V is for van Vogt

Or more accurately, V is for Voyage of the Space Beagle.

I have never managed to get through much of anything else written by A. E. van Vogt, but Voyage of the Space Beagle is one of those books that changed my life.

It was one of the first science fiction books I read- along with Decision at Doona by Anne McAffrey- and so every standard sci-fi trope hit me as something new and fresh.

My copy seems to have crumbled away- at least, I can’t find it anywhere, and it was looking pretty shabby last time I saw it. It had a picture of the coeurl on the cover. What this means is that I won't be checking any of my facts in what follows. Or putting any quotes in.

One appealing thing about Voyage of the Space Beagle is that the direction of the narrative is quintessentially Clamly - outwards, outwards, ever outward, on, on, on, into the unexplored intergalactic vastness, onwards and outwards! I can think of few more fitting ends to a story than to an endless journey through empty space in order to lead a planet-killing black cloud to its doom in the void.

I mentioned before how Hugh Lofting’s Dr Dolittle provided one fine role-model for my professional life. Voyage of the Space Beagle provided two more: the smart-arse nexialist who makes it his business to know more than everybody else does in their particular specialty, and the empire-building chemist who takes over said nexialist’s lab space. I see my subsequent career* as an attempt to harmonise these two competing visions of the scientist.

I immediately went off and started writing a story with a similar spaceship on a similar expedition. As you do, I crewed it with all the people I knew. This was partly so I could kill off all the people I didn’t like in gruesome ways on alien planets. As you do.

I didn’t make myself the nexialist- I made my know-it-all friend Steven Mathiesen the nexialist. I gave myself a role that I made up, which I think I called ‘environmental engineer’. Or ‘ecosystem engineer’. Something like that. As these stories work out, I think we got halfway through our first planet before I moved on to another project.

Sometime around then I was hanging around school after school because my Mum, who was a volunteer teacher person, had to do some after school thing. I think I was boooooooored. I can’t remember. But I do remember my english teacher pointing to one of these seedpods and saying: ‘That looks like an alien creature. Why don’t you write about that?’

So I did. They are about twice as high a person (I think) and live in endless sand deserts, where they filter tiny things out of the sand to eat- sort of funneling them towards their maws with those long arms of theirs. They were intelligent. I think only one of them had ever been brought back to Earth, and it did not survive long because of our high gravity.

The only other thing I remember writing about them was a list of the emotions they could experience. Something like Type 2 Joy, Type 1a Despair, and an emotion with no common English name, characterised by parameters X = 2.3 and Y = 7.0 on the Pfitzer-Gloschburg scale. Something like that.

My English teacher was horrified. ‘You can’t do that,’ I remember her saying.

‘What?’

‘Here- this is all scientific, about what they eat and such, and then here you’re talking about emotions. You can’t talk about emotions scientifically like that.’

‘Why?’

I can’t remember exactly how the conversation went, but I’m sure we ended up staring at each other in mutual incomprehension.

*: Collins Essential English Dictionary: verb. to rush in an uncontrolled way.

The picture of the Devil's Claw seedpod is lifted from evil-nature.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html. I don't know anything about that website except it had this picture sitting there for me to nick, so can't recommend you go there.

U is for Unfinished Business

I would like to offer the following spoiler for The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.

The narrator loses consciousness on page 298.

At the close of the novel, on page 449, he is still unconscious.

I humbly tips me lid to this impressive display of authorial chutzpah.

Abulia Day

In 1986, I owned a 'One New Word a Day' desk calendar. May 27th was 'abulia: an abnormal lack of ability to act or make decisions.' I felt that my life had a lot of applications for this word, and tacked it up on the wall. I usually remember each May 27th.

Er... why?

I turned on the radio this morning and happened to hear some minister in Mahmoud Abbas' government talking about some reforms they were planning with the police- this is part of what he said:

'We support the private security industry and we believe as a government that you need both a strong public security system and a strong private security system.'

Nicholas Raqsani, I think his name was. Actually, I just made him up. Who I really heard was our health minister, and what she said was this:

'We support the private health insurance industry and we believe as a government that you need both a strong public health system and a strong private health system.'


