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Nerd Word of the Week: Cryptid

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:00:00 +0000

Cryptid (n.) - A creature that is rumored to exist but no one has managed to prove is real. Bigfoot, chupacabras, the Moth Man, and the Jersey Devil are among the more famous examples of cryptids. Cryptozoology is the "scientific"study of cryptids, though (much like ufology) the field is often dominated by fringe scientists and conspiracy theorists who seem ill-acquainted with the actual scientific method. (There's also a subfield called cryptobotany, which seems mostly obsessed with finding giant man-eating plants. Little Shop of Horrors apparently was inspired true events.)

Cryptids, to no one's surprise, make excellent fodder for speculative fiction, such as A Lee Martinez's novel Monster, though the trend is hardly limited to books. The animated series The Secret Saturdays chronicles the adventures of a family of cryptid hunters, depicted in a Jack Kirby pulp-hero style. Moreover, giant cryptids seem to have a rolling contract with Syfy, as the channel has become infamous for cheeseball original movies like Megashark vs. Giant Octopus and Dinocroc vs. Supergator.

I bring it up because: A mere 76 years ago today, the first known photographs of the world's most famous cryptid, the Loch Ness Monster, were taken. On Nov. 12, 1933 Scotsman Hugh Gray snapped the first purported pics of Nessie, though to most eyes its look like a blurry image of a dog swimming with a stick in its mouth. 1933 was the year that the Nessie phenomenon gained media attention, with multiple sighting reports published in papers that year. It was only a year later that the world famous but since-discredited Surgeon's Photo of the Loch Ness Monster was taken, proving that hoaxsters trying to horn in on the cryptid action are a time-honored tradition, even if cryptozoology itself isn't.

We're on the verge of the 4th Epoch of memory

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:00:00 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Before we begin, a hat tip goes out to Phil "Bad Astronomy" Plait for disseminating this collection of Carl Sagan quotes, which inspired this little observation. As such, I'll begin with Sagan's own words, which invariably outstrip my own:

"When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented brains. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains. So we learned to stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library."

-- "Persistence of Memory," Cosmos

I posit that the advancement of our (and every) species is defined by the limits of our memory. As we overcome the inherent design limitations of each type of memory, we move into a new Epoch of Memory, and a new level of complexity as both a society and a species.

Within Sagan's words we observe the first three Epochs of Memory. Like all species on Earth, we first solely stored memory genetically. Not just the memory of our biological selves, but whatever rote, instinctual behaviors that dominate our actions still today. Even viruses, which exhibit nothing so complex as "thought" or "intention" nonetheless possess a form of genetic memory that impels them to propagate. This was our First Epoch of Memory, when our genes made of us all that we could ever be. The design limitation of genetic memory was its dependence on mutation to spur advancement. All learning was random. Carried to its logical conclusion, the First Epoch led to a random mutation that improved our memory.

The Second Epoch saw the rise of brains, organs designed explicitly to deal with information. We (or, rather, our genetic forebearers) could now remember information and apply that memory long before the implications of that data became encoded in our genes. We need not wait for some random mutation to give us an advantageous instinctive aversion to chewing on hemlock leaves; we could now remember the illness we suffered after first consuming hemlock and, if we survived, choose not to eat it again. Many species developed brains and applied it to this explicit advantage.

Carried to its logical conclusion, the Second Epoch gave rise to language, a collection of symbols that could be remembered collectively by a group and used to communicate information not directly discerned by an individual. Now, if one member of the tribe learned not to eat hemlock, all the members of the tribe could benefit from that knowledge. The limitation of language was tied, initially, to the limitation of our physical memory. We could only remember so much, and the fidelity of that memory often suffered when it was transferred -- as in, told -- to another individual. The children's game of telephone is the classic exhibition of oral history's limitations.

Language, carried to its logical conclusion, gave rise to Third Epoch of Memory, a time when information could be stored outside the individual in tangible form. Books, for most of our history. Now, so long as you had the basic knowledge necessary to decipher the encoding language, you could benefit from the collective experience of the entire species. The limitation of external memory is organization and availability. We no longer carry information with us, but we must actively seek it out, and then apply it contextually.

Books, carried to their logical conclusion, now stand us on the precipice of the Fourth Epoch of Memory. In this Epoch, seeking out, organizing, and contextually applying information has been rendered an external process. Put more simply, the Fourth Epoch of Memory arrives when externally stored information is indistinguishable from internally stored information. What we know won't be limited to what we can remember, because we can access external memory (the Internet et al) with the same ease, speed, and faculty as internal memory (our brains).

A combination of high-speed mobile communications, augmented reality interfaces, and massive free, searchable libraries of information are only just now being born. But when this mass of external memory that we have spent centuries exponentially expanding is suddenly available in perfect context at the perfect moment for everyone, we will have become a fundamentally different species all over again. What we know will be limited only by our curiosity and our bandwidth speed.

I, for one, can't wait for the Fourth Epoch to arrive. As Jamais Cascio warns us, this era won't be without its drawbacks, but I think it will be well worth the price of admission. I only wish Carl had been here to see it.

Truly Trivial: What sci-fi novel coined the phrase 'computer worm?'

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:00:00 +0000

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Once again, I am overburdened by day jobbery and must resort to recycling one of my old TechRepublic Geek Trivia posts for this week's Truly Trivial column. Don't worry; it's timely. Twenty-six years ago today, the computer virus was born. Twenty one years ago last week, perhaps the most famous computer worm ever, the Morris Worm, was launched. Which brings me to my original article:

The effects of the Morris Worm were so widespread and pronounced that it made the national news (quite a feat in 1988), and it eventually earned Morris a landmark if decidedly unintimidating conviction: Three years' probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $10,050 fine. In geek circles, people sometimes referred to the Morris Worm as the Great Worm, a reference to the Great Worms (i.e., dragons) found in J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series.

This, of course, was not why we called Morris' creation a worm, as these types of malicious programs (distinct from computer viruses) owe their etymology to a work of science fiction, rather than fantasy.

WHAT WORK OF SCIENCE FICTION COINED THE TERM COMPUTER WORM?

You can find the complete original Q&A here.

Short story: Crimes Against Science Fiction

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:31:00 +0000

I want to give a shout out to Suzanne Vincent and the editing crew over at Flash Fiction Online, who gave this story one of the kindest and most encouraging rejection letters I've ever received. This was really my first stab at flash fiction, and as such its rather derivative -- I was channeling a bit of Douglas Adams when I threw this together -- with a weak ending. I had fun with it, but it's time to put this little experiment out to pasture. Thus, Crimes Against Science Fiction is trunked here for your enjoyment.

---

When Tommy stumbled half-awake out of his apartment this morning, he didn't expect that the future would be waiting outside to kill him. Or that the future would be so fat.

"Stand fast, and prepare to answer for your crimes!" the one of the left shouted, pointing an exotic firearm at Tommy. The assailant was dressed in a flamboyantly colorful excuse for a military uniform, though the garment was clearly intended for someone far thinner than the rotund, pimply-faced gent breathing heavily in Tommy's parking space.

The one on the right interrupted. "Wait, we have to explain his crimes to him first. He isn't guilty of them yet." This one was slightly taller, and rail thin, except for the almost comically out-of-place beer belly swelling beneath the belt of his…er…outfit. This one was wearing some bizarre hybrid of 17th century samurai armor and 21st century leather fetish gear while carrying a wildly impractical, oversized sword.

"We've only got five minutes, I don’t want to waste it!" whined the apparent soldier.

"You're wasting it now," snapped the pervy one.

"No, you are!"

"More coffee. Kill hangover," Tommy mumbled, and began to move past the pair toward his car. Then the pervy one swiped at him with his sword, slashing Tommy's shirt.

Tommy looked down in barely-conscious disbelief. "Well, that kinda sucks."

"Sorry," the pervy one yelped.

"Don't apologize!" yelled the soldier.

"Sorry," the pervy one repeated.

Tommy rubbed his bloodshot eyes. "Are you guys part of an improv-anywhere group, or something? Because I'm not really into this."

The soldier pointed his weapon at Tommy again and puffed out his chest. "I am Colonel Jack Churchill, team leader of StarCorps Alpha. This is my ally, Avenger Black. We are here to prevent you from destroying the future. "

"Okay, so, is this gonna be on YouTube?"

"We are not performers!" The Colonel screamed, panting at the exertion.

"Well, I mean we kinda are…" The pervy one disagreed.

"Not now," the Colonel snapped.

"Look, guys, this has been trippy, but I've got a big presentation due today at work and…"

"Project TubeSock." The pervy one smiled oafishly at his pronouncement.

"What?" Tommy asked.

