Glenn's Book of Quotes, Number Fourteen

“Direct your eye inward, and you'll find,
A thousand regions in your mind,
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be,
Expert in home-cosmography”
-- Henry David Thoreau

That, my friends, is the journey worth taking. Why seek without for wisdom when there are worlds yet unknown within? Since you are going to be living the rest of your life in your own head, you might want to figure out what's in there. Unless of course you've already looked and found it to be empty. Then by all means hit the road.

Mythmaker

Ursula K. Le Guin is a great writer. I don't throw the word great around easily. I don't mean that she is just really, really good. I mean that she is a national treasure. She writes science fiction and fantasy that deals with profound questions of life and death, culture, morality, and ethics. Her writing is deceptively simple yet always beautiful and frequently profound.

I guess you could say I'm a fan. But in my usual slow way I only now got around to reading the last (so far) of the Earthsea novels, The Other Wind. It's been about ten years since I read the previous novel, Tehanu, so I'm glad Le Guin was gentle with us forgetful readers and wove little reminders of past events into the plot. I would say that if you are new to the series you could read this one without getting lost, but you shouldn't do it. You should read A Wizard of Earthsea first. Really. Drop what you're doing and go get a copy.

The Other Wind introduces us to a young sorcerer, Alder, who comes to our old friend Ged for help. He has been having troubling dreams about his wife in the afterlife. He sees her, nightly, reaching to him across the wall that separates death from life. Ged does what he can for him and then sends him to the island of Havnor to see the king. There he meets Ged's wife Tenar and their daughter Tehanu. From that simple start Le Guin creates a tale about love, reconciliation, magic, dragons, and the meaning of life. In the process she completely re-works the mythical structure of Earthsea and it's concepts of death and existence. Mythopoetic fiction does not get much better than this. It is a wonderful finale to a great series.

Edit: Oh fer cryin' out loud! I misspelled "Ursula." What a knucklehead I be.

Other Owls, Number Two -- Spooky

If you grew up in the Boston area it is very likely that you've been to the Museum of Science. It was either that best day of the school year, the field trip, or you had parents that gave a damn (or if you were very lucky, both), but you've probably got the tour. You've sat in the Apollo capsule, seen feathers in a vacuum, measured yourself against the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and covered your ears when the Van de Graff generator started to pop. Amidst all the fun you may even have been given the gift of a little knowledge, a sense of wonder, and a curiosity about the cosmos.

If it has been a long time since you were on a field trip to the MOS, you may have had the good fortune to meet Spooky, a great horned owl. From the museum's opening in 1951 until his death in 1989 Spooky was the place's official mascot. He was an ambassador from the natural world and a teacher to thousands of children. I was a very little boy when I saw Spooky. His keeper brought him out to see us and he obligingly stretched his wings to show how big he was. I was greatly impressed. Spooky turned his head in that odd way that owls have. My eyes must have been wide. So were his, of course, and they seemed to see everything. The keeper told us about how owls hunt and how owls eat and all about owl pellets and such. Spooky stood on his perch, looking quite grand. He had heard all this before. He flapped his wings once, unexpectedly. The young audience shuddered. I like to think he was amused.Spooky was 38 years old when he died, which I am told is a record. He was a grand old bird, patient with children, and a good teacher. He may have done more good than he could have ever known.

Elementary My Dear Doctor

The other day I took a geeky trip down memory lane and re-watched my all-time favorite Doctor Who story, “The Talons of Weng-Chiang.” This is the good stuff; it's got all the elements. Set in Victorian London it's got great sets and costumes, wonderful characters, ridiculous references to unlikely future and past events, and elements of Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, The Phantom of the Opera, and Fu Manchu. It's got that same smart-cool vibe you got from The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (the book, not the silly movie). It also has the very worst special effects in Doctor Who history, and that's saying a lot. When the Doctor, dressed in deerstalker and Inverness coat, hunts a giant rat in the sewers beneath the great city, it is supposed to be scary. While you might start by thinking about the tale of Sumatra that Dr Watson never told us, you soon loose all thought to fits of laughter at the sight of the pathetic attempt to depict the mutant rodent.

