SF Synchronicity

One reason I enjoy SF is all the esoteric trivia and useless facts that get absorbed into this mushy cerebellum somehow connect up in weird and interesting ways. “Synchronicity,” I believe the term is, coined in the early 20th century by psychologist Carl Jung. I envision some invisible ethereal realm, definitely Platonic, in which these ideas inexplicably exist, awaiting to be captured or encapsulated by our finite minds on some higher dimension we cannot have direct experience.

No, I am not stoned.

I do believe this, though not in any particularly thought-out or well-developed system.

Anyway, I’m reading this very, very good SF book, The Godwhale. And as I’m reading, I’m absorbing a lot of this esoteric trivia and useless facts that you’ll find in any well-written work written by a well-read writer. (alliteration!) Mr. Bass, who I still have not researched for my review, not having finished the novel just yet, knows his stuff well enough to convince me he knows his stuff. There’s a lot of medical jargon thrown about, things from surgical terms to biochemistry, which makes me think either Bass is a scientist-writer or doctor-writer, or that his major hobby must be reading medical journals. But more interesting to me is that, since most of Godwhale takes place on and under the ocean, there’s a lot of sea science thrown in.

There’s a lot of discussion about the bends in the novel (where it’s called the “pops”), that painful and potentially deadly situation that occurs when nitrogen bubbles into the bloodstream if a diver depressurizes too quickly (as in rushing to the surface from a deep dive). This triggered a memory in me: I researched all this stuff almost a decade ago when I wrote a short story called, vividly enough, “The Bathysphere.”

I flicked on the dusty old laptop and searched through my ancient word docs – all 400-plus of them – and found my notes on, let’s call it “sea science” for lack of any particular theme or direction. Got them from a neat little book I read entitled The Eternal Darkness.

Want to hear a couple of tidbits? Who knows, they may be the questions to tomorrow’s answers on Jeopardy …

- Every 33 feet you descend under water, the pressure doubles. At 33 feet below the surface, you’re at 2 atmospheres. At 300 feet, you’re at 10 atmospheres.

- An “atmosphere,” that is, the pressure of the air pressing down on you, is 15 pounds per square inch at sea level. You don’t feel it because you’re body is built to withstand such pressure. But if you descended to 300 feet below the surface, you’d start to feel it, as it is now 150 pounds per square inch of pressure.

- For most of the history of mankind, we’ve only descended to about a maximum depth of 100 feet. Think of all that undersea splendor, hidden from our eyes!

- In the 19th century we started to reach depths of about 500 feet. Remember those old divers with the iron helmets and the air tubes attached to them, with weights on their feet to help them descend? Here’s where the bends start their unwelcome knocking at the door of Scientific Advancement.

- Bathyspheres begin reaching greater and greater depths during the early 20th century, reaching significantly greater depths but still only in the low thousands of feet.

- The greatest depth in the ocean is the Mariana Trench, a couple hundred miles off the coast of Japan. It’s 35,800 feet deep. That’s over 6,000 feet deeper than Mount Everest is high.

- The average depth of the ocean, though, is about 12,500 feet.

- The average temperature at the bottom of the ocean is about 4 degrees above freezing, or 36 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s cold!

- Not only is it cold, but it’s dark. Pitch black. Due to the properties of water and the scattering ability of particles within the water, light does not reach much further down than a couple tens of feet. So don’t forget a flashlight.

- Nuclear subs can only reach a maximum depth of about 1,500 feet. This surprised me; I thought they went down farther. But again, it’s that pressure that stops them from going further, past “crush depth.”

- The pressure at 1,500 feet is about 45 atmospheres, or 675 pounds per square inch.

And so on.

Now the circle is going to be complete. Reading The Godwhale brought me to digging out my notes from a book I read in 2002, which now, in turn, is bringing me to a short story I wrote in 2003 using all these bits of trivia and knowledge about the sea. I, who have never been more than twenty feet or so off the shore in the ocean.

I think I’ll pull it out and read “The Bathysphere” before I go get my girls at the airport this afternoon. Maybe a review in the next couple of days ...

Entrepreneurial Mindsets

There are two mistakes an entrepreneur can make; two faulty mindsets that will do nothing but guarantee failure. *

The first is FIRE! READY! AIM!

This is the mindset of the man who doesn’t do all his homework. He’s got a great idea (or at least thinks he does) and immediately runs with it. Maybe not all the way to the bank, at least not yet, and maybe not straight to the poorhouse, either. But I think it’s obvious that this mindset isn’t the most efficient one to hold if you value your time and your money.

