David Lee Summers's Blog, page 15

Fighting the Battle

About the time this post goes live, I’ll be checking into the hospital for a radical prostatectomy to hopefully deal with my prostate cancer once and for all. Fighting prostate cancer was certainly not a battle I asked for, but I will fight using all the resources at my disposal. Thankfully I have terrific allies in the form of a great surgical team and my family. If all goes well, I’ll be back home and recovering tomorrow. I hope to share at least a short progress report on Saturday.

Give...

A Living Culture

I am fascinated by history and I love reading about discoveries made by archeologists who study artifacts humans left behind in the distant past. This is basically what led me to read E. Charles Adams’ The Origin and Development of the Pueblo Katsina Cult, which I discussed about a week and a half ago. However, I think it’s important to remember that pueblo culture is alive in the modern world. While I think it’s fascinating to read the story of changes that occurred in that culture some 500 yea...

The Three-Body Problem

The three-body problem is one of the more vexing problems of classical mechanics. In short, if you have a system of three objects that interact with each other, you can’t use classical Newtonian equations to predict their behavior. Effectively, you have a chaotic system. In astronomy, you might imagine three planets or three stars interacting gravitationally. I first encountered this idea in high school soon after reading how Percival Lowell began a search for a ninth planet in our solar system ...

Communing with Elder Stars

Kitt Peak National Observatory is situated on a mountain within the boundaries of the Tohono O’Odham Nation. Over the years, the observatory and the Nation have generally had a good relationship. One of the ways the observatory has shown its appreciation of the Nation’s support has been to open up from time to time to present a special night with access to the mountain’s telescopes. I have helped with a couple of these nights in the past. The most recent Tohono O’Odham night occurred while I was...

Encountering the Katsina

One of the pleasures of attending graduation at Northern Arizona University a couple of weeks ago was the opportunity to meet some of Verity’s friends, including a young Navajo man who graduated with a history degree and shared Verity’s love of Monty Python. We spent the afternoon after graduation with this young man. He gave Verity and my wife, Kumie, katsina dolls as gifts. Traditionally, Hopi people created katsina dolls as a way of instructing young girls and women about the katsinam, spirit...

First Action Bureau

This weekend finds me at Phoenix Fan Fusion in Phoenix, Arizona. If you’re planning to drop into the convention, you can find me and several other great authors at the Artisans of Words and Wonder Area in the Exhibit Hall at tables B914-B923. On my table, you’ll find science fiction, steampunk, and horror. It should come as no surprise that I write such a mix of genres when you realize that I grew up watching shows like Star Trek, The Wild Wild West, and Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. Another show...

The Dark Deception

At this point, I’m less than a month away from my cancer surgery and I’m deep in the throes of getting pre-operative clearance from my primary care doctor and cardiologist. As a result, it feels like I’m spending a lot of time in waiting rooms, either waiting for doctor’s appointments, or for tests. To me, the best way to spend that kind of time is with a good book. To distract myself from dwelling too long and hard on the forthcoming surgery, I picked a fun book based on one of my favorite chil...

Phoenix Fan Fusion 2024

Next weekend, I’m excited to return to Phoenix Fan Fusion in Arizona, which will be held at the Phoenix Convention Center from Friday, May 24 through Sunday, May 26. Phoenix Fan Fusion is a multi-genre pop-culture convention featuring actors, artists, authors, Among the actor guests are Dick Van Dyke, Alan Tudyk who played Wash on Firefly, Gina Torres who played Zoe on Firefly, Shamiek Moore who voices Miles Morales in the Spiderverse movies, and Grey DeLisle who has voiced Daphne in Scooby-Doo....

The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo

The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo was the iteration of the long-running Scooby-Doo franchise that ran, fittingly enough, for thirteen episodes in the fall of 1985. I would have been starting my sophomore year of college then. That was the year I first met Ross Lomanitz, who studied under Oppenheimer. It’s also when I first started getting to know the woman who would be my wife, though it would still be a few years before we would begin dating. Needless to say, I had other things on my mind than Saturd...

An Impossibility in an Impossible Universe

The title of today’s post refers to a quote by Ray Bradbury, who once said, “We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.” He was referring to how amazing we humans and the universe are and how it’s almost overwhelming to understand it all. Yet we do strive to understand it all through science, faith, and our imagination. Today is a big day for our family. We have gathered in Flagstaff, Arizona to celebrate my youngest daughter’s graduation with a geology degree from Northern Arizona Unive...