Paging George Berkeley

I'm visually oriented. No big surprise there; humans generally are. What I mean specifically is I'm at home, resting after surgery, and I find it really annoying when I need to use the ice pack because it covers my eyes. I'm awake and alert and thinking about the writing I'm working on and even if I'm listening to a podcast about writing (the Writing Excuses podcast, which I discovered through participant Howard Taylor, the writer and artist of webcomic Schlock Mercenary) I am bored and impatient.

Odd. It is about words, but more, about the concepts those words are intended to capture, but I want and need to see the words on paper. The podcasts are barely enough to divert my attention from cold eyes (literally; the ice pack, again).

Yeah, surgery. I don't remember it. They hooked me up, I sat around for about four hours until they had me walk over to the operating theater holding my bag of Ringer's in one hand, I lay down on the operating table and blinked the sleep out of my eyes in a quiet room with blood dripping out of my nose.

Retrograde surgical amnesia. Surgery might have been painful. I might have panicked going under. I might have complained about the fit of the mask. I will never know; those experiences were edited from me like the gaps in the Watergate tapes. Total lost a little over an hour. As far as I know I had contiguous memory from waking up in recovery but my only checksum is that the timing works.

That is; I had a blood pressure cuff on and I counted three inflation events in the time before my anesthesiologist came over to check up on me. They felt nominally the same elapsed time between each, and I know the machine is typically set to a fifteen minute interval, and the anesthesiologist confirmed it had been about an hour since I was wheeled in. So I may have lost a few bits here and there but I still experienced them as contiguous elapsed time (I have a pretty decent awareness of elapsed time when sleeping, generally able to guess within 25% of how long I've been under).

Yeah, it was kind of a Femi Estimation day. I had stuck my book (aka, iPhone with Kindle) at the bottom of my property bag and I got rather bored sitting there in gown with wires and tubes dripping off me waiting for the doctor to arrive. Started studying the parts of the IV, all the various glands and valves up to the bag of Ringer's Lactate (clearly marked, plus the cabinet it came out of was within my line of sight).

Wasn't until I thought about the problem of keeping air getting into the line that I realized the length of the tube had to be carrying saline and, from the looks of the valves, at sufficient pressure to keep my own blood where it belonged. Then I looked at the drip chamber where the level wasn't increasing and it became obvious there was a positive pressure in the system. Aka it had been dripping into me all this time.

So I estimated the droplet size and rate (2-3 mm in diameter, falling at one per second) and that came out to 500 ml/hour. Figuring the bag had been on for two hours at that point and presumably had started from one liter, that was within a factor of two. Tried to calculate column height versus blood pressure as a cross-check was a no-go, though. But there was another nice cross-check; I needed to piss, human bladder holds about .8 liters, typical urination from a less-full bladder is 1-2 cups and a cup is either 250 or 350 ml (I couldn't remember, but then I was only going for about a factor of 2 accuracy). Hadn't had any water since leaving home that morning so that was basically the Ringer's going through.

On the way back from the bathroom I let the bag in my hand go below my heart level and I got red tint in the line about ten cm up from my arm. Nice cross-check; the positive pressure was indeed column height. Over the next hour I made a mental mark on the bag and was able to verify a flow of around 100 ml over 20 minutes.

Yeah. This is how physics geeks pass the time. You should see me contemplating the competing regimes of convection, conduction and radiation over a cooling cup of coffee.

The operation? Nasal Polpectomy and turbinate reduction. I'm in the second day of recovery and mild inflammation is setting in but I'm basically able to breathe freely through my nose for the first time in at least a year. Too early to tell yet but I have a strong feeling this is going to return a lot of my strength.

The Bad Tempered Clavier

Why does the Venova have a couple of bad notes? This is a Yamaha instrument. They know how to build an instrument that is in tune (both with itself and to standard pitch). I theorized, then, that there was something in the physics of a woodwind that didn't permit all notes to be equally in tune.

Today I figured out how that works.

Start with the scale. We divide the octave, somewhat arbitrarily, into eleven equal parts. But the most-used scales we have built use only seven of those notes. There is a specific sequence of one-note intervals and two-note intervals that makes up the major scale, and by changing the starting note, all of the classic modes (the Phrygian and Lydian and so forth), including of course the minor scale.

The notes of a scale sound harmonious to each other; many melodies do not stray from the scale tones. Thus, the important tones for any instrument -- the ones you want to make easiest to play and most in tune -- are the scale tones.

In the case of a recorder, one finger and a thumb are used to support the instrument, one thumb covers the octave key; that leaves enough fingers for the scale tones but not enough for all the possible notes in an octave. So only enough tone holes are drilled to give you the major scale.

The out-of-scale notes, then, are achieved in other ways; in the recorder, by fork fingering and half-hole techniques. Or put another way, by manipulating combinations of the existing tone holes.

(Worth putting in here a bit about transposing instruments. Basically this idea of scale tones simple, chromatic tones harder, holds regardless of the instrument's range. A recorder in F plays the same scale sequence as the shorter recorder in C, just down a fifth. Some instruments take this one step further and are written in sheet music as if they are in C; like the Bb trumpet, which when playing a written C is actually playing Bb.)



So here's the issue. These scale tones have an imperfect relationship with the harmonic sequence. They are in fact (especially when you add in Equal Temperament) in rather arbitrary locations. The relationship of the chromatic tones has, unsurprisingly, no precise mathematical relationship to the tone holes drilled for those scale tone.

A wee bit on the acoustics of woodwinds. An oscillation started at the fipple, embouchure or reed is coupled to the column of air in the body of the instrument, creating a standing wave at some multiple of that original frequency. A set of harmonics, actually; by simple Fast Fourier transform, all of the harmonic series from the fundamental are represented (in different quantities which provide most of the distinctive timbre of that instrument).

When you open the tone holes sequentially from the bottom the acoustic length of the body changes, thus the frequency of the standing wave. But if you open mid-point holes in fork fingering, or half-cover a hole (both standard recorder techniques) you selectively enhance and suppress some of the harmonics, changing the flow pattern, causing the effective acoustic length to change by some fraction.

All of these special fingerings are, to repeat, built from the available tone holes; from tone holes that had been specifically drilled for the scale tones.

So it makes perfect sense that the fingering for most accidentals (another way to refer to out-of-scale tones) is a set of compromises. In the Venova, specifically, it can be set up for German fingering, with one set of notes generally flat, or for Baroque fingering, with an entirely different set of notes being off-pitch.




(Post written earlier and published today)

"It was a dark and stormy year..."

I keep having these ideas that cross historical times with fantasy elements. More or less. I'm interested in that intersection between the rational and the fantastic, particularly as a societal conflict. That's making me think of several possible time periods.

First is a somewhat hazy zone somewhere between Victorian and Edwardian, the place where antiquarianism is giving way to modern archaeology. When the map of history is slowly losing the "Here be monsters" in its margins. Not to say there aren't still endemic and deep-seated misinterpretations of both ancient and living cultures. Far from it; this is an age of the uncovering of Troy and extensive biblical archaeology. An age, also, where Piltdown could reside in a place of honor because that ridiculously obvious forgery supported what a part of the western world wanted to believe of itself.

