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(Picture from here.)
As I sit here and write this on 12/14/2020, the last few electors in the electoral college are voting. The last few states are Hawaii, California and Oregon-- another 66 electoral votes, officially making Biden president-elect.
This is not news. We've known this for a month, right? Yet, people have been screaming themselves blue in the face that the election must have been stolen.
Why?
I've gone over a whole lot of documents in the last month trying to figure out what evidence in this world could possibly allow anyone to hold on to this conclusion. There isn't any.
There's only one word for it: magical thinking.
I'm not going to go into why or how people are subscribing to this particular thread of magical thought. The reason it's magical is that it has no basis in evidence. It's the same thing as "alternative facts"-- facts that are not facts but support a particular conclusion.
The fundamental assumption in science is that the universe is there when we close our eyes. It exists independently of us. Evidence is the mortal enemy of theory. The hypothesis, theory, idea, and philosophy may be beautiful but if they are disputed by facts then, in science, they are junk.
This is not to say people don't ignore facts all the time-- think of that person not wearing his seatbelt. Or insistent he's just fine to drive with a .08% blood alcohol. Or the pilot next to you who utters those horrifying words, "watch this."
We are biased in interesting ways. I read once Michael Shermer noting in an article that none of our primitive ancestors ever died mistaking an empty bush for one with a tiger behind it. While many of our ancestors did die doing the opposite. It skews our reasoning.
Now, human beings are incredibly creative creatures. We are able to create completely out of whole cloth complete civilizations, languages, people, and animals that never breathed a breath. We will die in service of rules inscribed by people who died thousands of years ago.
Our primitive ancestors must have had similar abilities-- that caveman over there, Thog, always thinks a tiger is behind that rock. He never went near it. All of us thought he was a loon until Doug got killed. Now, we never go near the rock unless it's to toss flowers to appease the tiger.
That said, our ancestors were evidence based-- they had to be. Sure, they might venerate Tiger Rock but they didn't venerate every rock-- otherwise they'd starve. If their imagination got too bright on them, the world showed them what was real. The world didn't mind. As long as we weren't imaginative to the point we got eaten by that tiger, we could be as imaginative as we want.
And it served us well. Spears, art, song, dancing-- all sorts of fun things provided we didn't get so absorbed that the Tiger ate us.
Our imagination was a selective advantage for us and nature helped us keep it in check.
But we invented agriculture and civilization-- a mechanism of survival that didn't punish us if we lived to deep in our own heads. Now, imagination-- think culture-- was unchecked by the natural world. It was checked only by our own imagination. Think foxes and hen houses.
As civilization as progressed, the consequences for mistaken imagination for reality have gotten weaker and weaker to the point where they are new pretty much unchecked. While the rewards for it have steadily increased. A man can stand up and tell complete and utter falsehoods and not only suffer no consequence but instead have people cry out his name in messianic fervor.
I haven't spoken all that much about the problems facing us. Things like global warming, income inequality, the concentration of power, the fact there are more guns than people in this country and probably on the order of 60 billion rounds of ammunition. (See here.)
We can't even begin to consider this a problem unless we realize what facts actually are. Being an adult means accepting a fact you don't like. A lot of us woke up in November, 2016 having to accept a fact we didn't like. Bummer.
So for those out there that didn't like the November result and today's electoral college election.
Sorry, man. Bummer.
The print book is available here:
Go get 'em, champs.
(Picture from here.)
I am so tired of being... well, tired. I'm tired of spent hacks trying desperately to hold on to power. Tired of one side being outraged at the other only to find the other side just as outraged. I'm tired of people paying no attention to facts. I'm tired of hearing over and over how we are all doomed in one way or another.
(Pick a doom! Any doom! Global Warming! Economic Collapse! Democracy Destroyed! Famine! War! Disease! Can't win (or lose) unless you pick!)
So: Today I'm just going to talk about interesting and positive things. And because I want to keep away from the current environment as much as possible, I'm going to talk about space. I could have talked about things deep in the isolated Amazon but that goes back into doom again.
Starting with dinosaurs. (It's space. I promise.)
There's been a long discussion as to whether the mammals were destined to take over the dinosaur niches without the Chicxulub Impactor thoroughly making those discussion academic. Some scientists thought that dinosaurs were on the way out anyway. Others thought differently. A new study has come out that suggests that dinosaurs were still going to retain championship status on earth not only if the meteor had not struck, but even if the meteor had been 30 seconds late. See here, here, and here. It's not that the dinosaurs were unlucky. It's that mammals (us) were incredibly lucky.
