Hassenpfeffer Archive

Hassenpfeffer: the final post of the Blogger version

2009-04-20T10:31:00.003-06:00

Now, don't worry, I'm not giving up blogging. I've just consolidated my blog and my main website at edwardwillett.com. So with this post, I'm going to stop updating the Blogger version of Hassenpfeffer and simply mothball it. It's not going anywhere, it just won't get any new posts.

Instead, switch your bookmarks to http://edwardwillett.com/blog/.

If you get Hassenpfeffer through an RSS feed, you'll want http://edwardwillett.com/feed.

Come on over and check out the new digs!

Photos of the Day that were Actually Taken Sunday: The Robins

2009-04-16T09:43:00.004-06:00

More photos here.

SF Signal book cover smackdown includes Terra Insegura

2009-04-16T08:17:00.006-06:00

John DeNardo over at SF Signal is running a Book Cover Smackdown--and the Stephan Martiniere cover for Terra Insegura is one of them.

So which do you like best of these three?

Terra Insegura by...me! (Cover Artist: Stephan Martiniere)
Haze by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. (Cover Artist: Sparth)
Boneshaker by Cherie Priest (Cover Artist: Jon Foster)

Of course, I like Terra Insegura, but I think Boneshaker would be my second choice. It's got that airships-and-steampunk vibe going for it.

Photo of the Day that was Actually Taken Sunday: There Goes the Sun

2009-04-15T18:26:00.003-06:00

More photos here.

A universal theory of humour

2009-04-13T11:49:00.001-06:00

I am a very funny man. I have been told so, so it must be true. You can tell how funny I am by reading my very funny writing. Like this paragraph. This paragraph is very funny. It must be because I am a very funny man. I have been told so, so it must be true.

Why we find things funny has long been a matter of contention in the scientific world, probably because humor itself is so subjective. I think the preceding paragraph is funny. You might disagree. But now I can trump your disagreement with science: that paragraph is funny because it’s based on the surprise repetition of patterns.

Until recently, theories of humour have focused on what is technically known as “getting the joke.” Rather than looking at why people find things funny, they’ve looked at what people find funny.

But last year Alastair Clarke, a British evolutionary theorist (who, judging by his online photo, is a very serious man indeed) published the first universal theory of humour: the Pattern Recognition Theory.

According to Clarke, who is nothing if not confident, his theory “changes thousands of years of incorrect analyses and mini-theories that have applied to only a small proportion of instances of humour,” offering “a vital answer as to why humour exists in every human society.”

Clarke believes that humour occurs when the brain is surprised by the recognition of a pattern, and that the humourous response is a reward that encourages more pattern recognition in the future.

That award response has evolved, Clarke says, because “an ability to recognize patterns instantly and unconsciously” has been important to our species’ survival, helping us to quickly understand our environment and function effectively within it. He points out that language, which is unique to humans, is based on patterns.

Pattern recognition kicks in early, Clarke says, noting that children as young as four months old laugh at Peek-A-Boo. Peek-A-Boo involves surprise repetition: a clear, simple pattern that changes unexpectedly.

Many years later you may find that infant laughing at a stand-up comic...or the cast of Corner Gas, the hit Canadian TV comedy that wrapped up this week. Clarke refers to the “It’s so true” form of humor, in which audience members recognize the similarities between a situation and something they have their own mental image of, but are surprised to hear it described or see it acted out.

Clarke is continuing to explore and expand his theory. Just last month, he set out what he believes are the eight patterns that are the cause of all humor “that has ever been imagined or expressed, regardless of civilization, culture or personal taste” as a press release put it (in fairly grandiose terms).

The eight patterns break down into four “patterns of fidelity,” involving the recognition of units within the same context, and four “patterns of magnitude,” involving recognition of the same unit repeated in multiple contexts.

One pattern, and probably the most basic, is positive repetition: the “unit” (whatever pattern is being recognized, an image, an action, an object, a phrase, etc.) is repeated in a similar form with the same purpose. (Rodney Dangerfield’s “I don’t get no respect!”)

Another common pattern is scale: repeating the unit in an exaggerated format. (Throw one turkey out of a helicopter and you’ve got animal abuse. Thrown a dozen out while the news anchor shouts, “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!” and you’ve got a classic comedy bit.)

For the benefit of those wishing to base their future joke-telling on sound scientific principles, the remaining patterns are division, completion, translation, applicative and qualitative recontextualization, and opposition.

Clarke says all human humour involves at least one of the eight forms of pattern recognition, and may involve multiple examples.

That being the case, can we use this universal theory to say, once and for all, whether or not I am funny?

Alas, no. “Pattern recognition remains a subjective matter, just like any other perception,” says Clarke.

In other words, what you find funny still won’t necessarily be what I find funny.

So you’ll just have to trust me when I tell you, I’m a very funny man.

Would I lie to you?

My poster for Follies

2009-04-09T13:57:00.003-06:00

I've just sent this poster of Lyric Musical Theatre of Regina's upcoming production of Stephen Sondheim's Follies (in which I'll be playing Buddy) off to be printed. Designing these things is the closest I come to doing art any more. I always enjoy it!

Oh, and let this be first notice of the production, if you're in the area. Tickets (just $25!) will go on sale within a week or so at Bach & Beyond in the Golden Mile Centre here in Regina, or online at reginalyric.com.

