Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 84

A Dream of Junction

The following is based on a dream I had a couple of years ago that grew into the world of Junction (called “Router” in this earlier version). You’ll note a lot of details have changed, but I still kind of like this little scene.

Our sealed and armored helicopter flies over a flat, sparsely wooded plain. Silver autumnal grass ripples under our shadow. Stands of slender, birch-like trees cluster around meandering creeks. The landscape could be anywhere in central North America or Asia, but it isn’t even on Earth. The creeks occasionally part around the pine-colored, deceptively-soft-looking mounds of steel-wool bushes. To the north, beams of actinic blue light pierce the clouds: light leakage from the Class A star behind the Z-7 Hole. And to the east, the direction of our flight, I can see a rolling, glistening mass, like a gelatinized ocean. This is the border between the earth-like Z-1 biome, and Z-6.

“See the babylon trees?” My host hands me a pair of small binoculars. Beyond the oily border zone, a dark, serrated mass I had taken for distant mountains resolves into a wall of dark purple, cup-shaped leaves, each the size of a Roman Colosseum. The trees are much closer than I thought, which means they must stretch twice as high as our current altitude.

“Magnificent, aren’t they?” Alexander Wai Lim, Singaporean pharma-tycoon, is the director of the Golden Gateway Group, or 3G, the most powerful international lobby for de-regulation of the Papuan Hole. He is a heavy, tightly-coiled man, his brown skin roughened by a contamination accident early in the years of Routerian exploration.

When I ask him about his traumatic past on the Patchwork Plant: “Don’t such dangers necessitate strict guidelines about transgress through the Hole?”

“And do you think guidelines would help?” Lim gives me his characteristic chuckle and headshake, as if mystified the blind foolishness of the world. Both worlds. “The regulations in place don’t protect people on Earth from alien plagues. Their only function is to secure Japanese and Australian interests on Router against American Big-Pharma.” He favors me with a patronizing smile. “Now, I’m all for shouldering aside you Americans, but this bickering makes it impossible for anyone to get any real work done over here.”

“And that work is Pharmacognosic exploitation?” I ask.

“Exploration. Taking samples does no harm to Router. Rather the opposite.” He nods at the curly black hair of our native pilot, a man introduced to me as Mystery-Prince Ghegwu. “Our native employment programs and infrastructure enhancement have received international praise.”

And international condemnation. I inquire about the nature of the laws Lim and 3-G are attempting to overturn.

“That would be the entirety of the Exploration Charter, whose ratification was unilateral and completely illegal by international law.” Lim cannot be accused of thinking small. “Look, the Charter was drafted by people who had never been to Router, people who never even took a university biochemistry class. We, the early explorers, were never even consulted. The Australian military just moved in one day and built a bunker on top of the Hole. Completely illegal. Completely stupid.”

“And why is that?”

“What do you know about Taq polymerase?” Lim clearly has this speech prepared. “It’s an enzyme used for DNA amplification. Industry standard for almost any kind of genetic work. Worth a mint. And it originally came from an extremophile bacterium species that lives in the hotsprings at Yellowstone. Pharmacognosy has given us countless similar treasures, from drugs to industrial processes. And that was just on Earth.”

Practiced speech or no, Lim seems entranced by his own arguments. He sweeps his hand toward window, where a wall of alien vegetation casts long shadows over the grassy prairie. “There are animals in those giant trees with ferrofluid for blood. There are plants there that grow high-grade fiber-optic cable instead of leaves. Or fix earth metals in their wood. And the microbes! Give me a scoop of the sludge growing on the biomic border, a decent lab, and a few years, and I can revolutionize medicine, toxic waste management, mining. Not that gold mining is a tenth a lucrative as Pharmacognosy. And those idiots want to close the Hole?” His expression hardens, damaged skin like granite. “Over my dead body they will.”

English negatives are HARD!

My daughter has an easier time with saying “no” in Bulgarian than she does in English.

In Bulgarian, all she has to do is move the verb to the start of the sentence ,and insert the word “ne” before it and she’s got a grammatical sentence.

“Vreme e za san.” (It’s time for bed) elicits “Ne e vreme za san!” (No is time for bed!)

“Otivam na rabota.” (I go to work) > “Ne otivash na rabota!” (No go to work!)

The future or hortative is a bit more tricky. Rather than ne, she has to say nyama.

“Shte izimiya tvoito dupentse!” (I’m going to wash your bottom!) > “Nyama da izimiesh moeto dupentse!”

“Da otidem na van.” (Let’s go outside) > “Nyama da otidem na van!” (Let’s not go outside!)

And that’s it. If she were speaking Old or even Middle English, she would have a similarly easy time of it.

