The Best-Laid Plans

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Science

…Are often derailed by that mythical thing some call “real life”, or at least, life as lived anywhere off the journal page. I’ve spotted an absolutely perfect research opportunity and am currently focusing the majority of my efforts (other than the background level of writing stories I need to do to avoid going nuts) on catching up on my field, because it’s been a while and if I’m to have a hope of doing serious research again I need to know what’s up!

So, fingers crossed it all turns out well! More to follow later, depending of course on the outcome of something so very uncertain!

Aliens Used Our Bog Roll – In Wales!!!

Tags

Adventuring, Science, Thoughts

Good evening, everyone!

So what’s all this about aliens? Well, you see, it’s a tale of inexplicable mystery in the night, of occurrences so fantastic and improbable that surely no earthly force could have been responsible. Surely the only explanation could have been something uncanny, even supernatural… or could it?

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It’s a fine late evening in a seaside town in Wales. The two of us are out walking along the pier in the night, past the closed shops and rides, while the rest of the party remains in the arcade. I never was much of a one for gambling, and, since I have a gamer’s reflexes, I darn well notice when a machine is cheating me. (It’s happened.)

Pausing to look out across the bay, I can see past the headland of this one and into the next. (Or possibly I can just see England, I’m not quite sure. I know it is possible from here, in good weather.) I spot a really bright light, moving back and forth above the town lights on the shore, and point it out — is that a helicopter?

Pretty cool, then, but not that interesting. We walk on.

I look at the distant shore again, because it’s pretty, and I realise that the light I thought was above the lights of the distant town is actually on the somewhat nearer far headland, moving back and forth as if it’s negotiating a series of S-bends. Which, on a steep face, is reasonably likely. I point it out again, realising it must just be a car on full beam, and I misplaced it while glancing at it earlier. The headlights are close enough together to look like a single light at this distance, and so bright they’re reflecting in the waters of the bay. It weaves back and forth as I watch, presumably rounding the tip of the headland.

We walk on, and suddenly the light darts to the right, so fast it must be going over 90mph. Shocked, I stop again, and as I do it reaches another series of S-bends. Back and forth… but still not seeming to go either up or down.

Is it a helicopter? It couldn’t have got from above the city to the headland that fast, and it couldn’t have flown that fast from a circling start, and all the while it’s been a constant brightness. Now my mind is getting full of crazy things. I think about how bright the reflection in the water is: no way it’s a regular car. Or a regular helicopter. It’s not a plane, because they (mostly) can’t hold position like that. It’s nothing overly loud, or I’d hear it echoing across the gently rippling water, the swish of tiny waves the main sound.

So there’s no known object this thing can be. And what kind of military genius tests cutting-edge technology over a highly populated area?

But it can’t, can’t, can’t be aliens.

It just can’t. That would be stupid.

And all the while this insanely bright light is just weaving back and forth like it’s taunting me.

I look at the reflection again in the vain hope that will tell me something I couldn’t see in the air. Yellow-gold light on black water, it starts illuminating… not all the way to the far shore. At first I think it’s maybe halfway across the bay, then I recalibrate, remembering the rules of perspective. It looks halfway, which means it’s way, way closer than halfway.

Staring into the darkness, I slowly begin to make out something. A shape. A kind of triangle shape, black on black, the light at its tip…

I’m an idiot!

The light’s not bright, it’s just close by, sixty metres or so from me! It’s one of the conical buoys that mark out sections of the bay! I saw them not ten hours ago! But it’s black against black water, black rock, and black sky… and that’s why I didn’t see it.

Midday Miscellaneous

Tags

Instability, NaNoWriMo, News, Sci-Fi, Science

Or slightly after midday, really.

I went and picked up my thesis from the binders’! It’s still rather hard to believe it’s real, or that I wrote that! When did that happen? (Oh yeah, those seven years of increasingly cantankerous studentship. It’s funny, when you’re eyeball-deep in it you start to forget the beauty and glory of your work, and then every now and again something just occurs to you and it’s bright shining splendid all over again — at least until you sit back down in front of yet another line of Fortran that isn’t doing what it ought to.)

So, thesis! And I hand it in tomorrow!