"You will not complete it," the Colonel growled. "You will not commit your crimes against science fiction."

"Science fiction?"

The Colonel drew in a breath and lapsed into a practiced speech. "The software you create allows television viewers to pick any item onscreen and purchase it from the Internet. Suddenly, product placement completely supplants old-fashioned commercials. Hollywood designs shows based on what they can sell, rather than how cool they can be. The same thing happens to the movies. Sitcoms about car salesmen and fashion executives take over the world. Science fiction is left out, because you can't buy antiproton pistols or starskipper battleplanes or Zarconian she-slave androids…"

"God, if only…" The pervy one mumbled.

The Colonel rolled his eyes. "Without a revenue stream, the genre will all but die, kept alive only by the most devoted followers. Followers like us."

"Wait, I know you guys…" Tommy exclaimed. "You're dressed like those dudes from that lame TV show, the one that got cancelled after, like, six episodes."

The Colonel lunged for Tommy. "It wasn't lame, it was a cult classic!"

Tommy fended off the Colonel's attack with a simple sidestep, which led to the Colonel running headlong in Tommy's car door and his firearm skidding out of reach.

"Dammit," the Colonel wailed.

"Dude, watch the paint job."

"Avenger," the Colonel screamed, "Strike him down."

"You said you were going to shoot him," the pervy one whined.

"I lost my slugthrower. Just kill him."

"I don't want to kill him," complained the pervy one.

"You want kill me?" Tommy asked, surprised.

"No," said the pervy one.

"Yes," shouted the Colonel, scrambling to regain his weapon.

"Because of this TubeSock thing?" Tommy asked.

"It was Jack’s idea," shrugged the pervy one.

"Quit talking to him," ordered the Colonel.

"Because I stopped working on TubeSock last year," Tommy continued.

"What?" said the Colonel.

"What?" said the pervy one.

Tommy shrugged. "My venture capital fell through, so I had to get a day job."

"But the 'Net lists you as the TubeSock inventor," the Colonel insisted.

"I told you not to use the StarCorps wiki," the pervy one said.

The Colonel raised his recovered weapon again. "Maybe they just got the date wrong. We should kill him anyway."

"No," the pervy one stomped his feet. "We only paid for one timeline change. If we don't kill him, maybe we can get the fee back."

The Colonel frowned. "And if we can't, we don't have enough money saved to jump back again."

"We could sell your replica Dragon Armada command throne," the pervy one suggested.

"No way. Sell yours," the Colonel countered.

"Mine is nicer," the pervy one said.

"Exactly, so we could get more…," the Colonel began, when a device on his wrist started beeping. "Oh, no. You made us waste…"

In that instant, the pair disappeared.

"I didn’t just see that," Tommy said to himself as he stared at the parking space where pervy swordsman and fat Colonel used to be.

“Yeah, you did,” said a man across the parking lot.

“You saw it too?” Tommy asked.

“Saw it. Heard it. Trying to forget it,” the man replied.

“You think those freaks were really from the future?”

“If so, that’s the dumbest future ever. What kind of jackass is watching the crap I make when you can spend your free time boinking Cleopatra or shooting Hitler in the face? Screw cable, I’m gonna whack me a Fuhrer.”

“And you are?” Tommy asked.

“Ricky Ransom, Ransom Note Productions.”

“You make TV shows?”

“I produce the number three police-procedural comedy on basic cable.”

“Ever thought about funding some software development, Mr. Ransom? I bet I can sell an assload of donuts with a cop show.”

Ransom smiled. “I think there’s a future in it.”

Nerd Word of the Week: Spam in a can

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:00:00 +0000

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Spam in a can (adj.) - Space program slang term for a passive occupant in a spacecraft, specifically a space capsule. The phrase is generally attributed to Chuck Yeagar, if only because he's shown describing the Mercury astronauts as "spam in a can" in the movie The Right Stuff, though there is ample evidence that multiple astronauts and NASA officials used the term liberally during the 1960s Space Race. The early Mercury astronauts, all trained military pilots, are known to have resisted being mere "spam in a can" with no active control of their vessels, thus forcing a level of human direction into early space vehicles.

Spam in a can is now typically used as a snarky criticism of the current level of manned spaceflight technology, as humans are still travelling as meat packed into primitive metal containers and shipped long distances. This falls under the sensawunda criticism of NASA -- particularly the space shuttle successor Project Constellation, which is described as "Apollo on steroids" -- in that we are still not creating or using the sci-fi-inspired tech that books and movies has promised us for decades. Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran rather deftly pointed out the spam-in-a-can disappointment factor with NASA in the graphic novel Orbiter, wherein an alien intelligence redesigns our "primitive" space shuttle into a true interplanetary exploration vehicle.

I bring it up because: Laika passed away 52 years ago on Tuesday. For those that don't know the name, Laika was the first living creature that humans sent into space. She was a Soviet space dog launched aboard Sputnik 2 on Nov. 3, 1957. She died from overheating a few hours after launch, thus making Laika the first spaceflight casualty. Her likeness is preserved in a statue at the cosmonaut training facility in Star City, Russia, as her nation's first space traveler. Telemetry from her mission proved that living beings could survive launch g-forces and weightlessness, thus proving that spam in a can was a viable manned spaceflight model.

I also mention the spam in a can principle as a corollary to Charles Stross's recent thought experiment blog post, How habitable is the Earth? Stross essentially argues that humans are explicitly designed for a particular fraction of Earth's environment that exists during a hyper-minute fraction of Earth's geological history, thus making human space exploration -- which removes us from this environment -- a terribly difficult and expensive undertaking. Karl Schroeder recently counter-argued (the point, not Stross) that most of these problems are surmountable if we get launch expenses down and can get the proper equipment -- all of which already exists -- into orbit cheaply. Which gets us back to the spam in a can criticism: Until the tech gets better, large-scale humans space exploration is a pipe dream.

Truly Trivial: What was the original written formulation for E=mc2?

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:55:00 +0000

Image by dullhunk via Flickr

The old trivia geek is bogged down with day job wonkery, so I'm reprinting this old-school Geek Trivia from my TechRepublic days, "Eye for an Einstein." I quote from it thusly:

Einstein proved that even apart from movement, all objects that possess mass also possess energy. You can find out exactly how much energy with the simple calculation of mass multiplied by the square of the speed of light, E=mc^2.

The crazy thing is, you won’t find this famous equation in any of Einstein’s papers published before, during, or after 1905. That’s because Einstein never wrote his most famous equation in its most famous form.

Instead, he earned his scientific accolades expressing energy-mass equivalence very differently.

WHAT WAS THE ORIGINAL FORMULATION OF E=mc² AS WRITTEN BY EINSTEIN?

Get the full Q&A here.

Nerd Word of the Week: Fail Whale

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Image by playerx via Flickr

Fail Whale (n.) - Nickname for the custom 404 error page for the Twitter microblogging service. Also a geek-slang curse invoked whenever something goes wrong, especially if that something is Internet-related. The Fail Whale Twitter page depicts a flock of the Twitter mascot birds attempting to hoist a cartoon whale into the air, and includes the phrase "Twitter is over capacity." The Twitter Fail Whale usually appears when the Twitter servers are overloaded, typically as a function of the service's burgeoning popularity. Thus, the Fail Whale often shows up just when the most Twitter users are paying attention. The Fail Whale has become both a beloved and a reviled symbol for Twitter and for the growing-pain-ridden universe of social networking Web applications. You can now buy Fail Whale merchandise and join the Fail Whale fan club.

I bring it up because: 40 years ago today, the ancient Internet ancestor of the Fail Whale was born -- on the same day as the Internet. On Oct. 29, 1969, the first router-linked communication between two ARPANET-linked computers occurred when the SDS Sigma 7 Host and UCLA sent the following message to the SRI SDS 940 Host at Stanford: "lo." That's the letters L and O, transmitted in lowercase. No, that isn't the earliest l33t-speak version of hello ever recorded. UCLA was trying to send the login command to the Stanford system but the ARPANET link failed two letters in. Sort of like when your Twitter post times out and the page refreshes to a cartoon rendering of several painfully peppy songbirds trying to hoist and equally over-happy humpback into the sky. In other words, on the day we invented the Internet, we also invented the Fail Whale.

Truly Trivial: Who is the only Simpsons Treehouse of Horror writer to be honored by the Mystery Writers of America?

