Defeated by detail

The next book on my 'stuff people recommended' list is The Horse, The Wheel, and Language.  It is a book about archaeology / anthropology that looks at ancient peoples, particularly a group that lived in the steppes of Asia called Indo-Europeans.  

It is the first book that I failed to finish.

I didn't fail because the book was bad, or wrong, but rather because it is so chock fill of minute details that I just don't care about.  It sounds like it would be right up my alley - I am interested in historic trends and the idea of following the invention of the wheel or horseback riding and seeing how they influenced language migration sounds neat.

Unfortunately the book is just so dry and so full of proof for minor points that I couldn't get through it all.  I read halfway, and then stopped reading at all for weeks because I had no desire at all to finish.  Finally I concluded that I need to give up on my goal of reading all the books all the way through and simply write up what I have and ship it back to the library.

It turns out that I like broad strokes of learning when I am looking at something quite unfamiliar.  I suspect I am like most people in this regard.  If I am well versed in a topic I enjoy intricate detail, but for something I know little about I can't get that interested in a scholarly treatise that gets bogged down in minute tidbits.  I just don't care about the origin of a particular consonant in the Proto Indo European language.  

The book seems well researched.  I don't fault its academic credentials, though honestly I don't know that I would be able to tell if it was absolutely full of it.  That might be the issue, really.  If every single word in the book was a lie I don't think I would be able to definitely argue against it, and that means I am reading way above my pay grade.

If you enjoy detailed linguistic explanations and exhaustive examination of archeological evidence, this book may be for you.  

For me though, it was just a bit too much.  I don't have the knowledge required to get a lot out of it... and I suspect that 99.9% of humanity is in the same situation.

My next couple of books are much more approachable, written for mass audiences, and I am sure I will be able to finish them.  For now though I will consider myself defeated by detail.

Feathered scaly critters

The next book in my 'stuff people recommended' series is The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs.  Unlike many other books in this series it did not cause me to rethink my opinions on humanity or consider becoming a full on communist.  The book was a fun, straightforward description of what we know about dinosaurs at this point, starting when the dinosaurs first emerged and moving through time until their extinction.  

The author mixed in some anecdotes about fossil hunting and archaeologists throughout, providing some amusing moments.  Certainly when I think about scientists studying dinosaurs now I imagine careful dig sites with lots of regulations and structure, but back in the day competing scientists hired mercenaries and troublemakers to fight and rob each other trying to collect bones - quite the contrast.

Much of what I learned about dinosaurs as a kid was wrong.  It is neat to take a body of knowledge that I hadn't questioned and find out how many things have changed.  Movies like Jurassic Park are now quite dated because they don't show many of the dinosaurs having feathers - though these aren't feathers like modern birds have, but rather something halfway between a feather and a thick hair.  Also our understanding of how fast dinosaurs can move, what they eat, and how they behave has changed over time.

Mixed in with dinosaur facts are descriptions of environmental changes during the dinosaur period, covering things like climate change, plate tectonics, and other factors.

This is a good book for any age.  I imagine kids would get a kick out of the random stories, but they would also get a solid education about dinosaurs in particular and general scientific topics of many kinds.  I think most adults would enjoy learning about dinosaurs anew to update their knowledge, and the book is extremely accessible to anyone without any background required.

If you want a quick to read, well written book that gives a broad overview of many scientific topics with a focus on dinosaurs, this is a great book to pick up.  

Periodic Tales

In my continuing series about all the books people recommended to me I finished reading Periodic Tales.  This book is far less controversial than the last one I wrote about, and is a meandering tale winding its way through history.  It has the periodic table of the elements as its theme, so the author devotes each chapter to an element or group of elements and talks about their discovery, uses, and notable events.

The book is a good read for anyone whether or not you have any scientific training.  All the science in the book is pitched at a broad audience and is easily accessible.  The great majority of it is just a series of short history lessons which are generally interesting and amusing.  The author does a great job of blending humour and learning to make the stories fun as well as educational.  It isn't a long read so you can't expect to get a complete education on any one topic but if you want a series of history highlights with a focus on discovery then you will be happy with the book.

You will find pieces about gold rushes, aluminum (or aluminium, depending on where you live) utensils that were the height of fancy living for Napoleon III, and chlorine's use as a weapon in WWI.  The variety is huge.

One thing that stood out to me though was the way the author talked about gold, silver, and iron.  He spoke about them as though gold and iron were obviously male associated and silver obviously female.  Those associations exist in several cultures, but the idea that this is inevitable or inherent to the elements is quite absurd.  From a western historical perspective his point is supported, but he talks about it as if this is an inherent property of the elements themselves instead of a historical accident and that is wrong.

The reason this stood out to me is that gender essentialism is a real issue in society and it irritates me to see it.  It wasn't a huge part of the book, but I do like to point out these things when I see them.  It was a negative mark on an otherwise enjoyable read.

I recommend this book.  A few 'Silver is obviously a female element' comments aside, it was quick, informative, and fun.

Facts don't care about your feelings

I just finished reading the book Factfulness.  It is a book that constantly repeats things I have been yelling about for years to anyone who will listen, so it should be no surprise that I loved it.  The book leads off with 12 questions about the world, mostly relating to human wellbeing and trends.  All questions have 3 answers, A, B, C and the average person gets 2 correct.

You read that right.  Guessing at random would give you 4 correct, but the average person is significantly worse than random guessing.  The author of the book talks about how in all his years administering these questions to huge numbers of people one person ever got 11 correct, and nobody got 12.

I got 11 correct, and I definitely should have got 12, but I rushed through.  That isn't because I am smarter than everyone else, but because the author of the book was trying to make a point, showing how badly humans do on specific sorts of knowledge, and that is a specific sort of knowledge I focus on.

The idea behind the book is that we are terrible at interpreting certain sorts of data and the information we are exposed to predisposes us to come to incorrect conclusions.  The book clarifies a lot of important facts that we usually get wrong, and provides techniques for preventing yourself from reaching those incorrect conclusions in future.  It is a combination of science, sociology, and psychology.  Through reading it we learn about what scientific research and facts tell us about the human world, why we get it wrong, and how we can make our brains be better at this sort of thing.

