Bright lights, big geekery

For those times when a fully thought-out post is too much for each topical tidbit, there's the "five things make a post" post!

1. My family and I were lucky enough to be within driving distance of the Great American Eclipse on Monday, so we went on the moonshadow quest.  We didn't spend our precious 2 minutes and 25 seconds taking crappy cellphone pics, since we knew the professionals were out in force.  Here's an example from someone from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center:

If you can wait a bit, you should check out what Dr. Miloslav Druckmüller (arguably the best eclipse photographer in the world) will have to show for his trip to the States this week.  It may be another month or two before he posts his results, but trust me, they'll be worth the wait.

Should I join the thousands of others who are having trouble putting their experience of totality into words?  It was my first one, and I can honestly say it was a hugely different experience than looking at pictures online.  Truly remarkable.

= = = = =

2. I'd been getting out of the habit of reading novels lately, so a few weeks ago I decided to catch up on a reputed sci-fi classic.  I devoured Dan Simmons' Hyperion (and its second half, The Fall of Hyperion), and came out of it pleasantly enchanted by his vision of humanity in the year 2852.  I liked the "Canterbury Tales" framing vibe of the first book, and how he broke out of it in the second.  After hearing that a TV miniseries may be in the works, it got me thinking about a "dream cast" of actors who could portray Simmons' memorable characters.  I'm planning on reviving my YouTube channel and creating a slideshow video to illustrate those choices.  Fun!

= = = = =

3. A little more than a month ago, I was also fascinated by a serialized story posted online, titled "17776: What football will look like in the future."  I'm not a football fan, but this story was about much more than the gridiron.  If you want your mind blown, I won't say another word.  Just click on that link and don't be prepared to come up for air for a while.

= = = = =

4. The internet has allowed many of us to indulge in nostalgia in lots of different ways.  I forget how I came across it, but I found a description of a series of children's encyclopedia books that my Dad had when he was little.  The Vintage How and Why Library was published in the 1930s and 1940s, and I got to read them when I was a kid in the 1970s.

Nothing substantial to say, other than the most memorable bit being the Art Deco style renderings of majestic gods and men.  Also, don't let anyone tell you that elves with those swept-back ears were an invention of 1990s video games!  :-)

= = = = =

5. Speaking of the 1990s, here's some more nostalgia:

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GS d !s a+ C++ U+(-) !P L+ E--- W++ N++ o-- K w !O M V
!PS !PE Y+ PGP t+ 5+++ X+ R+++ tv+ b+ !DI D--- G e++++
h---- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

The above is my carefully constructed Geek Code, which is supposed to help others size me up in a single glance.  (I'll pass over the well-trodden irony that this gives the once-excluded the tools to become the excluders.  In practice, I think nearly everyone who used this code used it to find kindred spirits.)

I've (kinda sorta) wanted to make this for almost a quarter of a century, but I never did it back in the day.  The above string of identifying marks is brand new, but it's weird that the definition of the code hasn't been updated a long time -- so long that its home page has expired and the above link goes to a saved page at the Internet Archive!  Although most of the items are true for 2017-Cygnus, I did have to scratch my head a bit to recall my fine-grained ideological stances on the VMS operating system, Kibo, and the X-Files.  :-)  On a few of these things, I had to punt.  I used the exclamation point (!) to mean either "this thing is so foreign to me that I have no idea" or "it's just none of anybody's bidness."

Apollo Mnemonic

Why do I do the things I do?

You won't find the answer to that question here, just one of the things.  :-)

Last week, I was sad to hear of the passing of Gene Cernan, the last astronaut to set foot on the Moon.  That got me thinking that I've always wanted to have the names of the Apollo astronauts memorized.  Growing up, they were always quite important to me, but I think I could have only rattled off the crews of Apollo 1 (whose fatal fire just had its 50th anniversary yesterday), 11 (duh), 13 (because of the movie), and then just Cernan from 17 (for his special final status).

Again, I don't know why I would want to memorize them all, but I've done similar things in the past.  I once could recite the names of the first two centuries worth of Roman emperors in order, and also the names of the 20 divisions of the Mayan tzolkin calendar.  Maybe a few other lists that I've, um, now forgotten about, too.  :-)  It's not like I ever made a public show of that knowledge... it's just that I liked knowing it.

