The Tao of Glass

The latest work by Philip Glass is The Tao of Glass, written with long-time collaborator Phelim McDermott (who directed Satyagraha and Ahknaten), which is being performed in Manchester starting this week.

The Guardian has an article that describes their collaborations and what might be coming next. For me, the most interesting part of the article is this:

Meanwhile, McDermott is set to take Akhnaten to the Met in New York in November – and then, he believes, he will finally be ready to tackle Einstein on the Beach. There’s also the big dream: that Glass’s three “portrait operas” (Satyagraha, Akhnaten, Einstein) can be presented for the first time somewhere as a Ring-style marathon. “These operas are terrifying because you go, ‘There’s this scene. What actually happens? Anything?’ And then you do things you could never normally do.”

I saw Einstein on the Beach when it was performed in Toronto a few years ago; it was a transcendent experience, and I would consider travelling anywhere in the world to see the portrait operas trilogy performed together.

In the meantime, Glass fans (of which I am most defnitely one) can watch the Metropolitan Opera's simulcast of Ahknaten at cinemas worldwide, with the first performance being November 23. I will be at a theatre for that one.

Babylon 5 Is Still the Best SF TV Show

Recently tor.com publishied a long article about the 1990s TV series, Babylon  5, titled Babylon 5 Is the Greatest, Most Terrible SF Series. It's a premise that I would agree with, although I have reservations about the "most terrible" part.

As the article points out, Babylon 5 was a wildly inconsistent show, but you could say the same thing about almost every science fiction TV series, including Star Trek (any one of the many variants), Firefly, Stargate (any variant), or the Battlestar Galactica reboot. But at it's best, it had few rivals. The only series that had its emotional depth was Star Trek: The Next Generation, and that only occasionally. (I'm withholding judgement on The Expanse until I see what they do with the fourth season later this year, although I will say that it has consistently maintained a very high level of quality.)

Babylon 5 remains emotionally evocative in all the places it has become perhaps thematically irrelevant: in the jagged edges of the sets, the stumbling waltz of its plot threads, the lush indulgence of its dialogue, the patchwork aspects held together by glue and determination, as imperfect and brimming with colourful quirks as its most beloved characters. My favourite scenes in the show are the little things: Ivanova’s illegal coffee-plant, Londo and Vir singing Centauri opera together in the station’s hallways, Marcus regailing a beleaguered Doctor Franklin with his nerdy headcanons about which characters in Le Morte d’Arthur he thinks the B5 crew are most like, Delenn and Sheridan telling each other quiet, ordinary anecdotes about their very different childhoods. Babylon 5 is a story that is truly greater than the sum of its parts. Modern plot-driven shows tend to do one thing, and do it very well. Babylon 5 does a little bit of everything: mostly okay, sometimes horribly, and occasionally with an earnest beauty that is almost transcendent.

I think the value of Babylon 5, and indeed its entire thesis statement, is best summed by Ambassador Delenn’s sage invocation of Carl Sagan. She says:

“I will tell you a great secret… the molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station , and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are starstuff. We are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out.”

Babylon 5 is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. If you have not seen it, do yourself a favour and check it out.

How Does Spotify Know Me So Well?

I use Spotify quite a bit, mostly to listen to new music, and occasionally to delve into the back catalogue of artists I like. I also listen to their Discover Weekly playlist, which comes up with a list of songs that Spotify thinks I might like, based on what I listen to. Or at least that's what I thought until I read this article, which explains some of the algorithms that Spotify could be using to pick music for me.

Spotify doesn’t actually use a single revolutionary recommendation model. Instead, they mix together some of the best strategies used by other services to create their own uniquely powerful discovery engine.

To create Discover Weekly, there are three main types of recommendation models that Spotify employs:

1. Collaborative Filtering models (i.e. the ones that Last.fm originally used), which analyze both your behavior and others’ behaviors.
2. Natural Language Processing (NLP) models, which analyze text.
3. Audio models, which analyze the raw audio tracks themselves.

If you're interested in big data and how companies track your data, you should read this. 

How Concrete and Steel Built Baseball

There's been talk in Toronto about the future of its iconic domed stadium (officially known as the Rogers Centre, but everyone calls it SkyDome or just the Dome). It's one of the largest baseball stadiums, and certainly not the best, as it was designed as an all-purpose stadium, that could host football games and other events.

