Fantasy and SciFi Trivia

Thursday: “Execution by defenestration, my child, is a particularly human act.” Randall Garrett. Context?

From “A Matter of Gravity” in Lord Darcy Investigates. Not the Pride and Prejudice Darcy, but Lord Darcy, Chief Criminal Investigator for His Highness the Duke of Normandy, brother of King John of England. Supposedly in our own time, but in a universe where King Richard I survived his injuries at the Siege of Chaluz—and where the laws of magic, rather than science, were discovered and codified.

Friday: “No world is satisfactory unless the parts are equal to the whole.” Henry Kuttner. Context?

From “Gallagher Plus” originally published in 1943 and reprinted in Robots Have No Tails, 1952. Gallagher is an inventor whose genius subconscious takes over when he is drunk. And he’s very drunk at this point.

Saturday: “The world could not be blamed for what he was.” Philip Jose Farmer. Context? 

From The Maker of Universes, 1965, before Robert Wolff blows the horn that can open the gates between universes.

Sunday: “Why do I always have to show everything?” Madeleine L’Engle. Book?

From A Wrinkle in Time, Meg’s thoughts about herself (referring to the way she shows her emotions.) I was very tempted to tweet the first line of this book and ask which Newberry Award winner it was—surely not many award-winning books start out with “It was a dark and stormy night!”

Monday: “The right to be totally ignorant of any useful knowledge seems to be the basic one.” Keith Laumer. Book? 

This is from the short story “Native Intelligence” from Galactic Diplomat. The book reprints a group of short stories about Retief, a diplomat who delights in not-quite-standard diplomacy (and incidentally gives his superior fits.) Keith Laumer wrote the stories in the 1960s. The first sentence of the quote should have been “There’s always a certain percentage of any population with the conviction that society is a conspiracy to deny them their rights,” but the whole thing was too long for Twitter.

Tuesday: “But answers also carry in themselves their commands and their penalties.” Clifton. Context? 

The book is Eight Keys to Eden, published in 1960. This is a first contact story with a bit of satire about politics, which feels quite current, and the sentence following the one quoted is “The penalty being that once one thinks he has the answer he stops looking for it.” My own copy is a 50 cent paperback, but it’s now on Kindle.

Wednesday: “Her mind opened a memory to him, of snow and speed and the awesome power of the avalanche beneath her.” Bowling. Context?

From Homecoming. Marna is remembering avalanche surfing, merely an extreme sport from her point of view. Lai sees it as sheer madness.

When It’s Springtime in Alaska

The road I live on, looking close to due east. You can see that the snow hasn't melted at all. It'll be a little muddy when it does; this is a gravel road.

Waxing moon in the daylight sky--about 5 pm.

It’s forty below, according to the song. It can be–our 40 below record lows go through the end of March. But today it was more like 20 above, and while the sunlight was pretty bright, it was enjoyable being outdoors.

As you can see, the storm took down a few birch branches in my yard. Nothing like the snapped spruce at Wolf Run, though.

I took a few pictures, and thought I’d share them with those who live in warmer climes. The first part of Tourist Trap is very much based on the landscape I live in. Enjoy!

North Pole Weather

Sunrise at 8:13 this morning, sunset at 7:45 PM for 11 hours, 34 min and 43 seconds of daylight. We’ll break twelve hours in four more days. (I’ll explain why we get 12 hours before the equinox next week.) Still no melting to speak of except where the sun is shining on something dark, and last November’s ice is still on the roads. But the snow is settling (or evaporating) and the wind spinner is starting to show above the snow. The snow stake is a little hard to read in the shade, but it looks to me like we now have around 21” on the ground.

When we do get the air moving in from the south instead of the Arctic Ocean, things should warm up fast. The forecast is saying highs near 30 by the end of the week and we normally get about 10 days with maxima above freezing in March, so I have my fingers crossed. But the breakup of an omega block, such as the one we’ve been living with, is notoriously hard to predict.

Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Volcanoes

I’m sure you’ve heard, ad nauseum, about the plate tectonics underlying the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Indeed, it seems that plate tectonics, which produces earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis with devastating consequences is a force of destruction, pure and simple. But does it have a positive side as well?

