Specolations

A letter to me at age 20

2013-05-07T06:26:34Z

Dear Guy,

I can picture you sitting in your room at Bexley Hall, MIT, putting off another problem set. Those problem sets are important, kid, so I won’t make this long. But I thought you might be amused by something I did last night, me, the you of 40 years into the future.

I was sitting in my lab... no surprise I have a lab, I guess; I always planned to stay in science and (with a few unexpected twists) I’ve done so, though you might be surprised that I am a data collector now instead of a computer modeling theorist. And I was on the internet. The “internet” you haven’t heard of, but you have already experienced it. Know that PLATO terminal in Paul’s lab at the Artificial Intelligence Lab over at Tech Square, next to the Polarioid building? Imagine, instead of a few hundred terminals like that spread around universities and military bases, there are in effect billions of terminals like that, in every home all around the world.

So, I am reading on one of the sites on the internet about two friends of mine who are editors at a big science fiction house in New York. I guess you might be surprised to know that I actually know people who edit – and indeed friends who write – science fiction. No, I am not one of them... that dream didn’t pan out. (Don’t worry, a lot of other ones did.) But I do have friends who work in the business. Why not? It’s a small world, and if you hang around it often enough, like I have, eventually you meet a lot of people.

The cool thing is this: my friends were interviewed about their life and work and it sounded like an interesting enough article that I decided to buy the electronic version of the magazine where the interview ran, to have it downloaded to my computer. (You saw 2001, you can picture reading a newspaper or a magazine on a computer screen.) So, for a mere $5.50 (inflation, I know!) I gave them my credit card (just like a Harvard Coop Card only it works everywhere) and I got an electronic copy of a glossy, 72 page magazine full of color photographs, interviews, detailed articles, and pages and pages of news briefs about the world of... science fiction. Yes, science fiction is big enough to have trade magazines like this.

Here’s the part that will blow you away. This glossy color thick magazine? It’s Locus.

Yeah, that Locus. That mimeo rag that showed up at the MITSFS now and then? It’s big time now. Who’d have thought?

By the way... the MITSFS is still going strong. Polaroid went out of business in 2001. We still don’t have artificial intelligence, not really. And my lab is in Rome, Italy. Actually, at the Vatican. I’ll explain that in another letter...

The first time I saw tholins...

2013-05-04T07:34:22Z

A recent set of fun Tweets by @PlanetDr about making tholins in the lab – organic gunk thought to represent material made in atmospheres of places like Titan by UV irradiation of less gunky organic gunk found in those atmospheres – included an excited "You know who made up the word tholin? And who did the first tholin work? Carl. Sagan. (Yes THAT Carl Sagan)" It got me to reminisce about when I first heard the term. My memory does not necessarily match the truth, so let me first tell the story as I recall it, and then check to see if anything I remember can be confirmed...

It was at the DPS meeting (Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society) in Tucson in the early 1980s. I know I already had graduated from Arizona's Lunar Lab but I was still a post-doc in Boston, so that puts it between 1978 and 1983.

Carl Sagan was at the peak of his popular fame, and somewhat insufferable at the time. (He was a lot of fun in his youth; and he was an older, wiser, and humbler man in his last years. But fame is not kind to most people, and it certainly wasn't to him.) The meeting organizers had invited him to give a public talk, but he also decided to present a paper...

He swept into the meeting room, with his entourage, just as his name was being called. He got up and described making chemically gunky things in the lab, illustrating their chemical structure with dramatic hand gestures. ("They make lo-o-o-ng chains of carbon...") And he announced the name he had given them -- "Tholins"!

What he did not expect was the snickering of laughter from a corner of the audience, mostly from the young grad students working at the meeting.

He finished his talk, did not stay for questions, and swept out of the room, haloed by his entourage. So he didn't meet the young Arizona grad student running the slide projector for that session, named Dave Tholen. (Spelled differently; pronounced the same way.)

In 1990, Dave Tholen won the DPS Urey prize for best young planetary scientist.

Fact checks:

The DPS web site confirms that the DPS meeting was held in Tucson in 1980.
According to the LPL web site, Dave Tholen got his PhD in 1984, and I know he hadn't arrived by the time I left in 1978, both of which are consistent with him being a first- or second-year student in 1980.
The first paper by Sagan and Khare using the term "tholin" was published in in Nature in 1979. So this meeting wasn't the first time the term was used in public, but certainly it was new to most of the people hearing it at the time.

TEDx Talk at the Vatican

2013-04-25T17:13:38Z

Here is the TEDx talk I gave last week...

They apparently got some old gray-haired guy to play me; I've no idea who that person is. But then I actually don't remember giving the talk itself, it all went by in a blur.

By using the link here you can avoid the idiotic comments attached to the regular YouTube site.