That one flaw (and I wouldn't have it any other way) aside, this is still a great TARDIS trip. It includes my favorite supporting characters (Jago and Lightfoot), and my two favorite Doctor quotes.

Of Leela: “Savage. Found her floating down the Amazon in a hatbox.”
and
“Eureka is Greek for 'this bath is too hot.'”

One note of caution for the easily offended. Since part of the idea was to riff on Fu Manchu and other “yellow peril” genre fiction, there are a lot of stereotypical depictions of the servants of the evil Weng-Chiang. This story has been banned now and again, which is rather a pity.

Playing Doctor

I should like to prescribe a book to all of you who enjoy a good disease now and then. Whether you are an unlicensed medical professional or just an occasional hysteric, it will behoove you to read The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. Or perhaps it will ill behoove you, as it could just leave you with a literary infection.

The book, edited by medical scholars Jeff Vandermeer and Mark Roberts, purports to be the 83rd edition of Dr Lambshead's extraordinary collection of outré ailments. It includes such entries as “Ballistic Organ Syndrome,” “Jumping Monkworm,” “Logopetria,” “Third Eye Infection,” and the dreaded “Printer's Evil.” Each entry was provided by a different medical luminary. Among the biggies are Dr Alan Moore, Dr China Miéville, Rev Michael Moorcock, and Dr Cory Doctorow.

My favorite article was “Diseasemaker's Croup,” presented by Dr Neil Gaiman. It was such a startlingly clever and well written piece that it plunged me into the depths of depression, from which I am only now recovering. Let me explain. As I was reading the book I thought to myself “what a charming literary jest this is – how very clever – I wonder what sort of thing I could come up with that might fit in with this genteel madness?” Then I read Gaiman's entry. It was so well and imaginatively written that I immediately despaired of ever writing something with that much wit. Devastating

The book also includes excerpts from past editions, stories about the great Dr Lambshead himself, and an outline of the secret medical history of the twentieth century. Invaluable for the researcher specializing in nonsense, it is illustrated throughout.

A word to the people at Bantam Books. Use better glue. Pages should not separate from the spine on the first read. Unless . . . perhaps my volume suffers from a mutation of Printer's Evil. Excuse me, I think I need to wash my hands.

Charles N. Brown, R.I.P.

Sad news today. Charles N. Brown, founder, publisher, and editor of Locus Magazine, the newspaper of the science fiction field, passed away on Sunday. Since its inception in 1968 Locus has won 29 Hugo awards, which must be a record. I read Locus for many years. In time my interest in the subject faded somewhat, but my admiration for Mr. Brown and his magazine never dimmed.

Nerdgasm

Mythbusters will test Kirk's anti-Gorn cannon. Yesss. Grant rocks.

Happy World Population Day!

I love this official United Nations poster. Great message: overpopulation rocks! Yeah! Party on!

I'm not sure the UN is taking the problem seriously. We continue to breed like bunnies and those of us still alive are selfishly choosing to maintain that status. Today I would like to recommend a book that provides one practical solution to this challenge. Check it out.

Is the Sky Falling?

I felt the need to be controversial. I wanted to stir the pot, to get some argument going, to tick a few people off. But I just couldn't quite pull it off. Instead I read a controversial book. I thought perhaps people might glare at me in disapprobation while I read it during my daily commute. No such luck.

My controversial book was Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg. The Washington Post called it a “stealth attack on humanity.” Pretty strong stuff that. Must be awfully dangerous. What do you suppose Bjorn is talking about? Global warming.

Oh well, there you go. Probably one of those global warming deniers, right? One of those guys who say global warming is caused by trees or something, or that it's cold where I am so it's not really happening?

Nope. Lomborg accepts what the UN climate scientists are saying about global warming. He accepts the climate models, the predictions, the whole shebang. He agrees that it is serious and that something needs to be done. The problem? He's not hysterical, he objects to people overstating the problem, he doesn't think we should impoverish the world to address it, and he thinks that there are, in fact, higher priorities.