Part 1 of an interview with Stephan Martiniere, the cover artist for Terra Insegura...

2009-04-09T08:57:00.004-06:00

...be found here.

And just as a reminder, here's that cover art again!

The artificial scientist

2009-04-07T11:36:00.003-06:00

As I’ve noted before, the very first science column I wrote, ca. 1991, was entitled, “What is a scientist?”

Last year I re-ran that column with minor editing: the answer to the question hadn’t changed in 17 years.

But it may have changed now.

That’s because researchers at Cornell University have created a computer program that can derive fundamental physical laws from raw observational data.

In other words, they’ve created an artificial scientist.

By observing the behavior of a single pendulum, a double pendulum, and a spring-loaded linear oscillator (things you might use in a high school physics classroom), their software figured out some basic laws of physics, previously discovered by Isaac Newton and successors.

Big difference: it took human scientists centuries. The computer did it in a few hours.

This research arose from previous work by Hod Lipson, a professor of mechanical engineering at Cornell, on a self-repairing robot called Starfish.

Starfish knew how to repair itself because it was able to create a mathematical representation of the ways in which its components worked together over time. Technically, that’s called a “dynamical model,” but you could—and Lipson does—also call it a “self-image.”

With that self-image, it could make predictions about itself, and use those predictions to detect and repair damage.

Lipson and doctoral student Michael Schmidt realized that if the robot could create dynamical models from data about itself, it should also be able to create dynamical models from data about the surrounding world.

The only difference: whereas Starfish created a dynamical model of itself using robot pieces, the new algorithm creates models from mathematical pieces: variables, operators, symbols, functions.

In their experiment, the results of which were reported in the journal Science on April 3, Lipson and Schmidt fed motion-capture data of pendulums and oscillators into the algorithm. The algorithm started with a huge set of mathematical building blocks it could combine in various ways to recreate the patterns it discovered in the data. Through a process called symbolic regression (inspired by biological evolution), it compared the various combinations against each other, searching for the ones that were invariant—that didn’t change from one observation to the next.

Lipson uses the pendulum as an example. “When you look at a pendulum...some things go up, some go down,” he says. “But to recognize when something goes up another specific thing always goes down to keep the total sum constant, this is a key to understanding the observations in a deeper sense—such as recognizing the laws of conservation.”

The computer hung on to the mathematical expressions that remained constant and dumped those that weren’t. That left it with expressions that both matched the data set and could predict future behavior, which were further tested to ensure they were meaningful and not based on coincidental patterns in the data.

Finally, a human examined the results to figure out exactly what the expressions described. The researchers found that the algorithm, given data on position and velocity over time, discovered energy laws; for the pendulum, the law of conservation of momentum; and given acceleration, Newton’s second law of motion.

Using a parallel computer with 32 processors, analyzing simple linear motion took just a few minutes. The much more complex double pendulum required 30 to 40 hours. However, that time could be reduced to seven or eight hours by seeding the problem with terms from equations already derived for the simple pendulum: in other words, by allowing the algorithm to make use of knowledge it had already acquired, just like human scientists do.

Lipson and Schmidt want to continue their research by using their algorithm to examine biological systems, which are notoriously difficult to model. They hope it will be able to find invariant mathematical processes in the enormous sets of data researchers collect about biological systems and thus reveal previously unknown fundamental laws.

They’re quick to point out that their work doesn’t mean computers will make scientists obsolete. “A human still needs to pick the appropriate building-blocks and framework, as well as give words and interpretation to laws found by the computer,” says Schmidt.

To which a science fiction writer such as myself can’t help but reply, “For now.”

Quote of the Day

2009-04-02T10:56:00.002-06:00

"Trying to write when you're too tired to write is like trying to find a simile for trying to write when you're too tired to write when you're too tired to write." - Me, yesterday

Programming matter

2009-04-01T11:50:00.001-06:00

Remember the shape-changing T-1000 robot in the 1991 movie Terminator 2? It could disguise itself as anything—a policeman, the floor, whatever—and sprout tools and weapons as required.

It turns out it may very well have given us a glimpse of a very real future (though hopefully without the whole Armageddon-like-conflict-between-robots-and-humans thing).

Researchers right now are working on “programmable matter,” matter that can be ordered to assemble itself into...well, pretty much anything. You could think of it as a 3D equivalent of the pixels on a computer screen.

Imagine a bracelet that could morph into whatever electronic gadget you required, from cell-phone to pocket computer; a 3D model of a prototype car that automobile executives (if such people still exist in the future—a long shot, I know) could examine at the board-room table and tweak as desired; a single tool in your toolbox that could become a hammer, screwdriver, wrench or blade as required; a block of matter in a small apartment that could shape itself into pieces of furniture as needed; or (most creepily) a lifelike T-1000-like simulacrum of someone from the other side of the world you’re having a telephone conversation with.

Sure it sounds like science fiction, because it is—but so were computers, nuclear power and space travel before they burst into the public consciousness. And just as happened with those advances, the research that may give us programmable matter is bubbling along at labs all over the world.

There are a lot of different approaches being taken. One is Intel Corporation’s “claytronics.”

In Intel’s vision, programmable matter will be made up of tiny robots they’ve dubbed “catoms,” since they’re essentially artificial atoms which combine in various ways to create a desired object.

