Jarn’s Journal Year 2, Day 327

I found them! And they do not look nearly as hungry as Lion’s group, though they have piled thorny branches higher around their camp than I ever saw when they were near my shelter. Storm Cloud seemed delighted to see me, as was Songbird.

“Have you seen water near?” Storm Cloud asked me at once.

I looked at the water hole near their camp. Once it had been a deep scour in a river – I could see the dry bed stretching out in either direction. Now it was little more than a long pool, and from the cracked mud surrounding it, that pool was drying up. There were fish, trapped by the shrinking of the river, but they could not feed this group for much longer. There were also a few animal tracks in the mud, but only a few. And most of those visible were the paw-prints of predators. No wonder the thorn barrier was high and wide.

I thought back to what I had seen, flying over this land while I searched for Storm Cloud’s band. “Do you have water carriers?” I asked, because the nearest water in the direction toward greener land was a good three marches away.

In response she called out, and the people began bringing everything they had that would hold water. Gourds, mostly, and a few animal bladders and skins made into sacks. Not enough, I thought, but I didn’t believe their water hole would last much longer.

I’d about given up not interfering, and I could see only one way to help them reach the next real water source. “Take all the water you can,” I told them. “Go north. Make your trail easy for me to follow, and I will meet you when the sun goes down tomorrow. There I will take your water carriers, and bring them back filled.” I could teleport water to them, even if I could not walk with them. And as we went farther north, there would be more water. Wouldn’t there?

Jarn’s Journal is part of the very early history of the Jarnian Confederation that serves as the background for my science fiction novels. The setting is Africa, roughly 125,000 years ago. Jarn’s Journal to date is on my Author Site.

R’il’nian Teeth

My science fiction is based on two species, the R’il’nai and Humans, and their crossbreds, the Ril’noids, living together. One of the major differences between the two parent species is in life span. The Humans have what we would consider a normal life span. The R’il’nai, while not immortal, do not age beyond maturity. A number of my characters have been alive for millennia. Crossbreds can show either pattern.

This leads to all kinds of interesting situations in the society. How do the two species interact, for instance? How many Humans would want to marry someone who would never grow old? How does a R’il’nian act toward someone he or she knows will grow old and die while the R’il’nian is still young? This is in the background of all of my plots.

Here, however, I am addressing a different problem.

Most of the cells in our bodies are constantly turning over. I can imagine a creature that looks and acts human with a near-infinite life span, except for one thing. Teeth.

Tooth enamel wears, and unlike skin, it is not constantly replaced from within. Modern dentistry can do a lot to repair wear, but I’m having to have enamel repairs already. Young mammals are born with two sets of tooth buds, one that grows into teeth suited for the small jaw of a juvenile; the second set adult sized, and that’s it. People who lived thousands of years would wear out their teeth. How to handle the problem?

The R’il’nai would have to have an essentially infinite number of replacement teeth. When a tooth was worn out, it would be shed much as a child sheds its milk teeth, and replaced by a new tooth. How? They must have some tooth stem cells in their jaws, just as we have blood stem cells in our bone marrow. Assuming that a tooth would last for 50 or 60 years, this would mean that the R’il’nai and non-aging R’il’noids are teething roughly every two or three years. I don’t think I’ve actually mentioned that, but if a R’il’noid seems to be in a particularly bad humor, he or she may be teething.

Quotes mostly from Mercedes Lackey

The first six of this week’s quotations are from Owlflight, by Mercedes Lackey.

“To treat a person like a carpet, it is necessary that one do the walking, and the other allows himself to be walked on.” Shin’a’in saying, here applied to the wizard Justyn, who allowed himself to be walked on.

“Do you fault a man for no longer chopping wood when he has lost a hand?” Snowfire is pointing out to Darien that Justyn was not to be blamed if the Storms reduced his ability to do magic.

“The value lies in the accomplishment, not how it was done” Part of the same conversation.

