Tabby’s Star

 

I used to be in the know with this kinda stuff, but sadly not of late. Ever since my physics days, mid-90s, I subscribed to Astronomy and, later, Sky & Telescope. I knew the constellations, the stars within them, how to locate the planets and such phenomena as Cygnus X-1, the likeliest candidate for a black hole. A pal and I would regularly motor up north to the woods in the frigid cold of winter or in the middle of a buggy summer night, drink a few beers and point my telescope all over the night sky. But not for a long time. The magazines became politicized about a decade ago and I did not renew my subscriptions. Other things bullied for my attention, and despite a desire to keep up with astronomical doings, I haven’t.

Then I heard about Tabby’s Star.

I won’t tell you the source of my initial information about Tabby’s Star, as it’s somewhat less reputable than Astronomy or Sky & Telescope. But Tabby’s Star is a real thing. It’s a real star, first discovered back in 1890. It has an official name, KIC 8462852. It sits 1,480 light years away in the constellation Cygnus, visually a little past halfway between the star Deneb (the “head” of the “Northern Cross”) and its first bright star on the right arm. But don’t try to find it, as it can’t be seen by the naked eye. It can’t even be seen by my telescope (it requires a 5-inch or greater to be viewed).

What makes Tabby’s Star so special is that its brightness fluctuates on an irregular basis, up to 22 percent in brightness, something highly irregular in our universe.

What might cause this?

Well, in September of 2015, a group of “citizen scientists” searching for exoplanets, described the dimming problem in detail and offered some suggestions. Among those are –

   * An uneven ring of dust and debris orbiting the star

   * Some strange, currently unexplainable difference in the star’s photosphere

   * Similar to the ring of dust, a field of cold, dirty cometary fragments in highly eccentric orbits about the star

   * Or a large number of smaller masses circling about it in a tight formation

   * Or on a larger scale, perhaps Tabby’s Star is orbited by a single large planet with several oscillating rings of its own

   * Or for a more grimmer take, perhaps Tabby’s Star is in the slow process of devouring a large planet

But my favorite potential explanation, and those of many on the fringe, is –

   * Perhaps intelligent life is constructing a Dyson Sphere about the star.

Whoa.

What is a Dyson Sphere?

Picture a highly technologically evolved race in the process of constructing a sphere enclosing and encapsulating its star. Such a sphere would necessarily be a hundred or a thousand times the diameter of the star itself. And why would such a sphere be built around a sun? To capture a large portion of the energy radiating from the star, to power and fuel an interstellar civilization which had the means to do such an incredible feat of engineering.

Scientists convinced SETI – that part of NASA concerned with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – to point its radio telescopes at Tabby’s Star in light of this last possibility. And for a whole two weeks they did so, and found no evidence of alien transmission of radio signals.

So the search, and the mental quest for what exactly is happening about Tabby’s Star continues …

Oh, and you’re probably wondering why it’s called Tabby’s Star. It’s for the lead author of that 2015 paper – astronomer Tabetha Boyajian. KIC 8462852 also goes by several other names. Boyajian’s Star, naturally. Also the WTF star, which can informally stand for “where’s the flux?” or “what the f***?” Some refer to it whimsically as LGM-2, in honor of the first pulsar discovered, which was casually known as LGM-1, for “little green men.”

What do I think?

Well, I can’t lie and say that the whole Dyson’s Sphere angle does not intrigue me to the point of shivers. But there’s this thing called Occam’s Razor …

 

Gettin’ Old

 

Argh. Stress at work has given me heartburn; I’m waking up so often during the night I’ve taken to taking Tums proactively before bed. And yesterday, while doing nothing except turning my torso gently to the right, I seemed to have pulled a muscle in the lower left spinal region. While laying on the floor last night watching TV with the ladies I rolled over and it erupted in a piercing bolt of painful lightning all up and down my poor back that I could hardly move. Last night I slept terribly; woke at 2:15 am and went down to the basement office and watched, among other things, 1963’s Godzilla vs. King Kong on the internet.

I have been eating well again, and I think I lost a few pounds. I walked a few times and hurled the weights early in the week, too. But it seems like it’s one of those one-step-forward, two-steps-back kinda things. The more progress I make towards living a healthy lifestyle, the more work I find I need to do.

