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Book review: Lights in the Deep

LD provides a second look at Brad Torgersen’s Lights in the Deep:

I went into this with two disadvantages: I wasn’t at all familiar with
the author, and I haven’t regularly read short form science fiction for
many, many years. I ended up enjoying this collection nonetheless.

Diving into these stories quickly reminded me why I’m not as
big a fan of short stories as I used to be–the limitations in form
itself. As a young man I would devour short stories, but just about any
author, but particularly Larry Niven, Heinlein, Zelazy, Keith Laumer,
Robert Sheckley, and other similar authors. Back then, quick dips into
short stories appealed to me, but now that I’m an old man, I find my
tastes trending toward larger sized (huge) Space Operas from Peter F.
Hamilton, Neal Asher, Alastair Reynolds, etc.

The only recent short story collections I had read were by
Hamilton, and those were related for the most part to the various novels
he’s written, so this was my first dive into a collection like this in
years.

I’ll make quick comments about each entry in the collection and then give my summary.

The
Three Introductions – I read them, but I couldn’t tell you a thing
about them now. They were nice, but didn’t contain anything memorable.
Neither a plus, nor a minus to the whole.

Outbound – Quite a good story, one that I would have been
happy to see expanded to novel length. For me the downsides were the
brevity of this story… I wanted more detail about this setting.

Gemini 17 – A nice exploration of a *slightly* alternate history. Fun story with a good, humorous ending.

Influences: Allan Cole and Chris Bunch – I’m not familiar with
either author, but it’s always nice to see the influences in an
author’s background.

The Bullfrog Radio Astronomy Project –
Be careful what you transmit or the Men in Black (or are they) will
come for you. It brought back memories of laughing at the Art Bell show.

Exiles of Eden – Another nice story. I figured out what was
happening before the characters did. It’s an interesting concept that
you’ll be familiar with if you’ve read Alastair Reynolds “Revelation
Space” novels.

Writer Dad: Mike Resnick – More background on the author.

Footprints – A character piece. Perhaps a bit too “literary” for my tastes.

The
Exchange Officers – This excellent story is the polar opposite of most
of the previous stories. It has action, combat, technology, and less
emphasis on memories, and feelings. Perhaps my second favorite story in
the collection.

Essay: On the Growth of Fantasy and the Waning of Science
Fiction – An excellent subject to discuss that’s quite relevant to my
own thoughts and tastes. I’m NOT a fantasy fan. I’ve read Lord of the
Rings once, and that was quite enough for me thank you. I enjoy the Game
of Thrones TV show, but my attempt to start reading the first novel
resulted in boredom and sleepytime. I’m a HARD SF kinda guy, and this
essay covers some of the things that bug me with current SF/Fantasy–I
hate Star Wars, especially the second trilogy, I only liked the original
Star Trek, anyone who likes Avatar is an Ava-tard in my book. My
opinion is that the growth of fantasy reflects the decline of STEM in
modern American society. Fantasy is perfect for those with less than a
firm grasp on science.

The Chaplain’s Assistant – A return to a “character-based”
story. Interesting, but ultimately boring to me. I was not enthused to
find out that the next long story in this collection was a sequel to
this.

The Chaplain’s Legacy – My lack of enthusiasm for the previous
story caused me to put the entire collection down for a few days, but I
had volunteered to review this book for Vox, so I did my duty and read
the story. The good news is that I liked this much more than the
previous short, though in my opinion the size could have been condensed.

The Hero’s Tongue: Larry Niven – Of all of the essays in the
book, this one was the most enjoyable for me because of my own fondness
for Niven.

Exanastasis – Interesting, enjoyable, but ultimately forgettable.

Ray of Light – The final story of the collection and probably
my favorite. There were points in this story where I thought it was
going to break badly, but the story didn’t go in the direction I thought
it would end up, and I enjoyed it a lot.

The last story really brought my opinion of the whole
collection back up from a low spot. I enjoy Torgerson’s writing style,
and I will look up some of his longer work, but probably not the
forthcoming “Chaplain” story.

I’d give this collection a solid 3 out of 5 stars.

Mailvox: what could possibly go wrong?

GV writes to observe that the USA is about to experiment with an economic application of Hultgreen-Curie Syndrome:

I was listing to the radio when I heard the news that Janet Yellen would be named the next fed chair.  I went online to confirm this story and found this news story by NBC News.

