J.K. Ullrich's Blog, page 25

Story Fuel: NASA Confirms Liquid Water on Mars

The Martian hits theaters today! I’m suspending my usual policy of avoiding opening-day movie crowds and going this afternoon; Andy Weir + Ridley Scott x Matt Damon = too good to wait. But there’s also some exciting non-fiction news from the Red Planet this week. On Monday, NASA confirmed that its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has found evidence of liquid water.

Streaks on the planet’s slopes, called recurring slope lineae (RSL) have been in researcher’s telescopes since 2011. These lines darken in warmer weather and fade when the temperature drops, giving the impression of ebb and flow. The MRO’s equipment detected hydrated salts in the RSL, which suggests the seasonal change in their appearance may be due to water activity. Researchers identified two potential sources for the water: it could come directly from the atmosphere, or from a seasonal feed of groundwater. Details of the study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

A NASA image of the recurring slope lineae (RSLs) on Mars, now thought to be the result of seasonal salt water flows.

Mars is still drier than Earth’s most arid desert, posing a tough environment for even microorganisms to survive, but the likely presence of water raises exciting possibilities for both the discovery of extraterrestrial life. It also poses an unexpected challenge: the risk of contaminating Mars. An international organization called the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) maintains rules for “planetary protection”, intended to prevent exploratory missions from contaminating the environments of other worlds (kind of like the “Prime Directive” from Star Trek). COSPAR considers flowing water areas to be especially sensitive, and landers exploring those regions must meet special standards of cleanliness. The Curiosity Rover wasn’t made to these specifications, so it could be carrying stowaway Earth organisms.

Without samples from the RSLs, it will be much harder to search for signs of life. Some NASA experts argue that radiation and ultraviolet exposure have sterilized Curiosity and made it safe for Mars’ water biomes, but debate continues. Fortunately, science fiction is a great tool for unraveling the ethics of space exploration. I’m sure Mark Watney violated a few COSPAR rules against “contaminating” alien worlds with disco music!

Top 5 Wednesday: Banned Books

“Ban a book? How can someone control what I read?” I demanded. It was the mid-1990s and our local librarians had asked my mother, a trusted patron with an educator’s objective eye, to evaluate a young adult novel another parent was lobbying to ban. For me, books were like oxygen: ubiquitous, essential, and in almost unlimited supply. I don’t think my parents ever denied me a book. Even when my mother caught me reading the movie-illustrated novelization of Alien furtively in a corner of the library, she simply raised her eyebrows and said “that might give you nightmares.” The idea that someone could restrict my literary wonderland filled me with horror.

My mother explained—with the expression of stoic disapproval that brought out the German half of her genes—that some people were easily offended and felt compelled to impose their preferences on everyone else. In this case, a character in the book “flipped the bird” and an overprotective parent felt it would instruct her child in obscenity (funnily enough, I didn’t even know what “the bird” was until the brouhaha over the book forced my parents to explain it, so the would-be banner undermined her own intention). To support the library, my mother read Louis Sachar’s The Boy Who Lost His Face and ruled its content unremarkable. It stayed on the shelves.

That was my first encounter with the notion of banned books, and I’ve read dozens of them since. Classics I adore like like The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill A Mockingbird, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have library rap sheets that would make Whitey Bulger cringe. While browsing band book lists for this week’s challenge, I was appalled at how many of my favorite young adult books appear on the roster. Julie of the Wolves? A Wrinkle in Time? These books don’t contain graphic sex, profanity, or anything parents normally find objectionable. It pains me to think some kids may not have the opportunity to enjoy these stories as I did. So I’m devoting this Top 5 Wednesday to my favorite YA books that—in someone’s mind, at least—have a naughty side.

Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling. A devout Catholic colleague of mine once commented she hadn’t read these books because her pastor claimed they contained “witchcraft”. Another colleague—also Catholic—responded that, on the contrary, the stories displayed many positive Christian themes such as loyalty and sacrificial love. I’m with the latter friend. This marvelous epic defined a large part of my childhood, and I can’t imagine anyone condemning the timeless theme of good triumphing over evil.
Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. The Alice books were my generation’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. Apparently the standard coming-of-age themes—the awkwardness of sexual development, peer pressure, family dysfunction, etc—get a girl banned these days. But I was glad to have Alice along to make my own adolescence feel a little more normal.
Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins. I don’t disagree these books contain some violent scenes; however, unlike many  graphic movies and TV shows today, this trilogy also portray the consequences of violence, not just to the immediate victims, but to families and those forced into combat. The final book reads like a chronicle of post-traumatic stress syndrome, giving a fictional voice to a very relevant real-world issue.
His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman. My dad read The Golden Compass aloud to me as a child, and just this summer I finally read the subsequent novels . I didn’t find them anti-religious, as some people claim, so much as anti-closedmindedness. But then, closed-minded people are the ones who tend to ban books….
The Giver, by Lois Lowry. Probably the first dystopian story I ever read. I couldn’t recall any content worth banning, so I looked it up. The most frequently cited objection is “not suitable for age group”. I beg to differ. Making tough choices and coming to terms with uncomfortable realities about one’s society are hallmarks of young adulthood. It doesn’t get much more age-appropriate than that. More likely the dystopian elements make someone uncomfortable. It might get young people thinking critically about the world. How dreadful!

Top 5 Wednesday is the creation of Lainey over at Goodreads. Check out the group and join the other “Wednesday-ers“!

Shoot for the Moon: Photographing a Lunar Eclipse

Don’t forget about the rare super moon eclipse tomorrow night! Since the next one won’t occur until 2033, it’s worth trying to capture on film. Sure, you’re no Hubble Telescope, but with a little camera savvy, you’ll can capture the celestial show with any level of photography equipment. Here are a few tips for (literally) shooting stars:

Long exposures and hands off. As with any night photography, long exposures–the time during which the camera’s aperture stays open–are critical for adequate light. But that means the slightest wobble turns your picture into smeared impressionist art. Even the steadiest hands will cause blur. Use a tripod if you have one. For point-and-shoots, my favorite field hack is to stand the camera on a wall or a rock (or even my folded jacket on the ground) and set the self-timer.


Get close. There are two kinds of zoom lenses, optical and digital. An optical lens actually magnifies the subject, but so-called “digital zooms” just crop the image automatically, which makes it appear larger but degrades the resolution. Not a great choice for any situation. If you have a real zoom lens, you’re in good shape. But don’t despair, smartphone shutterbugs! There are some great lens accessories for phone cameras (I piloted one myself this summer). You can also try shooting through a pair of binoculars or even a telescope, if you’re lucky enough to have one.


Composition. Photographing the moon doesn’t mean you should ignore the Earth! A dramatic foreground–like silhouetted trees or an illuminated cityscape–adds interest and scale. It’s also a nice workaround for cameras without a lot of zoom capability.


Don’t forget your eyes. I’ve been doing photography for years, and learned from bitter experience how easy it is to get caught up pursuing the perfect shot and never actually see anything outside the viewfinder. Remind yourself to step back from the shutter and look with your eyes. Capture memories, not just pixels.

If you get a good image, send it to me and I’ll feature it on my blog. You can also submit it for the eclipse photo contest at Gizmodo. Have fun!

“It Ain’t Over ‘Till It’s Over”: Saying Goodbye to Yogi Berra

I usually devote my blog to science and fiction. But science is often accompanied by philosophy, and one of my favorite contemporary philosophers also happened to be one of the century’s great characters: the kind of endearingly quirky personage we often see attempted in fiction, but who rarely graces real life. Baseball legend Yogi Berra passed away yesterday at age 90. The Hall of Famer became a cultural icon with famously confounding quips like “when you get to a fork in the road, take it” and “no one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.” How many of these are correctly attributed to Yogi is debatable, but they are gems nonetheless. They read like contemporary koans, wisdom from a baseball Buddha. Yogi also helped write some of the most memorable chapters in the story of America’s pastime. Catcher and coach; 18-time All-Star; and one of only five players to be named the American League MVP three times.

I’ve been a Yankees fan since I was old enough to wear a ball cap (don’t hate; I was born in New York, and the lyrics of Take Me Out To The Ballgame guarantee my right to root for the home team) and I haven’t felt such bittersweet despondence for my team since Derek Jeter, my crush of 15 years, retired last season. Tonight the Yankees–and indeed, all of baseball–remember one of the most beloved characters in its story. My most often quoted “Yogi-ism” is “it ain’t over till it’s over”. I used it to rally hopeless college teammates when the rival school was kicking our butts; I use it when my Laddie gloats over a clever move in our board game and thinks he’s going to win; it’s my unofficial mantra for resilience and determination. Yogi’s time with us may be over, but his legacy and love remain with us. Like any favorite story, we’re sad when it ends, but its gifts will stay with us long after the covers close.

