You're in a Maze of Twisty Passages

One of the first harbingers of the micro-computer revolution was a game called Advent. Or Collossal Cave if you were early and Zork if you were later. In this game you moved by typing "Go East", or one of the other directions of the compass. This took you to different rooms with different text descriptions and different contents.

I did not realize how American this paradigm was until today. I was discussing getting about in Oxford when she casually remarked, "Navigation is more landmark based than address based here."

Americans have benefited from the Northwest Ordinance since George Washington, a surveyor, signed it into law in 1787. With a blank slate of real estate the new nation set about laying out all of its streets and highways in a rectilinear grid. It even got so mathematical, that the Mormons established a Cartesian x-y axis centered at their main Temple.

In contrast, England literally paved the cow paths. There's not a straight road or a right-angle in London--at least none I've been able to find. In America one only tolerates this kind of non-rationality when there's a body of water you've got to build around. Sadly, the Good Lord didn't use rectangular lakes when he laid out North America.

This is the second major reason why I'm in love-hate with England: I'm forever getting lost. Last time I was in England, I became acutely aware of the smallness of text printed on maps and my need of the reading glasses I failed to pack.

I haven't gotten a good solution, but here's how I'm coping this trip: I bought an unlocked GSM smart phone and when I got to England I bought a Virgin Mobil SIM card and put 10 pounds on it. We shall see how well Google Maps works.

When we venture forth for supper, I'll run some experiments...

The experiment proved most successful. I turned on the cell phone and Virgin Mobile provided a Google Maps update automagically that showed me exactly where I was. Bravo Google Maps!

I'm In Love/Hate With England

I hope you won't dismiss this as the grumpy ramblings of a parochial provincial Pro-America bigot, because I don't think that's who I am. (Is there any less-valid objection one can make to this charge?) I'm in the Mother-Country for the second time in my life. My first visit was occasioned by my daughter's graduation from Oxford. This visit is occasioned by my daughter's marriage there. Would I have chosen to take my vacation--or should I say "holiday"--in England otherwise? Probably not. Am I a better person for going? Probably so.

When I was a tender lad just out of grad school I had a job working for part of the gubmint solving math problems like the ones Alan Turing worked on during WW2. Though the Poles did all the heavy mathematical lifting solving the Enigma machine, they handed over their work to the Brits after Hitler and Stalin overran their country. Nevertheless, the Brits at Bletchley Park managed to advance the state of the practice of electronic digital computing enough to build the special-purpose devices that yielded ULTRA sources. (The US work in developing MAGIC sources from the Japanese machines--that yielded advance warning of Pearl Harbor--was a more significant cryptanalytic result.) This sounds like I'm damning the Brits with faint praise, but that's not my intent. They did cool stuff that advanced the art of cryptanalysis.

My point is that they had help.

They lent help to the US during the War and thereafter in the Cold War. Thus I made friends with several world-class mathematicians from the UK.

We got on famously and I learned how to speak some British. In the states the pavement is that asphalt-covered surface that cars drive on while pedestrians stay on the sidewalk, whereas in the UK the pavement is for pedestrians and the cars drive on the tarmak. Unless they're semi-tractor-trailers, you know--18-wheelers, in this case they're called articulated lorries, or artic's. I picked up on boot and bonnet instead of trunk and hood.

But I missed some important distinctions which grew to grate on my nerves when I came to visit a couple years ago. And that I'm reminded of right now.

I think some language committee somewhere negotiates useless language variants: one reasonable, the other goofy. Then they toss a coin to see which country gets the goofy one. Half the time the US gets the sensible one, and half the time the UK.

It's an amusing diversion to collect these differences, but it's relatively annoying to live with them. And that inspire's the hate part of my love-hate relationship with England. When I'm here it's like a linguistic pebble in my shoe.

When I walk up to a clerk in a store, I'm not "sorry." S/he will just have to "excuse me."

There are other linguistic differences I can elaborate upon. For instance, the Brits sensibly say, "Weak bridge," along with a weight restrictions. I can't imagine an American bureaucrat admitting that even the most shabby, ramshackle bridge is "weak."

The key point here is that the US and UK are different. And different is not necessarily good or bad. Sometimes it's good, or bad, or neither. And when it's neither I start making grumpy sounds like this.

You Know This IS A Business

I am not sure why this is, but there's a common portrayal of artists as being devoid of business sense. The stereotypical author is some creative sort who holes up in some garret perfecting his art while ducking calls from his/her long-suffering agent who wants to nag about this or that missed deadline. Likewise people get the impression that an artiste is some elevated form of human who can't be bothered with the mundane.