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:00:00 +0000

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One would be tempted to describe the annual "Treehouse of Horror" episode of The Simpsons as one of the most revered annual Halloween specials in the history of television -- except that half of the Treehouses of Horror have failed to air in time for Halloween. This year's episode, "Treehouse of Horror XX," aired on Oct. 18, breaking a nine-year streak of post-Halloween airdates. That's because halfway through the series' run, Fox television became a broadcaster of Major League Baseball, including the MLB playoffs and World Series, which has pushed the Treehouse air dates into early November. That's just one of the quirks of this 20-year tradition from TV's most distinguished animated sitcom.

So far as the distinction goes, The Simpsons was the first animated series to win a Peabody Award, which serves as the sweet, sweet icing on the series' 25-Primetime-Emmys cake. Despite this strong record of success, the Treehouse of Horror has been a subject of regular Emmy disappointment for the Simpsons production staff.

Most years, the alternate version of the Simpsons theme created for the Treehouse of Horror special is submitted for the Outstanding Musical Performance Emmy, but to date no Treehouse tune has taken home the statuette, nor has any other Simpsons musical number. Call it the Treehouse musical curse.

In fact, despite the fact that The Simpsons has garnered over 100 individual television awards in its history, only three Treehouse of Horror episodes have won awards of any kind. "Treehouse of Horror VIII" won the Golden Reel award for sound mixing, "Treehouse of Horror X" won the CINE Golden Eagle Award, and the 3D animated sequence from "Treehouse of Horror VI" won the Ottawa International Animation Festival grand prize. Not exactly the equivalent of the Golden Globe Awards, let alone the Emmys.

While the critics remain unimpressed by the Treehouse of Horror lineup, fans love the quasi-Halloween annual. Much of this adoration is due to the creative license given to Simpsons writers when preparing Treehouse stories. Series continuity is abandoned, as is subtlety and restraint. Writers are free to openly and explicitly parody any cultural topic, film, play, novel or TV show. Moreover, excessive violence is not only possible, it's encouraged, with Simpsons producers often intentionally ratcheting up the goofball gore in early Treehouse episodes just to tweak the television censors. Former Simpsons executive producer David Mirkin often strove to make the Treehouse of Horror specials funny and scary, which leads us to a unique distinction amongst the long and legendary list of Simpsons writers.

For an early Treehouse of Horror episode, the Simpsons brought in a guest writer who appeared in the credits of only one episode in the entire series' history. This writer's work, a portion of which was featured in this Treehouse script, earned him honors from the Mystery Writers of America -- the only Simpsons writer to ever attain such an award.

Who is the only Simpsons Treehouse of Horror writer to be honored by the Mystery Writers of America?

The writer in question is none other than Edgar Allen Poe, for whom the Mystery Writers of America named their annual awards, colloquially known as The Edgars. Poe's poem "The Raven" was the basis (and the title of) the third segment in the original Treehouse of Horror special in 1990, back when it was just known as the Simpsons Halloween Special. James Earl voice-of-Darth-Vader Jones recited the verses of "The Raven" during the segment, and various Simpsons characters acted out the described plot. Poe was credited as the lead writer on the segment, thus earning him the distinction of being not only the sole credited Simpsons writer ever honored by the Mystery Writers of America, but also the only Simpsons writer to have a major award of any kind named after him.

Despite Poe's individual accolades, the original Treehouse of Horror is hardly the most amusing, endearing, or horrifying episode in the Treehouse lineup. Instead, "Treehouse of Horror V" is generally consider not just the greatest Simpsons Halloween episode ever, but arguably one of the top ten greatest Simpsons episodes, period. (And yes, "Treehouse of Horror V" did air before Halloween on Oct. 30, 1994.)

"Treehouse of Horror V" included the Shining parody, "The Shinning," which inaugurated the infamous running gag of Groundskeeper Willie being slain by an axe to the back throughout the remainder of the episode. Thus, the exaggerated violence Mirkin was going for. James Earl voice-of-Poe Jones also reappeared as an alternate universe voice for Maggie Simpson in the same episode, created by Homer Simpson's careless time-traveling. The fifth Treehouse episode was also the last to feature Marge Simpson issuing a parental warning at the beginning of the episode, this time in the form of an Outer Limits opening voiceover parody.

Also, "Treehouse of Horror V" is to date the only episode where Principal Skinner is a known cannibal and the sky literally rains donuts (though not in the same segments). Personally, I blame Kang and Kodos. If that isn't Truly Trivial, I don't know what is.

TELL ME I'M WRONG
After years of writing trivia columns I've come to embrace the fact that almost everyone reading these things is smarter than me, which is why you always seem to find omissions, mischaracterizations, and outright screw-ups in my work. And like all great businessmen, I intend to profit from my own ignorance and sloth. Thus, I invite you, the reader, to call me out on these entertaining little glitches in each Truly Trivial column. The responder with the smartest, best-sourced, and/or most amusing gotcha will earn a place of honor in the subsequent column by having his/her/its comment highlighted next week in this space, along with an excuse, rebuttal or (more likely) half-hearted mea culpa from me. Yes, that is your sense of self-importance rising to the bait. Don't fight it. I dare you.

Setting reasonable expectations in Social Media

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:01:00 +0000

Image via CrunchBase

Tuesday night, I gave a presentation for the October Social Media Club Louisville meeting, called Setting (Reasonable) Expectations in Social Media.

Basically, I trashed the default stats attached to the Forrester Social Technographics Ladder because they include the likes of Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube, which collectively represent about ten percent of the page views on the entire Internet. Call it a classic case of outliers skewing the average. Forrester is trying to sell people on the need for dealing with social media -- which I agree with, folks should be dealing with and embracing social media -- but as a side effect they are making it sound like social media success is an inevitability. It ain't.

Here's the slideshow:

The above was basically an expanded version of a similar presentation I gave to a marketing class at the University of Louisville last month, which was designed to ground the budding marketers who will be asked to work miracles in social media once they're hired in a year or two. Surprisingly, many of the IT and social media pros in the room on Tuesday seemed a bit floored by some of the stats I threw at them. Basically, my premise is that if you want serious user interaction, you need a large audience size, because only a small percentage of any audience is going to give you the kind of user-generated content people seem to want (for free). That means you won't get decent user-submitted videos the day you launch your site, and you shouldn't launch a site on the premise of receiving user-generated videos.

Today I'm giving two more presentations to local business owners --Twitter for Businesses and Blogging for Businesses. Let's see if these topics generate as many jaw-drops and eye-pops as my last one.

Nerd Word of the Week: Monomyth

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Image by Michael Heilemann via Flickr

Monomyth (n.) - A term for the common structure of heroic stories, particularly in mythology. Also known as the hero's journey, the term monomyth was popularized by Joseph Campbell in his seminal comparative mythology treatise The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Campbell broke down dozens of epic tales from major mythological traditions and identified 17 common stages of any hero's story -- effectively writing the outline of seemingly every successful adventure story subsequently published.

George Lucas openly consulted with Campbell in writing the first Star Wars scripts, and thus the original Star Wars movie is held up as a paramount example of the cinematic monomyth in action. Naturally, this has led to some backlash. Novelist David Brin has cited the monomyth as a tool of despots used to justify their favored status. John Scalzi argues that Lucas's obsession with the monomyth contributed to the failure of the Star Wars prequels.

I bring it up because: Joseph Campbell killed genre fiction, or so some have argued. This is not news, as there have been several YouTube videos mocking the monomyth parallels between sci-fi franchises, but the subject got goosed last week when Ron Moore explained how Star Trek: The Next Generation writers incorporated science into their scripts. (To quote sci-fi editor John Joseph Adams's response to the interview: "Every time Ron Moore speaks about writing an angel kills itself.")

The geek blogosphere was ablaze after Moore's comments, hitting apogee when Charles Stross explained why he hates Star Trek -- because it sublimates ideas to story, effectively using the structure of the monomyth and dressing it up in technobabble drag. Thus we re-open up the can of worms as to why TV genre fiction seems so formulaic and facile when compared to prose genre fiction. Because, ultimately, we're a prisoner of the monomyth and use Joseph Campbell shorthand as the basis, rather than the framework, of the story. There are worse guides, but its hard to be taken seriously when everything looks and reads and sounds the same. Who says cloning is a future technology?

Truly Trivial: How did Wernher von Braun try to jumpstart a US space program a decade before NASA?

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:00:00 +0000

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If one were to construct a Mt. Rushmore of rocket scientists, almost any quartet of visionaries enshrined there would have to include Wernher von Braun, architect of the early American manned spaceflight program. (For this geek's money, von Braun would be joined by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, and Hermann Oberth, though you could also make a good case for Sergei Korolev as first alternate.) Fifty-one years ago tomorrow, President Eisenhower transferred von Braun and his team of engineers from the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) -- where he built the famous Redstone rockets -- to the newly formed NASA, where von Braun would create the launch vehicles for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.