Each catom will contain computing power, memory, and the ability to store and share power and information with its fellows. Intel wants to eventually make each catom a sphere about 100 microns—1/10th of a millimeter, about the size of a fine grain of sand—in diameter. If that sounds too cramped to contain any computing power, you don’t realize just how miniaturized computers have become.

“This is acres of space for nanoelectronic circuits,” is how Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer puts it.

With catoms that size, he says, “You could have a cup full of (them), or a tray, and (they) can be programmed to take on any arbitrary shape.”

That’s the goal. Right now, though, instead of making spheres, Intel is making cylinders, little tubes, each with 24 electromagnets around its circumference which can be powered on or off to move the catom in relationship to other catoms as their computers exchange information based on their programming.

These prototype catoms are about one millimeter in diameter and about 10 millimetres long. At a smaller size the electromagnets would give way to electrostatic forces.

Despite—or because of—the tiny sizes involved, the remaining challenges are immense. A lot of the work Intel is doing is aimed at developing the necessary programming to tell thousands of cooperating but distributed processors how to work together to create a particular object. New programming languages, algorithms and debugging tools are needed. (And what happens when someone develops a computer virus that attacks your programmable matter? Hmmm...is that a science fiction story I see before me?)

How close is all this? Jason Campbell, one of the key researchers at Intel working on the project, says his personal estimate of how long it will take has gone down from 50 years, when he started working there four years ago, to “just a couple more years.”

And remember, Intel’s is only one lab researching programmable matter, and their approach is only one of those under development. Eventually, one of these approaches may give us artificial, programmable atoms roughly the size of real atoms. And at that point...

Well, Clarke’s Law (formulated by famed science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke) pretty much covers it: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

If programmable matter really takes off, we’re going to enter a world where the mythical powers of wizards will become available to all of us.

Whether you find that exhilarating or scary probably depends on your view of human nature.

An instantaneous, universal, programmable vaccine?

2009-03-24T12:04:00.001-06:00

Efforts to immunize people against disease go back to at least 600 B.C., when the Chinese attempted to immunize people against smallpox by putting smallpox material in their nostrils (the permitting of which, I would think, would require a great deal of faith in your doctor).

Modern immunization began in 1796 when a British physician, Edward Jenner, noting that people who had had the much-less-deadly cowpox did not catch smallpox, inserted material from cowpox sores into the arm of a healthy eight-year-old boy. The boy caught cowpox, but when he was exposed to smallpox eight weeks later, he did not contract the often-fatal disease.

Vaccines have since become a mainstay of public health. Their impact has been enormous. Consider measles: in 2007, according to the World Health Organization, 197,000 people died of measles worldwide. That’s 540 people a day, or 22 people an hour. That sounds awful, and it is: but it’s tremendously good news compared to just a few years ago. Thanks to a worldwide focus on measles vaccinations, measles deaths dropped 74 percent between 2000 and 2007, and a whopping 90 percent in the eastern Mediterranean and Africa regions.

Vaccines, as I’ve written before, work by tricking the body's immune system into treating them as a full-fledged infection. Traditional vaccines consist of disease-causing organisms that have been either inactivated or killed, so they can’t cause disease. However, they still trigger the immune system’s normal response to the presence of foreign bacteria or viruses: the creation of antibodies specifically designed to attack them.

These antibodies remain in place after vaccination, so that if the full-strength bacteria or viruses of the same type enter the body in the future, the immune system has antibodies available to attack them immediately, destroying them before they can cause infection or disease.

But vaccines have one major drawback: it may take days or even weeks for them to build a person’s immunity. If you’re exposed to a fast-moving, deadly disease before that immunity is in place, your vaccination may do you no good. As well, vaccine development, particularly in the case of influenza, is sometimes a guessing game: scientists have to try to figure out which particular strain is most likely to strike a particular area, and they’re not always right.

Which is why the report of a new type of vaccine developed at the Scripps Research Institute in California is so exciting: it holds out the tantalizing promise of instant immunity.

A team led by Professor Carlos Barbas III injected mice inflicted with either melanoma or colon cancer with a vaccine designed to trigger a universal immune response--but not on its own. It remained inert until joined by a second injection of “adapter molecules”--small molecules tailor-made to recognize specific cancer cells. The adapter molecules essentially programmed the vaccine, telling it what it should generate an immune response to.

The result? Those mice--and only those mice--that received both the vaccine and the adapter compound generated an immediate immune attack on the cancer cells, which significantly inhibited the growth of their tumors.

This is the first time this kind of chemical-based, rather than biologically based, vaccine has been successfully designed and tested, and the possibilities are exciting. Barbas points to current vaccines against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Many antibodies are generated, but most aren’t able to target the active part of the virus. Using the new approach, it may be possible to hone in on the active part of HIV much more precisely and effectively.

“It opens up the possibility of having antibodies primed and ready to go in the time it takes to receive an injection or swallow a pill,” Barbas says. “This would apply whether the target is a cancer cell, flu virus, or a toxin like anthrax that soldiers or even civilian populations might have to face during a bioterrorism attack.”

Three clinical trials are already underway by the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to test this new approach against cancer and diabetes. Babas plans to continue his own research with cancer, and explore the use of this approach against HIV and infectious diseases for which no vaccines currently exist, the goal being to create adapter molecules specific to those diseases.

Keep your fingers crossed!

