Joe Haldeman's Blog

David Nicholas forwarded this fascinating article –

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/...

-- that makes a broad definition of "autocatalytic set" which elaborates into an explanation for life, the universe, and everything.  It turns out that the chicken crossed the road in order to lay an egg so that another chicken could cross another road.  And so on, to the Apollo Program and beyond.

  
Joe

We went to see Dark Shadows  last night, and came away unsmitten.  I like Johnny Depp in any role, but this one is so thin and trite he couldn't rescue it.  It's a bunch of vampire clichés rattling around in a shapeless container.  A few good sight gags and groaner lines . . . the teenaged girl asks Barnabas Collins, "Are you stoned, or what?"  He replies, "They tried stoning me once.  It did not work."

and this exchange . . . .

Joe

Oops . . . Gay reminded me that I forgot to note that astronaut Fincke was a student of mine at MIT, back in 1987.  Perhaps the only one who's actually been in space -- though I also had Peter Diamandis, a few years earlier, also in 21W.759, Writing Science Fiction.  He's the founder and Chairman of the X-Prize Foundation.

Joe

Having fun hanging around with old friends at the Nebula Awards weekend here in Washington.  Lots of sitting around in the bar and talking about people who aren't here.  Strictly social so far, but today I'll be getting together with editor and agent, separately.  So we'll move from milling and swilling to wheeling and dealing.

Yesterday we played tourist with a trip to The Library of Congress (or Congreff, as they ufed to spell it).  The tour was both interesting and a little sad, nostalgic.  As I think I've mentioned here, I used to live in Bethesda, before I left for college, and have wonderful memories of the LoC.  I was a chemistry nut back then, and I would sit for hours immersed in a 12-volume encyclopedia of chemical reactions, copying down equations that I could translate into experiments in my home laboratory.  Sometimes with loud or noxious results.

No kid can do what I used to do; take the trolley downtown and use the Library as a library.  Want a book, no problem; just look up the catalog number and write it on a slip of paper, and the minions would send your request to the basement via pneumatic tube, and the book would be delivered to your desk in a few minutes by courier.

The mechanism still exists, but only for members of Congress and their staffs, and other high government officials.  There are probably twice as many books now, in three buildings, and delivery takes thirty or forty minutes, with computers as well as pneumatic tubes.

And to be realistic, any kid with Google can access much more data much faster than I could, sitting at an oaken desk that might be two hundred years old.  Why do I feel sorry for him?

The most interesting exhibit, by far, was a reconstruction of Thomas Jefferson's library, which formed the nucleus of the new LoC after the British burned Washington in 1814.  He had his own system of classification (based on one devised by Francis Bacon) to arrange 6,487 volumes, which he sold to the government for $23,950.  There was another fire in 1851, which destroyed about two thirds of the volumes.  The collection now has about two thousand of the original volumes and three thousand replacements, which carefully match the lost editions.

John F. Kennedy famously told a party of Nobel Prize winners and other intellectuals, invited for lunch at the White House, "There has never been such a collection of talent and intellect gathered in this room since Thomas Jefferson dined here alone."

Speaking of famous people, I've enjoyed talking with astronaut Mike Fincke, who will be the keynote speaker at the banquet.  He's spent 48 hours in space-walk mode, more than any other human being.  A very smart guy, who incidentally has read a lot of science fiction.

Signed books for a couple of hours yesterday.  One fan gave me a copy of The Bridge of San Luis Rey to read – I'd mentioned Thornton Wilder in my sffnet column – but then ran off without explaining why.   It's been forty years since I read it, so I'll enjoy rereading it on the way home.

There was a panel on writing humor which, as expected, didn't give me any killer tips.  I guess the subject has a butterfly-like quality:  if you can pin it down, it's dead.

I remember reading an article in the Washington Post when I was in high school here, about literary cocktail parties – specifically about meeting Art Buchwald.  The writer described Buchwald's scowling cigar-chomping public persona, and said it was generally true that humor writers are in person very grim, where serious writers tend to reach for the lampshade at parties.  I'm in between, I think, though some people would roll their eyes at that assessment.  "What, he thinks he's serious?" or "What, he thinks he's frivolous?"  I am all things to all fen.

Joe

For those of us who are hooked by both Game of Thrones and Mad Men -- here's a thing Gay found that will confirm your suspicions . . . .http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...