Lomborg take aim at scientists and politicians who distort the facts in order to gain support for carbon reducing public policy. He's found evidence that having the doom-o-meter turned up to eleven all the time is starting to produce a sense of climate fatigue among the public. This is something that has bothered me for a long time. The continual barrage of “we're all gonna die real soon” rhetoric, the images of flooding in New York, malaria in Vermont, Florida under the sea, and other dire predictions that are unsupported by serious research will serve to undermine public confidence in science. Science is supposed to be about truth. Hyperbole should be left to sports.

The sea is rising. The UN says that in a hundred years it will rise by about a foot. New York and Florida will still be there. A foot of water is serious, but it is not the most serious issue of our century. It's pretty bad news for island nations like Micronesia. If we do nothing those folks are going to lose most of their land mass. The question is, what should we do? That is the core question this book asks. Should we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a Kyoto-type agreement that caps carbon emissions? UN scientists say that such an agreement, if the terms are met by all signatories (those countries that have signed it are having having a very hard time living up to their promises), will slow the rising sea. Instead of a hundred years, the sea will rise by a foot in a hundred four years. And the world will be poorer those hundreds of billions of dollars, and less able to handle the problem. Suppose instead that a substantially smaller amount of money was used to mitigate the flooding problems caused by rising seas. In the last hundred and fifty years sea levels rose a foot, so we've dealt with it before (without panicking). Lomborg, being Dutch, knows a thing or two about holding back the ocean. Micronesia, and other vulnerable places, would be able to save most of their land mass, and the world would be that much richer.

That's just a little of the controversial stuff that Bjorn Lomborg is saying here. He takes a cold, hard look at the numbers, applying economics to the problem, and asking the question 'how can we do the most good with what we have?' That seems to be a pretty rational question. Does it make sense to impoverish ourselves and to make advancement that much more difficult for people in the developing world by spending a fortune to reduce carbon emissions when scientists tell us the the return on that investment will be so very slight? Would we save more lives and improve the lives of more people if we spent our resources to, say, controls HIV/AIDS, eradicate malaria, and provide better nutrition to people in need? Naturally politicians will always say that we can do it all. But economics is the study of limited resources, and it casts a pretty harsh light on such wishful thinking. Cool It asks if we should spend a fortune now to do a little good in the future, or spend less now to do greater good for people in need today, leaving us wealthy enough to deal with the predicted consequences of global warming.

These are pretty tough questions, and Lomborg is a much-needed voice of rationality in a debate that hasn't often been marked by that trait. In a time when our president is telling poorer nations that they need to spend more of their scant resources on emission reduction, it is a voice that should be heard.

All Politics Aside . . .

How can you not like Barack Obama? Guy goes to Moscow and makes “Get Smart” jokes. And loving it.

Body Counter

Robert S. McNamara passed away yesterday. Before joining the government McNamara was head of the Ford Motor Company. Under his leadership decisions were made using sound statistical analysis rather than old fashioned methods like engineering savvy, aesthetics, and what used to be called common sense. Eventually all large auto makers followed Ford's example. It was a profitable approach to running a business. For a while.

McNamara used this same approach as Secretary of Defense. Applying principles of accounting to warfare, he reasoned that our military should have sufficient strength to not lose against any opponent, but did not need to have anything approaching overwhelming strength. In that way wars could be contained, as opposed to actually won, ended, or prevented altogether. During the Vietnam War he is said to have often overruled recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He created a strategy based on statistical analysis which demonstrated that the best way to win the war was to kill as many of the enemy as possible. This established the “body count” system of measuring military success.

In later years McNamara admitted that his role in wartime decision making was not all to the good, and he regretted it. It is estimated that about five million people died in the Vietnam War, mostly civilians. Robert S. McNamara died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 93.