Now I'm even writing in my sleep

2009-03-24T08:54:00.003-06:00

Just before I woke this morning, I was dreaming in an unusual fashion: in my dream, I was disembodied and observing other people, writing a running commentary in my head, very much like the process of writing fiction when I'm awake. I can't remember ever doing that in my sleep before, but of course we only remember bits of what we dream.

Anyway, when the alarm woke me, I was watching a woman, dressed in brightly colored clothes, leaving some sort of grungy-looking train station, and, mentally contrasting it with the bridge of the Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation, my dreaming brain constructed this sentence (or something very like it):

"It was a shame, she reflected, that the future was not the perfect, pastel place predicted by the TV shows of her youth--well, except for one gorgeously decorated bar downtown that dispensed more women than beer."

That's been stuck in my head all morning, so I figured I'd better write it down.

Not quite sure that I'll ever find a place for it in a story, though.

Page proofs of my book about the Bounty mutiny arrive

2009-03-23T16:30:00.006-06:00

I received the PDF page proofs of one of my upcoming children's non-fiction books, The Bounty Mutiny: From the Court Case to the Movie, from Enslow today. That's the title page. It's part of a series called Famous Court Cases That Became Movies--among the others in the series are books dealing with the Amistad mutiny (Amistad), Watergate (All the President's Men), and the Scopes "Monkey" trial (Inherit the Wind). In my case, the movie in question is the 1984 Dino De Laurentiis epic The Bounty, starring Mel Gibson as Fletcher Christian and Anthony Hopkins as Bligh.

There's some typo-finding and editorial query-answering to go, but I must say it's a pretty good-looking book. I enjoyed writing it, too, since I love reading about the great Age of Sail.

I notice the copyright date in it is 2010, though, so it may be a while before the actual book itself is available.

My review of Saturday's Regina Symphony Orchestra concert...

2009-03-23T10:17:00.002-06:00

...is now online, headlined "RSO scores again with movies." Here's how it starts:

Halfway through the second half of the Regina Symphony Orchestra's 10th annual The RSO Goes to the Oscars movie-music concert, Maestro Victor Sawa commented on the versatility of movie composers, who may find themselves writing theme music for sharks in one movie and mood music for superheroes in the next.

But it wasn't just the composers' versatility on display Saturday night -- the RSO once again proved that it can tackle any style of music with verve.

It may have helped that superheroes Batman (on timpani) and Iron Man (on viola) were lending a hand, on a night that also saw a family dressed as characters from The Wizard of Oz win the costume competition at intermission.

My LeaderPost review of Globe Theatre's Mesa

2009-03-21T13:10:00.002-06:00

My LeaderPost review of Globe Theatre's Mesa, which oddly enough has striking similarities to my CBC review of the same production--go figure!--is online this morning.

It begins:

Mesa, Globe Theatre's new mainstage production, is the story of a road trip -- a physical journey from Calgary to Arizona, and the metaphorical journey from youth to old age.

Which sounds pretty heavy, so let me hasten to add that Mesa, well-directed by Joey Tremblay, is also very funny.

It's 1998, and 93-year-old Bud (Sheldon Davis), is being chauffeured by his 34-year-old grandson-in-law, Paul (Curt McKinstry), on his annual winter trip to the Citrus Gardens trailer park in Mesa, Ariz. It's the first time he hasn't driven himself.

The characters they encounter along the way are played by Ryan Parker, also one of two musicians (with Jeremy Sauer) whose music establishes transitions -- and whose rendition of The Tennessee Waltz, with its line "Now I know just how much I have lost," provides an evocative framing device.

My review of Globe Theatre's Mesa

2009-03-20T11:59:00.002-06:00

Here's my review of Globe Theatre's latest mainstage production, Mesa. This is the script I've sent to CBC. Check against delivery today at 4:13 p.m. on the Afternoon Edition.

Globe Theatre’s lastest mainstage production is Mesa, by Calgary writer Doug Curtis. It’s a play that takes the audience along on a road trip from Calgary to Mesa, Arizona. Edward Willett took the journey at the opening night performance last night and joins me now.

Since we’ve still got snow and ice on the ground, Ed, a trip to Mesa sounds pretty appealing. How does the road trip in the play come about?

Well, it’s s trip that one of the characters, Bud, played by Sheldon Davis, has been making every year since 1967, when he retired from banking. That year he and his late wife began spending their winters in the Citrus Gardens trailer park.

In the play, which is set in 1998--the date is pinpointed by a reference to Senator John Glenn’s return to space, as the oldest astronaut in history, aboard the space shuttle Discovery--for the first time Bud, who’s now 93, isn’t driving himself: instead, he’s being chauffeured by his grandson-in-law, Paul, played by Curt McKinstry, who’s in his mid-30s.

Sounds like the set-up for a little intergenerational conflict.

Exactly. A 93-year-old man who’s been driving the same route to the same location for 30 years is not inclined to change the way he’s always done things along the way. Paul, on the other hand, who’s an aspiring writer, has very romantic notions about the journey. He wants to stop and look at everything, reflect on the tragedies and triumphs of how the American West was settled, soak up the atmosphere, etc., etc. Bud just wants to get to the next Motel 6 and eat at Denny’s--or better yet, Shoney’s.

