Epic Rap Battle: Newton vs. Nye

Have you ever wondered how Issac Newton would react to Bill Nye the Science Guy? Well, wonder no more:


Who do you think was the better rapper? I have to go with Newton, better known as Weird Al Yankovic. Vote in the comments below.

Lies Writers Tell... To Other Writers (Part Two -- Your First Novel Sucks)

As I mentioned last time, we writers have convinced ourselves of a lot of untruths, and, you know, it's fine to believe an untruth if that's what you want to believe. My kids, the two younger ones at any rate, still choose to believe in Santa Claus. At least, I'm fairly certain they know he's not really real, but they want to believe in him so they choose to do so. It's part of Christmas at our house so they choose to believe and that's totally okay.

Now, it would be a different story entirely if they were out telling their friends that their families were doing it wrong if they didn't have Santa as a part of their Christmas traditions.

However, if you ever sit it on a kindergarten class at Christmas time, those kids really believe in Santa -- I mean, really really believe in Santa with their whole hearts --and they will set out to tell anyone who might happen to say that Santa isn't real just how wrong he is. And that's where we writers are with this first lie (and I think it's the biggest, most damaging lie we tell): Your first novel sucks!!!
It sucks and you should, minimally, stick it in a drawer somewhere and forget it exists. Even better, pack it in the bottom of a box and bury it in your closet, but, to be really safe, you should dig a hole in your back yard, drop it in, and plant a tree on it.

[Now I'm going to take a little aside, so just follow along. Really, it applies.]

In science, there is a thing called a theory. People not in science have taken this word and warped it into something it doesn't mean, so follow the process:

Let's say there's a scientist taking a nap under a tree, a tree that happens to bear apples, and, while he's sleeping, one of those apples falls off of the tree and hits him on the head. This, of course, wakes the scientist up as he tries to figure out who's been throwing apples at him. But, A-HA!, he has an idea: "I think apples fall to the ground when they are dropped." This idea is called a hypothesis.

Now, the scientist wants to know if his idea is correct or not, so he devises a series of experiments to test it. He shakes the tree until apples fall off. He picks up the apples and drops them from his hands and, yes, sure enough, they all fall on the ground. He takes them up on the roof of his house and drops them from there. He gets other people to test whether when they drop the apples they also fall to the ground. He goes up on the highest building he can find, maybe that leaning tower place, and drops them from there. No matter what test he tries, the apples always fall to the ground.
Also, he finds that he no longer wants to eat any of the apples he's been dropping so he decides he should, next time, test his "drop idea" with something that won't become bruised and inedible.
At the end of all of the testing, IF the idea proves to be true, at least in so far as you can test it, you have what is called a theory. If, however, just one time, the guy drops the apple and it does not fall to the ground, you do NOT have a theory. At that point, you go back to your hypothesis and modify it and start testing all over again.

SO:
An idea that is just an idea is a hypothesis.
An idea that has been tested and tested and tested and has had NO (ZERO) failures is a theory.

See, the thing about a theory is that it is still conceivable that there could be some circumstances under which it would not hold to be true, but we don't have the means of testing those circumstances. A theory could still turn out to be WRONG.

And just so you know: The stage beyond Theory is Law. If we have shown, as with gravity, that you will get the same results EVERY TIME you do something, it's considered a Law, and we have shown mathematically that gravity does exist and that EVERY TIME anyone drops an apple it will fall to the ground.

And here is where we go back to this lie that writers tell: The people who state it, state it as a the First Law of Writing: Your first novel will suck. Throw it away and never think about it again.

So, right now, I'm going to punch a GIANT hole in that law. Going back to SCIENCE, any event which shows your hypothesis not to be true makes it not a theory. If it's not a theory, it can't be a Law, and, if it's not a theory, you, also, can't use it as a hypothesis. You have to go back to that hypothesis and modify it. So, if you take "Your first book will always suck" as your hypothesis, let's look at some first novels that show that that just isn't any good as a working hypothesis.