Anyway, I still don't know if I'll try to cram these astronaut names into my memory, but I did have fun creating a one-page "cheat sheet."  If I go ahead and try to memorize, I'll stick this in my pocket and refer to it as I study.  I looked around for something similar, but all the other infographics were either too busy (i.e., wouldn't look nice printed on paper) or didn't contain what I wanted.  I jazzed it up a bit with the mission patches and the informal call-signs for the ships, and I thought I'd share it here:

Clicking on the above gives you a medium-resolution JPG image.  I've also put a nicer PDF version at this Google Drive link.

Hey, if I can't use this blog to share the fruits of my weirdness, what good is it?

Update on the Right Stuff RPG

Back in 2012, I mused for a few posts (here and here) about an idea for a new game that allows players to recreate the excitement of not only the 1960s space race, but also the way things "could have been" in the succeeding decades -- moon bases, orbiting agricultural colonies, terraforming Mars, and so on.

Anyway, I just learned about a fascinating new game, just published this year, that covers some of this territory.  I admit that my first thought was along the lines of "Oh no, have I been scooped?!"  However, reading its rules has been a huge help in figuring out what I want my game to be, and what I don't really want it to be.

Leaving Earth is a tabletop board game written by Joseph Fatula and published by the Lumenaris Group.  Each player takes the role of a space agency, and the goal is to plan missions, build spacecraft, manage risk, and reach for the stars!  In itself, this isn't a new concept.  A year or so ago I also came across a much more detailed game/simulation on the same topic: Phil Eklund's High Frontier.  But Leaving Earth aims to shave off enough of the scientific and engineering crunchiness to make it a fun experience for players of all backgrounds.  It's essentially the same level of complexity that I'm looking to hit in my game.

Despite my love of all the techy goodness of space mission planning -- and I say that without an ounce of irony -- I think that my original "Right Stuff RPG" (name to be changed to avoid getting in trouble) wasn't really about that, um, stuff.  I was always thinking more about the personalities of the astronauts and the ways that they made larger-than-life history.  You can see even in my placeholder name that I consider it a Role Playing Game first and foremost.

I want each player to really get into their chosen astronaut characters, to care about them as people.  And, of course, to inject something of themselves into their characters, too.  Balancing the first (play acting) with the second (wish fulfillment?) is a juggling act that tabletop RPGs have been trying to perfect for more than 40 years now.  I'd love to prod players toward that goal, but traditional RPGs like D&D have an open-endedness of "plot" that requires a knowledgeable DM to manage it all.

Thus, the big question is:  How much of that experience can be programmed into a more casual kind of game?  I still have no answer to that, but I'm always open to inspiration...  :-)

V is for Vision(ary)

This post was originally going to be about William Butler Yeats' strange philosophical stream of consciousness book called A Vision.  However, the more I dug into it, the more I got disillusioned with its rambling and random nature.  Almost an incomprehensible fever dream, in some places.  I still hope to revisit it and understand it better, someday, but it's no fiery manifesto.

So, good luck for me that, right around the end of March, I discovered a completely different kind of Vision.  Nobel-prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek was recently asked to give a talk on his predictions for physics 100 years in the future.  He wrote up a more formal version of that talk and posted it online last month.

I'm no particle physicist, so I didn't really appreciate the most esoteric parts about quantum gauge theory.  I did like that he quotes Heraclitus and Parmenides to contrast the "God's-eye" view of the universe with our own "ant's-eye" view, but I don't think I grokked the physics implications.  However, once he's done giving his opinions of supersymmetry and string theory, the essay gets weirder and better.

Wilczek notes that much of our progress in science has been leading to greater and greater abstraction.  Forces are better understood as aspects of energy conservation.  "Energies" may, in turn, be best understood as symmetries of pure information.  Wilczek has written before about how "its" (physical things) may come ultimately from abstract "bits," but here he notes an interesting irony.  In biology, the trend has been to reduce more and more abstract concepts (like the mind) to an interplay of matter.  However...

"...if physics evolves to describe matter in terms of information, as we discussed earlier, a circle of ideas will have closed.  Mind will have become more matter-like, and matter will have become more mind-like."

He's not done with the physics-biology connection.  Wilczek also predicts that technology will continue to learn lessons from the systems that evolution has honed over millions of years.  Thus, a prediction that our computers will become more brain-like, and our machines will become more body-like.

Again, he brings it full circle.  He predicts the flow will go in the other direction, too -- i.e., that we'll continue to enhance our biology (especially our crude sense of color vision) by using technology.  Two of his briefest predictions are the ones that I'm most fascinated by:

• We will vastly expand the human sensorium, opening the doors of perception.
• Artists and scientists will work together, to create new works of extraordinary beauty.