Or maybe it was just a string of bad luck. The work stress seems to be solving itself, and I should have some resolution Monday. Hopefully it won’t affect my weekend circadian rhythms. That is, if I’m going in to work, as we’re expecting snow here in northern New Jersey Sunday night into Tuesday morning.

On a better note, I finished Craig Nelson’s Pearl Harbor: From Infamy to Greatness. What a fantastic book! In my World War II readings, I discovered that books in the subject generally fall into two broad categories: those that take a bird’s-eye view, focusing on strategy, battle tactics, the big personalities, the massed movements of armed forces, global repercussions, and those that focus on the man-on-the-ground, the soldier and his experiences, the awful events faced by civilians caught in the crossfire, and how such battles and policies affected the populations involved. Bird’s-eye view versus man-on-the-ground. What Nelson’s book does is create the best balance between these two angles of the twenty or so books I’ve read to date. I highly recommend it, and will keep an eye out for more of his work. There are a couple of lectures of his on the internet I listened to during my commute to work that I’d recommend also.

On the other hand, I’m having difficulty making headway into Red Mars. This is the book that’s lived the longest on my shelves, the elder statesman of the forty or fifty SF paperbacks I have on deck. I first cracked it around 2001, two decades ago, and only made it through the prologue. Now I’m around 160 pages in, almost a third of the way through, and it’s still slow going. But I’m keeping an open mind and will review it later next month.

My youngest daughter, age twelve, alternates indoor soccer with weight training at a local gym. Last night after dropping her off, my oldest and I drove to B&N, where I picked up, entirely on whims, two slim water-themed SF paperbacks (I’ve been reading too many time-consuming epics of late). One is The Maracot Deep, a tale about Atlantis by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the other The Water of Thought by Fred Saberhagen, something about alien water that gives people weird psychological powers and/or makes them go mad (?). They’re now the newest denizens of the On Deck circle, and may their shelf life be, uh, a fraction of that of Red Mars.

I also unearthed a high school notebook of mine, a record of what was going through my head forty years ago. Thumbing through it, I realized I just hit a gold mine. I discovered dozens and dozens of character names, perfect for the novel I’ve been planning out these past couple of weeks. Bad guy names, good guy names, background guy names. (It’s a novel based on World War II, so there are lots of guys as opposed to chicks.)

Broke out the electric guitar a couple times this week. Wrote another composition – I now think I have something like six albums worth of material – three CDs in today’s lingo. (Do the young ’uns even buy CDs anymore? Don’t think so …) Couple new things I’ve been fiddling with is “Motherless Children” – known to people my age as the theme from “Not Necessarily the News,” and the Dio-led Black Sabbath song “Neon Knights.” Among other stuff.

Well, that’s enough of an update. More meaty stuff to follow in the next couple of days.

 

A Joke for Our Times

 

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

A: Because he saw me walking maskless down the sidewalk during my morning exercise.

 

 

Yeah, I know. Not really funny. Kinda sad, actually …

“Devout”

 

OK, we’re going to hear this word a lot from our illustrious press corps over the next four years.

The secular media does not understand this word.

They believe that someone can be a devout Catholic if he goes to daily mass.

That helps, yes, but it is not the main determinant of devout-ness.

Devout means you believe wholeheartedly in that which you are devout towards.

And belief manifests itself outwardly in words and actions.

Thus, a devout Catholic is not pro-abortion. Nor does his legislative actions put men and women out of honest work for a debatable secular gain. Nor does he, say, for instance, officiate at a gay wedding.

These are not actions of a devout Catholic because devout Catholics do not do these things, because they do not accept such things are sanctioned by their beliefs.

Simply going to mass every day or carrying a Rosary in one’s pocket does not make one a devout Catholic.

It must be confessed that a good segment of the bishops and cardinals in the Catholic Church cannot be described as devout.

The point is, “devout”, “devout-ness”, is a high bar. It’s a rough, tough standard to meet. Few do, and those few are generally called Saints.

So the center square in the Presidential Bingo Card for the next four years will be: DEVOUT.

Or if you’re playing the Presidential Drinking Game, take a sip every time the press describes the man as a “devout Catholic.”

Anything larger could result in a nasty case of alcohol poisoning.

 

I am NOT Pro-Life

 

I have reconsidered some of my long-held beliefs recently.

Well, not really reconsidered. More like, clarified.

I am no longer Pro-Life.

Yes, you read that correctly.

What I am, is Anti-abortion.