I don't think this can be nailed down to a single year. You can have Budge and Petrie meet, but the latter is still fumbling and the former is more than a mere antiquarian. Nor can you concatenate the decipherment of Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs, cuneiform and Linear B. The stories of each of these, taken alone, also spreads across decades of which far too many of the stories are too interesting to want to leave out.

And oh yeah; the fantasy element? I don't know. I don't know if I even want it, except for the crassest of reasons (shelf space for SF/fantasy is bigger).


A new one just occurred to me today. And that's basically the EC Comics Weird War Tales, but using WWI. Because you can leave the weird completely out and the conflict that interests me is still there. It is the conflict that most steampunk stories shy away from recognizing; the old empires are falling, the old ways, the rigid social classes, the flower of French Chivalry and all that are falling as everyone flails around trying to get a grip on the quite literally world-changing technology of mechanized warfare (and industrialization in general).

Of course that's a slower process than just one war. It is just a place and time -- especially the earlier parts of the war -- where you can throw it into sharper relief. And more than one story, fiction and non-fiction, has already been written with just that same focus!

There's again no real need for the weird here. It is also unclear what roll the supernatural (or otherwise non-part-of-history) elements. To put it in strictly Lovecraftian terms (I wouldn't want to use the Mythos, not even in a serial-numbers-filed-off way, because it doesn't go where I want to go with it), you could have unspeakably ancient, indescribable lurkers in the dark representing either the fears of the coming modern world (as Lovecraft used them) or the reactionary and irrational. Or have the weird split, with something like Lovecraft's Migo representing the darker side of technology, fearful and impossible to fully understand.

One possible direction to take this is alternate history; that a completely new element is introduced, quite possibly one that reflects and emphasizes part of the existing societal conflicts. Such as (given purely as illustration because as an actual idea I hate hate hate it) zombies erupt in the middle of no-man's land and both sides have to turn their efforts towards combating, understanding, and possibly exploiting them.



A rather different venue, and one of my first ideas, is World War II. I particularly like the Pacific War for various reasons, but in any case. This could be a Secret History -- there are quite a few mysteries around and quite a few odd secret organizations and adding a few occult ones to the mix is hardly even fantasy (until and unless they actually manage to get something to work). Plus I'm fascinated by the side players, the civilians, the Coast Watchers, the boffins, etc.

Or it could turn alternate universe as various supernatural entities enter the fray. In any case, the key place where I would approach this period differently than the earlier war is that in this one, humanity is the greater monster. Or to be more specific; Cthulhu rises from the ocean and we start dropping nukes. And nobody is happy. Except the writer, because I am fascinated by the dawn of the nuclear age, the cast of characters, the way scientific questions were confronted, etc.



The last period of interest is modern day. And the sub-setting is archaeo-gaming; the intersection between archaeology and games. Here the core conflict is not exactly science versus tradition, or rationalism versus the demon-haunted world, but more the way modern Archaeology is trying to be honest to the facts and sensitive to other cultures, versus commercialism and lowest-common-denominator audiences and all the ways "it's just a story" can be used to trample the real concerns of real peoples.

I realize that sounds a lot more didactic and preachy than it should be. It wouldn't be. And there's plenty of space under the basic umbrella for retro-tech and paleo-gaming, the vibrant current cultures of emulators and 8-bit music and arcade restorers and all that. And real current concerns about intellectual property and cultural appropriation when archaeological artifacts can be scanned and those files printed in physical media or reproduced within virtual worlds.




All bunnies are, again, free for the taking. If you think you can write it, then you have my blessing.



And the rabbit's foot dropped today, during lunch. I'll write more (far too much more -- you know me!) on it soon, but the gist is that my area of interest is the Ancient World and the period of interest is....The Bronze Age Collapse!

No research? Hah! I'm cursed.

Well, yeah, the chapter I'm working on is in its own way a big set-piece, bringing together threads and hints that were spread out over the rest of the story. So I was going to have to look up at least a thing or two.

But really I'm doing the research because it is so fun. Take the boarding school in Scotland. Gordonstoun, the real Gordonstoun, is a perfect choice. Aristocracy went there. It has an unusual emphasis on physical fitness -- at its founding it had a physical regime which verged on Spartan. Someone over at Eidos did their research. So already excuse to talk about the weirdness of Sparta, and to quote Wellington.

And it looks like he didn't actually say Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Dammit, march of history!

Then I hit the best quote of all. Prince Charles went to Gordonstoun. Which he called, pithily, "Colditz in kilts." Oh, yeah. I gotta write about this place now.



So next I needed a throwaway detail -- a place that is just background so a character has a place to have some life changing thoughts. And I have no idea why, but I thought of the mummy room at the British Museum. A little diversion first to who said it had lost its charm (George and Ira Gershwin, and there's a great cover by old Blue Eyes himself.) Then on to the Egyptian collections.

After a little poking around I came across a paper that attempts to establish a baseline for nomenclature and provenance of the mummies in their collection. And, oh, the wonders in there. About Budge buying them wholesale in Cairo, the so-called Sales Room of the Cairo museum, the factories on the west side of Thebes swapping mummies and cases and grave ornaments to make the best-looking composites for the mummy trade. And of course the complete lack of provenance up until -- yeah, you could have seen this coming -- Flinders Petrie.

Yeah, but none of this is going to fit. I decided early on that Gebelein Female 1 was the best mummy for the scene I need to write. Who was nicknamed "Gingerella" despite her brown hair because at one point she temporarily replaced the male specimen known as "Ginger" (who was a ginger -- or at least he used henna to that effect) in the mock-up pit burial he was displayed in. And, yeah, even that is too much for the scene.

Besides, I need space to talk about Roman-era grave paintings (something I knew about already) because it underscores so well the point I'm trying to make in my little ode on a Grecian Urn...I mean, Pre-dynastic Egyptian Mummy. (And, dammit -- I was going to let it go but now I can't remember if it was the very Greco-Roman paintings hung like creepy posters or a really cheap Halloween mask on the front of a wrapped mummy, or actual carved death masks that are what I was thinking of. Heck...I think it might have even been a completely different funerary good...so I'm going to have to fact-check anyhow.)

Nope, nope, I'm wrong. Or rather, I was right before. I was thinking of the Fayum, the mummy portraits of the coptic and Roman era, and it has been contended based on comparative analysis that the apparent naturalism is less true than it could be. Which was the point I wanted to make for the story, connected as it is to preserved remains which are separated from their burial goods, the correct signifiers of status and gender, even their names -- in those rare cases that history recorded them in the first place).

And yet one more thing that won't fit into the scene. I love the life and character of the Fayum Mummy Portraits but there's something about the eyes that makes me think of the goggle-eyed gaze of Byzantine mosaic art.



