Writing | John Clarke Online

The Positive Side of Internet Data Gathering

There is a good reason why God and aliens (of the extraterrestrial variety) use telepathy to communicate. It is the only secure form of information transmission. Everything else is subject to capture, storage, and retrieval.

There is currently a frantic paranoia spawned by national and international agency’s collection of virtually everything we say and do. The only thing not open for capture are our thoughts and dreams, at least for now. (Yes, the Army’s working on that).

But governments aren’t alone in information spying — commercial industry is perhaps outpacing governments in their data collection efforts. Their motivations may be different, but the frenetic pace and implications are every bit as invasive. Privacy, as we’ve known it, is dead.

I’ve previously written about Google Noodling , which is a way of catching Google in their data-mining efforts. And like the tone of that article, you have to take a lighthearted view of such efforts. It is not going away. And if we don’t “get over it”, we may, in my estimation, go a little crazy.

But there is a positive side to all this, and a large and growing number of people are finding this side to be personally satisfying. That has to do with family connections, or genealogy. I’ve written about that topic as well.

Scan20080_1 crop — My brother and I. He was five years older.

Last night I solved a very personal family puzzle through the help of Ancestry.com. Both my parents had brown hair and brown eyes. Both their younger children, sons, had blond hair and blue or green eyes.

I’ve spent a lot of time of late with my brother before he passed from a prolonged illness, and I was struck as never before with the purity of the blue color in his almost iridescent eyes. (I’m the one with the green eyes.) When young, both of us had blond hair, which eventually darkened with age. My brother was tall and thin. I was thin, but vertically challenged.

In the next generation, both my children have green eyes, perhaps because I married a green-eyed girl. Our daughter has blonde hair, and even a granddaughter has greenish-brown eyes. And a new grandson baby seems to have blue eyes and blond hair.

I have never ceased wondering, as did my parents no doubt, where those light colors came from. Having believed strongly in my mother’s fidelity, I kept assuming that someday I would discover the source of the blue/green eyes and blond hair.

That happened last night, thanks to the technology of digitization and data mining. I discovered a World War I selective registration document from my Grandfather who died in a hotel fire many years before my birth. At the age of 34 he had blue eyes and “light” hair. He was both tall and “slender”, pretty much a perfect description of my brother.

The next morning I was able to go through unidentified family photos, and there he was, identified at last, the Grandfather I never knew. So apparently it wasn’t the mailman after all!

Obviously this discovery is of interest to no one except my cousins and other relatives. However, it does point out the value of computers, computer databases, and the sharing of information that large databases make possible. There is a tangible reward, for both the company providing the product (the database) and the customers who benefit from the data shared.

I’m sure that when my Grandfather filled out his draft card in 1918, he had no idea that the digital image of that card would end up in the hands of his unborn grandchildren and great grandchildren 95 years later.

Which makes me wonder, what will the world know about each of us 100 years from now? We’ll be long gone, but the record of our existence will survive somewhere in the depths of a digital storage facility. Without a doubt our descendants will enjoy reading about the inane things which pleased or troubled us in 2013, and which we so freely posted thinking that no one was listening, and no one really cared.

Believe me, some people will care. And apparently, everybody’s listening.

The Day the Gorillas Were Stopped at our Door

I think one of the reasons I enjoy my grandchildren so much, and vice versa, is because they know they won’t always get a serious answer from me. They sometimes call me “silly”, but they do so with a smile. Silly is fun.

Children will assuredly get an answer to any question they ask me (within reason). However, that answer may be weighted more on the side of creativity and fantasy than on reality. They understand that, and delight in it. My instincts tell me that there cannot be too much fantasy during the playtime of young children.

As for my choice of an answer, it’s not at all a conscious decision to alter reality. I simply abhor an uninteresting answer, to anything.

Case in point: My five-year-old granddaughter found two bottles of the popular foaming adhesive, Gorilla Glue, next to our back door. “What are these for Granddaddy?”

Well, the stock answer would have been that I was gluing adapter ends to some polypropylene drainage gratings, and the Gorilla Glue would hold nicely until I could embed the gratings in concrete.

But I sincerely believe that if a writer can build on a play of words, he should. In fact, it’s almost an obligation of adults to pass on an appreciation of the joy of words.