There's still a lot of mystery in space. The most recent Scientific American's lead article was about all the different kinds of supernovae. Astronomers see a lot of interesting structures that are the result of some past event but it's hard to figure out what. It's like seeing the car wreck and trying to figure out if a squirrel ran in front the driver to cause it. That is, if there are no witnesses left and you don't really have a wrecked car but instead more an interesting pile of rust.
One of these relics is the Blue Ring Nebula. (Picture above.)
The BRN is a ring visible in the far ultraviolet. Why the UV? Why only UV? Why the ring? What happened?
For a long time the BRN was thought to be supernova remnant but ultimately that didn't make sense as there were, really, two rings, one more visible than the other.
Finally, the group studying the BRN has a working theory. The BRN is the product of two stars merging. A few thousand years a sun-sized star orbited with a smaller companion star. As they grew closer, the smaller companion siphoned material from the large one, forming a disk. Eventually, however, the smaller companion was absorbed by the larger one, launching a cloud of debris into space in two cones. One of those cones is aimed at earth-- hence the ring structure. When the debris cone struck the interstellar medium, it caused hydrogen to glow in the far UV.
Very cool. See here.
It took Voyager 1 thirty-five years to leave the solar system and escape into interstellar space. The fact that we have a problem in the interstellar medium is very good. The fact that Voyager wasn't designed to do it and can't, therefore, do a good job is not so good. It's not surprising, then, that there is some effort trying to figure out how to get a probe out there. New Horizons is on its way to the medium (See here.) It's about 47AU out. Voyager 1 left at 94 AU and Voyager 2 at 84 AU. NH has detected the slowing of the solar wind. NH is planned to cross the Termination Shock boundary in the mid-2020s but that's still a long way from actual interstellar space. And it's still not an actual interstellar medium probe-- it was designed to look at Pluto.
So: how do we get a probe into the interstellar medium without waiting forever.
The answer might be a solar powered rocket.
The idea is fairly simple. Take your probe insanely close to the sun. Heat onboard helium to lunatic temperatures. Use it as propellant.
Nothing could be simpler, right?
Well, except for the part where nearly every material known degrades to plasma under these circumstances.
The Parker Solar Probe, though, is approaching that problem for different reasons. At its closest approach, the PSP will be four million miles from the Sun's surface and going a blistering 430,000 mph. (See here.) But the PSP did a lot of gravity assists to get to that point and is intended to have a long elliptical orbit-- much like the Juno orbiter.
The Interstellar Probe needs only a modest a modest 200,000 mph but it has to accelerate to that speed from 30k mph and do it in one swoop. So it has to get much closer-- 1 million miles. Four times closer which means 16 times the radiation and heat. (Pesky inverse square law.) Also, there are solar events that are local to the sun like snapping magnetic fields and local prominences. I don't know how far they extend but at some point not only does the quantity of the environment change, the quality does, too.
But all that is moot without propulsion. Not only does our Interstellar Probe have to use a maneuver to pick up speed on a close orbit about the sun, it has to use an engine to pack a lot of horse power.
Well, there's this huge fusion power plant just ready to help. And Jason Benkoski has built a prototype.
Interstellar medium, prepare to be probed.
I'm going to close with China's lunar probe but before that, check out these links:
Both of these are methodologies to get oxygen on Mars and the Moon.
Finally, the Chang'e-5 probe.
I have been in favor of a return to the Moon for pretty much ever. It's the stepping stone for the rest of the solar system. I know a lot of people want to go Mars Direct but I think that's the direction of failure. It's like Germany deciding that instead of invading Poland, they should start with invading Brazil. The Moon is close. It has good power. It has oxygen (see above.)
The western world has been going about doing various things on the Moon. (I'm looking at you, Lunar Orbiter.) But it seems to me that there's a slipshod shot gun approach. China seems to have a well thought out plan that doesn't change from election to election.
The most recent example of this is Chang'e-5.
The Chang'e-5 is intended to land, take samples, and leave instrumentation behind. The ascender then returns those samples to Earth. It's exciting for a lot of reasons-- not the least of which is that the Chang'e-5 is bringing back samples of ancient Moon rather than the more recent Moon of the Apollo missions.
China made no secret that this mission, and their other missions, are part of a larger effort to first create a lunar research station with human beings and eventually a colony. (See here.)
This is a good thing.
I'm not worried about an dropping rocks on the earth like in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I'm not even worried about a China Moon. Over time, colonies with long supply lines to the parent country have a tendency towards independence. It would be great to see Hong Kong Luna next to Lunar Boston and Tycho Paris.
What I'd like to see is this challenge interpreted as a means to get a consolidated, well thought out, forward thinking plan created and stuck to.