“Don’t be ashamed for allowing yourself to feel.” Snowfire is trying to soothe Darian after he has broken down and cried. The quotation continues, “You should rather feel sorry for those who do not.”

“Subtlety requires time and concentration, rather than power.” Starfall is trying to defeat the enemy mage without being discovered.

“If the people have survived, then the village has.” Snowfire to Darien, pointing out that people are more important than houses.

“I’ve got to try.” Sue Ann Bowling, Tourist Trap. Roi, faced with a Healing he may not succeed in.

All of these quotes were Tweeted from @sueannbowling.

Pride and Prejudice: Different Points of View

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

So begins one of the most enduring and enjoyable of English novels.  Over two centuries have passed since it was first written, and very little less since it was published.  It is a comedy of manners, and those manners are very far from today’s – but the human interactions and perplexities remain as strong as ever.  Derivatives have been rewritten on everything from murder mysteries to zombies to time travel. There are of course different editions of the original work or commentaries on it, but there are also sequels, plays, videos, retellings and even a paper doll.

I have recently been indulging in the original novel and two of the derivative works: the DVD of the BBC dramatization and a trilogy by Pamela Aidan of a retelling of the story from Darcy’s point of view.  The three versions give an interesting demonstration of the importance of point of view.

The original book is primarily focused on Elizabeth’s point of view.  It is not a tight point of view; Mr. Collins sneaks out to court Charlotte, Bingley’s sisters talk about Elizabeth behind her back, and even Darcy’s emotions are made clear to the reader long before Elizabeth has any hint that he considers her anything but a nuisance.  But in general the reader is not told much that Elizabeth does not know, and there is no scene without a woman present.

The dramatization follows the book quite closely, even to most of the dialogue being taken word for word from the book. Some changes, such as Darcy’s swim (Jane Austin certainly never thought of his meeting Elizabeth at Pemberley dripping wet) are minor, but the scenes immediately following discovery of Lydia’s elopement produce a definite shift toward a more distant and omniscient point of view.  In the book, the reader is encouraged to think, with Elizabeth, that Darcy wants nothing more to do with the family.  In the dramatization, the viewer follows Darcy to London and knows long before Lydia lets it slip that Darcy, far from withdrawing himself from the contamination of Elizabeth’s family, has humbled himself to bribe the man he hates most to marry Lydia.  The effect is a switch to a more omniscient point of view.

The Aidan trilogy, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman, is written using a tighter limited omniscient point of view than the original novel, but this time the character followed is Darcy.  The first book, An Assembly Such as This, follows most of Volume I of Pride and Prejudice.  As far as the scenes in which Darcy and Elizabeth both appear, there is little difference in what happens, though of course the interpretations are quite different.  Three new characters are introduced early, but only one, Darcy’s valet Fletcher, is human.  (The other two are Darcy’s horse and the young hound he is training.)  The last two chapters of the first Aidan book are concerned with Darcy’s attempts to distract Bingley from Jane in London.  Here Fletcher comes into his own in a sartorial rivalry–quite unanticipated on Darcy’s part–with Beau Brummel.  I suspect the major purpose of the author is to depict the shallowness and degeneracy of the group that would be considered Darcy’s social equals, and to point out that Darcy is aware of and disgusted by their behavior.  Other new characters introduced in this book are of minor importance, though some become critical later and at least one, Lord Dyfed Brougham, turns out to be an important character in Darcy’s recognition of his own selfishness.

The second Aidan book, Duty and Desire, covers the period between Darcy’s separation of Bingley from Jane and his visit to Rosings.  Elizabeth appears only through Darcy’s infatuation–which he is trying his best to overcome.  He must have an heir, and Pemberley must have a mistress.  He actively seeks a wife, hoping to put Elizabeth out of his head.  Darcy’s interaction with his sister in the first third of the book, together with the later house party, make his eventual proposal to Elizabeth at Rosings more believable, though it is not until the third book that he finally acts on his infatuation.    (I cannot help but wonder if Ms. Aidan saw the PBS special, Regency House Party, as that certainly ties into the last two-thirds of the second book.)  But the Aidan book is otherwise quite unconnected to the Austen original.