Of course little of this fits, and I'm far enough above my target word count I may have to split the chapter as it is. Thing of it is, it is making me think more and more of a place it could fit. There are so many stories and so many incredible characters in the earlier days of Archaeology. From the mass of scientists and artists Napoleon gathered around him at Giza to the famous names like Schliemann and Carter to the often unsung women and non-European archaeologists whose stories are finally starting to be unearthed.

I rather want to write a novel set in that transition period between antiquarianism and modern science. The research, though -- it is terrifying just how much one could find oneself wanting to do.

Orogeny recapitulates porphyry

Ah, research.

I'm into the "less research, dammit" part of the story. I'm skipping any rest stops, roadside attractions, or other touristing as I send my cast down the interstate and to the final location of the book.

All I wanted was a couple of words. Like "the red sandstones had been left behind for a muted, depressing yellow-ochre." Or something like that. But...what color is the area I'm traveling through?

Not a simple question. I'm thirty tabs deep now on the geology of the Colorado Plateau (of which the San Rafael Swell through which I-70 passes is part of), the various layers of Jurassic, Cretaceous, and earlier materials, the weathered remains of an anticline formed 60-80 MYA, the leaching of iron from exposed Navajo Sandstone, the unique endemic species, etc. etc.

I'm no geologist. In times past I had the illusion it might be possible to do world-building from the mantle out, to figure out the underlying geology and work all the way out to rain shadows and micro-climates. Well, the US is so damned geologically complex it is essentially beyond me to grasp enough of it to be able to paint the kind of broad strokes the template sentence above implies.

Still: the question of what central Utah looks like fails most of my tests; there is no kind of reproducible behavior involved, it ties into no politicized argument of which I am aware, is in short a completely neutral issue. I could say it was bright pink and filled with unicorn farts and it would only reflect on my willingness to do the research.

Yeah, but you see...it's fun to read up on the geology. And, yeah -- how else would I find that the Planetary Society set up a station because parts of the swell are similar to the landscapes of Mars?

Those who do not learn history...

...have an easier time writing a quick novel?

The character Sam Starfall (from the webcomic Freefall) once said, "My lies are more convincing when I don't know what's impossible."

Back when I was hacking out an artwork or two with Poser and Bryce (anyone remember Bryce3d? The textures were legendary. So were the render times) I was a member of a 3d art forum. And the same conversation came up over and over again; a (usually young) artist complaining they didn't want to learn perspective, color theory, the other basics of traditional art. Their stated reason? Because that would negatively impact their ability to bring out their own, unique, vision.

My usual rejoinder is that yes, Outsider Art is a thing, but most of us benefit from learning the rules before we go around breaking them.

But, as I get deeper and deeper into history, archaeology, and the classics, I'm starting to have more sympathy for the "Sam Starfall" school.

Bunny of the Week

The Great Pyramid of Cholula.

Under a 14th century Spanish Colonial church (a major pilgrimage destination) and covered with so much earth and other structures it looks like nothing more than a tall and regular hill lies a massive pyramid.

Begun somewhere around 200 BCE and built in stages over a thousand years, this elaborate pyramid complex is half a kilometer per side, larger in base and volume than the Great Pyramid of Giza, making it the largest monument in the world. Tunnels and passages wind through the structure; archaeologist have uncovered over six kilometers of passages so far. It is of course richly decorated, including fantastic murals, elaborate stone carving, and there are also multiple human burials.

And it is built on top of a cenote. Which, to add just that extra level of fantastic (something else I learned within the last couple of days) the distinctive cenote of Mexico's Yucutan Peninsula (deep circular pits where the surface has collapsed into massive limestone caves) are concentrated in a ring of shocked and fractured limestone that is itself a remnant of the Chicxulub Impact (the probable cause of the K-T extinction event of 68 MYA). These cenote are often connected in strings of caves, following the flows of an underlying aquifer which extends all the way to the sea.

Oh, yes, and just to put the Ancient Aliens firmly in the mix, an old name for the site is Acholollan (Nahuatl) meaning "place of flight." And, yes, the suggestion has been made that mysterious older inhabitants did just that. Perhaps their planet needed them.


So. Largely un-excavated (although quite well known and, like any ancient monument you've heard of, a major tourist destination), layered down through history from Spanish Colonization to late pre-contact to the height of the Mayan Empire to truly ancient caves to a catastrophe from tens of millions of years ago. Extending deep underground from the modern excavations to excavations by treasure hunters and seekers after building materials back through the Colonial age at least, to deep passages to natural tunnels to deep underground rivers stretching all the way to the sea.

And my only question is; why hasn't Lara Croft already been there to raid it?

Bass Canards

Passed the worst of it. Money came into my Paypal. Then my late paycheck arrived. I put in a full day at work. And I mailed off the latest set of M40 grenades. I even got a little fiddle practice in.

One of the reasons I've been behind on the fiddle practice is I've been using my breaks to tinker with an acoustic experiment. I bet I could get it declared a "20 percenter." Considering we do, well, acoustic design at work. Or rather, the company does. I reload coffee machines.

So what I built was an experimental Cajon. These are drums made in the form of (and historically, from) wooden boxes. Because of the nature of the sounding surface (or tapa), there are a variety of different sounds that one can get from one, including a reasonable approximation of the basic kick-tom-snare setup.

I was cutting from scrap wood, so I used slightly smaller and non-standard dimensions. But what I really wanted to explore was the idea of porting.

See, the box itself functions as a Helmholz Resonator. Not the perfect spherical one, however. Like a guitar body, the acoustics are a complex blend of the air mass inside the volume of the cavity communicating with the outside through the tone hole and modified by the flexible materials making up the body itself. This is even more complex in a cajon as one side of the box is the drum head itself -- which has specific resonance modes itself (multiple modes, in fact, with different combinations of strength of the various nodes excited depending on where the surface is struck).

According to a university acoustics lab experiment I read, even though the 0,0 node of the tapa is around 110 Hz, there exists a second peak of acoustic energy of the cavity. They were studying how this is modified by changing the diameter of the tone hole.

Well, I thought I'd see if I could emphasize low frequencies by using a cabinet design trick; by porting the hole. Adding a tube extension essentially lowers the emphasized frequency. This, at least, can be readily calculated. I didn't bother, as I was making this from available scrap. Instead I simply experimented.

Adding the port instantly cut much of the supporting resonance in the 200-400 hz range. Which is where the strongest most characteristic strike tone had been. It brought in a new peak of strongly boosted frequencies centered at about 50 Hz for the tube length shown above. The wadding (which I added to before closing the box) was designed and effectively did muffle most of the original "box" tone, leaving almost nothing but the "slap" of hand on wood and a deep powerful thump much like that you'd get from a good kick drum.



Unfortunately another part of the experiment was not as successful. It did not seem possible to selectively reduce the damping (and the effect of the porting) to allow richer, more tom-like tones in other strike zones. Nor was I entirely happy with the "slap" of the loose edge I designed for a snare-like effect (too woody, although it did have a good slap. I can put more sizzle in by adding guitar string under it, but I'm afraid this might be audible in the "kick" as well).