So, yes, there’s some friction between them. You could say Paul is looking to find himself in the wide-open spaces, and Bud found himself a long time ago and just wants to get through those wide-open spaces to be with his dwindling circle of friends in Citrus Gardens, to get up and tell a few jokes and sing a few songs at the Saturday night dance. He knows his life is winding down and he wants to spend what’s left of it doing what he wants. It’s something Paul comes to understand as the play progresses, and in the end he does find out something about himself by coming to understand Bud better. In other words, alongside the actual road trip, there’s a bit of a metaphorical road trip from youth to age that Bud has already made and Paul is embarking on.

All of which makes it sound just a little dank and depressing, which it isn’t, at all. It has its bittersweet and poignant moments, but in general, it’s very funny from start to finish.

Tell me about the cast, and the performances. Are there just the two actors?

Not the way director Joey Tremblay has decided to stage it. Obviously Bud and Paul run into various characters along the way (not QUITE literally, although Bud’s tendency to issue vague directions at the last possible moment brings them close to disaster a couple of times, and one unfortunate creature does meet its demise beneath their wheels). In the script, the suggestion is that Bud plays all of these characters, who only interact with Paul. But Tremblay has instead given all of those characters to a third actor, Ryan Parker, who is also one of the two musicians.

There are musicians?

Indeed there are. Parker and Jeremy Sauer provide musical cues and interludes. In fact, music ties the whole show together, with The Tennessee Waltz both beginning and ending it, with its line “Now I know just how much I have lost” in particular resonating with the theme of aging that runs through the piece.

Parker’s characters, which include a drunk in a small-town bar, a security guard at a casino and gunfight-staging used Mexican furniture salesman on the streets of Tombstone, are all very funny, in an over-the-top kind of way. My one complaint (as someone born in the U.S. whose relatives still live there) is that the playwright has used them for the kind of cheap aren’t-Americans-stupid laughs that Canadians eat up but which have been horrible clichés for decades now. Surely “I have a cousin in Toronto, you must know him” should have long since been laid to rest (preferably with a stake through its heart) as a source of amusement.

(As an aside, we made a road trip to Sante Fe, New Mexico, last summer, and our experiences with Americans included the Montana bread-and-breakfast owners who knew Canada well and loved Regina; the science fiction writer in Denver who ranches in Wyoming and comes to Regina all the time for Agribition; and the gallery owner in Santa Fe who was married to a Canadian and lived in Prince Rupert for a while--all more interesting characters than the dumb-drunk-gun-toting sports fan that makes an appearance in this play.)

How do the performances of the two lead characters stack up?

They’re both very good. Davis is playing someone decades older than his real age, but he’s perfectly believable in the role: he moves like an old man (albeit a fairly spry one) and there’s enough of a quaver in his voice to convince you of his age without turning him into a caricature. It would be easy to make Bud someone the audience didn’t like at all, given his irascibility and set-in-his-ways-iness, but Davis is sympathetic without going too far the other way and making Bud cuddly. He comes across as a real person with a real--and very lengthy--past who has good reasons for being the way he is.

McKistry is also excellent. His character is in his mid-30s, but he comes across as even younger, probably because of the contrast between his naivete and romantic notions about the West and the extremely down-to-Earth Bud. We find out over the course of the play that there’s some unhappiness in his marriage, and Paul talks about not liking the person he is when he’s up north--but that’s all in hints. My one criticism: whether in the script or in the performance, I wish we could see some hint of just what Paul is like when he’s home in Calgary. We infer it from what is said, but we don’t actually see it on stage: Paul seems too shallow a character to have any hidden depths of darkness or cynicism, especially at the beginning.

A road trip implies moving from location to location. How do they accomplish that on the Globe’s stage?

It’s cleverly done. Roger Schultz, the set and costume designer, has made a very simple but effective set that consists of a raised, circular turn-table in the middle, covered with fake grass--the cheap, unnaturally green kind--and surrounded by a little moat filled with pebbles. When the lights come up, there’s a garden gnome sitting in the middle of the turntable, a gnome whose significance we don’t discover until it appears again at the end of the play.

Surrounding the turntable is a circular road, complete with center stripes. The corners of the set are filled in with more fake grass, and there are four lawn chairs. That’s it! Put two lawn chairs together, and you have the car. And when you need to indicate that the car is twisting and turning, you put the lawn chairs on the turntable and have a costumed stage hand come out and spin it back and forth. By moving the chairs around, you can establish the bar, the casino, and so on.

To establish where each scene is taking place, images are projected on two walls of the theatre, opposite each other, above the heads of the audience. So, for example, when we’re in a casino, we see images of a casino. When the characters are visiting London Bridge, sitting in its improbable location in the middle of the Arizona desert, we see pictures of it. This works well in some ways, not so well in others. Rather like those annoying television screens that are in every bar you go into any more, the images--which change constantly--draw your eye. Particularly if you’re sitting, as I was, where you have to look left or right to see them, they tend to pull your attention away from what’s happening on stage. Even when there are just variations of the same thing being shown, the images change often enough that you can’t help but look up at them frequently. As a result, though I enjoyed them, I thought at times they actually distracted from the play. I think I would have preferred something more static: a single image of the bridge, fewer images to establish travel through the countryside, so you could glance up just once in a while and not feel you were missing something.

So you have a few criticisms of the play, but overall...?