So my answer to her was as follows: “I use Gorilla Glue in case gorillas come into our backyard to scare us. I’ll run out into the yard and glue their feet down.”

That answer was very well received.

“Why is one bottle white and one bottle brown?”

“Well of course the white gorilla glue is for white gorillas, and the brown is for brown gorillas.”

Silverback Gorilla at London Zoo, Wikimedia Commons

“Let’s go try it!” she yelled almost ecstatically.

Looking out the window I saw no gorillas, or any other animal wild or tame. “Well, I think the gorillas are hiding from us now.” Thinking like an adult, I didn’t want her to be disappointed.

“No, they’re not. We’ll just pretend,” she said with a sly wink that seemed to say, You do remember how to play, don’t you?

And with that, the five-year-old sprinted outside, paused at a spot where the threatening gorilla hoard was standing, and squirted pretend glue on pretend feet. She was fearlessly immobilizing at least six gorillas, and by my reckoning, three were white, and three were brown because she selected just the right bottle for the proper gorilla.

As proof of the effectiveness of her defensive strategy, no gorillas entered our house that day.

snowwhite — Snowflake the Gorilla, Wikimedia Commons

Now, to be fair to all gorillas, I do plan to take my granddaughter to the zoo one day and explain to her what an intelligent and peaceful, and threatened species gorillas are.

And then I’ll probably explain the real reason Gorilla Glue is named as it is. Gorillas undoubtedly use it to glue their nests together so gorilla babies won’t fall out of the trees at night.

Gorilla_nest (1) — Gorilla night nest. Photo courtesy of Jefe Le Gran, Wikimedia Commons.

Makes perfect sense to me.

The gorilla face featured photo is by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash.

What Are Spammers Thinking?

I’ve noticed that from time to time normal, rational people comment on my blog posts. Unfortunately, their comments are usually lost in the noise. Where is the noise coming from?

Well, spammers.

Spam on blog posts is one of the most bizarre human or computer behaviors I have ever seen. And frankly, it makes no sense at all.

When some computer fills up one or two paragraphs with wildly random characters or words, I think it’s a good bet that no intelligent life form is behind the keyboard. If I had a monkey, it could probably do a better job.

And though I appreciate it when some comments praise my work, when they quickly lead to an ad for Viagra I become suspicious that they aren’t actually insinuating that my posts are leaving the readers flat. I suspect they haven’t read a word, and some computer is inserting an ad which the programmer hopes will automatically get posted. I hate to disappoint, but my posts have nothing to do with the pharmacology of impotence, and therefore such obviously slanted ads will get no traction with me.

As a matter of fact, any reader with more than a microwatt brain will notice two things. 1) there are no ads on my site, and I strongly resist any outside efforts to get me to “monetize” my website. I figure if I can’t afford to keep the website up without selling ads, then I’ll shut it down. 2) The name of the blog strongly implies I am a man, and upon reading a few posts you see that I have an attraction to men’s toys. So why do I see a preponderance of spam trying to get me to push handbags and women’s boots?

If I was going to push ads, they would be for man-toys like motorcycles, airplanes, high definition video cameras, arctic survival gear, wingsuits, and diving gear. You know, guy stuff. But the purveyors of those specialty items have the good sense and integrity not to spam me. Fur-lined boots and handbags do not occupy even a cubic nanometer’s worth of space in my brain. So why would I link to spam sites selling those things?

You would think that the fact that I have dumped thousands of spam attempts for completely unnecessary fashion accessories would catch someone’s attention in the respective marketing departments. Their money is being wasted. But that fact is seemingly never appreciated by the spammers.

Also not appreciated is that I never publish anything in Japanese. I have been to Japan, but I can’t read or write kanji or hiragana. In fact, one of the most disorienting experiences of my life occurred in a Japanese bus station where there was not a single character from the Latin alphabet. So why would spammers send me lengthy spam in Japanese writing? Are they completely clueless? Or do they think I’m a renaissance man who acquires languages like some people acquire DVDs? I’ll confess, I’m not that man. I have a hard enough time with American English.

The irony of it is that before long I’ll likely receive one or more spam comments based on this posting. It will probably read something like this:

“You hit the actual fingernail in the head regarding this gleam… This information is so hard to find I will link to your feed and tell my friends who have been searching. Buy Viagra cheap online.”

