@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @@@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
07/24/09 -- Vol. 28, No. 4, Whole Number 1555
Table of Contents
Acknowledgement (comments by Mark R. Leeper):
This week's MT VOID is brought to you by the Pre-Owned-Humvee Owners Exchange.Buy a used Humvee today. Humvee: It's not a car. It's a defense system. [-mrl]
Turning on a Dime--Or Getting Your Dollar (comments by Mark R. Leeper):
What happened to General Motors was a tragedy brought about by the suddenness of the changing environment economic environment. Can you really expect an industry that had been making cars since the early twentieth century to shift gears so fast to more fuel- efficient cars in those three short decades since the mid-1970s? I don't remember any President talking about changes being needed in the auto industry before Jimmy Carter. If Truman had mentioned something about it the industry might have had a chance to swerve in time. But we didn't even have an energy crisis until 1973. [-mrl]
Playing with Units in Physics (comments by Mark R. Leeper):
When I was maybe ten or eleven years old my brother talked at the dinner table about the physics he had learned in school. They had talked about Albert Einstein's famous equation linking matter and energy, E=MC^2. Well, it did not make sense to me. You could use different units for the numbers you put in. C was the speed of light. That is 186,000 miles per hour. But you would get an entirely different number if you used different units. If light goes at 186,000 miles per hour, that is the same as 272,800 feet per second. But wouldn't you get a different number if you plugged in 272,800 feet per second instead of 186,000 miles per hour? Of course you would, I was told. But the units would change also and you would still get the same answer. The numbers would change but so would the units. I gave some thought to this. One mile a minute is the same as sixty miles an hour. One had a number of only one and one had a number of sixty, but the units were different and that compensated for the difference in the numbers.
That got me interested in the units of physics. Frequently on standardize multiple-choice tests in physics and chemistry they would give your four possible results for a calculation, but only one would have the right units. Knowing that you could eliminate the wrong answers (or sometimes most of the wrong answers) without doing any calculation.
The units seem like such a simple thing, but the units of a physics formula almost tell a story. I had heard that the faster you drive a car the more your fuel efficiency drops. How do you get the best trade-off? Suppose you want to measure a car's performance proportional to its speed and its fuel efficiency. I might be willing to travel at half the speed if I could double the fuel efficiency. You would want to multiply the speed and the efficiency together. So you multiply together the miles per gallon figure by the miles per hour figure. And what units would you put on that.
(miles/gallon) x (miles/hour) = (square-miles)/(gallon-hour)
Can that unit make sense? Yes. You take two identical cars and put them on a flat plane. One starts at the starting point and travels north at a fixed rate of speed until it has used up one gallon of gasoline. You have an identical car start at the same starting point travel east at the same fixed speed for one hour. They will have driven two paths perpendicular to each other. In other words they have swept out two adjacent sides of a rectangle. Take that rectangle and measure its area. The area of the rectangle will be the car's performance.
Now are the units really correct on E=MC^2? This would say:
energy=mass*(distance/time)*(distance/time)
Is that really what we think of as energy? Well, take some matter with mass, say a meteor. It has been moving through empty space for a long time. Now Newton says that left to its own devices it will neither speed up nor slow down. It will have a mass and a speed (or distance/time) and it will get those free from the universe and the initial conditions. Mass times speed is not really changing much. But it is getting all the speed it has from its beginning conditions. If you want it to speed up you apply some force to it. Force is mass times acceleration. Its distance/time is increasing. At what rate is it increasing? Well, it goes from one distance/time to a larger one in a certain period of time. So its acceleration is distance/time/time. In fact, the force you gave it is what it took to give that much mass that much acceleration. Twice the mass would have cut the acceleration in half. Energy or work is defined by a physicist as "moving something against resistance." Force times distance is work or energy. So just looking at what the units represent we get:
energy=distance*force
energy=distance*mass*acceleration
energy=mass*distance*acceleration
energy=mass*distance*speed/time
energy=mass*distance*distance/time/time
energy=mass*(distance/time)*(distance/time)
So the proper units of energy would be those of mass times speed- squared. The energy of a piece of matter is its mass times a speed squared. And this speed turns out to be the speed of light. [-mrl]
Mangal Pandey (letter of comment by Taras Wolansky):
In response to the comments on Mangal Pandey in the 07/10/09 issue of the MT VOID, Taras Wolansky writes:
I'm afraid Mark slightly misread my last. It was Mangal Pandey's single-handed attack on his British officers that I called "disorganized and ineffective", not his legal defense in his court martial. That he attacked those officers without knowing if his fellow soldiers would back him suggests that, as he later testified under oath, he may not have been entirely in his right mind.