The theory of plate tectonics, which at this point does the best job of explaining the earth’s geology, is based on the idea that the earth’s surface is made up of a number of semi-rigid plates which slide around over the earth’s surface. They interact primarily at their edges, where they may be pulling apart (as in the mid-Atlantic and the African rift valleys) sliding past each other (as in the San Andreas fault of California) or colliding.

Plates are made up of ocean crust, sometimes with relatively light continental crust on top. Ocean crust is dense enough to slide under other plates; the lighter continental rock above it resists being pulled under, and buckles or folds if it is on top of two colliding plates. Thus collisions of two plates with continents on top generally leads to mountain ranges such as the Himalayas.

Collisions between ocean plates and plates with light continental rock atop generally lead to subduction zones, such as the one off the west coast of South America, where the oceanic crust is pulled under the lighter continental crust. The sediments pulled down with the ocean crust are gradually heated and melted, reappearing as volcanic magma. Thus the volcanic spine of the Andes.

If two oceanic plates collide one is normally pulled under the other, but it is less obvious which will be subducted, and in fact this may change over time. The same melting of sediments occurs, and a line of volcanoes, such as the Aleutian Islands, normally develops next to the subduction zone.

Plates don’t slide past each other smoothly. They stick and then break loose, producing earthquakes. If they are just sliding past each other they may produce earthquakes but there is generally not much vertical movement. If one plate is being pulled under another, however, the sticking normally results in a bowing up of one plate, and when that sticking is released, there may be considerable vertical movement. If that movement is under water, a tsunami is created. This is what happened with the great Alaska earthquake, and has now happened off the coast of Japan.

But what would happen if the plates all just stopped? If there were no more plate tectonics? More, if there had never been any plate tectonics?

First, the earth would be flat and completely covered with water, if there were any water on the face of the earth. Mountains are constantly being eroded by the forces of weather. Given far less geologic time than has actually passed, any initial irregularities in the surface of the earth would have been smoothed out. Plate tectonics is and has been the main mountain builder on our planet.

Second, there is some question as to whether we would have an atmosphere. Certainly we’d have a hard time breathing the mixture of carbon dioxide, water vapor and other compounds put out by volcanoes, but then we’d have a hard time breathing the atmosphere prevailing when life evolved. Plants convert the gasses produced by volcanoes into an atmosphere we can breathe.

Third, plate tectonics is part of the way radioactive heating in the earth’s core is transferred to the surface. It’s one of the reasons we don’t have the radical resurfacing we think we see on Venus.

Plate tectonics can certainly produce devastation, but like weather, it’s something we have to live with. Japan has actually done a superb job of preparation, but there are prices we must pay for living on a dynamic planet, one which can support life. One of those prices has just come due.

Radiation Therapy for Breast Cancer

Once I was finished with chemotherapy, I had 6 weeks of radiation therapy to look forward to. By this time it was early December, and radiation therapy was a 5-day-a-week affair, some fifteen miles from where I live. I cannot drive in the dark; laser therapy for diabetic retinopathy has left me essentially night-blind. Luckily the cancer center was willing to schedule my appointments for near noon—the only daylight available this far north in the winter.

The first step is called simulation. This is when the technicians work out the exact position you need to be in for the radiation beams to have a maximum impact on the area from which the cancer was removed and a minimum impact anywhere else. They also mark key points on the breast with tiny tattoos. Laser beams on those tattoos eventually line up the radiation beams.

Door of the radiation room. The white is the edge of the door--and it has a lead core, so you can guess how heavy it is!

The tattoos were tiny—so tiny they were generally circled or otherwise marked with felt pens so the technicians could find them.

Probably the worst part of the procedure was that the position they wanted me in was lying down with both arms over my head. I had a frozen shoulder at one time—it’s still stiff—and lying for 15 minutes with my arms over my head, my hands clutching a rubber ring, was agonizing. The technicians generally had to help me lower my arms after the session was over. I could not move them.

Aside from that, the sessions were simply boring. Nothing much was visible, and I had to keep perfectly still while the machine rotated around me. Because of the intensity of the X-rays, the whole room was shielded and the technicians had to be out of the room while I was actually being irradiated. In fact, I recall that at one point they were having problems with the electric mechanism that opened and closed the thickly shielded doors. It was all they could do to open and close them manually.

Cancer radiation machine. The patient lies on the gurney on the front left which is then pushed under the white head, and the head then rotates around the table.

