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Sunday, February 26, 2017
Hope: A prophetic novel of an outsider president and the deep state
- Zelman, Aaron and L. Neil Smith. Hope. Rockville, MD: Phoenix Pick, [2001] 2008. ISBN 978-1-60450-293-0.
- I post reviews of every book I read here, but this post is about a novel I read fifteen years ago, Hope, by Aaron Zelman and L. Neil Smith, which, although I considered it a thriller bordering on fantasy when I read it in 2002, I now consider prophetic and highly relevant to events now playing out in the United States. Alexander Hope, a wealthy businessman with no political experience, motivated by what he perceives as the inexorable decline of the U.S. into a land where individual liberty and initiative are smothered by an inexorably growing state, manages, defying all of the pundits and politicians, through a series of highly improbable events, to end up elected president of the U.S., riding a popular wave of enthusiasm he generates in large rallies where he tells crowds things they've never heard before from the lips of politicians of the Locust and Quisling branches of the unified party of the ruling class, or from their mellifluous mouthpieces in the mainstream media. Crowds find themselves saying, “Wait—that makes sense!”, and the day after the election finds America with a president unlike any in its history. Hope arrives in Washington with no political allies: members of both purported parties see him as an interloper and potential destroyer of their comfortable and lucrative racket. The minions of the bureaucracy and the “Beltway bandits” who feed at the federal trough are in a state of abject panic: here is a president who understands that about 95% of what they're being paid for is not among the enumerated powers of the federal government. Never before has there been such a threat to the welfare/warfare/surveillance/nanny/spy empire, and this “deep state” reacts and begins to draw its plans against this elected interloper. President Hope owes nothing to anybody except the voters who elected him. He has no constituency in Congress, and is unbeholden to lobbyists and donors. The legacy media, joined at the hip to the slavers, is unanimously aligned against him and his agenda. Hope has no alternative but to push government by Executive Order to the limit, finding that his predecessors have created ample precedents he can now exploit to dismantle or at least obstruct the administrative state. He continues, as he did in the campaign, to go over the heads of the media and communicate directly to the electorate, unfiltered. This is a dangerous course, and before long the deep state begins to respond with acts, both overt and covert, to deal with the imminent threat. Does any of this sound familiar? As I noted, when I read this I thought it fantasy; now it seems like we're living it. If you like political thrillers, you may enjoy what has now become almost a guide to current events. I shall certainly be re-reading it in the months to come.
Posted at
01:52
Monday, February 20, 2017
Transit of Venus: 2004 Updated
The Web pages for the 2004 Transit of Venus have been updated to HTML5 with improved typography, embedded animations, and stale external links fixed. All pages and CSS style sheets have been validated for correctness.Posted at
23:31
Sunday, February 19, 2017
Les Quatre Saisons Updated
I have just posted an updated version of Les Quatre Saisons, a one-year time lapse video of construction in a field adjacent to Fourmilab in 2005–2006. The new version includes embedded video using the HTML5 video facility. This provides higher resolution than the embedded YouTube video used previously. Some broken links to the tools used to produce the movie have been fixed. The YouTube version of the video and links for users who wish to download the movie in a variety of formats continue to be available.Posted at
15:22
Monday, February 13, 2017
Pitch Drop
Pitch Drop describes the longest continuously-running scientific experiment, which demonstrates how even the most viscous fluids will eventually flow as the liquids they are. Do it yourself instructions are included for the very patient.Posted at
00:38
Sunday, February 12, 2017
Reading List: Pale Blue
- Jenne, Mike. Pale Blue. New York: Yucca Publishing, 2016. ISBN 978-1-63158-084-0.
-
This is the final novel in the trilogy which began with
Blue Gemini (April 2016)
and continued in
Blue Darker than Black (August 2016).
After the harrowing rescue mission which concluded the
second book, Drew Carson and Scott Ourecky, astronauts of the
U.S. Air Force's covert Blue Gemini project, a manned satellite
interceptor based upon NASA's Project Gemini spacecraft,
hope for a long stand-down before what is slated to be the
final mission in the project, whose future is uncertain due
to funding issues, inter-service rivalry, the damage to its
Pacific island launch site due to a recent tropical storm, and
the upcoming 1972 presidential election.
Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, progress continues on the
Krepost project: a manned space
station equipped for surveillance and armed with a nuclear
warhead which can be de-orbited and dropped on any target
along the station's ground track. General Rustam Abdirov, a
survivor of the
Nedelin
disaster in 1960, is pushing the project to completion
through his deputy, Gregor Yohzin, and believes it may hold the
key to breaking what Abdirov sees as the stalemate of the
Cold War. Yohzin is increasingly worried about Abdirov's
stability and the risks posed by the project, and has been
covertly passing information to U.S. intelligence.
As information from Yohzin's espionage reaches Blue Gemini
headquarters, Carson and Ourecky are summoned back and plans
drawn up to intercept the orbital station before a crew can be
launched to it, after which destroying it would not only be
hazardous, but could provoke a superpower confrontation.
On the Soviet side, nothing is proceeding as planned, and
the interception mission must twist and turn based upon limited
and shifting information.
About half way through the book, and after some big surprises,
the Krepost crisis is resolved. The reader might be
inclined, then, to wonder “what next?” What follows
is a war story, set in the final days of the Vietnam conflict,
and for quite a while it seems incongruous and unrelated to all
that has gone before. I have remarked in reviews of the earlier
books of the trilogy that the author is keeping a large number
of characters and sub-plots in the air, and wondered whether and how
he was going to bring it all together. Well, in the last five chapters
he does it, magnificently, and ties everything up with a bow on the
top, ending what has been a rewarding thriller in a moving, human
conclusion.
There are a few goofs. Launch windows to
inclined Earth orbits occur every day; in case of a launch delay,
there is no need for a long wait before the next launch attempt (chapter 4).
Attempting to solve a difficult problem, “the variables refused
to remain constant”—that's why they're called
variables (chapter 10)!
Beaujolais is red, not white, wine (chapter 16).
A character claims to have seen a hundred
stars in the Pleiades from space with the unaided eye. This is
impossible: while the cluster contains around 1000 stars, only
14 are bright enough to be seen with the best human vision under
the darkest skies. Observing from space is slightly better than
from the Earth's surface, but in this case the observer would have
been looking through a spacecraft window, which would attenuate
light more than the Earth's atmosphere (chapter 25). MIT's Draper Laboratory
did not design the Gemini on-board computer; it was developed
by the IBM Federal Systems Division (chapter 26).
The trilogy is a big, sprawling techno-thriller with interesting and
complicated characters and includes space flight, derring do in remote
and dangerous places, military and political intrigue in both the U.S.
and Soviet Union, espionage, and a look at how the stresses of
military life and participation in black programs make the lives of
those involved in them difficult. Although the space program which
is the centrepiece of the story is fictional, the attention to detail
is exacting: had it existed, this is probably how it would have been
done. I have one big quibble with a central part of the premise, which
I will discuss behind the curtain.
This trilogy is one long story which spans three books. The second and third novels begin with brief summaries of prior events, but these are intended mostly for readers who have forgotten where the previous volume left off. If you don't read the three books in order, you'll miss a great deal of the character and plot development which makes the entire story so rewarding. More than 1600 pages may seem a large investment in a fictional account of a Cold War space program that never happened, but the technical authenticity; realistic portrayal of military aerospace projects and the interaction of pilots, managers, engineers, and politicians; and complicated and memorable characters made it more than worthwhile to this reader.Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.The rationale for the Blue Gemini program which caused it to be funded is largely as a defence against a feared Soviet “orbital bombardment system”: one or more satellites which, placed in orbits which regularly overfly the U.S. and allies, could be commanded to deorbit and deliver nuclear warheads to any location below. It is the development of such a weapon, its deployment, and a mission to respond to the threat which form the core of the plot of this novel. But an orbital bombardment system isn't a very useful weapon, and doesn't make much sense, especially in the context of the late 1960s to early '70s in which this story is set. The Krepost of the novel was armed with a single high-yield weapon, and operated in a low Earth orbit at an inclination of 51°. The weapon was equipped with only a retrorocket and heat shield, and would have little cross-range (ability to hit targets lateral to its orbital path). This would mean that in order to hit a specific target, the orbital station would have to wait up to a day for the Earth to rotate so the target was aligned with the station's orbital plane. And this would allow bombardment of only a single target with one warhead. Keeping the station ready for use would require a constant series of crew ferry and freighter launches, all to maintain just one bomb on alert. By comparison, by 1972, the Soviet Union had on the order of a thousand warheads mounted on ICBMs, which required no space launch logistics to maintain, and could reach targets anywhere within half an hour of the launch order being given. Finally, a space station in low Earth orbit is pretty much a sitting duck for countermeasures. It is easy to track from the ground, and has limited maneuvering capability. Even guns in space do not much mitigate the threat from a variety of anti-satellite weapons, including Blue Gemini. While the drawbacks of orbital deployment of nuclear weapons caused the U.S. and Soviet Union to eschew them in favour of more economical and secure platforms such as silo-based missiles and ballistic missile submarines, their appearance here does not make this “what if?” thriller any less effective or thrilling. This was the peak of the Cold War, and both adversaries explored many ideas which, in retrospect, appear to have made little sense. A hypothetical Soviet nuclear-armed orbital battle station is no less crazy than Project Pluto in the U.S.Spoilers end here.
