The Warmth Stealers

Posted on 16 September 2017 by Larry Russwurm

You might find it oddly satisfying when you get a cat to sit on your lap and it starts purring. Ostensibly you think it is because the cat trusts you and loves to get full body massages. But that is only 2/3 of the story. They are also there to steal your warmth.

You will find that cats prefer your lap much more often in the winter, spring and fall than summer. That is what clued me in on the warmth stealing. They also like to steal the heat from baseboard heaters and even warm lights if they can get close enough (this one is likely to come to an end as more people invest in LED lights and other lighting that produces little heat). But a light has to be on and baseboard heating goes off and on, too, so they still like the lap.

Or the bottom of the lap. Ever notice that when you get up in the cooler months from an insulated couch that a cat has stolen your spot? They are just sopping up the warmth that you left unguarded. So you can either force the cat to move or entice the cat to move. That is if you still want the spot the cat has stolen. This is usually true of a favoured viewpoint to watch the television.

So I present a way to entice your cat out of a favoured location. This method hopefully avoids a confrontation with our cat overlords.

First of all decide on a spot that your cat can curl up in. It must be insulated and comfortable like the spot that you just had stolen from you.

Secondly, sit in the spot for 5 or 10 minutes. It helps if the spot also has a half decent view of the television or is elsewise good enough for the 5 to 10 minutes you will be in it.

Thirdly, you must remove yourself from the spot you don’t want. Warning: this isn’t a very good plan in a 2 cat household. In that eventuality, the second cat is likely to grab this second warm spot. Which means you must soldier on to spot number three and waste another 5 or 10 minutes.

Fourthly, the hope is that your cat moves itself to the new warm spot. Also, if your cat feels too lazy to move this plan can backfire because of that, too.

Finally, you can sit in the favoured spot or you can call your cat a lazy no good bum.

And that is the plan. Use it wisely, grasshoppers.

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If a Critic Critiqued Science Papers as a Whole

Posted on 9 September 2017 by Larry Russwurm

My suspension of disbelief is thrown off almost immediately with these science papers. They exist in such exotic locales. For example these tall tales exist in: 1)Volcano caves buried under miles of ice on Antarctica, 2) Old mines, many miles under the Earth’s surface, 3) A 27 kilometer ring that collides particles together at near light speed, 4) an observatory on top of the tallest mountain in the world 5) almost any close space locale, 6) the darkest parts of the rain forest, or any other unlikely settings.

These settings stretch our imaginations too much when readers should only be expected to know the ins and outs of the city of New York and their own town or city. And the only reason New York is allowed is because all the publishers have offices in that city.

One thing that is charming about these science papers is the use of the first person ‘I’ or the first group ‘we’. This method of story telling usually has me so engrossed that I get into the story right away. Like the series The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny it sucks most people in.

The use of the first person to draw you in is more than countered by the motivation of the I or we character(s). There seems to be a care for such minutiae that it pulls me right out of the story again.

Then there are the info dumps. One info dump follows the other to the end of these papers. The info dump is so severe it’s almost as if the reader needed to know everything so they could replicate it in some exotic locale much like the writers of these papers used.

Where is the build to the climax? The conclusion is just reported on. Has no one told these scientists that all good writing follows the simple rule, “show don’t tell”. Well they all break this rule again and again. I can’t blame them, though. The writing is about such esoteric things that even with telling I find I didn’t understand most of what has been said.

So I must leave these papers with a rating of one half a star out of five. “Nyeah!” I say to the people who put me onto this critique, expecting me to give a rating of zero stars. But I have always been a sucker for first person. It’s just too bad they didn’t have an unreliable narrator, because this review would have been a one star out of five.

And I have been told that with unreliable narrators science wouldn’t progress.

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The Web that Spiderman Weaves

Posted on 2 September 2017 by Larry Russwurm

Marvel comics swears that Spiderman’s webs dissolve which is why there are not crews to clean up Spiderman’s webslingings all over the city. But that is a simple answer for what I fear is a more complex problem.

Let’s examine the properties of his spider silk. It needs to be strong so as to support Spiderman’s acrobatic weight. Secondly it must be very sticky so that one end can easily latch onto a building’s concrete, glass or cladding and still support Spiderman’s weight.

As well, criminals are not stupid. If one found that carrying a knife could cut them out of Spiderman’s webbing, they would also carry this simple tool to get themselves unwebbed.