The worst problem was not the therapy itself, but the weather. January 2009 started out cold. The first ten days of the month not only had minimum temperatures below –40 F, the maximums were often below -40 as well. At those temperatures, both cars and power plant cooling ponds leave contrails. In built-up areas such as Fairbanks, those contrails flow together to create ice fog. In particular, there is a military power plant just north of the main road into Fairbanks from North Pole, where I live, that has caused several fatal accidents because of the ice fog it produces.

There is another way to drive into town, by making a long detour to the north around the base, and that is what I did for the first week of January, when I had daily appointments. Even then, the fog in town was so dense that I had a hard time seeing streetlights or telling exactly where I was, let alone seeing cars more than a couple of car-lengths ahead of me.

In mid-January the weather turned around and we suddenly had four days with highs well above freezing. A touch of relief? NOT. Our roads almost always have ice and snow over the asphalt or gravel in winter, and a midwinter warming just makes everything appallingly slippery.

The only side effect I had from the radiation therapy itself was the equivalent of a mild sunburn on the treated breast. My oncologist gave me some cream to treat this, but it was more a slight reddening than painful. Again, I kept up daily exercise throughout the therapy. I felt a little increase in energy after the chemo and radiation were over, but was not aware of fatigue during the treatments.

Am I cured? Less than three years after diagnosis, it’s impossible to be sure. I’ve had a mammogram and visits with both doctors in the last couple of weeks, and everything looks fine, thanks in large part to the fact that my primary care physician actually caught the cancer a couple of months before my regular annual mammogram was due. The early detection plus the exercise can probably get the credit for the relatively minor side effects I suffered. The cancer also pushed me into going ahead and publishing Homecoming.

And while my hair only thinned rather than falling out entirely during chemotherapy, it did come back in curly for a while. The photo of me, which was taken to go on the back of the book, was taken the summer after my treatments ended. Alas, my hair is now as straight as ever.

SciFi and Fantasy Trivia

Thursday: “I don’t think we’re in West Virginia any more, Toto.” Eric Flint. Context?

From 1632, the novel that started the Ring of Fire series. A small Appalachian town of our own day has been transported to the middle of the 30-years war in Germany, and the West Virginians are just beginning to realize that wherever they are, it isn’t where they were. The statement is an obvious takeoff on The Wizard of Oz.

Friday: “Spurs and riding crop to fly a mule were about as sensible as four wheels and a clutch to sail a ship.” Suzette Haden Elgin. Context?

The passage is from Twelve Fair Kingdoms, first volume of the Ozark Fantasy Trilogy. Yes, that’s flying mules, held to a speed of 60 mph because 60 is five times twelve. (They’re into numerology, too.)

Saturday: “So I have seen the moons of Jupiter, and mountains on our own.” Poul Anderson. Context?

From A Midsummer Tempest, 1974. Shakesperean characters, dialog in iambic pentameter—take a good look at the quote!  The chief character has just had his first look through a telescope.

Sunday: “We need three laws of our own, but I’m glad we don’t have them.” Asimov. Context?

The “three laws” are of course Asimov’s three laws of Robotics: “1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.” The book is The Naked Sun, second book with the human detective, Elijah Bailey, and his robot partner, R. Daneel Olivaw.

Monday:  “There was more to the business of carrying fire than she realized, however.” Auel. Context?

From The Valley of Horses. Ayla, cast out by the Clan, is learning to survive on her own.

Tuesday: “And he knew now the ultimate corruption of power: to make another person a toy to do your will.” M.Z.Bradley. Context?

From The Heritage of Hastur. Regis is considering what Dyan has done to Dani.

Wednesday: “His mother had told him about the sky, but he had never expected it to be this far away.” Bowling. Context?

From Homecoming. Roi is remembering the first time Derik ever took his slaves outdoors, and his first sight of the sky.

 

North Pole Weather

Spring is coming! How do I know? The sun is blindingly bright on the snow, the days are getting longer (almost 11 hours today) and OLLI classes (Osher Livelong Learning Institute) have started. That’s why this post is a day late–I had classes yesterday in rocks and fossils, the science of smell, and Beringia. Fridays  it’s the health care system and one on health problems for us old fossils (the non-rocky kind.) Expect the weather reports to be on Tuesdays this month.

