In what surely must be a legal first, the Texas Supreme Court has cited an alien off-worlder in a recent judgment, a fictional alien at that. In Robinson v. Crown Cork and Seal, the Texas court cited Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, from the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. You will recall that, in one of the finest scenes in the film, Mr. Spock dies heroically saving the Enterprise and her crew. Just before dying, he says to Kirk, “Don’t grieve, Admiral. It is logical…” And he reminds Kirk that “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…or the one.”
In the following movie, The Search for Spock, Kirk turns this dictum on its head by telling Spock that the reason they came for him was because the needs of the one outweighed the needs of the many.
“Appropriately weighty principles guide our course. First, we recognize that police power draws from the credo that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Second, while this maxim rings utilitarian and Dickensian (not to mention Vulcan21), it is cabined by something contrarian and Texan: distrust of intrusive government and a belief that police power is justified only by urgency, not expediency.”
Footnote 21 reads: See STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (Paramount Pictures 1982). The film references several works of classic literature, none more prominently than A Tale of Two Cities. Spock gives Admiral Kirk an antique copy as a birthday present, and the film itself is bookended with the book’s opening and closing passages. Most memorable, of course, is Spock’s famous line from his moment of sacrifice: “Don’t grieve, Admiral. It is logical. The needs of the many outweigh . . .” to which Kirk replies, “the needs of the few.”
Some have pointed to earlier quotations for this thought, including Aristotle, and the Gospel of John 11:49-50 in the Bible (which quotes Caiaphas, the High Priest, expressing a similar thought). But really, I think Spock said it the most succinctly.
Yes, it’s true! (If you forgive my slight poetic license.) High school students from Brookline, Massachusetts shot a terrific video of Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft coming down through the atmosphere and breaking apart in a fiery cascade over the Australian outback. The lucky students were aboard a NASA DC-8 aircraft, monitoring the reentry, which landed a separate reentry vehicle (visible to the right of the breakup in the video), bringing back samples of an asteroid.
I can’t find a way to embed the video (dang!), which might be just as well, considering how my last embedding effort turned out. But watch it here. And read the full story about these high school students who got a surprise trip Downunder in a NASA jet.
I first came across this video on Tobias Buckell’s blog. It’s a short animation of a talk about what gives us motivation, according to psychological studies. The speaker is Dan Pink, author of the book Drive. If you’re interested in which drives us more, money or satisfaction, take a few minutes to watch this.
I wondered how sound the actual science was, so I asked my resident expert, my brother Chuck, who happens to be a distinguished professor of psychology. The answer? “Go to selfdeterminationtheory.org. Deci and Ryan have been studying these things for…40 years.” Sound, in other words, but hardly new.
New or not, though, it’s something people all walks of life would do well to think about.
We’ve just passed the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jacques Cousteau, the famed underwater explorer who died in 1997. It was Turner Classic Movies that turned me on to this fact, by running a series of classic Cousteau TV documentaries, including Cousteau Odyssey and the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.
I practically idolized Cousteau during the period that these shows aired. In fact, as a college student who had taken up scuba diving (in chilly Rhode Island waters), I wrote to Captain Cousteau, basically asking for a summer job. To my delight, he wrote back, saying that he’d like to meet me the next time he was in New York. I waited, and didn’t hear from him. I wrote again, and heard back again. But unfortunately, the meeting never happened. (This was long before email or cheap long distance telephone, so the whole thing hinged on snail mail.) Despite that disappointment, I maintained my interest in underwater exploration. I even used it in my SF—with a novelette in F&SF, and later, with my novels Seas of Ernathe and The Infinite Sea.
I was feeling nostalgic for those days tonight, poking around online—and in the process, I came across this Ted Talk by National Geographic underwater photographer Brian Skerry. It’s a great talk, and is filled with phenomenal undersea images. Give it a look.
Here’s a video anyone concerned about the BP oil spill should watch. That’s pretty much everyone, right? It’s got lots of bad language, but what’s a little bad language when greedy, incompetent corporations are busy destroying the planet? Watch it even if it bothers you. The first couple of minutes of the video are background. The real meat of it starts with the discussion of booming school. This is based on an article originally published on Daily Kos.
I just finished writing about the wonderful new space technology being developed. But technology has its dark side, and this story is all about technology badly used. That’s important to know about, too.
I wrote recently about how Falcon 9, a new launcher from SpaceX, was awaiting its first test launch. Well, last Friday it went off beautifully. This is the rocket that’s scheduled to take over the job of carrying cargo (and perhaps eventually people) to the International Space Station after the retirement of the shuttle fleet. This flight carried a dummy Dragon capsule into orbit. The Falcon 9 builds on the model of the Saturn 5 moon rocket, using a cluster of nine engines, and having the ability to achieve orbit even it loses an engine. It’s in the size and power class of the Delta IV and Atlas V launchers that currently serve many launch needs. But the goal of the program is to bring down the cost of launch to orbit.
Here’s a video that pretty much shows the whole flight to orbit in realtime, mostly from an onboard camera. It’s pretty cool. Note that it starts at T minus one minute, so you might want to fast forward at the beginning.
A family of red-tailed hawks have taken roost on the front ledge of a building near us, opposite the Fresh Pond Shopping Center in Cambridge. The first flight of one of the fledglings created quite a stir the other day. And the day following, I happened to be passing through the parking lot of the office building when I found a crowd of people gathered around a parked car. There, on the roof of the car, was the young hawk—peering around, probably wondering who all these yahoos were that were getting in the way of his flight training. I snapped a few shots with my cell camera, and a few minutes later, he took wing and got himself up onto a tall CVS sign in the same lot.