But in the meantime, I'll settle for China Moon.
I was thinking about many different topics for this blog. Some of them were political. Notably about there not being acceptance of voting reality. Or maybe the about Moderna's new vaccine-- or an even more nano-particle vaccine that does exceedingly well in mice.
I tried. I really did.
But all of these things are tied together and whenever I pulled on one thread it unraveled back to things that depressed me and I felt like clutching my dog and weeping for my homeland.
No. It has to be better than that.
So I'm going to talk about failure.
A kiridashi knife is a Japanese utility knife. (Though I have seen this knife in use in Chinese images.) They have different styles. Many of them are straight on both top and bottom with a steep, straight edge. The bevel of the knife is only on one side, like a chisel. It is used in wood carving and bamboo work. I have also seen it used in the kitchen.
The last knife I made from a file. I liked the heaviness of the resulting blade. It had a nice heft. There was some of the file steel left so I decided to use that.
The file was the back portion where the file tapers down to a point. This is where one would fasten a handle.
The last knife had a scale handle. This means it was two slices of wood with the knife blade sandwiched between. It was made with apple wood. I liked the look of the wood, though it's a strange wood to work with. The apple wood I've been working with is from thick branches. Consequently, I'm working both with the outer section of the branch and the inner sapwood. This is an interesting combination. It means that some of the wood is hard as hell and cuts nicely while other portions are softer and have a tendency to turn granular. It results in a very nice look but is a bit difficult.
But I didn't want a scale handle for this knife. For one reason, because it tapered to a point, there was no way to have scales all the way back. For another, I wanted to try to chisel out a seat for the blade.
After all, I didn't have enough opportunities to mess this up. I needed more.
My plan was to shape the blade with an angle grinder and then create the one sided bevel on the belt sander. Then, I would make the handle, fit the blade into it. Shape the handle and I was done, right?
Ha.
Shaping the blade turned out to be the easy part. I've been using the angle grinder for a while now and I've gotten okay with it. The biggest problem is to not destroy the hardness of the blank by overheating. I was careful. Then, I heated the blade at about 450F for a couple of hours to lower the temper a little bit. Now, the blade was normal knife toughness and hardness instead of file harness and brittleness. This would make it easier to work with.
Putting the bevel on the blade was a challenge.
I had built a holder for it but it turned out I had made it too small. Or at least, not big enough in the right way. Most knives have a long bevel leading up to the point. But the kiridashi has a very steep, straight angle. So the bevel holder I had made didn't have enough to grip. It took a bit, but finally I fashioned a set of clamps to hold it and put the bevel on. Clearly, I need to build a new tool.
I ended up with a very pretty blank. This is where things started to go wrong.
I first was going to drill into the end of the apple wood and fit the blade into the shaft that way. But the shape was so odd I didn't trust it. Instead, I opted to cut the apple wood in half, chisel out the space for the blade and glue it back together. Using the Taymor Rule (From Julie Taymor where she says don't try to hide infrastructure, use it as part of the effect) I decided to put an ebony powder epoxy to glue the two pieces together, giving a black line.
First mistake: the apple wood cylinder wasn't even and I ended up a with an angle. Okay. I can adapt.
Then, I chiseled out the section and realized that because the two halves were uneven, I couldn't chisel out half the section. There was some fraction of the space for the blade that could be in one section and then in the other. I remeasured and found, luckily, that the offset was close enough to the thickness of the blade that I could chisel out one side and not the other. Yay!
I glued the two sections together and scraped off the excess. I wanted a cylindrical handle-- I'd seen pictures of this and liked the utilitarian look. But where the handle ended on the blade was uneven and the wrong shape. So I had to cut that out. I used a cylindrical sanding drum to cut it down to where I wanted it. I tried to protect my beautiful, shiny blade but I failed at it. There are a multitude of scratches and dings on the blade.
I also tried to use a brass rod as both ornamentation and to hold the two halves of the handle together. I messed up here, too. I didn't get them lined up straight. I messed up a hole.
I finished the handle and tried to sand off the dings but they were too much. Eventually, I gave up and decided to chalk it up to experience.
Then, I discovered I had made a left handed kiridashi.
Because the kiridashi has a one sided bevel, there is a preferred side to cutting. Things cut are pushed away from the blade on the bevel side. One wants to cut with the bevel facing away from the wielder. Since I had put the bevel on the left side, the preferred direction of cut is to the left side. A right handed wielder is cutting with the objects cut being pushed towards the chest and face.
So: I had not only messed up the implementation of the knife I had also messed up its intended use.
That's a pretty well failed knife.