How about that for a non sequitur!

If you have an interest in the psychology of spammers and spamming, there are a couple of articles, one scientific and one lay press that I can recommend. Another article, classified by Google as being scholarly, reportedly has a bad habit of infecting computers with viruses and other malware. According to the recommendations of my security software, I will not be recommending that site.

Spammer Image Photo by Clint Patterson on Unsplash

I am Neanderthal, Pt. 2

The gleam in my father’s eye came in 2013. That is when it all started for me, years before my birth. I am more than a little annoyed by that.

In my searching of the archives trying to learn of my roots, I came across a 2013 article discussing the debatable morality of recreating the Woolly Mammoths through genetic tinkering. It would be immoral, was the scientist’s opinion.

So, how do you think that makes me feel, the only Neanderthal on Earth? No one bothered asking my opinion.

Morality, I think, is based on the profit motive; on hidden agendas. It is arguably immoral to create a solitary herd animal when there is no financial reward for creating an entire herd. A herd animal is lonely without a herd. I know; I am a herd animal too, in the strictest sense. If there was financial gain involved, I can guarantee you a herd would reappear, like magic.

Other than a tourist attraction, what could the incentive be for creating a herd of mammoths? The novelty would quickly wear off, I’m sure.

At least it did for me. The curiosity and wonder I invoked in the public as a child began to wane as I grew ever more body hair, and began to assert my independence, and hormones. Quickly I became yet another difficult, and apparently not very attractive, adolescent. I was seen as boring; old news.

But curiously, at the same time the morality of creating a single previously extinct herd animal was being discussed, the Russians uncovered liquid blood from the underbelly of an ice-bound Mammoth. Almost immediately, that miraculously preserved blood became a siren of inescapable beauty to geneticists. The most pious of them wondered, so I read, why God would reveal this magic pool of genetic mystery after so many millennia if in fact humans were not fated to recreate the Mammoth.

And almost in the same breath, Neanderthal. After all, Mammoths and Neanderthal are forever linked through folklore, originating in the cave art of my ancestors.

mammoth hunters — Mammoth Hunters: from arthursclipart.org.

Which brings me to a dream I had. It is true that supposedly primitive people put stock in dreams; but I digress.

I dreamed that Armageddon came suddenly, with nuclear weapons unleashed from Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia, China, and the United States. It was horrifying, and true to prediction a nuclear winter ensued. Virtually no humans survived.

But there were survivors who actually thrived in the dark and cold. They were a large band of us Neanderthals who had been bred in secret locations in Siberia. After the holocaust, we Neanderthals were able to escape and pillage the remains of a devastated Earth.

And once again, herds of recreated Woolly Mammoths were also released in Siberia and fell prey to our kind, once again providing us sustenance.

Unwittingly, geneticists had secretly and unwittingly ensured the survival of a race of hominids, not exactly human, but close.

When the surviving humans and Neanderthals met, there was once again romance in the air. Beggars can’t be choosers when genetic survival is at stake.

But like I said, it was only a dream. I’m sure it could never really happen.

Could it?

To be continued.

I am Neanderthal

neanderthal-human-456 — CREDIT: Neanderthal Museum (Mettmann, Germany)

I suppose it was inevitable that I would be different; the ultimate “n” of one, the rarest species in the universe, the only Neanderthal on Earth.

By human standards I am very spiritual; I can remember my time before incarnation. I was told that I would be given a unique opportunity to excel in this lifetime. Of course, I had no idea what that truly meant. But there are no “do-overs” in life. I’m stuck for as long as I am here; so I might as well make the best of it.

Since no one knows how long Neanderthals live, I’m starting my memoirs now, at age 25. This way, if some violence or illness claims me, I’ll leave behind a record of what some would call a curious life. But it’s the only life I’ve known.

It all began in March 2013 when my ancestral genome was completely identified. Far as I can tell, that work was only a matter of curiosity. Actually, I would classify it not as curiosity but as mischief.

They tell me I was born in 2018. My earliest memories are of being tested and prodded. My body’s supply of blood has been withdrawn at least 10-times over, finding a home in just about every laboratory in the world.

You’re welcome.

I never signed a consent form for that testing, but apparently I have no more rights of consent than any other non-Homo sapiens. I am, apparently, guinea pig.