Overall, I liked it a lot. Bud and Paul are interesting characters you enjoy being with. Their journey to Mesa provides plenty of laughter and one or two lumpy-throat moments as well. Older people may identify most with Bud, younger people--especially those with elderly relatives--may identify most with Paul, but I think everyone will enjoy travelling to Mesa with them.

The audience at opening night agreed: they gave it a quick and enthusiastic standing ovation.

Photo of the Day that was Actually Taken Tuesday: Me in Rouleau

2009-03-19T23:04:00.004-06:00

I had a school reading in Rouleau (Corner Gas-watching readers may know it better as Dog River) on Tuesday. Here I am in "action" (I use the term loosely) reading a few pages from my new YA SF proposal. I also read from Jimi Hendrix: Kiss the Sky, talked about myself (I'm very good at that), showed book covers, and answered questions.

Hugo Awards final ballot released

2009-03-19T22:50:00.002-06:00

The Hugo and John W. Campbell Best New Writer final ballot has been announced. Alas, Marseguro is not on it. (I and everyone else would have been shocked if it had been!)

What I find most interesting about it is that three of the Best Novel nominees are young adult books: Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (which just won the Newbery Medal) and John Scalzi's Zoe's Tale. Rounding out the list are Neal Stephenson's Anathem (which will my first choice!) and Charles Stross's Saturn's Children.

You can read the complete list of nominees here. To vote, you have to be a member of Anticipation, the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, being held August 6 to 10 in Montreal.

But remember, you can vote for the Prix Aurora Awards just by paying a nominal fee!

My preview of the Regina Symphony Orchestra's movie music concert...

2009-03-19T09:52:00.001-06:00

..., RSO Goes to the Oscars, is in today's LeaderPost.

Here's a bit from the middle:

For Sawa, switching from symphonies to soundtracks is natural.

In a strange way, he says, "we owe a debt of gratitude to the Nazis. Oscar Hammerstein, Max Steiner, Eric Korngold, Bernard Hermann, Franz Waxman -- they all came over because they were being persecuted in Europe.

"The entire Hollywood sound was created by the classical composers of Europe.

"When we talk about classical music and how it survived the second half of the 20th century, everyone was going to the movies, they were listening to classical music.

"The snob factor is missing when you go to the movies."

And today's movie composers are just as good as those early ones, Sawa says.

"The modern-day ones learned from the best."

Marseguro is an Aurora Award finalist!

2009-03-17T08:45:00.002-06:00

I've known for a while, so I'm thrilled to finally be able to formally announce that Marseguro is among the finalists for an Aurora Award in the category of Best Long-Form Work in English.

The Auroras recognize Canadian science fiction and fantasy artwork, writing, and fan activities. Nominated for and voted on by fans, they're the Canadian equivalent of the Hugo Awards--or, to put it in movie terms, the Canadian science fiction and fantasy equivalent of, say, the People's Choice Awards.

Also nominated in the Best Long-Form Work in English category are:

After the Fires, Ursula Pflug (Tightrope Books)
Identity Theft and Other Stories, Robert J. Sawyer (Red Deer Press)
Impossibilia, Douglas Smith (PS Publishing)
Defining Diana, Hayden Trenholm (Bundoran Press)

Next comes the voting process. Any Canadian citizen or resident may vote; there's a $5.50 voting fee. Mail-in or online ballots must be submitted before Wednesday, July 15, 2009. For more information or to vote, you can go here.

If you read and liked Marseguro (or any of the other nominees), and are a Canadian or live in Canada, please consider voting! The more votes, the better.

The awards will be presented at Canvention, the Canadian national science fiction convention, which this year is taking place in conjunction with the 67th World Science Fiction Convention, Anticipation, being held in Montréal from August 6 to 10.

Here's the complete list of nominees in the other categories:

Meilleur livre en français/Best Long-Form Work in French

Une fêlure au flanc du monde, Éric Gauthier (Alire)
Les vents de Tammerlan, Michèle Laframboise (Éditions Médiaspaul, coll. Jeunesse-Plus)

Best Short-Form Work in English/Meilleure nouvelle en anglais

“All In,” Peter Atwood (May–June, Weird Tales magazine)
“Back,” Susan J. Forest (June, Analog magazine)
“Ringing in the Changes in Okotoks, Alberta,” Randy McCharles (Tesseracts Twelve, Edge Science Fiction)
“A Bouquet of Flowers in a Vase by Van Gogh,” Douglas Smith (Impossibilia, PS Publishing)
“Doorways,” Douglas Smith (Postscripts Magazine #17, PS Publishing)

Meilleure nouvelle en français/Best Short-Form Work in French

« Ballade sur Pallide », Michèle Laframboise (Virages 44)
« La révolte des gilets-malins », Michèle Laframboise (QUAD9 6A)
« Le Dôme de Saint-Macaire », (Solaris 167)
« Jos Montferrand et le Grand Brigand des routes », Alain Ducharme (Solaris 161)

Best Work in English (Other)/Meilleur ouvrage en anglais (Autre)

The Gaslight Grimoire, Jeff Campbell & Charles Prepolec, Editors, (Edge Science Fiction)
Neo-opsis magazine, Karl Johanson, Ed.
Tesseracts Twelve, Claude Lalumière, Ed. (Edge Science Fiction)
Through the Window: a Journey to the Borderlands of Faerie, Marcie Lynn Tentchoff (Double Edge Publishing)
On Spec magazine, Diane Walton, Managing Ed.