Ever hear the old cliché, “By failing to plan, you’re planning to fail”? It describes this mindset, and it’s true.

The second is READY! AIM! READY! AIM! READY! AIM! etc, etc, etc …

This is almost the complete opposite of the first mindset, a hundred-n-eighty degree shift. Here you do too much homework. As a matter of fact, homework is really all you do. Instead of running all the way to the bank, the poorhouse, or some destination between, you’re not even leaving the starting gate! Similarly, this mindset is as inefficient as the first one in terms of your valuable time and money. Some would hold even less so, since you don’t have feedback to work with as to the efficacy of your idea / business plan.

Ever hear of the phrase, “analysis paralysis”? I’m the poster boy for it.

I’m trying to set up a couple of niche websites to make some money. Not looking to become an overnight millionaire; I’m realistic and practical. But I do see it as an opportunity at making something doing something I quite enjoy. The first mindset, the Fire Ready Aim mindset, scares me a bit, but I really don’t have much to lose at this stage of the game. I’m much more wary of getting stuck in the Ready Aim Ready Aim Etc loop. However, I got several ticking clocks, all constantly ticking and tocking and counting down to various zero hours that I don’t think this will be a problem either.

More details? Well, as soon as I have some, you’ll be the first to know …


* As I alluded to in the middle of the post, there really is no failure, as long as you keep trying. Or, to phrase it another way, failure is giving up. Some writers encourage us to replace the word failure with outcome, to lessen the psychological stigma. Think of the old Edison story, of how he went through a gazillion chemical compounds in search of the filament to glow in an electric light bulb. He never thought he failed a gazillion times, only that he produced a gazillion successful outcomes.

Heb 12:1b-3

While watching a bunch of really bad movies last night, I was thumbing through a couple of books: an antireligious self-help book (why the fervent need to be “antireligious”?), my old calculus book (I like reading the mathematician bios – go figure), my Astronomy magazines, and a somewhat-Protestant-tinged Bible study guide.

It was the last book, a slim little devotional to “Excellence,” from a Biblical point-of-view, that made the greatest impression on with me, especially as I got ready for bed and slumbered the pre-dawn hours away. This quote, in particular:


“ … let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith. For the sake of the joy that lay before Him He endured the Cross, despising its shame, and has taken His seat at the right of the throne of God. Consider how He endured such opposition from sinners, in order that you may not grow weary and lose heart.”


It’s Hebrews, chapter 12, verses 1b-3.

I’m not familiar with that book, towards the end of the New Testament. In full I only read it once, way back in ’92 when I read through the Bible from beginning to end mid-February to mid-April. I’ve tried reading through it a couple times since, but I always found it a dry and somewhat difficult read. I’d say it’s easily the most difficult book of the New Testament. I’d rather read Revelation, or the Gospels, or even Romans.

Anyway, the verses stuck with me all through the night, echoing behind my occipital bones.

“Keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus”… Do any of us really do that? Is that what is expected of us, truly, those who claim to be Christians? Those who claim to be “disciples” of Christ? Can it be humanly done? Keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus?

Think about it. What do we normally focus on throughout the day? Work? Family? Politics? The mindless inanities we watch on the tube (such as The Amityville Horror)? The single-minded pursuit of short-term and fleeting pleasures? Or simple and possibly self-destructive ways to avoid pain? Imagined sleights, guilt over things that may or may not have happened years ago, anxiety and fear over an illusive future? How about the next item on a never-ending to-do list? Seriously. If you had to chart out in an Excel spreadsheet the percentage of your thoughts * , what would the break down be? Do you even spend 1 percent on Christ? **

Paul tells us to keep our eyes on Jesus. He also says to pray ceaselessly (1 Thessalonians 5:17). Can you possibly imagine how your life may change if you took this admonition literally?

Perhaps that’s why those three verses reverberated within my mind throughout the night.


* I’ve read that we have up to 45,000 thoughts a day. I don’t know the veracity of that figure, but I think it makes sense. If you’re awake 18 hours a day, that breaks down to 2500 thoughts an hour, or about 41 thoughts a minute, which yields the average time of just over a second per thought. Makes sense if you count the fleeting stimuli that enter our mind and average in those periods we concentrate on a narrow band of ideas or images.

** One percent of 45,000 is 450. Do you think about Jesus Christ 450 times a day? I don’t know about you, but I consider myself fairly devoted, and I probably think of Him maybe ten or twenty times a day. That’s something like half-a-percent of one percent. Good grief! I spend more thoughts in internal debate on what flavor ice cream to buy at the grocery store … Lord help me!