All of that, however, very nearly never came to be.

Wernher von Braun was the leader of a handful of German scientists that developed the infamous V-2 rockets that the Nazis used to bombard London during World War II. As Germany began to fall at the end of the war, various factions were vying to capture von Braun and his compatriots in order to secure the German rocket expertise for themselves. Moreover, von Braun rightfully suspected that the German SS had orders to execute the rocket scientists should it become likely that they would fall into enemy hands. Thus, von Braun and his team decided they should actively surrender to Allied forces before they could be killed; the only question was to which Allied nation?

Von Braun's group surrendered to the Americans, with von Braun's brother Magnus literally flagging down a U.S. infantryman riding a bicycle and shouting: "My brother invented the V-2. We want to surrender." Von Braun noted that they chose the Americans in part from fear of how they would be treated as POWs by the Soviets, who were also advancing on the position where the German rocketeers surrendered. Still, had von Braun's team been sequestered elsewhere (as nearly happened) or been forced to abandon their research and take up arms in defense of Germany (as other scientists were forced to do), he may never had made his way to NASA.

Once captured, the U.S. military had to "bleach" von Braun's record in order to clear him for service, as President Truman stipulated that no German war criminals could work for the United States. Wernher von Braun was an SS officer, and his V-2 rocket program employed slave labor, though von Braun himself claimed both actions were forced on him the Nazi power structure. After he was "cleared" to design rockets for the U.S., the military assigned him to build missiles, rather than space vehicles -- despite the fact the von Braun actively campaigned for a manned spaceflight program.

Thus, von Braun resorted to a rather unusual public relations maneuver in an attempt to "jumpstart" public demand for manned spaceflight in 1949 -- nine years before NASA existed.

How did Wernher von Braun try to jumpstart a US space program a decade before NASA?
In 1949, Wernher von Braun wrote -- but failed to publish -- a science fiction novel. Titled Project MARS: A Technical Tale, the book was a classic Golden Age sci-fi adventure story which also laid out von Braun's vision for a manned mission to Mars. This vision included launching a ten-spacecraft fleet towards the Red Planet -- using only 1940s-era technology. Most reviewers concede the book is terribly written, even allowing for the standards of the era and for its translation to English from German. This would explain why no less than 18 publishers rejected it. However, as a technical primer, Project MARS is an almost peerless historical document. That's probably why Apogee Books finally published Project MARS in 2006, more than fifty years after it was written.

The ideas von Braun detailed in Project MARS would become the basis for a far more successful public relations campaign that he waged in the 1950s. Von Braun enjoyed early success as part of Project Hermes, wherein he and his fellow German rocketeers refurbished captured V-2s for American use. This led to von Braun's transfer to Huntsville, AL, where he began to develop the Redstone rockets. This afforded him the leeway to speak to the press, and on May 14, 1950 The Huntsville Times ran the headline "Dr. von Braun Says Rocket Flights Possible to Moon" on its front page.

This, in turn led to von Braun's participation in an illustrated series in Colliers Weekly in 1952 titled "Man Will Conquer Space Soon!" The popularity of the initial Colliers article eventually led to von Braun consulting on a Disney studios television project, Man in Space, which detailed future manned spaceflight missions -- animated in the signature Disney style. Man in Space first aired in 1955 and is still considered one of the most influential popular media depictions of human spaceflight ever created.

Thus, when the 1957 launch of the Soviet Union's Sputnik I forced the United States into the space race, there was no doubt that Wernher von Braun was a necessary component of the technical effort. And a fair portion of that necessity was derived from the publication of ideas that von Braun detailed in Project MARS many years before.

It's fascinating to imagine what might have been. What if a country other than the United States captured von Braun and his team? (Warren Ellis's Sidewise Award-winning Ministry of Space graphic novel examines what could have happened if the British, not the Americans, had liberated von Braun.) What if von Braun had been killed in the war, and Korolev led the Soviet space effort without a comparable American rival? What if the U.S. had entertained von Braun's spaceflight ideas sooner, rather than having their hands forced by Sputnik? Could the ideas in Project MARS truly have come to pass? It's an answer that goads the imagination, and resides in the realm of the Truly Trivial.

TELL ME I'M WRONG
After years of writing trivia columns I've come to embrace the fact that almost everyone reading these things is smarter than me, which is why you always seem to find omissions, mischaracterizations, and outright screw-ups in my work. And like all great businessmen, I intend to profit from my own ignorance and sloth. Thus, I invite you, the reader, to call me out on these entertaining little glitches in each Truly Trivial column. The responder with the smartest, best-sourced, and/or most amusing gotcha will earn a place of honor in the subsequent column by having his/her/its comment highlighted next week in this space, along with an excuse, rebuttal or (more likely) half-hearted mea culpa from me. Yes, that is your sense of self-importance rising to the bait. Don't fight it. I dare you.

Nerd Word of the Week: Hoopy frood

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:46:00 +0000

Image by sarkasmo via Flickr

Hoopy frood (n.) - A particularly capable and impressive individual. Specifically, a savvy and successful interstellar hitchhiker. The phrase originates from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy radio series, wherein Zaphod Beeblebrox remarks: "Hey you, sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is!" The shortened form hoopy frood is used by sci-fi fans, and H2G2 fans especially, to describe persons with similar abilities as Ford Prefect, who somehow survives the destruction of planets and the ire of villainous aliens with surprising aplomb.

The phrase knows where his towel is is roughly equivalent to hoopy frood, but the towel reference is far more well known and commonly used. Thus, hoopy frood is also a loaded slang term for Hitchhikers Guide devotees. The regular geeks -- even the ones that haven't read the entire Hitchhikers Guide series -- know the towel reference, but only hoopy froods know and use the phrase hoopy frood.

I bring it up because: This week And Another Thing..., the final Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy novel, went on sale. While it may be the last chapter of H2G2 universe, And Another Thing... is also the first Hitchhiker's Guide novel not authored by the late Douglas Adams. Thus, all the hoopy froods are trying to sass the new author, Artemis Fowl creator Eoin Colfer, to see if he really knows where his towel is, prose-wise. Here's hoping he can bring the funny, and that And Another Thing... isn't the prose equivalent of Vogon poetry.

Truly Trivial: Which famous computer was Douglas Adams the first Briton to own?

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Image by markbult via Flickr

Today we come to honor the legacy of one of the late twentieth century's true Renaissance men. He was a multitalented author, playwright, musician and scholar. He contributed to some of the most beloved and well recognized media works of our time, and his wit and humor have been celebrated by -- and have greatly influenced -- some of the foremost thinkers of the age. We speak, of course, of Douglas Adams, and while geeks need little prompting to speak of him, we are moved to again revisit this icon of the nerd underverse on the occasion of his most famous franchise's final chapter.

And Another Thing..., the last novel in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, goes on sale this week. It's also the first, last, and only Hitchhiker's Guide novel that isn't authored by Adams himself. Eoin Colfer, the originator of the Artemis Fowl series (which might be described as Harry Potter by way of Dirk Gently), was bestowed the honor and the challenge of completing the Hitchhiker's Guide story by Adams' wife and daughter.

There are those who are rightfully leery of anyone besides Adams attempting to continue the Hitchhiker's Guide universe. After all, Adams' creation spanned the media landscape, finding its way into novels, radio, television, movies, and video games. Moreover, the Hitchhikers Guide series has influenced everything from basic text editors to chess supercomputers to Google's built-in calculator.

Yet for all that the Hitchhikers Guide has meant to us, Douglas Adams himself meant more. He wasn't just the creator of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, and Zaphod Beeblebrox. Adams occasionally jammed with Pink Floyd and picked the title for the group's final album, The Division Bell. Adams was one of only two non-Pythonites to write for Monty Python's Flying Circus. Oh, and he wrote a couple of Doctor Who serials, where he met Lalla Ward -- who played Romana -- and eventually introduced her to her present husband, noted zoologist and religious critic Richard Dawkins.

To say Adams was a man of many talents is an absurdly extreme understatement. And we haven't even begun to discuss his charity work or his technology advocacy. In fact, buried within the mountain of Adams-related trivia is the fact that he was an early adopter of one of the most well known consumer computers ever released. In fact, he was the first Englishman to own one.

Which famous computer was Douglas Adams the first Briton to own?

Douglas Adams was reputedly the first British resident to own an Apple Macintosh computer in 1984. Accounts occasionally differ, with some suggesting that actor/author/humorist Stephen Fry -- a friend of Adams -- was first, but the accepted wisdom is that Adams was the first Briton to receive a Mac.