“It is time for bed.” > “It is not time for bed.” (although you could also say “It no is time for bed” as in Bulgarian)

“I go to work.” > “Thou goest not to work!” (I’m pretty sure my daughter would use the familiar pronoun)

“I will wash your bottom.” > “Thou shalt not wash my bottom!”

“Let us go outside.” > “Let us go not outside!”

And so on in the past and all other tenses, for all other situations.

But then around the time of Shakespeare we started using modal verbs and everything went to hell. Now we have SEVENTEEN separate negatives (not counting nonstandard dialect forms):

not, isn’t, aren’t, wasn’t, weren’t, won’t, wouldn’t, don’t, doesn’t, didn’t, haven’t, hasn’t, hadn’t, can’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t, and mustn’t (although this one’s getting rare).

Yes, the history of these words is still visible as combinations of “is not” “do not” and so on, but they’ve become fused together into unique words that you just have to memorize.

Or not. It shouldn’t be surprising that non-native speakers (as well as many speakers of many dialects of English) pare this list down, saying “he don’t” and “I ain’t.” My daughter went another way:

“It is time for bed.” > “It can’t be time for bed!”

“I go to work.” > “You can’t go to work!”

“I will wash your bottom.” > “You can’t wash my bottom!”

“Let’s go outside.” > “Let’s can’t go outside!”

Most of the time, she’s grammatical, but that last sentence makes it clear she’s just using “can’t” as an all-inclusive negative like Middle English “not” and Bulgarian “ne.” Recently, she’s started to correct “Let’s can’t go outside” to “let’s don’t go outside,” which shows she’s starting to discriminate between different negatives, but she still has a long way to go.

So what do you think? Want to reform English so it’s easier for my daughter learn? Which do you prefer, saying “can’t” all the time, or “don’t” all the time?

Excising the Heart

Princess Borjigin’s tutors insisted that the Gi could only be mastered through emotional purity, intuition, and skill. She was instructed to let her feelings guide her, as when painting, singing, or composing poetry.

Borjigin was terrible at painting, singing, and poetry. She was terrible at gi-gong too, until she stopped thinking about it as art and united it with her true loves: mathematics and engineering. Her discoveries shocked a continent and began a scientific revolution, but would they be enough to stop the inexorable advance of the Yellow Waste?

104 Worldbuilding for YA with Aimee Hyndman

http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/104Aimee-Sep7.mp3

I’m talking with Aimee Hyndman about Hour of Mischief out now from Curiosity Quills.

Cogpunk or Clockpunk or whatever it’s called

Did you think ‘I want this to have lots of clocks in it’?

Shared Worlds writing camp

Ender’s Game started as a short story

I write my best drafts when I write really quickly because then I don’t allow myself to get bored with the idea.

Christopher Paolini published his first book when he was 16. What have YOU accomplished lately.

Jeff Vandermeer‘s Annihilation

Lashing out against catagories

Which dorm you sleep in at Hogwarts

Also, Divergent

Fantasy distopias? Where could they be?

Cold Europe

If there were no Gulf Stream, what would European history look like? Colder, for one thing.

With Athens and Rome on the latitudes of Chicago and Indianapolis, civilization would be off to a slow start. Egyptians would probably do fine (I am told that Houston is indeed habitable for at least some of the year), and the Fertile Crescent is still fertile, but the majority of Europe is a snowy forest and tundra.

The three areas of highest population density are also the most southern: Greece, Italy, and Spain. From there, the three prongs of Afro-Asiatic culture (Berber, Egyptian, and Semitic from west to east) have made the greatest inroads into colonization, pushing north the Basque, Tyrsenian, Uralic, and Indo-European-speaking herders. These nomadic people eventually went extinct or were assimilated over time. Modern Indo-European-speaking Europeans are the descendants of later waves of migration Anatolia, Perisa, and South Asia.

European populations climbed during the Golden Age as new breeds of wheat allowed civilization to expand northward, but remained peripheral to the politics of the larger world. Before the Mongol Invasion, the most notable historical effect of European colonies was their function as refuges for the deposed nobility of various deposed Egyptian dynasties.

The function of Europe as a refuge expanded greatly during the Mongol Invasion, when Arab scholars fled the sack of Baghdad, taking their technical and scholarly expertise northward. New cities such as Mlulzee, Djew Alp, and Chadic Bizas were cut from the primeval forest, then thrown into isolation during the collapse following the Plague.