And, in fact, the other sepoys supported him hardly at all, with the result that he succeeded in wounding just one officer before he was arrested (after an equally bungled attempt to shoot himself) and was hanged a few weeks later. (This all took place before the beginning of the Indian Mutiny.)
There's another possibility. As a soldier and a Brahmin, Pandey belonged to what is often called an "honor culture". If he felt that his personal honor had been somehow injured, then the attack itself might have been the point, regardless of any prospects of success (as in a duel). That might also explain why the other soldiers "remained mute spectators", as Wikipedia puts it. In this view, Pandey had a personal point to make; encouraging other soldiers to mutiny was merely an afterthought. [-tw]
Mark replies:
I think you are taking your interpretation of the events from the British accounts which today even the British themselves doubt. Prior to the struggle for independence the British always misunderstood the Indians and dismissed them as being much less than they were. Very much later no less a figure than Winston Churchill dismissed Mahatma Gandhi as simply a "half-naked fakir." That was his assessment in a time somewhat more enlightened than during the time of the Sepoy Revolt. Which is all to say I trust neither side to be giving the whole truth. That was what I was saying.
I may indeed have misread your comments, but if so I did on at least three readings. [-mrl]
A DOG OF FLANDERS (letter of comment by James E. LaBarre):
In response to Mark's review of A DOG IN FLANDERS in the 07/17/09 issue of the MT VOID, James LaBarre writes:
To add a bit of an SF twist to this, if your readers don't already know, Theodore Bikel played both Worf's adopted father in STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION, as well as Rabbi Koslov (Susan Ivanova's Uncle Yossel") on BABYLON 5. [-jelb]
Time Travel (letter of comment by Wendy):
In response to Hugh McGuinness's comments in the 07/17/09 issue of the MT VOID, Wendy writes, "I recommend the book REPLAY by Ken Grimwood, about a man in his mid-life crisis dying and getting "reborn" into his own eighteen-year-old body. (The amazon.com page review has some spoilers.) [-w]
This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
Traditionally, I save my articles about Jorge Luis Borges for August. (I have no idea how this tradition got started.) But I actually have another one that is a two-parter, so I figure I'll start early.
Having read many of the books published in English about Jorge Luis Borges, I figured the time had come to branch out, so I decided to try BORGES ANTES EL ESPEJO by Jorge Mejia Prieto and Justo R. Molachino (ISBN-13 978-970-732-133-5, ISBN-10 970-732-133-4), in Spanish. It was probably the best possible choice to start with, being only 180 pages, and consisting almost entirely of one- or two-paragraph quotes by or about Borges.