Last night we went to a pair of well done plays.  First was a 90-minute condensation of Hamlet , just a lean version of the classic.  Then an intermission, and then the hour-long _The Prince Formerly Known as Hamlet_, a hard-boiled mystery narrated by "Justin Thyme."   Some of the comedy was eye-rolling silly, but of course that doesn't bother me.  The actors in the second did parodies of their roles in the first.  Hamlet himself was especially funny, thrashing around refusing to die on cue.  Ophelia in the first one was demure and understatedly sexy; in the second she was "Feelya," not at all demure, in a sexy dress that could rise and fall like Venetian blinds.The first line of the second play is also the catch-phrase on the advertising poster:  "The problems of one Danish prince don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."Joe

Should your brain hurt first thing in the morning?  Of course!  Here's why:(Background:  Bell's Theorem, or Bell's Inequality, goes " No physical theory of local hidden variables can reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.")Terry Rudolph, . . . a physicist at Imperial College London. . . .  gives the example of a die that can be prepared to give either even numbers, with a 1/3 probability of getting 2, 4 or 6; or prime numbers, with a 1/3 probability of getting 2, 3 or 5. The real state 2 can be produced by either preparation method, so the same reality underlies two different probabilistic models. The authors show, however, that the same reality cannot underpin different quantum states.  Their theorem does, however, depend on a controversial assumption: that quantum systems have an objective underlying physical state. Christopher Fuchs, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, who has been working to develop an epistemic interpretation of quantum mechanics, says that he has avoided the interpretations that the authors exclude. The wavefunction may represent the experimenter’s ignorance about measurement outcomes, rather than the underlying physical reality, he says. The new theorem doesn’t rule that out.  Still, Matt Leifer, a physicist at University College London who works on quantum information, says that the theorem tackles a big question in a simple and clean way. He also says that it could end up being as useful as Bell’s theorem, which turned out to have applications in quantum information theory and cryptography. “Nobody has thought if it has a practical use, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did,” he says.  Because it is incompatible with quantum mechanics, the theorem also raises a deeper question: could quantum mechanics be wrong? Everyone assumes that it reigns supreme, but there is always a possibility that it could be overturned. So Barrett is now working with experimentalists to check predictions that differ between the theory and the epistemic accounts it conflicts with. “We don’t expect quantum mechanics would fail this test, but we should still do it,” he says.Hurt yet?  This gives me a once-familiar feeling, which I first got back in 1966-67, taking courses in general relativity and quantum theory.  I think you can sum it up as "If this is so easy to say, why is it so hard to understand?"Joe

I'm a year late on this, but I loved the alternate-history propaganda reel "Man Conquers Space," at   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHJFbz... reconstruction of a celebration of the conquest of space, if we had started back when Von Braun was a pup.  Bittersweet but very good.  Joe

Finally went to see the new Avengers epic, and thought it was a good popcorn movie.  Loved the sight gags, especially with the Hulk.  Scarlett Johansen doesn't age!  She caught me when she was the girl with the pearl, and I could happily watch her reading the phone book.  The metal monster worm/s -- gorgeous.  The hand-2-hand combat, eh.  Given the context, there's not much to criticize.  Nice last scene.  I'll go to the next incarnation.  Oh, the first ten minutes -- the first twenty million dollars -- was kind of overblown and unnecessary, I thought.  Just cut to the chase.  Joe

We just spent a couple of days relaxing at Amelia Island, up on the Florida-Georgia border, where they were celebrating the annual Shrimp Festival, and we tried to cooperate by eating our weight in the little beasts.

We played tourist with old friends Mike and Sharon Tackaberry, whom we met on a New Zealand tour about thirty-ump years ago.  The main street of the island is a mile-long gift shop with occasional outbreaks of culture, which we sped past.  There were occasional pretty girls zig-zagging in and out of the crowds of geriatric dinosaurs.  They were going too fast to catch, but I was mostly watching.

Got some writing done in the mornings and a couple of nice bike rides, to and from the only coffee place open early.  Also took a three-hour boat ride, Amelia River Cruises,  out to some of the outlying islands, which used to be hideaways for the super-rich, from about 1880 to post-WWII. Most of the big places are resort hotels now.  Very pricy, like $400 per day and up.  But you pay for a special combination of century-old charm and isolation, and if you like that you'll get your money's worth.  I might go up there to finish a novel some day.

Here is a picture that I think qualifies as Wretched Excess (Food Division) – on the way out of Amelia Island we stopped at the Doo Wop Café, all done up in 1950's bling, 45 records all over the walls, B&W celebrity pictures, even an ersatz 1957 Chevy with a plastic Elvis leaning out of the window.  You sat in red-and-white Naugahyde bench seats at matching Formica tables with individual little juke boxes . . . and if you were brave, this is what you ate –

(The James Dean Special:  Two hot dogs with chili, jalepenos, bacon, and chopped onions, accompanied by ersatz melted American cheese.  Or was that turmeric-colored mustard?  I left it alone.  But the curly fries and cole slaw, yum.  I have to admit that I adored most of it.)

  I think I'd better go out and get some exercise . . .

 Joe