If and when I get back to this (I saved a few other pieces of scrap wood) the next experiment is going to be making a bongo-cajon but using partial baffles instead of airtight partitioning. I'll see how the two air volumes communicate and interact.


A little more on-line research and I found some good technical discussion at a Cajon builder's forum. And, yes, the porting trick is well known -- there's a pair intersection between Cajon builders and speaker builders. There's also a style of Cajon playing (and building) that aims for a close approximation of kick-and-snare (and, somehow, hat). 

But I find I side with the larger community in that I miss the "wooden" tone of the classical Cajon. That is, the 200-400 Hz range which my ported and damped experiment specifically reduced. However, based on a slightly better understanding of the underlying math (one day I'll get around to reading the rest of that book I have on musical acoustics) I've decided to pre-calculate the dimensions (particularly the critical sound hole dimension) of the planned Bongo Cajon.

It's all about ethics in creative writing

I've reached a place in my fanfic where an ethical issue has become hard to ignore.

It always matters to get the facts right. To do the research. But there are some places -- even in a work of fiction -- where the writer bears a specific responsibility towards the facts.

The first reason is reproducibility. People will learn things from your book. On the negative side, this is why the writers of the television show MacGuyver were very careful; whenever Mac was shown making an explosive (or anything else an impressionable young watcher of the show might chose to duplicate themselves) they'd leave out a crucial step. Or intentionally get something wrong.

There's an almost identical act that gives me the impression of an understood professional obligation among nukees; apparently, if you know how to make an atom bomb, and you describe one in a book, you are required to get some of it wrong.



On the flip side of reproducibility, your book may be the only source of certain information. My star example is a friend who got an eye injury on his first day in town, but knew the name and location of the nearest Emergency Room due to it being mentioned in an urban fantasy novel. He was in pain, he was a penniless student...you can't blame him for not taking the more reasonable course of, say, calling a cab and asking them to find him an Emergency Room. The point is; that it was in a book, the information was detailed and sounded reasonable, and at that moment that was what he reached for.

You can do the same for many trivial things; which train do you take to Harlem, is tap water safe in Bangkok, can you really make a sauce by boiling down tomato juice and beer (yes...I have learned cooking tips from Spencer.)

You can also find yourself the source of information in rather more critical times. If I put CPR in a scene, for instance, I owe it to the safety of the public to make it as accurate to current teaching of the American Red Cross as I can -- and if possible, put in a disclaimer as well (that you really, really need to be properly trained). The same goes for treating snake bite, handling firearms, fall protection gear, etc.

Because fiction has penetration, and fiction has weight. The person who is contemplating applying a tourniquet may not read non-fiction. They may not have studied the first aid they should have. They might, conversely, have been briefed extensively on expedient field medical care, but the dry rote memorization of those lessons flees before the emotional, full-color depiction they encountered in a work of fiction. What the instructor said sounded reasonable, but Spock made it look so right to do this...



And this brings us to facts that don't have a direct, day-to-day impact. History has always been a whipping boy for political movements, right back to the ancient kings who talked up their accomplishments (or outright lied about them) to cow outsiders and to strengthen their hold upon their own people. There are many peoples today who look to history to find justification for their actions in the past or their proposed actions in the future; "The Tutti cruelties upon our people must be avenged!" or "Taiwan has always been part of China!"

A surface impression of the various and sundry hoaxes and outlandish theories of fringe Archaeology is that they are amusing but trivial. Questions about who built the Pyramids, say. But when you dig deeper you quickly discover these are essentially codes for rather darker motivations; motivations of racial and religious antipathies, and excuses for imperialism and genocide.

Let me be very specific; in the American Southeast, there are incredible earthen mounds (some still survive and are worth a look.) There are, as there are of many spectacular ancient constructions, lots of amusing theories as to who built them. There is also the documented archaeological evidence of who built them.

The point is, all of the pseudo-archaeology boils down to, "Anyone but the (actual) Indians." Because that is how they were framed when the existing peoples of those lands were violently thrown off them. In fact, the "Vikings, Egyptians, Lost Tribe of Israelites" were specifically portrayed as, after having constructed the mounds as part of a high, complex culture, being massacred by the primitive savages. Whom the white races discovered squatting on those bloodstained ruins when they arrived; thus justifying their massacre in turn.

Don't trust me on this. Look at early sources. There are Founding Fathers who said almost exactly what I said above.

Now, this isn't as bold and direct today. But we still live in an era of marked inequities, and there are strong intersections between the people who spend effort on showing the Mound Builders have no relationship with modern Native Americans, and people who wish to throw a giant wall up along the Mexican border.

For another example, Great Zimbabwe was for decades described as the construction of, again, "Anyone but Africans." This was not fringe literature; this was the official word taught in Rhodesian schools. And since it was government policy, it was easy to get permission to dig, often destructively, in search of the desired evidence. Destroying much of the real archaeological record in the process. Fortunately, that has been reversed since 1980; the new regime even named itself in recognition of the past greatness of its peoples.



Not all pseudo-archaeological ideas are such trip-mines. But there is one particularly troubling problem I have yet to mention. And that is that there is a grab bucket of specific ideas that get reached for over and over by others -- including those with nakedly polemic aims.

Take one specific instance; the Khufu cartouche in the resting chamber of the Great Pyramid (or, rather, the idea that this is a 19th-century forgery). I'm writing a story in which this is offered as one of the pieces of evidence that the Giza group was built under the direction of aliens. Thing is, this is being brought up today (well, as of this blog post, two days ago in the comments of an archaeology-related blog I follow) as proof that the Pyramids were constructed by....well, you know the refrain by now. And this is of course an insult to the Egyptian people. And it is a muddying of the real work being done in understanding early Egypt.

So if I place this same piece of contentious "evidence" in my story, I am not just supporting my own plot, I am lending that one more brick of citation to this "fact" that will be used in arguments I am morally opposed to (among the people who pull this plum from the grab-bag are Creationists...and I really don't feel the need to list the rest.)

There are many of these bits, and they are well known; some, known enough that your reader will have heard of them already, lending an extra verisimilitude to your story, in the same way H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth referenced each other's made-up reference works of occult literature (and Robert E. Howard borrowed at least one of their mythological entities). That makes them dangerously attractive to the writer.

I suppose I should sort this list a little. There are the non-mysteries; Who built the Easter Island heads? (The locals) Then there are the non-facts; are the Tolima figurines ancient fighter jets? (No.) And there are the non-artifacts; Is the Yonaguni Monument a sunken city? (No.) You can reach for any of these as a writer and there is a good chance your reader will have encountered them before (or will encounter them later), and that gives the imaginary world you are creating an extra weight of citation. But at the same time, you are aiding in the spread of misinformation, and some of this misinformation is applied towards specific and dangerous social goals.