Sunrise this morning was 7:35 am; sunset will be at 6:30 pm, and we’re gaining six and three-quarter minutes a day. The sun is more than 20 degrees above the horizon at noon, and the sun’s warmth, while not enough to start melting the snow by direct radiation on that white surface, is producing some melt around the edges of snow patches on dark surfaces. Sunlight on the back of the thermometer has even pushed it to above freezing, though the air temperature when I took the picture was 6 below. The local weather forecast (which I trust a lot more than I do the forecast on my iPhone) says highs today will be 15 to 25 above. Definitely spring by Alaskan standards, even if the ice from the freezing rain last November is still on the roads.

Ice on Badger Road, the nearest major road to my house. The rutted snow in the foreground is the road I live on.

That ice will be a real problem once it really warms up. Right now, we have what is called an omega block with high pressure aloft over the Bering strait steering winds from the Arctic Ocean over interior Alaska.  Breakup of such a blocking situation is a very difficult forecasting problem, but if the numerical forecasts mean anything, we might have warm upper winds from the Pacific by the official start of spring, March 20. If so, cars will be all over the roads. Cold ice isn’t really that slippery, if you’re used to driving on it and if you have appropriate tires and all-wheel drive. Ice near the freezing point is something else!

Horse Colors: Manchado and Brindle

This time I’m discussing a pair of markings that may or may not be genetic: manchado and brindle. Sorry, I don’t have any photos, but scroll down the White Horse page and look at Figure 8-120 in Sponenberg.

Manchado is in the pinto group if it is genetic, but it has hardly been investigated at all. Sponenberg says it is primarily found in Argentina, but it is found there in several breeds. This is taken by some as indicating an environmental cause, and by others as indicating that Argentineans pay more attention to horse color than do people in other parts of the world.

There is no question that manchado is different from other spotting genes. At first glance, it is a combination of pinto and leopard (Appaloosa) traits, but manchado horses do not have known leopard or pinto genes. The minimal expression is white on the top of the neck, giving a partially white mane. The head and legs normally remain dark. The white areas are crisp-edged, but these white areas normally have round or oval colored spots within them.

There are a few photos on the web, most notably one showing a Throughbred stallion and an Arabian mare, both breeds which are rarely spotted. Sponenberg shows a photo of a Welsh Pony with the Manchado pattern, but does not state whether is particular individual was from Argentina.

Brindle is a little better understood, but not by much. There are three types of bindles, one involving black stripes, one involving white stripes, and one in which the horse is actually a chimera. In the first two cases, much more common genetic mechanisms appear to be necessary.

For black stripes, the horse must have black interspersed hairs, a condition called sooty by geneticists. In most horses, the interspersed hairs are uniformly mixed into the coat or more numerous toward the back of the horse. In a few horses, the black hairs are organized into vertical stripes.

If white hairs are present, as in roans, they may also occasionally be organized into vertical stripes. This is also referred to as brindle, though it is not known whether this type of brindle has any relationship to the type with black stripes.

Finally, it is possible that two fertilized eggs are merged in early gestation. The chimera that results actually has tissues with two different DNA sets, and these tend to be arranged in vertical stripes. A brindle of this type could actually combine any two colors found in horses.

A website from White Horse Productions has excellent photos of these and other rare modifiers in horses. Scroll through the entire page.

The Planets of Tourist Trap: Eversummer

#Scifi Homecoming had three planets, each with its own ecology. Tourist Trap has two more: Falaron (site of most of the action) and Eversummer. Eversummer had life but not intelligent life when it was colonized, and Falaron was terraformed by the R’il’nai, who transplanted to it the ecology of ice age North America.

Eversummer is interesting not only for its ecology (which I won’t go into right now because it plays a role in the plot of Tourist Trap) but in its physical characteristics. Our own planet has seasons because its axis of rotation is not exactly perpendicular to the plane of its orbit. When one end of the pole is pointed most nearly at the sun, that hemisphere has summer while the other hemisphere has winter. Spring and fall occur when the sun’s rays are just tangent to both poles.