The trend now is to smaller, purpose-built stadiums that echo the design of the earliest modern stadiums like the original Yankee Stadium or Detroit's Tiger Stadium. Deadspin has an article about the history of those stadiums and how they used modern mate

In the new construction, form no longer necessarily followed function, as the ballparks received artistic flourishes as a testament to the craftsmen who made them as well as permanence they were supposed to embody. The exterior walls at Shibe Park had terra cotta balls and bats as decoration. Ebbets Field’s rotunda included a chandelier of baseball-shaped lights. And Yankee Stadium’s unprecedented third deck was capped with copper friezes, in what’s become probably the most iconic representation of sports architecture. Simply put, these new ballparks were aspirational.

“The concrete-and-steel stadiums not only represented a safety measure, but a leap of faith on how popular baseball would become,” says MLB historian John Thorn. “In effect, it was like Field of Dreams. They built in the hopes it would come. They built ballparks of great seating capacity and seeming posterity.”

If you're a baseball fan, you'll find it a fascinating article.

Nothing I Wrote Is Worth That Much

An original Apple 1 manual is up for auction with bidding currently over $12,000 US. Nothing I've written is worth or ever will be worth that much, sigh.

According to images, the Apple Operation Manual is nothing like the manuals of modern consumer electronics. The pamphlet contains what looks like the circuitry schematics of the Apple-1 along with paragraphs that teach users how to get the computer to work.

Read more at MobileSyrup.com: An Apple-1’s original manual is up for bidding for more than $12,000

If you have to ask what an original Apple 1 computer is worth, you can't afford it.

Building Affordable Modular Apartments

I have seen several low-rise townhouse developments built near us in the last few years, and I am both amazed and appalled at how primitive the construction methods remain. Teams of workers nail and bolt the frames together by hand, add plywood framing and installation, and then other workers add interior drywall, wiring, plumbing and exterior finishes and roofing. It's terribly labour intensive and hence expensive.

A company in Chicago is trying to change that by building modular apartment units in a factory and shipping the units to the where they just have to be bolted together.

Skender’s 100,000-square-foot factory on the Southwest Side, which began production in late May, contains four bays with hulking gantry cranes overhead, as well as welding jig tables that are dozens of feet long. But don’t look to be wowed by sci-fi feats of robotic automation—there’s not a robot in sight (yet). Instead, the technology is aimed at seamless coordination.

...

 At Skender, this repetition begins once an order is placed, and staff begin identifying the relevant components and writing assembly-line schedules. When materials arrive, numbered and bundled with an instruction set, they’re laid out on massive welding frames that allow line workers to affix clamps that secure steel elements. It’s not super-high-tech, but it means that welds can be accurate to 1/1000 of an inch. (“If I’m out on the dirt at a site, I’m talking about 1/16 of an inch at best,” said Scopano.)

To me, this kind of production makes a lot of sense, both in terms of expense (which will probably decrease over time), and the ability to control quality. (I am boggled a how shoddy some of the local building construction appears to be). 

I have seen some limited steps in this direction. On Kingston Road a large condo or apartment building is going up. They are using prefabricated metal (I assume aluminum) wall frames instead of wood and the building is going up much faster than with traditional wood framing. A couple of years ago I saw a TV news segment on a Toronto-area company which is building prefabricated homes in a factory and assembling the components on site. I expect to see more of this kind of construction n the future.

 

Love the Art, Hate the Artist?

It's a question that I see asked a lot these days. Can you love the art but hate the artist?

That's a question that's central to the essay On John Wayne, Cancel Culture, and the Art of Problematic Artists.

A man and his wife name their son John Wayne. At the baby shower the wife’s best friend pulls her aside: “Maybe it’s not my place to say it, but I just can’t believe you’d name your boy after a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe.” “Oh Deb,” the wife says, patting her friend on the shoulder, “you should know us better than that. We’d never name him after that John Wayne. We’re naming him after John Wayne Gacy.”

The joke, of course, is that Wayne is so out of favor in certain pockets of contemporary culture—particularly those vocal online—that a child-molesting, child-murdering clown could somehow be less problematic than the iconic Western actor.

In February of this year, an onslaught of twitter users declared Wayne “cancelled” when they discovered what many of us already knew: that the actor had a pretty extensive record of heinous views and shameful deeds. The tumult began with a tweet by a screenwriter named Matt Williams on the evening of February 17th: “Jesus fuck, John Wayne was a straight up piece of shit.” Williams accompanied those words with screenshots of Wayne’s infamous 1971 Playboy interview. The tweet went viral.

It's a long article that delves into both the history of John Wayne and the movies he became famous for and role of art and artists in our politically fractious times. 

Researchers Discover a New Property of Light

You might think that physicists have a complete understanding of the properties of light, but that turns out not to be true. A team of researchers at the University of Salamanca have discovered a new property of light, called self-torque. 