Some random samples (all translations are mine, which is why I am giving you the original Spanish as well):
Borges talks about how he and his sister had invisible friends when they were young and, "Finalamente, cuando nos aburrimos de ellos, le dijemos a nuestra madre que habían muerto." ("Finally, when we were bored with them, we told my mother that they had died.") [page 17]
Perhaps an early example of Borges's playing with the the concrete versus the figurative can be found in José µngel Valente's comment of Borges's thoughts when he was a boy on buying items: "Pero si el objeto que el niño desaba adquirir costaba más de un peso y menos de dos, ¿t;cuál era de las dos monedas de un peso la que el comerciante le cambiaba?" ("But if an object that the boy wanted to acquire cost more than one peso and less than two, which of the two one-peso coins was the one that the cashier gave him change from?") [page 22]
I must admit that sometimes I found that I had initially mistranslated something--and I liked it better that way. "Me lanzó a esta aventura el 'Sartor restartus' ('El remendón remendado') de Carlyle, que me deslumbró y dejó perplejo." I initially read this as "I threw myself into the adventure of 'Sartor Restartus' ... by Carlyle, that put me to sleep and perplexed me." But it actually* says, "I threw myself into the adventure of 'Sartor Restartus' ... by Carlyle, that dazzled me and perplexed me." [page 26]
Weeks ago, I commented on Borges's comment on politicians: "Creo que ningún político puede ser una persona totalamente sincera. Un político esta buscando siempre electores y dice lo que esperan que diga. En el caso do un discurso político los que opinan son los oyentes. más que el orador. El orador es una especia de espejo o eco de lo que los demás piensan. Si no es así, fracasa." ("I believe that no politician can be a wholly sincere person. A politician is always looking at the voters and says what they want him to say. On the case of a political discourse it is the listeners whose opinion is expressed more than the speaker's. The speaker is a type of mirror or echo of what others think. If this is not so, he loses.") [page 43] Both this quote, and the title of the book, are reflections (!) of the importance of mirrors in Borges's work. I have commented on this at length in my reviews of Labyrinths and A Universal History of Infamy.
Borges even comments on his recurring symbols: "¡Ah, los laberintos! ¡Ah, los símbolos! Al final de cada año me hago una promesa: el año próximo renunciaré a los laberintos, a los tigres, a los cuchillos, a los espejos. Pero no hay nada que hacer, es algo más fuerte que yo. Comienzo a escribir y, de golpe, he aquí que surge un laberinto, que un tigre cruza la p gina, que un cuchillo brilla, que un espejo refleja una imagen." ("Ah, the labyrinths! Ah, the symbols! At the end of every year I make myself a promise: the next year I will renounce the labyrinths, the tigers, the knives, the mirrors. But there is nothing to be done-- it is something stronger than me. I start to write and, suddenly, up pops a labyrinth, or a bright knife, or a mirror reflecting a face.") [page 118]
In CONVERSATIONS WITH JORGE LUIS BORGES, Borges explains why he wrote only short works: "I think what I want to write, but, of course, they have to be short pieces because otherwise, if I want to see them all at once--that can't be done with long texts. ... I want to see at [one] glance what I've done ... that is why I don't believe in the novel because I believe that a novel is as hazy to the writer as to the reader." In BORGES ANTE EL ESPEJO he is quoted as having said of novels: "Soy demasiado perezoso para escribir novelas. Para hacerlo hay que utilizar muchos rellenos. Antes de llegar at tercer capítulo me sentiría tan aburrido que nunca llegaría a terminarla. La novela es una supersticíon de nuestro tiempo, como lo fueron la tragedia de cinco actos y la epopeya. Es verosímil que desaparezca. Puede haber una literatura sin novelas de cuatrocientas o quinientas páginas, pero no sin poemas o cuentos." ("I am too lazy to write novels. In order to do that, I would have to use too much 'stuffing.' Before getting to the third chapter I would be so bored that i would never manage to finish it. The novel is a 'superstition' of our times, as was the tragedy in five acts and the epic poem [earlier]. It is likely that it will disappear. One can have a literature with novels of four hundred or five hundred pages, but not without poems or short stories.") [page 109]
Borges also talked about how he tried to write as simply as possible; I wrote about his statements and how they do or do not apply to other authors in my comments about H. P. Lovecraft in the 10/31/08 issue of the MT VOID. [-ecl]
Mark Leeper
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