Posted at
00:03
Saturday, February 11, 2017
Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-vingts Jours: Web Edition Updated
The Web edition of Jules Verne's 1873 novel Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-vingts Jours was originally posted at Fourmilab in December of 1996. An updated version, with improved typography and confirming to the XHTML 1.0 and CSS 3 standards, has just been posted. All illustrations have been remade from the original scans into greyscale PNG images, adjusted for contrast. All documents have been checked with the W3C Validator.Posted at
15:01
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
De la Terre à la Lune: Web Edition Updated
In April 1996 I posted a French language, completely illustrated edition of Jules Verne's De la Terre à la Lune. This 1865 novel, about a voyage to the Moon conducted by a group of members of a gun club by means of 900 foot cannon, was one of the first works of science fiction in the modern sense. I have just posted an updated edition, using modern Web standards (XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 3), with improved typography and formatting. All of the text and illustrations are unchanged. All documents and style sheets have been validated for standards compliance by the W3C Validator.Posted at
20:52
Sunday, February 5, 2017
Reading List: Hector Servadac
- Verne, Jules. Hector Servadac. Seattle: CreateSpace, [1877] 2014. ISBN 978-1-5058-3124-5.
- Over the years, I have been reading my way through the classic science fiction novels of Jules Verne, and I have prepared public domain texts of three of them which are available on my site and Project Gutenberg. Verne not only essentially invented the modern literary genre of science fiction, he was an extraordinary prolific author, publishing sixty-two novels in his Voyages extraordinaires between 1863 and 1905. What prompted me to pick up the present work was an interview I read in December 2016, in which Freeman Dyson recalled that it was reading this book at around the age of eight which, more than anything, set him on a course to become a mathematician and physicist. He notes that he originally didn't know it was fiction, and was disappointed to discover the events recounted hadn't actually happened. Well, that's about as good a recommendation as you can get, so I decided to put Hector Servadac on the list. On the night of December 31–January 1, Hector Servadac, a captain in the French garrison at Mostaganem in Algeria, found it difficult to sleep, since in the morning he was to fight a duel with Wassili Timascheff, his rival for the affections of a young woman. During the night, the captain and his faithful orderly Laurent Ben-Zouf, perceived an enormous shock, and regained consciousness amid the ruins of their hut, and found themselves in a profoundly changed world. Thus begins a scientific detective story much different than many of Verne's other novels. We have the resourceful and intrepid Captain Servadac and his humorous side-kick Ben-Zouf, to be sure, but instead of them undertaking a perilous voyage of exploration, instead they are taken on a voyage, by forces unknown, and must discover what has happened and explain the odd phenomena they are experiencing. And those phenomena are curious, indeed: the Sun rises in the west and sets in the east, and the day is now only twelve hours long; their weight, and that of all objects, has been dramatically reduced, and they can now easily bound high into the air; the air itself seems to have become as thin as on high mountain peaks; the Moon has vanished from the sky; the pole has shifted and there is a new north star; and their latitude now seems to be near the equator. Exploring their environs only adds mysteries to the ever-growing list. They now seem to inhabit an island of which they are the only residents: the rest of Algeria has vanished. Eventually they make contact with Count Timascheff, whose yacht was standing offshore and, setting aside their dispute (the duel deferred in light of greater things is a theme you'll find elsewhere in the works of Verne), they seek to explore the curiously altered world they now inhabit. Eventually, they discover its inhabitants seem to number only thirty-six: themselves, the Russian crew of Timascheff's yacht; some Spanish workers; a young Italian girl and Spanish boy; Isac Hakhabut, a German Jewish itinerant trader whose ship full of merchandise survived the cataclysm; the remainder of the British garrison at