James L. Cambias's Blog, page 28

The Baristiary

For more than twenty years now I've done a lot of my writing in coffee shops. It gets me out of the house, I can observe my fellow pseudointellectuals and blowhards, and I don't have to answer the phone or walk the dog.

In that time I've seen a lot of coffee shop employees. A lot of them are part-timers, and the turnover is high, so even in towns where we only spent a couple of years I've gone through multiple generations of baristas. After a while one notices some recurring types. Here is the fruit of my decades of fieldwork: The Baristiary.

THE CONNOISSEUR: Some people work at Starbucks or a local coffee shop in order to make money. And then there are the ones who work there because they care a whole lot about coffee. Connoisseur Baristas are the ones who can deploy a whole battery of wine-snob vocabulary to describe differences among coffee varieties and roast styles.

Good Points: Actually do know what they're talking about, which can be interesting for the first hour or so.

Bad Points: The second and third hour, plus the barely-concealed sigh when you just want regular drip coffee.

THE INTENSE GUY: Always male, usually below average height and with very short or no hair. Either no tattoos or a full Yakuza paint job. Generally a few years older than the rest of the staff. These guys seem quite bright and articulate, very hard-working, so much so that you're a little surprised to see them pulling lattes for minimum wage. That surprise lasts until they engage someone (maybe you) in conversation. The Intense Guy has one or two subjects that he cares intensely about and has researched extensively. The most benign Intense Guys care intensely about some musical or cinema subgenre, but unfortunately most of them care intensely about socialism, or Objectivism, or genetically-modified crops, or (sigh) national politics. Their extensive research consists of having read one book which Explains Everything, and a bunch of Web sites put up by other Intense Guys. A few Intense Guys go on to become store managers or get real jobs, and the rest wind up on watch lists somewhere.

Good Points: Efficient at the job, willing to go beyond the standard drink list.

Bad Points: You may actually care very intensely about the same thing; that never ends well.

THE TEMP: Hard to describe because you only see her once. Maybe you said, "You're new here, right?" and the Temp said, "Yeah," and the next time you came in she was gone. If you ask the other staff about her, expect either a derisive snort or a shrug.

Good Points: New face.

Bad Points: Never stays long enough to learn the job.

THE LIFER: If you're nineteen, working at a coffee shop is pretty cool. It's not very hard work, really; the hours are usually pretty flexible; you get to chat with other local hipsters and intellectual poseurs. It's less cool when you're thirty-nine, but about half the coffee shops I go to have a Lifer on the staff, who decided that going to college parties, following local bands, getting stoned, and going mountain biking are all he or she needs out of life. Very likely to have neck or face tattoos.

Good Points: Continuity.

Bad Points: You worry that your children will wind up like that.

THE FOUNDER: The one who started it all. Usually a man, unless the shop offers a lot of baked goods. Forty to fifty years old ��� a few are older, and took this up after retiring from a much more prestigious and high-paying career. Essentially a combination of The Connoisseur and The Lifer, but with some entrepreneurial talent, a source of capital, and fewer tattoos. This is the mysterious older guy who comes in at odd times, asks the customers how they're enjoying their drinks, frowns slightly at the people with laptops open, and then goes behind the counter and rearranges everything while muttering "we have a system for this!" When he leaves the staff put everything back where it was.

Good Points: If you have a complaint, it will be listened to and probably acted upon.

Bad Points: You tend to learn more than you care to know about the problems of running a small service-sector business.

THE OVERWHELMED: It's too intense behind the counter! There's orders to fill, transactions to ring up, spills to wipe ��� the pressure is too much! When this barista is on duty, even with others on hand to help, everything is a crisis. Expect shouting, swearing, and lots of under-the-breath grumbling. Especially about how much you put in the tip jar.

Good Points: Amusing to listen to.

Bad Points: Treats any request as an intolerable burden.

