Erratica Reduex

My Dad was a W.W.II veteran, and my mom still is, so I'm having a drink in their honor. By all rights I should by honoring my mom with a glass of Merlot or Chardonnay (ick!), and my dad with a glass of Jack Daniels bought on sale at Right Aid, with me driving him to the store when my mother wasn't around like a conspirator in a bank hold-up. But I think a Lemon Drop will suffice.

My Dad worked for the army air force, the details are hazy. Evidently he had a health defect that kept him from active duty, so he went to Lockheed Martin, and worked as an engineer for the bombers. He had a ceremonial piston valve from a B-12 Liberator, which is huge compared to the ones from a car. I used to pretend it was a spaceship when I was a kid and reading Heinlein novels. Later, he worked as a safety engineer for NASA during the moonshots, and the aircraft companies that were the hot, glamorous tech firms of the 50s and 60s. They remembered him; in the late 90s, he testified for the defense in a toxic waste dumping class action suit. He enjoyed the attention.

My mother was not a WAVE, she was a WAM. She says it stood for "Wide Ass Marine". She joined the Marines to get away from her schizophrenic mother, and ended up in the San Francisco Presidio, doing bureaucratic stuff. She would go dancing with the gay guys she knew, and evidently was quite popular. Later she became a teacher, and as a socialist with friends who had fought and died in the Lincoln Brigade, only avoided being blacklisted by resigning due to pregnancy. Later she became a principal, a member of the Thousand Oaks planning commission, and continued to defend the school system against interfering reactionaries with a subtlety that would impress an Akido master, and that I will never match. Later she opened one of the first centers in California for testing and teaching Learning Disabled children. She currently does a lot of weaving on her looms, and travels to shows.

My point, if I have one, is the memories I have of these veterans, neither of whom fired a bullet in anger, and who's lives continued long after their war, and in one case, is still continuing. And yet they did their duty in a time of crisis, and for that I salute them, and have a drink for them.

Mightygodking, previously known for his brilliant redubbing of the Marvel comics Civil War series and (NSFW) Ultimate Power, as well as the most dead-on snarky Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows review, has actually done some serious work.

For instance, he has written the Best Alternate Universe Beatles Story, EVER.

This isn't just fanfic. How good is it? Well, I got over my Beatles fan phase years ago, and still I wish this could have happened. Starting  from the real life event where Lorne Michaels offered the Beatles $30000 to appear on Saturday Night Live, real life event, we see a small change made, and then watch as the changes ripple out, and become larger and larger. And then at the end, we see the subtle twist that explains everything.

It's utterly brilliant. I recommend it highly.

Happy Birthday deirdremoon! My dear friend, may this coming year be a wonder for you.


Happy Birthday Spuntnik! Our first tentative step into space. Worth remembering as the dawn of a new age, and a new frontier.

Say...I don't suppose you've considered "Spuntnik" as a child's name, have you?

As part of a review of the Dante's Inferno video game Got Medieval has done a valuable service to those medievalists who think that  "video" might be a misspelling of a Latin insult: Got Medieval Explains what video games are.

Got Medieval follows it up with a review of Dante's Inferno the video game, which surprise surprise, takes some liberties with the text, while being "reasonably deferential to the core narrative of the poem".  Evidently video game designers have a different definition of "reasonable" than medievalists do.

Next, Medievalist answers the question we've all been asking for ages: "How authentic IS the video game Joust?": the answer will surprise you, or not, if you remember how whacky medieval iconography can be.  He then finishes with a brief look at Magna Carta, that game that's amazing in it's historical costume research.

As some people may guess, I love the irreverent attitude of Got Medieval.  I recommend that to anyone interested in medieval studies or intelligent humor check it out.

Here's an interesting tidbit: James Nicoll on his blog pointed out that Fun fact: Andre Norton's first novel is equidistant between us and the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. On mentioning that, a friend pointed out that the interesting thing is her novels are still readable, in a way that many writers from the 1950s and 60s aren't. There's a nuge number of SF novels that have aged very badly; either the novels are built on a scientific fact that's later proven wrong (Niven's "The Coldest Place") or posits a short-term future that hasn't worked out (Harrison's "Make Room!"), and a few, like Norton, Schmitz and the like that survive. So what are some of the characteristics of novels that last the ages?

Here's a couple thoughts:

1. Don't sweat the science: sad to say for a genre with "science" in its name, but if you build your novel around some neat new cutting edge scientific theory or technology, you have a really good chance of it being completely wrong. Norton's science is at the level of "and then they pushed a button; likewise is the space opera science of authors such as Schmitz and Farmer.

2. Make your background concepts universal, not contemporary: Norton deals a lot with backgrounds and character problems that have resonated throughout history: war refugees making a place for themselves, the fall of empires, exploration of new lands. Those writers who wrote about the Soviet-U.S. war continuing into the 21st century, or the massive overpopulation of the 1990s, turned out to not be such universal concepts.

I'm kind of developing a couple other rules, but this is what I have so far. Any thoughts?

I've been poking through the Universal Leonardo site, and have been impressed by how accessible its making Leonardo for the general public. As well as a decent amount of information, it's got some pretty interesting activities, like "Make a Monster", which distracted me for longer than I expected.