Memories of Patriot's Days Past

2013-04-24T07:17:28Z

The sad events last week in Boston have highlighted the long-standing local custom of celebrating Patriot's Day there. I remember April 19, 1975, because it was the day my Fortran program for my MS thesis finally converged and gave good answers ("you keep debugging the program until it gives you the answers you want") and I deliberately set the date of my PhD thesis defense to April 19, 1978.

My dad writes with more distant memories (reposted with his permission):

“Hardly a Man Is Now Alive - - -”

Patriot’s Day, April 19, was a big holiday around Boston when I was growing up. There were two games at Fenway Park, morning and afternoon. The already legendary Boston Marathon took leg at Hopkinton at noon. That morning, two mounted policeman, disguised as Paul Revere and William Dawes, horsed up from Charlestown to warn every Middlesex village and farm that the Red Coats are coming, with suitable civic observances and libations along the way.

But most important of all, the day marked a week-long school break. More often than not - I still remember the occasions well - the weather turned unseasonably warm. just for the holiday. Our gang took our first swim of the year, skinny dipping in the brackish pond formed by seepage fromthemuddy Mystic River into the muddier marsh west of the Fellsway. The water was so shallow, no more than two or three feet at high tide, that you had to swim right from water’s edge to avoid sinking calf-deep into the mucky goo, mined with razor edged clam shells and spike-tailed horseshoe crabs.

“ Listen, my children, and you shall hear—” Back in 1935A.D., when I was a senior at Medford High, I recited the whole blamed thing from a platform at the site of the new City Hall. I had rehearsed it for weeks in advance, at the school parking lot. Mr. Carey, vice principal and public speaking coach, would stand at the far end of the lot and I shouted the thing to him from the back steps about a mile away. We had never heard of a PA system and he would cup a hand over his ear when my voice didn’t reach him. I got pretty good at it. That’s how they trained orators in those days.

Alas! When the moment of truth arrived, I found a strange device in my face up at the speaker’s platform. Somebody had acquired a newfangled contraption to amplify voices. They called it a microphone. But I had to recite at a shout, the way I had memorized the poem. People unfortunate enough to be in front of the loudspeakers clapped their hands over their ears in agony. I thought they were signaling that they couldn’t hear and blasted away even louder. The words echoed back from speakers mounted at Medford Square a half mile to the south and Haynes Square, a mile to the north. All three of my voices fought in dissonance at City Hall, and I stoutly plunged on right through them to the bitter end. My ears ring to this day. Paul Revere fell off his horse crossing the Mystic River. The Red Coats fled from Lexington without firing a shot. The usual highlights of that day, the Boston Marathon and the morning-afternoon games at Fenway Park, were mere afterthoughts.

Ah, yes! As the poem noted, “Hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year!”

Survived to blog another day...

2013-04-21T08:44:46Z

I'm back from Rome; an hour's bus ride, but a million miles different from my usual life. (No, we didn't get a special place at the Papal Mass so rather than face the crowds I came home early.)

The TEDx talk went well, I am told; oddly, I don't remember a thing about it. I am not even sure what I said. I think I deviated quite a bit from my script, which was probably good; after I had gone over that script for the 50th time it began to sound like utter gibberish to me. I read someplace that 800,000 people tuned into the livestream, but I don't really believe it. 800, I believe. They say that the videos will be posted sometime this coming week.

The speakers had a pizza dinner that night, and I wound up sitting next to Mohammed Ali -- no, not the one you're thinking of, but an artist from Birmingham (UK). I didn't try explaining that I had grown up in Birmingham, too... Birmingham, Michigan. Rather a different atmosphere. (Birmingham, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, is the home of auto company executives; I grew up two miles from Cranbrook, the prep school that Mitt Romney went to.)

Anyway, he and his assistant Kyle (sp?) were fascinating guys, and we had a great discussion of comparative religions and the similarities of the children-of-immigrants experience in the US and the UK. ("So, when your ancestors arrived in the US, did they wind up working in restaurants?" Yup. And construction labor. And then the next generation gets an education, and the generation after that gets to be the scientists and the artists. And of course, every Italian was obviously assumed to be a ~~terrorist~~ gangster.)

My other big accomplishment was finally picking up my Permesso di Soggiorno, the Italian equivalent of a Green Card. Yes, I live in the Vatican City State, technically, but every time I step out the front door I am in Italy and they have every right to want to keep track of people like me. I'm an immigrant, you know...

To the Big City

2013-04-18T06:56:50Z

I am leaving this afternoon to spend three days in Rome itself. Today is a rehearsal for, and tomorrow the performance of, my TEDx talk. It should be either spectacularly good, or a total disaster. But at least it will be in English. Here is where I did a short clip to advertise it... coming in out of a windy day without a chance to comb my hair:

Saturday I have various errands to run (including a Jesuit meeting in the evening). Sunday am are rumors of Mass with a certain Argentinian who's been in the news lately, but nothing is confirmed.