While an admitted Mac fanboy, Adams was also a serious student and thinker on computing technology. He frequently wrote and published essays on current computing trends and applications, many of which are collected in The Salmon of Doubt, a posthumous anthology of Adams' final work (including an incomplete Dirk Gently and/or Hitchhikers Guide novel). Readers of MacUser magazine or Britain's Independent newspaper may well recall Adams' computing columns printed therein. He also spoke at the 2001 Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco shortly before his death.

Douglas Adams' funeral was livestreamed on the Internet by the BBC, the first church service of any sort broadcast by that agency to the Web. Even in death, he was on the cutting edge of media technology. That legacy lives on today in h2g2, an Adams-founded and Hitchhiker's Guide-inspired competitor to the Wikipedia currently run by the BBC. Moreover, there are a number of portable computing and augmented reality projects under development that are explicitly designed to create a contemporary version of the Hitchhiker's Guide, even if it's only for us mostly harmless denizens of Earth. With any luck, we'll have the technology ironed out just in time for the Vogon Constructor Fleet to arrive, thus proving that all of us, Adams included, are (from a comic perspective) Truly Trivial.

TELL ME I'M WRONG
After years of writing trivia columns I've come to embrace the fact that almost everyone reading these things is smarter than me, which is why you always seem to find omissions, mischaracterizations, and outright screw-ups in my work. And like all great businessmen, I intend to profit from my own ignorance and sloth. Thus, I invite you, the reader, to call me out on these entertaining little glitches in each Truly Trivial column. The responder with the smartest, best-sourced, and/or most amusing gotcha will earn a place of honor in the subsequent column by having his/her/its comment highlighted next week in this space, along with an excuse, rebuttal or (more likely) half-hearted mea culpa from me. Yes, that is your sense of self-importance rising to the bait. Don't fight it. I dare you.

Nerd Word of the Week: Streisand Effect

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Streisand effect (n.) - A circumstance wherein attempting to forcibly suppress or censor a piece of information results in that same topic receiving extraordinary additional publicity. Sometimes also known as getting Steisanded. The Streisand effect is almost always used to describe the unintended and counter-productive negative online publicity resulting from attempting to remove information from the Internet.

The term comes from a civil action waged by celebrity Barbra Streisand, who once sued to keep a picture of her California beachfront mansion off the Web. (She failed, by the way, because you can still view the picture here.) The mansion was photographed as part of a pictorial series on California coastal erosion, and Streisand's $50 million legal action turned the same picture she was trying to suppress into the subject of legal debate, online discourse, and widespread news coverage, thereby popularizing it far more than the original erosion pictorial ever could have done. Moreover, her legal claims were spurious and reeked of presumed celebrity privilege, both of which are common factors in subsequent instances of the Streisand effect. Basically, anytime someone powerful and/or famous tries to control what is said about them online and uses ill-considered legal bullying to try to get their way, the Streisand effect is likely to ensue.

I bring it up because: None other than Ralph Lauren got totally Streisanded this week, when his lawyers demanded that BoingBoing (one of the five or so most popular blogs on the planet) take down a post that criticized an overly photoshopped hyper-anorexic model depicted in a Ralph Lauren ad. Now, BoingBoing certainly has a massive blog readership, but it's important to remember that its a massive blog readership and that 95 percent of the world has never heard of the site. Plus, BoingBoing does a dozen or so posts per day, and this was just one, so even the devotees of BoingBoing would have forgotten the Ralph Lauren potshot in a week at most. But when Lauren's legal goons made a ruckus -- and used an idiotically misapplied Digital Millennium Copyright Act clause to demand the post's removal -- they shone a huge, self-destructive and self-perpetuating spotlight on both the post and the subject of its criticism. (For the record, criticism and commentary fall squarely in fair use copyright exceptions, which was the content of the BoingBoing post.) That's a classic Streisand effect blowback if ever there was one.

Truly Trivial: How many extrasolar planets have official nicknames?

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Today is a major anniversary in planet-hunting circles, as 14 years ago on this date scientists announced discovery of the first traditional planet orbiting a major star other than our own sun. That is to say, we found the first real alien planet.

On Oct. 6, 1995, scientists Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced they had observed a planet orbiting the star 51 Pegasi, which is just over 15 parsecs from Earth (that's about 50 light years or 1.28 Han Solo Kessel Runs) in the middle of the constellation Pegasus. The planet is now called 51 Pegasi b, with the lowercase letter indicating that it was the first object found in the 51 Pegasi system besides the star itself. Thus was born the formal exoplanet naming convention which, like so many scientific traditions, starts out logical but can get really confusing.

The trouble with the International Astronomical Union's exoplanet naming conventions is twofold: They weren't honored for the first exoplanets discovered, and they get pretty screwy when applied to multi-exoplanet star systems. As noted above, 51 Pegasi b was the first "traditional" planet found orbiting a major star. That is to say, it was the first planetary body found orbiting a star not unlike our own sun. 51 Pegasi b was not, however, the first planet found outside our own solar system.

Planets PSR B1257+12B and PSR B1257+12C were found orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12 in 1992, three years before 51 Pegasi b. Note the uppercase designations of the planets, rather than the lowercase tradition started with 51 Pegasi b. Since the pulsar planets were the first discovered and because they orbit a pulsar rather than a regular star, their naming convention was largely ignored when "real" planetary discovery started. The original designations of the first planets were grandfathered into official IAU catalogs rather than retroactively changing their names. (When a third, more closely orbiting planet was found around PSR B1257+12, they called it PSR B1257+12A, just to keep the confusion going.)

As noted, the accepted IAU convention is to label planets in order of discovery, rather than in order of orbital distance from the star. Thus, 55 Cancri e is the innermost known planet in the 55 Cancri system, but has the later letter designation because it was the fourth planet discovered around that star. As more massive planets are easier to find, and more massive planets tend to orbit farther from parent stars than do less massive planets, this erratic lettering system will likely become more common.

Planetary naming issues are also more complicated in multi-star systems, as stars are designated with uppercase letters, and those designations are combined with lowercase planet labels. Thus the second planet around the second star in the 16 Cygni system is 16 Cygni Bb.

No wonder 51 Pegasi b is referred by many scientists by its common name, Bellerophon, rather than by its formal IAU designation. We all grew up calling Spock's home planet Vulcan, rather than 40 Eridani Ac. It's a wonder more planets haven't been given common names.

In fact, how many extrasolar planets have been given official IAU-approved common names?

Officially, exactly zero planets have been given IAU-approved common names, because it is against International Astronomical Union policy to bestow common names on planets. (Yes, this was a trick question.)

The nicknaming of 51 Pegasi b as Bellerophon -- after the Greek hero who tamed the Pegasus -- was strictly informal. Yes, we were all trained by various science fiction universes that every planet had a common name, and scientists watch Star Trek, too. But naming every exoplanet after a mythical figure is actually pretty impractical, given how many planets we've found since the first pair were discovered in 1992.

According to the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, we have to date observed 374 exoplanets in 316 star systems besides our own, with 39 of those being multiplanet systems, and some planets being rogue or orphan bodies that orbit no stars. That's an average rate of 22 planets discovered every year since 1992. And the rate of discovery is increasing. And there are between 100 and 400 billion stars just in our own galaxy, many of whom we haven't even begun to look for stars around. Thus, even if we scraped the name of every recognizable person, place, or thing from the Encyclopedia Mythica and slapped them on planets, it wouldn't be terribly long before we had more exoplanets than available names.

Being the first traditional exoplanet discovered, 51 Pegasi b received decidedly more publicity and scientific interest than many subsequent exoplanet discoveries. As such, its informal designation as Bellerophon was more a grassroots nicknaming than an official term, given that it had more of lay audience that liked the catchier name.

Only two other exoplanets have what you would call generally accepted nicknames: HD 209458 b is sometimes called Osiris, and PSR B1620-26 b is known informally as Methuselah. Osiris -- named for the Egyptian god of the afterlife and rebirth -- earned its nickname due to being the first exoplanet discovered with an atmosphere. Methuselah -- named for the oldest known person depicted in the Hebrew Bible -- is the oldest currently known exoplanet, with an estimated age of roughly 12.7 billion years.

Thus, while the IAU is not in the business of giving common names to exoplanets, scientists and the media are, and they'll throw a nickname on any extrasolar orb that has enough publicity star-power. That's not just a serendipitous slice of self-regulating self-promotion, it's a systematically stellar sample of the Truly Trivial.