But... is it really true that we need a private health insurance industry? This private health system is currently complaining that if legislation is changed so that the government no longer bullies people into buying their product, no one will buy it. I would be embarassed to be associated with a product that was as crummy as that. And in my rare lucid moments, I would ask myself, do people really need our product?

Crazy Ape Bonkers Physical Chemistry Metaphor Weekend, Day Two

in which Dr Clam gets out of a bind that has been worrying him dreadfully for a long time

Another thing I have been waiting on for a long time is an outline and defence of the orthodox Islamo-Christian doctrine of ‘Hell’. I had gone on at length in the very early days of the Accidental Blog about how, as I understood it, this was a pernicious doctrine that led logically to the conclusion that the human race should be exterminated. This was because of the introduction of an ‘infinite’ amount of suffering into any calculation of the consequences of our actions throws the whole thing out of whack. More generally, how can an ‘infinite’ amount of punishment be logically applied to a finite creature?

Infinity is the problem.So long as the sufferings of Hell can be understood in such a way as to be finite, there is no intrinsic reason why the existence of Hell cannot be reconciled with a perfectly just and merciful God. Like so:

Justice is served if the sum total of the punishment of the finite creature is exactly as much as it deserves.

Mercy is served in that the finite creature is given exactly what it most truly desires – separation from God – and is not punished one jot or tittle more than is just.

I have realised that the answer was there all the time in C. S. Lewis’s ‘The Great Divorce’. The denizens of the ‘suburbs of Hell’ in this book are finite creatures who are insubstantial phantoms. The appear to be evaporating away, fading, over the course of the story. Why can’t they do this forever? Shrink away, but never reach pure nothingness. If they do this, than their total suffering will be finite, although they are infinitely extended in time.

This will make more sense with an equation. Take this one, which I came across the other day while deriving the Equipartition Theorem:

The area under this function, from x = 0 to infinity, is not infinite, just π^1/2/4. So we can get any finite amount of suffering that is necessary out of the infinitely-prolonged existence of a finite creature.

So we have not really introduced infinities into the moral equation.

And it does not logically follow that a belief in Hell implies the human race should be destroyed.

Which is good.

Crazy Ape Bonkers Physical Chemistry Metaphor Weekend, Day One

I have been hanging out for a lucid counter-narrative to my narrative for the Iraq War(s) for some time now. As you may recall, my problem is not there aren’t any reasonably consistent counter-narratives, it’s just that none I can think of can possibly be the informing counter-narrative of the omnipresent anti-war establishment I see around me.

Here are the counter-narratives I have thought of:

1. The Ground is the Image. This is just how my narrative appears if you think human rights are bollocks and you might be next on the regime-change to-do list. As my long-long-ago post about Darfur suggests, this to-do list logically expands to encompass Russia and the RMP, so it is not surprising that they would not be onside. This worldview will also to a very large extend determine the position of the United Nations, as the higher ideals many nations may want to express through that body will tend to be dragged down to the level of the unrepresentative swill. I have no sympathy with this counter-narrative, as might be expected.

2. They’re hopeless. Hopeless! GWB et al are so incompetent that there is no chance that their Napoleonic project will come off. As a pragmatist, I can see the sense in this counter-narrative. But as outlined in the Hillel Halkin piece that I circulated to kick off our ‘warblogging by email’ so many years ago, this logically suggests that once the war is underway, anyone who shares the view that human rights are not bollocks should chip in and help. And anyone in the United States who does not want to see their country take a serious hit to their prestige and influence ought to chip in and help. It could be argued that the war would still fail, even with our help; or as Andrew did in 2003, that if we make it too easy, GWB et al will just try it again. But once it becomes evident that the project will probably come off, but with a great deal of difficulty, these arguments no longer apply. I think this is basically the counter-narrative of McCain. This narrative also applies much more to Afghanistan than to Iraq. Iraq is flat, urbanised, educated, close to allied states, strategically important, and has a track record of being successfully conquered. Afghanistan is not any of these things.

