal that for all practical purposes, it might as well be zero. By that rationale, sure, there are tons of writers and runners in the world, but they are outnumbered on a planetary scale by people who aren’t writers or runners — so, basically, virtually nobody writes or runs. (This is a fun way to claim significance for just about anything.)

And why didn’t almost every person out there do any of these things? BECAUSE THIS STUFF IS HARD. But I did it anyway. Regardless of the time it took to finish, or the quality of the product as I look back on it, or how I felt or didn’t feel as I was doing it, I did these things.

To hell with layering it, like a damned wedding cake, with asterisks. To hell with putting disclaimers on it. That’s a hot pile of horse puckey. I did these things, and they were worth doing. Doesn’t matter if it could’ve been better; doing it was better than not doing it. Doesn’t matter if it took a long time; it’s done now. And if I don’t show some pride in the things I’m doing, who the hell else is gonna do it for me?

To hear me tell it, basically everything I’ve done is only a half-measure. Sure, I wrote a few plays after college, but they were just those lame murder-mysteries you can see anywhere. And yeah, I wrote a full-length play that was a smash hit at my old high school, but it’s really too long and there’s all kinds of things wrong with it. Yup, I’ve finished a novel, but I’m not published yet. Or yeah, I run, but only about fifteen miles a week these days. Sure, I’ve run long-distance races — but only a half-marathon. (By the way, somebody seriously needs to get on re-branding the half-marathon — the title itself is a caveat. And get out of here with that Pikermi crap, you can’t be serious in a run if people think a digitized cartoon rat goes dancing across the finish line.)

See how lousy that sounds? But strip the caveats out, and that turns into:

I run four days a week. And I’ve run over 13 miles at a stretch before.

I’ve written plays. (Plural.) Which were performed for audiences which paid money to watch them.

I’ve written a novel. (And am working on more.)

See how much better that sounds? That sounds like a guy who’s got his life together. That sounds like a guy you’d buy a cup of coffee for, if you could, and maybe hear a little bit of what he has to say.

So here’s a challenge for me and for you: cut out the caveats and the disclaimers. Stop knocking yourself down before you’ve even properly stood up. Accomplish whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish and be proud of the accomplishment.

Stuff your caveats in a sack. Then set the sack on fire and shoot it out of a cannon.

Pareidolia, Foie Gras, and Guardians of the Galaxy 2: A (sort of) Terrible Review

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Have you ever been in the midst of a dream, and then realized that you were dreaming? You’re there, and you’re standing naked in front of the class, or you’re taking the stage and you’ve forgotten your lines, or you’re soaring in the sky with psychedelic dolphins or whatever, and it clicks: this isn’t real. It can’t be real. The world doesn’t work this way.

Suddenly, the dream is a lot less convincing. Probably you wake up. Or maybe you turn into Neo and you’re able to change the dream to suit your whims or something. Either way, it’s like one of those pareidolia images of faces in everyday objects: once you see it, there’s no unseeing it. You can’t ignore it and go back to believing that the dream was real.

pew-pew-pew

What’s all this about, then? Well, the wife and I saw Guardians of the Galaxy 2 last night. And about halfway through the film, like Neo in The Matrix, I woke up. Not that I had fallen asleep — no, as is Marvel’s wont, the action is cranked to eleven in this offering. Rather, I looked around. Noticed the seams on the walls, the jagged edges at the periphery, the hidden patterns in the carpet. And the spell was broken. I wasn’t just watching a movie anymore, I was in a world that I knew had been crafted deliberately, created to work surreptitiously on my subconscious.

(Spoiler note: This isn’t exactly a review, and there’s nothing explicitly spoiler-ific here. But if you’re planning on seeing it, and want to be able to immerse yourself fully, you might want to don your peril-sensitive sunglasses now.)

Now, sure, movies are designed to do this to you anyway. Hell, so are stories. Creators craft these things to manipulate your brain from top to bottom: telegraphing some story elements to invite you to make predictions. Playing to well-known tropes to help you find your footing in a strange world.

And GotG2 does that. But this isn’t that. I wasn’t discerning the hand of the creator in the brush strokes. Rather, I was discerning the hands of the studio execs molding the story externally as it was crafted. A whole new matrix within the matrix.