I can easily throw out references to the Bone Wars, the mysterious disappearance of the best specimens of "Peking Man," the recent homo floresiensis and of course eoanthropus dawsoni (aka the Piltdown Hoax) to establish a fictional world where modern humanity is actually a recent interloper who migrated here from the land of the Fae (and have ancestral memories of magic and wee folk and all that). But when I do so, I am adding emphasis to citations of the same by Creationists who have successfully thrown barriers in the way of teaching science in my local schools!



To more specifics. Within the 119,000 words of my current fanfic I've already talked about several well-known archaeological mysteries (or "non-mysteries"). Whatever the line it is that I'm trying hard not to cross, I don't feel as if I crossed it yet.

I mention the Voynich Manuscript. In fact, I provide my own "explanation" for it. This doesn't bother me because the facts about the manuscript (its date of creation, what is known of its provenience) are not disputed in my story. And although I offer a theory, there are many, many theories out there, all with approximately equal support. So I am not throwing weight on a single disputed point. Lastly, my theory is rooted in the specific mythology of a certain television show. Saying the equivalent of "The sphinx's nose was shot off by vacationing Klingons" adds nothing to any existing disputes.

I make a similar throw-away on the Phaistos Disc. My explanation of the Golem of Prague is slightly more troubling, but just in one aspect. The Golem is firmly understood as mythology in the first place; it isn't an established or even contentious bit of history. And there are similarly many, many golem stories. And also similarly to the example above, my spoof explanation is entirely dependent on the mythology of a specific television show.

I do, however, make remarks about the reality of various and sundry copies of the Spear of Longinus. But I am not sure this is particularly in contention. I do no, in manuscript, specifically attack any singular example and say that this one is not acceptable as a relic.

What bothers me more in this sequence is I do a POV scene from an actual historical character. However; there are many tales already told about High Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, and I hope I was somewhat successful in framing that excerpt so it can be understood to be another fictional exploit by the High Rabbi in the style of the Jewish fables and tales.

(I also have a manuscript discovered in Prague that details the death of Grand Duke Vytautas during the Battle of Grunwald. But once again, my embellishment does not add or subtract to any contentious history.)

The minefield I am walking into now, however, is this; in the universe of the Stargate franchise, not only were early humans visited by aliens, some of these aliens interbred with humans, passed themselves off as gods and inspired worship, and may have gifted insights into technologies such as agriculture and writing.

This is insulting to humanity and counter-factual to everything known from the archaeological and paleontological record. It supports an anti-science bias. And there is worse. There are several specific threads of pseudo-archaeological and supernatural belief that demon-like creatures -- fallen angels, evil aliens -- actively interbred with humanity and are working through their progeny to destroy modern humanity. That these variously-named "Nephilim" control the media, suppress science, push dangerous "vaccines" (which are of course poisons), even "encourage homosexuality" (somehow) to further degrade, enslave, and destroy all good right-thinking people.

(This is not an American peculiarity but it is particularly strong here).

For reasons of my plot I would like to have a character theorize that Monks Mound in Illinois was constructed with the aid of some of the "Ancient" race -- survivors of Atlantis, in fact -- and that some modern people carry a genetic signature (as given in the Stargate franchise, the "ATA Gene") as a result of interbreeding. But in doing so, I am playing directly into the abhorrent belief set above. What I haven't decided, however, is that whether, as bad as these ideas are by themselves, tying them into specific pseudo-archeological or counterfactual claims makes it worse.

I feel as if it does. Let me go to a completely different example. Say I want to establish some sort of mental powers (psychokinesis, say) in the world of some story I'm writing. As tempting as it might be, I'd never roll out the old "we only use 70% of our brains" canard. Because this is bad science, but more specifically than that, this is a well-entrenched bit of falsehood that should be confronted wherever it is found. It may not mean anything beyond itself (except for supporting a credulous and at least slightly anti-science viewpoint). If I mentioned it at all, it would be to point out that it is wrong. And not simply to naysay, but to use it as a teaching moment as to how actual science is done and give some glimpse into the state of the art of neurology (that we've moved a wee bit beyond phrenology, and we do in fact have some idea how our brains work).

Saying "A certain hawk-nosed centurion commanded his men to destroy the nose of The Great Sphinx as it was insulting to him" does little harm because it isn't a well-established counter-factual. Saying "Klingons on shore leave shot it off" is even less damaging (except to the Sphinx) because Klingons are clearly fictional. Saying "Caesar accidentally damaged the Sphinx when attempting to transport it back to Rome" is more dangerous as the specificity of detail gives it a surface plausibility -- claiming the same of Napoleon is worse as it would be within keeping of his documented behavior and is more likely to be believed without supporting citation. Saying, however, "The original broad, flat nose of the Sphinx was destroyed in the 18th century in order to cover up the actual racial identity of the rulers of the Old Kingdom" plays into an existing dialog and is, of the above, the worst of all (regardless of what radial characteristics you wish to establish as being "proven" by the nose in question).




So what is the conclusion? Obviously, be aware and respectful, and do the research. It is one thing to propagate an error due to a necessary dramatic choice, and another to do so out of ignorance that it is an error. Somehow it is worse. Don't ask me to defend why -- well, most likely because knowing the truth gives you more tools; to use the thing but to clue in the reader what you are doing, or to find a better option.

This is akin to my argument about realism in Science Fiction -- which overlaps into realism in doing Historical Fiction. The reaction in far too many writers (and certainly the defense resorted to by counter-critics) is that it is necessary to stretch the truth in order to make the story work.

Balderdash. Yes, it may be, but the actual error being made is starting with story and then trying to fit the facts to it. And this is an error of creativity. When you start with the thing you are going to reach for facts to support (and if you fail to find facts, then falsehoods) is that the bucket you are reaching into for that original idea is shallow. You are aping whatever was done in fiction already. Often what's been done to death. I hear this cry about the nasty old facts stifling ones creativity, but what I see being done is tired retread.

If you start with the research, you discover the real world is vastly more complex and interesting than whatever you might have imagined. I could easily create a fictional Pharaoh out of hazy memories of all the fictional ones I'd seen before (Ten Commandments et al). Or I could read up; the heretic Akhenaten, the cross-dressing Hatshepsut, the boy king Tutankhamen -- would I have dreamed up anyone as interesting as them?

The time to go sideways is after you've researched the real thing and tried to work with it. Trying to write Space Opera these days puts one up against the light-speed limit and forces you to either bend some physics or get really creative.

And that I guess is my best advice. Do the work. Don't reach for the easy "Bermuda Triangle" or "Nazca Lines" -- unless you can say something new and original about them and in that way refuse to simply pass on and add to the echo chamber reinforcement of the existing anti-science claims.

And I am glad that, even though he is living in a fictional world in which Ancient Aliens are a thing, my Dr. Zahi Hawass was able to use the words of his real-life counterpart and educate the reader; "My people did not need help to make a pile of rocks."

Physics of Sound : Addendum

aka "We're doomed, doomed." c.f. "Kids these days..."


In my previous essay I emphasized how real-world physical acoustics leaves fingerprints in recorded sound. For instance; record in your living room, and unless you smother it with excessive post-processing, anyone listening will know it was recorded in a living room. Which is fine, unless you meant for it to sound like it was recorded on a wind-swept moor.