You don't learn to do new things without failure. Heck, people fail even when they know what they're doing. (I'm looking at you, Star Wars Episode One.) What's important is how to handle failure.
Bobby Duke, an artist whose work I follow, built a truly amazing sculpture only to have it fall and shatter while being photographed. (See here.) In that case, the execution and design was spectacular and the loss was from something stupid. A different kind of failure. He posted later how he was handling it and how he would take it make from it something even more awesome. That is a good handling of failure.
So what do I take from this?
In the case of the knife, I know what I did wrong-- I have a few ideas how to mitigate my own inadequacies in these techniques. I'm still scratching my head on some of them.
More importantly, I want to make another kiridashi. I liked the knife, even though in all estimations it's a failure. Some parts were pretty. The idea is sound. I just failed at it. That's all.
Failing happens all the time. Denying it doesn't change it. Denying it only makes it impossible to learn and to make something better. If you can't fail, you can't succeed.
Back when I was learning to fly, I found it difficult. I kept messing up. A helicopter pilot friend of mine said that was a good thing. She said I was learning all of the potential failures. I would recognize this if these ever happened while I was flying. If it all came easy to me, I would never learn beyond the normal case. I would never learn the failure case-- the case that kills you.
I'm not enthusiastic about failing. I'm a human, after all. But I can learn from it.
And maybe I can learn to cut my tomatoes left handed.
That book is Jackie's Boy, shown at left.
Jackie's Boy is a novelization of the novella that came out in 2010. I was asked by an editor of a publications house to extend it to a novel At first, I couldn't figure out how to do that. Then, I did.
But the moment had passed. Between the time the editor approached me and I reapproached him, his ability to command publication had reduced. Or, at least, that's how he presented it to me.
Jackie's Boy, the novel, has languished without a home.
Until now. On 12/15/2020, it is released.
You can pre-order JB as an ebook at Amazon, B&N, Kobo and Apple.
It's coming out as a print book from Amazon and B&N but I have no links for it as yet. I'll update when I have links.
So, to both my readers, go and get my new book. Make me proud.
Okay. It's the pandemic. It's been a godawful long time. I just saw one of my best friends, in person, for the first time in seven months. If you can call it that. We were both masked. We stood six feet apart and made grotesque long distance hugging motions at one another.
Who am I kidding? It was the best moment I'd had for months with someone who wasn't living inside my house. Of course, it was the only good moment I'd had for months with someone who wasn't living inside my house.
That said, there are some really good diversions on youtube.
(Yes. I've been watching a lot of it. For one thing, the news sections pops up effectively in headlines so I can be depressed without the horrid experience of actually watching the news. Small mercies.)
So: these have been good at getting me through the night.
In no apparent order...
We got into fishing in a big way this year. It's outside. It's doing something. We can spend some time together outside doing something. It's fairly easy to maintain social distance.
I mean it would be great if I actually caught fish. Wendy and Ben did. Turns out fried fish fresh from the lake is pretty good.
RF fishes a lot and has a lot of videos. He shows you what he does. He shows you when it works and when it doesn't. There's a lot of "doesn't" in his show. He usually catches a fish eventually but you get to watch him cast six or eight or forty times before that happens. This is endearing to me since I cast a lot and don't catch many fish.
It's also true RF isn't proud. If he can't catch bass, he'll catch bluegill. Pretty much anyone can catch a bluegill. Bluegill range from not very big to extremely small. But RF likes them all.
In all his videos I only saw him keep a few fish.
On the con side, he really has some very good spots down there in Tennessee. Wendy and I are looking at a bunch of shad feeding. RF tosses a hook into the swarm and hooks one and then uses it for bait.
We stop at the shad feeding point. We never see that.
Scishow is great for 8 or 10 or 20 minute discussions about interesting scientific things. This can be the evolution of sharks or the nature of the Big Bang Theory. (The scientific theory. Not the show.) The hosts don't dumb it down but they don't bludgeon you with math either.
There are several hosts but one (whose name escapes me) looks a whole lot like Peter Dinklage if PD were six feet tall. Being lectured to about science by Peter Dinklage is far from the worst thing in the world.
That said, the only thing that would make Scishow better is if it really were hosted by Peter Dinklage.
I would love that.
Joe Scott has two basic video blogs. One about science ("Answers with Joe") and one about his emotional state. ("TMI") Both are fun.
Answers with Joe is Joe Scott trying to figure out science and technology and explaining what he's found out to the viewer. This can be a lot of fun since he is not a scientist but does have a real drive to get it right. He's also the first to admit when he runs off the edge of his understanding.