They’ve been drawing crowds of birdwatchers from all over the area. There’s a gallery of some pretty good pix on Boston.com. But—rather like my experience watching the space shuttle launch—the pictures don’t compare to standing fifteen feet from the (not so) little guy, watching him try to make sense of it all. I could identify.
I haven’t written yet about my reaction to the proposed change of course for the U.S. space program. To be honest, the Obama proposal threw me for a loop. In case you just got back from Antarctica and haven’t heard, President Obama’s budget proposal for NASA was a shocker: When the space shuttle is retired at the end of this year, the plan is to turn responsibility for manned launch-to-orbit over to the private sector. They’re working on it, they say they can do it—and cheaper—so let’s turn ’em loose to do it. Buy seats on the Russian Soyuz in the interim. And that multi-billion-dollar Constellation program to send astronauts back to the Moon? Cancel it. It’s over budget and troubled, and was never properly funded to begin with. So what’s NASA’s job, then? Plan for the future; invest in new technologies; go into deep space to visit an asteroid, then aim for Mars—say, by the mid 2030s. Total funding to increase, but get NASA out of the routine business of space transportation. For one good analysis, look at Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait’s comments.
There’s a lot to like in the Obama proposal—though after watching Atlantis launch in person, I’m not sure there’s anything “routine” about launching humans into orbit. Putting that aside, though, what’s good about the plan? Well, long-range planning, with a genuine vision for exploration, is always good. While I believe we have unfinished business on the Moon, visiting an asteroid is also a terrific idea. We might have to move one of those suckers one of these days, to keep it from snuffing us like the dinosaurs; furthermore, we might find ourselves mining the asteroids for metals like nickel and iron, for future space construction. Time to start learning how.
What’s not to like? Well, laying off a highly skilled and experienced workforce, for one thing. Under the Obama proposal, a lot of those people who know how to put things into space will be out of jobs in a year or two—a frightening loss of human infrastructure. Some might find jobs in the private companies like SpaceX, who hope to step into the gap. But many won’t. And what about the astronaut corps? Have we trained them, only to turn them out? Are we abdicating our hard-earned leadership role in space, as Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan think? It could happen. Our astronauts are split on the question. And what about this long-range thinking? That’s okay to talk about today, but what happens when the next administration comes in? Will they want to make their own mark, and change directions yet again? One space expert I talked to said that was his biggest concern. In fact, according to him, the whole reason we don’t already have a replacement for the shuttle is because we keep changing course every four years.
I picked some brains while I was at the Nebulas. One writer I talked to, someone who’s a big space booster, and definitely on the conservative side politically, said, “I don’t much like Obama. But I do think his proposal has a lot of merit.” That took me aback, as did another person on the inside, who said, maybe losing all that experience won’t be all bad. Maybe new blood will be willing to try new ideas.
So what do I think? I’m not sure I have enough information to carve out a position. I’d love to see the shuttle keep flying a little longer, while we design a replacement. But the spare parts lines have already been shut down; the business of retiring the thing is already well underway. To reverse that could cost billions. Am I ready to depend on other countries to supply the space station we’ve built at such a cost? I hate the thought. Can Elon Musk and SpaceX, and similar smaller companies, step into the breach? Maybe. We’ll have a better idea when the Falcon 9 test rocket launches later this year. But what’s Congress going to do? That’s as hard to predict as the weather. Stay tuned. It’s going to be interesting.
SpaceX Falcon 9 static fire on launch pad
“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” — Proverbs 29:18
Did this make the news outside Massachusetts? Probably, because we’re in a state of emergency again. And again it’s water, but this time from a pipe. Today the main aqueduct supplying water to most of the greater Boston area broke, sending our drinking water gushing into the Charles River. This is the new tunnel that was built less than a decade ago, and was expected to safeguard us against a break in the old aqueduct (which is now under renovation and not in service).
Our water utility, the MWRA, switched to backup reservoirs, which are not of drinkable quality. So starting today, and for who knows how long, we have to boil our drinking and handwashing and food-prep water. And when it’s all over, we’re going to be flushing the pond-scum out of our pipes. That could be days or weeks from now. The section of pipe that broke was a custom-made, 10-foot wide, stainless steel pipe installed just six or seven years ago. I’ll bet they don’t carry those down at Ace Hardware or Lowes.
By the time I got to the supermarket to see if there was any bottled water left, you couldn’t even buy seltzer. Looks like I knew what I was doing when I laid in a stock of beer the other day.
Although Amazon staff publicly stated they were conceding to Macmillan in the big battle over ebook pricing, they still have not restored Macmillan/Tor titles to their listings. Is this a continued tantrum against Macmillan, to punish them for their negotiating position? Does Amazon care how many authors they’re harming? (I think we know the answer to that one.) I am a longtime Amazon customer and Amazon Associate, but I don’t plan to send them any more of my dollars as long as they continue this senseless war.
Since Amazon is no longer selling new copies of Sunborn, let me post some purchase links here to stores that will sell it to you. (Betterworldbooks.com is a retailer I only just became aware of. Part of their mission is to actively support literacy programs around the world. Worth checking out.)
And let me join John Scalzi in urging you to support other Macmillan authors by buying their books from other outlets!
[Edit] Here’s a new message from Macmillan CEO John Sargent, who seems to feel that the situation may be nearing resolution. (I’m not sure I agree with his reasoning on the changes coming to publishing, but there you have it.) Meanwhile…