Br. Guy Consolmagno, the Vatican, Alien Extraterrestrial UFOs, and stuff...

2013-04-04T20:13:59Z

The title is designed to reach anyone who has heard about me from a web site or book purporting to express my views on these subjects.

About a year ago, an author (whom I will not name or link to) conducted an extensive interview with me by email. I thought he was a legitimate journalist. However, seeing the ways in which he has twisted, misquoted, and invented utter falsehoods from the things I said, I have come to suspect that he is either a knave or a fool.

There are no Vatican secrets about UFOs. Neither I nor anyone I know has any evidence that extraterrestrials exist. We do not believe that "Jesus is a hybrid" or any of the other bizarre claims that this author makes. He is either seriously deluded, or a deliberate con-man.

Let me phrase this as strongly as I can: I do not know of any credible evidence at all that there has ever been contact of any form between extraterrestrial aliens and Earth. Period. I cannot imagine a circumstance where such contact could be kept secret for very long. And I say this, not only as an active astronomer for 40 years, but also as someone who knows lots of people in the SETI community (who would love to have such evidence), and as someone who's been an officer in the American Astronomical Society and in the International Astronomical Union. If there was something like this going on, we'd all be talking about it. There isn't, and we aren't.

That is a quote taken directly from one of the emails that I sent this author!

Here are some other things that I sent him in my emails:

… talking about Unidentified Flying Objects, which is to say, odd things seen in the sky, I have no problem with that. There are objects in the sky, presumably flying, that many people have a hard time identifying. "UFO" is certainly the right term for that! But once you insist that they are evidence of aliens, or government conspiracies, or for that matter once you try to fit these phenomena into any other preconceived notion, they are no longer "unidentified" -- you have implicitly identified them. And I am highly skeptical of any proposed identifications that rely on aliens, extraterrestrials, conspiracies, etc. … We have no artifacts from UFOs in our labs. We have nothing to test. Thus my skepticism.

I also note that there is a population of very skilled observers who spend a lot of time outdoors at night, without any connection with (or control by) the government or any other "official" institution: these are the large number of amateur astronomers around the world who own their own telescopes and spend hundreds of hours observing the skies. And you find that these people tend to be the most skeptical of all about UFO claims. Because they know the sky really well, and spend a lot of time looking into it, they are very familiar with what is out there... and though they see many unusual things in the sky, they are able to identify them without recourse to unknown, unidentified causes.

In response to a question about "official positions from the Vatican" about extraterrestrial life, I wrote to him:

There are no "official Vatican positions" on such topics. Nor is it a new idea; you can find people talking about this over the last thousand years… I have no idea how the Church would respond. It has been the subject of any number of science fiction stories; most of them not very good, I'm afraid.

Finally, some of his material appears to have originated in an article that appeared in a British newspaper in 2005, apparently referring to something called "The Jesus Seed". When he asked me about it, I replied:

Virtually everything in this article (about me at least) is wrong... sometimes in trivial ways (I'm not a Star Trek fan), sometimes in important ways (nothing I said in my Catholic Truth Society booklet is new, much less controversial). Some of it might simply be the author's honest misunderstanding of what I was trying to say, because he read it in the light of his own unshakable prejudices… But most of it is pure invention on his part.

(A few trivial words in the above quotes have been altered so that they make sense in the context. I cannot possibly see how he can derive the conclusions purported to come from me, in the light of these direct statements I wrote to him.)

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Paul Cornell's London Falling: not quite a review

2013-03-30T16:07:44Z

I've been very grumpy in my reading lately. On my "to be read" shelf are half a dozen books with bookmarks inserted about 30 pages in, books that I have started reading and, while not hating them enough to dump them, I haven't loved them enough to finish them. So the very fact that London Falling was a book I couldn't put down is a major plus, right there.

The book is a cross between an urban fantasy and a police procedural, and works fine on both levels, though there is nothing special about it in either regard, per se. There is also, I suspect, a lot of humor that comes across as in-jokes to an outsider like me, an American unfamiliar with British football. (In that regard it could have stood a little more inclueing, but there was enough for me to follow the plot and at least recognize where the jokes were, even if I suspected I was only getting about half of them. As every American knows, Britain can't possibly be a real place; it must be a fantasy world, one whose customs and mores are all the more fun for being inexplicable.)

