Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

When it comes to “days that certain people nudge each other and wink about,” I’m rather fonder of “Pi Day” than “May the Fourth.” In thinking about that, though, I did remember that the last time I made a post on the subject (but not on the day) for the sake of “having something show up on this journal every so often” it was also an effort at producing something cheerful and distracting at a moment of concern for global health and following a “Friday the thirteenth.” I’m conscious I’m not avoiding quite as many things now; I’m also conscious at least some people would insist perpetual and redoubled safeguards are to be maintained on pain of “you’ll be sorry.” I’m also stuck on a previous caution and washing my hands an awful lot after touching something that hasn’t sat around inside my place for several days.

As for the day itself, I did finish the last slice of a “half pie” I’d bought at the grocery store on the weekend. Remembering there’s another day later in the year that can be written in “day and month” format rather than “month and day” to become the approximation of pi “22/7”, I got to thinking of a better approximation of that mysterious number. The only problem was I couldn’t remember it and kept coming up with random numbers in my calculator. It took punching in pi myself to the modest number of digits I can remember and multiplying it by a half-recalled denominator to realize I’d been mixing up my digits when trying to recall “355/113.”

There seem much cheerier things to be reading right now than a book about a nuclear power plant disaster, and to try for a “see, things could be worse” take seems all too much like tempting fate. Earlier this year, though, I’d got around to watching the five-part “Chernobyl” series shown on HBO and found it unsettling and compelling. Aware in general of “realities behind representations,” though, I did want to double-check some details and started looking up old National Geographic articles I remembered and taking chances on Wikipedia pages. Reading a book on the subject seemed that much better, however, and I did know there’d been one published not that long ago. On my last visit to the area bookstore before it closed for public health purposes, I found paperbacks of Adam Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl, but didn’t buy a copy. Afterwards, I was stuck with thoughts of buying an ebook version. Just to touch every base, though, I searched the catalogue of my local library’s ebook lending service, and found the book there. Signing it out did mean getting on a waiting list, and I did wonder if I’d have to wait until May to read the book even as I recalled the disaster had begun in April. However, checking the waiting list every day produced a few jumps forward, and I was able to sign out the book sooner than I’d expected.
( Villains and heros? )

Getting “home for the holidays” gave me a chance to see the stars from the countryside. Even with less light pollution in the way, though, I’m still not that good at identifying constellations: after recognizing the asterism of the Big Dipper and following the pointers to the pole star, I was pretty much limited to spotting Orion, although if I’d looked for it I think I could have found Cassiopeia.

It took getting back from vacation and looking at the astronomy sites I follow, however, to see notices of the red star in Orion Betelgeuse fading. This news has been punched up a bit by reminders Betelgeuse is close in astronomical terms to going supernova, even if there are reassurances it’s far away enough to not threaten life on Earth. At the moment I’m wondering more if the star will be brighter again when I next get out into the country.

I started reading the August issue of Scientific American today, and got to an article about a NASA program that funds “research that would be ‘huge if true.’” The article focused on some scientists who had been given a grant to investigate “the Mach effect,” playing with inertia to create a push in one direction, with the intimation enough research and development could turn this into a full-blown spaceship drive. A part of me does want to be cautious about gee-whizzery, and going back to the article I did note cautions from other scientists. At the same time, though, I was thinking of a contraption plugged heavily in Astounding Science Fiction around when its editor was getting a reputation for promoting pathological science, which was supposed to turn rotational motion into a steady linear push but seemed in the end to only work when it was sitting on a tabletop. The thought of an “I told you so!” or two wasn’t encouraging in this case. As I thought about that, though, I started thinking that “inertia” being involved reminded me of E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman novels, where the “inertialess drive” neatly sidestepped all the complications of relativity, limiting your super-streamlined starship’s top velocity only by friction with the interstellar media. For all the looking back at science fiction, though, I could contemplate the NASA program is looking forward right when we’re all looking back to Apollo 11.

The radio news this morning led off reporting a Canadian scientist was sharing the Nobel Prize in Physics. "National pride" focused much sharper in the next few moments when it was mentioned the scientist was at the University of Waterloo, which I went to. Her name then being announced as Donna Strickland had me thinking "Did she teach some of my undergraduate courses?" Looking into some of the reports turned up she'd joined the university when I was going there, so it was at least possible.

It's easy enough for "making too big a deal of any kind of encounter with a celebrity" to go awry, perhaps even when that celebrity involves science. Thinking back to the relative impressions different parts of university have left on me up to now, I am bit a conscious to what an extent "memory" is "reconstruction," too. Still, knowing Strickland's specialization is optics had me remembering I'd done all right in that subject; going off into the weeds, only a few years later I'd wondered if "comedic mad science" might take on that subject rather than the usual disciplines of "biology," "engineering," and "high-energy physics." In any case, I'm certain there are plenty of other University of Waterloo graduates taking a similar interest in this.