The key takeaway is that a lot of things are getting better.  For example, I have gotten into a few heated discussions about pollution where people tried to convince me that pollution is getting worse everywhere.  I brought up air quality in Toronto, and these people stated that it is getting worse every year.  I pointed out that we can falsify this both anecdotally and scientifically - just think about the smog pouring out of car tailpipes in decades past, and look at car tailpipes today.  Or, you know, you can just look up the numbers and see that air quality in Toronto has been constantly improving ever since we were able to measure it.

Lots of things are like this.  People see disasters on the news or charities begging for help with images of catastrophe and fail to realize that while individual problems exist, the global trend for nearly all measures of human well being is constantly improving.  We miss the forest for the trees.

Of course that doesn't mean we should rest on our laurels!  Both the author and I are convinced that we should do more for environmental causes and assisting those less fortunate in the world, but we should do that while being aware of the successes we have had.  "We have a lot more to do" can go along with "Many things are improving rapidly" without contradiction.

Everyone should read this book.  If all you get from it is a new understanding of global trends it will be worth it, but you can get so much more.  It can give you tools to be a better activist, a better environmentalist, and a better thinker.

Time travel is the worst

 I liked the Umbrella Academy Season 1.  It had characters I enjoyed watching, a great aesthetic, and a bunch of neat world building that I wanted to see more of.  It wasn't perfect, but I had a great time with it.

Unfortunately UA ended up being a lot like The Matrix.  It had all these cool ideas that didn't quite fit together, but it didn't have enough time for you to sort out exactly how they didn't fit.  There was still tons of room to imagine that the writers had all of it figured out, and that later on you would see the story come together beautifully.  Then the next chapter came out, and everyone realized that they had been just making shit up the whole time and when they actually tried to put it all together it looked like a junkheap instead of a carefully crafted narrative.

A substantial part of the problem was that UA was determined to have a bunch of time travel.  You *can* do time travel well (see Terminator 2), but the way to do it well is to simply have it happen off screen.  Time travel happened, sure, but now the characters just have to cope with the situation they are in.  Shows where the characters can time travel and change the past all end up being a disaster.  UA had the time travel pretty much off screen for the first season, which was fine, but in the second season they elected to have lots of time travel in the plot, and that blew everything to bits.

You can't just have a character who can go back in time and fix anything that goes wrong.  It makes all the decisions everyone makes totally silly.  Heck, the revelation that he can do this retroactively trashes the first season of the show, since now we know that he could have solved all the problems any time he wanted, and he just didn't because the writers told him not to.

Having everything go terribly and then fixing it by 'turns out the character can go back in time and change anything he wants!' feels like they were trying to go for a big emotional scene but lacked any sense of creativity or long term thinking and came up with the most silly, hackneyed, destructive idea they could and ran with it.  It isn't easy to write characters into dire situations and then have them get out of those situations in a believable but surprising way, but if you can't write that, then find someone who can.  Just throwing up your hands in despair, employing a Deus Ex Machina, and giving up on any world consistency or dramatic tension going forward is pathetic.

It is easy to see where this heads.  In future the character simply forgets to use his 'fix anything with time travel' ability, and they write stories as if this major plot point never happened.  I know that in superhero stories characters forgetting to use their powers is common.  That doesn't make it good.  It isn't just with nonsense time travel either - characters in UA consistently have abilities they forget about, or don't bother using, for no reason.  They have a hugely important conversation in the show where all the main characters desperately need a villain to tell them something.  One of those characters can mind control people, and does so regularly.  All she has to do is say "I heard a rumour that you answered all of our questions" and the villain would spill any secret they desired.  Since they were desperately trying to prevent Armageddon at that point, it would be entirely justified!  But she forgets, because that way the plot can happen.

It sucks, because I like the people in the show.  I like the weird retro/futuristic blend of the tech.  I like that they blend in stories about people of colour and queer people and make those struggles part of the narrative.  

But the plot is a travesty, and the worldbuilding is an inconsistent mess.  Whenever the characters need to be in a place for the plot, they go all robot 'beep boop I am going over here now' even if it makes no sense whatsoever.  What a waste of a bunch of good character building.

So many superhero shows fall into the trap of gifting characters amazing powers to solve problems and then completely forget that this changes the world and they will actually have to account for those marvellous new powers at other times.  Unfortunately Umbrella Academy does this, and to an extent that I just can't care about it anymore.

Making it up as we go along

I like my science fiction hard.  I want stories where a strange thing is proposed, and then the writer takes a long look at what that would do to society.  I don't like stories that are set in the future but in which everything is resolved with techno babble and space wizardry.

When I watched the first season of Altered Carbon I quite liked it.  It had some issues, notably the excessive sexual violence against women, the star actor having only a single expression, and the departures from the books in ways that weren't useful, but I still had a positive watching experience.  It did the thing I want science fiction to do where it built a consistent, believable universe and explored the consequences of a particular scientific discovery - the ability to move human consciousness from body to body and preserve it after the death of the meatsack.

I read all three books in the series and enjoyed them too.  The followup books weren't as good as the first, but there was still something there that I appreciated.  When I heard of season 2 I eagerly awaited the adaptation of book 2.  The reviews were positive and particularly highlighted how it was better than season 1, so I had high expectations.

Those expectations were dashed.  There were good things - I liked the queer and POC representation in the show better.  The lead actor was a considerable improvement.

But the story.... ack.  Instead of writing an installment that built on the first season, they decided to just randomly change physics and technology whenever they had a cool scene to write.  The AIs in particular were a neverending sack of nonsense technobabble in the service of unnecessary details.  Want to have a certain spot look a certain way?  Mumble about nano swarms and then have it just happen.  Want to threaten an AI?  Mumble about code and have it just happen.

It makes me sad when writers clearly give up.  Instead of building a compelling story in the world they have created, they just decide to change the world any time the facts get in the way of whatever thing they want to do.  I can't be excited about threats to characters when the threats are nonsensical, nor thrilled by solutions when they are pulled straight out of somebody's ass.  It is especially egregious when they use a solution for one thing and then refuse to use it for another because they want to make up some new stupid random thing to solve that.