To put it another way, if these following authors had listened to the advice (the very common, spoken-everywhere-among-writers advice) that their first novels were no good and had junked them, here are some (just a few) of the novels we would not have in our world. [By the way, all three of the novels I think everyone should read are on this list. All three of what I would say are the most significant novels I have ever read were first novels by the author.]
Oh, and let me clarify: When I say "first novel," I don't mean "first published novel" (meaning they had a few practice ones that they did throw away); I mean "first written novel by the particular author." Sometimes, in fact, these were the ONLY novels the particular author EVER wrote.
Here's just a few:

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien -- Sure, you might say that he wrote a bunch of other stuff before he wrote the The Hobbit, but he had never written a novel before, and that's a very different kind of thing than other types of writing. Oh, and if he'd never published this, there would be no The Lord of the Rings or anything else by Tolkien.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell -- This novel won a bunch of awards, too.

Watership Down by Richard Adams -- It also won a bunch of awards.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley -- I can't even summarize how influential this book has been. Imagine if she'd just tossed it.

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens -- Probably nothing else needs to be said, BUT it was also the first book ever to become a "publishing phenomenon" (think Harry Potter except that didn't really hit it big until the third or fourth book), his first book.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte -- The only novel she ever wrote.

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison -- His second novel took 40 years to write.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee -- She said she would never be able to write a book to top Mockingbird, so she never made an attempt at a second novel.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Neuromancer by William Gibson -- Gibson had written a few short stories prior to being commissioned to write a novel. The idea terrified him, but he wrote it. It changed the landscape of both science fiction and reality. It won both the Nebula and Hugo awards as best novel of the year when it came out.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling -- Because you can't keep her off a list like this. And, beyond that, I'm not going to say anything else about it.

And, really, I could go on. I could go on for a long time. I mean, I've only covered first novels that have gone on to become significant works of literature, but there are plenty out there that have been more than adequate first novels. This idea that "first novels" should be tossed in the trash is a myth. It's not even an adequate hypothesis.

Granted, some first novels will suck but, then, some of the authors even on this list never wrote anything to equal the greatness of their first work. Harper Lee wouldn't even try again. I'm not saying that your first work is literary genius puked on a page; I am saying don't listen to people that tell you to just put "that one" away and never let anyone see it. To me, that sounds more like, "My first novel sucked; therefore, all first novels must suck." Don't judge your work by someone else's failure.

Lies Writers Tell... To Other Writers (Part One)

Being a writer's a tough gig. Okay, no, wait: Being a published writer is a tough gig. It's the difference between sitting around in your house and playing guitar merely for your own pleasure – or, maybe, the pleasure of a few friends – and playing on stage in front of an audience. An audience which may or may not have actual people in it and an audience which may or may not even be listening. So you go up on stage and play your heart out and no one responds and you don't really have any idea of how good you were. It's a tough gig.

Because it's so tough, we've come up with little lies to tell ourselves to make the seeming rejection less hurtful, and these lies would be okay if we only told them to ourselves. The problem is that once we've told them to ourselves, we start telling them to each other and, when we start telling them to each other, we inevitably tell them to people who are just starting out, and those lies can really cause problems for people who think they're hearing the truth from people who ought to know it. Then they believe the lies, too.

And that's the real problem: People don't think they're lies. They believe they're telling each other the truth, but it's the same as believing that the world is flat or that man never walked on the moon. Or, you know, that climate change isn't happening. So you have people that mean well, they really do, who are telling people, “Hey, you can't sail your ship off in that direction, because you'll fall off the edge of the world.” Just because you believe it doesn't make it true.

So let's talk a little math and science before we go on.

If you think back to your days in geometry, you might remember these things called postulates. In case you don't, I'll remind you. A postulate is something, in an argument (or a math problem), that we accept as a given. Basically, it is something that is so basic that there is no way to prove it so we just accept it as fact. The classic example is a = a. It's pretty clear that that is true, but, mathematically, there's no way to prove it. It's like using a word to define itself.