It appears you were right about what you wrote in your blog post on 9/16/2013 entitled The job no one wants.  You wrote that you assumed it would be Janet Yellen.  It’s funny how the link to the NBC news story talks about her being the first women to head the central bank and some of her accomplishment but it leaves out the quote you put at the end of that blog post were she said the following;

 “For my own part I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.’s — I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.”
– Janet Yellen, 2010

With someone like that in charge what could possibly go wrong.

Christine Lagarde at the IMF and Janet Yellen at the Fed. This should be an interesting test of whether putting women in charge will make it all better. I wouldn’t mind being wrong, for all of our sakes, but I’m not terribly sanguine about the probabilities here.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard summarizes: “So there we have it. The next chairman of the Fed is going to track the labour participation rate. Money will stay loose.”

We are all war criminals

The Red Cross paints a target on its chest:

The International Committee of the Red Cross have called for video games to punish crimes committed in battle by adhering to real-life international war conventions.

“The ICRC believes there is a place for international humanitarian law (the law of armed conflict) in video games,” the organization that works worldwide to provide humanitarian help for people caught in war zones said in a statement on their website. “The ICRC is concerned that certain game scenarios could lead to a trivialization of serious violations of the law of armed conflict,” they added. “The fear is that eventually such illegal acts will be perceived as acceptable behavior.”[…]

Bernard Barrett, a spokesman for the organization said they were not trying to censor games or spoil people’s fun, but rather, “make clear that there are rules in battle and that certain acts are illegal.”

 I can’t imagine I’m the first game designer to read this and think, “hmmm, what if the Red Cross was taken over by liberal fascists and started behaving like liberal fascists usually do….”

The lesson of p. punctatus

Immigration advocates never seem to take into account that the putative benefits of immigration depend entirely upon the characteristics of those entering the society en masse.

In a recently published paper in PNAS Early Edition, Dobata and Kazuki Tsuji demonstrate what they believe is the first observed public goods dilemma observed in a non-human and non-microbial system.

By using the social ant Pristomyrmex punctatus, they were able to show the fitness consequences to the colony and track the shifting genetic make-up as cheaters invaded and took hold. Researchers have recently evaluated these questions in systems involving viruses and cells (where cells may secrete protective substances, or self-destruct to form a spore-dispersing stalk) but not in multicellular organisms before. Yet the results are so similar, write Dobata and Tsuji, that they believe universal principles are at play.

P. punctatus is a curious species. The queen caste, morphologically and functionally distinct in most social insects, has been secondarily lost. All workers are involved in both reproduction and cooperative tasks like foraging. There is still a division of labor, among age groups. Young workers take care of inside-nest tasks, which include asexual (thelytokous) reproduction. Older workers ease out of reproduction and shift to tasks outside the nest, like foraging.

But there is a third kind of P. punctatus. A group of cheaters, made of a single intraspecific lineage in the field, that engage in very few tasks, save for reproduction.

The researchers found when these genetic cheaters infect a colony they have better individual fitness than the workers, both in terms of survival and brood production. They reduce worker survival and reproduction, as more young workers shift to tasks outside the nest to effectively pick up the slack. Eventually, the cheater hordes take over. The authors call the cheaters a kind of  ”transmissible social cancer.”

In cheater-only colonies, more eggs are initially produced, compared to worker colonies, but they are neglected. Eggs begin to rot and the nest becomes a dirty, unhygienic place. Eventually, the nest dies. For a group, cheating is an evolutionary dead end.

Compare the global North to the global South. Then consider whether the immigrant communities of today more closely resemble meticulous productive ant nests or dirty, unhygienic places. Ants might not be able to anticipate the idiocratic consequences of allow a “transmissible social cancer” to take root in their colonies, but one would have thought that human beings could do better.

When a society’s social policy is a scientifically predictable evolutionary dead end, it should invite rethink. Instead, questioning it is deemed akin to blasphemy. This is not the hallmark of a society destined for survival.

Making it better by ruining it

Tom Hoggins is a harbinger of the scalzification of the game reviewer:

GTAV is a sensational video game and a
marvellous feat of technical engineering. However, as always with Grand
Theft Auto, controversy has not been far behind the adulation.

The series penchant for carnage and violence is well known, as you may expect
from an “open-world” game about criminality that gives players carte blanche
to cause havoc in its facsimile of the United States. Set in Los Santos, a
twisted vision of Los Angeles, V is Grand Theft Auto at its most barbaric;
torture, cannibalism and murder featuring in its nihilistic milieu.
There has also been much discussion about how GTAV treats women. That GTAV is
misogynistic is a defensible position. Women in the game are either bit-part
players or set dressing: strippers to throw money at, prostitutes to pick
up.