Character abilities also shift without warning.  Sometimes people are unbeatable fighting machines, and then in the next scene they get bested by some random chumps because they needed to get arrested because plot.  Equipment randomly acquires or loses abilities for convenience, so it is hard to have any idea what anyone can do.  At one point the characters are standing at the scene of a battle, completely surrounded by well equipped dead fighters.  However, the next scene needs them to be at a particular gun store, so they announce that they need guns and head off to the gun store, leaving reams of excellent armament just sitting on the ground.

I can't get into a story that silly.  Nothing feels serious or real, and the emotional moments end up being contrived instead of poignant.  It is sad, because the source material gave them a ton to work with, and instead they created an entirely new story, one that is held together by the flimsiest of plots.

Dodging meteors

I have spent a lot of time laughing at Archer.  Stirling Archer, that is, and his band of bitter, maladjusted misfits.  The show Archer did the super spy / mad scientist thing really well, so long as you can tolerate the characters being a bunch of bigoted assholes.

But the latest season is sad.  It still has Archer's classic banter, but it is set in space in the far future, and the writers seemed determined to use this as an excuse for shoddy, half baked writing.

The latest episode I have watched is a perfect example.  The entire story is based around the crew getting eaten by a giant space monster and their attempts to escape.  Ten kilometer tall spacebound tentacled horrors are absurd, but if you really need one in order to get your story working, I am fine with that.

But don't give me bullshit lines like "We were dodging a meteor storm when we cut through this galaxy and got caught by the space monster."  Galaxies are BIG.  Meteors are FAR APART.  You aren't suddenly dodging a meteor storm in deep space.  You might blast by a single rock while travelling 10,000 km/s, but this is never going to run you into a vacuum loving squid's mouth.

The space monster was necessary, so I am happy to forgive the ridiculousness of it.  However, the sorry set of excuses the show used for getting people *into* the monster was not.  "We came to investigate a distress signal, and when we tried to cut the monster apart in order to get the other ship out, the monster caught us." is at least a vaguely plausible story.  I don't mind making stupid crap up if it is necessary for the plot, but I hate it when writers make stupid crap up because they can't be bothered to spend the 30 seconds required to think up something that holds together.

It almost seems like the people writing this mess actually don't know what the word galaxy even means, the way they toss it around.  It strikes me as plausible that if the entire writing team was asked what a galaxy is they would have nothing more accurate than "It is, like, an area of space?"

I don't mind it when the rules get bent for reasons.  I get that!  What irks me is when the only reason is "I was feeling super lazy."

Writing this episode, or indeed any of the episodes so far, without butchering science and sensicality would have been easy and wouldn't have required any extra time or effort.  Archer went and got sloppy with the writing, as so many science fiction shows do, and it feels like the end of its appeal.

The science of dungeons

I am currently filling out a survey about a game I play - Dungeons and Dragons.  Many of the questions on the survey were reasonable to my mind, as they asked about things like how well I fit with the group, what sort of player I am, etc.  I think the creator of the survey will be able to get interesting data out of it.

But some of the questions are badly written at best.  For example, there is a question asking about how often I get certain feelings.  Do I feel like 'humans are basically good' once / week, 2-3 times per week, or every day?  What?  I don't suddenly get struck with a 'humans are good!' feeling and note that down.  I certainly can't give you a rate per week of such things.  But the survey doesn't have a 'this doesn't apply to me' answer, so I have to click a rate in order to move on.

It also had a really silly question about how long it takes me to feel like I belong in a gaming group.  Is it 1-2 sessions?  3-4?  5-6?

How in the world are you getting any kind of real data out of this?  I don't join a new group every month and then count how many sessions is it until I get a 'belonging' feeling.  When I joined my last group I got along with the people fine.  We have had lots of sessions, but I certainly never got a 'I belong' feeling.  When joining my previous group I knew most of the players for a decade or more so clearly I wasn't going to suddenly feel like I belong after 4 sessions - that sense of being comfortable with those people was already there.  Really, do we actually expect that people who click 7-8 sessions are in any way different from those who click 5-6 sessions?  This is a complete guess, with people clicking randomly.  The players and the game style matter in this way, the number of sessions does not.

What I actually want is an answer that says '1 or infinity, depending on if the group is people I like or not'. 

It feels like answering a question 'Do you like jobs?' without any context.  Sure, you will get answers, but the information given is so vague that the answers will be totally random and worthless for digging out useful data.  I like some jobs, but I hate others, just like nearly everybody.

The design of scientific experiments and surveys is critical.  When you build surveys foolishly, or design experiments badly, you end up falling prey to Garbage In, Garbage Out.  All the fancy statistics in the world won't fix your conclusions when your data is rubbish at the outset.

I think this is something we need to train people on more effectively.  It isn't easy though, because you often have to look at things from somebody else's point of view, and you don't even know what somebody that might be.  There might well be people who feel 'humans are good' intensely 3 times per week, and that question works perfectly for them.  However, there are going to be a lot of people who just click randomly because the question is meaningless to them, and if you don't have a 'this doesn't apply' answer your data will be corrupted.  You also need to account for cultural differences and language proficiency when you write your questions.

Writing good questions and setting proper controls to make your experiment give you the information you actually want is hard, but it is critical if we don't want our knowledge corrupted and diluted by all kinds of studies that don't actually show what they claim to show.  We already have enough of that, thanks.

A Trojan Horse

Dan Simmons is an author I have a history with.  He wrote the Hyperion novels, which are a crazy far future set of books that are chock full of wild and fascinating ideas.  I have read the four book series several times, despite each book being a doorstopper.

Wendy has had another duology by him, Ilium / Olympos, on our bookshelf for years, and I figured I should try this series out.

It is a mess.

Much like the Hyperion series it has all kinds of cool ideas.  It also has a bizarre fascination with old english poets and playwrights, for some reason.  Unfortunately Ilium lacks one of the things that I most liked about Hyperion - the tech.  In the Hyperion series the tech is far beyond anything we have, indeed often far beyond what we imagine is possible.  However, it all fits together.  In Ilium though Simmons just has any random tech he wants for the story and justifies it by using the words quantum or nano.  Quantum teleporting.  Quantum energy.  Quantum field.  I quantum the quantum quantums!  And if that isn't enough, just call it nano quantum, and you are good to go.  If you thought Ant Man and The Wasp had stupid amounts of quantum nonsense, prepare to see it dialled up to 11.