THE HOT ONE: This Barista is young, fit, ridiculously good-looking, and either has no tattoos or actually chose ones which are flattering. Clothing is cut off, form-fitting, transparent, or all three. Customers of the opposite sex spend an awful lot of time making awkward small talk with this Barista, and the tip jar is always topped-up. Goes home at the end of shift with a partner who is either even hotter or "that?!"

Good Points: Nice to look at.

Bad Points: Out of your league, sir or madam. Actual coffee-making skills are likely to be minimal.

THE TATTOO BORE: "This one says 'Do or do not, there is no try' in Chinese. Or maybe it's Japanese. I don't remember. Anyway, it's a quote from Gandhi. This is a picture of the cat I used to have, and this is a picture of my current kitty. This is the Viking rune for Coexistence. On the back of my leg here I got a unicorn, because that's my spirit animal. And on the other leg I have a pentagram ��� this one is point up which makes it a silver magic sign. Point down is hurtful magic. Then here on my back . . . "

Good Points: Um . . .

Bad Points: As long as there's some un-inked skin left they can alterate between talking about the tattoos they already have and the tattoos they're going to get.

THE STUDENT VISA: Usually a couple of years older than the normal run of Baristas, the Student Visa dresses like an adult, does a reasonably professional job, and ��� despite the heavy accent ��� has interesting things to say. Often the Student Visa is both an expert on some extremely difficult academic subject, and a huge fan of some obscure aspect of American pop culture. Sadly, in a couple of years the Student Visa will move on to  well-paid tech job in California, or go back home overseas to become Deputy Minister For Foreign Trade.

Good Points: Has probably had all the coffee drinks in their original form and knows what they're supposed to taste like. Also: functional human being.

Bad Points: NSA is probably logging your Web cruising while you're in the cafe.

I expect there are some types I've missed. If anyone has additions, please feel free to add them in the comments.

Random Encounters: Martian-Ravaged London

(Yes, the Random Encounters are back! Once again, I'm going to try to put up one table each week.)

The Martians dropped down out of the sky onto southern England in the spring of 1899, and got as far as London before succumbing to Terrestrial germs. They left behind a devastated city, transplanted Martian organisms, alien super-technology ��� and Victorian society completely shattered. Now survivors are emerging from hiding, and Her Majesty's government is trying to re-establish control over the ruins.

ENCOUNTERS IN MARTIAN-RAVAGED LONDON

(Roll 1d20 if the characters are moving about the city, 1d10 if they remain in one place.)