This is an excellent example of how the internet can be used for education,  something I have a more pressng interest in, now that I'm back in the education field..

I always wondered why classic historians focused so much on wars and the like. To my mind, social and technological shifts were at least as important, if not moreso. Then as part of a project, I got a partial list of the wars Europe has been involved in since the late 18th century:

American Revolution (1775-1783), French Revolution (1789-1792 or 1799), French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1797), Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), War of 1812 (1812-1815), Spanish Revolution (1820), Greek War of Independence (1821-1829), Russo-Turkish War (1828-1829), Polish-Russian war (1830-1831), First Schleswig War (1848-1851), First Italian Independence War (1848–1849), Second Italian Independence War (1859), Third Italian Independence War (1866), Crimean War (1853-1856), Second Schleswig War (1864), Serbo-Bulgarian War (1865), Austro-Prussian War (1866), Ten Years' War (1868-1878), Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878), Cuban War of Independence/War of 1895 (1895-1898), Spanish-American War (1898), Greco-Turkish War (1897), Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), Boer War (1899-1902), Italo-Turkish War (1911-1912), Balkan Wars (1912-1913), World War I (1914-1918), Russian Revolution (1917-1918), Finnish Civil War (1918), Polish–Ukrainian War (1918-1919), Estonian Liberation War (1918–1920), Czechoslovakia-Hungary War (1919-1920), Polish-Soviet War (1919-1921), Irish War of Independence (1922–1923), Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), World War II (1939-1945), Greek Civil War (1946-1949), Soviet invasion of Hungary (1956), Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (1968), Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988-1994), South Ossetia War (1991-1992), Georgian civil war (1991-1993), Croatian War of Independence (1991-1995), Abkhazia War (1992–1993), Bosnian War (1992-1995), First and Second Kosovo Wars (1996-1999), 2008 South Ossetia war.

Wow. I don't really wonder any more. I still think the social and technological developments are more important in the long run, but I can see why historians focus on t.he guns and swords part of history

Courtesy of the Onion:

San Francisco Historians Condemn 1906 Earthquake Deniers

I can seriously see those people holding conferences, right along side the evolution deniers, the young-earth creationists, the 9-11 conspiracy buffs, holocaust deniers, the vaccination opponents, the "HIV doesn't cause AIDS" nuts...and in the background the UFO freaks are going "Dudes, we were here a LONG time before you all!"

It's more than a little depressing, really.

It was in Wikipedia, therefore I KNOW it's true!

And here's some other amazing but true (because it's on Wikipedia) articles!

Remember kids, you can trust Wikipedia for all your research needs! 

When I visited the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit at the San Jose Tech Museum this last Sunday, one of the major things that stuck with me was how ingenious the Renaissance engineers were as a whole. They had a good practical grasp of physics, and put their knowledge of Euclidean mathematics to incredibly elegant and complex ends, as the designs for cathedrals, hoists, springs and other items in the exhibit hall show. They did not lack for intelligence and learning; they were not crippled by their culture. Indeed, I could see them performing great feats of mechanics, at our level of complexity, if not for two basic limitations.

The first limitation they had to deal with was materials. They were limited to various types of wood, rope, animal skins, and small amounts of wrought iron. As a result, the structures they made were heavy and bulky; consider this model of a crane by Leonardo's mentor Filippo Brunelleschi, to see both their ingenuity and material limitations:



The model points out another limitation that they faced: power. For power sources, they were limited to low-density sources like muscle (human and animal), wind, and water. Again they did highly ingenious things with what they had (as witness to aqueducts and proposals for siphons crossing mountains), but the power limitations combined with the heavy and bulky available materials to limit what they could accomplish. So no flying machines or submarines; many of their sketched out inventions that seem feasible to us, were toys or daydreams, because they lacked proper power sources, and the material scientists of the day were busy trying to turn lead into gold.


So, why does this post have an "Under the Green Moon" tag if it's about Renaissance inventors? Well, I've been trying to set the technological milieu of UTGM, and I'm thinking that for the most advanced Daemon states, the late Renaissance will work for the appearance of a lot of the engineering. This isn't so much a direct parallel, as a result of how I conceive a number of resources to be in short supply; specifically metals.

Since UTGM is set 30,0000 years in the future, nearly all the extractable resources will have been used millennia previously. And while most metals will still be around, many of them will be in a refined state that any low-tech civilization will have a hard time using. Consider how much difficult high-test steel is to smelt compared to pig iron- and now consider having to separate it from high-test concrete, or even higher-tech materials. And a lot of those metals will be in landfills or ruined cities where there's plenty of hazards for enterprising scavengers, ranging from pitfalls, to toxic materials.

So even before the current era, I see civilizations turning more toward natural substances; woods, fibers, ceramics, chitin. Unlike the Renaissance, I can imagine that with genetic engineering and eons of materials science, some of those materials could be very advanced; imagine wood as light as bamboo, yet as strong as steel.

The Daemons and other races have other advantages the Renaissance engineers don't have; they have magic. While the magic is far from all-powerful, and really resembles classic descriptions of psionics more than anything else, it can provide a fairly intense source of heat and motion.  While I don't see industrial level smelting, magic could power vehicles or the like.

All of which is saying that I can still have a more fantastical version of the Renaissance; I can have my zeppelins and other inventions that came about much later in history.