IQ tests seem to be of particular interest to academic scientists. There is a never-ending line of psychologists trying their particular flavor of IQ test on me. But the truth is, I am Neanderthal, not Homo sapiens. As someone once said, “A cat is a genius at being a cat.” I am a genius at being Neanderthal. I am the smartest one there is.

I have been asked what I think about the “Caveman” videos. Well, my ancestors, like yours, lived in caves; that’s true I suppose. However, the caricatures I see are as repugnant to me as blackface is to an African-American. Enough said.

As an adolescent I was constantly pitted physically against older boys. I’m proud to say I whipped their butts; every single one of them.

Starting at age 14, the U.S. Army began running me through endurance and strength tests. They found my limit, for sure, but never told me how I compared. But I did overhear someone in a grey suit once say, “We need lots more like him.”

I guess that means someone likes Neanderthals.

Speaking of liking, I’ve often wondered if I’ll ever find a girl. They tell me that humans and Neanderthals once interbred, but based on my experience, that seems highly unlikely now. Besides, who would fall in love with a guinea pig, even a well-endowed guinea pig. I am, after all, not human.

At least, that’s what they keep telling me.

To Be Continued

A Conversation with a Cloud

I lay on the summer grass with a young lady friend of mine. We were holding hands affectionately, talking softly about nature, love, and a future that was fated never to happen. As we talked about nothing of lasting importance, I pointed to a dying cloud. All of the clouds drifting lazily overhead were dying as the day’s heat was dissipating and the air was becoming calm, preparing for evening.

I suspect it’s an infrequent event when someone points out an act of nature that had always been visible, but had never been noticed. Indeed, we watched, not saying a word, as the first of the day’s puffy clouds ceased to exist.

I was pleased with myself; glad that my prediction had been proven true, and pleased with her reaction. In fact, I was so pleased that I still remember that incident, many years later, even though the face of the girl has mercifully faded from my memory.

However, now that I have matured enough to ponder the imponderables of life, I realize there is more to the story. As I replay the event in my mind I realize that the cloud talked back to me.

I know that sounds bizarre, but all I can say is that my memories, perhaps having been repressed due to their strangeness, are finding their way back into my consciousness. Perhaps there’s a reason for their reappearance at this stage in my life.

I am not dying; the cloud closest to me seemed to be saying.

I was at first taken aback. After all, who’s ever heard a cloud speak.

I said I am not dying.

OK, if a cloud is willing to talk to me, I suppose I should respond. That would only be polite.

“Yes you are,” I argued, politely of course. “You’re getting thinner by the minute. In fact, you’re disappearing before my eyes.”

I’m not dying; I’m resting.

I laughed, with Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch in my mind.

“Well, resting or not, you’re quickly disappearing.”

But I’m still here.

“You’ll be long gone, any minute now.”

I am moisture; water vapor. That will still exist. It just won’t be visible to you.

“But your whiteness, your cloud, what you are, will be gone.”

I am not a cloud. I am moisture. A cloud is my physical appearance, but that changes throughout my life. And regardless of how I look, what I am, vapor, still exists.

“Well, you’re looking very anemic now.”

I am not anemic!

Apparently the fading cloud had feelings, and perhaps a little bit of a temper.

“Well, you are at least looking very benign right now.”

Like I said, I am resting. Today my mission is to provide shade. Today is an easy life for me.

“So, does that mean you’ll be reborn tomorrow?”

Of course.

“And you’ll look different?”

No two clouds are ever alike.

Strangely, I was beginning to understand that cloud, just a little perhaps, through some seemingly impossible way. And then I had an uncharacteristically profound thought, for a young man.

“You say the true you is nothing more than water vapor. Would you call that your soul?”

By now the cloud had completely disappeared, but I could still hear its voice in my head.

It is what I am. It is always there; it does not change. If that is what you call a soul, then so be it.

By now the voice of that thing that used to be a cloud was fading as the invisible vapor moved on.

Needless to say, I did not discuss what I was hearing with my then girlfriend. She moved on to another boy soon enough.

The next day dawned with building cumulus. There was instability in the air, and clouds were pregnant with moisture. Wishing for confirmation of what had happened the day before, I turned my attention to the nearest cloud.