3. The US is the Great Satan. If you are Noam Chomsky or John Pilger, you believe in human rights and the rule of law (I think) but you see the world through a lens that magnifies all the transgressions of the United States and makes it *the* great evil in the world. You can select your data, I think, so that you could honestly hold this view. But if you are one of these people, you will have no strong feelings on whether Obama or McCain should be president. You know what Kennedy and Johnson got up to. You wrote articles saying that Clinton was a Nazi when he was president. You protested against the war on Serbia, and you know that a Democratic victory is still a victory for the Military-Industrial complex. As a contrarian, I have some admiration for those who cleave honestly to this narrative. Opposing someone who is stronger than you and could crush you like a bug *because* they are stronger than you and could crush you like a bug is stirring and noble and appeals to the small fraction of Irishness in my blood.

4. My Kingdom is Not of this World. The transcendent moral law prohibits war. There is a greater spiritual universe compared to which this mortal world is an insignificant mote, and the disfiguring effect of war on just one soul outweighs any temporal benefit. It is better to be butchered with a clear conscience than to take up arms. To hold this position, you need to believe in moral absolutes, like Tolstoy or Gandhi or Pope Benedict. And if you do, you will have protested just as loudly when the war machine rolled out over Serbia and Afghanistan. As an idealist, I admire this narrative. This is the narrative that sometimes gives me pause.

But my problem remains. These counter-narratives are not the counter-narratives of the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald or of Nancy Pelosi. I believe that the apparent consensus view of educated people in the West is not a coherent counter-narrative to my narrative at all, but a muddled superposition of all these counter-narratives. Like a molecular orbital can be represented as a linear combination of orthogonal atomic orbitals, this counter-narrative is a linear combination of orthogonal counter-narratives. It does not form a consistent structure that can be described by classical narrative theory, but is a decoherent quantum superposition of narratives.

Of course, the text on that T-shirt needs to be horizontal, Marco, in order to sneak past security. Handera, my one-time dwarven rogue from World of Warcraft, will demonstrate:

20/20 Summit

It's good to see that the government is taking the problem seriously.

I just hope they follow the talk with some action.

There can be only one

And, just to give the impression of evenhandedness:

Okay, okay, so I too am easily seduced by pretty speeches...

But I feel very pleased with our Prime Minister's performance on his world tour. Lu Kewen is doing a fine job.

Cry Havoc

Most countries in our peer group got rid of private armies a long time ago. Instead, the government decides how many soldiers the country needs. It decides how much they are going to be paid. It decides where they should be stationed, and how many, and sends them there. This seems to work.

We also have a government-run system for internal security. The government decides how many police we need, how much to pay them, and where to put them. This also seems to work.

In our country, we have a system of public schools which is run along similar lines. The government decides where we should put schools, decides how much the people who work in them should be paid, and distributes teachers to schools where they are needed. This seems to work reasonably well. It would work better if the government were not simultaneously supporting a parallel private sector system with a massive system of inequitable subsidies. But still, you never read about the schools in Wilcannia, for instance, going under because they can’t find teachers.

So what is the problem with rural doctors? If we are going to have medicine controlled by the public sector, then let’s have medicine controlled by the public sector. We shouldn’t have to put up with a private army of health care mercenaries when we could have a professional service. Why can’t the government just decide how many doctors the country needs? Decide how much they are going to be paid? Decide where to put them? And send them there? Why wouldn’t this work? Sure, there might be some leakage to the private sector, just as there is with schools, but I don’t see why this should be a big problem. Public sector GPs could have rostered days off. They could work reasonable hours. They wouldn’t have to worry about paying enormous insurance bills. I’ve heard the argument that doctors would all go overseas if we tried this, but that would only prove we were training the wrong people to be doctors. People motivated solely by greed, with no true calling to public service. After all, our army isn’t haemorrhaging people going overseas to join private armies. Our police force isn’t decamping en masse to serve in Sweden. Even our public school teachers seem to be staying in the country, by and large.

You'd think this would be the right time, with a 70+% approval rating and a bulging surplus, for a Labor prime minister to take on the AMA. Time to start putting together a professional public health service as world-class as our professional public armed services. I will keep myself in readiness to read all about it in the papers!