The thing that first caught my fancy was a negative: the number of the typical mistakes of the genre that this book does not commit. Rather than omnipotent bad guys and bland Mary Sue heroes, the characters are real enough, and interesting enough, for me to want to spend time with them, as they discover their own abilities and limits. The nature of the evil is not universe-encompassing: indeed one of the excellent tensions of the book is the fact that the heroes could rather easily run away to safety if they wanted to... their choice to confront the evil is, indeed, a free choice. While the structure of the book is somewhat formulaic (you can tell by what page you're on, what sort of event you should expect to occur next) there is one delightful shocker of a surprise at just the right point in the story, which not only completely fits with what we've been told but in fact makes much that happened earlier, better understood. (And raises the stakes in an excellent way.) And there are major mysteries left at the end of the story that make me want to read the sequel.

But what intrigues me the most is a subject that I will need to think about further before writing further (which is why this is "not quite a review"). And that's the issue of the underlying theology of the universe that Paul Cornell has created here. It's tricky to work out (and indeed one of the fine unfinished puzzles of the book) because we only understand the nature of the supernatural evil through the points of view of the main characters, who are by their background quite theologically naive. But I know that Paul himself is not so naive. He must know, as the author, how good and bad, heaven and hell, work in this universe. But I'm not sure, myself, what that system is... and he's got me curious as to how it does work, and how he intends to explain it.

It would be fun here to try to speculate; but I need to think about this some more, before I do. Since the book hasn't come out in the US yet, half of the people who read this LJ won't yet have been able to join in on the speculation. I can use that as an excuse to put off scratching my head here, in public. And maybe by the time I do get around to it, I'll have read the sequel.

Ring, ring!

2013-03-28T16:42:16Z

On March 6, getting into my rental car in front of beamjockey 's house en route to a speaking gig, my phone buzzed to let me know it had gotten an email. I gave it a glance. "I have just purchased your MIT class ring on eBay. Did you mean to sell it?"

My first thought was that it was some sort of spam or fraud, but the return address was from the MIT alumni site. And I was indeed missing my ring. When I had first looked for it, three weeks earlier just before giving a talk in California (I generally only wear it while giving public talks), I had noticed it was missing from the shaving kit where I usually keep it. At that time I had just assumed that I must have left it in Rome. So it was possible this was the real thing. And, indeed, my name is engraved on the inside of the ring.

The guy writing me included a link to the eBay site, and the seller did mention a name inscribed inside the ring that could be "easily removed". And the seller was in Tucson. (And asking $800 for the ring.)

I left an email with the guy who wrote me, a phone message with the guy on eBay, and a phone message with members of my community back in Tucson. Many, many further messages ensued in all three directions over the next three weeks. Rather than detailing them, here's the summary:

They guy who bought my ring was indeed an MIT classmate (whom I did not know) who had always wanted a class ring but couldn't afford it back then. He now works in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech. He contacted the eBay seller to inform him that the ring had been stolen and that he was sending back to him, requesting a refund.

The guy who sold the ring said that he had bought it "from an older Mexican woman at a swap meet in Tucson" which of course could describe nearly everyone selling things at a swap meet in Tucson. He insisted he had no idea it was stolen (presumably because there were so many Mexican women in the class of 1974 at MIT with the first name of "Guy," as inscribed in the ring). He agreed to refund the buyer and return the ring to me, eating the cost of whatever he had paid this woman for the ring.

I was already en route back to Rome when this occurred, so I gave him contact details for my rector, Fr. Paul, in Tucson. They agreed to get together to exchange the ring. Three times they set a date... without ever meeting.

Finally I wrote to the guy with the ring, noting my uncertainty about how to proceed since obviously I didn't want to involve the police or eBay, but that my rector was himself leaving for Rome the next day. He then did finally meet up with Fr. Paul, in a public place, and handed over the ring. His excuse for missing the other dates was that he had a very busy schedule involving "court dates."

Yesterday, Fr. Paul arrived in Rome and handed over my ring to me.

Among other things, I count my blessings for honest people like the fellow at Georgia Tech who took the initiative to ask about the ring. (There are a couple of astronomy books of mine in the mail to him, as a thank-you.)

And never again will I pack my ring in luggage screened by TSA.

Rome again, Rome again...

2013-03-27T06:57:52Z

I am finally back home after an eventful two months away from Rome. When I left we had a different Pope and uncertainty as to who would be running the government in Italy. Now we have a new Pope, and uncertainty as to who will be running the government in Italy. Rome is eternal.

The big problem with this trip was that I enjoyed it so much, I liked the people I was speaking with so much, that I gave 110% to every presentation and thus ran myself ragged. (Leading a retreat group from 10 am to 4 pm is especially exhilarating… and exhausting.) You'd think after 20 years of doing this I'd have learned by now.

I also put on ten pounds in the process.

And so, it was actually with relief (tempering my obvious disappointment) that I learned my plans for a sabbatical in Australia in 2014 have fallen through, as the folks there who were paying for the Jesuit chair have discovered their benefactor can't afford it anymore. Must have been the diamond-encrusted memory sticks that I insisted upon having...