“You look full of life this morning.”

I heard nothing.

I tried again, “You look very full of life this morning.”

You talkin to me boy? The cloud was growing vertically as well as horizontally.

“Well, I was trying to.”

Yes, I thought I heard you thinking I was pregnant.

I sincerely hoped that no one else could hear this … uh… conversation, if you could call it that.

You’re right, though. I’m about to give birth.

“To rain?” I wondered out loud.

Rain? Oh no. That’s the process, but not what is borne.

“I don’t understand”.

I give birth to puddles, ponds, lakes and oceans; any container that my rain falls into.

“Containers? Really?”

Tell me little man, do you have a mind?

I laughed. “Last time I checked. What a strange thing for a cloud to ask.”

OK, then where is it?

“In my head of course. In my brain.”

Oh you silly little man.

“What?”

Your brain is the container. Your mind is shaped by the container, but it is not the container.

It seemed very strange getting a lesson — well, maybe I could charitably call it a philosophy lesson — from a cloud. But then they tell me all knowledge is being stored in clouds. I wonder if this is what they mean.

Pay attention. I’m telling you important stuff here.

“I’m sorry; my mind was wandering.”

Minds do that. They don’t like being kept in containers; it’s too confining.

“Do tell.”

Do you know your mind survives even when your brain does not? Your mind can leave its container just like my water can leave its containers.

This was beginning to sound suspiciously like the ancient mind-body problem. Is the mind the brain, or vice versa?

Except that could not possibly be. After all, I was talking to a — cloud.

“So if we have a soul, you’re saying our soul retains its mind?”

You like that word, “Soul”. You used it yesterday.

“How do you know that?”

If you can believe it, that cloud chuckled, in a vaporous sort of way… I swear it did.

All information is shared in the clouds. That’s why I’m talking to you.

But to answer your question, yes. Your soul retains its mind. Actually, humans have been taught this for thousands of years. Yet most of them still don’t seem to understand. Which puzzles me — it’s really not that difficult.

“You know, I hate to be skeptical, but you seem way too smart for a cloud.”

Oh come now, do you really think clouds can talk?

For some inexplicable reason I was shocked by that question. Apparently I had already suspended disbelief as this second day’s conversation had become more and more interesting.

Having been forced back to reality, I answered. “Well … no. Not really.”

They’re a parable. It’s Me whose talking to you.

“Me who?”

There was no answer. I asked again, “Me who?”

That question has never been answered.

Would You Rather Face a Cunning or Relentless Foe?

Suppose you find yourself on an alien planet, battling with indigenous species. On your side, you have smarts, both natural and technological. The alien defenders have nothing; no technology. Well, they do have slime, but that’s all.

Brains against the brainless: Who do you think will win?

Before the Ticks — Blithely headed into tick-infested woods.

I spent a summer weekend with my family in a cabin in the Virginia mountains a few years ago. It was nature at its finest, until we discovered after a short walk in the woods that ticks seemingly rained down upon us and were invading our bodies as fast as their little legs could move. We were food, and they were hungry. Human-sized meals didn’t come around those woods very often, apparently.

The entire family, adults and children, stripped down to our underwear on the porch of the cabin, trying to rid ourselves of the invaders. Modesty took second place to the fear of miniature arachnids.

Once the imagined itching had abated and the baby was asleep, we soothed our nerves with puzzles and games, or reading from a well-stocked bookshelf. I picked a book with an interesting cover; it was John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War.

I cannot say enough good things about Scalzi’s debut novel, a futuristic science fiction, other worlds story. Suffice it to say, it features combat between Earthling soldiers and all sorts of bizarre and ruthless alien life forms. Although Scalzi didn’t write about invading armies of ticks, per se, I could easily envision such a terrifying encounter.

Cabin 1 crop — This author devouring Scalzi’s “Old Man’s War”.

I also think and write about extraterrestrial aliens. Like most writers, I assume ETs are sentient, and calculating. Depending upon the writer, those ETs may have either high morals, or no morals at all, but they always have a brain.

Lately, I’ve had to rethink potential plot elements dealing with intelligent life forms. The reason is, scientists now claim that a single celled animal, a slime mold, acts with a shocking degree of intelligence. The kicker is, being a single celled organism, slime mold does not have a brain.