SOURCES
51 Pegasi | Wikipedia
51 Pegasi b | Wikipedia
55 Cancri e | Wikipedia
Extrasolar planet - First discoveries | Wikipedia
Candidate Planet Catalog - All | Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia
HD 209458 b | Wikipedia
PSR B1620-26 b | Wikipedia
Vulcan system | Memory Alpha

TELL ME I'M WRONG
After years of writing trivia columns I've come to embrace the fact that almost everyone reading these things is smarter than me, which is why you always seem to find omissions, mischaracterizations, and outright screw-ups in my work. And like all great businessmen, I intend to profit from my own ignorance and sloth. Thus, I invite you, the reader, to call me out on these entertaining little glitches in each Truly Trivial column. The responder with the smartest, best-sourced, and/or most amusing gotcha will earn a place of honor in the subsequent column by having his/her/its comment highlighted next week in this space, along with an excuse, rebuttal or (more likely) half-hearted mea culpa from me. Yes, that is your sense of self-importance rising to the bait. Don't fight it. I dare you.

Help some starving artists realize their movie dreams

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:00:00 +0000

My old buddy (and budding screenwriter) Brian Kelly is a finalist for the MovieHatch.com $10 million screenplay prize. The final step for him and his partner is to win the voting in the MovieHatch final contest round. I've posted his message in its entirety below.

I’m competing in a contest called the Makin’ Movies Feature Film Competition on Moviehatch.com.

By going to this link: http://www.moviehatch.com/index.php?option=com_moviehatch&task=detail&movie=156 , you can vote on a movie trailer that represents a sci-fi thriller screenplay that I’ve written called BURN. I already have a leg up in the competition for 2 reasons: I was approached by a studio executive to enter the contest after they’d read my script and loved it, and because out of 500+ entries, I was chosen as one of only 25 featured pitches.

Voting lasts from October 1 to October 31. When casting your (hopefully 5 star ;)) vote, you will be prompted to enter your name and email address. You must then check your email and click on a link sent to you by Moviehatch.com to confirm your vote. I know entering your email may discourage some of you, but this is the only way the vote will be counted. The link will take you to a registration page, but it is not necessary to register for the site in order to make your vote count. Once you’ve clicked the link in your email, you’re done.

The site was created by established screenwriters and filmmakers to help discover unknown talent in the Hollywood film industry. Their partners include the people behind major motion pictures such as Gladiator, X-Men, Legally Blonde, Meet the Parents and Final Destination as well as more recent movies like The Ugly Truth, 500 Days of Summer and Paul Blart: Mall Cop. So they are legit and I’m incredibly lucky to even be considered.

I need your help in forwarding this on to everyone you know, or at least anyone you think might be interested. Put it on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace... anywhere you want! Help a guy reach a dream he’s been pursuing for years!

Thanks to everyone!

Brian

I've voted already. I hope I can count on (all five) of my readers to do the same.

Nerd Word of the Week: Sensawunda

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Sensawunda (n.) - Sci-fi slang term for sense of wonder, used to describe emotionally stirring or intellectually stimulating concepts depicted within speculative fiction. Golden Age science fiction is often lauded for its surplus sensawunda, with point-of-view characters constantly amazed at the scope, scale, and strangeness of creatures, locales, and technologies featured in these sci-fi stories. A.E. Van Vogt's Empire of Isher series is often cited as a classic example of a sensawunda tale, as are the various Heinlein juveniles like Rocket Ship Galileo and Farmer in the Sky. To this day, the original Star Wars is held up as the paramount cinematic example of sensawunda, even if its various prequels utterly failed to live up to this standard.

Contemporary science fiction is often criticized for lacking sensawunda, especially as concerns fashionably cynical or jaded protagonists who are never amazed or inspired by their objectively fantastic and extraordinary experiences. Many critics have cited this sensawunda deficit as the reason why fantasy has overtaken science fiction in mainstream literary success, with the Harry Potter phenomenon -- and its willing embrace of sensawunda -- serving as exhibit A. Moreover, many modern characters are meta-aware, often acting as if they know they are in a fictional setting and using their knowledge of standard spec-fic tropes to navigate and outsmart the challenges of their own stories. This has the effect of being alternately hilarious (in the case of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series) or diminishing of the story; if the main character does not take it seriously, how can the reader? Iain Banks and John Varley have consciously tried to recapture the sensawunda flair of these classic sci-fi tales, with Varley explicitly channeling Heinlein juveniles in his Red Thunder and its sequels, and Banks engaging in gleeful Golden Age romanticism in his novel Feersum Endjinn.

I bring it up because: Today is the 51st anniversary of the incorporation of NASA, and if ever a real-world entity attained and then lost a sensawunda, it's the American space agency. While NASA is objectively doing faster, better, cheaper space exploration today with its advanced satellites, deep-space probes and robot rovers, it has lost the pioneer flare (and bottomless Cold War budget) that captured the imagination during the heady days of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. The upcoming Project Constellation and its Ares V rockets and Altair and Orion spacecraft harken back to the golden age of manned spaceflight, but no one is certain they will ever actually get built and, if they do, whether they'll feel just like a remake of a classic tale that has, sadly, loss it originality and sensawunda. Let's hope the critics are wrong, because the world is a brighter place when our reach exceeds our grasp, and the sky is filled with manned rockets daring for the stars.

Truly Trivial: What events comprise a close encounter of the fifth kind?

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Hot on the heels of last week's Nerd Word -- Majestic 12 -- we return to the surprisingly timely topic of alien abduction. Most of the current upturn in alien interest is due to the new Milla Jovovich movie The Fourth Kind, which ostensibly profiles alien abductees using real (for Blair Witch Project values of real) interview footage. The film's title refers to the fourth type of so-called close encounter, wherein humans are abducted by the occupants of UFOs. Setting aside the plausibility of actual UFO abductions, have you ever wondered who it was that conjured up this enumerated spectrum of close encounters?

Look no further than one J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer and ufologist who had the distinction of both working for Project Bluebook -- the U.S. Air Force investigation into UFO phenomena -- and for publishing a moderately famous book on the subject, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. Hynek is the founder of the Center for UFO Studies and, as much as such a thing is possible, is considered a reliable authority on unidentified flying object investigations. In the aformentioned UFO Experience, Hynek laid out three kinds of close encounters to categorize the various UFO reports that he had analyzed (and, most often, debunked) during his tenure as adviser to the Air Force and as a civilian investigator:

Close encounter of the first kind, wherein a UFO is merely observed
Close encounter of the second kind, wherein physical evidence of a UFO is recovered
Close encounter of the third kind, wherein the occupants of a UFO are observed

Despite what Jovovich's PR folks might have you believe, there was no fourth kind of close encounter when Hynek published the scale in 1972. Nor did he explicitly add a fourth kind to the scale before his death in 1986. This was added later by other ufologists, with some significant contributions by Jacques Vallée, Hynek's frequent collaborator and perhaps the only other well known "respectable" UFO researcher. (Vallée was the real-life inspiration for the lead research scientist character, Lacombe, in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounter's of the Third Kind.)

For his part, Vallée did not explicitly endorse the alien abduction defintion of fourth kind of close encounter, but merely described them as "cases when witnesses experienced a transformation of their sense of reality." Vallée was equally circumspect as to the definition of a close encounter of the fifth kind, the most involved and potentially definitive UFO interaction of the revised close encounter scale.

So, what events comprise a close encounter of the fifth kind?

A close encounter of the fifth kind is described by Jacques Vallée as "cases of lasting physiological impact, such as serious injury or death."

This is considered a somewhat extreme fifth-kind definition by other ufologists -- a group among whom consensus is not necessarily the norm. The competing definition of a close encounter of the fifth kind, one preferred by some SETI researchers, is that of voluntary bilateral communication between UFO occupants and humans. That doesn't necessarily mean a complex world-changing transmission from the stars, as depicted in Carl Sagan's Contact; it could be as simple (if not as heart-warming or Reese's Pieces-peddling) as the one-on-one cute human to cute alien communications depicted in E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial.

Suffice it to say, a close encounter of the fifth kind goes beyond abduction and confers a definitive, irrefutable consequence of alien contact. One would prefer that consequence be communication rather than injury or death, but that's up to your local ufologist and/or screenwriter to parse out.

As noted, the close encounters of the fourth and fifth kind were not included in Hynek's original three-tiered scale. Thus, the enduring disputes about the precise defintions of these encounter types. A competing extension model of Hynek's scale are the Bloecher sub-types, created by ufologist Ted Bloecher, which simply qualify close encounters of the third kind, rather than extend the scale. Wikipedia lists the seven Bloecher subtypes as follows:

A: An entity is observed only inside the UFO
B: An entity is observed inside and outside the UFO
C: An entity is observed near to a UFO, but not going in or out.
D: An entity is observed. No UFOs are seen by the observer, but UFO activity has been reported in the area at about the same time
E: An entity is observed. But no UFOs are seen and no UFO activity has been reported in the area at that time
F: No entity or UFOs are observed, but the subject experiences some kind of "intelligent communication"
G: Abduction (same as close encounter of fourth kind)

While the Bloecher subtypes are laudable for the specificity (and possible extension into cryptozoology, given that you can have close encounter sof the third kind without involving UFOs), it's little wonder that they haven't enjoyed the same relative mainstream publicity as close encounters of the fourth kind. After all, do you really think anyone would go see the new Milla Jovovich abduction movie if it was titled Subtype G? (Okay, maybe anime fans, but that's it.)