TMI on the other hand is Joe trying to make sense of his life and this current world situation. It's very personal and, frankly, I don't listen to it as much as I listen Answers. There are some real nuggets here, though. For example, he did one TMI where he wondered if social media is a possible Great Filter.
(The Great Filter is one of the hypotheses on why we're not hearing lots of conversation from out there. The idea is that there is some kind of event, probably self-generated, that prevents a species from getting off planet and getting out there riling things up.)
Hijinks ensued.
As both of my readers know, I've been experimenting with making knives. I have Outdoors55 to thank for this. I mentioned him earlier, though not by name. (See here.) It was his video that made things understandable enough to me so that I could try it.
Outdoors55 has a particular point of view on everything he does. It's extremely practical. For example, the video I watched about making a knife said, basically, make a knife from a file because the file is already heat treated. In another video, he built a tiny forge out of four bricks and a couple of torches. It's a very serviceable forge for tempering a knofe and it costs about six bucks.
A lot of very good advice that I'm probably not smart enough to take.
I cannot say enough good things about this site. OSP has two hosts: Red and Blue. Red talks about fiction tropes and mythology. Blue talks about history. They make extremely interesting, extremely funny videos about what interests them.
There are also some serious ones, too. Red's Trope Talks are interesting and not particularly funny-- except that Red is funny just by herself.
I've seen them all.
She has the best take on Journey to the West I've ever seen. Also, her take on Lovecraft should be seen by everybody.
I found this one very recently and I have to say I'm in love. These are, really, flash fiction or short stories with fairly minimal illustration.
The video We're the Last Humans Left begins:
Or species probably began about two hundred thousand years ago and judging by the fucking state of us I think we can all agree it was a terrible idea.
Which gives you an idea how his nihilist side works. But that's not the only good thing about his material.
Letter to Marble 3 begins:
To our excellent friends of Marble 3. Congratulions on decoding this message from the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. You must be getting very clever. Don't ask us why it's written in your languages. Give us some credit. We're gone now. But we left this message behind for when you're ready to hear it.
It's a lovely, hopeful, and not terribly sentimental letter to us to keep trying to be better.
Which is pretty much all there is, isn't it?
Also called Betsy Lee.
This is a very strange site. There are a lot of different pieces to it. There are two main story lines: No Evil and Swingers Side Show Dance Club. The dance club story line is, sad to say, now defunct. It's worth watching but it ends abruptly.
No Evil is an entirely different kettle of fish.
Imagine meso-american mythology being told with the point of view of Appalachia.
No Evil is convoluted and mysterious. Several parts or flat out obscure-- you know that what is happening has a reason behind it but the reason is not forthcoming. It may never be forthcoming.
I'm fine with that. No Evil has interesting characters and a good plot. Some of the singing is heartbreakingly beautiful. (I'm looking at you episode 10.) It blends music and folk lore seamlessly.
Some singing, I think, is by the production team. Some comes from old recording.
The sense of it reminds me of the Grand Old Opry and other like music I heard when I was a child fifty or sixty years ago.
And that's it.
These are interesting sites. Things I like might not be things that you like but give them a whirl.
(Smilodon image from here.)
This is what used to be called Columbus Day. It is now called Indigenous Peoples Day.
People came to the "New World" at least 15,000 years ago. There is some evidence that they may have made it here as much as 20,000 years ago. Regardless, the ecology here was very different from where they had left. I am referring to the megafauna that were here for quite some time and seemingly disappeared about 11,000 years ago.
These were the animals living here when the Native Americans arrived.
When Columbus sailed into the Caribbean there were thriving populations of human beings already here. Some of the largest cities in the world were in the "New World"-- cities supported by agriculture without the aid of cattle or horses. Smarter people in that they had to be ingenious in different ways without domesticated large animals.
One wonders how North America might have turned out if humans had realized they could domesticate the horses and camels that were already here, long before they "old world" humans figured it out. SF writers: go for it.
The animals usually spoken of in this context are, besides the horses and camels, were mammoths, mastodons, smilodons, giant sloths, glyptodons (an armadillo on steroids), short faced bears, an American cheetah, a giant beaver, and the dire wolf. Many were much larger than equivalents at the same time in the "Old World." Of course, humans had fifty thousand years to take care of them.
My two favorites are smilodons and mastodons.
Smilodons were the saber toothed cats you saw in Ice Age. They ranged from medium cats coming in at 55-100 kg (Smilodon gracilis) up to 280 kg (S. fatalis). To give some comparison, modern lions top out at about 225kg. (BTW: there was a North American lion, Panthera atrox, that weighed as much as 420kg.)