I don't mind wild tech, even tech that violates the laws of physics as we know them.  What I can't stand is mindless, foolish explanations that toss around buzzwords and pretend like that makes it all work.

I am cool with establishing new rules in a fictional world.  What I can't stand is the author obviously wanting a character to go to a place for a scene, so they have somebody yell about quantuming the quantum nano field to make it happen instead of actually, you know, writing well.

The Ilium duology really made me remember some of my Dungeons and Dragons experiences from my teenage years.  Inexperienced Game Masters would come up with a plot and wouldn't know how to get the characters into the story they had written, so they would have a massively powerful character show up and order the characters to do the thing.  No good explanation or reason would be given, it would just be 'All of you have to do this thing.  No, I won't tell you why or how.  Just follow me, or I will punch you out and carry you.'

This often resulted in the entire party being beaten up, tied to horses, and dragged along while the powerful character (who clearly didn't need any of *us* to win the day) lectured us on our flaws.

Ilium has a ton of this, and for the same reasons.  Simmons obviously had scenes in his mind he wanted to do and couldn't come up with good reasons for those scenes to occur, so he would just have some nearly omnipotent, omniscient character show up and order the regular people to do some damn fool thing.  The demigod would refuse to provide any reasons or context, and if the regular person resisted, they were unceremoniously smacked down.  Even after they finally gave in and did what the demigod wanted, it was usually unclear why doing that even mattered in the first place!

It might sound like I think Simmons is a hack and has nothing to say.  That isn't true - Ilium has no end of cool scenes and original ideas.  The problem is that the plot makes no sense, the characters are inconsistent and unpredictable, and he doesn't tell the reader what the hell is going on because he is so busy getting to the next cool thing.  It reminds me a bit of Too Like The Lightning, which I read awhile ago and did not like.  Other people lauded it for its ideas, which is fair, but failed to add that the plot and characterization were a hot mess.

Simmons really needed to sit down with his ideas, cross out about two thirds of them, and then write these books.  Either that, or maybe add another 4 books to the series so he could actually have the room to make it all make sense.  In any case it desperately needs an editor to tear it down and make better use of the gems that are there.  For example:  There are posthumans who have been given tech to make them into immortal 'gods' who live on Mars and are presiding over an alternate universe siege of Troy on an Earth from another dimension.  They have resurrected a human from the 21st century to record the event, and then he is tasked by one god to murder another.  Wow, what a wild premise!  You could write so much with that!  This is about 5% of the premise for the actual story.  It is just too much, and Simmons tries to juggle all the things he has created and the reader gets to watch the balls all fall down.

I am sure lots of people liked these books.  Unfortunately they hit my personal pet peeves of having weak villains, terrible tech, weak and nonsensical plot, and flat characters.  I find that many science fiction books that get all kinds of awards totally fail on these fronts, so clearly some people are good with that.

Me?  Not so much.

Bash those genitals, stat

At Polywood this weekend I had a discussion with a few people about whether or not it would be physically possible to have sex with all the people.  That is, would it be possible to have sex with every living person on the planet?  If so, just how fast would you have to have that sex in order for it to work?  Would those people be coming in at you so quickly that it is merely inconvenient, or are we talking about sonic booms being created by onrushing sex partners?

Time to math.  And by math, I mean make all kinds of guesses and approximations and not worry too much about rounding errors.

First off we have to define sex.  Sex is widely variable of course, using many body parts, but I am going to just assume for my first approximation that it involves bashing groins together, since that is a pretty common form of sex.  The world has roughly 7.6 billion people, and I am going to guess that 2/3 of them are able to consent to sex, which is 5 billion.  I don't want to spend too much time on this, so let's assume I need to get it done in a year.  No holidays though, I am not a slacker, but I do need 8 hours of sleep a night.  I don't need time to eat, as I can just do that while the groin smashery is going on.

So, with 365 days available I have to have 'sex' with 239 people per second.  I will assume each person has to move 1 meter in towards me, move back and forth 10 cm three times, and then get 1 meter away again in the allotted time.  This gives them an average velocity of 620 meters/sec, or a cool 2233 km/h.  This is closing in on Mach 2, which means that every person doing this is going to be generating massive sonic booms with every bash of groins, as well as their movement.  Also just getting 239 people per second next to me is a major problem logistically.  Even if you could somehow get an infinite line of people walking 239 abreast, when they get close they suddenly have to accelerate to the above speeds, and setting up a situation where you have an infinite line of 239 people walking abreast is a massive undertaking on its own!

Another major problem is that this is assuming average velocity.  People are, in this simplification, making instantaneous changes in velocity and we know you can't do that... acceleration takes time.  This means that it is certain that their maximum speeds are going to be drastically greater than that, likely capping out around Mach 4.

Now we get to the real problem - the G forces on the people involved.  If you are moving at 4466 km/h and then have to decelerate to 0 m/s within a space of 5 cm that is a LOT of Gs.

And by a LOT, I mean 1,500,000 Gs.  Now there is a lot of debate over exactly how many Gs a person can survive for a really short time.  Maybe it is 50.  Maybe it is 100.  But what we are sure of is that 1.5 Million Gs reduces a person to a fine red mist instantly.  There is no 'sex' because all that happens is a bunch of miniscule organic particles fly into me at enormous speeds and I am killed by some combination of nano missiles that used to be a person and shockwaves.

Okay, so given that this experiment would destroy every person within hundreds of meters of it instantly, let us try to back it off a bit.  Let's assume I have thirty years to complete my sexual journey, I start with the oldest people first so they don't die before I can 'sex' them, and I have sex with five people simultaneously using a variety of body parts.  This decreases the required speed by 80% for the additional sexing outlets, and another 95% because of the increased time allowed.  (This is a guesstimate based on the fact that more people come of age given that this takes a lot longer so I have to have more sex than before.)  That gives me a 99% reduction in speed for the incoming bodies, which hopefully reduces the lethality of the situation.

99% is a big reduction, right?  It solves all the problems!