That's just another of decidedly slapdash distinctions that make define the domain of the Truly Trivial.

SOURCES

TELL ME I'M WRONG

After years of writing trivia columns I've come to embrace the fact that almost everyone reading these things is smarter than me, which is why you always seem to find omissions, mischaracterizations, and outright screw-ups in my work. And like all great businessmen, I intend to profit from my own ignorance and sloth by inviting you, the reader, to call me out on these entertaining little glitches in each Truly Trivial column. The responder with the smartest, best-sourced, and/or most amusing gotcha will earn a place of honor in the subsequent column by having his/her/its comment highlighted next week in this space, along with an excuse, rebuttal or (more likely) half-hearted mea culpa from me. Yes, that is your sense of self-importance rising to the bait. Don't fight it. I dare you.

Nerd Word of the Week: Majestic 12

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:18:00 +0000

Image by loomingy1 via Flickr

Majestic 12 (n.) - One of several purported code names for an ostensible ongoing conspiracy between scientists, military leaders, and government officials to investigate and/or obscure evidence of UFOs. It is the assumed precursor to more well known (and substantiated) government UFO efforts such as Project Sign, Project Grudge and Project Blue Book. Also known as Majic 12, Majestic Trust, M12, MJ 12, MJ XII or Majority 12, this group holds a prominent place both in the mythology of ufologists and UFO conspiracy theorists, as well as the science fictional works which play off UFO cover-up themes. The X-Files is perhaps the most famous example of using Majestic 12 as a recurring plot device, though the less successful series Dark Skies was more explicit in its use of this supposed organization.

I bring it up because: On this date 62 years ago -- Sept. 24, 1947 -- President Harry Truman supposedly commissioned "Operation Majestic Twelve." The executive order has been serially debunked, but it nonetheless serves as the lynchpin around which much ufology and conspiracy lore revolves. Moreover, UFOs and their associated fringe theories are coming back into style if the Nov. 6-opening Milla Jovovich alien abduction movie The Fourth Kind is any indication. Debuting the same day is the George Clooney comedy The Men Who Stare at Goats, which is based on another oft-cited conspiracy theory -- the supposedly true story of the U.S. government's attempts to create a squad of psychic soldiers. Following just a week after that is 2012, the Roland Emmerich disaster flick (that's both a genre and a prediction for this movie) based on yet another fringe science/conspiracy theorist trope -- that the world will end when the Mayan Long Count calendar "runs out" in the year 2012. Face it, when there's a network TV series called Fringe that's pulling decent ratings, the fringe itself has got have a little mainstream cred. Just ask the new First Lady of Japan, who has visited Venus on a UFO. Personally, I blame the secret masters of Majic 12. That, or Coast to Coast AM. Same difference, really.

Truly Trivial: What secret F-U to the Beatles is hidden in the Mac OS?

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:00:00 +0000

It's part of the accepted wisdom of the technology community that Apple Computer cofounder Steve Jobs is a paranoid, narcissistic jerk who has channeled his character flaws into both a cult of personality and a world-changing consumer-tech empire. I mean, you've got to be something of a high-profile jackass for The Simpsons to devote and entire episode B-plot to punking you out, and since company culture often reflects the personality of its executive leadership, it's little wonder that Apple has a long and glorious history of getting sued by unlikely people. (Carl Sagan? Seriously?)

Still, it takes a special man and a special company to wage a three-decades-long trademark war with The Beatles. The core of this dispute (pun intended) is that the holding company for most of The Beatles' intellectual property is Apple Corps, which felt that Jobs' and Steve Wozniak's fledgling little tech concern was treading on their trademark turf. This dispute was settled in 1981 when Apple Computer paid Apple Corps $80,000 and promised not to enter the music business. So long as there was a clear separation between which company made tech and which company made (or, rather, licensed) music, everything was cool.

Then, in 1986, Apple started integrating MIDI synthesizer chips into their computers, a trend that culminated in the Apple IIGS line of desktops. To Apple Corps thinking, this was a breach of the settlement, so the Beatles IP-holder sued Apple Computer again. And won. And killed the IIGS line, along with any direct hardware integration of synthesizer or music-mixing tech into Apple computers.

Now, as they say, it was on.

Apple resented the Beatles for nixing its foray into sound tech, and Apple Corps was watching Apple Computer like a hawk for any sign that Steve Jobs' company was treading anywhere near music industry territory. It got so bad inside Apple Computer that the company's legal department had to sign off on any system sounds that may or may not be interpreted as "excessively musical."

Thus it came to be that in 1991 former Apple sound designer Jim Reekes created a little file that has been in every Mac OS since System 7 -- one intended in part as a subtle, secret kiss-off to Apple Corps and their legal representatives for all the inconvenience their litigious oversight caused Apple Computer developers.

So, what secret F-U to the Beatles (or, at least, their lawyers) has been hidden in the Mac OS for almost 20 years?

The answer is the sosumi system chime, which -- when you think about -- is a name that sounds an awful lot like "so sue me." (Here's what the actual sosumi file sounds like. If you've ever powered on a Mac, this will seem very familiar.) Back in 1990, Apple Computer's legal department was so terrified of an Apple Corps lawsuit that it had previously instructed the aforementioned Jim Reekes to rename a component of (and thus massively rewrite) the sound manager API from noteCMD to frequencyCMD so as not to imply any musical application -- literally an Orwellian rewrite of computer code. Thus, when Apple legal followed up to tell him he couldn't have a sound file called chime, Reekes was primed for some sarcastic vengeance.

His first instinct was to call the file Let It Beep as a dig at the Fab Four's classic "Let It Be." Unfortunately, even the most obtuse company lawyer would probably note the sarcasm evident in such a file name, so Reekes went to plan B -- a snarky homophone. He came up with the sosumi filename and claimed it was a meaningless Japanese term, which got it past all the legal eagles. Thus, the chime file snuck its way into Mac System 7, and it's been carried over into every subsequent Macintosh operating system since, including Snow Leopard.

Now, this is hilarious and all, but no doubt some of you are asking how it is that Apple Computer was banned from the music business but somehow started printing billions of dollars in profit thanks to iPods and iTunes. Simple: Apple Computer offered to buy off Apple Corps for $1 million, and the Beatles IP-holder refused. So Apple went and made iTunes and iPods anyway, and promptly got sued by Apple Corps.

Only this time, Apple Computer won.

Basically, a British judge ruled that Apple Computer wasn't printing any physical music media with Beatles content or Apple Corps logos on it, so there was not breach of settlement. Computer files don't count. Defeated, Apple Corps has since accepted a full buyout of its own trademarks by Apple computer, which Apple Computer now licenses back to Apple Corps. In the end, Steve Jobs actually got the Beatles estate to pay him to use a logo they had first. And they wonder how it is that the iPod is kicking the Zune's ass in the marketplace.

In related news, The Beatles music catalogue is now available on Rock Band, but still not on iTunes. We'll see how long it takes Darth Jobs to win on that front, too.

SOURCES

TELL ME I'M WRONG
After years of writing trivia columns I've come to embrace the fact that almost everyone reading these things is smarter than me, which is why you always seem to find omissions, mischaracterizations, and outright screw-ups in my work. And like all great businessmen, I intend to profit from my own ignorance and sloth by inviting you, the reader, to call me out on these entertaining little glitches in each Truly Trivial column. The responder with the smartest, best-sourced, and/or most amusing gotcha will earn a place of honor in the subsequent column by having his/her/its comment highlighted next week in this space, along with an excuse, rebuttal or (more likely) half-hearted mea culpa from me. Yes, that is your sense of self-importance rising to the bait. Don't fight it. I dare you.

Nerd Word of the Week: Noosphere

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:00:00 +0000

Noosphere (n.) - Intellectual term for the sphere of human thought, and/or a medium of exchange for all human ideas and knowledge. Sometimes used as a metaphorical synonym for cyberspace, the Internet. The related terms Noocene and noocracy refer to the era when humans became self-aware and began improving themselves though idea sharing, and a system of government that directly acknowledges and harnesses this awareness, respectively.