And as a corollary, I am also Pro-Capital Punishment.

Anti-abortion.

Pro-Execution.

Protect the innocent.

Punish the guilty.*

I am decidedly not Pro-Life.

 

(Hat tip to Timothy Gordon and William M. Briggs)

 

* I will state for the record, though it should not be necessary but I wish for certitude here, that the guilty party must have been legitimately convicted of a heinous crime in a legitimate court of law and must have had said conviction reviewed by a legitimate authority over such matters.

Return to Tolkien

 

Well, out of the blue yesterday a strong urge to re-read Tolkien swept over me. I kinda know that this will happen when I find myself dissatisfied with “life out there,” as well as when I’m looking to recharge my reading activity. Yes, I have some hard SF paperbacks on deck, and yes, I still want to read them. I am getting ready to crack open Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, again, for the first time in two decades, tomorrow. And after that, I’ll probably check out the John C. Wright book I mentioned in an earlier post. I am looking forward excitedly to those two reads, in light of my enjoyment of the hard SF I read in November and December.

But Tolkien beckons. Yes, I did re-read the Hobbit this time last year. Due mainly because the family bought me a special leather-bound Hobbit/Lord of the Rings set. So after a couple of hard SF’s are put in the can (and I can get back “into the feel” for SF to pen my outlined novel), I will venture back to Middle-earth. It’s going on nearly five years since I journeyed with Frodo and Aragorn et al, so the time is right.

Oh, and I have been watching a fair amount of Tolkien videos out there on the web, something I never really have done before. One thing I particularly noticed is the gusto with which these guys attack Tolkien pronunciation. What zeal! What zest! I mean, the Scottish guttural ch’s, the sibilant and ululant Finnish / Quenya syllables, the sturm-und-drang of Khuzdul, the language of the Dwarves. How did this all elude me in the numerous readings and re-readings of the Master?

Sadly, and horrifically, I realize I read Tolkien with a New Jersey accent.

Now, it’s not like Tony, Paulie, and Richie Aprile are sitting round the counsel of Elrond like they did outside that butcher shop in Carlstadt.

But what I’ve heard interiorly is but a far, far cry from the sounds that must have resonated in Tolkien’s mind.

So with this re-reading, my goal is to speak the languages, the names of people and places, as Tolkien would, in my head.

March 1st would be a great embarkation date …

Thought(less)

 

“What is most thought-provoking in these thought-provoking times, is that we are still not thinking.”

 – Martin Heidegger

 

Oh how I pine for the misspent days of my youth, pre-Internet, where anything worthy of interest had to be diligently sought out, read, pondered, and re-read, soul stirring stuff rarely transmitted in 280 pages, let alone 280 characters.

Quick example? I fondly think back on the hours and hours spent wandering the book shelves in the Rutgers library on College Avenue, five floors worth of rickety metal shelving holding dusty dusky books dozens and decades years old. The frayed cloth jackets of those esoteric relics from prior ages, cradled reverently in my hands, fingerprinted with ghosts of students past. My initial forays into religious and philosophic ideas, unguided (and, hence, usually unfruitful), a drunken ramble through pre-modern thought (and modern does not necessarily mean “better”). One key phrase or paragraph or reference would lead me to another book, and another, and another.

The good old days.

When I learned to think.

 

A Sane Take

I despise the state of politics since 2016. Actually, since 2008. I can think of few things worse to dwell on and be obsessed with than politics. The dumb jerk at my office is going to be in hysterics over the events of yesterday. I have no interest in it. But, as the saying goes, “you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.”

Here’s the sane take:

You have 5 percent of the left that are the crazy true believers. You have 5 percent of the right that are the crazy true believers. They see violence as a legitimate means of gaining power. Their cause is the true cause, and those diametrically opposed to them are pure evil.

These two groups are inflamed by politicians and certain groups to nudge the culture in the direction that will obtain power for said politicians and certain groups.

One side has academia, tech, the media, and, now, sports. The other has talk radio, the military, and a great swath of America between the coasts. One sides holds an idealized image of an America better than it actually is, the other holds a slandered image of an America worse than it is.

Ninety percent of us just want to live our lives in peace. We want to be free to work where we want doing what we want. We obey just laws. We attend religious services. We save for vacations and for retirement, for our children’s education and to have a better life in general. We care for our fellow man. We respect those who hold these similar beliefs. We are not racists, homophobes, or fascists. Nor are we communists or socialists. The Ninety Percent are the red blood cells of America, the engine of America, the heart and brains and marrow of America.