Roll Twice and Combine
Plot Advancing Encounter: Something relevant to whatever has brought the heroes to London.
Disguised Detective: London's greatest consulting detective, cleverly disguised (roll again on the table to see who he's impersonating). Roll 1d10 to see who he's searching for. 1-2: German Spies (#4), 3-4: Martian Survivor, 5-6: Player-Characters, 7-8: The Professor (#8), 9-10: The Ripper.
German Spies: A party of 1d4 technical experts from Friederich Wilhelm University in Berlin, accompanied by twice as many German Army engineer troops. The scientists have Mauser pistols, the soldiers carry rifles. They're officially here to "evaluate the need for assistance" and unofficially to grab any Martian technology they can find.
Mobile Plant: A Martian species which has proved resistant to Terrestrial pathogens. During the day it spreads its leaves and stays in one place, but at night it moves about looking for living prey. The plant is blind and deaf, hunting only by scent. It has a lethal sting.
Naval Patrol: The near-annihilation of the British Army and London's police have left keeping order in the hands of Royal Navy shore parties. This is a team of 1d6 sailors armed with rifles, an ensign or petty officer with a pistol, and a medical corpsman. Their main priority is to locate and help survivors. They'll ignore minor looting, but meet violence with summary execution.
Poisonous Fog: London's infamous "pea soup" fogs have only gotten worse with the smoke of burning buildings, refugee campfires, and the deadly gas weapon of the Martian invaders. The fog covers an area 1d10 times 10 yards across, and anyone caught in it must hold his breath or take poison damage.
The Professor: One of England's greatest mathematical minds ��� and one of its most ruthless criminals. The Professor rode out the invasion in his hidden headquarters, and now is taking advantage of the chaos. He's looking for Martian devices to study, looting carefully-selected houses and museums, and assassinating all rival gang bosses as they return to the city. The Professor is accompanied by 1d6 thugs, all heavily armed.
Thieves: An organized gang of looters, searching for food, liquor, weapons, and valuables. With the death of the Martians they've gotten more ruthless about eliminating witnesses.
Wandering Lunatic: Unhinged by the horrors of the invasion, this poor individual roams the streets, calling the name of an incinerated loved one. There's a 50 percent chance that the Lunatic will mistake one of the heroes for the object of his or her search, and pursue the party thereafter.
Checkpoint: A fortified position at a major road intersection, manned by 2d6 Royal Marines commanded by a Naval lieutenant. Their mission is to prevent looters or curiosity-seekers from entering the city, help survivors get food and medical help, and prevent violence.
Flooded Area: The choking Red Weed and the destruction of drainage and water systems left an area 1d100 yards across flooded. The water's 1d6 feet deep ��� but there's a 10 percent chance the explorers will stumble into a deeper section by mistake. Obviously any basements, sewers, and Underground Railway sections in this area are completely flooded.
Gang: A band of survivors don't want you poking around their neighborhood. 2d6 toughs armed with butcher knives and clubs chase the intruders out.
Martian Lair: One of several outposts the Martians set up during their brief occupation of the city. It contains 1d6 items of Martian Tech (see below), 1d8-3 Mobile Plants (#5), 1d6-4 captive humans, and 2d6-10 Martian survivors (#12).
Martian Survivor! One of the Martian biology experts, who realized the danger from infection and managed to immunize itself. Now it hides out in the ruins, feeding on unwary refugees and plotting to trade its scientific knowledge for survival.
Martian Technology: Roll on the Martian Tech table below.
Pub: The Queen Victoria pub, in a shabby East End square untouched by Martian invasion, is open for business. The beer's overpriced and the place is lit by kerosene lanterns after dark. Customers include Royal Navy sailors, looters, scientists, Germans, and a handful of neighborhood holdouts. For now there's an unofficial truce in the pub, and troublemakers are quickly taken care of. Permanently.
Ruin: The party stumbles across an iconic London building half-smashed by Martians. There's a 50 percent chance that 1d8 Thieves (#9) are searching the place.
Trap! During the invasion Army troops and guerrillas planted improvised mines and tripwires to slow the Martian fighting-machines. The booby-trap is a dynamite bomb packed with nails and wire. Roll 1d6 to see how well it's concealed. 1-3: Obvious, 4-5: Average concealment, 6: Fiendishly well-hidden.
Tracks: Roll again to see what the party finds traces of.

MARTIAN TECH TABLE

Note that humans may not be aware of what these machines are, or can do, unless they've seen the devices in action. Roll 1d10 to see what the machine is, and then 1d10 for its condition.

Devices

Black Smoke Launcher: A tube holding 1d6 Black Smoke rockets. Each rocket flies straight and level for 1000 yards or until it hits something, leaving a trail of poison gas 20 yards wide.
Blood Extractor: A system of glass pipettes and flexible tubes capable of draining and storing all the blood in a human body.
Crystal Egg:A psychic communication device linked with another Egg back on Mars.
Excavating-Machine:A powerful six-legged machine with big digging scoops.
Fighting-Machine:A giant war tripod armed with a deadly Heat-Ray and gas projectors. It has metal tentacles capable of snatching up a human from the ground.
Flying-Machine:A simple airplane with folding wings, capable of holding two Martians or four humans.
Handling-Machine: A multipurpose work machine with multiple tentacle arms and six stumpy legs. It's unarmed, but its powerful tentacles can demolish most Earthly buildings with ease.
Heat-Ray: A projector for the devastating Martian heat beam.
Power Cylinder: A shiny green metal cylinder capable of powering one of the Martian machines or weapons. It can operate without fuel for a decade, but prolonged exposure to it harms a person's health. If broken it contaminates an area 1d100 yards across.
Smelter:A machine capable of turning ordinary dirt into aluminum. It takes about 10 pounds of dirt to make 1 pound of metal.