[Which reminds me of a funny story. This one time at a “Chinese” restaurant (I say “Chinese” because, clearly, this was not just Chinese) with some friends and my brother, my brother wanted to know what curry is (because they had curry chicken, and he'd never seen curry chicken at a Chinese place), so he asked the waiter, “What's curry?” First, that question confused the waiter. I mean, it confused the waiter a lot. We spent more than a few minutes just explaining the question. Finally, once he understood that my brother wanted to know what curry is, he responded, “Curry is curry!” That's the best answer we could get from him. The only answer. a = a. It was less than helpful.]

The thing that's so insidious about these lies is that we approach them as if they are postulates. Or, to use another word, we treat them as axioms. Un-disputable facts. (Look, I know the word is “indisputable,” but that doesn't really convey the same meaning. I'll use the prefixes the way I want to use them, okay? Okay.) This <thing> is so true that all I need to do is state it and you have to accept it. Period. “The Earth is flat.” Don't look at me like that; for centuries, that fact was indisputable.

The truth is, most of these things are more like hypotheses. And there's your science lesson. A hypothesis is an idea that is then subject to experimentation. The problem with these lies, even as hypotheses, is that they have already been disproven. It's like the Church choosing to cling to the belief that the Earth was the center of the universe even after Copernicus and Galileo had shown that it wasn't. Or like Republicans continually stating that climate change isn't happening (okay, fine, I know this is a non-partisan blog, and I know it's not all Republicans, but give me a break).

So, now that you've had your introduction, next week we'll actually talk about some lies.

Aliens and Mothering/Parenting

It's Mother's Day today in the U.S. on the planet Earth. In honor of the occasion, I've been using the hand-decorated mug my son made for me (even though the marker ink came off on my hand) and thinking about alien parents. According to the "Your Inner Monkey" episode of the documentary Your Inner Fish (more influence from my son, as he was briefly obsessed with this series), humans are born with brains that are relatively undeveloped compared to monkeys. This is a feature, not a bug, since that means we have an extended childhood that allows our brains to develop over a couple of decades, giving us time to be socialized and educated.That means human children need more intensive nurturing than other animals that mature more quickly. A lot of this nurturing comes from the child's mother, though fathers, other relatives, teachers, and other adults can influence a child as well.

Do you think sentient life forms on other planets require this much nurturing as they develop? If so, do you think it comes from their mother, or whatever the equivalent is? Other life forms may have more than two parents, or may be raised by other members of their race besides their biological parents. No matter what customs apply, I expect natural selection would still favor parents who bond with their offspring--and offspring who form an attachment to their parents would get more support as they mature.

Here's a video featuring one of my favorite alien mothers, the Horta from the original Star Trek series:

You have to feel sorry for a mother who has to care for an entire planet's worth of offspring by herself.

And if I may insert a shameless plug, you can read about a human mother in my SF Catalyst Chronicles series.

It's Pi Day!

I couldn't resist a couple of videos to celebrate the date. At least this pi has no calories, but you still require a lot of patience to prepare the second one:





P.S. I was tempted to schedule this post for 3:14 A.M., but sadly, that wasn't an option.

A MEGA POST of EPIC THINGS!! BOOM!

WHEN HUMANS FIRST CLIMBED DOWN FROM THE TREES and stood on their hind legs, they immediately regretted it. Probably. I believe that the habit of looking at the stars was because they were really looking back up at the trees they'd crawled down from and wished they could go back, but upon looking up at those trees, early humans noticed the stars for the first time. Yes, that sounds very factual to me, that's what happened.

Fast forward an age or two, and staring at the stars is still something you did if you were out at night. City lights of any type weren't really a thing for most of world history, and even in a large city in late as the Victorian era you'd still be able to see stars galore when you stepped outside.