Recent Reads: His Dark Materials trilogy

First, a confession: it took me much longer than it should have to read this trilogy. My dad bought The Golden Compass in a local children’s bookshop when I was about ten years old (I recall the store fondly because it had the best reading nook I’ve ever encountered: an artificial tree molded into the wall, with a perfectly kid-sized hollow lined with cushions. That’s an experience Amazon can never replace, alas) and read it aloud to me. Bedtimes became imagination expeditions into a universe full of cosmic Dust and daemons, hot air balloons and armored polar bears (my dad’s stentorian voice brought those ursine characters to life)! I loved the story, and even re-read it when the movie came out over a decade later. But somehow I never read the other two novels. Maybe I just got distracted, or maybe I didn’t want to risk spoiling my charming memories of the original book.

Well, I finally did it. I finished the series in a week of late-night binge reading. Lyra, the scrappy heroine of The Golden Compass, stumbles into a parallel world. So does Will, a stoic boy from modern-day England running from mysterious assailants. Her quick-witted street smarts and his calm strength keep them a step ahead of assassins, thieves, and soul-eating Specters. The two take accidental possession of The Subtle Knife, a mystical blade capable of opening portals between worlds. The children befriend a physicist studying dark matter and she constructs The Amber Spyglass to reveal the secrets of Dust. Meanwhile, Lyra’s father Lord Asriel marshals his forces for a final assault against the oppressive Authority. But it is Will and Lyra who must undertake an unthinkable journey to liberate humanity, and they who must make a heartbreaking sacrifice.

Despite a few unresolved plot points and a somewhat anticlimactic final battle, it was an enthralling story. But then, how could quantum physics + steampunk x alternate realities = anything but awesome? I appreciated how Pullman took a simple adventure story and layered it with science and philosophy. Many groups object to the books as anti-religious, but I found them surprisingly positive from a spiritual perspective. The notion of connectivity with the universe—our physical forms crafted of the same particles that make trees and stars and waterfalls—comforts and uplifts. Of course, that’s no promise of a happy ending. I realized halfway through the final book that there was only one way the story could conclude, but when I got there I cried anyway. (Thankfully, I dreamed up my own narratively consistent epilogue that makes things much more satisfactory.) It took me almost twenty years to finish this epic.  It will stay with me at least that long.

Next Sunday’s Matchup: Earth’s Shadow @ Moon

If the term “supermoon” gives you delicious chills, how about “blood moon”? During lunar eclipses, the Earth’s atmosphere bends sunlight in a way that often lends the moon a red hue.

Next Sunday night, there will be more to watch than just football! Americans who can tear their eyes away from the Broncos/Lions matchup will witness an astronomical show that hasn’t taken place in over thirty years: a supermoon eclipse.

A supermoon occurs when the moon turns full phase at its perigee–the point of the lunar orbit closest to Earth–making it appear exceptionally large and bright in our night sky. This phenomenon has coincided with a lunar eclipse only five times since 1900.

NASA says the supermoon eclipse will be visible throughout the Americas on the night of September 27 (astronomers in Europe and Africa will have to get up in the wee hours of September 28 to see it). If you miss it, your next chance won’t be until 2033, so make sure you take a break from football and catch the celestial halftime show!

 

The Future in 5,000 Words: Cli-Fi Writing Contest

The next outstanding voice in cli-fi could be yours!  Arizona State University–home of the The Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative–is sponsoring a 2016 Climate Fiction Short Story Contest. The rules in a nutshell:

Stories up to 5,000 words envisioning a future impacted by climate change and reflecting current scientific knowledge
Submission deadline: January 15, 2016
Judges will include sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson
Grand-prize winner receives $1,000; three additional finalists receive book bundles signed by cli-fi author Paolo Bacigalupi

Read the full criteria and submit your story here. After you’ve sent it in, shoot me an email describing what you chose to write about and why, and I’ll feature you in a mini-interview here on my blog. Don’t miss this opportunity to help develop the cli-fi genre and contribute to its canon (and maybe score some sweet literary swag, too)!

Story Fuel: Melting Mars (Supervillain Style)

Only twenty days until the adaptation of The Martian hits theaters! The sci-fi survival tale will undoubtedly fuel interest in the feasibility of real-life trips to the Red Planet. NASA head Charles Bolden anticipates such a mission could occur in the 2030s, although Martian author Andy Weir thinks 2050 is a more reasonable timeline. In either case, it would take a long time to make Mars habitable for humans. But everyone’s favorite mad scientist, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, has proposed a solution to expedite the process, one that has the ring of bad foreign policy: bombing Mars.