800px-Slime_mold_grows_on_anything_001 — Slime mold knows a good thing when it finds it. (Photo credit: SB_Johnny)

Intelligence without a brain?

Compared to slime mold, ticks are geniuses if we count the gray matter cells contained in their single-minded heads. However, according to a Japanese researcher the brainless slime mold can solve problems even scores of engineers could not easily solve.

Sounds like science fiction to me.

So now imagine the following storyline. Your spaceship lands on a verdant planet that has no higher, brain-possessing life forms, at all. However, what it does have in abundance is slime mold. And of course the threat from slime mold is easy to ignore — until it is too late. The mindless protoplasm senses all sources of food, and fans out in all directions, following the scent.

The ship’s science officer tries to warn the mission commander, but the arrogant and miscalculating commander responds with a volley of lead rounds into the nearest slime; which of course is not in the least bit deterred from its food-finding task.

And when the crew sleeps, as of course they must, the brainless mold finds the food sources, one by one, absorbing the human nutrients.

Human-sized meals don’t come around those woods very often, apparently.

Being brainless, slime mold cannot be considered cunning. But, one could argue, it’s not stupid either: it can’t be tricked. It is, if anything, relentless.

From a cinematic perspective this is not an entirely new theme. The 1958 movie The Blob starring Steve McQueen popularized the idea of mindless organisms devouring humans. But at that time there was no real science behind it. Now there is.

Some interesting science facts about slime mold are found in this link and the following Scientific American – NOVA video.

[youtube id=”lls27hu03yw” w=”700″ h=”600″]

Space Wars

I had a dream, and it troubles me.

I had a dream a couple of weeks ago and awoke knowing I had seen something very disturbing, but couldn’t remember what it was. Then on February 21st I had a lucid dream where I realized that what I was seeing was what I’d seen the previous week. Then I understood why I was disturbed.

It was a scene from a vantage point in space. It was cinematic in quality, big screen, IMAX, at least. I was there.

The troubling part was observing a space vehicle moving up to the space station, then seeing the vehicle suddenly yaw its nose away from the station as if slammed by some powerful but invisible force, followed a split second later by the white paint on the space station charring before my eyes. Not all of it, just the part closest to an out of view source of blistering heat. The curved portion on top of the station was spared; from a thermal radiation standpoint it was very realistic.

Curiously, the station was not the ISS: it was much smaller but the markings on the white paint were clearly U.S.. I overhead two men talking on the coms, supposedly ground control, saying the heart rates of the station occupants soared.

It woke me, and I realized the entire dream sequence had lasted about five seconds, at most. It must have been the sauerkraut from the night before.

But what struck me as startling was the news article the next morning about the Chinese preparing for war in space. http://freebeacon.com/dia-director-china-preparing-for-space-warfare/

To quote, “Beijing is developing missiles, electronic jammers, and lasers for use against satellites…The Chinese, as well as the Russians, are also developing space capabilities that interfere with or disable U.S. space-based navigation, communications, and intelligence satellites.”

Suddenly, the thought of either space-based or ground-based attacks on manned vehicles or space stations becomes a frightening possibility.

Then tonight I read that a NASA notebook computer containing codes for controlling the Space Station was stolen.

http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/03/01/nasa-laptop-stolen-with-command-codes-that-control-space-station/

“These incidents spanned a wide continuum from individuals testing their skill to break into NASA systems, to well-organized criminal enterprises hacking for profit, to intrusions that may have been sponsored by foreign intelligence services seeking to further their countries’ objectives,” Martin said. “Another attack involved Chinese-based IP addresses that gained full access to systems and sensitive user accounts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.”

We tend to think of space as a neutral environment where brave souls put their lives at risk to be part of man’s push away from our planet. It is an environment for scientific pursuit. Of course we have raised a generation or two on images of space battles where humans are fighting to preserve humanity. There is lots of death and destruction, but it is heroic in scope and detail. If death can be glorious, then dying to protect Mother Earth from Klingons is a glorious way to die.

But what I saw in those five seconds of searing imagery left me with a profound sadness. I had witnessed, so to speak, the end of our honeymoon in space. Man’s evil nature was reaching way beyond our stratosphere.