This technological expansion might also help us explore space without actually making the trip in person:

"As people acquire routine access to extremely capable distant sensors and actuators, their sense of identity will expand beyond the limits of their physical bodies.  An immersive experience of "being there" will not necessarily involve being there, physically.  This will be an important element of the expansion of human culture beyond Earth, since human bodies are very poorly suited to extraterrestrial environments.  One can imagine an expanding web of intelligence more easily than an expanding web of settlement, and I expect it will happen much sooner."

Lastly, Wilczek claims that with these expanded senses and powers, we will evolve to greater levels of humility.  Knowing more means having greater perspective about what we still don't understand.  We can only hope.  :-)

Four Hands

March 18, 1986

There were four of us in that boat of a station wagon, screaming away from the light into the suburban black. The car could have held double that amount, but strangely, nobody else wanted to come. Driving was Niall (pronounced Neil) Farrelly, an upperclassman who was stuck rooming on a floor full of obnoxious college freshmen because he transferred to our school in the middle of the term.

Niall was one of the last people I thought would be interested in driving 100 miles out of town on a whim.  But hey, he was an engineering major, and he had been inundated with the same media hype we'd all been hearing for the past year.  Carl Sagan couldn't shut up about it, and there was that ominous looking book nearly everywhere you turned.

This was supposed to be one of the last weeks that you'd be able to see Halley's Comet, in the southeastern sky, as it screamed away from the light and back into its own corner of the suburban black.  From our campus, east was the shining Philly skyline, and south was puffing oil refineries.  It only seemed logical to do the road trip thing, and the Jersey shore seemed perfect.  We pointed to a little dot on the map called Cape May, right at the southern tip, knowing it to be far from the sparkly rides and well-lit boardwalks.

We left around 8:00 pm, with that utter disregard for a good night's sleep that can only be understood prior to the age of 25.  Poor Niall was stuck in a car with three of those obnoxious freshmen.

To his right was Fozz, a wide-grinning frat pledge and fellow engineering major, who just spent the last few hours arguing with his girlfriend about this spur of the moment trip.  In the back seat, passenger side, was Beave, Fozz's roommate, and the amateur astronomy buff of the group.  I was next to Beave, right behind Niall.  (I won't be telling you my college nickname, but thank you for asking.)

We stopped at our campus 7-11 to get cigars to smoke on the beach, then we zoomed off to Cape May.  After almost 30 years, I can't recall much about the drive down, but I remember that little town.  We circled and recircled the half-dozen streets, looking for the best place to park and comet-gaze.  There was rampant paranoia about the town cops that we glimpsed from time to time.

Then the beach.  We finally parked and walked out onto the sand, the waves crashing higher and closer to us than really seemed proper for that time of night.  The stars were crisp and the sky was black.  Beave kind of sheepishly told us that, despite being from Baltimore, he had never stood on a beach before.  We broke out the cigars, mainly for warmth.  I didn't mind the stomach ache it gave me.

It probably took a half hour to really get our bearings -- and to remember that we had a friend's binoculars in the car -- before we found that sad little comet near the horizon.  Just barely a smudge with the naked eye, the coma and tail were nicely visible with the binocs.  We felt mildly betrayed by the talking heads on TV -- not to mention Professor Billyuns and Billyuns -- who all promised a major spectacle.  It didn't matter.  This was something special.

Being so excited, we didn't notice the elderly couple walking along the beach.  (I won't examine my memory in too much detail, for fear that these old people weren't so much older than I am right now.)  They saw what we were doing, and asked us to point out the comet for them.  Despite our gesturing, neither of them could make it out.  I think it was me who suggested propping the binoculars on a nearby stone wall, and have Fozz go stand about 10 feet in front.  I'd look through and get it centered, then tell him how to adjust his stance and his upraised arm, so he would be pointing right at the target.

It took a few minutes to get right, but it worked.  The lady and the gentleman took turns looking through the steadied device, and their eyes followed Fozz's magnified finger right to it.

"Hey Beave," Fozz called over, a while later.

"What?"

"I touched a comet."

We hung around a bit after they left, collecting shells and daring each other to go further towards the water.  Before getting back in the car, we did probably the cheesiest thing any of us had ever done, or done since.  We put our four hands together and vowed that, if any of us are still alive when the comet comes back again, in 2061, we'll make our way down to this very same beach and say hello again.

We got back in the car and headed to the highway that would take us back to the city, to the light.  Almost at the on-ramp, red and blue light filled the night.

Panic, of course.  It was something like 3:00 am, and we were 100 miles away from where we should have been.  (Though we were breaking no laws here, I still have no idea if we were violating university policy by being out of the dorm like that.)