My immediate tasks are to finish the figures for a paper that was otherwise ready to submit two months ago; and to prepare the TEDx talk I'll be giving in Rome next month. They said they wanted a copy of that talk on March 15, but they're Italians so I didn't sweat it... Also, one of these days I need to go into Rome and pick up my permesso (the Italian equivalent of a Green Card).

The figures are an interesting case, one of the many things I have learned by being on Twitter. All the figures were nicely done in multi-colored format. My twitter friends, speaking on papers they've seen at conferences, pointed out to each other how frustrating such figures are when seen by someone who is colorblind. D'oh! At the very least I need to redraft them so that essential information is not transmitted only by color. In the process I will make them publishable at no cost in black and white, which is not a bad thing.

Now, on to work. And looking forward to the Triduum approaching.

I have a new boss...

2013-03-13T19:49:53Z

Thanks to everyone who's written with your good wishes for our new Pope. This is an amazing choice. Not sure what it will all mean, of course, but so many new things to deal with.

On a personal note, I remind you that our Observatory director is also a Jesuit from Argentina, who knew Francis when he was the provincial of the Jesuits in Argentina (before he became a bishop). So there is already a personal connection there. How this will play out is anyone's guess...

I am actually in Manchester, England, right now – for the second time, I was away from Rome for all the excitement. I get back to Rome on March 25, to a very different place than the one I left in early February.

Coming to a shire near you...

2013-03-11T02:50:07Z

I arrive in the UK on Wednesday and begin a round of talks. Here's my schedule (only the talks open to the public)... some of these have attendance fees.

Thursday March 14, 7pm, Manchester, at the Catholic Chaplaincy, Avila House, Oxford Rd, Manchester: God's Mechanics
Saturday March 16, 11 am - 4 pm London, Mt Street Jesuits Encountering the Creator
Monday March 18, 7-9 pm, London, Mt Street Jesuits: Astronomy and Belief
Thursday, March 21, evening, Dublin, Gonzaga College, South Dublin Astro Soc. "Discarded Worlds"
Friday pm, Sat daytime, Surrey House of Prayer: Changing Cosmos, Constant Creator

If anyone is likely to be around for dinner in London the evening of Saturday, March 16, let me know!

Small World redux

2013-03-11T00:27:39Z

I am speaking on Monday at St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, a small town about an hour east of Pittsburgh. The college arranged to have me met at the airport by a local fellow, about my age, who runs an auto shop and has a one-person chauffeur service on the side. I had plenty of time to get to know him on the drive here; pleasant enough fellow, named Greg Ruffo. (Yes, my GT friends will take a double-take at that name; it's just one letter different from an old friend of ours.)

Chatting about my background, I mentioned that I had been at MIT. "The little brother of my best friend went there to get his PhD. He was in some sort of geology program where they'd go to sea, I forget what they called it... "

No, I thought.

"Little Dougie Toomey..."

Doug Toomey was my apartment mate when I was a postdoc at MIT in 1982.

It has been said before, but this is further proof, that in fact there are really only 500 people in the world and we keep running into the same ones over and over.

Welcome new friends...

2013-03-03T18:56:57Z

In the past 24 hours I have had three new folks "friend" me on Live Journal. Since it's been months since that happened, I was curious about what may have caused me to cross their radar. So I tried Googling myself to see if anything startling had been said about me in the past 48 hours, and found... nothing that I could see.

I did, however, discover that three of my books are on the Open Education Database list of the top 100 popular science books. (In some very flattering company.) Now I have to wonder how *they* heard of me, too...

Hooray for Hollywood!

2013-03-02T15:48:19Z

As you may remember from Worldcon, there are people trying to make a documentary movie involving me. It's all very vague. But yesterday we went to one of those Hollywood hotels that are in all the movies and did a "breakfast" (no food arrived) and lunch (very nice food, thanks) to see if some other people might be interested.

Yes, we got photos:

William Shatner was not only charming but intelligent. Asked good questions, kept me honest. And I hope I look as good at 81. He would stop me in mid-story and say, "wait a minute..." which really helped me see where things might be going off track. Lots of food for thought.The takeaway I got was a better realization about how some of the ways I use terms (like "faith" and "science") are heard in ways that are different from what I might have expected. But is it entertaining? That remains to be developed.

For lunch we had not only this fellow:

namely, Bill Prady, the producer of The Big Bang Theory, but also his science advisor from UCLA (just up the street), David Saltzberg. Bill is from Detroit, grew up in Southfield, and went to Cranbrook -- all within bicycle rides of where I grew up. Our conversation was much more relaxing, since we are closer in age and background.

The UCLA physics professor who advises the show, David Saltzberg, is a graduate of U of Chicago; he studied there when I was doing my philosophy at Loyola and physics classes at UC. He also worked at Fermi, and remembers working with beamjockey ("He won't remember me, I was just the graduate student "Ace" on the team...")