The noosphere is a recurring plot device in science fiction, perhaps most notably in The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, which saw noospheric weapons ravaging human civilization by permantly erasing ideas, and in the anime/manga series Neon Genesis Evangelion, in which several characters sought to make the noosphere a tangible reality.

I bring it up because: Eighteen years ago today, the first version of Linux kernel was released to the Internet. This led to a revolution in software development and the publication of two seminal essays by Eric S. Raymond: "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and "Homesteading the Noosphere." The former deals with top-down versus grassroots software engineering and commerce. The latter discusses the possibility and preconcpetions of actually owning and profiting from ideas in an era when said ideas can be massively, instantly, and freely exchanged via the Internet. The noosphere is thus an overlap concept between science and science fiction, wherein this collective intelligence of humanity is simultaneously a philosophical construct, a sociological phenomenon, and economic force, and a buzzword-compliant synonym for the Web. Plus, if you know how to spell and pronounce noosphere, you've got instant nerd-cred.

Goodbye Written Weird, hello Jay Garmon dot Net

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:40:00 +0000

Image by 1541 via Flickr

Last night, my colleague Jason Falls gave a presentation on the importance of maintaining your personal brand online. Among his key points of advice was owning your own domain name. Unfortunately, most of the valuable versions of my name as a domain have been on backorder for months or years (stupid GoDaddy auto-renew).

Rather serendipitously, JayGarmon.net finally came through this morning. As such, the Written Weird is no more -- or won't be by this weekend, when the DNS propagation is complete. (For the record, JayGarmon.com is owned by a State Farm agent in Russell Springs, KY -- no relation -- and I don't expect I'll ever get that URL.) Going forward, this site will be known as Jay Garmon [dot] Net. Yes, I totally cribbed the title styling from Wil Wheaton. The change is largely cosmetic, intended mostly for SEO and branding purposes. Blogger will auto-redirect all the old link equity, and since Google owns Blogger, I'm told that little to any PageRank damage will be incurred. We'll see.

In any case, the content of this site will remain the same. Moreover, the fact that my URL came through just before I relaunched my personal trivia column is a tasty piece of happy. With any luck, I'll have the new DNS situation squared before I appear on TechTalk radio this weekend. Sometimes, things just go right.

Getting back into the trivia game

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:15:00 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

I've been out of the trivia game since April of this year, when my new job at Techtarget forced me to give up my eight-years-running Geek Trivia column at TechRepublic. (Seeing as how my new employer is a direct competitor with the old one, this was hardly an unreasonable employment request.) It was a sad, difficult thing to give up a column that was in many ways the axis of my online identity, but it was also a bit of a relief. Eight years in the same gig without a significant break left me a bit burnt out on trivia columns.

Still, after four months off, I've got the trivia bug again. My Nerd Words columns haven't sated my trivia needs. So, I'm getting back in the game. A week from today -- September 22, 2009 -- I'm going to started doing weekly trivia posts again. Every Tuesday, 10:00 am Eastern, look for a new trivia column in this space. With any luck, I've not quite lost the touch for fun factoids. And if it proves to be as fun and rewarding as my last trivia gig, I just might be at it for another eight years.

So who is this 'Jay Garmon' jerk...?

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:00:00 +0000

Greetings, potential cyber-stalkers! You've reached this page in all likelihood by following a link from one of the various obscure and irresistible outposts I haunt throughout the intarweebs. (That, or Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button just totally hosed you.) Now that you're here, I suppose you want to know just who is this Jay Garmon jerk I've been hearing about?

The answer is far geekier than you ever could have dreamed.

I, Jay Garmon (or, to hear my parents of the federal government tell it, Jared Matthew Garmon) am a professional geek. Specifically, I am a writer, husband & father, social media consultant, science fiction nerd, self-professed trivia expert and general Internet addict. Each of these aspects is entertained at different venues around the Web, as listed below.

Social Media Consultant: First and foremost, I have somehow conned my way into being a board member of the Social Media Club of Louisville, a non-profit group that advocates for new technologies and their use for the betterment of communication and society at large. Mostly, we have nerd get-togethers and pontificate about the future of online discourse, commerce, and tech. For reasons defying understanding, the SMC'ville founders assumed I'd be good at that sort of thing, and placed me in a very minor leadership role. I speak regularly on social media and emerging technologies at both SMC Louisville meetings and to external organizations, not the least of which is an ongoing Social Media marketing program at the University of Louisville. (They have their own Facebook page.) I also, upon occasion, develop social media strategies and tactics for businesses, for which I am also occasionally paid.

Writer: This post is hosted on Jay Garmon [dot] Net (formerly known as The Written Weird), which is my personal blog where I pontificate on whatever topics interest me with very irregular frequency. You can also find herein copies of my science fiction short stories that I have "trunked," which is a euphemism for "given up on trying to publish." Yes, I have written other sci-fi shorts, but those I'm actually still trying to get into print. If that ever happens, expect the first announcement to appear on JayGarmon.net along with a copious overuse of exclamation points and bragging to my writers group. As to writing work for which I am actively paid, look no further than my LinkedIn profile, and you'll see I've made my living in whole or in part by stringing together words for CNET, CBS Interactive, Scholastic Library Publishing, and TechTarget, among others. But that's all non-fiction, so it doesn't count.

Husband & Father: Check out my Flickr photo stream, which is almost entirely dedicated to my daughter, wife, family, and friends, in that order, with each respective subject's photo volume descending logarithmically. I also have the requisite Facebook page, but--fair warning--I won't be joining your mafia wars, trivia quizzes, or 25 Things memes. I'm there to stay connected, not beat your high score in Scrabulous.

Science Fiction Nerd: For several years, I was the host of The Geekend, a nerd culture blog at TechRepublic, a Web community for IT professionals run by CBS Interactive. Predating the Geekend is Geek Trivia, a weekly (ahem) geek trivia column that I wrote for nearly eight years. Both the Geekend and Geek Trivia remain archived online, and have been cited by sources as diverse as author John Scalzi to the editors of Wikipedia. Most of what I would have written for Geekend ends up on the Written Weird today--most notably in my Nerd Words column--but you can always go back and see where my online writing career truly began. I also help run a local science fiction convention and make appearances at various local geek meetups, should you be overcome with an urge to stalk me.

Self-Professed Trivia Expert: As a successor to Geek Trivia I now write the Truly Trivial column here at JayGarmon.net, wherein I throw a few hundred words at an obscure factoid that very possibly only I find fascinating. For reasons beyond understanding, other people are entertained by this. Also quite inexplicably, the kind and talented hosts of the TechTalk radio show on WRLR 98.3 FM in Chicago have me on as a regular guest and there I prattle away about movies, science fiction, technology, current events and ... eventually ... provide a geek trivia question each week. If you're game for a listen, you can tune in each Saturday at 11:00 am Eastern via the live video stream (where you won't see me, because I appear by phone) or just download the podcast via iTunes. I usually show up about ten minutes into the show and they hang up on me less than fifteen minutes later, so plan your listening accordingly.

General Internet Addict: Perhaps the most holistic view of my life as the Prince of Dorkness can be divined from my Twitter stream. I've also got a minor (read: mostly neglected) presence on a host of other online communities and services, and the best way to cyber-stalk me everywhere is just to follow my Profilactic profile.

In the unlikely event you would like to retain my services as a consultant, writer, speaker, radio guest, conference/convention panelist, or one-shot dungeon master, you can reach me at jay [at] jaygarmon [dot] net. Depending on the job, I can be be had for very free or very not. Pitch me, and we'll talk.

Nerd Word of the Week: 5G War

noreply@blogger.com (Jay Garmon) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:30:00 +0000

Image by Army.mil via Flickr

5G war (n.) - Also known as 5GW, fifthgen war or fifth generation modern warfare. Any of several theoretical successors to fourth-generation modern warfare, which describes the primary strategies and tactics of a new type of conflict, particularly one that is indisputably superior to the previous generation. It is becoming the preferred buzzword for imagined futuristic conflicts, supplanting previous trope-words like hyperwar or infowar.

What exactly constitutes 5G War is up for debate, which is part of the reason it's slowly starting to catch on in the sci-fi set, as it can give the appearance of authenticity to a mil-SF work without actually contradicting any canonically established sources. 5G war is generally imagined to involve guerilla tactics enhanced by modern consumer communications technology and/or cyberattacks, but it's a good bet that as other techno-fads come and go, they'll make appearances under the 5G war banner as well.

I bring it up because: Friday is the eighth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, which thrust the concept of fourth generation, assymetric warfare into the public consciousness. As the world continues to grapple with the various implications of that tragedy, science fiction does likewise, helping us prepare for future conflicts by imagining impossible ones.