First, let's take a step back. Over the last few decades, physicists have discovered that it is possible to twist the wavefront of a light beam, giving it angular momentum. This looks a bit like a spiral staircase, with the beam wrapping around an empty middle. When such a beam is targeted at something, you see a bright donut. These beams are said to have orbital angular momentum (OAM), a property not dependent on polarization (which instead is about the geometry of the electromagnetic oscillations.)

As reported in the latest issue of the journal Science, researchers have discovered that it's possible for an OAM light beam to exhibit "self-torque". As the beam moves forward, its twist goes from wider to narrower, a bit like a screw. If such a beam is projected onto a flat surface, it would appear in the shape of a croissant or crescent.

At this point, it's not clear if there is any practical use for the phenomenon, but science is like that. Give it time, and someone will think of  something.

Do watch the video, by the way. It shows the complexity the equipment used in modern physical research. It's way beyond anything in the labs when I was studying physics in university.

Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds

A few years ago something remarkable happened in the science fiction world; a tranlated Chinese-language science fiction novel, The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin, won the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel. The author has sold millions of novels in China but was relatively unknown in the West until that point. That has changed, and big time, even to the point of having a long profile published in the august pages of the New Yorker.

Liu’s stories typically emerge from a speculative idea that has the potential to generate a vivid, evocative fable—more often than not, one about mankind’s ability to bring about its own demise. “The Three-Body Problem” takes its title from an analytical problem in orbital mechanics which has to do with the unpredictable motion of three bodies under mutual gravitational pull. Reading an article about the problem, Liu thought, What if the three bodies were three suns? How would intelligent life on a planet in such a solar system develop? From there, a structure gradually took shape that almost resembles a planetary system, with characters orbiting the central conceit like moons. For better or worse, the characters exist to support the framework of the story rather than to live as individuals on the page.

Liu’s imagination is dauntingly capacious, his narratives conceived on a scale that feels, at times, almost hallucinogenic. The time line of the trilogy spans 18,906,450 years, encompassing ancient Egypt, the Qin dynasty, the Byzantine Empire, the Cultural Revolution, the present, and a time eighteen million years in the future. One scene is told from the perspective of an ant. The first book is set on Earth, though some of its scenes take place in virtual reality; by the end of the third book, the scope of the action is interstellar and annihilation unfolds across several dimensions. The London Review of Books has called the trilogy “one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written.”

Much of the books’ resonance, however, comes from the fact that they also offer a faithful portrait of China’s stringently hierarchical bureaucracy, that labyrinthine product of Communism. August Cole, a co-author of “Ghost Fleet,” a techno-thriller about a war between the U.S. and China, told me that, for him, Liu’s work was crucial to understanding contemporary China, “because it synthesizes multiple angles of looking at the country, from the anthropological to the political to the social.” Although physics furnishes the novels’ premises, it is politics that drives the plots. At every turn, the characters are forced to make brutal calculations in which moral absolutism is pitted against the greater good. In their pursuit of survival, men and women employ Machiavellian game theory and adopt a bleak consequentialism. In Liu’s fictional universe, idealism is fatal and kindness an exorbitant luxury. As one general says in the trilogy, “In a time of war, we can’t afford to be too scrupulous.” Indeed, it is usually when people do not play by the rules of Realpolitik that the most lives are lost.

I read The Three Body Problem and enjoyed it; though it wasn't my favourite novel of the year, I have no issues with it winning the Hugo Award, and I recommend it to anyone who likes somewhat old fashioned but mind expanding science fiction.

In any case, the New Yorker profile is a fascinating look at both Cixin and the new world of science fiction that he represents.

Featured Links - July 7, 2019

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• The World's Appetite Is Threatening the Mississippi River. More farming means more pollution. The article is a good example of how to use infographics. 
• The Top Secret Cold War Project That Pulled Climate Science From the Ice. What started as a cover story became more important than the secret project. 
• 16 Free Ways to Download Any Video Off the Internet. Sometimes it's better to watch a local copy. 
• Rare image of US Air Force's secretive space plane in orbit. It's pretty hard to hide something in orbit. Paint it black, maybe?
• The Open Office Trap. I hate open offices.  

We're Toast 9

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Climate Change and Environment

• The World's Most Insane Energy Project Goes Ahead. What were they thinking?!
• The Midwest's Farms Face An Intense, Crop-Killing Future
• Permafrost in Canada Is Thawing 70 Years Earlier Than Expected. Which releases methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas.
• Plastic wrapped in plastic: The wasteful reality of America's grocery stores. Canadian grocery stores are not much better.
• This is the world's most destructive oil operation – and it's growing. Sadly, it's Canadian. 
• Welcome to the fastest-heating place on Earth. In the world’s northernmost town, temperatures have risen by 4C, devastating homes, wildlife and even the cemetery. 