And the silk must not dissolve for a webbed bag of criminals destined for the police and courtesy of your friendly neighbourhood Spiderman. At least not until the police want to release said criminals to get in their squad cars and be sent to jail.

Let’s say on average, a security guard patrols every 4 hours an area where Spiderman might leave his bag o’ criminals. Then the security guard must phone the police and wait for them to arrive.

Then, between the checking of the security cameras to find what happened and the police arriving much later (there is no rush because the criminals are just hanging there waiting to be released), I imagine Spiderman’s webbing must last at least eight hours before dissolving.

Which means that those long strings of silk that Spiderman swings on are just left for the morning high traffic times. And every swing by Spiderman is another 100 foot length of silk just waiting to cause problems.

Car wheels are going to go over the webbing and it will stick more to the wheel than the building because a larger surface area of the sticky stuff is caught by the wheel than holds it onto the building. As the wheel turns the webbing could get stuck on the axle forcing the axle off the car and ruining it. This will cause accidents with other cars.

Toddlers are early risers. What if one of them is taken outside? The first thing the toddler will do on encountering the web is put it in its mouth. The toddler’s mouth will be shut tight and it will be unable to eat for another 8 hours.

Bigger kids would likely try to imitate Spiderman by swinging on the leftover silk strands. All this will accomplish is to have the kid ram into the building the spider silk is attached to and be stuck there beside the building unable to remove their hands from the silk.

A street cleaner will be no help as its bristles will get stuck after a few revolutions, either breaking the machine or making it wait another 8 hours to become useful again.

The wind might blow the spider silk into a large building’s entrance where it sticks over the door. If the door opens inwards people might think they can still get through. But if they over estimate how much room they have to get through, their hair might be stuck for a full working day to that spider silk. Now a scissors is unlikely to work on the spider silk but they can cut off some of their own hair to gain their freedom. Spiderman’s city is a city with adults that look like they let their children cut their hair.

All these problems and more are likely to occur after a Spiderman patrol. Do yourself a favour and don’t welcome Spiderman to your city.

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Television Dreams

Posted on 19 August 2017 by Larry Russwurm

I grew up outside of Elmira, Ontario an area known for its old order mennonites. Old order mennonites are much like the Amish and reject 20th and 21st century technology. They get around by horse and buggy, have no electricity in their homes, and their churches are called meeting houses.

I went to school with some of them. The males leave school at 12 years old when they are considered to be of prime working age to work on the farm. Most of the females leave at the end of grade 8.

As non old order mennonites, we laughed at this rejection of technology and culture. If I were a boy, I would always have worn dark trousers with suspenders and a white shirt with a dark jacket and possibly a straw hat. All the girls wore flower print dresses and had their hair down in two braids, one for each side of their head.

But our culture was different. We could do anything we wanted with technology the height of which seemed to be television and the telephone. Sure there were things like answering machines but only Jim Rockford had one of those. And at the end of the seventies, video arcades were just starting. But television ruled supreme as the dominating technology that whiled away more hours than anything else.

So we laughed at the mennonites who didn’t have this window on the world and were stuck with only toys and games from the 1800s.

Television showed us many things but a lot of shows passed by us almost unknown. There had to be a hook that got to us somehow. Stalwarts like Happy Days and Little House on the Prairie entranced us. Who wouldn’t want to be the Fonz, able to fix anything with the proper hit of the jukebox or motorcycle.

And we loved following the adventures of Laura Ingalls in her twin braids hung down with her flower print dresses. People from that time used to get around by horse and buggy and that too was a draw. She must have lived in a finer time because she had adventures every week.

It was fascinating watching these kids who would use only toys and games from the 1800s. Despite all our technology, we couldn’t help but dreaming about colonizing the American prairies.

How could we explain this all to our friends, the old order mennonites? Having never watched Little House on the Prairie or any television for that matter, how could they understand? I imagine that the suspension of disbelief for this show might have been too much for them.

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Title Mining is Strong in Imagine Dragons

Posted on 13 August 2017 by Larry Russwurm

For their first album I wrote a post to show how every Imagine Dragons song on their first album had a title that had been used earlier. As a control, I compared it with a Kate Bush CD which also had 12 songs. She only had 2 unoriginal titles.

Well for their 2nd album Imagine Dragons’ first release had an original title: “I Bet My Life.” It was followed up by the singles “Shots” and “Gold” which at first glance from me were original titles till I looked further down the list of Duck Duck Go matches.