In other news, last night was a desperate race to midnight, and I squeaked in just under the wire… mainly by going off on a tangent and wittering on about space, because I can do that for days on end. This, therefore, isn’t so much Plot as it’s me letting myself get distracted and witter on in order to make word count in the <10 minutes I had remaining! But I kind of like it, and what’s NaNo for if not to share?

Anywhere from the mining colonies of the asteroids to the orbital stations of Venus, to Mars her home or the radiation-bathed moons of Jupiter, the spectacular views of Saturn orbit… or maybe the NEO miners, those nearby stations that industriously harvested and broke down any space debris passing close to Earth.

Earth. Old mother, birthplace of the human race, but no longer their only home. Still stained with pollution, still scarred with mining and deforestation, but cared for yet, still blue and brown and green from space, streaked with her ever-changing swirls of white as clouds danced across the surface of the world. Still capped at the poles with ice, though less than there had once been; mountain ranges tipped with snow. In the night, the vast cities shone and sparkled like living jewels, diamond dust scattered in random handfuls onto cobwebs in the darkness. And all around, stations orbited, shuttles flew back and forth between Earth and Moon, Earth and station, station and Moon. Attended by this graceful, miniature ballet, the stately planet sailed on in her endless journey around the sun, as she would for countless years to come, heedless of the delicate life birthed from her ancient surface and reaching out towards the stars.

I Have Conquered This Thesis

Tags

News, Science

It happened! It finally happened! I’ve been officially notified that my corrections have been accepted and I now need to create and hand in the bound copies of my thesis!

PARTY TIME!!!

*dances around the house like a nutjob*

Star Trek: Now and Then

Tags

Films, Recommendations, Sci-Fi, Science, Star Trek, Thoughts

When the latest Star Trek was still showing in the local cinema, I went to see it with a friend of mine. We enjoyed it so much that we went twice, the second time in 3D! And I’ll definitely be picking up the DVD from a non-second-hand shop as soon as I catch it on sale. (I don’t have much income right now…)

There were many good things about the film, and it really did feel like Star Trek this time, and I absolutely loved Victory Through Classical Music, which has got to be just the most awesome way to win a fight if you can’t get out of having one. Weapons and power are not and never will be a match for intelligence, and even when sometimes it seems like it’s all we know, ultimately conflict won’t save us; we’re stronger together than apart, though trust can be the hardest thing of all to give.

I might write more about it later, or perhaps when I have access to the DVD and can see it all again, but for now, what’s really on my mind is the strangest, most tangential thing.

(There follows an account of the author practically having flashbacks.)

Bits and Pieces

Tags

Alt-Shift, Science

I keep getting distracted by things to do lately. Not things I need to do, or things I have to do, but things I very much want to do. Which means I’m jolly well going to do them, or else what has it all been for?

My on-and-off under-construction roleplay setting in the world of the Path of the Gods series (which RP book I will be sharing when it’s readable, and which series I will also be redrafting soon) now runs alternate Fridays, and I, of course, am running it. Two of my three players have an in-depth knowledge of the world, having had to put up with my hopefully vaguely coherent ramblings on the subject for a few years now; the third is new to it and unfamiliar with the various concepts and the nuts and bolts of it all. Currently, the party are in an utterly dead landscape known as the Barrens, exploring a half-village in search of clues as to what is happening and why… but they’ve just seen movement on the horizon, and that could all too likely mean they’re in terrible danger.

Then, the following day, it was up bright and early for adventure! My poor character Helen, slowly fraying away into Oblivion, ventured forth to try to stop the world from coming apart in ways she’s all too familiar with… but it all went horribly wrong, as one of our own party succumbed to the voices calling us. We lived, but the destruction was only hastened, and Helen feels she’s at the very gates of oblivion.

And then I was supposed to have a nice game of Star Citizen, but despite working just fine a week ago, today it was unable to download the manifest, so once again I ended up sitting around chatting to the guys while they played Star Citizen. Which is still fun, but it’d be nice to fly!

That, and on top of all this, we’ve finally detected gravitational waves!!! It’s a wonderful time to be alive!

Meanwhile, I still need to be writing Alt-Shift. To this end, I have its prompt CD on, and am mostly doing that. Well… that and surfing the Net. And writing blog posts because I suddenly realised I haven’t written one in days.

