Author: Pat Chiles

An expatriate Southerner in the Midwest, writing about writing and whatever dadgum else interests him. Author of the science fiction thrillers FROZEN ORBIT, FRONTIER, and ESCAPE ORBIT, published by Baen Books.
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What Good is Apple?

This, for starters.

Kevin Williamson at NRO has a pitch-perfect assessment of the late Steve Jobs’ impact on technology and society. His conclusion is noteworthy:

I was down at the Occupy Wall Street protest today, and never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them — and for us — is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the Barney Franks and Tom DeLays an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords. And they — and we — will be poorer for it.

And to the kids camped out down on Wall Street: Look at the phone in your hand. Look at the rat-infested subway. Visit the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, then visit a housing project in the South Bronx. Which world do you want to live in?

We love our iPods and would love to have a Mac even more, but they are a tad pricey. Though here’s something to consider: if Microsoft hadn’t dumped Vista for Windows 7, we’d have bitten the bullet and migrated to Apple. A lot of other people apparently felt that way, which is the reason Microsoft rushed out Win7.

That’s why innovation and competition are good things. Even though we may have a humble HP running lowly Win7, I thank Steve Jobs for making our home PCs much better than they would be otherwise.

Because does anyone really think Windows would have improved all that much without Apple leading the way? Would Windows even exist if Apple hadn’t pioneered graphic user interfaces? Imagine still living in a world of MS-DOS. Scary, ain’t it?

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Palin is Out

Well, crap.

I had prepared an eloquent post comparing Gov. Palin to Ulysses S. Grant. It was pure brilliance, comparing the sorry state of Republican leadership to the sorry state of Union generalship during the Civil War. And as a proud son of the South and graduate of her finest military institution, you’d better believe it killed me to say that.

The historical analogies were pretty clever. Or they would have been, except that she’s just announced that she won’t be running for President.

I won’t begrudge anyone for doing what’s best for their family, but it was really looking like she’d run. I was hoping she would, but that interview on Greta last week planted the first seeds of doubt in my mind. It’s hard to imagine what more the media could do to her and her family but that was certainly a major consideration. No doubt she also has some private polling data that showed her chances would’ve been a real long shot.

There’s much work ahead to bring our country back to its founding principles and restore some semblance of sanity. It’s about so much more than replacing Obama and his band of merry Marxists. Hell, a broken mop with a bucket for a head could do a better job than the current occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

We not only have to defeat the Democrats, we have to continually fight a rear-guard action against the country-club establishment within our own party so we don’t have to endure another Leftist onslaught like this in our lifetimes. She was hands-down the best person for that task, though perhaps too much damage was already done to her reputation. And that’s a crying shame.

So who else is out there? There’s a lot to like about Cain, but maybe not enough. Perry’s too much of a blowhard for my tastes. Bachmann is dead-on right about a lot of things but hasn’t really explained what she’d do so much as what she’d not do. And she definitely jumped the shark on the vaccine issue. Romney would be okay in many ways but is downright terrible in others. Either way, he’s certainly not the man to straighten out the party.

Despite the Governor’s expressed intentions to work for change from outside the political structure, it’s hard to see how she will have the same clout going forward. Now that she’s removed herself as a threat to the other candidates, and especially the party establishment, exactly where is her leverage? The power of ideas and being on the side of truth is sometimes not enough. Although I will say this: if she endorses a particular candidate, I’d be much more inclined to take that person seriously.

The hard work continues.

UPDATE: Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection nails it:

It disgusts me that a candidate of such quality cannot run as a practical matter, and that we are left with second and third choices.  But reality is reality, and it would have been a tough road to overcome the past three years.

Palin had the opportunity to be a game-changer in the direction of this country; someone who really understood at a gut level how far down the road we are on the path to a country we will not recognize; someone who understands that the political class holds the country by the throat, and that removing the grip is necessary not just changing who holds the grip.

Precisely.

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But Would it Make a Good Omelet?

Scientists attempting to hack chicken DNA to “reverse-evolve” a dinosaur from an embryo.

From the story at Wired:

Hints of long-extinct creatures, echoes of evolution past, occasionally emerge in real life—they’re called atavisms, rare cases of individuals born with characteristic features of their evolutionary antecedents. Whales are sometimes born with appendages reminiscent of hind limbs. Human babies sometimes enter the world with fur, extra nipples, or, very rarely, a true tail. Horner’s plan, in essence, is to start off by creating experimental atavisms in the lab. Activate enough ancestral characteristics in a single chicken, he reasons, and you’ll end up with something close enough to the ancestor to be a ‘saurus’…Already, researchers have found tantalizing clues that at least some ancient dinosaur characteristics can be reactivated.