The Toyota Smugmobile

I got to take a Prius for a little spin this week. I've been wondering what it's like to drive a hybrid. Now I know. It's not too different from what I'm used to. From the driver's seat it sounds pretty much the same as a normal car. It steers the same, it accelerates the same, except the hybrid may be a bit smoother. No big deal. It's just like driving a car. But it is not your plain old car, and the designers at Toyota have put a lot of work into reminding you that you are driving something different. The key isn't a key, but a little black box you fit into a port, rather like an oversized USB drive. You start it by pressing a power button. Instead of moving the shifter into the drive or reverse position and leaving it there, you move the joystick up or down for drive and reverse. It moves back to the middle when you let go and the lights on the dash tell you that you've moved from neutral into drive. In reverse the car continually beeps, to remind you that you are in reverse. Also, when you are backing up a little screen in the dashboard gives you a view from the rear view camera. That camera is necessary. To make the car as aerodynamic as possible the rear window in the Prius is reduced to a mere slit. You don't notice it so much when you are driving, but when you are backing up it is a bit of a pain. When you change to drive the screen switches to graphic readout that is supposed to show you continually how much gas you are saving by driving this car. It gives you your miles per gallon at that moment and the average of miles per gallon for your entire trip. It also gives you a very pretty and ever changing bar chart. I'm sure it is measuring how wonderful you are for driving this great car, but I never bothered trying to figure out what all the little symbols mean.

Why all the bells and whistles? The Prius constantly reminds the driver how much less fuel he is consuming and how small his carbon footprint now is. It almost whispers to you as you drive; “you are a good person, you are better than those people in the SUVs, because you drive a Prius.”

Not that I was arguing, of course. As I drove along I spoke to the other drivers on the highway. “Out of my way you gas guzzling road hog, can't you see I'm morally superior?” “Move over you polluting bastard, that's my parking spot.” I laughed as I passed by gas stations. I smirked at the exhaust rising from other cars. And when we brought the car back to it's spot in the parking garage I rolled down my window and listened to the echo of my voice shouting “I'm better than you are.”

Well, maybe, maybe not. But I did drive quite a few miles, visited our favorite cheap restaurant, had lots of red meat and fried food, and watched as the gas gauge didn't move a jot off of “F.” I could get used to that.

Pirate Primer

Oh, better far to live and die,
Under the brave black flag I fly,
Than play a sanctimonious part,
With a pirate head and a pirate heart.
Away to the cheating world go you,
Where pirates all are well-to-do;
But I’ll be true to the song I sing,
And live and die a Pirate King.

Ahoy me hardys, and all that. Yar, I've got pirates on the brain. I took it into me head that I didn't know enough about the history of pirates and I needed a primer on the subject. I read David Cordingly's Under the Black Flag a few years ago and found it to be very good, an excellent place to begin any serious self-directed education on the subject. Nevertheless I felt like a little more background would be nice, so I picked up a copy of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Pirates.

I've read a couple of these Idiot's Guides before and found them to be useful. They deliver the goods painlessly with a bit of fun. Yes, sometimes they over-explain or point out the obvious, but the reader can't complain. He did, after all, see the title of the book. This guide to pirates turns out to be pretty good. It starts out rather weakly with an overview of piracy before the seventeenth century, touching on the classical world and the Vikings. The writers take pains to tell us that slavery existed, and it was bad. I've never been too keen on historians who tell me how I should feel about the actions of the long dead. Just tell me what they did and let me draw my own conclusions. After all, I'm not a complete idiot. Um . . .

This section could either have been expanded, reduced, or eliminated altogether. As it was it felt inadequate. It's when we get into the period often called The Golden Age of Piracy that the book starts to get interesting. There's lots of useful details of the life of the average seaman in general and pirates in particular. We get background on the political and social milieu in which they lived and that shaped their lives, and we get a number of brief sketches of individual pirates.

If you're trying to learn the basics about pirate history, this is a good place to start. But if you're going to read only one book about pirates, skip this one and pick up Under the Black Flag.

Trivial Hoot Four

In our last installment we asked how many episodes of the original series did the Enterprise visit the planet Vulcan. You certainly remember that we only see the surface of Vulcan in one episode, Amok Time. But Enterprise visits a second time. In Journey to Babel the ship stops at Vulcan to pick up Ambassador Sarek and his wife Amanda. You may recall Kirk offering Spock the chance to beam down and visit his parents while they were there, at which point Spock reveals his relation to the ambassador and his wife. Cue dramatic music, go to commercial. So there's your answer, two.

Here's the new question. Stretch your brain and see if you can get this one. Please tell me where you will find the following list of items: one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days' concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; three pair of nylon stockings.

Yeah, sounds like someone's planning a great weekend.