Oh, yeah, another thing. Prady drives a really cool Porsche. Hmmf. And him from Detroit!

Twelve seconds of fame

2013-02-27T16:38:26Z

My nexus of all things online, beamjockey , writes (slightly paraphrased):

Todd's sister in law spotted Brother Guy on the Today show this morning. Here's the segment about Castel Gandolfo, where Pope Benedict will reside:

<http://www.today.com/video/today/50970011#50970859>

Guy appears between 0:53 and 1:05, working the pulleys to open an observatory dome on the palace roof, then peering through a telescope. He doesn't speak-- I presume this is NBC file footage.

The narrator says, "Until recently, the area also provided a unique intersection between science and religion. Nearly a dozen astronomers once used this papal observatory to study the skies."

Nice, if very brief, acknowledgement of the work of the Specola.

I note that, contrary to the impression given in the clip, we are still alive and kicking, if no longer in the palace itself. Our new labs are in the gardens (as documented here previously) and of course our modern telescope is in Arizona.

On public and private personas...

2013-02-24T17:50:55Z

So, about a week ago, my dad, who has been reading science fiction since the days of "G-8 and his Flying Aces", was chatting with me (on FaceTime) about Old Man's War. He liked the beginning, didn't care much about how it developed. Speaking as an old writer himself (at 96 years old, he qualifies!) he also expressed an off-hand opinion about some of Scalzi's writerly tics, mentioning in passing "I would have liked to have edited that stuff."

Now, the odd thing (which I suspect he didn't realize) is that I happen to know the guy who actually did edit that book. (Hi, pnh !)

And that weird interface between the "faceless editor" we can safely rail against and the person whom I had dinner with last September has come up against recently in discussions about Pope Benedict.

To my mind Pope Benedict is many overlapping people... He is the (by definition impersonal) world leader whom we can all have strong opinions about, for and against. He is also the person I saw within the place I work, still from a distance but at much closer quarters, operating within a structure that I know I've been constantly puzzled by. The Vatican is about the size of middling high school, 500 employees total, a place that sometimes can do wonderful things in an instant, while other times resisting even some of Pope's more technical (and presumably non-controversial) reforms. But Pope Benedict is also the human being to whom I gave a tour of my lab, who laughed at my jokes and told one or two of his own.

It's odd to hear criticisms about someone I have actually met. It's hard to hear; even if the criticisms are valid.

Meanwhile, I am on a speaking tour in North America and the British Isles (including a short trip to Dublin) and facing the fact that I too am both a public and a private persona. People like my talks, that's why I get to keep giving them; and they like to tell me so. But I get really uncomfortable hearing myself praised. (Not nearly as uncomfortable as when I hear myself criticized, of course!) I feel the pressure to try to live up to the absurd expectations of fans. Likewise, I feel the need to not live down to the absurd expectations of those who, often for understandable reasons, see me as a personification of institutions they have real problems with -- both Big Religion and Big Science.

And the most awkward moments can be with the people with whom I am slowly translating in role from the one (public persona) to the other (friend). I have met some celebrities of fandom and of science where I feel exhilarated to be in their presence, but not yet relaxed enough that I don't also have the fear of saying something really stupid in front of them (something I am very capable of doing, without warning). The lesson is, to be sure that when I'm on the other side of the table, I likewise also learn to give the same slack to my fans that I hope they give to me.

A perfectly obvious post of advice to my SF writer friends

2013-02-06T07:13:52Z

No idea why I feel obligated to say this, except that it's 7:55 am and I am killing time before an 8:15 am meeting...

What do I look for when I pick up a science fiction book? (Any book, for that matter, but especially SF.) All I ask for are three things:

1. Make me turn the pages.
2. Show me something I haven't seen before.
3. Be honest.

Easy, right?

1. I think number one is the hardest. There are many authors (including many who have had wonderfully successful careers without my stamp of approval, thankyouverymuch) who seem to fail at this.

The classic example of a writer who's very successful but, for me, fails on this score for some reason is Neil Stephenson. Both Snow Crash and The Confusion have wonderful opening scenes, and yet once I put them down I never had the urge to pick them up again. (Cryptonomicon, by contrast, held me to the very last of its many, many pages.)

Why? This is my own personal twitch, but... neither of them had a character who I cared about enough that I wanted to spend more time with them. I don't necessarily have to like the character – the people in pameladean Tam Lin were all the artsy types whom I avoided like the plague while I was in college, but somehow she made them interesting enough that I wanted to see what happened to them. (In that case, I think it was her description of the children's books the main character was leaving behind that did it for me.) So, having given all you writers my wisdom on what I want ("make me turn the pages") I confess I have no idea how to accomplish it.