Condition

(Roll 1d10 to see what shape the device is in.)

1 to 3: Wrecked. Completely smashed and inoperable. There is a 25 percent chance that the machine is leaking toxic substances. It still is instructive to study.

4 to 6: Damaged. The machine is obviously damaged, but one might try to operate it anyway. When operating there is a 10 percent chance of catastrophic malfunction per turn, and a 10 percent chance of leaking toxic material. Useful for study.

7 or 8: Subtly Damaged. It looks intact, but there is hidden damage. As above, there's a 10 percent chance per turn of catastrophic malfunction. Useful for study.

9: Undamaged. It's ready to go! All you need are eight tentacles and a superhuman intellect, and you can use it easily. Invaluable for study.

10: Still Running. Not only is it intact, it's powered up and functioning. The "industrial" devices like Handling-Machines or Smelters will still be executing their last instructions. All you have to do is figure out how to shut it down . . .

SITUATIONS IN MARTIAN-RAVAGED LONDON

For each encounter, roll 1d6 to see what that individual wants.

A desires B
A wants to capture B
A wants B dead
A wants to go somewhere
A wants to solve a mystery
A wants X

 

A Curious Omission

Like most people, I went to see the Disney/Marvel super-epic Avengers: Endgame a couple of weeks ago. It was good; I give it an A overall. This post isn't a review or analysis of the film. It's just one question.

The question is this: during the Big Final Battle with all the heroes against the villain's legions with the fate of the Universe at stake (again) . . . where are the U.S. armed forces?

Seriously: the battle takes place in upstate New York, on American soil and within range of at least two Air Force bases, three or four Air National Guard bases, two Army bases, and an Army National Guard division dispersed around the state. This doesn't even include any local assets of the fictional military/intelligence agency SHIELD.

Now while the battle might well have ended while ground units were still rolling down the New York Thruway, there should at least have been some aircraft overhead. It's especially odd given that three of the Avengers are current or former Air Force officers themselves.

This isn't the first Marvel movie in which major military forces have been conspicuous by their absence. The climactic battle of the previous film, Avengers: Infinity War, took place in central Africa ��� but there was time for various superheroes to reach the scene and prepare for battle, which means "mundane" military forces have could been involved. However isolationist the rulers of Wakanda may be, they surely wouldn't turn down outside help in the face of an invasion by aliens bent on destroying half the Universe. Ethiopian Air Force MiG-21s could show up, or U.S. Marines in Ospreys from Djibouti, or carrier-based planes from the Indian Ocean.

No doubt the fictional, "in-universe" explanation is that the conventional military units simply couldn't arrive in time, or were engaged off-screen, or something. But why didn't the moviemakers at least acknowledge the existence of real-world armed forces?

After all, the trailer for the upcoming Godzilla: King of the Monsters shows the big G stomping into battle against King Ghidorah with an escort of F-35 fighters. (As I commented to my family, the only thing cooler would be if Godzilla was riding a Harley and holding a big American flag. Maybe they're keeping that for the sequel.)

I think Godzilla provides a clue. Real-world military forces are very powerful. A couple of A-10 Warthogs can turn a column of tanks into scrap metal. A B-52 can rain down 70,000 pounds of bombs in a single sortie. Compared to that, even a mighty hero like Thor or the Incredible Hulk seems kind of redundant. And the more human-scale heroes like Hawkeye or Black Widow become simply insignificant. What can a guy with a bow, or a woman with a Beretta pistol and a taser wristband do when there's serious firepower around?