Politics

• Canada's Climate Emergency Declaration Is Just Empty Words. I am very disappointed with our current government.
• A growing lack of trust in authority poses a serious danger to our health. That includes lack of trust in science, and that is dangerous.
• Runaway Senators, Militias and Koch Money: What the Hell Just Happened in Oregon? Another right-wing armed insurrection in the US.

Technology

• The 3D-Printed Gun Threat Is Getting Weird and Scary
• Could 5G take weather forecasting back to the 1980s?

A Free SF Story

There's a lot of good science fiction being published online, some of it free to read. "Any Way the Wind Blows" by Seanan McGuire is an alternate worlds story, which happens to be one of my favourite subgenres of science fiction.

This is a quick, entertaining read with a nicely worked out background that would make a good basis for a novel. There's one thing that readers who aren't familiar with the SF publishing industry might miss. As you might guess from the "cover" picture, New York's Flatiron building plays a major part in the story. Until last month, it was the home of  Tor Books, the pre-eminent publisher of science fiction and fantasy.

More on NASA's Artemis Moon Program

It's been 50 years and we still haven't gone back to the moon. NASA has a plan, the Artemis mission, and a goal (set by the Trump administration) of landing there by 2024. But given everything in detailed in this latest update from Ars Technica, that looks unlikely.

During a visit to Johnson Space Center last Friday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine explained that, unlike the Apollo hardware, Orion and SLS need some help to get a crew to the lunar surface and that this is the role the Lunar Gateway will play. "We can get to low lunar orbit, but there’s not enough delta-V to leave low-lunar orbit," Bridenstine said. "So we can go, but you can’t come home. This is why we need to get more delta-V. Think of a small space station in orbit around the Moon where we can aggregate landing capability by the year 2024."

However, the White House Office of Management and Budget, which is typically loathe to initiate large new space programs, has pushed back against the Gateway. The budgeting office argues that a Gateway is not technically needed to stage a landing mission from lunar orbit. Depending on their designs, some lunar landers could be pre-placed in an orbit for rendezvous even without the Gateway.

"OMB is definitely trying to kill Gateway," a senior spaceflight source told Ars. "OMB looks at what the vice president said about getting to the Moon by 2024 and says you could do it cheaper if you didn’t have Gateway, and probably faster. They are fighting tooth and nail to nix the Gateway."

I do hope the OMB gets its way and forces NASA to amend its plan to use commercial launchers and vehicles and drop the Gateway, which is essential just a sop to the big aerospace companies.

The Apollo Jettison Anomaly

A previously classified anomaly that could have killed the Apollo 11 astronauts on re-entry has recently been revealed. It almost caused the Service Module to collide with the Command Module, and it also affected two previous flights.

A serious anomaly occurred as the crew careened toward a landing on Earth, according to Nancy Atkinson, a science journalist and author who details formerly classified information about the event in her new book, " Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions."

"Through my interviews and research for the book, I uncovered a serious anomaly that occurred during Apollo 11's return to Earth," Atkinson — whose book comes out July 2 — told Business Insider in an email. "The event was discovered only after the crew had returned safely to Earth."

The problem happened just before Apollo 11 returned to Earth, causing a discarded space module to nearly crash into the crew's capsule.

What's more, Atkinson's sources suggest, the same issue also threatened the crews of three other Apollo missions.

I have not heard about this before reading the article linked here and it's made me quite interested in reading Atkinson's book.

The Soviet N1 5L Launch Failure in Detail

Fifty years ago today, the Soviet Union attempted to steal some thunder from the American Apollo program by launching their giant N1 rocket on an unmanned mission to fly around the moon. The booster only made it a hundred meters into the air before crashing back to ground in an explosion that destroyed the launch pad. It was the largest explosion in the history of space exploration.

Now, space historians are able to piece together details of the doomed Soviet lunar exploration program. The excellent Russian Space Web site has published a long article on the N1 5L failure.

The first launch failure of the N1 rocket in February 1969 dealt a heavy blow to the Soviet space program, already hopelessly behind the US in the Moon Race. While engineers at Sergei Korolev's TsKBEM design bureau were picking up pieces, their Kremlin bosses watched the US to add to its triumphant flight of Apollo-8 around the Moon in the previous December yet another successful test of the Saturn-5 rocket during the Apollo-9 mission. Two months later, Apollo-10 hovered just a few miles from the lunar surface, setting the stage for the actual landing in the summer. Not surprisingly, new calls for changing the course came to the Kremlin.