These were extremely successful predators until they weren't. They hunted things like bison or camels-- one wonders if they left the really large herbivores to the American lion. No one knows if they hunted in packs or singly. But they arose 2.5 million years ago and came to an abrupt end along with all the others.
While smilodons were in the cat family, they were unrelated to tigers. They were no more a saber toothed tiger than a similarly named Tasmanian tiger. It would be interesting to know which was the apex predator: P. atrox of Smilodon. Most of the literature I read suggested Smilodon was an apex predator. However, it's hard for me to believe that when P. atrox is on the scene and twice as big. As far as I can tell, atrox had not abandoned its predator ways. Of course, without a precise knowledge of animal ranges, it's hard to tell. Smilodons might have been apex predators in locations not frequented by P. atrox.
Lions and Smilodons appear to have different strategies for killing. Smilodons sacrificed bite force for precision with their sabers. Where lions and their relatives developed significant jaw bones and muscles. This is one possible way they co-existed: different prey selection. However, one study suggested the dire wolf, Smilodon and atrox hunted the same prey, suggesting all three were in competition. I find this interesting. Unless there were a huge diversity and quantity of prey available to them, this could not have been permanent.
Let's move on to mastodons, the mammoth's less popular, scrappy little brother.
Mammoths get all the press with their curvy tusks and long hair. They're taller so they get all the attention.
Mastodons are smaller, flatter and have long, flat tusks. Mastodons ate rough fair: woody small trees and bushes. Mammoths were grazers and liked grass. Mastodons were everywhere, all over North America, Russia down into China and down into Viet Nam. Mammoths had a comparatively narrow range: a band in North America, northern Russia and China. Mammoths ranged further north than mastodons. Mastodons ranged much further south.
(Although, I think this opinion might be revised. There was a tremendous mammoth site found in mid-Mexico recently. Or maybe they just managed to get far enough south to reach the end of their range. Also, I'm including the range of all the mastodon species here, including some where the genus attribution is still under discussion.)
While mastodons have been depicted as hairy as their mammoth cousins, there's no evidence for this. Some studies have suggested they were more like elephants-- which might account for their relatively southern range. They looked more like elephants than mammoths but were only distantly related to either one.
One study of mastodon mitochondrial genomes suggests significant dispersion along with the glacial shifts. Different groups would migrate into new areas as the glaciers retreated and then get pushed into new locales as the glaciers returned. This pushed different groups together, isolated one group from another and mixed things up. All of this appears to be shown in the variation in mitochondrial DNA.
People have a tendency to come across a given place and presume that it's always looked like that. The state we initially encounter is what we think of as the natural state. Subsequent changes are compared against this natural state. When the Europeans came to Atlantic coast and found these huge forests, they thought that state was primal and without human intervention. Given that human beings had been there at least thirteen thousand years by that point, nothing could be further from the truth. Of course, the vast majority of Native Americans had been obliterated by European diseases and couldn't argue the point. (I strongly recommend reading 1491.)
The ecology of North America had been isolated from human beings for millions of years. The megafauna I mentioned above was integrated into that ecology. And disappeared virtually overnight.
Mastodons , like most of its elephantine relatives, were drivers of that ecology. (Another such driver was the beaver. I suggest reading Eager, an ecological analysis of the role of the beaver. But I'm not going to discuss that right now.) They, along with mammoths, had played that role for over two million years when glaciers came and went. Then, they were gone. Smilodons, gone. Giant sloths, gone. But the ecology they drove didn't disappear with them. It just stumbled along with great holes punched in it.
Herbivores-- especially giant herbivores-- exert a strong downward control on vegetation. (See here.) They limit the spread of trees and buses by eating them-- only a subset survive to become large. They can increase grasslands by knocking down or eating grass competitors. Elephants have been known to dig out waterholes when they extract minerals. The elephants go on their way but the waterholes remain. The vegetation responds. Some take advantage of the animals by using them for seed dispersal or pollination. Or just by using the enormous amounts of dung-- a mammoth might eat 300kg of food a day. That high quality fertilizer had to go somewhere.
Apex predators have a similar influence on the size of their prey. Predation is expensive. A predator can't end up expending more energy getting food than the energy that food will supply. So, large predators imply large prey. Not always-- baleen whales can be considered predators for the herring and krill they consume. But usually, on land, a large predator tends to hunt single relatively large prey animals rather than consuming many, many small animals. Again, not always-- this is a tendency, not a law. There has been some evidence that in the north country of Canada of wolves consuming large amounts of rodents. But those same wolves are also hunting deer and elk.
