Diary of a Mad Natural Historian

I know it’s been all over the web, but I don’t care. I’m posting this picture because it’s just so friggin’ amazing:

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The Mars Reconaissance Orbiter takes a picture of the Mars Phoenix Lander as the Lander parachutes down. I wish I could find the Arthur C. Clarke quote about 2001 coming true (except for the monolith pieces), but not being noticed because the principal players were/are all robotic.

The Phoenix Lander has a Twitter account - the latest tweet: “Looking forward to moving arm today. Will bend the wrist and flex the elbow. It’s been stowed for 10 months so I’ll move it slowly/gently.” (@marsphoenix)

Continuing with our Drake theme- this time, emphasizing UFO hair - color, if not length: Charlie Stross (who’s heard of J. G. Ballard) writes a post explaining how much control an author has over the way their book is published (especially, in this case, influence over cover art).

Unless we’re talking about the small press or self-publishing, the answer is “zip”. The author is responsible for writing and delivering the contents of the book and, optionally, additional material such as a dedication and acknowledgements. But the way their manuscript — a typescript, typically prepared in accordance with the ancient and established Rules — is turned into a book is entirely up to the publisher.

Why would he feel that it was important to say this? Behold the US cover for his latest - due for a July release:

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As an aside - what better place for the immobile enhanced breast meme than in a CGI portrait…

Via The Reality-Based Community, a link to this overview of the work of Onken and Jones. It ties in to a question I’ve always had about the way events work - are there really pivot points, or are there broad trends that force thing in certain directions and we retrofit the specific causes (or - as things seem usually to be - a bit of both)?

The researchers also found that assassinations have no effect on the inauguration of wars, a result that “suggests that World War I might have begun regardless of whether or not the attempt on the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 had succeeded or failed.”

In other news, my friend Ray seems to have been involved with early efforts towards a transatlantic cable, discussing same with a favorite steam-vicky - Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Alternative histories can be a lot of fun - or they can be teeth-grindingly dumb. Part of the trick, it seems to me, is to find a good pivot point - a specific thing that could have gone differently - and then carefully work through the implications. Done poorly, it devolves into a “Well, my Goths invented the Gatling gun” - “So what? My Romans allied with Godzilla!” kind of exercise (complete with the smell of burning plastic and the pop of Black Cats - not that I’d know anything about it); done well, it makes you wonder about why things turned out the way they did.

All this is a long-winded way of pointing you at a Strange Maps post on a map of the Republic of New Netherland - maps and alternative history - nice match. While I’m on the subject, C.M. Kornbluth’s Two Dooms is alt history that is definitely worth a read.

“I’m an angry Rhesus brain controlling a titanium body, from the government and I’m here to help.”

I don’t think this was the kind of robot (OK, properly this one’s a cyborg) overlord that Rogers was imagining. Unfortunately, given the way the world works, I think it’s a lot more likely that machine-phase overlords will turn out to be upset simians rather than cool, dispassionate intelligences. And just to clarify - I mean a different species of upset simian…

After reading Pluvialis’ post on drowned cities (and other things) last summer, I spent a week or so racking my brain trying to remember where I’d read a description of a drowned Thames estuary, complete with underwater buildings being reinhabited. Courtesy of BLDGBLOG’s excellent interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, I’ve been whacked over the head with it - Blue Mars.

The concrete cylinder ended some three meters down, but the ladder continued, down into a big chamber, warm, humid, fishy, and humming withe the noise of several generators in another room or building. The building’s wall, the floor, the ceilings and windows were all covered by what appeared to be a sheet of clear plastic. They were inside a bubble of some kind of clear material; outside the windows was water, murky and brown, bubbling like dishwater in a sink.

Nirgal’s face no doubt revealed his surprise; Bly, smiling briefly at the sight, said, “It was a good strong building. The what-you-might-call sheetrock is something like the tent fabrics you use on Mars, only it hardens. People have been reoccupying quite a few buildings like this, if they’re the right size and depth. Set a tube and poof, it’s like blowing glass. So a lot of Sheerness folks are moving back out here, and sailing off the dock or their roof. Tide people we call them. They figure it’s better than begging for charity in England, eh?”

I channel-surfed my way to a teevee program on the history of Soviet helicopters the other evening. There was footage of the Mi-12; it’s tough to envision just how big it is until you see it swallowing trucks whole. I did a YouTube search and came up with the following clip - it’s in French and interestingly enough what parts of the narration I understand match perfectly with the English version I saw. Mi-12 fun fact - there’s a shaft connecting both powertrains together. Both engines on one side could fail, but both rotors will continue to turn.