These singles on Smoke + Mirrors were no where near as popular as the songs on Night Vision according to Vevo counts on Youtube. I think Imagine Dragons lost a large proportion of the pro title mining crowd. Scared of the unfamiliar titles, fans either didn’t buy or didn’t get the word out to the rest of the public. Some are quick to say “Sophomore jinx” but I think Imagine Dragon fans just love title mining.

Their latest album “Evolve” had a first single called “Believer”. Why just a couple years ago American Authors released a single with the same name. So it is obvious to everyone that the title was mined. Currently it has two and a half times the number of hits on Youtube as the most successful song on their second album.

And I found no less than three other songs on the album that have been large hits before. Rise Up was a big hit for Parachute Club in the eighties, Dancing in the Dark is a Bruce Springsteen classic and Yesterday was one of many big hits by the Beatles.

Sure there are 3 tracks on the 11 track album whose titles might be unique: Mouth of the River, Thunder, and Walking the Wire. It’s just that Thunder and Walking the Wire have many similar titles making them seem unoriginal, too. Maybe Imagine Dragons don’t want to alienate fans of their sophomore album with its more original titles. Still, the vast majority of songs used title mining. So I bet they are going to stick with that. Really, its like cutting off Sampson’s hair.

But I have a challenge for Imagine Dragons. Artists gave up a long time ago on having totally original song titles. But there seems to be less freedom for the artist in coming up with album titles. In fact, I can’t name any two albums that have the same name.

I dare Imagine Dragons to do this. Perhaps it will be an easy thing. They could use an unoriginal title of one of their songs for their album’s name. That way they could be doubly title mining for both the album and song. If they do this, I bet they will become the premier rock band of our time.

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In Search of Justin Trudeau’s Middle Class

Posted on 5 August 2017 by Larry Russwurm

It’s a question I had often wondered about but never found by my own thoughts. So I started to ask it out loud.

First of all I know that I am not a part of Justin Trudeau’s middle class. I’ve watched his announcements and pronouncements and he often says he is helping the middle class. But he has never helped me so I simply cannot be part of his middle class.

So I’ve begun asking people, “Are you a part of Justin Trudeau’s middle class?” Most are perplexed by the question and answer “I don’t know.” So I go further and ask, “Has Justin Trudeau ever given you a helping hand?” Most times I get the answer, “What? A politician help me? Ha ha ha!”

So I continued my quest and question. I’ve also gotten the assertion that, “Of course I’m part of the middle class!” But then I ask if Justin Trudeau has ever helped them and most say, “No, no, I only help myself. I’d starve to death if I’d have to rely on politicians.”

But the odd person is insistent. “Yes I am a part of the middle class. So I must be part of Justin Trudeau’s middle class, too.”

“But has Justin Trudeau ever helped you? That’s the definition of Justin Trudeau’s middle class.”

“I don’t know, but he must have, then.” Most have clenched teeth at this point.

The quest to find Justin Trudeau’s middle class would have continued for I don’t know how long, until I had a brainstorm. I checked the provinces’ Sunshine lists of those civil servants making over $100 000 per year. I started trying to contact these people. I contacted a few. Half didn’t know but the other half said “Yes, I believe I am part of Justin Trudeau’s middle class for I have received some minor help from him.”

The trend was more obvious when I matched salaries to those in the know. Justin had helped the richer ones on the list.

It was as obvious as my middle finger on my hand. “Middle” is a vague word. To qualify, the middle class could easily be defined as having a salary somewhere between $200 000 per year to $49 151 064 per year or less than E. Hunter Harrison makes courtesy of Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. E. Hunter Harrison could be the lone salaried employee in the upper class.

To confirm, I checked Justin Trudeau’s policy and followed some of the governmental moneys spent. So I am now convinced that Justin’s middle class is exactly as stated above. My only problem with this is how could he exclude E. Hunter Harrison from all this largesse without inviting him to scream “Discrimination!”? Then I had it. Justin never said he wasn’t helping the upper class, too.

So now I think I have found Justin Trudeau’s middle class. Neoliberalism calls for neodefinitions.

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The 6 Basic Characters and the 5 Basic Settings

Posted on 30 July 2017 by Larry Russwurm

If you have delved into writing for any large degree you must have come across the idea (or the book) that there are seven basic plots. Now I am not going to tell you what these seven are (some have even said there are only two – tragedy and comedy), but I will tell you that this angers me. I mean when you over generalize to make something very complex very simple, it strikes me that much meaning is lost.