Good luck with making that work for you.

The first thing the writer should do is write. And the second thing s/he should do is be a reliable business partner. If you promise you'll write something, remember that a promise made is a debt unpaid.

Now, being a reliable business partner does not mean you wear striped pants like Mr. Monopoly or smoke fat cigars. It isn't being J. R. Ewing and stabbing the other guy in the back. Or it shouldn't be. Being a reliable business partner has more to do with character, keeping your promises, and doing your best on a consistent basis.

Henry Cloud wrote a book, Integrity, wherein he says that success in any endeavor is a mix of three things. You have to know your stuff. You have to inspire trust in those you work with. AND you need the character not to screw it all up. People engage in self-sabotaging behavior all the time. If you're young and pretty, your encounters with the legal system can be the source of a lot of free tabloid publicity. These hijinks will give people reasons to look for Someone Else.

Would you put money at risk in any venture whose success depends upon Lindsay Lohan staying out of jail/rehab, or Charlie Sheen not dying of some drug overdose?

When you decide you want to get a book deal, that's the sort of thinking that will be going through potential agents and editors? Will this guy be a pain in the butt? Can this gal deliver a salable manuscript when I need it?

Sorry, but you've got to grow up a little bit in one corner of your life. The New York Times keeps track of the best SELLING authors, not the best WRITING authors. The most successful self-published author (in my opinion) of the Kindle/Nook ebook era is John Locke. He describes how he sold a million ebooks by doing all the things he did while building a successful insurance business. If you don't look too close, you'll see reminders of Amway's multi-level marketing.

The biggest successes in the near future of writing will include those who know how to put together a grass-roots sales organization. And then manage their writing and (perhaps) self-publishing as a business enterprise. Even if you go with a traditional publisher, they'll be looking at your "author's platform" to provide an unpaid adjunct to their own advertising and promotional departments.

So, you'd better set about to minding your business.

Jumping The Shark

Decades ago, Henry Winkler strapped on Fonzy's leather jacket and water skis. The Fonzy character then did a water ski jump over a shark. The television series was called Happy Days and it had had a very long and successful run. Happy Days had nothing to do with water skiing or sharks. Fonzy was a cool motorcycle-riding tough guy, not a stunt man. The episode was untrue to what the show was about or what its characters were about.

It told all of America that the folks writing the scripts for Happy Days were out of ideas. At this point a mercy killing of the show was appropriate. And that's what happened shortly thereafter.

A story or series of stories has to be true to itself. Long running series, like Perry Rhodan managed by constantly escalating the stakes. But despite how large the galactic empire, Perry Rhodan and the characters around him were consistent with the space opera that starts with an astronaut finding a marooned extraterrestrial space ship.

Doctor Who has gone through nearly a dozen actors portraying a thousand-year-old alien who travels about in a blue police call box that's bigger on the inside than on the outside. Nevertheless, it has maintained a more or less internal consistency.

Different writers have been at the helm and they've pushed the story in their own directions. None appear to have tried to put him on water skis so far. I've thought the writing to be paper thin in places, but that's consistent with the cotton-candy nature of the show.

Then there's Castle. This show has been maddening because its writing is so inconsistent. I like the premise of a cop show with lots of eye-candy and Nathan Fillian living every scribbler's fantasy of making tons of money as a writer. It works well with a light-hearted comedy romance between the two main characters. It works less well when it forgets this and turns into a heavy drama. No, I don't believe these two are credible Jason Bourne material. Nor do I believe they're going to save the world from some international conspiracy. These episodes are painful to watch because the tension is so fake and the outcomes so predictable.

The audience has to believe in the characters. As the characters act untrue to their essential natures, the audience starts to doubt. When the doubt grows to a critical point, they're just a shark and a water-ski-ramp away from irrelevance.

And Now A Word From Big Brother

I've noticed a lemming-like behavior on network television. This isn't a conspiracy theory. I'm a conspiracy experimentalist, not a conspiracy theorist. Instead, it's a groupthink.

This groupthink appears to be going on among script writers. It's not new. I recall in the 1960s, one show would do a "speed up time" episode, and before you know it three other shows would do the same thing. I distinctly recall the "guy in a gorilla suit" episodes of shows as disparate as Perry Mason and Gilligan's Island.