Recovery and riches came first to the southern Mediterranean, as it always had, but the discovery of the New World by Berber explorers put an end to the European cycle of irrelevance.  Cold-tolerant crops such as potatoes and corn brought about a population explosion in the chilly north, and while the Berbers colonized North and South Igrbrq, the Northern Egyptians quietly pumped people and resources across the Alps. Canaanite prospectors soon reported villages of Egyptian-speaking, potato-liquor-swilling Copts everywhere from the Rhine to the Danube to the Volga. Determined to turn back this “New Horde,” they built the European continent’s first railroad from Bizas to Chadic Bizas. The Age of European empires had begun.

Let’s Pretend

 

My wife and I were watching our daughter play in the park the other day and she reached up into a tree, picked a seed off a branch, and put it in her mouth. We both told her off in our native languages, and she defended herself back to us. In English, my daughter told me (with whithering scorn) “It’s only pretend food, Dan” while in Bulgarian she said “Samo na uzhkim go izyadoh, mamo.” (literally. “Only for pretend it I ate, Mother.”)

That phrase na uzhkim (for pretend) comes from a conditional particle I’d never heard before: uzh. Uzh might translate as “if” as in “uzh si mi priyatel” or “if you ARE my friend…” but it carries the implication that whatever follows is not true. You are supposed to be my friend, but you are not my friend, you are only pretending to be my friend.

Uzh therefore joins my list of Bulgarian conditional particles (3 now and counting)

predictions:

Shtom = if (definitely true) Shtom si mi priyatel, shte igraem vseki den (Once you are my friend, we will play every day)

conditions:

Ako = if (assuming it’s true) Ako si mi priyatel, tryabva da igraesh s men (If you are my friend, you should play with me)

pretenses:

Uzh =if (untrue) Uzh si mi priyatel, no ne si. (You are supposed to be my friend, but you aren’t.)

My wife tells me uzh is rare in the speech of adults, but common for children and the elderly. It was probably edged out of adult conditional speech by the more familiar ako (if), but had been retained by children, who like to pretend, but want to make sure nobody takes the game too seriously.

For example, my daughter might be crawling on the ground, meowing. If I say “Are you a cat?” She’ll say “No, Dan, I’m pretending to be a cat.” Uzh sam kotka.

 

Parasitoids

Wasps! is there anything horrible they CAN’T do? Mother parasitoid wasps lay their eggs inside the bodies of other animals (in this case it’s caterpillars, but other species use tarantulas). When the wasp larva hatches, it hijacks the nervous system of the host (much like I am hijacking Coral’s scenario) and makes takes it somewhere dangerous (in the caterpillar’s case, to the end of a stick where it is stuck protecting a bunch of wasp pupas, in the case of Coral’s scenario, read on).

There are other examples of parasitic mind-control, such as zombie ant fungus and Toxoplasma gondii. The key is that parasites can make their hosts perform complex tasks.

So. What if there was a plant whose seeds parasitized nearby animals, forcing them to do work like weed and fertilize the plant before they sought out a nice patch of ground and died their, giving their bodies as nourishment for the new plant? Various species of parasitoid plants would evolve, warring against each other by means of puppetized animal proxies. Of course plants that took better care of their animal slaves (fed them, clothed them, provided shelter and intoxicants) would do better in the long run. The animals might be bred by the plants for strength or intelligence, and might spread to cover the cover the planet. The name of this plant, of course, is “wheat.”

103 Transhumanism with Matt Sheean

http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/103MattsheeanAug24.mp3

 

I’m talking with Matt Sheean, about his and Simon Roy‘s Utopia Plantitia. Also, colonialism, technology, the noble savage, transhumanism, zombies, and Cartesian Dualism.

Simon Roy is a sweet, patient man with a knife

Drawing Simon’s stuff (“Royification“)

Malachi Ward and the Singularity

Elevator pitches

The Borg are great!

We’re doing you a favor by conquering you

Davi Kopenawa’s The Falling Sky

Carl Hoffman’s Savage Harvest

Everything you guys do is stupid

Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood and tentacles

Rousseau’s Noble Savage

There’s no such thing as traditional surgery, and I’m glad about that

Traditional Californian Botox medicine

Transhumanism?

Assuming it’s smart, my computer double won’t pretend to be me

The Head Museum

Ray Kurzweil (kurz-wile?)

The Ship of So-and-so (Theseus, it’s the Ship of Theseus)

Don’t worry, there are no people anyway

Replacing human parts

(aside from World War Z) The best damn zombie book: Raising Stoney Mayhall

What is it like to be a zombie

Descartes and dualism

Daniel Dennett…possibly getting off the Cartesian merry-go-round?