The third book, These Three Remain, covers the second half of Pride and Prejudice, from the arrival at Rosings of Darcy and his cousin, the proposal, and most important, and totally left out of the Austen original, Darcy’s struggle with himself which leads him “to see himself as others see him”. By the time he meets Elizabeth again, at Pemberley, his change is convincing enough that we can follow him to London and his bribery of Wickham to marry Lydia with some degree of belief. After this, the trilogy gradually returns to the original novel, though I greatly enjoyed the scene where Lady Catherine confronts Darcy at his town house.

By itself, the trilogy would not compete with Jane Austen’s novel.  It does, however, complement it, as does the dramatization.

All in all, the novel and the two derivative works form an interesting demonstration of how different points of view can make different stories of the same events.

North Pole Weather, 4/16/12

Sunrise this morning was 6:10 pm, with sunset not until 9:33 this afternoon for 15 hours 23 minutes of daylight. We’re still gaining almost 7 minutes a day, but the snow, while pretty wet lately, is far from gone. The snow stake shows just under a foot still on the ground. There’s been enough melting that the path to the shed (and the tricycle) is impossible to shovel – it’s ice. Too bad, as they’ve plowed the bicycle path, though the tenth of a mile of dirt road to get to it is a horrible mixture of mud, ice, and potholes. But the edges of the raised beds are poking out of the snow, and at this rate I’ll be able to see the soil in the beds beds themselves pretty soon. It was actually above freezing this morning at 7 am.

I’ve started wearing my athletic shoes when I go anywhere, just tossing the boots in the car in case I encounter ice. I’m actually getting to attend evening functions, like The Stoned Guest (P.D.Q. Bach) Friday night. I need to start the beans next week, and the squash the week after that. Time to start visiting the greenhouses, too – I rely on them for culinary herb plants and flowers.

If only I weren’t so busy with OLLI classes this month! Northern vegetation changes and archaeological science Monday, iPhoto and digital photography Wednesday, astrophysics Friday, and a weekend workshop on fiction writing at the beginning of next month. Hope I can remember to keep the plants watered!

p.s. at 4 pm: temperature +57°F and I had to take off my jacket and turn on the air conditioning driving home! Still plenty of snow, though — the snow stake says 8″, though lots of bare ground, as well as mud and puddles,  are showing.

Six Sentence Sunday

Quite a few comments last Sunday expressed confusion over Zhaim. I thought I’d explain something and give a snippet from Tourist Trap, my now-published book and winner of the Garcia Award for best fiction book of the year.

The R’il’nai and some of the R’il’noids in my fiction are able to strip memories from their minds into computer storage. All but Roi have done this in fairness to the “new” Zhaim, so Roi alone has the memory of Zhaim before Marna imposed an artificial conscience on him. He also seems to be the only one who has retained the memory that Marna said the treatment should be repeated every quarter century. The snippet below was well over 200 years before Rescue Operation in story time, when Roi was only 18.

The woods lightened ahead of them, and the mist lifted as they entered a clearing. Roi glanced around quickly, looking for something they could use as shelter. Nothing but grass and sodden wildflowers. He checked the compass and headed straight across, hoping the Mastodon River wasn’t too far away.

He heard a thunderclap behind him when he was halfway across the clearing and spun to face it, fearful he knew what it was. Zhaim stood before him, a triumphant leer on his handsome face and a beamer swinging toward the party.

If you want to see other bits from both Tourist Trap and Rescue Operation, click Index above and then Six Sentence Sunday.

There are lots of other great authors on Six Sentence Sunday. Click on the logo to find them. They’d all love your comments.

Breakup Season

The usual four seasons, especially as defined by the equinoxes and solstices, don’t work very well for interior Alaska. Show cover is generally established by a month after the autumnal equinox, and stays on the ground until well after the vernal equinox. Rivers freeze a little later and remain frozen longer in the spring, and the only running water for six months of the year is in hot springs and indoors. But there is one season that everyone both longs for and dreads: Breakup.