I put no stock in dreams, at least not my own. But that particular dream did serve to increase my awareness of the not-so-subtle signs that man is determined to extend his malevolent reach into what was once considered hallowed ground; the firmament, the very heavens we have for so long dreamed of reaching.

And now we would spoil it.

Children of the Middle Waters

Children of the Middle Waters (working title) is a science fiction/thriller that has been completed and is being submitted today for consideration by Tom Doherty Associates, New York. My friend and mentor, the writer Max McCoy, has provided literary criticism and encouragement for the manuscript. Max, who works primarily in the Western genre, wrote a diving-related thriller called The Moon Pool, which happens to involve in its closing chapter the Navy Experimental Diving Unit, and someone a lot like me.

Below is a blurb briefly describing Children of the Middle Waters.

In the deep-sea canyons and trenches of the Earth lie thousands of alien spacecraft and millions of their inhabitants who have to leave soon or risk being stranded forever, or being destroyed. Due to their physiology they have been unable to directly contact humans, but they are adroit at mental contact and remote viewing, when it suits them.

They need the help of two humans to assure their safe escape, an experienced Navy scientist and a beguiling graduate student. But introductions through mental means are slow and suspect, as you might imagine.

The U.S. government is well aware of this deep sea civilization, and is desirous of the weapons the visitors possess, which puts the two unsuspecting scientists in the middle of a conflict between powerful
military forces and powerful intergalactic forces. Things could get messy.

Even worse, jealous friends turn on the unlikely duo and put their lives at risk.

Children combines two separate Native American beliefs and legends with current events. It is a complex thriller with science fact and science fiction mixed in with military action and government intrigue. Also revealed are romantic possibilities that far exceed the capabilities of the mundane, everyday world.

Early American Indian beliefs create an ending for this story that no one could anticipate. It is an ending that causes the protagonist to realize everything he has held dear is wrong, in one way or another. At the same time he discovers a reality that is the greatest blessing that man can receive.

Computer Simulation as Art — or Rorschach Test

No one has ever confused me for an artist.

I might have been visually gifted as a 3rd-grader, as my parents told it, at least compared to my peers. However, I never seemed to progress beyond that point. I think my progress slowed about the time I saw my first Rorschach test.

I realized then that some people’s art is someone else’s diagnosis. After all, it is no fun to look at an ink blot abstraction, to voice an opinion about it, only to have an authority figure nod his head and write in his notebook as he says, “I see,” when obviously he didn’t.

Clinical trauma aside, I now know that all humanity looks instinctively for visual patterns and searches for meaning in patterns whether they be random or not. There is a survival aspect to that of course; if we detect a tiger’s stripes partly hidden in a confused background of woodland scenery, that offers a potential survival benefit.

Sometimes, even the most mundane things turn out to be “pretty”. Such were the images I saw being formed on my computer screen the other day. The more I looked at them, the more interesting they became. They were like my own Rorschach test, in a very literal way. They were random patterns based on random processes, but my brain refused to look at them that way. They appeared to me as images of natural things, representing anything except what they truly were.

The image to the left, for instance, looked to me like a view through a telescope of a star field with at least one galaxy situated near the center axis.

Or in a very biological way, it might be the view through an immunofluorescence microscope.

The next image looked to me like a view of a placid star seen in ultraviolet light. I could almost feel the blistering heat radiating through space.

Alternatively, it might be a view of a human egg waiting patiently for fertilization, an altogether different interpretation, but like the first, being a necessary component of creation.

The final image looked to me like a cooler star but with clearly visible solar prominences, magnetic storms arcing over the hellish nuclear surface.

I have no idea what others might see in these images, if anything, but I’m guessing each image can be interpreted differently based on one’s own life experiences.

And that after all is the whole point of art, and Rorschach tests.

The above images were created as part of a random, or stochastic, simulation of rebreather scrubber canisters. They are a view of the upstream end of an axial canister, and shows the state of the canister as heat producing carbon dioxide absorption reactions are beginning.

The cooler looking the canister, the less the amount of exhaled carbon dioxide entering the canister.

The simulation tracks chemical reactions and heat and mass transfer processes in an array of 272,000 finite elements making up a simple absorbent canister. Slicer Dicer and 3VO software (PIXOTEC, LLC) were used to visualize the three-dimensional data set acquired during one moment in time shortly after the simulated reactions began.