But I am not going to argue that there are more than seven plots. Instead I am going to argue that there are only a limited amount of characters and settings, the two other big areas in writing, to bring out your ire just as the seven plots brings out mine.

I would also like to say that I do this because many writers “specialize” in character because they think all plots have been done before. I also point out the limited settings because, I, as I have posted before, like to say I am a setting based author. So this exercise will annoy me as well as others.

Don’t laugh at the first category of character. You would be mistaken to say that that is the only character that is ever used. The first archetype of character is the “human”. Yeah you wince at the broadness of this category as many authors stated goal is to bring the character’s humanity to the written page. But enough. We are all humans and know what a human is at this point. So this is the first and most obvious category.

The rest of my 5 6 categories of character are: alien, robot or computer, godlike or near godlike, animal, and lesser magical creatures. That’s it. And I feel that the rest of these 5 6 are largely self explanatory for a human like you.

I bet you are thinking, well of course he has it down to 5 6 categories of character, since he uses such a broad stroke. Well you’re going to say the same thing again when I introduce the 5 categories of setting. After that perhaps you’ll understand my anger when someone says there are only 7 plots.

The first setting is “earth” which prior to the last couple hundred years seemed to be the only place to represent many, many stories. But even then there was some attempt to buck the normal. Some stories took place in heaven or hell so I’ll just call the second category “the divine”.

As far back as Keppler’s day the other world or the exo planets, planets, moons, asteroids or comets category was born. Basically anything that was hard and had gravity.

Weird science fiction has pushed things further, saying that stories are possible in gas giants or stars (or even life can be stars) or neutron stars can have life or do something to life, and what stories are possible near the event horizon of black holes. These categories are ridiculous but fertile.

The last category is free fall, or any situation where gravity doesn’t enter the picture.

So there you have it the 5 Categories of Setting and the 5 6 Categories of Character. Think on that and the whole idea of overly broad categories.

I myself will pick 7 stories with the different plots and read them to young impressionable people. Then, when I am done the 7, I am going to say “Enough! I have read you all the basic plots there are. I have shown you everything you need to know.” Then the young people will be jaded know-it-alls. They will fit in our post-modern world where everything is really just modern.

If they try to get out of my trap by mentioning “well at least there’s character and setting” I can wow them with the fact that combined with character and setting, there are still only 175 210 (7x56×5) possible stories, and anything else is just randomly mixing characters or settings in the 7 basic plots.

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SETI: Dumb Isn’t Dumb

Posted on 22 July 2017 by Larry Russwurm

SETI is of course the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligences. Now I have no problem with listening for interstellar messages. That actually seems prudent and quite bright. But earthlings should only listen and never speak. That is, we should never send out our own messages to extra terrestrial intelligences.

Why not? Some might ask. Maybe they’ll teach us things with two way communication. Well first of all they may teach us things without our input so we stand to get something while giving away nothing about ourselves. Now that’s a win. I say we must never give away more. Why? Because even a cursory glance shows us as being violent bastards.

No alien is going to want to give us the cure for all of our current power woes. Say they know how to get nuclear fusion done cheaply and efficiently. What might they think we might do with such power? Why when we invented nuclear fission the first thing we did was take out Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Cheap nuclear fusion might be enough to take out a continent or a world. Clearly we aren’t fit yet to have cheap nuclear fusion.

Maybe they’ll give us the plans for a starship. And let humanity spread its violence out to other worlds.
What did whites do when the New World peoples of earth showed weakness by dying of Old World diseases? They repopulated the areas with whites as the new majority. The whites even showed that they knew it at the time. Remember those stories of giving infected blankets to North America’s indigenous peoples?

Maybe we wouldn’t be so violent with intelligences that are unlike us. But usually on earth that has made us more violent and likely to lash out. Neanderthals were less like us. What happened to them? It looks like they were wiped out by people. Perhaps we can claim ignorance on this one – it happened in prehistory.

But just look at all the genocides on ‘the other’. The Armenian genocide, the holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Bosnian genocide and even currently – the genocide of Yazidis, the list goes on and on. Is a xenocide so unlikely by humans? Especially with the ‘proof’ of the missing Neanderthal.

If I were an intelligent alien, I would never, ever give humans more power than they can amass on their own. By the way if you’re a science fiction writer, why not write the truth – a far future where humans invade another race’s territory for, well, their territory? This constant lie of aliens invading Earth has a foundation in what humans expect of a higher power.

I suspect that intelligent aliens lie low. Maybe they settle a small area of nearby habitable planets. But they lie low and protect themselves from the violent filth that exists in the rest of the universe. Like humanity.

