M. Thomas Apple's Blog, page 55
June 15, 2019
Just Because You’re Not Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They’re Not Tracking You…
Most people aren’t aware they are being watched with beacons, but the “beacosystem” tracks millions of people every day. Beacons are placed at airports, malls, subways, buses, taxis, sporting arenas, gyms, hotels, hospitals, music festivals, cinemas and museums, and even on billboards.
Big Brother is Watching…and Sending You Ads. And Ads. And Ads…
June 13, 2019
Vulcan does not exist — but 40 Eridani does
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As a kid I remember reading about “Vulcan,” which people used to think existed between Mercury and the Sun but always orbited on the opposite side.
Completely fictional, of course.
But…
Vulcan made a comeback as the fictional home of Spock in Star Trek. It was said by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry to be orbiting around 40 Eridani (also called HD 26965), a triple star system in the constellation of Eridanus “the river” in the southern hemisphere just 16 light years distant. In September 2018, astronomers at the University of Florida in Gainesville found a “super-Earth” exoplanet orbiting exactly where Vulcan was said to be.
There is only one logical conclusion…
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June 11, 2019
The Moon is a Shining Ball of…uh…Nickel?
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“Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the Big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground…”
Uh. OK. That’s a LOT of metal. Nickel and iron? Ancient asteroid impact? 300 kilometers deep?
Sounds like a “golden” mining opportunity…
…even enough to totally justify “the Moon is a part of Mars“?
June 10, 2019
The Dearly Departed
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On this day, June 10th, what would have been my mother’s 69th birthday had she not passed away suddenly last October, I am conflicted.
Do I have the right to write about family history yet again?
And yet without the past, it’s difficult to write about the future. They are connected, by both visible and invisible lines, threads of beliefs and behaviors, attitudes and antagonisms, odd coincidences and strangely fortunate happenings. Particularly in my family.
[image error]My grandmother (Betty Connally) was never supposed to have children. My grandfather (Al Langworthy) was an only child, born of a wedding that was not supposed to have taken place. My mother was named before her mother’s first husband, Lt. John Hart, was killed a month after the D-Day invasion, even though she wasn’t born until six years later when her mother had remarried.
The strange coincidence was that Al and John had been friends before the war. “How’s Johnny?” Al asked Betty when they met after the war, in January 1946 – not knowing Johnny had been killed.
The guilt must have been immense. Al proposed after half a year. That’s all we knew, until recently.
After my mother passed away, we rediscovered my mother’s long-lost science fiction manuscript (Destiny in the Future, all sales donated to the American Cancer Society to raise awareness of breast cancer). And we also found a handful of letters from my grandfather to my grandmother. All were written in 1946, just before and just after they married.
[image error]But there were no letters from her to him. There were two from her to her first husband, Lt. John Hart, killed in July 1944. It doesn’t mean my grandmother never wrote letters to Al, just that if she did, none survive. She forever compared my grandfather to his ghost, a comparison my grandfather could never win.
And yet she kept Al’s love letters, nonetheless.
The letters are often sappy, filled with trite phrases and lots of curious misspellings such as “mischevious” and “exspression” (no autocorrect back then, obviously). But more than often poignant, and very revealing about my grandparents’ character.
As kids, your older relatives are just your relatives. You don’t think of them as separate, individual personalities. Grandma is just Grandma. Uncles and aunts are just Uncles and Aunts. It’s been difficult for me to get to know my relatives as people, partly because there are simply so many of them (literally over a dozen aunts and uncles in our family forest) and partly because I live so far away from them.
We used to be concentrated in the Albany/Troy/Schenectady Capital District region of New York. Now we’re scattered across the world. Many of us joined the military, as members of my family always have, from the 1600s onward. The poor get to fight rich men’s wars. This has never changed. An unfortunate connection of the past to the present and future.
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I am undecided whether I have the right to publish my grandparents’ private letters. They rarely wrote anything. But they were anything but private people. My grandmother, especially, was never hesitant to express her opinion, openly and publicly (usually with a healthy dose of profanity). My mother, likewise.
Me, too.