While trying to come up with the next thing to post to this journal, I happened to think back to an article in the August issue of Scientific American about "inner speech," talking to yourself in your head. That a part of thought is unvoiced speech is an idea I've seen before, but all of a sudden I happened to wonder about the times I've just been trying to think only to find everything in my mind fragments, breaking off and jumping to something else. It felt a lot less involved than the "dialogues" I remembered seeing mentioned in the article, along with comments that reading dialogue in fiction can key into inner voices. I have been conscious for quite a while now of not reading fiction as regularly as I could. Even going back to the article and seeing a comment that inner speech can be telegraphic in brevity didn't quite help. The question is how to concentrate and stay focused.

I happened to look in the right direction at the library to see the books on polar exploration, and one of the titles, "An Empire of Ice," caught my eye. Even though I might have imagined the book from that to bring up the usual arguments for "British polar incompetence," I took it off the shelf anyway to see the subtitle brought up "science" in the Antarctic, and remembered an article in Scientific American from a few years ago during the centennial of the first journeys to the South Pole. (After finishing the book, I hunted out the issue and saw the article had also been written by the book's author Edward J. Larson.) In the introduction, Larson mentioned how whenever someone learned just what he was writing about they would dwell on the contemporary conventional wisdom of Robert Falcon Scott as the compleat incompetent and Ernest Shackleton as the man who brought the men under his immediate command back alive. (Roald Amundsen, who closed out the era when polar explorers would only get "nearest" to their goals through repeated success, seems to have made it look so easy that efforts to make a big deal of him still don't seem to direct too much attention his way.) He promised that in focusing on the scientific efforts of the two British explorers he wouldn't dwell on the contemporary perceptions, which got my attention enough to make me sign the book out.

While there have certainly been efforts made to condemn Scott's scientific ambitions too by pointing out how Edward Wilson, "Birdie" Bowers, and Apsley Cherry-Garrard went through "The Worst Journey in the World" to collect emperor penguin eggs during the months-long Antarctic night on the hope the embryos in them would prove some theories soon disproven anyway or making a big deal of Scott's party pausing to collect some geological samples on their doomed journey back from the South Pole, the book puts them and the other efforts in perspective, connecting them to previous scientific expeditions and contemporary theories. Along with the collecting of biological and geological samples, the study of ice (although I wondered if the explorers suggesting the Antarctic ice had retreated when they reached it might attract undue attention from some) and plenty of meteorology (Larson brings up Susan Solomon's "The Coldest March," which argues Scott was caught by unexpectedly and unusually cold weather, but doesn't make as much of a point of that himself), there does happen to be some pointing out of the contemporary racism that sought "scientific" justification. In the end, though, the book suggests that the scientific side of the expeditions, in being downplayed in favour of mere "ordeals," left things open to be taken apart by a later and less easily impressed age. The question that gets asked in different contexts about whether "knowledge" is "worth losing lives for" may still lurk all the same, although I did get to thinking how Cherry-Garrard's own book tries to tackle it in closing. Given that my strange sympathy for "convenient targets" can extend to some historical figures, I was willing to accept this book in any case.

I was driving back through the night from a shift at work today when, somewhat to the south and west, I seemed to notice an odd, orangish, vertically elongated light in the sky for just a moment. Wondering just what it was, I kept driving, and then I got to thinking how things had become embroidered about different "lights in the sky" so as to help produce interstellar spacecraft from them... and then clouds I hadn't noticed before kept shifting, and I realised the light had been the crescent moon. I don't know what I would have wound up wondering what else the light could have been had the clouds not kept moving, but it's good to have some certainty.

(...and Mr. Lincoln.)

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

(from The Origin of Species, first edition.)

Assorted discussion of late about the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider, and especially the efforts by some to find "risks" in it, have made me think a little. I suppose I agree quite firmly with those who aren't worried, such as the Bad Astronomer, but I can somehow see it as a "comforting" "technological apocalypse," if you're worried about "our own cleverness doing us in!" Worries about "too much stuff being put into the air" or "too little stuff to take out of the ground" seem to sound as if they threaten the way everybody lives, but a particle accelerator seems to be something the worried can do without... of course, I can also see it as being something for people to not take quite seriously, the way we wound up being able to look back on "Y2K" fears. (And at least for the moment, there are status reports on whether we're here or not.)