Not so much.  One advantage is that people moving this way are no longer creating sonic booms as nobody is breaking the sound barrier.  This reduces our destructive potential greatly.  It also means that you only need an infinite line of people walking twelve abreast, which is *way* more manageable.  Still requires some logistics, but it should be possible with enough money and effort.

The trouble is still the G forces that those people experience.  150 G is drastically smaller than 1,500,000 for sure.  It even puts us close to the survivable level of G forces, given that the times involved are extremely short.  But going back and force with those levels of Gs is going to paste your brain to your skull and kill you, even if your skeletal structure can stand the strain.  Is it possible that a human survives such a thing?  I suppose, but I think the expectation would be that everyone involved would die.  I think the corpses would remain intact, largely speaking, but I would expect near total fatalities.

Given that, I think you would find it extremely difficult to convince people to take part in a serious effort to have one person have sex with all other humans.

There are other techniques you could employ to make this go better.  You could collect all the voyeurs in the world and just have them watch and call that sex.  You could assume you have longer to live, or decide that you are only doing this with people that want to (which pretty much solves the problem immediately, really.)  New assumptions mean new calculations.  However, given my basic assumptions we can safely say that you absolutely cannot have sex with all the people in the world in one lifetime, even with an outrageous apparatus to support it and nearly infinite money at your disposal.

Sorry to disappoint.

To Mars!

Wendy and I like explaining things to Pinkie Pie.  We both take great joy in doing our best to make incredibly complicated scientific topics just simple enough that she can grasp them.  The other day Wendy was trying to teach Pinkie Pie about the behaviour of fundamental particles and how quantum mechanics works.  The thing Wendy was talking about was the fact that you don't actually know where a particle is exactly, and it could at any time just decide to be somewhere else.  The example Wendy used to illustrate this is the idea that a person *could* theoretically teleport to Mars if all of their constituent particles did that at once.

It is unlikely.  Like, really unlikely.  Unlikely enough that nothing that unlikely will occur in the entire history of the universe... most likely.

But there is nothing theoretically stopping all the particles in your body from simultaneously teleporting to Mars.

The best part of this was that a few months ago when I was explaining similar concepts I also talked about particles teleporting and I used the exact same example.  I could have talked about teleporting to Grandma's house, or Texas, or Jupiter, or just to the bathroom, but I used the example of teleporting to the surface of Mars.

I wonder if perhaps Wendy and I learned this concept from the same source, and that source used teleporting to Mars as an example to illustrate this very strange part of physics.

In any case I don't know that Pinkie Pie really has any better understanding of physics.  But she does know that she could just teleport to Mars.  Maybe.  Probably not.  Really, really probably not.

But if she *does* teleport to Mars, now she can be sure that it wasn't magic, but in fact an extremely likely event that is totally admissible in physics.

Presumably while she suffocates or freezes to death, I suppose, since Mars isn't exactly a nice place to live.

(The true odds on bet in the situation of appearing to be on Mars is clearly that she is hallucinating and she isn't really on Mars.  That is considerably more likely than spontaneous teleportation, by about 100,000 orders of magnitude or so.)

We have air

The premise that humanity needs to go to another planet because Earth is too polluted is a common one in science fiction movies and it drives me bonkers.  Somehow writers don't seem to get that even if Earth gets nuked, climate change runs amok, and resources get used up, it is still about a billion times better than anywhere else.

You know what Earth, even a wrecked up Earth, has that Mars and Titan and Ganymede don't have?  AIR.  We have AIR here, air a human can safely breathe.  That alone makes Earth, even a sad, down on its luck Earth, better than anyplace else.

But you know what else Earth has?  Livable temperature ranges.  Even with climate change Earth has temperatures in the -50 to +50 range.  We can survive those.  Mars is -60C.  Titan is -179C.

Our water here is polluted.  Our resources are being used.  But you know what Mars and Titan and everywhere else doesn't have?  Pure water!  Fossil fuels!  Strong sunlight for growing things and generating power!  They don't have that stuff.

I mean, unless you go to Venus or Mercury.  They have lots of solar power available.  Also instant death, either by burning or disintegration, depending on which surface you land on.

It irks me even more when this sort of thing is used as a justification for colonization of other planets.  Other planets are useful for research, certainly, but we haven't colonized Antarctica, and it is about a billion times more hospitable than anywhere off planet, so until we bother with that, then we have no business whatever thinking that colonizing other planets is a useful endeavour.

Maybe we will try to colonize other planets because GET EM, THAT'S WHY but let us not pretend it is useful for anything.

I just watched the movie The Titan and it set me off.  The whole premise was standard nonsense - the Earth is in rough shape, so we will genetically engineer people to live on the surface of Titan, not requiring oxygen, and capable of hanging out in -179C temperatures.  If we can do that why the hell aren't we genetically engineering people to live on the parts of Earth that are wrecked?  It has be about a billion times easier and cheaper.  The Titan was also a complete piece of garbage from about fifteen other angles too, but the idiotic premise was the cherry on top of a poop cake.

I know, I know, I shouldn't get all worked up about sci fi movies having idiotic premises.  But the thing is, they don't have to be stupid.  You could have a premise like Seven Eves, which requires humanity to find a new home in a way that absolutely makes sense.  I don't mind people making up worlds with new cosmic phenomena or lightsabers or whatever but I do mind when the worlds they make up don't hold together at all and the characters' decisions make no sense.

Just a few lives

The Naked Man told me I needed to read the book The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.  He was right.  This is one of those books that had me thinking for days afterwards, going back over my life and looking at events in my past in a new light.

I will talk about the book, but I won't spoil anything beyond the first couple of pages.  The idea behind it is that some people, just a tiny fraction of the population, is reborn when they die.  However, they are reborn in a strange way - they are born again into the same situation they originally were but gradually regain all of their memories of past lives.  So if you were born in 1920, you would live a normal life, dying in 1990 say, and then be reborn again in 1920 on a new version of Earth.  Each of these people proceeds through Earths the same way - if I meet you on Earth v1, and we both die, we both get reborn on Earth v2.  If I die really young on Earth v2 though, I might next meet you on Earth v3 after you die another time too.