Nuking Mars’ polar caps is one (very dramatic) proposition for making the planet’s climate more human-friendly.

On last night’s episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”, Musk called Mars “a fixer-upper of a planet”. Its frigid climate poses challenges to colonization. One solution is the introduction of greenhouse gases, which would warm the planet over a span of years (hey, it worked on Earth, right?). Musk’s alternative could heat things up much more quickly: detonating thermonuclear weapons over the poles. The radical idea prompted Colbert to dub his guest a “supervillain”. (Of course, if he really were a supervillain, he probably wouldn’t have joined Stephen Hawking and Steve Wozniak this summer in calling for a ban on AI weapons; what supervillain doesn’t love evil robots?)

Combine all these themes—a Martian colony, murderous androids, nuking an alien planet—and you’ve got a sci-fi spectacular that might give The Martian a run at the box office. But beneath the outlandish implications lie some serious questions. If Earth’s environments continue to decline, colonizing another world may no longer be a matter of novelty science, but one of species survival. How ironic if we accomplish it with the tools that put us in such dire straits to begin with! Humanity’s track record of controlling these things isn’t exactly stellar. We’ve glimpsed the devastation of nuclear fallout, and even now we’re failing to control the effects of greenhouse gases. Could we really employ these methods for “good” instead of “evil” in a terraforming effort? Musk may not be a supervillain, but his vision exposes some superhero-caliber questions of technological power and the Promethean hubris of those who wield it.

A Perfect Excuse to Re-Read “Harry Potter” (as if anyone needs one)

Prepare to squeal, fellow Potterheads: publishers just released new images from the upcoming illustrated edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I haven’t seen Potter art this captivating since the demise of art dungeon.net (I practically wallpapered my college dorm with Marta’s beautiful fan art).

As someone who still misses the anticipation and joy of the original series, having these illustrated editions to look forward to restores a flicker of the old magic, eagerly awaiting the next installment. The book is scheduled for release on October 6.  In the meantime, feast your eyes on teaser images like this one at Hypable. Seriously, I can almost smell the pumpkins.

If you want to keep the Hogwarts Nostalgia Express rolling, check out this panegyric to the understated awesomeness of Ginny Weasley, my frontrunner for the Most Under-appreciated/Under-utilized Contemporary Heroine award. Of all the fantastic characters in that series, she was the one who most often surprised and delighted me with unexpected badassery. One fateful night, just after The Half-Blood Prince came out and I’d stayed up late to read it, my mom poked her head into my room.

“Goodnight, Ginny,” she said from the doorway.

“Ginny?” I giggled, peering over the pages. “I thought I was Hermione?” She’d called me that before in homage to my bossy intelligence and neurotic academic habits.

Mom shook her head. “No, I think you’re more like Ginny. You’re feisty and funny and athletic. And you’re not afraid to make trouble.”

Ever since then, I’ve felt a special affection for Ms. Weasley. We rebel redheads must stick together!

The Real-Life Engees: Alaskan Communities On The Edge

Blue Karma keeps coming true. Last week’s an Alaskan company announced plans to ship water to California’s drought zones; now this evening, I watched an NBC Nightly News feature about Alaskan communities poised to become America’s first climate change refugees.

Rising seas and shrinking coastlines mean flood and erosion, which may drive residents inland. Government estimates place the cost of relocation at $300,000 per villager, but the price is not only financial; it’s cultural as well. These towns are home to many Inuit families who rely on access to marine resources. Moving would disrupt the way of life they’ve maintained for generations.

Residents of Kotzebue, Alaska, and other towns like it may become America’s first climate change refugees.

In Blue Karma I envisioned a near future where this plight was so common, people had developed a vocabulary shortcut for the issue. Thus I coined the term “engee”, a portmanteau of “environmental refugee”. I never imagined applying the term in a real-life context so soon after dreaming it up, but that’s exactly what’s happening. One good storm and inhabitants of places like Kotzebue and Shishmaref will have the dubious distinction of being America’s first engees.

I don’t say this out of narcissism, or to claim some badge of clever prognostication. I say it to raise awareness about a nascent crisis threatening to alter lives and reshape geography across the US and the world. Entire towns–their history, their architecture, their people, their culture–might simply disappear from the map. It’s painful to imagine a place effaced like that. We can hope that a plight of this magnitude might urge action on climate change, but even that may be too late to make the waves recede.