Meilleur ouvrage en français (Autre)/Best Work in French (Other)

Jean-Louis Trudel, Sophie Beaulé, (Éditions David)
Solaris, Joël Champetier, édition et direction littéraire

Artistic Achievement/Accomplissement artistique

Looking for Group, Lar deSouza (Online Comic)
cover Neo-Opsis #14, Stephanie Ann Johanson
Imagination, Michèle Laframboise (Imagination contre les pigeons spammers, Vermillion)
Fear Agent #22, Ronn Sutton (Dark Horse)
cover JEMMA7729, David Willicome

Fan Achievement (Fanzine)/Accomplissement fanique (Fanzine)

The Original Universe, Jeff Boman, (Ed.)
Opuntia, Dale Spiers (Ed.)
Clair/Obscur, François-Bernard Tremblay, (Réd.)
Brins d’éternité, Guillaume Voisine, (Réd.)

Fan Achievement (Organizational)/Accomplissement fanique (Organisation)

Robyn Herrington Memorial Short Story Contest, Renée Bennett (Administrator)
World Fantasy 2008, Kim Greyson (Guest Liaison)
FilKONtario 19, Judith Hayman, & Peggi Warner-Lalonde (Co-chairs)
World Fantasy 2008, Randy McCharles, (Chair)
Anime North 2008, David Simmons (Organizer)

Fan Achievement (Other)/Accomplissement fanique (autre)

World Fantasy 2008 Podcasts, Kurt Armbruster, & Ryah Deines (Producers/Ed./Hosts)
Impulse, news bulletin of MonSFFA, Keith Braithwaite (Ed.)
Through the Keyhole – 25 years of Keycon Memories, Jennifer Ennis (Ed.)
Fan Writing, Lloyd Penney
Heather Dale Concert, Joan Sherman (Organizer)

Science shows musicians really ARE more sensitive

2009-03-16T11:59:00.002-06:00

Musicians have a reputation for being sensitive types, finely tuned to the emotions of those around them. In fact, it’s become a bit of a cliché in movies (with the possible exception of the many late drummers of Spinal Tap).

Normally, after a beginning like that, I’d go on to write that science has now proven the cliché wrong--but in this case, quite the opposite is true.

Researchers at Northwestern University have found that the more years of musical experience musicians possess, and the earlier the age at which they began studying music, the better their nervous systems are at interpreting the emotional content of sound.

The study was led by doctoral student Dana Strait, who conducts her research in the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at the university (and who is herself a pianist and oboe player).

Strait points out that scientists already know that emotion in speech is carried less by the specific meanings of the words being used than by the sound of those words. The most obvious example: I know instantly by the way my daughter calls “Daddy” whether I need to leap to my feet and run down the stairs prepared to dial 911 or whether I can reply, “Just a second, Daddy’s playing Scrabble on Facebook” and mosey downstairs a few moments later.

For the study, which was published in the latest issue of the European Journal of Neuroscience, Strait and her colleagues enlisted 30 right-handed men and women, with and without music training, between the ages of 19 and 35. The ones with music training were grouped using two criteria--their total years of music experience and whether their training began before or after the age of seven.

Participants watched a subtitled nature film to keep them entertained (“entertained” is apparently a loose term) while listening through headphones to a “scientifically validated emotion sound”--specifically, 250 milliseconds--a quarter of a second--of a distressed baby’s cry.

Sensitivity to the sound, particularly the more complicated part of the sound that contributes most to its emotional content, was measured through scalp electrodes, which allowed the researchers to track brainstem processing of the sound’s pitch, timing and timbre.

What they found was that the musicians’ brainstems locked onto the complex part of the sound--the part with the most emotional content--but de-emphasized the simpler, less emotion-conveying part. This was noticeably different from non-musicians’ response.

In other words, musicians’ brains responded more quickly and accurately to the emotional content of a sound than the brains of non-musicians.

This is in line with previous research that has shown that musicians are more sensitive to the nuances of emotion in speech than non-musicians. A study by one of this study’s co-authors, Richard Ashley, associate professor of music cognition at Northwestern, found that musicians may be able to sense emotions in sound after hearing them for only 50 milliseconds--just 1/20th of a second!

Interestingly, the authors of the study note that the acoustic elements that musicians process more efficiently than non-musicians are the same ones that children with language disorders, such as dyslexia and autism, have problems with.

This suggests that musical experience could be of benefit to these children--and the benefits might go beyond language processing.

Lead author Strait used to work as a therapist with autistic children. Strait suggests that early musical training might also help them and other children with an impaired ability to perceive other people’s emotions, such as those with Asperger’s syndrome.

As for the rest of us, it just goes to show that for once, Hollywood may have gotten something right, and that if what you’re looking for in a relationship is someone who is exquisitely tuned to your every emotional nuance, who can listen to you say, “The driveway needs shoveling,” and understand the depths of meaning hidden within that simple declarative sentence, then you should look for a professional musician who began playing the piano or violin at age three.

Just don’t necessarily expect them to, you know, shovel the driveway. Got to be careful of the hands, you know, and anyway, they have to rehearse.

But at least they’ll understand how you feel about that.