What I've noticed in this decade is a tendency for the groupthink to have a distinctly political spin. For example, a particular political viewpoint does not like guns in the hands of lawful citizens. It seems that a handgun can only be handled by a sit-com character if he is about to shoot himself with it. The message from Big Brother is, "Sure, you may have the right to carry that gun, but you're going to be the laughing-stock at the office when you wound yourself in a comedic fashion."

The irony here is that those involved in these shows have no idea how to safely handle a gun. If all you know about guns comes from television, there's no such thing as muzzle discipline. If you ever handle a gun, you need to control where it's pointed at all times. Unless you're starring on a television show.

Here's a little quiz for you. If you can't answer correctly, you probably should not be passing gun laws.

"It is bad idea to lay Russian roulette. Why is it a particularly bad idea to play Russian roulette with a Colt 45 (M1911) pistol?"

And this groupthink extends beyond subverting the Bill of Rights.

The blessing of Instant Netflix is that you can easily do a marathon of a particular show. (Or maybe it is a curse.) I don't pay close attention to the initial hype for a new series. If two weeks go by and all my friends are raving about the show, I'll regret my decision to ignore it. When that show comes out on Instant Netflix, I'll start watching back episodes back-to-back.

Such was the case with a television series that shall remain nameless. I'm in the middle of such a marathon when an episode comes on that propagandized a particular political viewpoint. The writers pretended to poke fun at both sides, but they end up creating a strawman of the "wrong" view and proceeded to delegitimize it. If I were in a theater I wouldn't have walked out immediately--just gnashed my teeth in silence. I was in the privacy of my own living room and I had no need to mind appearances. I fast-forwarded through the rest of the political tract sailing under the false-flag of comedy, I finished that episode and removed the series from my Instant Queue. I won't be back.

It's easy to respond to such artistic expression with, "this was written by my enemy for my enemies," and then dismiss it.

The Communists failed to create the New Soviet Man, because human nature is not as plastic as the central planners hoped. This is the lesson of collectivist failures going back at least to the city-state of Sparta.

I recall a few years back when all the newspaper comics got together to do anti-world-hunger strips. I'm not coming out in favor of starving kids in China (and I encourage you to finish your supper for that reason.) I am against cheapening one's art and risking alienating audience by writing agenda-driven stories.  At least the Red Chinese produced propaganda you can laugh at.

It Works Like This

I touched upon this obliquely when I claimed one ought never put two Sherlocks in the same room wherein I deprecated the practice of baffling the reader with a bunch of inside-baseball expert blather. And I've touched upon this obliquely when I noted that Science Fiction has a distinct expression that favors invention and science over sociology and culture. I'm more a fan of the Jules Verne expression over the H. G. Wells expression.

The writer may know things other than writing. For instance, Erle Stanley Gardner was a practicing lawyer before Perry Mason argued his first murder case. Police procedural stories are often written by former cops or forensic pathologists. Military Science Fiction stories are often penned by former military people. In each of these cases, the writer can truly say to the reader, "I know something you don't."

This enables the writer to do two things: 1) He can lend details from his experience. Mr. Gardner was able to use his own courtroom experience to insert small details that lend verisimilitude to his narrative. 2) He can explain how something works. If you want to see world-class explaining, pick up a Neal Stephenson book. You won't need a forklift. You just think you will. I'm interested in the explaining thing today.

Experts love to be true to their craft, and this makes them think, "I cannot dumb this down." They say this to justify writing that proves opaque to the ordinary reader. If you refuse to dumb something down, you're the dummy.

I was in the middle of my Masters' degree studies in Mathematics at Michigan State University when a visiting scholar came by to give a colloquium. He gave a talk on a topic of mathematics that was very difficult for me, and I knew I did not understand it going in. So, I was a little scared at the beginning of the talk. I needn't have been. The guy made the topic seem a lot easier than it really was. He knew multiple motivating examples for the key ideas and he knew which ideas were the more important ones.

I realized that this was the smartest guy I'd run into at MSU. It takes genius to make some things look easy.

C. S. Lewis famously said that if you cannot explain something to the woman who does your washing, you really don't understand it.

Understanding is like cutting a path through the tangled undergrowth of your ignorance. When I first learn something, I blaze one trail through this jungle and it twists about a lot. But when I learn a thing better, I have more than one way to get to the same point. All knowledge is interconnected somehow and the more you know, the more interconnects you possess.

Also, when I barely understand a thing, I don't know what's important and what's insignificant. Pretty much everything has to be held onto for dear life lest it be needed later. It's a lot less work when you know what the essential issues are and can dispense with the rest.