The book primarily looks at what happens when people like this try to cope with other people in the same situation.  They form alliances, get into conflicts with one another, and try to change the world in all kinds of ways.  Having many lives to try to accomplish goals can change your capabilities hugely though - firstly, you have an amazing breath of skills to draw upon.  On top of that though you can just try things over and over again until you succeed, though this might entail living seventy years between attempts!

I have spent much time recently considering how I would handle events in my life if I had all the knowledge and abilities I have now.  How would confrontations with bullies go in grade six if I had the confidence and public speaking abilities I do now?  (Answer:  I would win.)  What would I do in university, given that I already know the things I know?  Would it be better to just take the same courses again and do well without trying, or would it be better to take totally different subjects?  Would I try to be friends with the same people?

How do you decide what to do with your life when you have an infinite number of lives to work with?  Just figuring out goals takes on all kinds of new angles.  If I always die by 2050 I might not care what happens after that since I just live through 1978 to 2050 over and over again forever.  I could just live a life of luxury, coasting off of bets on sports results and lotteries, but after hundreds of years of decadence would I still just want to be rich and sit around playing board games for yet another life?

I suspect I would end up grabbing money and power via gambling and then spend my years whiling away the time as an eternal hedonist.  I don't know that changing the world would hold much appeal when the world will simply reset itself every time I perish.

But you can't be too sure.  After all, people change after a couple hundred years and lifetimes of experience.

This book is fun to read, engaging, and makes you think.  It also holds together remarkably well, which is rare for science fiction that involves time travel.  I recommend it to everyone without hesitation as it combines great ideas with grounded, tight writing.  It is rare to get a book so thought provoking and so easy to read at the same time.  I certainly plan to tackle whatever else Clair North writes to see if I enjoy it as much.

Curious questions

For the past four months I have been involved in a scientific study of polyamorous people.  Every month they send me a survey to fill out that usually takes about an hour.  In general I like the idea of improving scientific understanding of people like me but in practice I wonder if the information and conclusions are going to be much use at all.

They ask questions like "how appealing are the alternatives to your relationship with Wendy?" and I don't know what to say.  Do they want to know that computer games are really fun and if Wendy isn't around I will play Hearthstone and be happy?  Do they want to know if I think I could find somebody else to be in a relationship with if she wasn't around?  Are they wondering if I think she is irreplaceable?  I can't tell, so I guess, and then I think that the combined guesses of lots of people are going to be mashed together into well intentioned but ultimately inaccurate summaries, conveyed to audiences with the tagline "New study shows that polyamorous people think that their partners are easy to replace!"

There are also lots of funny / weird questions that relate to bodies and attraction.  They asked me to rate how important my partner's penis size is to me, whether or not the tightness of their orifices is a big deal, and how much I want my partner to be petite.  It seems like they took a grab bag of stereotypical bodily preferences and just asked a bunch of them to figure out what people care about.  My answers in this regard were at least easy to figure out even if I did think the questions were kind of bizarre.  One thing I had to puzzle out was how to answer the question about petite preferences.  I am a big dude, almost exclusively attracted to females, so the question of whether or not I want my partner to be smaller than me hasn't really been a thing.  I am sure if I was middling height I would have more useful thoughts on the matter but since I don't hang around women's basketball stars I just don't know.

I also wonder if they are going to make more of my changing answers over time than they should.  They ask things like "Rate 1-10 how much comfort you get from your relationship with The Flautist" and I can't really figure out how to answer.  I am sure the answer is on the high end, but I honestly couldn't tell you if I should click 7, 8, or 9.  I wonder if they will see a series of answers over the course of the year that vary between 6 and 10 and conclude that my feelings have changed, when in fact they should conclude that the question is extremely vague and my answers are highly random.

Most of the survey, even if it is not perfectly designed, makes sense.  They are asking about my partners and how we interact romantically and sexually.  At the end of the survey there is a page that focuses almost exclusively on how I react to warmth and cold, and it feels bizarre and out of place.  Why does a study about poly people want me to fill in a bunch of information about whether or not I like cold days and how much I want to share warm beverages with people when I get chilly?

I am getting bored with answering the survey questions as the months go by.  I have eight more months to go and picking numbers largely randomly for vague questions for an hour is getting tedious.  I want to contribute but the frustrations with how little good information my answers are actually passing along make me not care much.  I like doing science and usually I enjoy trying to figure out what surveys are looking for in their questions, especially when they try to be tricky about their actual goals.  But this doesn't feel like a puzzle, it feels more like a mess.

Good science is hard to do, especially when you are sending out surveys to large numbers of highly varied people.  I want to help, but the process constantly illustrates how easy it is to screw it up and draw all the wrong conclusions.

WW1 forever

Charles Stross recently wrote a blog post that I really liked.  He talked a lot about why he doesn't read science fiction much anymore even though he is a science fiction author.  His reasoning was largely that people usually write science fiction without really filling out the world in ways that make sense.

The main example he used was the way that space battles are so consistently staged like WW1 fighter battles.  The planes move slowly enough and have short enough range that they can see each other easily and a viewer can watch them spin and twirl around each other as they battle.  In short, it is visually appealing, even though it makes no damn sense in nearly any science fiction setting.  The most obvious example is Star Wars where the way space battles were staged was clearly for the benefit of the viewer, not because any of it was logical.  To this day the same WW1 style of space fighting continues to be used even though pilots that shoot guns at each other well within visual range went out of style by WW2 and don't seem likely to ever return.

Stross doesn't like worlds where things don't make sense.  He wants to be able to figure out why the bread vendor on the street that the heroes walk along is there.  He wants the system of money and culture and tech to all fit together seamlessly.  You can have wonder and magic, tech that is beyond current scientific understanding, but if you give people teleportation technology then you should actually change society in response.

Star Trek is a great example of another silly trope in science fiction - the high tech showdown at OK Corral.  So many science fiction stories give people weapons and tactics that are simply lifted out of Westerns and plopped down in futuristic situations.  Nobody seems to have advanced past six shooters.

There are good counterexamples of course, and I have a few in mind.  The Forever War is a great example of futuristic battles that do not rely on six shooters or biplanes as models.  Humans fight a war that is completely alien to what we are used to and I LOVE it.  I don't know that it is any more 'realistic' because it does rely on tech magic wands but the author really tries to extrapolate and do something interesting and it feels right.  Ship combat uses plausible physics and it really does make the story feel more real.