When predators get big, some of their prey get bigger to escape them. Very large predators escape them altogether and at that point the predators descend on their sick and young, leaving much of the population intact. Since, then, the predators go after smaller herbivores, they are, in effect, reducing the competition to large herbivores. Smilodon went after horses and camels-- mid-range, grass consuming herbivores. This left the field open to mammoths.
An interesting side effect of increase in size is this large increase in biomass. The consequence of that is ecological control. By "control" I do not mean the mastodons are sitting around figuring out their next move, I mean the population is interacting with the ecology towards a new equilibrium.
This study shows that dispersal of phosphorous (an essential mineral for life) was radically different in the megafauna age compared to now" "...we estimate that the extinctionof the Amazonian megafauna decreased the lateral flux ofthe limiting nutrient phosphorus by more than 98%, withsimilar, though less extreme, decreases in all continentsoutside of Africa." This resulted in a long term decrease in phosphorus all through the Amazon that is still ongoing.
The ecological implications of the megafauna extinction to parasites, micro-predators, medium predators and mega-predators are interesting. (See here.) The giant vampire bat (Desmodus draculae and D. stocki) were not able to switch prey and went extinct. Smilodons, the dire wolf and P. atrox went extinct-- which meant medium prey such as bison and elk had less predation until smaller predators stepped up.
The question always comes up: why did the megafauna go extinct?
One study suggests the shift towards megafauna was a response to ecological instability. This instability came to an end around 11k years ago and the result was that there came a selection against large megafauna in North America. Recently, as these systems equilibrated, the world evolved into "stripes"-- areas that had a reliable temperature and rainfall. These areas supported a different selection criteria for animal size. They suggest the extinction didn't happen suddenly but over the last 100k years as the ice age ceased and the climate stabilized. Thus, the "stripe" that allowed megafauna became sections of India and Africa and the temperate megafauna downsized to bison and cattle sized animals.
Humans might have played a role. The "overkill hypothesis" suggests the Clovis hunters with their superior technology were able to bring these large animals down. It's certainly true that mammoths and mastodons were hunted by human beings. While their great size proved an impediment to the larger predators, it did not seem to deter people. That said, it's unlikely that there were enough people in North America to directly hunt these animals to extinction.
However, it's also true that all of the megafauna species were under some stress. One idea was that humans hunted enough of the larger animals to shift the ecology and that shift served the final blow.
My own feeling is that humans pretty much devastate the landscape wherever they go. I suspect this is what they did to Neanderthals. Not so much kill them but leave the land barren enough to push them over the edge. There were no Neanderthals in North America, so we made do with the megafauna.
M novella, The Long Frame, will be on sale here at BVC today. Here it is. It's sort of my answer to consciousness upload fiction.
As I think about it, there's a substantial subgroup of my work that is, in part, a response to existing tropes and genres. Another example of this is The Secret Life of Fairy Tales. What happens is I get dissatisfied with standard treatments of a given idea and it festers until I know what it is that bothers me. At some point, I get a take on the idea that is congenial and I blend the take and the irritation into a story. Hopefully, I get something new.
As far as we were concerned, summer 2020 pretty much sucked.
We had a pretty severe drought. That was problem enough in the best of years. It put an enormous stress on our fruit trees as well as on the animals living in the surrounding forest. We've had a cherry tree on the corner of one of the espaliers since we built it. This year it bloomed and looked very nice and then promptly died in July. I haven't had the heart to cut it out yet. I will, of course. And seal it so that it doesn't crack. Then, maybe I'll make something of it. But I'll miss that tree.
We had one final plum of the original five plums we planted back when we started this project. The others all succumbed to black know. But this one was far enough away that I had hopes that it would escape that fate. It didn't. We had to cut it down, too.
We did get more apples this year than any previous year. That has been the gift that keeps on giving. I plan on harvesting the apples on one corner tree today. The Granny Smith apples aren't ready yet-- that tree has been trying my patience for a decade. This last winter I trimmed it severely. I'd think that paid off but the other apples also did well. Go figure.
We had a good peach harvest-- a couple of the young trees produced a few tasty fruit. The old standard produced its yearly bushel. Peach trees are supposed to last only a few years but that one has been going strong since 1994.
Good yield on the Cornelian Cherries.
This is all of the stuff that we'd have to discuss in normal times.
But these aren't normal times.
Wendy figured out this might be coming back in mid-January. (A tip to people out there. Marry smarter than you are. I did and it has never been anything but a blessing.) She had been following the news out of Wuhan for a few weeks. Her Ph.D. in biochemistry and microbiology didn't hurt, of course. When we went to Arisia, we attended a panel with the head epidemiologist for the State of Massachusetts and other like-qualified individuals. They talked about various things. In the Q&A, Wendy asked about the Wuhan corona virus. They all had this deer-in-the-headlights look.