Heidegger says “that’s just the wrong way to look at the world”

I choose my philosophers based on how funny they are

The feisty John Searle

It’s just stuff, man

Aristotellanism isn’t the same as vitalism, you dummy

John Haldane, who is nice and articulate

Maximo Pigliucci (also here)

And Matt illuminates the true nature of reality! Listen carefully.

~~Update: Ancestor, Matt’s Singularity project with Malachi Ward comes out in issue three of Island Magazine. Utopia Plantitia comes out next year, publisher TBA.

Special bonus! Here’s a fun video where he and Lawrence Krauss and Dan Dennett are all drunk together!

103 with Matt Sheean

http://www.thekingdomsofevil.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/103MattsheeanAug24.mp3

 

I’m talking with Matt Sheean, about his and Simon Roy‘s Utopia Plantitia. Also, colonialism, technology, the noble savage, transhumanism, zombies, Cartesian Dualism,

Simon Roy is a sweet, patient man with a knife

Drawing Simon’s stuff (“Royification“)

Malachi Ward and the Singularity

Elevator pitches

The Borg are great!

We’re doing you a favor by conquering you

Davi Kopenawa’s The Falling Sky

Carl Hoffman’s Savage Harvest

Everything you guys do is stupid

Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood and tentacles

Rousseau’s Noble Savage

There’s no such thing as traditional surgery, and I’m glad about that

Traditional Californian Botox medicine

Transhumanism?

Assuming it’s smart, my computer double won’t pretend to be me

The Head Museum

Ray Kurzweil (kurz-wile?)

The Ship of So-and-so (Theseus, it’s the Ship of Theseus)

Don’t worry, there are no people anyway

Replacing human parts

(aside from World War Z) The best damn zombie book: Raising Stoney Mayhall

What is it like to be a zombie

Descartes and dualism

Daniel Dennett…possibly getting off the Cartesian merry-go-round?

Heidegger says “that’s just the wrong way to look at the world”

I choose my philosophers based on how funny they are

The feisty John Searle

It’s just stuff, man

Aristotellanism isn’t the same as vitalism, you dummy

John Haldane, who is nice and articulate

Maximo Pigliucci

And Matt illuminates the true nature of reality! Listen carefully.

~~Update: Ancestor, Matt’s Singularity project with Malachi Ward comes out in issue three of Island Magazine. Utopia Plantitia comes out next year, publisher TBA.

And a Voice Spoke out of the Thunderstorm

Thinking about electrosynthesis.

I can imagine an organism that turns movement into stored energy by means of piezoelectric elements (which is actually less convoluted and weird than oriental wasps and their photovoltaic larvae). In other words, the wind blows on the “lichen” moving elements of it around, and the lichen synthesizes sugars.

I can further imagine that in some situations, it benefits the lichen to reverse this pathway, burning calories to generate electrical potential in its tissues. Shocking intruders might be one way to go, but another is to utilize the attraction between negative and positive elements in order to move around.

When released into the air, spores of different individuals could flip their electrical potentials around to attract each other and increase the chances of successful impact and mating. If being swept up in a storm, the spores could play with their charges to stick together into more complex shapes, forming themselves into Kevin’s “flying carpets” and “paper airplanes” in order to better control their descent back to earth.

THAT sort of behavior, in turn, might lead to the evolution of static-charge-based logic circuits suspended in storm cells, where a mass of spores churns through calculations in order to most effectively choose and seek out good environments in which to land and germinate. These suspended mats would be composed mostly of non-reproductive “somatic germ-cells,” whose function is to run calculations, form stable flight configurations, and harvest and convert energy, all in the support of a small number of real reproductive germ-cells.

We can even bring visual changes back into the mix. If the mats have visual systems (perhaps by forming a sphere and converting their entire body into a pinhole camera), they might flip white-black elements rapidly back and forth to create images like the e-ink display of a kindle. Even COOLER, though, by selectively turning large parts of their storm cell dark (heat-absorbing) or light (heat-dissipating) these mats could steer and sustain the wind keeping them up. Perhaps there are permanent or very-long-lived cyclones on this planet, kept “alive” by the work of millions of flipping, static-charged spores.

You’d also have a lot of interesting related species and ramifications: electric stinging nettles, hunting clouds of spores that attack and shock or asphyxiate animals, battling dust-devils, wind-blasted channels through inconvenient mountain-ranges, mining of iron-bearing rock to produce electrical generators made of spinning metallic dust, a whole host of areal filter-feeders, lightning-spiders that build nests to steal the electrical potential of passing storms…

Plus, if the way these things coordinate with each other is through electrical discharge, they can absolutely have them hijack a human’s nervous system. Imagine a man with a small tornado engulfing his head…

Ooh! Getting goosebumps here!