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Minor spoiler alert! I’ve posted on Alan Moore and Gerry Anderson recently and wasn’t surprised at all to find that Moore knows his Anderson. In The Black Dossier Mina and Allan arrive at a spaceport where they steal a rocket - a Pancake Extra-Large 4. They had been told that the Extra-Large models are named after how the previous models met their end (thus Shrapnel XL2). One guess as to how the Pancake meets it’s end (with a not-too-bright Perspex robot pilot at the controls).

!Warning - contains minimal original content!

Some pix from recent web wandering united by funky pelage. In order of discovery:

Telstar Logistics’ Flickrstream yields a screencap from Gerry Anderson’s UFO.

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As a commenter notes, it’s important to keep your utility belt fully stocked with golf tees. I believe one of these lovelies will be featured a little further on…

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Via FLOG, Chris Butcher shows us a rockabilly ‘do that… words fail me. I’ll bet this guy smokes cigarettes as part of the persona - he’s taking his life in his hands every time he fires one up.

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Yhancik - billions of blistering blue barnacles! There are some Tintin pix in this post - about halfway down.

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More MoonBase loveliness from Poletti’s Flickrstream (worth looking at - lots of great images):

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Two musical notes (sorry)… The actress pictured above is Gabrielle Drake. The musical tie-in? Nick Drake was her brother. And - while nosing around for more background on UFO, I fell over a new-to-me early electronic instrument: the ondes Martenot.

I sometimes wonder if Cyril Kornbluth will be the next Philip K. Dick movie/screenplay-wise. Actually, he may already be - my ties to to the motion picture industry consist of being able to look up titles on IMDB. Two Kornbluth/Pohl collaborations I read ages ago have stuck with me to this day: Gladiator-At-Law and The Space Merchants. Gladiator-At-Law seems especially apposite nowadays, what with the housing finance mess (aka Big Shitpile) - revolving as it does around housing and arcane financial arrangements to obscure who controls what. I wonder whether Pohl or Kornbluth read Gangs of New York; one of the gangs in Belly Rave (a slum housing development originally named Belle Reve) is the Wabbits - surprisingly close to NYC’s Dead Rabbits. Wa-wa-wabbit twacks! Also - struldbrugs! The Space Merchant’s Chicken Little (a huge blob of chicken tissue that’s fed chorella algae -IIRC- and has hunks sliced off that become people food) resonates today as well - here’s a class on animal tissue culture and tissue engineering. I can’t wait for Ron Popeil to get involved - “Makes beef jerky for around $3 a pound, and you know what went in it, because you made it yourself!”

Kornbluth hit the silver screen at least once - The Marching Morons fathered Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. I loved the Marching Morons when I first read it - in my defense, I was fourteen - since then, well… It’s great fun, but when you’ve finished there’s a strange odor in the air. I smell eugenics. We’ll ignore the statistical cold water as well - tons of dopes, tiny elite - what are your chances of rolling lucky seven in the can’t-choose-your-parents crapshoot. That’s right - in all likelihood, you’d be one of the pinheads. The Marching Morons does give me an excuse to introduce a great new word: tlonian - adjective applying to a product that has metastisized off the screen and into the real world (see: Holiday Inn) and post a video of an AWESOME new tlonian product from Idiocracy, Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. I love Borges.

Human memory is an odd thing. It’s not particularly accurate and it is often manipulated - by the memory’s owner and by other parties. Sometimes this is a bad thing - think about the satanic abuse hysteria of the 1980s and the whole ‘recovered memory’ controversy - and sometimes it’s a good thing. We’re not all saints (even the saints aren’t); not having to remember every time we’ve been less than what we think we are is a blessing. What are people going to be like when they have a detailed objective record of the world immediately around them and their interaction with same? Will we be better people - less likely to ignore the cry for help? Will we be the same ol’ folks, just closer to insanity as we get our noses rubbed in the disconnect between our internal model of ourselves and the real way we act? Or, will we photoshop the hell out of our recordings to bring them into line with our sense of identity?

Everything old is new again. From the comments on Stross’ transcript, let me highlight a couple of good points.

In some ways, it’s a step backwards to an earlier time. An average medieval peasant wouldn’t have had the same concept of privacy we do — he most likely lived in the same room as his whole family and some animals. All of his neighbors new what was going on, and he regularly confessed to his priest. He didn’t get lost, because he had lived in the same place most of his life. *

The qualifier (in some ways) is important - level of detail and public accessibility are important differences. In the Monty example, Mary Kalin-Casey is not objecting to peasant-level (walking by and seeing Monty in the window) loss of privacy - it’s the notion that he can be seen by anyone with an internet connection that bothers her.
On Stross’ self-driving car prediction:

Driverless vehicles were commonplace up until WW2; they were called horse-drawn carriages. I have relatives born in the Twenties who tell of napping while driving home from a party or something. *

True - and a hint about where things may be going on a slightly different front. Nanotech is a hot topic - the collision of nano and biology is where (I think) a lot of progrees will be made. After all, there are already molecular mechanisms - consider the mitochondrion.