Fascinating. Or something.

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Book Report: Heaven’s Shadow

Okay, not quite. I’m planning to start posting book reviews, as soon as I’m done writing my own and have time to read other people’s stuff again. I’ve been picking through Boyd Morrison’s The Vault for nearly a month and am not even halfway through yet. Our 13-year-old finished it in like three days.

Such is the life of a writer with a full-time day job. Darn those evil corporate bigwigs who expect me to actually work, on stuff they deem important, and then pay me for it!

So until I can devote the time to sharing books I’ve enjoyed with you, check out this interview with the authors of Heaven’s Shadow at The Space Review. It’s the first of a trilogy by a couple of guys who’s names you’ve probably seen in TV and movie credits. Here’s the gist of it:

It appears to be about a new space race, this time to be the first to land on a mysterious near Earth object (NEO) that is passing outside the orbit of the Moon, but within reach of an Constellation-like system.

It’s actually about an unusual type of First Contact, humans encountering an alien vehicle and an alien intelligence. We aren’t anywhere near the first to attempt this—not even in the first thousand. But we think we have a slightly different story to tell.

Works for me! I’ve already reserved it at our library, maybe I can knock it out over three or four months and get back to you…

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Let’s Go To Prison!

If Pro is the opposite of Con, then the opposite of Progress must be…?

Congress.

This story is downright scary. I’ve touched on this alarming trend of criminalizing just about everything, for example the outrageous Gibson raids. And it’s being done without consideration of “willful intent”, which used to be the threshold for criminal convictions. And a lot of the things they’ve deemed illegal are just plain stupid, in my opinion.

Here’s an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal’s piece:

“One controversial new law can hold animal-rights activists criminally responsible for protests that cause the target of their attention to be fearful, regardless of the protesters’ intentions. Congress passed the law in 2006 with only about a half-dozen of the 535 members voting on it.”

Emphasis mine.

Now, I’m an omnivore and therefore no big fan of PETA. I didn’t claw my way to the top of the food chain to eat Purina Rabbit Chow. But that’s just stupid.

And there’s this one:

“…a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, man with an extensive criminal record, was back in school pursuing a high-school diploma and working as a drywall installer. While doing some remodeling work, Mr. Yirkovsky found a .22 caliber bullet underneath a carpet, according to court documents. He put it in a box in his room, the records show.

A few months later, local police found the bullet during a search of his apartment. State officials didn’t charge him with wrongdoing, but federal officials contended that possessing even one bullet violated a federal law prohibiting felons from having firearms.

Mr. Yirkovsky pleaded guilty to having the bullet. He received a congressionally mandated 15-year prison sentence, which a federal appeals court upheld but called “an extreme penalty under the facts as presented to this court.”

I should think so.

Clearly this guy was not one to blindly trust, but it sounds like the court accepted the “I found the bullet” story. I mean, come on. 15 years in Federal Pound-You-In-The-@$$ prison for a lousy .22 Long cartridge? Even a serious round like 9mm or .45 shouldn’t count…because they’re not firearms. What the hell was he gonna do, throw it at somebody? Maybe put it in a slingshot?

It’s as if we’ve reached some kind of crazy lawmaking inflection point, where our representatives are constantly in such a rush to prove they’re “doing something” that pretty soon damned near everything will be illegal. Combine that with the recent trend towards militarizing our police forces, and you’ve got the key ingredients for a very disturbing situation. We may all end up in prison camps, but at least our Congress-critters can sleep well knowing they’ve done something.

Congress should only meet for, say, 60 days a year, so we can limit the damage. And every new law should have a sunset provision. Force them to revisit it in five or ten years and decide if it still makes sense.

And if it doesn’t, maybe we can find a way to put them all in the Big House to commiserate with all the other ne’er-do-wells.

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E ≠ MC²

Holy hyperdrive, Batman: Faster-Than-Light Particles Question Einstein’s Theory

One would hope the CERN researchers have thoroughly vetted their results and analyzed them eight ways from Sunday before making it public. Gizmodo also reports on this while not sounding entirely convinced at the same time. The comments probably add more to this debate than I could, in any event. Interestingly, blogger/scientist L.Riofrio has been advocating a light-is-slowing-down theory for some time so one must wonder how this figures into it.

A few years ago, I went back to school to learn all the Calculus that I should’ve studied as an undergrad. But that’s what happens when an English major Forrest-Gumps his way into an Engineering job.

Boy, what a difference 20 years made. What once would’ve sent me screaming into the night was now fascinating. I drank it in. Anyone not majoring in one of the hard sciences or an engineering discipline should at least take Calc 1 and 2. And take it with an open mind, not as some medieval torture that you must endure.