The corollary is that acoustic physics can be the easiest way to load desired information into a recorded sound. Want a cue to sound like it is coming from an iPod speaker? Play it back on an iPod speaker. Or play it back on that speaker, record the result, and play that back! (Leaving aside whether placement in space is also desired for that particular effect).

However.

Your audience is increasingly not getting that necessary reference to the real acoustic world. They are increasingly surrounded by processed sound. By amplified sound, by reinforced sound, by manipulated sound, and more than anything else by recorded sound.

This is the latest serve in the volley between audience and sound designer. First one could be said to start back in the Mystery Plays. By the time of Opera and Vaudeville, a whole symbolic language had been built of artificial sounds, standing in for elements of the desired environment; mechanical effects from the slapstick to the thunder run and the wind machine.

This is a trend developed through the golden age of the radio play and the early sound films, advanced by creative directors like Hitchcock and Wells, and reaching fruition sometime in the 70's when film sound became a fully designed element; no longer thought of in terms of mere reproduction, but a canvas of substitution. Film sound has become akin to film editing in being a language the must be learned by the audience, until they accept without thinking that the cry of a red-tailed hawk means the mountain on screen (whether it is meant to be in Peru or on Barsoom) is tall and majestic.

A Hollywood gunshot or fist no longer sounds much like any "real" gun or fist, to the point at which the sound designer takes a risk in putting out a sound that goes against that programmed expectation. The otherwise unmemorable action film Blown Away went through expensive effort to record the actual sounds of explosives before test screenings forced them back into the stock, expected, "blowing on a microphone" effect that was itself a relic of earlier and more primitive microphone techniques.

The next volley is amplified music on stage and ADR dialog on film; an audience raised to expect the kind of pristine vocals and instrument reproduction possible in a studio (or with studio techniques laboriously introduced into every available cranny of production audio and married as seamlessly as possible with studio re-takes). The audience of 1940 heard mostly unreinforced voices on stage, even on the musical or in opera, from the pulpit and even from the podium and bandwagon. Now, reinforcement is omnipresent. And the vast majority of story and song that is delivered to the theater audience is outside of that still-acoustic space.

In short, the audience is used to hearing every syllable clearly, every finger pluck clearly. They don't have to pay attention, much less strain, when listening at home to radio or television or recording, and they aren't listening to unassisted voices in an acoustical environment in the movie house or concert stage. With rare exceptions.

And they have brought those expectations to live theater. They expect to hear dialog as crisply, and with as little effort on their own part, in that still-acoustic space. So the poor theatrical -- and even operatic -- sound designer is forced into ever more technologically sophisticated (and expensive) systems to reinforce and amplify and (usually less successfully) clarify.

So now we come to the last salvo. And that is an audience who spends a significant part of their waking life with earbuds in. They no longer have any first-hand experience with a physical acoustic environment. To them, the sonic cues that tell how far away a sound is, or how big a room is, are those created by designers -- by film and television sound designers, but even more frequently by game programmers.

Just as we can no longer trust our audience to understand an actual recorded gunshot -- how we need to present them with the fake, wrong, ersatz gunshot they expect -- we can no longer trust them to pick up environmental or physical acoustic clues that mimic or are taken from the real world. To them, increasingly, distance is reverb and a shout is merely volume.

We may, as designers, have to learn this new and artificial language instead if we wish to communicate with our younger audience.

But then, the way some trends are going, we might just put aside the microphones entirely and put the whole thing in the form of tweets.

Essay: Worldization

The human brain is very good at picking up subtle audio cues; the little changes in phase and frequency content and direction that between them reveal the size and distance of an emitter and the size and surfaces of any enclosure around it.

These elements are difficult to fake, and nearly impossible to remove. If you record a voice-over session in a room, it will sound like it was recorded in a room. There is almost nothing you can do to remove those tell-tale clues.

Physicality matters. And physicality also sells. So as a sound designer, you can leverage that same physics.

One of the old tricks used in cinema was Worldizing. Basically, this meant taking pre-recorded material and playing it back in the same or similar acoustic space that was being shown on screen. Then record that. A similar trick has been used in record production; the most obvious being the "transistor radio" effect, achieved by -- yes -- playing back the track through a small speaker and picking that up on a mic.

You can perform this same trick live in the theater environment. If you have a sound effect that is pretending to be from an on-stage radio, then play it back through a small speaker. And place it as close as you can to where the prop is; again, that human audio processing system is uncannily good at figuring out where a sound is coming from in 3d space.

Of course, there are ways to fool that mechanism. One very useful trick for theater is the Precedence Effect. Simply put, the brain localizes on the first source heard (and/or, within a graph of intensity versus precedence, the loudest). So you can reinforce the sound of that small speaker to make it louder and fill in more of the low end content with other speakers, and as long as you stay within certain constraints of volume and time the sound will still "appear" where you physically placed the small speaker.

It isn't just speaker size. Placement matters. And so does the environment. If you place a speaker behind the set it will reverberate around the off-stage spaces and carry with it an aural "map" of that space. Put it on stage, within a defined space there (say, the couple of set walls that represent what the audience can see of a connected anteroom or bathroom, or inside a cabinet or coffin) and those acoustic spacial cues will be aded to the sound.



The simplest recording process is to record dry and add the appropriate ambiance later. However, there are times it makes sense to record within a specific acoustic space to begin with. Record in a stairwell and it will sound like a stairwell (or, at least, sound like a tall enclosed space). Interestingly, you can record on the actual stage and, if you've placed your microphone well (either in the audience, or near the speakers) on playback you will get phantom sources that seem to exist right there in the space with you. I did this once for Rosencranz and it was most effective.

On the flip side, you don't want every VO session to sound like the lobby, or every instrument you record at home to sound like your living room. Dampen those give-away reflections. I often record VO in costume shop storage, because all those hanging fabrics provides an acoustically dead space.



Physics appears in sound in other places. The vibration modes of any object -- not just a musical instrument -- change over various intensities. You can not record speaking and make it sound like shouting, or record a light tap and make it sound like a hard crunch. Or even record a piano played softly and make it sound like a piano being played vigorously. Physics doesn't allow it.

Again for voice-over work, if you want a voice to sound like it is twenty feet away, record from twenty feet away. Conversely, if you want it to sound like it is on a phone or a headset, then get that mic that close (or, better yet, find a phone or headset and record through that).

The latter is better because, once again, physics. You can simulate what a carbon element sitting in a phenolic handset sounds like, but you get a more accurate simulation with less work if you just record through that actual technology to begin with.

And this blends into sound effects. There is much more to be said on sound effects; about how audiences have been trained to expect things to sound a certain way (which they do not in real life), about how you need to focus in and strip down real sounds in order to "sell" them in the limited sonic window you have available in a play, and how distorting the real and creating the unreal are part of the art of sound design. But the best starting point is with real sounds. Not necessarily the sounds of that exact thing, mind you -- see above! -- but with real sounds. A microphone pointed at an actual mechanical object be it a snapping twig or a wind-up clock delivers multitudes of detail that is difficult to synthesize.