The Hyperion series is the second great example because it shines in showing off what a futuristic soldier with futuristic equipment might be able to do.  Unlike Star Trek's pathetic six gun phasers a soldier in this universe would be wearing armour that lets them fly, provides effective, shifting camouflage, and has a variety of defenses against beam weapons, projectiles, and other attacks.  That soldier's gun is capable of taking down a small flying craft at tens of kilometers distant and can deliver flechettes to destroy unarmoured targets, beam weapons, or explosives.  The soldier operates all of their gear with a powerful, effective direct connection.  Such a soldier could take out a small army of modern day soldiers or even destroy an aircraft carrier by themselves if they were so inclined.  THAT is what a soldier hundreds of years in the future should be able to do!

I think this is a big part of why I am not as big on Star Trek or Star Wars as many other nerds.  I know a lot about them but they don't grab me the way really top drawer science fiction does because they are so obviously staged for cinematic combat, not for logical conclusions.  Similarly I found Ender's Game the movie to be a big letdown, in part because it went with stupid tropes like asteroid belts being all close together and silly WW1 style ship combat.  There were lots of problems with that movie, but those ones really got me down, especially when they were shoved in there even though the book didn't have them in it at all.

It matters to me a great deal that the monetary system of a futuristic political entity make sense.  I am okay with violations of physics, so long as those violations are spelled out and then taken to their logical conclusions.  What I want is a wondrous new world, imagined to take into account all the strange things the author has dreamed up.  What I don't want is a reskinned Western shootout or WW1 battle.

An unnecessarily happy ending

I saw the movie Chappie this weekend.  It was a bad movie that managed to entertain me despite its badness.  Throughout most of the movie I would have deemed it quite fun indeed, but unfortunately the ending really fell to bits.

Chappie is about a robot called Chappie in the near future who acquires self awareness and begins to rapidly learn, growing up from unable to speak or understand anything to functioning roughly like a teenager within about 5 days.  Chappie is involved with criminals and desperately violent makers of war robots so there is some action involved too.

A lot of the time when people try to write science fiction movies I end up being really disappointed by them.  I don't mind preposterous assumptions as long as the movie makes those assumptions clear and then writes a good story that makes sense afterwards.  Chappie was normal in that regard because the way that Chappie acquires consciousness is unrealistic and the rate at which Chappie learns is ridiculous.  However, the story of a robot growing up and trying to cope with the terrible conditions it finds itself in worked for me.

The problem is that the movie should have ended tragically.  Chappie and most of the humans surrounding it should have perished.  There was only one reasonably sympathetic character in the movie to my mind and it still made sense for him to die the way the story played out.  However, that doesn't happen.  The plot instead calls for Chappie to personally discover the secret of completely learning, digitizing, and transferring consciousness from body to body, including from human to robot.  This way instead of everyone dying in a savage battle most of the main characters get to have stupid and unsatisfying resurrection scenes at the end of the movie.

I can cope with resurrection scenes, but when you just randomly tack them on to the end of a movie it cheapens everything that went before it.  A character's heroic death suddenly isn't much of a thing when the writers randomly and without foreshadowing simply bring them back to life.

There is also the problem with the visuals.  A lot of the scenes in the movie involve using computers and mostly they manage to make it look reasonable.  Some hacker movies can't stop themselves from having the hackers manipulating giant 3D constructs when 'writing code' and Chappie at least avoided that... until the consciousness mapping part.

Apparently you can look at a digitized consciousness as an animated image, and it looks like a pixellated random colour map on a computer screen.

I know you want the characters and audience to see *something* when the main character suddenly acquires the ability to replicate human and robot consciousness, but having it randomly be a splatter of colours with a constant shimmy to it just makes me cringe.

The movie could have been so much better if either the foolish and unnecessary consciousness mapping was removed or if it just didn't work and all the characters died in the end.  A tragedy would have been infinitely better than the Deus Ex Machina (seriously!) mess that comprised the denouement of Chappie.

It is just sloppy.  Tell me what bullshit I have to believe for the story to work, then write a good story.  Don't get halfway through and then decide to make up a bunch of new bullshit to desperately scavenge an acceptably happy ending out of a story that shouldn't be that way.  The best science fiction explores what happens in a world with a twist, it doesn't keep adding twists until the story can be turned into pablum for the masses.

The 4 hour bullshit

I got The 4 Hour Body, a book about how to make yourself superhuman by using all kinds of tricks.  It is written by Tim Ferriss, who got famous primarily by writing The 4 Hour Workweek, a book about how to make lots of money only working 4 hours a week.

I am not going to link it or show the cover because I do not want you to buy or read this book.

There are things in The 4 Hour Body that are true, and other things that are good.  The book is aimed at straight men, and part of the 'be amazing at sex' section is a bunch of stuff about how to focus on women's pleasure during sex, and even a bunch of stuff on performing clitoral massage without the masseuse involved having any sort of stimulation at all.  Convincing straight men to think about this stuff is good!  I like it.

But much of the rest of the 'be amazing at sex' section is rubbish.  It follows the pattern of the rest of the book, which is that Ferriss talks about how you can do magical things just by taking some supplements or eating a particular food.  Become irresistible sexually!  Heal like Wolverine!  Pack on muscle in ways that are literally impossible without sewing meat onto your body!  A pack of lies and nonsense packaged in a pseudoscientific shell is most of the book, complete with links to help you purchase the products he recommends.

On the other hand Ferriss does provide a really useful critique of many of the issues with mainstream science publishing including issues with methodology that you should watch out for.  This stuff is actually totally reasonable and there is a lot of information on how exactly experiments and data can be twisted to show things that aren't really there.  This is useful information and surprisingly better written and informed than I expected.

But then he concludes that instead of actual science you should trust his personal experiments where he randomly does stuff to himself and then draws broad conclusions from that single data point.  The fact that 'I did a bunch of weird stuff all at once and saw changes anecdotally so my hypothesis must be true!' is far *worse* than the other crimes of science that he talks about seems to have escaped him.