2. I've read a lot of stuff. I have seen most of the things people are trying to do, done better, already. So, surprise me. papersky (writing, as she says, at the edges of genre) is a master of this. She doesn't always succeed in getting me to turn the pages (some of her more esoteric fantasy doesn't have the hooks shaped to lure me in), but when she does, she has me hooked but good.

3. Be honest? To misquote Hemingway, I think, all you have to do is sit in front of the keyboard and bleed. Again citing papersky that was what made Among Others a Hugo-winner. (Along with it being a page-turning and showing me an enormous amount of stuff I hadn't seen before, of course... but it was its honesty that sold the deal.)

By contrast, I can think of a couple of other writers (again, very successful but still...) who write fantasies where you walk away wondering if they really believe in their story. Not just that, when they walk away from the keyboard they know it's fiction; but even while writing it, they know it's fiction. Or they make their characters do what is expected, rather than showing that spark of insanity that reality always holds.

Anyway, time for my 8:15 meeting...

On the writing life...

2013-01-31T07:59:51Z

Well, yesterday was a pretty good day.

I heard from the magazine US Catholic, who had solicited an article from me about spiritual reflections on astronomical images, that they've accepted my revisions to the first draft, and, by the way, where should they send the check?

A few emails later, the contract finally arrived from my agent (we'd heard the offer last November, as I recall); an outfit that apparently used to be (and may still be) Image Books but which has a variety of other legal names -- contracts can be confusing that way -- a subsection of Random House, has agreed to hand over $20K to my agent (most of which will find its way into my community's account in Tucson) once we sign this piece of paper, with subsequent similarly large hunks of money coming along when we deliver the manuscript and when it finally appears in print. Oh, yeah; we're supposed to hand them 100,000 words by next November. Piece of cake.

I was thinking about these bits of good news while contemplating Scalzi's recent post on "why I write: to get rich". I know what he's talking about. To deny the importance of payment, denies the work involved in the writing. Simply sitting in front of a keyboard typing in 100,000 words is physical labor in and of itself, not even thinking about having to dream up those words. And exposing one's soul in public with those words comes at a cost as well, one that cannot easily be measured in money but which money does help compensate.

But I see that money that comes from my writing only long enough to hand it over to my community. And my community supports me, physically and emotionally, whether I sell a story or not. So obviously I write for reasons that are independent of money.

Scalzi probably publishes as many words a year in his blog and tweets as he sells to Tor. A cynic might say that his public presence online is a very clever marketing ploy. Certainly if a reasonable fraction of his followers buys each book as it comes out, out of a sense of "friendship" to someone they think they know well even if he can't possibly know them, he'll sell more books in a year than I ever will. But "being somebody" online only to sell books doesn't work -- lesser authors who try that trick come across as phony. And meanwhile, even with a huge ego, at some level it's dreadful to be somebody, to be public, like a frog... as Emily Dickinson pointed out more than a century ago.

Scalzi's public life also comes at a cost to the privacy of the rest of his family. I am reminded, actually, of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who wrote a regular column in the mid 1800's called "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" that was the equivalent of such a blog. His son was mortified to have all his doings (including later articles describing his service in the Civil War) spread across the month pages of the Atlantic. Somehow, OWH Junior survived the experience, however.

We who write, write because we have to. If we didn't have to, we wouldn't. But we can't not write.

Getting paid for it, lets some of us feed the habit. But it validates the experience for all of us, whether we need the cash or not.

Promoted from the comments...

2013-01-27T14:50:13Z

... to my previous post about crazies on line. I am reposting it here, because this comment came in late and is worth the notice.

After I complained about having been duped into an interview for a UFO site aska_kettlingur 66.212.201.235) wrote:

Jan. 27th, 2013 12:29 pm (local)

UFOs and Ancient Aliens

I finally found a TV show that debunks the myth that our ancient monuments, such as pyramids and Stonehenge, were built by visiting aliens. It seems they were really built by visiting Time Travelers whom we have misidentified as aliens. I'm glad they've cleared that up.

I would love to have a reference or link to that show!

Guy's Travels

2013-01-26T08:18:13Z

I am off tomorrow for a week at an International Space Science Institute workshop in Bern, Switzerland; when I get back I'll have just a few days to play in my new lab before heading to the US and the UK for a series of talks. Since it would be fun to connect up with my friends here, I'll give a listing of places you can find me... all open to the public.

1. UC Merced, Tues Feb 19, 7:30 pm: God's Mechanics
2. SETI Institute, Fri Feb 20, noon: Adventures of a Vatican Astronomer
3. Loyola University Chicago, Mon Feb 25, 4 pm: Loyola Lecture, The End of the World (Yet Again)
4. Ventura County (California) University Series, Thurs Feb 28, 7:30 pm: Science and Religion
5. University of Illinois Foelligner Auditorium, Thurs March 7, 7 pm: The Unfinished Cosmos
6. St Vincent College Perf. Arts Center, Latrobe PA, Mon March 11, 7:30 pm: Brother Astronomer

I'll be hanging out with beamjockey the weekend of March 8-9, but otherwise I'm rather tightly scheduled so I don't know who-all I'll be able to see during my travels. Typical. That makes it all the more fun to connect during these talks, when at least I will know where I will be.