Here’s what I mean: Marvel’s using a pretty simple formula these days. Stories get bigger and bigger. Crazier, wilder villains (see: Doctor Strange doing battle with a god). Savvier, snarkier self-satirizing heroes (see: the entirety of Deadpool). And a sequel is always measured against the yardstick of the original.

And how do you make a sequel better than the original? Easy, you take the same characers, craft an entirely new storyline that plays to their developing relationships and strengths that tests them in all new ways, encouraging more growth, more development, more feels from the audience. Right? HA HA HA no. The way you make a sequel that plays as well as an original is you take everything the original does well and you do it more.

Don’t sweat the storyline so much: you’ve already got viewers baked-in. Just ratchet up the things they loved about the first movie. Give the funny characters more funny. Make the romantic tension a little more taut. Make the explosions even more explodey.

What made GotG1 so much fun — what audiences loved about it — were a few things. The old-school music soundtrack laid over a futuristic world. The irreverence. The niche-ifying of every character (there’s the snarky central guy, the badass no-nonsense chick, the brick-joke, doesn’t understand sarcasm or interactions in general dude, the jerk-store a-hole raccoon, the mute monster with a heart of gold. See also: Five-Man Band.)

And about halfway through the film, I realized that this film wasn’t actually doing what a sequel should do. There was very little new development. Not much added to the larger universe of which this story is a part. Instead, this movie was focus-grouped to make me want to watch it by giving me more of what I liked about the first one.

Let me not drive this into the ground: a few examples will prove the point.

Musclebound Drax, whose brick humor was the cornerstone of his character development (what, again, does he actually contribute to the team?) is tossing out even more deadpan sarcasm-proof jokes here, at what felt like a ratio of twelve-to-one over the original.

Angry little ball of sentient fur Rocket, in GotG1, made his place by throwing out sarcasm and lashing out when people called him a raccoon and just general dickery. His character development here: he’s a total a-hole to everybody, with at least two characters specifically pointing the fact out to him along the way.

And of course, the soundtrack is just as jarring in its strange setting, but there feels like even more of it, and it even becomes a focal point of the story itself: the central villain spins one of the songs into a metaphor for his own development. It’s well done, mind you. What at first seems like this big, romantic yen about wanderlust morphs into a twisted, sociopathic rejection of humanity (and all lifeforms in the galaxy, actually — readers of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will hear echoes of the denizens of Krikkit in the villain’s desire to wipe out everything in the universe that isn’t him).

There’s nothing wrong with any of the above. But once you hear the voice in your head — the voice that says “OH YOU ENJOYED THIS THING ABOUT THE ORIGINAL MOVIE? HERE HAVE MORE OF THAT THING” — you see it everywhere in this movie. Douglas Adams wrote brilliantly about humor that what makes it so lovely is its rarity. In the midst of a hot summer, you run out into a surprise thundershower for the joy of splashing around in the puddles, for the sprinkle of the rain on your face, because these things are rare and not happening every day. But when humor is everywhere — when it’s been raining for weeks and weeks, each day like the last, with no hint of the sun — the rain is a little less magical. GotG2 is like that: it’s a week-long deluge when what I really want is the surprise afternoon shower.

Put another way: they make foie gras by force-feeding geese until their stomachs explode. Having watched GotG2, it feels that I’ve been force-fed in the single aim of extracting more dollars from my wallet. And my stomach is near to bursting.

I say all that to say this: GotG2 is good fun. It’s perfect summer fare — lighthearted, action-packed. If you liked the first one, well, you’ll probably like the second one; not least of which for the reasons I’m talking about here. But if you miss the movie? Well, you’re not missing much.

Watch This

Pavowski4 Comments

I’m one of those guys who still wears a watch.

I know, right? Older than old school. Positively ancient. Not only do I wear a watch to begin with, but I don’t even wear one as a fashion statement: I wear the tacky digital kinds (one of those backward primates who still thinks digital watches are neat).

Why bother? When we have what are essentially supercomputers tucked in our pockets, what’s the point of having an outdated piece of tech strapped to the wrist?