Right now, Cal has just given up talking to his superior officer and childhood friend, Stephanie Swan. She’s… really quite scary, actually, at this point in time. He’s going to go back out, and stare across the ruins, and think back over his life, and how it all came to this…

Science Fiction, Science Fact

Tags

Sci-Fi, Science, Thoughts

Here’s something that gets to me. (Don’t worry, you’re not a captive audience. Not until I find a way of making your mouse and keyboard dispense glue on command, anyway.) Let’s talk science. No, really, let’s. Because that’s something that there really should be no problem with and yet that is almost invariably messed up.

Here’s the Big Secret. Here’s how it all works, here is, at its core, the be-all and end-all of what science is and what it is about. What, how, why, when, where. You know, the kind of standard questions you need to answer to have, say, a plot. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. It’s not some kind of esoteric magic, it’s humanity’s most basic tool in the DIY box. Actually, it is the DIY box.

A surprising number of people have the misconception that in some way, SCIENCE is a kind of religious belief system, vaguely along the lines of CHRISTIANITY or BUDDHISM or whatever. (Insert your favourite religion here. I’m lazy.) Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s nothing more than asking questions and finding out the answers. Call it a murder mystery with the universe as the culprit. “My water leaked away! Whodunnit?” “This tree is glowing red and yellow and hurt me! Whodunnit?”

Some of the answers are complicated, and we aren’t all Sherlock Holmes. I know I’m not. But it doesn’t matter: you’ve just gotta keep on going, sifting through all the evidence you can get your hands on. You figure out if X, then Y, and if it turns out that if Y, Z must follow, and you can’t find Z anywhere, then you can be pretty sure you don’t have any Y either. So if you then proceed to go and discover X, one of the things you worked out must be wrong, and you need to go back and fix that and figure out a better guess at what’s really true. (Truth in this sense is an ideal absolute: truth is the universe, as it were. If you can accurately reflect the universe from the most basic principles, including neither more nor less than the contents of said universe, what you have is either true or very close to it.) And so human knowledge crawls along, one crabwise step at a time, because us inconvenient people keep on asking questions. There’s always another “Why?”, always another “How?”, because the world is a complicated place and easy answers don’t seem to grow on trees. (Which are far too complicated, anyway.)

Many good stories rely on something weird or unpredicted happening, and much of the interest can be in people’s attempts to cope with it. But one major, major stumbling block that puts me right off is the reactions ascribed to “scientists” and “sensible people”. Yes, we want evidence. You’d probably want evidence too if I told you that I’d spoken to Tinkerbell just yesterday and she told me it was very important that you wear a green shirt today. But if Peter Pan literally started flying through every city in England tossing fairy dust everywhere and making random people fly, real scientists don’t spend the next six months insisting the fact that they’re levitating is totally impossible despite being ten metres off the ground. They go “oh my goodness this is amazing HOW IS THIS HAPPENING I WANT TO DO THAT”, float over to the nearest piece of kit they can think of that might be useful to determine the exact powers of fairy dust, and once they’ve eliminated any competing possibilities, discard all the theories previously in existence that don’t account for said properties of fairy dust. Yes, there’s a large component of “Are we all hallucinating?! Pinch me!”, as is only sensible when anything psychedelic happens, but once that’s out of the way, it’s all whoa cool let’s ride.

And what’s more, fundamentally, we’re all programmed to do this. Badly, but we are. Nobody likes a story that makes no logical sense, because, well, it makes no sense. One day Tiddles saw the moon rise and the moon rose twice though in the ocean a giant tiger and a shark ate my 1740s sports car. While I brushed my hair I saw I had three ears but one was a kangaroo and it dived into the lightning it became. We make sense of things, it’s what we do. It’s why we’re not all still sitting in caves with no clothes.

It’s being human taken to the nth degree.

To reiterate: here is all you need to know! The world is in front of you. When you poke it with a stick, what does it do, and why? When you think you have the why, test the why! Poke the why with a stick! What does it do? Does it do what you expected? If not, why? How does this happen? Think you’ve figured it out? Poke the how! Are you sure? What if it was under different conditions? Would they change how it worked if your idea was right? Do they in the real world? It’s not about having the answers — it’s about asking all the questions.

That’s all.