Gibraltar, which has been cut off and reduced to a small island; and Palmyrin Rosette, formerly Servadac's teacher (and each other's nemeses), an eccentric and irritable astronomer. They set out on a voyage of exploration and begin to grasp what has happened and what they must do to survive. In 1865, Verne took us De la terre à la lune. Twelve years later, he treats us to a tour of the solar system, from the orbit of Venus to that of Jupiter, with abundant details of what was known about our planetary neighbourhood in his era. As usual, his research is nearly impeccable, although the orbital mechanics are fantasy and must be attributed to literary license: a body with an orbit which crosses those of Venus and Jupiter cannot have an orbital period of two years: it will be around five years, but that wouldn't work with the story. Verne has his usual fun with the national characteristics of those we encounter. Modern readers may find the descriptions of the miserly Jew Hakhabut and the happy but indolent Spaniards offensive—so be it—such is nineteenth century literature. This is a grand adventure: funny, enlightening, and engaging the reader in puzzling out mysteries of physics, astronomy, geology, chemistry, and, if you're like this reader, checking the author's math (which, orbital mechanics aside, is more or less right, although he doesn't make the job easy by using a multitude of different units). It's completely improbable, of course—you don't go to Jules Verne for that: he's the fellow who shot people to the Moon with a nine hundred foot cannon—but just as readers of modern science fiction are willing to accept faster than light drives to make the story work, a little suspension of disbelief here will yield a lot of entertainment. Jules Verne is the second most translated of modern authors (Agatha Christie is the first) and the most translated of those writing in French. Regrettably, Verne, and his reputation, have suffered from poor translation. He is a virtuoso of the French language, using his large vocabulary to layer meanings and subtexts beneath the surface, and many translators fail to preserve these subtleties. There have been several English translations of this novel under different titles (which I shall decline to state, as they are spoilers for the first half of the book), none of which are deemed worthy of the original. I read the Kindle edition from Arvensa, which is absolutely superb. You don't usually expect much when you buy a Kindle version of a public domain work for US$ 0.99, but in this case you'll receive a thoroughly professional edition free of typographical errors which includes all of the original illustrations from the original 1877 Hetzel edition. In addition there is a comprehensive biography of Jules Verne and an account of his life and work published at the height of his career. Further, the Kindle French dictionary, a free download, is absolutely superb when coping with Verne's enormous vocabulary. Verne is very fond of obscure terms, and whether discussing nautical terminology, geology, astronomy, or any other specialties, peppers his prose with jargon which used to send me off to flip through the Little Bob. Now it's just a matter of highlighting the word (in the iPad Kindle app), and up pops the definition from the amazingly comprehensive dictionary. (This is a French-French dictionary; if you need a dictionary which provides English translations, you'll need to install such an application.) These Arvensa Kindle editions are absolutely the best way to enjoy Jules Verne and other classic French authors, and I will definitely seek out others to read in the future. You can obtain the complete works of Jules Verne, 160 titles, with 5400 illustrations, for US$ 2.51 at this writing.
Posted at
00:24
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
Fourmilab Adds IPv6 Access
No, you're not dreaming—starting today, you can access Fourmilab over the IPv6 Internet protocol as well as the legacy IPv4 protocol. IPv6 remedies the address space exhaustion problems of IPv4 by moving to a 128 bit address space which should alleviate the crisis at least until every elementary particle in the universe requires its own Internet address or the network is extended into the multiverse. An IPv6 address is written as groups of hexadecimal digits separated by colons. Fourmilab's IPv6 address is thus “2a05:d014:d43:3101:c6ee:ea42:3836:6cbf”. If you're a glutton for punishment, you can type in this address, for example in a URL:Posted at
02:14