Well, regular readers know already that I’m a little bit preoccupied with time as a concept. I wrote an entire novel (still in edits — okay not in edits yet, but slated for it soon) about time-traveling teenagers. There’s no telling when that phone in your pocket will run out of juice or kick the bucket all on its own (as the technology increases, so does the crash potential). Not to mention the fact that — and perhaps I’m showing my teacher stripes here a bit — I find it enormously tacky whipping your phone out as regularly as breathing to check anything: social media, e-mail, the time, the weather. I’m guilty of enough of that without resorting to the phone to check the time several times an hour.

Further, something about my bare wrist bothers me. Hard to nail down why, but my unadorned body kinda skeeves me out. I wear all kinds of stuff, preferably the kind I don’t have to take off, just so that my naked skin isn’t just flapping in the breeze. Rings on both hands (I’m down to just one on each hand these days). A three-year-old glow-in-the-dark bracelet from a 5k. A really rather sharp man-chain necklace, a gift from my wife in our first year together. I even, back in times we won’t talk about, dabbled in earrings, and in my really dark days, an anklet. (I know. I KNOW. It was the nineties. God.)

And then there’s my watch, which is the only functional accessory in the lot.

I dunno, I think there’s something elegant and classy about being able to track the movement of time — time, dictated by the very movement of the planet around the sun, or, in a less direct sense, by the actual vibrations of Cesium electrons (and yes, okay, they’re not “Cesium electrons” but rather electrons in orbit around a Cesium atom GOD this isn’t a science class) — just with a flick of the wrist, an adjustment of the sleeve. Plus, and I know I’ve mentioned this before, I’m a teacher, and teaching types live and die by the number of minutes left in the period, so I like to have that information handy. (I am so sorry. No I’m not. Every pun is deliberate.) Seriously. Digital watches are neat.

And my watch broke the other day.

Well, the band broke. And with the caliber of watches I traffic in, that basically means the watch is dead to me, because it costs only slightly more to buy a replacement watch than it would cost to buy a replacement band, not to mention finding the right band and fiddling with microscopic screwdrivers and tiny pins and pieces that can barely be seen with the naked eye. No thanks. Plus, that battery will be going soon, for that matter, and … yeah. It’s quicker and easier to shell out $20 for a new watch than to sink time and repair into the old one. (#firstworldproblems, I know.)

How did I break the band? Fair question. Here’s my humble-brag: push-ups. Apparently my wrist bulges like an inflated python, and after — man, how long did that watch last? let me ratchet this humble-brag up a step — let’s say a few thousand reps, that thing snapped like a fat man’s belt at a Vegas buffet.

So I have to muddle through a few days, watchless.

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Don’t look at the tan-line too long. You could go snow blind.

And it’s painful. Because I have no idea what time it is, outside of knowing that it’s generally night or day based on the light coming in through the window. Sure, I could check the systems clock at the bottom right of my computer screen — or the digital display on the cable box — or the Roman-numeral-analog job hanging on the wall — or the other digital display on the stove — or the one in the dash of my car — or my alarm clock that shows the time TWICE (once on its face and once projected in foot-tall letters on the bedroom wall — OR OKAY FINE MY PHONE — but no.

NO.

I needs my watch.

I feel naked without it.

So naked I’m thinking of putting an anklet on my wrist.

Please, think of the anklets.

No, wait. Don’t. Don’t think of the anklets. EVER.

Why I Am an Atheist

Pavowski13 Comments

I “came out” yesterday, but I didn’t tell the whole story.

I’m not here today to tell the whole story, either, but I do want to tell part of it.

I started this post once and then threw the whole thing out. I had hacked together a list of the big reasons why I believe what I believe and gave brief explanations and justifications. (Lack of evidence. Bible and other holy texts contradict themselves. Problem of evil. So forth.) But then I realized, there are other, better, cleverer sources out there for all the standard atheist talking points. Seriously, every atheist has a post like this. And not just because I didn’t want to overtly follow the crowd, but I realized that as much as all those well-stocked, off-the-shelf answers do apply to my beliefs, the big guns — the personal stuff — the story are maybe a little more interesting.