"You know your left tail light is out, son?"

Again, almost 30 years of time has fogged the details, but I'm pretty sure a verbal warning was all that Cape May's finest had for us that night.

I knew I should've been sleepy on the drive back.  We all should've been.  We were also not quite 20 years old and knee-deep in high adventure.  Classic rock anthems blared from the radio, and we sang along loudly.  But then another song started up, one we all knew by heart.  Its first bars were just lone piano, cycling through a subtle harmony that penetrates one's chest because the pianist's left hand is all the way down at the bass end.  We didn't sing to the first few verses, because this is one that builds.  The words that make up the name of the song don't even appear until it's nearly over.  It's the one moment of this whole trip that will be burned into my memory until the year 2061.

"Hey Beave," Fozz turned around and called.

"What?"

"Don't stop believin."

Me... In... Space...

No, I haven't been accepted into the astronaut program -- yet!

However, my namesake, the Orbital Sciences CYGNUS spacecraft, has just made its first flight into orbit!  (They must be Rush fans, too.)  If you look closely at the press photos, you can see that it's named after yours truly.  Here, let me blow it up for you...

I think the entry of private companies into space flight is an extremely hopeful sign for the future.  More players make for a more exciting and competitive game, leading to lower costs and new ideas.  Still, there's plenty of room for the government to fund the really big, visionary projects -- if it so chooses.  I was excited to see an article in this month's Physics Today outlining some grand ideas for how to really accomplish an interstellar trip to Alpha Centauri.  (It's pretty rare to see speculation like this in that great, but slightly musty and stodgy, magazine!)

All the more impetus for this Cygnus to get moving on his project for a Space Race / Right Stuff inspired role playing game.  Initial ideas for that game are here and here.  We'll see what the fuuuuuuture holds!  :-)

Billyuns and Billyuns

I was originally planning to do my Obscure RPG Appreciation Day (May 30) post about a quirky sci-fi game called Starfaring.  I've since switched to another topic, but I did want to talk a little bit about this one, too.  This quirky game of seat-of-the-pants interstellar exploration was written by Ken St. Andre and published in 1976.  Not only did this game precede nearly all other sci-fi RPGs, it was also released into the wild a full year before the coming explosion of space opera to be ushered in by some bearded dude from the Central Valley.

Starfaring has already been very ably reviewed by Grognardia, and the offbeat (very un-PC, slightly NSFW) charm of its no-budget illustration style was conveyed further by Jeff Rients.  Since I've never played the game, I didn't think I could add much to what's already been said out there about its rules or its jokey aesthetic.  Even though its sci-fi setting is highly evocative of Star Trek, I think it also presages a bit of the sci-fact wonder that this guy managed to communicate...

...just a few years after 1976.

For me, one of the most fun parts of Starfaring is its extensive tabular system for the Game Master (um, "Galaxy Master") to randomly create interesting solar systems for the players to explore.  In the latter part of the 1980s, this was something I was trying to do myself, with the seemingly infinite tools afforded to me by a spiffy 128K Mac.  In my first forays online, I also found something called the Universe Simulation Mailing List (USML) in which people exchanged ideas and programs to do similar things.

One thing that I never really thought much about was what I would do with the simulated stars, planets, and alien races, once I had created them!  A copy of Starfaring would have done me good at that time, whether or not I would've been able to convince my friends to sit down and play a game or two.  As it was, I didn't really finish constructing any elaborate alien realms, but I can still remember a lot about my fractal algorithm for making random world maps.  Maybe I'll have to try to code it up with the, ahem, slightly more powerful tools that are available today.

Another fascinating thing about both Starfaring and USML was that their creators were working with the certain knowledge of only 9 planets.  Today, astronomers know about more than 800 planets (and those are for sure, with more than 3000 other "candidates" awaiting firmer confirmation) circling hundreds of different stars.  There are some that may be very similar to our Earth, but there are many other weird types that sci-fi authors never dreamed possible.  Here's an animation of the orbits of just a few hundred of them.

And yes, there are some like this, too.

Prediction time:  In my lifetime (I'm in my mid-40s now, FYI) I'm saying there will be convincing data from an extrasolar planet that indicates that some kind of life exists on it.  Probably a combination of pure molecular oxygen (O2) in the atmosphere, liquid water covering much of its surface, and a signature of chlorophyll or some other photosynthetic molecule covering the rest of it.  Of course, the best bet about the details is that it'll really be something that nobody has yet imagined!  All of this is just beyond the reach of current telescopes, but a lot can be done in a few measly decades.  :-)