The axis of rotation of Eversummer is perpendicular to the plane of the orbit, and the orbit itself is close enough to circular that the planet stays a constant distance from the sun. The result? No seasons. As Marna sees it:

“The planet, with its rotational axis almost perpendicular to its orbital plane, had no seasons. The poles were bitterly cold, glaciated wastelands where the sun forever rolled around the horizon. The equatorial belt was an unchanging steam bath, the permanent home of daily tropical thunderstorms, varied by hurricanes along its poleward borders. The desert belts, inevitable result of the conflict between the planet’s rotation and its unequal heating by its sun, were broad and sharply defined, with no transition zones where the rains came seasonally. The temperate zones, between desert and polar ice, were swept year round by equinoctial storms, varied only by occasional droughts. No monsoons, no seasonal blanket of snow to protect the dormant land, no regular alternation of wet and dry seasons.

“All of the settled planets Marna had known or studied—long-lost R’il’n itself, Riya, Central, Falaron, Kovee, Earth—had axial tilts between fifteen and thirty degrees, and a regular progression of seasons. Those seasons might be subtle in the tropics, but they were present. And she was beginning to think they were a lot more important than she had ever realized.”

A planet rotating faster than Earth might have more than one desert belt, but with a sun of earthlike distance and intensity, and a similar atmosphere, this is a reasonable description of a planet with no axial tilt.

Monsoons are seasonal wind reversals, so no monsoons. There would, however, be differences between land and water. Land cannot move; any gentling of the difference between maximum sunshine at the equator and zero at the poles must be made up by air motion. On Earth, air and water vapor handle about half of the necessary transfer. Water, however, can move, and heat can be transferred from the equator to the poles fairly efficiently by water. Thus at high latitudes, water will be warmer than land even without seasons. At low latitudes, the land will be warmer than the oceans.

Since surface winds tend to blow from cold to warm, there will be a tendency for the winds to blow from oceans onto shore in the tropics, enhancing coastal rainfall. At high latitudes, the winds will almost always blow offshore, minimizing coastal rainfall.

Further, the requirement of momentum conservation, together with the transfer of momentum between air and ground, will assure that east winds dominate in the tropics, while west winds dominate at temperate latitudes. Thus tropical east coasts and mid-latitude west coasts will still tend to be wet.

What else could be the effects of a pole nearly perpendicular to the plane of a planet’s orbit? Or one where the pole is in the plane of the orbit, like Uranus?

Science Fiction and Fantasy Trivia

Thursday: “You can’t have civic loyalty with a city dying on its feet.” Simak. Context?

City is made up of stories originally written between 1944 and 1951 and combined into a single volume in 1952, and looking at a future that seemed reasonable then, but in some ways very strange today. Certainly Simak did not foresee the energy crisis—his starting world is based on ultra-cheap transportation and acres per person, and it is the dogs and their robots who are telling the story.

Friday: “Who shall number the years of half of eternity?” – Mary Shelley. Context?

Not Frankenstein! This is from a short story, “The Mortal Immortal,” reprinted in Asimov’s The Birth of Science Fiction. Originally published in 1834, well after her famous novel, Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus, published in 1818.

Saturday: “Gone away, gone ahead,” #McCaffrey. Context? 

These lines are from the song, preserved in the records of the Harper Hall, that inspired Lessa in her journey through time in Dragonflight.

Sunday: “A whale with the strength of a cavalry regiment would be a pretty whale.” Jules Verne. Context?

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. At this point in the story the Nautilus is still thought to be a giant narwhal. It has just been sighted and outrun the Abraham Lincoln, and Professor Aronnax has just compared it to an engine of two thousand horsepower—hence the regiment of cavalry. (The quote is from the Mercier Lewis translation.)

Monday: “I don’t like kidnapping on principle. It’s worse when I’m the kidnapee.” Alan Dean Foster. Context? 

From Icerigger. Skua September is explaining how he came to be in the lifeboat that made a crash landing on Tran-ky-ky.

Tuesday: “He was too respectable, too polite and correct to be—death!” Andre Norton. Context? 

This is from Witch World: the meeting of Simon Tregarth, on the run on Earth, with Dr. Jorge Petronius, guardian of the Siege Perilous.

Wednesday: “Home,” she said aloud. “I can go home. I may die, but I’ll die with a Riyan wind in my hair.” Bowling. Context?

Homecoming. Marna is still on the isolation satellite, but has just realized that her only reason for staying there is meaningless if she is to die.