Still, humanity can listen. Perhaps some race of intelligent bunnies has evolved without predators. So perhaps there are some truly good hearted intelligent aliens. Before they travel to us and find out our true violent nature, they might send us directions to improve our lot in this tough universe.

Let’s just hope that after we don’t hunt down those intelligent bunnies for sport.

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The Thousand Year Connoisseur

Posted on 15 July 2017 by Larry Russwurm

There is no doubt that becoming an expert takes a lot of time and effort. To become a connoisseur is almost like becoming an expert’s expert. There is a lot of knowledge involved – look no further than the wine connoisseur who can tell what type of wood the cask has been made of as well as a hundred more little details that are important to them about the wines they consume.

But is the connoisseur as accurate as a scientific analysis of the wine? For some properties I’m sure the science is better. But if we limit the scientific analyses to only the short time that the connoisseur takes in determining flavour, perhaps both are as accurate as each other.

But let’s say the connoisseur hones her skill over a millennium. Might she not become as reliable as all the scientific tests that could be done on the wine? Of course no human lasts a thousand years so all this is just speculation. Unless we are talking about vampires.

Do vampires care about wine in the slightest bit? Probably not but there is one thing a vampire tastes week after week, year after year. That is the blood of a human.

Can they taste blood sugar levels, or any other levels a lab might want to know? I am guessing but I think after a thousand years of feasting on the substance they might know all about a human’s blood readings – even things we haven’t developed tests for yet.

We should hire some of these creatures of the night to work in all of our blood labs. I believe the vampire can perform the needed tests right away without all the time that scientific testing needs. So it’s a win for the humans. Maybe they’ll be able to lift the requirement that the humans fast before certain tests.

And the vampire gets all the blood she can drink just for being scientific in her expertise. Warning. This might lead to overweight vampires that might not live so long. Still, I imagine they would make a quite happy 800 year old corpse when they check out of their comfortable life.

So let’s make friends with these creatures of the night. We can give a little blood and they can help our health system.

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Why Do Extreme Right Wing Authors Glorify the Left?

Posted on 8 July 2017 by Larry Russwurm

Robert A. Heinlein was an extreme right wing author with his assertion that he was libertarian. Some of you may correlate libertarians with liberals but there is no real connection. Libertarians largely believe that the government should provide a military and little else to its citizens. This largely puts them in the same camp as the Tea Party in the US.

This is very much at odds with the family values of the main family in Have Spacesuit – Will Travel. The protaganist is a space loving teenager but his father almost steals the show despite not being that present in the story.

The teenage son at one point goes to the spot in the house where his father places unneeded money. Since there is none there, the son knows from experience that there is none to be had and asking his parents would be useless.

This communal money reminds me of a political system that starts with the same letters. It basically is an example of “from each according to ability, to each according to need”. That’s right. It is an essential tenet of communism that the family operates under.

Orson Scott Card is a more recent extreme right author. He was on record as saying essentially, that if the government adopted gay marriage, this meant that the government should be overthrown. Now, to be honest, no one really followed up on Card’s threats so how bad can he really be? Still his extremism is obvious to almost anyone who sees Card’s political rantings on the net.

In the Ender Series (his most famous work), Ender is confronted by two possible xenocides. A xenocide is of course the complete extermination of an intelligent species. The first xenocide is actually committed since the “buggers” attacked Earth and finally Earth (with Ender’s military skills) pushes back so much that these intelligent aliens are exterminated. Except for the Hive Queen who Ender spirits away with the hope of letting her live out her life and resurrecting the buggers.

In the book, Xenocide, Ender takes up the cause of the “piggies” and the rest of their planet that has a dangerous virus that is important for that ecosystem. But humans want to wipe out the planet to stop the virus from ever endangering human life again. Ender chooses to fight and to stop the xenocide.

Now Ender has reasons to allow the two xenocides. The buggers never once negotiated and just wanted to exterminate humans. Why not commit a genocide against them?

The second xenocide and destroying of a planet could have been allowed to go ahead without resistance, and humanity would be spared a very dangerous virus.

These two examples of softness in Ender remind one of a socialist. Always looking out for someone else even if it makes the socialist’s life worse.

I think I have proved that some extreme right wing authors have strong left wing themes. I think there is one simple reason for this. These right wing authors don’t want to appear to be very mean or small minded. They don’t want people to be afraid of socializing with them. So they use the left.

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