And real sounds have, well, reality. A gravitas, even. They carry that verisimilitude of real objects operating under the real physics we've instinctively absorbed through living in that physical environment. Even when you use a sound out of context, or use it to sell something quite different from its actual origin, those tiny cues of vibration nodes and damping and the little bits of noise of clattering and chattering and slithering and scraping are all there making it feel more real -- as well as more complex and more engaging.



Lastly, microphones have response curves and pick-up patterns. Equalization after the fact introduces phase shifts (as well as other artifacts); the better way to get a "bright" sound is to start with a "bright" mic. Real objects -- this is particularly obvious in musical instruments -- radiate from multiple sources in multiple directions. A microphone a few inches from a violin will hear a distinctly different sound picture if over the bridge, the neck, the back, or over an f-hole. And that same microphone a foot away will get yet another set of pictures depending on what part of the violin you aim for.

This is why placing microphones properly is so essential to getting the desired sound from a musical instrument that is being recorded (or reinforced in a live sound situation). The right mic, the right position, the right distance; these are all things that are difficult but not impossible to correct at the console or with plug-ins in the DAW. Which is not the same as saying post-processing never happens. There are instruments that are almost defined by artificial processing of the original acoustics, primary among them being the rock drum kit.

This matters for voice-over recording to. Or for foley work. It is essential in both to put on headphones and find out what is actually going to the recorder. Search out the sound field, move the mic and change the angle, to find the sound you are searching for.

A few musical notes

Felt inspired and full of energy...
...an hour before work ended for the day. It's that last hour that's the killer (why I'm moving towards a 35-hour week instead).  I miss ten hour days. Ten is no harder than 8, but it gives you either more pay or a longer weekend.



Put in 20-30 minutes on the fiddle today. Still working on that coordination -- rather, the sequence. According to a study I read, takes 20-40 milliseconds for a string to "speak" from when the bow is applied. You need, however, to be on the correct string and have the fingers in the right position before that happens. And the problem is, starting the bow is a shorter motion than moving the finger or, worse, moving to bow to a different string. The study didn't go into that, but looking at the graph the former is in the range of hundreds of milliseconds, and the latter I'm betting is much longer than that. Like a finger on the piano keyboard, these are ballistic motions; you need to start them well before they are required to be complete.

So you can't just start them both at the same time. You do that, you get squeaks and squeals. You have to anticipate by a fraction of a second. Of course I'm making it harder (much harder) on myself by not using a detache bowing, but trying to do this within the change of direction.



Over the weekend dreamed up a possible motif for my proposed Tomb Raider: Legacy OST (original sound track). Made a quick recording in Reaper off the keyboard (yay! Got some more use out of the Behringer!) Assuming I get that far, I will be doing at least the Nathan McCree motif on my Clarke pennywhistle. But will it take me long enough to get around to it that I'll be able to do a fiddle part as well? Unlikely, either way.



On the way back from the grocery store sung "My Dog Has Fleas" (aka the open-string pitches of standard/soprano ukulele tuning.) And when I got in, a quick check on the uke showed I was right on pitch with all of them. So I think I may have absolute pitch. Far from perfect, however (again, I have indirect evidence I'm only sensitive to 30 cents or more for absolute. Relative, the tuner tells me I'm sensitive to within the limits of the display). I'm still using the Snark every time I practice on the fiddle; it clips right to the headstock so it is easy to look and see if you are on pitch.



Also over the weekend, I borrowed back the Morrow Project CBR and Medkit long enough to stick new batteries in them and to try to do a short video demonstration of the electronics. It did not go well. I couldn't get the display to show up properly on the laptop's built-in camera, and I was awful; rambling, disjointed, uncoordinated. I supposed I could play around with recording a new narrative and doing a bunch of edits to splice the new material together with some better pictures, in-progress construction pictures, etc. But that's a lot of work and my channel has nearly no hits.

Otherwise, I have a buyer in Germany for a couple more M40's, I'm waiting on a new MOSFET for the Holocron (plus four pounds of obsidian flakes), I'm three to five hundred words away from completing the next fanfic chapter, and I got as far as taping a fresh sheet of paper to my drafting board for new Holocron art.

Wrong Soapbox

I've gone and written myself into a corner again on my TR/SG1 fanfic.

Well, sort of. The plot will proceed just fine. But I may have made it impossible to indulge in the polemics I had planned.

I've got Lara somewhere between the midwestern states and northern California; somewhere where I can preferably look at relics of the Mississippian culture. And I was going to go off a little on hyperdiffusionism; I originally created "Colonel" Newberry to not just be arguing that Vikings or Egyptians or one of the lost tribes of Israel were responsible for the creation of the spectacular burial mounds, but to wander even further afield into Giants, Nephilim, bits of biblical literalism and even some Young-Earth Creationism.

Two problems, though. One is that the Colonel's character is rapidly evolving on me; he is turning into someone more intelligent and competent and perhaps a nicer person as well. The other is that at this juncture Lara is undercover (or, rather, she thinks she is) and not in position to make the scientific and rationalist arguments. Worse, though, is this; when you think about it, her whole career has been based on the reality of some kind of hyperdiffusionism. In her world, there were gods/aliens who gave gifts of advanced technologies to primitive cultures. She's held the real relic -- an alien weapon -- that gave rise to the legend of Excalibur. She's met at least one of the rulers of Atlantis (and shot her in the face...but Natla got better).

On the other side of the pond, I'm sending Daniel Jackson to Croft Manor so Alister can let him know Atlantis was real and start him on the right track to bring all my mice up to the right spot for the climax. Thing is, Daniel is hardly one to harp on the obvious problems with the Atlantis myths. He spent his career arguing that the Egyptian gods were aliens from space, and has very, very good proof that he was right. Those very "gods" shot him in the face (Daniel also got better). And later in the official SG1 canon he not only searches for Atlantis on his own impetus, he finds it.

About the biggest wriggle room I've got here is that Alister could chose to put one on, and bring up the counter-arguments. Also, of course, the one he knows is not the one Daniel later finds (or so they think...I'm not sure anyone but Lara is actually going to realize over the course of this particular story just what the Ancients/Lanteans have been up to).



Well, losing polemics is probably good. Although without the chance to talk about the Mad Hatter logic that led from a Mayan codex to the continent of Mu, or the social trends that disinherit people from the accomplishments of their own culture, I may have to work harder to fill my 8,000 words.

Well, I did just do a little reading on climate cycles, and I am very, very tempted to do another long aside -- similar to the Ariadne vignette -- of Seh and her family, early agriculturalists in that moment where even their god can't project them from a shift (some 8,000 years ago) in the flood patterns of the Nile....

Ode on a Minoan Urn

Deeper I fall down the rabbit hole. I've said before, that practically everything is simpler than you think to get into, but harder than you think to do well. The most straight-forward seeming of subjects will inevitably unfold layer upon layer of unexpected complexity upon closer examination.