There are three lead characters that players can control in the game: all
male. The women characters are often leered at or cast as nags. One of the
player characters daughters has “skank” tattooed across her back, one
mission has you chaperoning a paparazzo as he tries to photograph an aging
actress’s “low-hanging muff.”

At one stage during my play-through of the game, I had a barrage of these
aspects which made me feel deeply uncomfortable. I commented to a friend
that I was concerned about the treatment of women within the game, that
there were few female characters drawn with any depth and that it felt a
deliberate decision to avoid an attempt to do so.

I was the first second nationally syndicated game reviewer, and it is a little sad to see how grotesquely standards have fallen since I ended my game review column. There are two ridiculous points here as well as a remarkable failure of observation.

  1. Torture, cannibalism, murder, and nihilism all get a pass. But the treatment of women, well, that makes gamma boy feel uncomfortable.
  2. The game has earned over $1 billion already and received a 98/100 critical reception. It is one of the most successful, best-reviewed games in the history of the game industry. Does the reviewer think that removing one of the GTA’s most well-known attributes is actually going to improve either its sales or its critical reviews?
  3. The reviewer fails to observe that the deliberate attempt to draw female characters with any depth is done so because that it precisely what its young male audience wants. They are sick of women relentlessly trying to control them. They are sick of women drugging them and punishing them because they don’t behave like little girls. And GTA V, like its predecessors, allows them to escape a ruthlessly feminized world in favor of one that, if nothing else, allows them to behave in an unapologetically masculine manner.  

The success of GTA V is because it is misogynistic. It is what games are supposed to be: it is escapist.  The Telegraph reviewer writes: “Games will not be able to take its much coveted place in
mainstream culture while these type of people get to dictate anything. Good
riddance to them when they are finally cast off.”

And the day that happens, the game industry will begin to die. Instead of great games like Doom and World of Warcraft and GTA 5, it will be Spamville, and Mafia Clicks, and Words with Friends, and 50 Shades of Necrobestial Rape Fantasy until the industry collapses amidst general bewilderment. If the McRapies ever replace the likes of Rockstar and Romero and me in the way that this guy has succeeded me in the mainstream media, (and McRapey has been trying to establish himself in the game industry), that’s exactly what you’re going to get.

VPFL Week Four

105 Greenfield Grizzlies (4-0)
78 Bailout Banksters (1-3)

91 Fromundah Cheezheads (4-0)
59 Suburban Churchians (2-2)

99 Bane Sidhe (2-2)
54 RR Redbeards (1-3)

79 Mounds View Meerkats (2-2)
76 Bradford Gamma Rays (1-3)

75 ’63 Mercury Marauders (2-2)
67 Boot Hill Hangmen (1-3)

No Vikes this week, which is great because it gives Christian Ponder more time to recover from his “injury”.  Which, if Leslie Frazier isn’t completely crazy, will last as long as it takes for Matt Cassel to demonstrate that he is turnover-prone or not. Cassel missed some throws and got lucky on two possible interceptions, but on the other hand, looked like a real NFL quarterback, got the ball out quickly, and registered a higher QB rating than Ponder has ever recorded.

Denver is looking virtually unstoppable, but we’ve seen this show from Manning before. Don’t bet the farm on the Broncos yet. New Orleans is looking formidable now that they’ve got Payton back, demonstrating that coaches are almost as important as quarterbacks in the National Football League.

I was pleased to see the Piranha of the Serengeti roar back in the late games after getting a complete goose egg from Andy Dalton subbing for the bye-weeked Aaron Rodgers. That’s the sign of a well-balanced fantasy team; one that can win without a quarterback if need be.  Dare we detect shades of the 2000 Ravens?

NSA spying is useless

NSA head openly admits the Obama administration has been lying about the effectiveness of the NSA spying regime:

The Obama administration’s credibility on intelligence suffered another blow Wednesday as the chief of the National Security Agency admitted that officials put out numbers that vastly overstated the counterterrorism successes of the government’s warrantless bulk collection of all Americans’ phone records.

Pressed by the Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at an oversight hearing, Gen. Keith B. Alexander admitted that the number of terrorist plots foiled by the NSA’s huge database of every phone call made in or to America was only one or perhaps two — far smaller than the 54 originally claimed by the administration.

