day 344: forced reboot

This is how you start a science story. From Douglas Preston’s “The Day the Earth Died,” published by The New Yorker, which chronciles a paleontologist's work on the Chicxulub Yucatan astroid strike that didn't just kill more than 99 percent of all life on Earth, but forced a restart of the carbon cycle:

If, on a certain evening about sixty-­six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in brightness, although it barely moved. That’s because it was not a star but an asteroid, and it was headed directly for Earth at about forty-five thousand miles an hour. Sixty hours later, the asteroid hit. The air in front was compressed and violently heated, and it blasted a hole through the atmosphere, generating a supersonic shock wave. The asteroid struck a shallow sea where the Yucatán peninsula is today. In that moment, the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began.

A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. The result was a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.

The piece goes on from there and just gets better.

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The daily read

• The New York Times
• The Washington Post
• Exhalation, Ted Chiang
• “The Day the Earth Died,” Douglas Preston, The New Yorker

day 342: the weekly mindmap

Map of my mind's random walk this week.

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The daily read

• The New York Times
• The Washington Post
• Exhalation, Ted Chiang
• “Gin! The Storied Spirit Enters a New Era,” Imbibe

day 341: Gilles Deleuze

The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. ... What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the thing that might be worth saying.

Gilles Deleuze, 20th-century French philosopher. I might add the problem of getting people to shut up until they have something to say. Of getting everyone to shut up so the rest of us can think.

day 340: the male bear gaze

A greyscale image from the Churchill bears. When an apex predator gives you a long look.

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Read

• The New York Times
• Exhalation, Ted Chiang
• The Washington Post
• "Old-Time Feeling," Amanda Petrusch, The New Yorker
• “The First Election at the End of the World,” Charles Pierce, Esquire

I recommend the Charlie Pierce to your attention. And, of course, Ted Chiang.

Day 339: wham!

Bruce Sterling, from a 1989 piece titled “Slipstream”:

“Science Fiction” today is a lot like the contemporary Soviet Union; the sprawling possessor of a dream that failed. Science fiction’s official dogma, which almost everybody ignores, is based on attitudes toward science and technology which are bankrupt and increasingly divorced from any kind of reality. “Hard-SF,” the genre’s ideological core, is a joke today; in terms of the social realities of high-tech post-industrialism, it’s about as relevant as hard-Leninism.

… But now look at it. Consider the repulsive ghastliness of the SF category’s Lovecraftian inbreeding. People retched in the ’60s when De Camp and Carter skinned the corpse of Robert E. Howard for its hide and tallow, but nowadays necrophilia is run on an industrial basis. Shared-world anthologies. Braided meganovels. Role-playing tie-ins. Sharecropping books written by pip-squeaks under the blazoned name of established authors. Sequels of sequels, trilogy sequels of yet-earlier trilogies, themselves cut-and-pasted from yet-earlier trilogies. What’s the common thread here? The belittlement of individual creativity, and the triumph of anonymous product. It’s like some Barthesian nightmare of the Death of the Author and his replacement by “text.”

That’s getting it said.

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Read

• The New York Times
• The Washington Post
• “Under Water,” Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker
• “Running the Table,” Frank Conroy, GQ

day 337: ted chiang

Ted Chiang has the capacity to dazzle. I am reading his second collection of stories, Exhalation, and the title story is a sentient robot's meditation on its own consciousness and what a machine posits as the origin of the cosmos. To answer his questions about how memory works, the robot disassembles its own brain—you'll have to read the story—and comprehends how its own cognition occurs:

...I then turned my microscope to the cognition engine. Here too I observed a latticework of wires, but they did not bear leaves suspended in position; instead the leaves flipped back and forth almost too rapidly to see. Indeed, almost the entire engine appeared to be in motion, consisting more of lattice than of air capillaries, and I wondered how air could reach all the gold leaves in a coherent manner. ... the leaves formed temporary conduits and valves that existed just long enough to redirect air at other leaves in turn, and then disappeared as a result. This was an engine undergoing continuous transformation, indeed modifying itself as part of its operation. The lattice was not so much a machine as it was a page on which the machine was written, and on which the machine itself ceaselessly wrote.

My consciousness could be said to be encoded in the position of these tiny leaves, but it would be more accurate to say that it was encoded in the ever-shifting pattern of air driving these leaves.

The machine's universe is under a chromium dome and the energy source, as well as the lifeblood of the robots, is argon. Entropy in this universe will not be the same energy stasis as in our cosmos, but the cessation of pressure gradients that move the argon around. When the robot's universe experiences full pressure equilibrium, it will cease to be. With every breath and every thought, the robot realizes, there is less air pressure, therefore, less order, therefore eventual entropy.

With every thought that I have, I hasten the arrival of that fatal equilibrium.

In Chiang's imagined machine universe, the Big Bang was a Big Breath:

The universe began as an enormous breath being held. Who knows why, but whatever the reason, I am glad that it did, because I owe existence to that fact. All my desires and ruminations are no more and no less than eddy currents generated by the gradual exhalation of our universe. And until this great exhalation is finished, my thoughts live on.

That is lovely, but not as lovely as this:

Though I am long dead as you read this, explorer, I offer to you a valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.

That sublime final sentence echoes Mary Oliver:

Ten times a day something happens to me like this—some strengthening throb of amazement—some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest, and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.

and Marilynne Robinson:

This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

To which I concur, all in.

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the day's reading

• The New York Times
• The Washington Post
• Exhalation, Ted Chiang
• “Silent Dancing,” Judith Ortiz Cofer, The Georgia Review
• “The Telltale Heart,” Lauren Smiley, Wired

day 336: ursus maritimus

My Churchill, Manitoba polar bear shoot was more successful than I could have dreamed. Thirty bears over two days, good light, good companions, great luck. So you know, this one is what's known by naturalists as a subadult male. Rather large as teenagers go.

Do click on the image to see it in lightbox.

Day 334: tundra tease

Just returned from a three-day shoot in Churchill, Manitoba and the Canadian subarctic tundra. You may know that there are polar bears up there. So do I have any polar bear pictures? You'll just have to check back.