Why? Carl Sagan once said something along these lines: “We have constructed a society that is almost entirely dependent on science and technology, yet have structured our education system so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a recipe for disaster.” While I had serious disagreements with much of his social thinking and general disparagement of religion, this is absolutely correct.

Because Calculus is nature’s Rosetta Stone. It’s the universal language of science and engineering. It’s the method we use to describe and predict the world around us. It’s how we quantify things that are dynamic, constantly changing. Once I began to understand it, the power of Calculus blew my mind. And I developed a much greater appreciation for Sir Isaac Newton. Building upon the work of others (because that’s how it goes), he pretty much invented Calculus in his early twenties while on an extended break from college (“University”, in the Queen’s English). They were closed for an outbreak of Tuberculosis or some other devastating 17th century disease.

And he did it without slide rules or a whiz-bang TI84 Silver Edition calculator.

I also developed a much greater appreciation for God. And let me tell you, it can be a struggle to remain grounded in your Faith while pursuing Science at the same time. The latter frequently challenges our notions of the former. It shouldn’t. Unfortunately, too many with scientific education use that as a convenient excuse for Atheism.

In my case, learning Calc was different. To a much greater degree than Trig or Algebra, it gives us tools to understand nature from the smallest subatomic particle to the farthest galaxy. From modeling the behavior of viruses to figuring out how to measure blood pressure.

More importantly, it’s a tool we can use to mathematically predict things which is the key to scientific discovery. It took centuries for man to figure out the language of nature. God’s rules of the road. And we’re still refining it, four hundred years after Newton first figured it out for himself. But God snaps His fingers, and it just is. Left there hanging, taunting us to try and catch up.

One example: our class once dug into E=MC² as an exercise. It didn’t take long to see that as values of E (energy) got closer to C (speed of light), the value of M (mass) started heading for infinity. Which mass can’t do, despite what my bathroom scale has been telling me for the past several years.

And that’s my layman’s view of why this could really shake up physics. If CERN is correct, it is a Very Big Deal that shows how much we still have to learn.

God is Infinite. Men are puny.

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Artist Bleg

Anyone ever seen this illustration before? I’m looking for the artist…

Other than the folding aft wings, it’s pretty close to what I envisioned for the Clipper spaceplanes in Perigee. In my version, those passenger modules you see in the mid and rear would be for cargo. Couple of reasons for this:

1) It enables a critical scene late in the plot.

2) Realism. If something like this were to ever come into service, you can bet the people paying those ticket prices are going to want to be up front where they’re close to windows. Note how the aft and mid-deck pressure vessels for the pax are embedded deep inside the hull; I’m assuming no windows. That’d be one puke-inducing ride. Also, time-critical freight would be a huge business for such a vehicle. Forget FedEx overnight to Japan. How about same-day service?

It looks like a cutaway from Flight Global, but there’s nothing on their website. I’d like to use this in my book but can’t find the original for the life of me.

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Snoopy Come Home

I don’t know if this project is comparable to finding a needle in a haystack. Maybe more like finding a particular grain of sand on a beach.

I’m a bit of a math geek but the prospect of finding a 42-year-old Lunar Module cast away to orbit the Sun boggles the mind. It can probably be done as we have a pretty good handle on orbital mechanics. Limiting the variables will be a problem. To my amateur’s mind, the big questions would be getting precise enough data on the LM’s orbital elements after they left it behind, and what kind of other weird cosmic effects may have pushed it around over the last four decades. Solar wind and gravity gradients are way beyond my layman’s knowledge.

Apollo 10 was a dry run for the first landing mission, Apollo 11. Their orbit took them pretty darn close the the Moon’s surface, and they did everything but actually land. But even if the crew had grown a wild hair and decided to go for it, they would’ve been in for a long stay. The Lunar Module for the dry-run mission was used precisely because it was too heavy for a landing attempt. Grumman had embarked on an aggressive weight-reduction program for the landers, and apparently this one (LM-4, named “Snoopy” by the crew) didn’t make it to the scales in time.

But don’t feel too bad for the guys who almost made it. Two of the crew (Gene Cernan and John Young) ended up going back as mission commanders. Of the very few men who’ve been to the Moon, they’re part of the really select few who have done it twice. The third, Jim Lovell, flew around it twice on Apollo 8 and Apollo 13.

You’ve probably heard of that last mission. I would imagine his frustration at not landing was tempered by the relief of just getting back alive.

And in case you’re wondering, Apollo 10’s Command Module was named (you guessed it) Charlie Brown. Not sure where Lucy and Linus fit in here, but Snoopy actually has a long history with the space program, particularly during the 60’s when both the agency and the comic strip were at their heights. The Silver Snoopy is still a prized award within NASA ranks.

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