Suppose you're writing an explanation for something--like how a radio antenna works. You have to decide which parts of the explanation are pertinent or not. And then you can devise analogies that motivate the key ideas. An antenna element is not exactly like a tuning fork. It uses vibrating electrons to induce electromagnetic radiation whereas a tuning fork uses vibrating tines to induce sound. However, the process is essentially the same even if the details vary.

Cool facts about the partial differential equations governing the behavior of the radio waves can be left out of some explanation, because they are not pertinent to the story. Sure, you'll need to know them if you ever build an antenna, but not when you write for a popular audience. The expert is an expert because s/he knows what can be safely left out.

The expert is also an expert because s/he knows the connections between this thing and other things. Your audience may not know anything about short wave radio, but they do know something about other things, like snakes. Those other things they know about should be what you use to approach the subject.

I spoke of this obliquely before, but I'll say it directly here. The writer should make the reader feel empowered and good, not intimidated and bad. Maybe the reader lacks the time and the inclination to take a degree in radio engineering and/or pursue FCC licensing. But s/he can get a taste of the coolness of the work. The writer must be sensitive of and compassionate toward the reader to make the prose understandable and enjoyable.

Aiming The Subconscious

Ever get a killer idea in the shower? And wonder where it came from and how you came to think it?

My physics prof told me this story and it may not be exactly true. I believe the truth is pretty close.

Once upon a time there were these missionaries in South America. They'd left the temperate North America to work in equatorial Ecuador. But instead of wearing pith helmets and tramping around the rain forests and doing whatever missionaries do, they went to a mountain top and built a radio station--a honking huge radio station.

The radio station was intended to broadcast world-wide via short-wave radio. There was something special about this spot on the globe that helps radio propagation. The important detail is that this radio station had significant effective radiated power.

All the equipment has been set up and tested successfully. They built the tower, installed the antennas, hooked everything up, and started broadcasting.

This station used what's called a "dipole antenna." You can make one by just cutting two straight rods of metal to the same length, lining them up sticking straight out in opposite directions, and hooking them up to your radio transmitter. These rods are called antenna elements. Each element is like a tuning fork in that it has a natural resonant frequency, but for electricity, not sound. If you change the rod's length, the resonant frequency changes. In a broadcast radio station, you match the antenna's resonant frequency to the transmitter's broadcast frequency.

It seems that the humidity in Ecuador interacted with the antenna elements when they were pumping a lot of power through them. It caused the ends of the antenna elements to erode in a process not unlike Saint Elmo's Fire. This shortened the length of the elements and causing antennas to become de-tuned. The radio station quit broadcasting.

The radio engineer struggled to solve this problem without success. It looked like the project would fail.

Defeated, he went to bed, and he had a dream of two snakes made of fire who were fighting. The snakes coiled around themselves and then bit each other in the mouth. This formed a loop made of two fire-snakes.

The radio engineer woke up with the idea for a "folded dipole element." By folding the ends of the two elements back toward themselves and joining them into a single piece of metal, there were no end-point to erode in the humid air and electricity. Without the metal eroding, the length remained the same and the antenna remained in tune. Huzzah, the folded dipole antenna proved an elegant solution.

(Dr. Google tells me the antenna is actually the "quad loop" whose driven element is indeed a loop, and that the dreamer's name was Clarence Moore.)

This story illustrates my recipe for aiming my subconscious to solve problems. Think through the problem from every conceivable angle. Work like a dog fully engaging the conscious mind. (You can call this phase programming the mental computer.) Consciously fill your noggin with everything that's known about the problem and everything you've tried that does not work. Engage your emotions and become passionate about solving the problem and how much you want the solution.

Then let go of the problem. Consciously set it aside. Go Running. Take a shower. Paint an apartment. Plant a garden. Do something unrelated to the problem at hand. When you've tired yourself out go to bed and sleep in--with a notepad beside the bed. Or by the shower.

While you're doing these Other Things, your subconscious should be beavering away at the facts you loaded it up with during phase one. How hard your subconscious works for you will be a function of your passion for solving the problem. With your conscious mind loosened up your subconscious will have a clear channel to send the solution to you.

This is similar to the process I described that A. E. Van Vogt followed. If you're stuck on a plot-problem, you should try both approaches and see what works best for you.

P.S. If you'd like a chuckle at the expense of HCJB and Radio Catolica Nacional, check out this story of how some risque QSL cards got sent out.