And I fancy myself a storyteller, after all. So.

I stopped going to church when I was a teenager, maybe partly because I started to catch the whiff of BS from the whole thing, but mostly because I was lazy and didn’t enjoy it. Thus was my belief put on an ice floe and set adrift to wither and die as I went off to college and began to really learn things about the world. Probably the near-daily occurrence of encountering a fire-and-brimstone street preacher pounding the bricks at the Tate Student Center at UGA fueled my growing doubts about the beneficent nature of religion in general; these guys (and they were always guys) would scream death and damnation on gay students, on sexually active students, on basically anybody who walked by. Not a good look for Christianity, even if, to be fair, those angry handful are a pitiful minority.

I guess that was when I became an agnostic; neither believing in nor disbelieving in god. Organized religion was right out, but inwardly I determined that maybe it was possible that a well-intentioned god had set the universe spinning and was unable to control it or interact with it much beyond that point, sort of like a kid who folds up a paper airplane and tosses it off the top floor of a skyscraper. I stayed there for a while, just sort of grinning and bearing the devout types while shaking my head and pitying the true atheists.

I think even then I felt it was better to believe in something than in nothing.

But then I had a kid. (To be fair, my wife had the kid … I mostly wandered around in the background and tried not to pass out.)

And our kid had a birth defect.

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My son, 1 day old.

He had gastroschisis, which in short, meant that his intestines spilled out of his abdomen in utero and had to be, for lack of a better term, stuffed back in after birth. To be fair, on a sliding scale of birth defects, to quote our specialist, “this is the birth defect you want.” In the vast majority of cases, children with gastroschisis make full recoveries.

And he’s lucky. We live in the 21st century, where medicine is in many cases indiscernible from magic, and our son is now perfectly healthy and will likely never suffer any ill effects from this condition. Had he been born even forty years ago, even surviving would have been a long shot.

His defect earned him a stay in the NICU for the first twenty-six days of his life. If I needed proof beyond doubt that there was no benevolent god looking out for us, I found it in the neonatal intensive care unit. Here were children — infants, no less — innocent of anything save being born, suffering from all manner of maladies. Some were “minor” like my son’s (though it’s hard to view having your intestines in a bag and being unable to eat except through a tube inserted in your skull as a minor thing). Others were far worse. Birth defects run the gamut from immediately, horrifically terminal to survivable with lifelong care or disability to, as in our son’s case, merely inconvenient. Some of the babies who shared air and nurses and doctors with my son would not survive even the twenty-six days my son was in residence.

And that’s nothing short of tragic.

(Let me sidebar to say that the staff we interacted with were phenomenal. Their jobs put them in the least desirable of situations daily — people are not by and large happy to be spending their days like ghosts hanging around the dim corners of the NICU — but they were soldiers, and they made soldiers out of us.)

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Somehow, in those early days, he learned to smile.

I didn’t think about it at the time; I was too focused on my wife’s and my grief and my son’s health during the whole affair. But looking back on it now, that time in the hospital was the nail in god’s coffin for me. I couldn’t — and still can’t — square the idea of a god who cares in any way about the humans he’s created after seeing all those infants fighting for life, breathing and eating through tubes, hooked up to machines — man-made machines, mind you — that gave them their only prayer at life, a prayer they would never have had if all were left in god’s hands.

Yeah, there’s the problem of natural disasters and evil and all of that, and I have trouble squaring those, too. But for me, the question of atheism is a lot more local. A lot more personal. A lot more visceral. And there’s maybe more to be said at another time. But the fact is, as many reasons as I have for what I believe, I only really need one reason.

If we had left my son’s life in god’s hands, my son would be dead.

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Now, though, he’s a pretty awesome big brother.

For all that, though, I don’t view the world in a cynical way. Far from it. The world is an incredible place. We are lucky to have even the blink of an eye in which to appreciate it. I am lucky that my son was born in a time when the advances of medical technology could give him a chance at life. And no, I don’t claim to know where we came from. And only a fool would claim to know where we are going.

But we are lucky, and the world is incredible, independent of any god.

As Douglas Adams put it:

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it, too?