FYI I also have some events coming up in the UK in March, including talks at the University of Manchester on March 14, retreat-type stuff in London all day on Saturday March 16 (Mount St. Jesuit Center) and 23 (House of Prayer, Surrey), and a talk in Dublin at Gonzaga College the evening of March 21. More details as the time approaches (or write to me directly if you're interested in attending). I do hope to have time at least one evening free for dinner with whoever is in London at the time... best possibilities include Friday or Saturday, March 15 or 16, or Tuesday the 19th.

[edited to correct the date of the Merced talk]

The lab is ready!

2013-01-25T16:38:52Z

The workmen have been doing their thing all week, but finally last night we were ready to move in. Thanks to Mike and Ellen and their kids (visiting from Arecibo) I was able to get all the stuff I had moved out of my lab last week, back into the lab last night, in less than an hour!

As I had mentioned in a previous post, the design was by Br. Bob Macke, and our administrator Fr. Maj made it all happen sooner and better than I could ever have dreamed...

Here are some before (left) and (right) after photos. (It's also fun to compare these photos with some of the designs in the previous post.)

The view from the lab door

Top, where I used to try to work; bottom, what it looks like now. And finally:

The lab also serves as my office. Next to me, not shown, is where Bob will be moving in come August.

The main difference visible here is that the new benches are higher (for working while standing up) with chemically impervious tops and a much more solid base (no more worries about shaking the table when I make my measurements). There's also gobs more storage space. What is not visible is still to come, a set of walls and doors to add a new level of security to the collection area itself. (And a new cabinet to hold the larger meteorites.)

The new chairs are nice, too...

A vigorous question in Italian

2013-01-22T07:36:49Z

An issue has come up here in our multilingual community and I am curious as to what the various Italian speakers among my friends have to say about it.

Every day before pranzo (the midday meal) our community meets for a reading of the prayer of the hours. (Jesuits are not *required* to do these prayers in community but it is encouraged where possible.) And one of the prayers at the beginning, recited every day, contains the word "vigore" which, as you can guess, means "vigor" or "vigour" (depending on your time zone).

The dictionaries all say that the accent is on the first syllable, VI-go-re, but our local native speaker puts the accent on the second syllable, vi-GO-re.

Is this something that varies from place to place in Italy? (Our local speaker is from outside Naples, which is noted for its odd twists of the language.)

More crazies online

2013-01-06T06:57:20Z

My friend beamjockey keeps an eye out for me on Google News and has recently sent me a link to my latest bit of fame... someone whom I gave a serious e-mail interview to, thinking he was a legitimate journalist, but who turned out to be another UFO nut. As Bill put it, "This guy is an expert on 'UFO-related demonology,' so we must take what he writes seriously."

I won't bother linking to the site (for obvious reasons).

I sometimes wonder if these UFO people are sincere but deluded, or if they are in fact deliberate con men. Judging from what I sent him vs what he wrote, one surely would think that this guy falls into the latter camp. His distortions of what I wrote (example, that I sent him a "secret PDF" of what is in fact a booklet that's been on sale for years) are so extreme that one really can't believe they are legitimate misunderstandings.

But if that's so, then why? Why does he feel the need to create such absurdities and publish them on the web? It can't be for the money... I can't imagine he's making any sort of serious cash off his web site, and there's got to be an easier way to make a living (like flipping burgers at McD's) than creating all this load of crap. As a writer once told me, it's nearly as much work to write a bad novel as a good one...

I just have a hard time imagining what's going on inside his head. Which pulls me back to my first theory, that he is in fact so utterly deluded that he really believes this stuff. Or at least at some level wants to. Maybe to himself he says "I'm scamming the marks, I'm smarter than they are..." But even there, why does that seem like an accomplishment to him, to be able to scam the marks? In any event, I feel for the poor guy.

I just wish he hadn't dragged my name into his delusions.

Top Ten Internet Memes that Drive Me Nuts

2013-01-05T12:56:07Z

1. Top ten lists

2. Pointless ranking of things that cannot be scaled linearly

3. The misuse of the word "meme"

4. Any use of the word "meme"

5. The use of "me" or "my" on anything having to do with computers (as in "My Computer" or "me.com" or "my top ten list") as if doing so makes a faceless inanimate computer somehow "personal" or that such a label somehow makes significant an otherwise unimportant location.

6. Grandiose projects that are announced and started but never finished.

7.