Breakup is the time of year when snow melts and rivers thaw. The two are connected by more than sunshine and warmer weather. Melting snow makes mud (one of the reasons breakup is a time of some dread) but it also runs into rivers. If the water rises in the upper stretches of a river before lower reaches are thawed, as often happens in Alaska, the result can be ice jams and resultant flooding. I’ll talk about that some other time, but right now I want to discuss the simple process of melting snow.

Clean snow reflects most of the solar energy that strikes it. Some of the sun’s rays are absorbed within the snow pack, and cause internal melting and settling — but this is a slow process. Even clean snow, however, is a very good absorber in thermal infrared wavelengths. The sun doesn’t put out much energy in these wavelengths, but buildings, trees, and just about everything else except polished metal does. As a result, snow near the south side of a building melts much faster than snow out in the open. So does snow near tree trunks.

I see this every year. In addition to the photo of my road, which is rapidly turning into mud, I took two of the north and south yards of my house, minutes apart. Both areas got almost exactly the same amount of snow, and both have very similar exposure to sunlight. The snow stake still has a good 18” of snow. The ground around the birch is almost bare.

Why? Two reasons, actually, and the combination explains why open birch forest is usually the first natural area free of snow around here. First, birch trees hold their seeds through winter, and drop them shortly before breakup. As a result the seeds on the snow around the tree absorb the solar radiation and transfer that energy to the snow, speeding its melt. Natural selection? Quite possibly. It certainly seems likely that the enhanced snow melt, leading to earlier warming of the ground, would help the tree.

Second, the tree itself absorbs some solar energy, and then re-radiates it to the snow in the form of thermal infrared. Just about any object poking through the snow this time of year has a little depression around it. Spruce trees do an even better job of absorbing sunlight than do birches, but they also shade the ground and transfer much of the energy they absorb directly to the air. As a result spruce forest, while it probably does a better job of warming the air than birch forest, is among the last areas to have completely bare ground.

On a different note entirely, one of the fixtures of breakup in Fairbanks is the Beat Beethoven 5 km race, a fundraiser held today for and by the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra. I won’t be running this year, though I did “run” with a cane once — and came in last. The idea is to cover the 5 km before the end of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, about 30 minutes. I’m volunteering this year to park my car along the race route with the radio tuned to 91.5 (KSUA, the campus radio station) blaring out Beethoven’s 5th. I expect temperatures below 50°F and much of the course to be slippery or wet!

Added later (after the race.) This is definitely a family race. There were parents pushing their children in strollers, parents with children in backpacks or riding piggyback, dogs, and one contestant on crutches. (And she wasn’t at the end, either.) I did have a bit of a problem in that instruction to volunteers said if possible, not to have your car idling as the runner went by. I did. And needed a jump to start the car after the battery totally discharged itself.

Jarn’s Journal Year 2, Day 325

Year 2, Day 325

Even the predators are hungry.

Not that I let that stop me from stealing two of their fresh kills and teleporting them to the vicinity of the camp I found yesterday. The shaman, who goes by the name of Lion, begged me to stay, and share my wisdom with them as I had with Storm Cloud’s group. Wisdom? Knowledge perhaps, thanks to the computer library, but it is these people who seem able to adapt that knowledge to their environment. Was it not Songbird who combined her knowledge of basketry with the information in the computer to devise the fish traps?

Well, I could teleport in enough food to keep them from starving from areas where the drought had not been so extreme—but visiting them occasionally would be sufficient for that. I pointed to the half-moon, visible in the daylight sky. “I will return when the moon is full,” I told Lion. “And I will join you at the Gather. But for now, I need to find Storm Cloud’s band.” I was perhaps going too far with the promise to join them at the gather—I still didn’t know were that was! But if I could find Storm Cloud, I could follow that band, no longer constrained by my inability to walk any distance.

