S. Evan Townsend's Blog, page 130

Another Earth Right Next Door

New research based on data from the Kepler space telescope's observations indicates that an Earth-like planet maybe right on our doorstep . . . astronomically speaking.

Keep in mind, the galaxy is huge.  It's 100,000 light years across.  And a light year is 5,878,499,814,276 miles.  So that's . . . a very big number.  Just call it 5.88 x 10^17 miles across the galaxy.  That's absolutely unfathomably huge.

So when scientist say an Earth-like planet could as close as 13 light years away, that's, well, right on our doorstep.  Only problem is getting there.  If you could (you can't) go the speed of light, it'd take 13 years to get there.  If you could fly a 737 there (you can't), it would take about 17.5 million years.  That's a long time in a coach seat.  If you could build a spaceship capable of going a million miles per hour it would take about 8,700 years.

Still, 13 light years away is, on the scale of the galaxy, right next door.

Research

Learn how doing research (and finding out I was wrong) improved my novel Book of Death at the Ask David blog.  And while you're there, leave your own review!

Movie Review: Flight

Last night I watched Flight .  The movie stars Denzel Washington as an airline pilot who miraculously (and skillfully) lands a crippled aircraft saving most everyone on board.  The plane was in a dive that would have killed everyone but he managed to crash land it with only six out of 102 people on board killed.  However, this starts a chain of events that lead to his life falling apart.

I thought this was going to be a conspiracy thriller, the big evil corporation or the big evil government intelligence service set him up somehow and it would devolve into car chases and shoot-outs.  But no.  This movie is a character study of a man whose life is crumbling around him.  I don't want to give too much away but Washington gives an amazing performance and the entire film is just shot with simplistic beauty.  I thought the ending was a little unbelievable but up until then it was a first rate character study and as a writer I appreciated that.

Flight is rated "R" for "drug and alcohol abuse, language, sexuality/nudity, and an intense action sequence" so it's not for kids.  But adults should enjoy it.

There is one glaring error aviation buffs/pilots will catch.  I'll leave that up to the student to find.

Zen and the Art of Driving Fast

(Editor's note: I wrote this in 2007 in response to someone saying my driving fast-even on a racetrack-was irresponsible.)

Nirvana.

The ears are overworked with wind noise, road noise, engine and exhaust noise.  Only the wind can be ignored.  The road noise tells you that the car is stable.  When you hear a whine is when you worry.  Engine and exhaust noise tell you the engine is healthy and when it's time to shift.  There's no time to watch the tachometer so you must rely on your ears and experience.

The eyes are sweeping.  The pavement coming at them at over 100 miles per hour is ignored.  You know this sheet of asphalt like you would know a lover's body.  The eyes are looking for visual cues to turn-in, apex, and exit of each corner.  Here it's the blue part of the stands, there it's a wooden structure called a "turn station" and there it's a telephone pole.  Being a class there are cones demarking these things but due to hills and weeds, they are not always visible.  But the eyes are also watching the other cars.  While looking through them to find the corner markers, it is watching them for sudden unexpected moves and slowdowns.  Here as nowhere else do you  dare be this close to another car at highway speeds.

The inner ear, felt in the ass, tells you the car is tacking straight and the  tires are not sliding over the asphalt.

The right foot is planted against the firewall, the left hovering over the clutch.  Both hands are on the steering wheel, probably at "nine and three."

Your brain is processing all this information.  The baud rate is enormous and the limited bandwidth of your brain becomes selective.  The itch of your nose, the discomfort of the helmet, the cold of the wind coming in the window all fade away.  Your mind is completely and utterly concentrating on its task, on piloting a powerful car at speeds over one hundred miles per hour around a track that twists and turns seemingly at random.

Your mind has reached "speed nirvana."  Gone is everything other than driving, other than moving your body to make the car move as you wish, observing, listening . . .

Driving.