I’m also uncertain whether our family’s history is of any interest to anybody outside our own family. But I can see clearly in our family’s history the trauma inflicted by conflict, trauma that scars the past, the present, and the future for many families. My grandmother’s refusal to meet the men who brought her first husband’s death notice. My grandfather’s refusal to acknowledge that he was dealing with what now we would call PTSD. Survivor’s guilt. His insistence that he got a Purple Heart, when it was his dead friend who got one. Stories about events that never happened to you. Knowing that you survived and your friends and loved ones did not. The difficulty of returning to “normalcy” (if ever such a thing existed).
[image error]The paranoia about Communists (upon hearing news of Sputnik in 1957, my grandfather ran outside and banged on doors up and down the street, shouting that the Russians were coming — he did it again in 1965 during the Great Northeast Blackout).
And this is just my mother’s side of the family. My father’s side has its own history. As does everyone’s.
It would probably work much better as fiction. In fact, it often has. Anybody who has read the “war poets” or any given 19th century Russian fiction can recognize the need to fictionalize real events.
I love history, but I want to put a face to the dates and events. I want to bring humanity into my science fiction as well. History isn’t just young men blowing stuff up and pounding their chests. Every action has reactions and repercussions that echo down generations. The past influences us now and in the future.
Which is why there will definitely be more on the way, both in the writing of my family’s past and in future SF. Stay tuned!
June 8, 2019
Martians and Humans? Dating is OFF
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Martians should stop reproducing with Earth-humans.
You heard it here first. Mars doesn’t need women. Sorry.
The Moon, Mars, and What?
No, the Moon is not “part of Mars.”
No, I don’t know what he meant.
No, I don’t really feel like posting about it.
So there. Nyah.
June 7, 2019
What ever happened to May?
One minute I’m blogging along, the next minute…
No, I don’t mean Theresa May, I mean the actual May…er, May, as in the month of. I missed the entire month of blogging!
Right. Well, I have some catching up to do. A few more interesting science tidbits, more about family history and possible story ideas for historical fiction (and/or fictionalized history).
And there’s that SF novel I keep meaning to finish…
More soon, I promise!
April 30, 2019
Aliens are among us! Um, apparently…
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Still, the fact that someone as highly educated as Chi wrote an entire book based on salvation by extraterrestrials could be a sign of how daunting our future is starting to look.
Or, conversely, how wack some Oxford dons really are…
April 27, 2019
Interstellar Travel Tech — oh, Really?
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“It is time to venture beyond the known planets, on toward the stars.”
Yes, I agree, but I don’t see how any of the ideas in this article will help us achieve that goal. I think the problem is the reliance on conventional means of propulsion. Clearly some sort of bending of space/time is needed to leave the solar system faster than, say, a decade, let alone reach other star systems.
Dawn already used an ion engine (way too slow). The solar gravitational lens is neat but it won’t take us there physically. The “space-based laser” idea is funky but impractical.
Getting off Earth should help (Moon Base, Mars, somewhere else like Triton). Escaping our own planet’s gravity well takes way too much effort. But after that, it’s time to forget about rockets and start thinking of truly “wacked out” ideas.
For starters, Discover, how about dumping your absolutely awful page design? Yeesh, this page is hard to read.
— http://discovermagazine.com/2019/apr/new-technologies-could-let-us-explore-beyond-the-solar-system
April 25, 2019
New Lifelike Biomaterial Self-Reproduces and Has a Metabolism
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“Fundamentally, we may be able to change how we create and use the materials with lifelike characteristics. Typically materials and objects we create in general are basically static… one day, we may be able to ‘grow’ objects like houses and maintain their forms and functions autonomously.”
You mean like Iron Man from a decade ago (as seen in Infinity War)?
Or Venom back in 1984?
Honestly, scientists these days…can’t even keep up with comic books from the ’80s…
(That said, I’m not entirely thrilled with the idea of living in a living house that can maintain its own form and feed itself…on what?! you might ask…)
— Read on singularityhub.com/2019/04/24/new-lifelike-biomaterial-self-reproduces-and-has-a-metabolism/amp/