Godzilla, at least, is an indestructible city-sized monster with atomic fire breath. He's in the same weight class as a military force. So he won't be overshadowed by some jet fighters. They can join in the fight without reducing his star power. Superheroes get left in the shade. So the armed forces have to stay off-screen in Marvel movies.

Still . . . just a couple of computer-animated jets in the background, or a line about the army being half an hour away, would have satisfied my nitpicker's soul.

Unleash The Wild Hunt!

No, not the one with mythical hounds and/or Celtic deities crossing the sky on dark nights. The one with University of Chicago students taking a break from being obsessive overachievers in order to overachieve obsessively. Here's this year's list. Can you get all these things before noon Sunday?

 

And if you haven't got the time or energy for that, you could always read my book.

Hollywood Insider Gossip!

According to my Hollywood sources the actual title for Star Wars Episode IX will not be The Rise of Skywalker, but rather

Everything Rian Johnson Told You Was A Damned Lie

A Film by J. J. Abrams

 

 

Be Careful What You Wish For

It's an old lesson, but one we must re-learn every now and then.

Recently I began to suffer from "gamemaster withdrawal" after half a year or so without running any roleplaying campaigns. I was bursting with ideas for games, so finally I sent out a call for interested players, and drew up a "prospectus" of games I'd like to run. The idea was that the players could vote on which campaign appealed to them.

I kept it simple. The prospectus had six campaigns on it:

"Unknown Stars" ��� a classic Traveller game of mercantile exploration in a newly-reopened subsector,
"Beyond Tomorrow" ��� a D20-based "Gamma World"-style campaign of space voyagers returning to a devastated far-future Earth,
"Against All Flags" ��� a more-or-less straight historical pirate game set in 1714,
"SHIELD Stories" ��� a game of doughty SHIELD agents in a world of superheroes (essentially my version of the Agents of SHIELD TV show),
"Lost Decade" ��� a Call of Cthulhu campaign about characters who have all just recovered from amnesia and must find out what they were doing over the past ten years, and
"A Billion Worlds" ��� I kind of just threw this one in on a whim, a campaign using a fictional far-future hard SF setting I've been developing for a fiction project.

Most of them were pretty low-effort. The simplest would be the pirate game, since my own knowledge of the world in 1714 is good enough to let them just sail around and bump into people.

The SHIELD campaign was almost as easy, especially since I intended to let my players occasionally take the roles of the mysterious "Steering Committee" setting objectives and priorities for the agency's operations. Their decisions would determine what kind of missions Col. Fury would hand out to their agent characters. All I needed was access to a couple of Marvel Comics fan wiki sites, and forty years of reading comic books.

The Traveller campaign and "Beyond Tomorrow" needed a little more preparation, but they were confined to fairly limited areas so I could generate some worlds or places for the party to explore, and expand only as needed.

The Call of Cthulhu game needed a bit more preparation, but I had not only a lot of existing support material for the game, but also H.P. Lovecraft's entire corpus to steal from.

So, no matter what game my players picked, I could run it without a lot of effort. Easy-peasy.

Guess which one came out first in the vote? That's right ��� my unlikely dark horse candidate, "A Billion Worlds." For that one I have to come up with dozens of intelligent species and subspecies inhabiting a billion artificial habitats, asteroids, terraformed moons, and planets, with eight thousand years of history to invent.

Now, fortunately, I have to do most of that anyway for the new novel I'm working on. So the roleplaying game and the science fiction project can borrow from each other.

Maybe this is for the best, really. Low-effort campaigns don't test my powers at all. The Billion Worlds won't be easy, but I doubt I'll get bored with it.

A Cinematic Contradiction

Recently I was watching a video bemoaning the current state of Hollywood. I won't bother linking it ��� you've seen it before, or read it in print. Hollywood has no creativity left, it's all remakes and adaptations of older stuff. You know the drill.