You can find useful things in the book if you are hunting for them.  He talks about vitamin D, and I realized that I often don't get much sunlight.  I have since been spending time reading in the sun on my balcony regularly and that seems like it will be enjoyable, even if it has no effect on my health.

But then he goes and talks about how you can put on 34 pounds of lean muscle in 28 days with only 4 hours spent in the gym.  Just eat this handful of supplements and get HUGE INSTANTLY.

Hint:  If people could put on 34 pounds of muscle in a month by eating random supplements half of the population would already be doing it.  You can't, they don't, it is bullshit.

Honestly what it comes down to is Ferriss is selling a pipe dream.  People want instant answers, effortless gains, magic pills.  He tells them that they can become magicians, if only they follow the proper incantations and rituals he has written down.  He forgot to include eye of newt and feathers of a cockatrice but other than that he might as well have been selling spells from Dungeons and Dragons for all the good it will do anyone.

It bothers me.  I get why people want answers, and they want to believe that there is hope.  After traditional methods have failed, surely it is good to believe that there is some way forward, a hidden path to utopia that has been so far overlooked?

Maybe there is, but Ferriss isn't the one who is going to find it.

If you want to find the things that Ferriss does well there are other books that will give you the same information without the hype and the snake oil pitch.  Go out there and find them.

The difficulty of understanding teapots

A few weeks ago I was having a conversation with Pinkie Pie about religion and belief in God.  We talked about some of the reasons for believing in God and Pinkie Pie brought up the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the One True God.  She found the idea of the FSM hilarious, needless to say.

I took the opportunity to talk about why the FSM exists as an idea.  I described how it was a response  to various specious 'proofs' of the existence of one god or another.  After all, there isn't anything to convince us that an omnipotent creator isn't a FSM instead of whatever other version of god people have cooked up.

I also talked some about Russell's teapot.  That is, I presume that there is a teapot floating out in space, perhaps full of warm tea with two lumps of sugar.  It is just far enough away from Earth that our telescopes cannot detect it.  Since you cannot disprove the existence of the teapot, I presume that it does exist.  Just like the FSM this is an argument that shows how silly the 'God exists because you can't prove he doesn't' line of reasoning is.  The burden of proof on someone making a specific claim that lies outside any observed phenomenon lies with the person making the claim, not those who would ignore it.

I thought I was so clever.  Teaching my child about reasoning and argument and debate.  Look at me imparting wisdom to a young mind and inoculating her against propaganda!

On Friday Pinkie Pie was watching Futurama with a friend of hers and the FSM came up in the episode they were soaking in.  Pinkie Pie then proceeded to explain the FSM and Russell's teapot to her friend.  What Pinkie Pie got across was that in space there is a giant spaghetti god and also a teacup full of tea with sugar.  The teacup is there, but also not there, and it is tremendously funny.

The part about the burden of proof didn't quite make it into her explanation.  Nothing about skepticism, science, or debate was covered.  Just hilarity and various foodstuffs in the cold dark of space.

There are days where I am convinced I am a good parent and teaching my child things is useful.  Then there are days full of giggles and space food and the crushing sense of impending doom that comes from knowing that these children are one day going to be running the world and the people trying to teach them about it are failing miserably.

The machines are here

Every time the machines beat humans at something new there is a big kerfuffle.  It was a huge deal when Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess years ago, and last year Go was finally dominated by a computer.  Now it is poker's turn.

There are many kinds of poker and various kinds have been beaten at various times but no limit heads up Hold Em was taken down just now, and that to me feels like the proper benchmark for computer dominance.

I recall when chess finally fell many people said that Go was simply too big, that machines would never beat humans.  They laughed at the idea of machines defeating the best poker players, because poker is so much about reading human expression and mood.  They were wrong.  The machines will beat us at everything.

And I do mean everything.  Not just mathematical games like Go, but far more difficult to quantify things like reading facial expressions and predicting behaviour.  They are even going to beat us at sex.  They aren't there now, not by a long shot, but eventually the robots will come for sex just the way cars came for carrying goods, computers came for chess mastery, and factories came for making shaped pieces of iron.  It is just a matter of time.

I am reading the Ancillary series of books by Ann Leckie, which is a science fiction series set in the distant future.  I recommend the series both as science fiction and as commentary on gender and sex, though the actual story and characters we never that compelling to me.  In it there are extremely powerful AIs that watch people all the time and learn their patterns by speech, facial expressions, and more.  They know when people are upset before the people themselves know.  This is going to be a reality given enough time because every time we have set ourselves the challenge to build a tool that will be better at something than a raw human we have succeeded, or are on the way to succeeding.  Reading and predicting human behaviour will be no different.

The idea of AIs watching me through myriad cameras and knowing what I think before I do isn't frightening to me.  Maybe it should be, but I honestly just shrug at the thought.  The machines already do pretty much everything better than me and my life is shaped by the rest of the world already so somehow it doesn't feel like it will be all that different.  Would machines watching me, trying to predict me really be that different from humans trying to do the same thing?  The only difference I see is one of efficiency.

A really big sword

I saw The Edge of Tomorrow this weekend.  I loved it to pieces.  Action movie with a cataclysmic setting with cool future tech but modern enough to make it relatable; right up my alley.

It also doesn't hurt that the most badass soldier in the world is a woman wielding a gigantic sword.

See, you have to be terrified of an opponent wielding a sword in a world of guns.  Because when you see a swarm of enemies coming towards you shooting grenades and machine guns and one of them is rushing in wielding a preposterously large blade you can reach only one conclusion.

She is so dangerous and going to kill so many of her enemies that she can't even carry all the ammo she would need if she were using guns for all of her killing.  I mean, she is a badass, and obviously could carry a *lot* of ammo.  But even that large amount of ammo simply won't do to kill all the stuff she is going to kill that day.

Now that is a scary prospect.  Or a heartwarming prospect, depending on which side you are on!

The movie makes no damn sense from a science standpoint but that doesn't interfere with the enjoyment of it at all.  It doesn't try to explain physics, but happily breaks all the rules in order to tell an entertaining story.  Plus in a two hour movie having about one hour devoted to a training montage is pretty fantastic.

So ridiculous, yes.  But also fighting aliens with gigantic swords for reasons of being so awesome, for which I will forgive nearly any transgression against science.