Not commuting, not "operating a motor vehicle," but DRIVING.  The skills were acquired in years of back-roads speeding and days of track training.  Talent plays a role, the ability to process the information coming in fast enough to react.  To hear the screech of tires and know you need to look for a car sideways in the road.  To smell brakes and know you need to slow down and give your over-heated pads a break.  To run your eyes over the instrument gages on straight aways to make sure the beast under the hood is not suffering.

This is driving.  This is speed nirvana.  Gone are the worries of work, relationships, money, whatever.  It is you, the car, and the pavement coming at you at 220 feet every second.

Nirvana

Sunday Six: The Mugging

Today's Sunday Six from Chapter Five of Rock Killer :

Charlie took the bag from her shoulder and held it out for him.  He reached for it.  Once he had his hand around the strap, she pulled back hard.  The boy was pulled off balance and Charlie grabbed the wrist of his knife-wielding hand and twisted hard. 
She was rewarded with a dull, moist pop as she broke the joint. 
He howled in pain and dropped the knife. 

Close Shave

Because my novel Rock Killer is about asteroid mining (sort of like Gone With the Wind is about the Civil War), anything in the news about asteroids tends to grab my attention.

It seems that on February 15th a small asteroid (that probably looks nothing like the one pictured here) will make a record close pass by Earth.  As Fox News reports:

“This is a record-setting close approach,” Don Yeomans of NASA’s Near Earth Object Program at JPL said in a video released by NASA this week. Yeomans, however, emphasized that the asteroid, designated 2012DA14, won’t hit Earth.

“It will come interestingly close, closer than many man-made satellites,” he said.
 

How close is "interestingly close"? About 17,500 miles above the surface at closest approach.  This is within the orbit of communication and GPS satellites.

 The rock is 50 meter wide (165 feet about) and if it hit Earth would most likely leave a crater like Meteor Crater in Arizona.  Not a catastrophic impact unless you're in the vicinity.

As scientist look we're going to find more of these Near Earth Objects (NEO).  NASA has a project to find as many as possible with the goal of, partly, give us some warning of an impact.  As we find more NEOs, we'll become aware of more close approaches to Earth that in the past we never knew happened.

Apple Users Like Me (They Really Like Me)

I find this very interesting.  According to this website, 78% of personal computers run Windows while just 3.7% are Apple Macs. (No idea what the remaining 18.3% are, can't all be Linux I would think).  So when I look at the statistics for this blog, I see this interesting pattern:
That's 59% of my lifetime page views are from Macs, 24% from Windows, and 3% from iPhones (with the rest other various systems; I wonder who the four BlackBerrys were).

Maybe artistic people are more likely to use Macs and more likely to come to this blog.  Maybe I have fans who have Macs.  Maybe the sample size is too small and it's a statistical aberration (seems unlikely with n>2,500).  Maybe I should ask my cousin who's a statistics graduate student to ponder the significance of that.

Oh, and just to let you know, I use a PC (Dell laptop) but have an iPhone, so I have divided loyalties.

Bonus points for figuring out the allusion in this post's title.

Life the Universe and Everything

Got thinking today about extraterrestrial life.  That is, technically, life off of Earth.  So it could be on the Moon, Mars, in the asteroids, on Saturn's moon of Titan, or floating in the band of Jupiter's clouds where water is a liquid.

Extraterrestrial life does not have to mean little green men.  Or big, carnivorous, enslaving cat-like beings.  It could mean . . . bacteria-like life.  Or fungus.

Now here on Earth, we have found bacteria growing in places where we never, ever thought life could flourish: under the ocean where volcanic vents make the water over 200 degrees, under the ice in Antarctica, inside hot rocks.  These "extremophiles" can live, for example, where their environment is so acidic it will melt steel.

So if we have found life on Earth in places we never thought we could, why couldn't there be bacteriods out there in the universe?