I don't really disagree. I do think that we forget how much Hollywood has always relied on remakes and adaptations. It's possible to acknowledge that and still be a bit put out by how poorly Hollywood is doing it nowadays. When a film like The Martian or Arrival faithfully adapts its source material, I am almost shocked.

However, one point in the particular diatribe I was watching made me puzzled. The critic mentioned that one cause of the "dumbing down" of cinema is the increasing reliance on foreign markets. For big movies, more than half the revenue now comes from Asia. That means the films have to cross cultures easily, so no subtle depictions of social class dynamics in a mostly-black Catholic private school in New Orleans in the 1970s, because nobody in Shanghai really gives a damn about that.

Okay, fine, and true enough. Globalization is real and ongoing. One reason so many films are about punching aliens is that aliens don't buy movie tickets and won't boycott or ban your movie for showing them getting punched.

BUT, this made me wonder about a seeming contradiction. If Hollywood wants to make movies for a global audience . . . why are so many films based on old American TV shows, toys, and cartoons? How many adults in China right now remember playing with a Hasbro Battleship set when they were kids? How many moviegoers in India have fond memories of watching Lost in Space? Heck, how many people outside the United States have read any Marvel comics lately?

Can someone explain this seeming contradiction? If you want to appeal to a global audience, why not just make movies about new characters and save the cost of buying rights and the grief of complaints from fans? Surely there must be some rational economic motive underlying this, but I can't see it.      

 

If you want an exciting adventure which is entirely new and different, check out Arkad's World, from Baen Books. Currently on the shelves in your local bookstore!

Disaster Excuses

One common thread running through science fiction, almost since the beginning, is a concept I call "Disaster Excuses." A Disaster Excuse is some awful event used to justify what would otherwise be an unlikely technological project, journey, or social change.

For a long time the standard Disaster Excuse was nuclear war. From 1945 up to the 1980s, nuclear war could justify almost anything. The most obvious was a return to medieval or even stone-age society ��� too many examples to count. It was also used to explain oppressive future religions, paranoid underground civilizations, secret time travel, and fertility cults. As with most Disaster Excuses, it was a prime mover for the colonization of space.

But it wasn't the only one. Beginning in the 1960s, pollution and overpopulation became equally prominent Disaster Excuses. Again, an overcrowded Earth was often the justification for colonizing other worlds or voyaging to the stars. Draconian population-control regimes served as the rationale for any number of dystopian futures.

Overpopulation waned a bit as a Disaster Excuse, for a couple of reasons. First, the trend lines have gotten less worrisome as the birth rates in country after country drop to replacement level or below. Second, once writers realized that most of the population growth was coming from outside North America and Europe, it was hard to ignore the kinda racist aspect of that particular apocalypse.

Pollution morphed into Climate Change, and is still going strong. It also seems to have spawned an odd backlash against space colonization. Because various writers over the years used environmental destruction on Earth as the pretext for terraforming Mars or settling planets of other stars, somehow the idea got around that this was a serious proposal. Consequently I've seen a number of critiques of space colonization centered around the idea that "we can't run away from Earth's problems!"

Astronomical disasters occasionally crop up as Disaster Excuses ��� most notably in When Worlds Collide. They do lack the social relevance of other excuses, since you can't really show off your political bona fides by taking a stand against colliding planets or interloping black holes.

All this does raise a question, though: why do we need a Disaster Excuse at all? Surely colonizing Mars or sending spacecraft to other stars are things worth doing even if Earth is a perfectly swell place to live. I'd even argue that a peaceful and prosperous society is actually more likely to tackle large projects like those. A starving or war-torn world is too busy struggling for survival. The Apollo program was launched in the booming 1960s; the leaner 1970s saw massive cutbacks in space budgets. Right now we're in another boom era, so that eccentric billionaires can afford their own space programs. I think I prefer that to fighting over my next Soylent ration.