A round-up of my recent Futurismic posts

2009-03-13T16:11:00.003-06:00

Here are links to what I've posted over at Futurismic in the last month or so:

Sample chapters for new YA SF novel off to agent

2009-03-12T13:34:00.003-06:00

I just sent off sample chapters for my latest YA proposal, for a science fiction novel with a hint of steampunkishness to it, to my agent. The working title is The City Must Die!, and I'm quite excited about it. Now if only a publisher can be found who shares my excitement...

Just for fun, here are the first and last sentences of the three sample chapters:

Chapter One

Teetering on tiptoe atop a spindly plaster column, the Amazing Belgrani spun three times and vanished in a puff of purple smoke.

Now, it felt more like the start of a nightmare.

Chapter Two

On the morning after Alania Beruthi's fifteenth birthday--although he didn't yet have the slightest notion that she existed--Danlyk woke early, though how he knew it was early, he couldn't have said.

He heard a girl's scream.

Chapter Three

Alania slept poorly the night after Krenz's unexpected appearance.

And then, still screaming, she fell off the end of the chute and plummeted into empty air.

To read the rest...well, you'll have to hope some editor buys the book!

My preview of Globe Theatre's production of Mesa...

2009-03-12T08:23:00.004-06:00

...is in today's LeaderPost.

It begins:

The premise of Mesa, which opens at Globe Theatre on March 18, sounds like the setup to a joke: "So this 30-something guy and his 93-year-old grandfather set out on a road trip together to Mesa, Ariz. ..."

And sure enough, Mesa is a comedy -- but not, says director Joey Tremblay, in a "yuk-yuk, door-slamming" kind of way. Instead, he calls it a "feel-good, bittersweet, nostalgic kind of comedy."

Read the whole thing.

A Canadian satellite proves small is beautiful

2009-03-10T12:19:00.001-06:00

Space satellites, typically, are big, expensive beasts, which is one reason we all cringe when one fails to achieve orbit, as happened on February 24 with NASA’s $280 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO).

Complex satellites like the OCO, which was intended to monitor atmospheric carbon dioxide, are of course absolutely necessary for some tasks.

But satellites don’t have to be big and expensive to do useful work, a fact proved beyond a doubt by a much, much cheaper and smaller satellite marking the one-year anniversary of its successful launch next month.

Best of all, it’s Canadian.

Called the Canadian Advanced Nanospace eXperiment 2 (CanX-2), it masses only 3.5 kilograms (compared to 447 kilograms for the OCO, which was pretty typical), and is roughly the size of a milk carton. Best of all, it was roughly 100 times cheaper to build than a traditional satellite with the same capabilities.

Those capabilities are pretty impressive, too, for something you could put in a shopping bag. It can’t compare to the OCO, of course, but it does contain an atmospheric spectrometer, developed at York University, that provides measurements of airborne greenhouse gases, with a resolution high enough to identify local variations in greenhouse-gas emissions.

The GPS Signal Occultation Experiment, which comes from the University of Calgary, uses the constant radio signals from the Global Positioning System to more accurately model the Earth’s atmosphere, by measuring how much those signals are refracted (bent) as they are blocked from CanX-2’s receivers by the atmosphere.

Better modeling of the atmosphere will help enhance GPS accuracy, which can sometimes suffer during periods when there are auroras and other disturbances in the electrically charged outer layer of the atmosphere known as the ionosphere.

The experiment is very cleverly piggy-backed on the satellite’s own use of the GPS system to provide precise updates to ground control about its position in orbit.

Another experiment, from the University of Toronto, is testing the efficiency of a special treatment designed to reduce atomic oxygen erosion in materials exposed to space. (On Earth, oxygen is most often found as a molecule of two oxygen atoms. Atomic oxygen consists of single atoms of oxygen. Formed by the sun’s energy breaking apart ordinary oxygen molecules at the edge of space, these solitary oxygen atoms are very reactive--anxious to latch on to other molecules--and that makes them very corrosive.)

Also on board is a network communications experiment from Carleton University, a test of a new way for low-Earth-orbit satellites to communicate with ground stations and other satellites--kind of like an outer-space Internet.

Dr. Robert E. Zee, director of the Space Flight Laboratory at the University of Toronto, which developed the satellite, notes that it is likely the smallest satellite to ever perform these kinds of scientific experiments--particularly the atmospheric monitoring experiments--from orbit.

But the significance of CanX-2 goes beyond the science instruments to the design of the satellite itself. In particular, it boasts an amazing miniature attitude control system.

Spacecraft, like aircraft, have to be stabilized along three axes. The CanX-2 uses sun-sensors to measure its attitude, and maintains it using, and I can’t resist quoting this, “a momentum bias system with three orthogonal vacuum-core magnetic torque coils and a reaction wheel.”

That means--I think--that it keeps wheels spinning along in each of the three axes. As anyone who has found it easier to balance on a moving bicycle than a stationary one knows, a spinning wheel resists being tipped. The resistance of the spinning reaction wheels therefore keeps the spacecraft stable in all three axes.

And as if all that wasn’t enough, there’s also a power system--22 solar cells feeding both the spacecraft and a rechargeable battery for use when it’s in shadow--two on-board computers, a communications system, and even a propulsion system that uses cold gas (sulfur hexafluoride) as a propellant.

There are many more tiny satellites in the works at Space Flight Laboratory. Through its student apprenticeship program with the University of Toronto, it’s also training the satellite engineers of the future.

Judging by the success of the CanX-2 system, the future is shaping up to be faster, smaller--and cheaper.