Neither Lion nor any member of his band could tell me exactly where to find Storm Cloud’s band. They did, however, have considerable awareness of the regions each band roamed over. Not teleport coordinates, not a map, but a general awareness of landmarks, and distance (in days’ travel) and direction between them. By the time I left Lion’s band, late in the evening, I had a much smaller area to search in hopes of finding Storm Cloud and Songbird.

I can only hope they are in better condition than Lion’s band.

Commenting on Blog Posts

There are times when I’d like to comment on a post and I can’t.

I’m not talking about blogs where the author has turned off comments because he or she doesn’t want to be bothered. Nor am I talking about books and magazines where you have to be a subscriber to comment. (I do feel rather annoyed that the New Scientist will not recognize that to save paper and storage space I have an iPod subscription.) I’m talking about blog entries that ask for comments, such as some on Six Sentence Sunday and Science Fiction and Fantasy Saturday, and don’t allow me to comment.

I suspect that in many cases the author of the blog has no idea that people who want to make comments cannot make them. If by any chance mine’s in that class, for goodness sake contact me at sbowling at mosquitonet dot com and I’ll try to figure out how to fix it.

So far, with my WordPress blog, most of my problems have been with captchas and with Blogspot blogs.

Most captchas are only an annoyance to me, though they may make commenting impossible for those with visual or aural handicaps. Usually I can get one by at least the second try, though I have run into a few lately that three tries (after which I quit) were not successful. One type has separated distorted letters, and I can never figure out whether and where to put spaces. Other times I am sure I have gotten it right (3 times!) and the thing keeps coming back with “you didn’t get it, try again.” But the worst are the ones that won’t even accept my identity.

Many Blogspot blogs have a “select profile” button that in some cases gives you a choice of Google Account, LiveJournal, WordPress, TypePad or OpenID. The only one I’m familiar with is WordPress, but when I try it, it just gives back my entry without forwarding it to the site. I’ve heard this is because the blogger in question has enabled captcha, and there is a bug in the captcha code for blogspot.

There are other blogspot blogs, with what looks like the same “select profile” button, but the button gives you three additional choices: AIM, Name/URL or Anonymous. These I can comment on with no problem, putting my WordPress blog in as the URL. I have no idea, though, of how the blogspot bloggers set up their sites to use one or the other “select profile” buttons, or a third option that simply gives radio buttons.

I don’t think I use captcha. WordPress asks me to moderate all comments before they appear, and has a built-in spam filter (akismet.) Some of the spam is clearly machine-generated. But of course I don’t see the blog as readers see it, so if I’m wrong, please let me know.

Quotes from Anne McCaffrey

All of this past week’s quotes but the last were taken from Dragonsdawn, by Anne McCafffrey. This is the first of the Pern novels in terms of internal (Pernese) time, but nineth in terms of when it was written.

“Things were going far too well.” Kenjo, on the first landing approach to Pern.

“History was something one read about in books.” Sorka, then elementary age, is unimpressed by the idea that she is making Pernese history.

“Horses, always. We were promised horses.” Sean, talking with Sorka about the need of the traveling folk for draft animals.

“Alaskans had a reputation for never throwing anything away.” Sallah Telgar, commenting on the way the quartermaster (who is Alaskan) has stripped the colony ship, sending everything remotely usable down to the new colony.

“It’s one thing to see, and another to know.” Sorka, when she is taken along on an exploration trip.

“Mankind prove[s] in many ways that greed is universal.” Admiral Benden at a meeting of the colony’s leaders while they are discussing a legal framework for the new colony.

“If they drink that much beer, they wouldn’t be drinking that much water.” Tourist Trap, by Sue Ann Bowling. Roi’s observation on the Eversummer plague situation, which sends Marna looking for a water-borne source.

Note that all of these quotes were tweeted on @sueannbowling. Follow to get more Context? Quotes, and challenge yourself to identify them before these weekly roundups!