Like some invading pathogen, the extreme left and the extreme right need to be walled off and ultimately starved out. Never happen, but thanks to the omnipresent amplifier of anonymity that the Internet is, the voices of these extreme fringes, and those in power and/or political office or those seeking power and/or political office, seem louder than they actually are.

And that is what has led to all this talk of a second civil war.

Instead of Make America Great Again or Build Back Better, how about a

RETURN TO NORMALCY.

 

Hard SF on Deck

 

Over the past year or two I’ve found myself consuming lots of fantasy, historical, and horror fiction, in about that order of volume. All well and good. I enjoy my forays into fantasy, such as my travels in the Malazan Empire over the summer, my evenings spent in Victorian London on Baker Street, or the nightmares I’ve spent with Dr. Warthrop monster hunting.

But now that I’ve got a skeleton of an outline and fourteen pages of ideas to adorn it, I’m going to have to switch to hard SF. Science fiction that’s just as heavy on the science as it is on the fiction. It’s like a boxer getting ready to enter the ring again, or a football team advancing to the league championships. You gotta watch tape of your next opponent, to know where you stand. What needs to improve, what weaknesses need to be attacked, what’s been done to death and where advantages lie.

The genre this new idea I’ve been infatuated and on fire with since October 1 will be hard science fiction, and some things I’m going to have to address are such things as cultures and societies of different planets at war with each other, as well as how that war will be waged and what futuristic weapons will be waging it.

The last two books I put away since Thanksgiving past helped orient me to a proper frame of mind: The World at the End of Time by Frederik Pohl and As on a Darkling Plain by Ben Bova. To read over the next three months I picked five other paperbacks off my shelf as I’m completing my outline and my characters and plot and produce the rough draft:

Red Mars (1993) by Kim Stanley Robinson. Won Nebula Award for Best Novel, book one of a trilogy.

This one’s been on the shelf for nearly 20 years. I remember forging in 50 pages back around the time of 9/11. Then that whole thing happened and my interest in the book dropped overnight. A couple of jobs followed, then the wife and I bought a house, had children, I took other jobs, and all the while this book of man’s attempt to terraform the Red Planet gained dust on the far end of the bookshelf.

Count to a Million (2011) by John C. Wright

This book, on the other hand, I picked up six weeks ago, purely on the basis that the author has one of the greatest blogs on the Internet. I – and those whose blogs I read – have been reading him for years, but only now, unfortunately and to my shame, have I purchased a ticket into his SF world. Not sure what it’s about, exactly, though the back cover talks about gunslingers and apocalypses, cryosuspension and alien artifacts. Hmm. Sounds intriguing.

Nexus (2013) by Ramez Naam, book one of a trilogy

Picked this up Saturday purely on a whim and a quick scan of the summary. Could be crap, could be the Next Big Thing. Certainly it seems to be the exact type of story Hollywood would greenlight: a new drug sweeps society, allowing humans the mind meld with each other, and nefarious things are afoot once an innocent researcher comes across evidence of such afooted things of nefariousness. Seems a bit Crichtonesque, too, and I went through a late-90s phase were I read everything of his.

And a pair by Alan Dean Foster:

Voyage to the City of the Dead (1984)

Alan Dean Foster gained fame and fortune through SF movie novelizations – I first read him in the Alien novelization. Later I realized I had read him earlier, as a pre-teen, as he had ghost-written George Lucas’s Star Wars novel. Over the years I’ve read a bunch more, plus, and this is important, a very, very involving, suspenseful and original work, Midworld. My enjoyment with that book inspired me to pick this one up, a study of three alien cultures interacting on a river world. I bought it on vacation down in Hilton Head six years ago and read 40 or 50 pages, but put it down upon returning home and never picked it up again. Until now.

Phylogenesis (1999), book one of a trilogy

Not entirely sure what plot this one follows, but it involves a limited relationship between humans and an insect race in the years first contact. Both species find the other repulsive. But two misfits, a human and a Thranx, meet and momentous adventure ensues.

So that’s 2021 Q1 reading, so to speak. If I buzz through them I have a trio of Heinlein as backup – Between Planets, Citizen of the Galaxy, and a possible re-reading of Time for the Stars.