She took this as a sign of Things to Come and we were apocalypti-shopping before February. We started our lock down with 150 pounds of flour in the basement and the freezer filled with meat and other things.
Which brings us to the problem of harvest. Usually, we freeze most of the harvest. This year we don't have the room. Instead, we canned the Cornelian Cherries and dried most everything else. But now it's time for the grapes. I've held off as long as I can and they have to be harvested today. My standard plan is to take the grapes, bag them up and freeze them. Then, later in the fall when it's cooler, I thaw the grapes and make the wine. The freezing frees up (IMHO) more flavor. Also, since I have to heat the grapes to thaw them, I can use any grapes that dried out. The water fills them out and they have more flavor. Otherwise, it's like putting grape-nuts into the wind.
Not this year. This year I have to process this directly. Which is an incredible pain.
It helps a little bit that the Concord grapes were severely overgrown and I cut them back, hard. Which means I don't have much in the way of harvest this year. Most times this would be bad. This year it's good.
It also doesn't help that the whole world is in the crapper. It seems like I'm walking around with a constant base level of depression. Wendy agrees. That slows us down. I'm working but it sometimes seems that's all I'm doing. Other things don't get finished, get done slowly or don't get started.
The garden properly got a little out of our control this year because of this. We got some basil and tomatoes and the squash harvest was good. Excellent beans. But the gem corn didn't work out. Nor did the cucumbers and other things.
As I said: 2020 sucked.
That said, there was a bit of brightness.
Back in the 80s I built a little cabin in Vermont. We've been going up there ever since. But in the last few years, between troubles at home, health issues and work, it got away from me. I pretty much gave up on it and we were looking to sell it.
Ben, my son, really likes the place. He has gone up several times this year both to quarantine himself when necessary and to get away from his folks. Lock down has its cost.
While he was up there he did some clearing. He returned and urged me and Wendy to go up and clear the place. The field that immediately surrounded the cabin had become forest.
So we went up there with chain saw and shears and cleared off the trees in the acre or so immediately surrounding the cabin. A neighbor of our (big shout out to Fred for this) came over with his tractor and mowed down the remainder. Where before there had been close forest, now there was an open field. Where before the air did not move through the close trees, now the wind blew over us.
It was like a load lifting from my heart. Suddenly, I could see the sky again. And the northern Vermont night sky is something to see.
2020 hasn't been all bad.
Once I had the knife about where I wanted it, I had to change the temper. Remember, the steel from which the file is made is hard. I wanted it tough.
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They asked several questions. Since these aren't going up on their blog, I thought I'd put them here.My father was an engineer with the heart of a poet. My mother was a writer with the heart of an engineer. So I became a science fiction writer. My day job is as a software engineer in aerospace. Right now I’m working on the Dream Chaser vehicle intended to supply the ISS.
Annie’s first, of course. For the ebooks, first would be bookviewcafe.com and second, Amazon. The print versions are available at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Annie’s is clearly the first choice.
I have a blog I keep up regularly. In addition, since I do most of my publishing with bookviewcafe.com, that’s a good place to go. They also have a newsletter.
I’m interested in how human beings navigate novel situations. Simple Things is a story collection so there is a broad swath of things that happen to people and how they deal with them. Welcome to Witchlandia looks at what is now called “paranormal” and back in the seventies was called “psionics” in the context of athletic or cognitive ability. It’s a crime novel. Crime novels are interesting in the way they allow you to take characters out of their comfort zone.
Welcome to Witchlandia is deeply embedded in both Boston, Massachusetts and Columbia, Missouri. (Part 1 is in Columbia. Parts 2 and 3 are in Boston.) Since the main character has the ability to fly, her ability comes under FAA rules. I’m a pilot and this was very interesting to me. However, I could only reference a few aspects of flight in the book. Simple Things is a story collection and covers a lot of ground. One story, Jackie’s Boy, involves a young boy and an intelligent elephant navigating a post-apocalyptic landscape. They end up at (or near) the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee. Given their environment, I couldn’t explore the sanctuary there. However, it is a wonderful place and I happily shout out to them now: www.elephants.com
I have a new novel, God’s Country, coming out in July. If you were to ask the question what do recreational drugs, the discovery of a higher beings, prostitution, cults and biochemistry have in common, the answer would be God’s Country.
I do a lot of woodworking and gardening. Like anything else, you have to make time for that which (or who) you love.
Music without words or words in a language I don’t know. I listen to a lot of Japanese pop music.
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