And in a way, everyone was an expert. But advances in optics and film and the discovery that there is, seriously, a lot of stuff to look at aside from the few thousand objects visible (if you're viewing from a pretty dark spot) from earth with the naked eye made astronomy into something that you had to have a bit of expertise to pursue. At least if you wanted to push the frontiers.

And as such, the term Astronomer describes a whole subset of specialities, as a cosmologist (they don't do hair, you're thinking of something else) about planetary science and you may get a pretty baffled look. You may as well be asking an ear, nose, and throat doctor to diagnose your chronic foot pain.

They may know something about it, but it's a bit outside of their area of expertise.

Well, I was once considering what I'd need to do in order to be an astronomer. Considering if my love of space, of the stars, of all things not of this earth, would be a viable career path for me.

Which is when I first heard this joke: You know what a master's degree in astronomy will get you?

Answer: The right to serve coffee to real astronomers.

Queue sounds of laughter.

So, I decided it was a lot of work, and I'm notorious from having an easily distracted sort of personality. I might get obsessed with playing the oboe and spend a year doing only that with each free moment.

The path of least resistance made a lot of sense to me. So I quit school (this is just the first time I'd quit school, believe me, I've done it way more than just the one time) and took a job driving a truck for a paper recycling company.

Where am I going with this? I kind of forgot.

Oh yes, so, I'm not an astronomer.* But aside from writing, it's still one of my favorite things. Period. At times, I wonder what I'd be doing if I'd followed that dream I once had and pursued a career in astronomy. Then I see something like this:

That is, in case you're confused, a picture of an impact crater on mars. It's not really blue, btw, it's been enhanced so the ejecta from the impact is more easily viewable. But regardless, it's a new crater. That's a 30 meter wide hole in the planet. Wow.

Did we see this impact? No, that we missed. But we did notice the crater it left. Um, maybe a few years after it was over. You know, it could have been as long ago as 2010 that it happened.

Which leads me to the question, how did we notice it? I mean, Mars is way smaller than earth, but it sill has as much land as North America. And given the lack of a meaningful atmosphere or plate tectonics, craters don't tend to go anywhere once they show up. So there is a lot of them. How did we find this new one. It's like a finding a needle in a haystack, so to speak.

Or finding a new pepperoni on a pizza the size of Rhode Island.**

I mean, did we count them all, and then someone noticed the count was wrong? Well, turns out, some fine folks at the Univ of Colorado counted them. Yep, a man named Stuart Robbins said, in his own words, "I basically drew crater rim circles for four years."

My god. that's insane. Someone has been counting the craters on Mars. It was joke, people.

And then it dawned on me, that's totally what I'd be doing if I'd ever become an astronomer. I just know it. I'd be counting stress fractures on Europa or something. I'd be leaving work on Friday and saying, "See you Bob, I'm up to 14,244 so far. Hope to find a few more on Monday."

Funny thing, Robbins and his team came up with 635,000 craters more than 1km in size. I couldn't even use his damned map to find this new crater, it's too small!

So, by that point, I'd decided to stop my investigation on how the crater was discovered. As I'm sure it wasn't that interesting, or rather, my passing interest in the question led me to another thing, and then I didn't care enough about the original question to continue looking into it. But I came away a little bit in awe of the men and women who waste spend years of their lives counting things.

As for me, I'm glad I decided to do dream of being a writer instead of an astronomer. Imagine my disappointment in learning I spent a decade of higher learning only to being reduced to counting things.

*The title of an astronomer, when I was a kid, was astronomer, not Astrophysicist. Now they're all Astrophysicists, I think it's a marketing ploy myself (*sigh* of course it isn't) No matter what they say. I guess there is something implied by each of those terms that makes one think an astronomer only looks at things, while the astrophysicist actually understands how those things work. But I hate trying to spell astrophysicist, it's really hard for me. 

** I have no idea. I made that up.