Gen. Alexander and other intelligence chiefs have pleaded with lawmakers not to shut down the bulk collection of U.S. phone records despite growing unease about government overreach in the program, which was revealed in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

“There is no evidence that [bulk] phone records collection helped to thwart dozens or even several terrorist plots,” Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, Vermont Democrat and committee chairman, told Gen. Alexander of the 54 cases that administration officials — including the general himself — have cited as the fruit of the NSA’s domestic snooping.

“These weren’t all plots and they weren’t all foiled,” he said.

It’s not enough to shut down the spying. These lying bastards to the U.S. Constitution need to be put on trial for treason. The spying wouldn’t be justified even if it had foiled 54 plots, but the fact that the actual number is much more likely ZERO simply underlines that the most dangerous plot against the American people is the plotting being done by federal agents and appointed government officials.

How the Rabid Bat was born

Fred Reed tells us of the future history of America’s next generation air superiority fighter:

In early 2035, the thirty-fourth year of the war against Al Qaeda,
 the Pentagon issued a White Paper saying that the F22 Raptor, the
front-line fighter plane of the United States, was nearing the end of
its useful life and needed to be replaced. Not everyone agreed. Various
budget-cutting organizations argued that the Raptor had never been used
and thus no one could tell whether it had a useful life. Anyway, the
job of the Air Force, killing third-world peasants and their families,
had been co-opted by drones. America didn´t need a new fighter, said
the critics.

The Air Force countered that the new plane would look feral
and make loud, exciting noises. To this, critics could find no
rejoinder. Design studies began.

An early question was what to call the new fighter. By
tradition, aircraft were named after aggressive but unintelligent birds
(F-15 Eagle, F16 Fighting Falcon), unpleasant animals (AH-1 Cobra,
F-18 Hornet) ghosts (F-4 Phantom, AC-130 Spectre) or Stone Age nomads
(AH-64 Apache). However, something with more pizzazz was needed to get
funding through Congress.

Discussion ensued. Suggestions were solicited from The
Building, as the Pentagon calls itself. These ran from “F-40 Screaming
Kerblam” to the politically marginal “Horrendous Dyke,” whose author
believed that it would depress enemy fliers. Going with zoological
tradition, the Air Force wanted to call it the Rabid Bat. A
congressional wag weary of military price tags  suggested “Priscilla,”
because that no pilot would then go near it and the country would be
spared the expense of wars.  (His idea of painting it in floral
patterns was not taken seriously.)

A national transgender- advocacy  group favored “Susan B.
Anthony,” but this was held to be disrespectful of Ebonics, and in any
event Anthony might be Susan. It was hard to tell about these things.

The Air Force prevailed. The Rabid Bat was born.

Loud exciting noises! You can’t front on that. The sad thing is that it isn’t any sillier than putting female combat troops on the front lines.

This guy isn’t disabled

I used to go to Gopher football games back when Tony Dungy was the quarterback. I still remember when they upset Michigan. I couldn’t believe it when they moved their games to that ridiculous Dome. And they haven’t won the Big 10 since before I was born. But if they do, in my lifetime, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was due to the toughness and determination of their epileptic coach:

Immediately after Jerry Kill has a seizure on the sideline, one longtime assistant takes over the headset and communicates with officials. The defensive coordinator handles the postgame news conference and splits the remaining news media obligations with the offensive coordinator. Should Kill miss practice, they revert to their schedule from a week earlier, with adjustments based on their next opponent.

Always, Kill returns soon after to his office at the University of Minnesota. The assistants come to work and see him at his desk and nod and head to their own offices, not a word exchanged. 
Kill, 52, is a reconstruction specialist, an expert in taking over
feeble programs and turning them into something better. He is probably
also the only college football coach in the country who has a seizure
protocol. There is no three-ring binder or written list of step-by-step
instructions, only the calm and routine borne from years spent side by
side with his trusted assistants, as they climbed from the lower levels
of college football to the Big Ten. 
Three times in the last three seasons, Kill could not finish games
because of epileptic seizures. Each time, thousands witnessed him
splayed on the ground, as spasms shot through his limbs and his body
shook uncontrollably and some of his players cried.

Talk about the courage of being willing to get up again after being knocked down; this man epitomizes it. The life lesson he is teaching his players, however upsetting it is to them, is much more valuable than the Xs and Os.