Like in Khrushchev's reign at the turn of the 1960s, Vladimir Chelomei, the head of the rival TsKBM design bureau, reemerged on the scene with an "alternative" launcher to the troubled N1. Obviously, this time, there was no point in talking about beating Americans to the Moon, but instead, the Soviet response would be a manned mission to Mars! To this end, Chelomei proposed to upgrade his mighty but non-existing UR-700 rocket into an even bigger UR-900. (685)

However neither technical failures nor political pressure at home and abroad could deter Soviet engineers from pressing on with the N1 project. By that point, they had no illusions about winning the Moon Race, but the N1 still remained the centerpiece of the Soviet space program.

For anyone with an interest in space history, this is a must read article.

EditTools 9 Released

On the American Editor blog, Richard Adin has announced the release of EditTools 9.0, a macro suite for Microsoft Word designed to automate many common editing tasks.

 New features in EditTools 9 include:

• Backup 
• Counter 
• Open Dialog Manager (ODM) 
• Revision Tracking 
• Time Tracker 

Time Tracker not only lets you keep track of the time you are spending on a project, but it also keeps data about your projects and calculates your Effective Hourly Rate (EHR) and Average Pages per Hour (APH) for the specific project, all projects worked on in the current year, and all projects over your career.

For more information, see the EditTools web site.

While I've not used EditTools, I am a firm believer in using the automation features of Word to streamline tasks and improve accuracy and consistency. EditTools looks to be a good solution for those who want an out-of-the box tool.

SF Novels Being Published in July

I wouldn't have thought that July would be a big month for publishing but this list of science fiction and fantasy novels being published this month proves me wrong. There's some good stuff here that should fit almost any taste.

How the Rolling Stones Craft the Perfect Setlist

The Rolling Stones are on tour again. They played Saturday night north of Toronto to generally favourable reviews, and no, I didn't go.

I've always wondered how the Stones create their setlists. If you look at songs played on a tour, they seem to have a good balance between the hits that they pretty much have to play (Jumpin' Jack Flash, Honky Tonk Women, Satisfaction), and older deep cuts and blues standards.

Rolling Stone interviewed the band members, who explained the process. It seems that Mick Jagger is the one who gets the final word, which makes sense, because he's the one up front singing on most songs.

The Rolling Stones have a system for planning what songs they’re going to play at every show. On concert days, the band usually soundchecks in the afternoon. Then Mick Jagger gets to work with keyboardist Chuck Leavell on making the set list. They take a few things into account: They look at what songs they played the last time they were in the area to make sure they don’t repeat themselves, and Jagger thinks about his voice and what he’s comfortable singing. Sometimes, the band makes song suggestions: “He’ll be quite honest,” says guitarist Ronnie Wood. “He’ll say, ‘Actually, no, that won’t work here,’ or ‘We played it here too many times.’ Or he may just go, ‘Yeah, we’ll give it a run,’ so you never quite know what to expect, but you always get a reason why we won’t perform something.”

What Is BGP And Why You Should Care About It

Last week some major Internet services, such as Cloudflare and Amazon, went down. The cause was a configuration error in a core Internet protocol called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) caused by a US service provider.

This isn't the first time that something like this has happened, and as this Wired article points out, it probably won't be the last.

BGP isn't the only historic internet system with trust issues. Another fundamental protocol, known as the Domain Name System, has dealt with similar issues. If BGP is the internet's navigational system, DNS is its address book. DNS hijacking has become a major security issue around the world, and the Department of Homeland Security even issued an emergency directive in January aimed at defending DNS accounts.

As with DNS, though, concerns about BGP date back decades. In 1998, for example, a group of hackers from the L0pht collective famously testified before Congress that they could take down the internet in 30 minutes by attacking BGP. Ten years later, Kim Zetter assessed the state of BGP insecurity in WIRED, writing, "Government and industry officials have known about the problem for more than a decade and yet have made little progress in addressing it, despite the national security implications."

For more details on what happened and its implications, see last weeks Security Now podcast at about 1 hour 10 minutes into the podcast.

2019 Locus Award Winners

The winners of the 2019 Locus Awards were announced this weekend. To no one's suprise, Mary Robinette Kowal won the Best Science Fiction Novel award for The Calculating Stars. The winner of Best Fantasy Novel was Spinning Silver by Noami Novik.

The awards are nominated by and voted on by subscribers and readers of Locus Managazine, the SF field's long-running news magazine.

(And yeah, I know I said I was taking the weekend off. I was going to schedule this for tomorrow and clicked Publish without setting the schedule first. More coffee is indicated).