Unfortunately, finding bacteria, while qualifying as life, isn't quite as exciting as Green Orion Slavegirls.  But it would be life.  Give it a few billion years and you'll have someone to talk to.

Now, that's another problem, how to communicate with a species that evolved completely separately from humans?

Writing Lessons: Words

This is the first blog post where I will share with you my secrets for good writing.  There will probably be about five of these, posted occasionally.

From a novel I recently wrote, comes this passage (that I've modified for this lesson):

Phillip held the gun's grip in his hand, his finger on the trigger.  His palms were sweating and his heart was beating hard.  He looked down the ally, concentrating. The zombie surprised him, coming from behind some boxes and moving fast.  Phillip, startled, shot twice almost without thinking.  It probably saved his life as the zombie cried in pain and blood leaked from its body.  That also stopped it long enough for Phillip to shoot it in the head twice resulting in more blood.  How does that paragraph make you feel?  How does it hit you in the guts?  Not very hard?  That's because of the words I used (or didn't use) in the paragraph above.

There are three things you can do to punch up your writing: 1) use "power words" and "power phrases," 2) use adverbs to modify verbs, and 3) use adjectives to modify nouns in both cases to convey emotion, feeling, or paint a picture.

What are power words and phrases?  "Power words" and "power phrases" are words or phrases that don't just tell what happened but show and tell and often relate a feeling.  You want your reader to see, hear and feel with your characters.  For example:

Joe tripped and fell.
Or:
 Joe stumbled and was slammed to the pavement.
("Stumbled" paints a picture and "slammed" is a power word, much more visual and evocative than "fell" and then "to the pavement" again paints a picture.)

And if we add rule #2 above (adverbs):
 Joe stumbled and was slammed painfully to the pavement.
(For some reason I like that better then "painfully slammed" I think because first you get the "slam" then you get the "pain.")

And rule #3 is added:
 Joe stumbled and was slammed painfully to the hard, cold pavement.
(Don't worry that it's now twice as long, your reader won't care if it's written well.)

So let's looks at the paragraph above (about Phillip and the zombies) as I actually wrote it (changes are in strike out and bold):
 Phillip held clutched [power word] the gun's black plastic [adjectives] grip hard [adverb] in his hand, his finger on the trigger.  His palms were sweating and his heart was beating hard trying to jump out of his chest [power phrase].  He looked peered [power word] down the dark [adjective] ally, concentrating.The zombie surprised him, coming from behind some boxes and moving fast with alarming speed [power phrase].  Phillip, startled, shot twice almost without thinking.  It probably saved his life as the zombie cried roared [power word] in pain and black [adjective] blood leaked  mushroomed [power word] from its pale [adjective] body.  That also stopped it long enough for Phillip to shoot it in the head twice resulting in more blood a spray of dark viscera [power words (spray and viscera) and adjective (dark)]. 
And if you want to read that clean, here it is:
 Phillip clutched the gun's black plastic grip hard in his hand, his finger on the trigger.  His palms were sweating and his heart was trying to jump out of his chest.  He peered down the dark ally, concentrating.The zombie surprised him, coming from behind some boxes and moving with alarming speed.  Phillip, startled, shot twice almost without thinking.  It probably saved his life as the zombie roared in pain and black blood mushroomed from its pale body.  That also stopped it long enough for Phillip to shoot it in the head twice resulting in a spray of dark viscera. 
Compare and contrast to the first version of the paragraph.  They both tell the same basic story.  But one tells the story much more emotionally and vividly. 

Class dismissed.

Wow! Thank you!

I woke up this morning and opened my browser and bam, got a nice surprise.  This blog had exactly 2,500 pageviews.  I was impressed.  I started this blog in August of 2012 so it's only about seven month old.  Now I know some blogs get 2,500 pageviews a day.  But I'm happy with my 2,500 as of today.

So thanks to everyone who has come to my blog to read my ramblings!

By the way, have you bought any of my books yet?