SEE THIS MOVIE

The new Apollo 11 documentary is amazing. There's footage I've never seen, and I've probably watched every space documentary made in the past forty years. Skip this week's crop of comic book heroes and see a film about real ones. 

The Philosophical Alphabet Inside Us

Let us return to those thrilling days of yesteryear . . . specifically to Restoration-era England, when a group of intellectually curious men began to meet at Gresham College to watch scientific experiments and discuss matters like how gravity works and whether blood circulates. At first they were informally known as the "Invisible College" (not to be confused with the other Invisible College of that era), but eventually the group secured a charter from the King and turned into the Royal Society.

The membership list of the early Royal Society is a pantheon of Western European scientific greats: Elias Ashmole, John Aubrey, Isaac Barrow, Robert Boyle, Giandomenico Cassini, Kenelm Digby, John Evelyn, John Flamsteed, Edmund Halley, Johannes Hevelius, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Gottfried von Leibnitz, John Locke, Marcello Malpighi, Nicholas Mercator, Isaac Newton, William Petty, Prince Rupert, John Wallis, Christopher Wren, and a host of less well-known figures.

The patron saint of the organization was Francis Bacon ��� by some accounts the whole idea for a scientific society was inspired by a group called "The House of Solomon" in his utopian novel The New Atlantis. But the real father of the Society was John Wilkins. Wilkins was a Church of England bishop, who managed to navigate the tricky shoals of religious politics from the pro-Catholic reign of Charles I to the arch-Protestant Commonwealth period under Cromwell to the libertine Restoration era of Charles II without losing his head. He wrote books on cryptography, engineering, linguistics, astronomy, and a science fiction novel. But his unfinished lifelong project was the idea of a Philosophical Alphabet (or "Universal Character" as he sometimes called it).

The idea of a Philosophical Alphabet was to do for language what mathematics did for numbers: create a language, ideally one which was ideographic so that words and concepts would have a single symbol, in which the rules of grammar and word formation would encode actual physical reality. That way, just as in mathematics, one could learn truths by manipulating the symbols. So just as by adding the numbers 2019 and 228 we get the result 2247, in Wilkins's hypothetical alphabet we could relate the characters for "Water" and "Cold" and thereby derive "Ice." Naturally, this language would be highly useful in diplomacy, trade, and in communicating scientific discoveries to people in other lands.

More importantly, a sufficiently well-compounded Philosophical Alphabet would allow discoveries to be made in the same manner. By playing around with the characters for "Light," "Velocity," "Time," and "Gravity," presumably Isaac Newton could have come up with General Relativity three centuries before Einstein.

But of course the project ran aground on the fact that a human-created system of characters can't incorporate information which the creators don't know already. (Numbers are a system for representing information, more like an algorithm than a symbol. In the argot of computer games, numbers are "procedurally generated.") Quite simply, there is no necessary connection between symbols and the things they represent.

Unless there is . . .

The "language" of DNA is composed of nucleotide sequences. Those sequences in turn create segments of RNA. And those RNA segments create proteins as amino acid molecules bind to the RNA strands, and then combine into protein molecules. This is not an arbitrary "translation" system: the structure of the protein comes from the arrangement of amino acids, which comes from the sequence of the RNA nucleotides, which comes from the sequence of DNA nucleotides.

DNA actually is a Philosophical Alphabet.

And now a group of researchers in Florida have expanded DNA's vocabulary. They've come up with four additional nucleotides, to create an 8-letter system of DNA instead of the natural 4-letter version. As yet, as far as I'm aware, the team have not created a complementary set of RNA which could then be used for protein synthesis, but I know of no reason why they couldn't go ahead and try.

Think of the potential results! Sure, the most likely product is collections of amino acids which don't bond together into anything useful. But amid the mountains of dross there could be entirely new protein structures ��� proteins impossible for natural DNA to produce. Proteins never before seen on Earth.

By creating and rearranging the codons of the DNA "language" we can discover new biochemical reality. Bishop Wilkins would be proud.