All I'm trying to do is create a 2,000 word sketch, a little fantasia. I'm not trying to be historically or linguistically accurate -- but I do feel constrained, however, not to blatantly violate historical reality or to perpetuate tired myths.



So it turns out we sort of know what the Minoans called themselves, as well as what they (or, at least, pro-Aegean peoples considered generically) called the various islands and other locations around that corner of the Mediterranean. For the former, Minoan trade with Egypt was well-established enough that Minoan translators were present at court, some Minoan writings (notably at least one medical text) were phonetically transcribed into Amarna-period hieroglyphics, and depictions of Minoans appear in tomb art.

There are strong reasons to believe there are similarities between the Minoan language and writing and later Mycenean (just as there are documented connections from Mycenean through to early Greek). There may also be an Etruscan connection. Some small progress is being made in translating Linear A, although it has not gone much past recognizing a few place names, but there is growing confidence in the basics of word order and conjugation as well as understanding the written alphabet.

But I'm not going to be able to use much of this. I haven't the patience to learn Mycenean or Etruscan conjugation (likely parallels to the Minoan), much less struggle through the papers and books and blogs where the slow decipherment of the language takes place amid much argument. Just filtering out which theories I chose to adhere to for the purpose of the chapter would be too much work!

And practically speaking, my main need is to properly lead the reader. To cleave from the familiar names enough to clue them in that I am not using the stock props of King Minos and Minotaur, Ariadne and her Clew. But not to be so obscure they have no idea who I am referring to. And still yet, avoiding another mined passageway in not picking terms that sound too much like something entirely different (and wrong). And all of this within and maintaining the flow and consonance of a narrative in (modern, even colloquial) English.



On the subject of learning too much (aka, the time you feel confident is the time you are most ignorant. The more you know, the more visible the voids in your understanding become for you) I knew already that the early 20th century conception of the Minoan world was suspect. It is largely the product of one man, who saw Greek myth and particularly the Minotaur everywhere, and who reconstructed some of the architecture according to a marked Victorian sensibility.

What I had not realized is that this colonization by other aesthetics did not by any means end with Arthur Evans. The laughing dolphins of the famous palace "fresco," images of noble Minoan youths; apparently some of these are so retouched and reconstructed they are a kind of Ship of Theseus themselves. They tell us much less about Minoan artistic sensibilities than they do about the 20th century artists who filled in the spaces between small faded fragments.



Well, whatever. I'm stuck with a Stargate universe, which builds on the artistic integrity and scientific accuracy of Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, re-treading the already shopworn Ancient Astronaut nonsense of Von Daniken and the like; nonsense that borrows liberally from older Theosophist meanderings that in turn drew upon existing conceits of hyper-diffusionism.

(In the baldest of terms, the colonialist reluctance to credit non-white, non-european cultures with accomplishments like the Giza pyramids, requiring theories of (white) outsiders as givers of culture and technology; the romantic idea of these outsiders is then fleshed out with elaborate fantasies, a host of new-created myths, which then go through multiple permutations as they evolve to suit the Weltanschauung of the era of the writer de jour. Salt with cherry-picked appropriations from whatever actual science is being done at the time.)

So whatever I try to get right about history, the core truths will always be that there are real figures behind some of the gods, and they did give some of the culture and technology enjoyed by various ancient peoples as well as lend their names and stories to our mythologies. And in this particular sketch, there was a Minotaur of sorts, and it was fought by an Athenian youth who went on to be King...oh, and in my specific Stargate universe version, the events in the labyrinth also supplied (possibly even though Solon) some of the threads Plato gathered together to create his Swiftian political lesson on what happens when a perfect Republic meets a rapacious empire going by the name Atlantis.

Topology and Gender

Opened a show Thursday. Started ten minutes late due to an electrical problem -- a problem I had seen coming but wasn't in a position to do more than try to correct after the fact. And that's made me think about the problem-solving toolkit. And further; it is possible this is a chicken-and-egg problem? Does the toolkit come out of domain knowledge, or can the toolkit be learned and applied by someone without that domain knowledge?

Right. Definitions first. When I have a microphone fail on stage, I have several problem-solving steps I can go through. I also have several prophylactic problem-solving steps that I try to do when setting up that microphone in the first place.

Simple example. This last show I strung cables for a house speaker and a foldback speaker across the front of the stage. Taped them down, then went to the stage snake. Potential problem here; which cable is which? They are under scenery and tape and can't be easily traced. Solution? A long time ago, I started putting ID bands on all my microphone cable. The cable to the foldback had "114" labeled on both ends. Problem solved.

A similar situation arises when I ran the cables from another speaker and a microphone (now, really, a smart tech labels all the cables with tape flags before running them, but even that is no panacea.) This was never a problem, however; the gender on each cable end is different, making it obvious which is which.

And this opens up into two of the most basic tools for keeping cabling from getting confused; gender and topology. In a sound system, particularly, most of your cabling has gender. Sound sources are male. Places where sound goes are female. With some exceptions, you can follow the arrow of male cable ends from the microphones on stage through all the snakes and mixers and processors and finally end up at a speaker.

Which means you know the purpose of any cable on the floor by the gender you see.

Topology is a similar and related problem-solving method (both prophylactic and after-the-fact.) MIDI cables, for instance, are a daisy-chain topology. You can string MIDI from one item to another, but they must go from an OUT (or THRU) to an IN. Follow the MIDI signal chain from the master (a keyboard, say), all the way out to the last slave (usually a sound module). Anything else is a mistake.

USB is a hub topology. You can never take USB out of a slave. It always starts with a host and goes to either a peripheral or a hub. And, yes; I've had musicians come up to me asking for a "USB A to USB A" cable. Nope. There can be only one (host). Everything else is in USB B, Micro, etc., etc.

Most people, I have found, run power to an orchestra pit by taking every object that needs to be plugged in and stretching it to whatever outlet is nearest. This means you have cords running every which way, and when the guitarist needs to move his amp over a foot to make room for the bass player the cord doesn't stretch and the only other outlet nearby is already filled up with music stand lights. And when someone trips on a cord in the dark things across the pit go mysteriously dead with no-one able to figure out where they need to plug in to get power back.

My method is to first determine the likely needs, then to provision outlet spaces; start from the smallest number of clearly defined sources of power, tape those cords down well, then break out in a star topology to power hubs placed in strategic parts of the pit. The thing is; you can always expand the star; plug an additional power strip into an existing power strip. And this means you always know where to look when the power fails to a trumpet player's stand light.




So what started this train of thought?

In this show, we have a blacklight effect. Several UV fluorescent strips are arrayed across the front edge of the stage. Their power cords are all gathered together into a power strip, which gets power from an extension cord which runs all the way back to the lighting table in the back of the auditorium. There, it is plugged into another power strip so that the switch on the strip can be used to toggle the effect on and off. The power for this strip comes from a nearby wall outlet.

I describe it this way because this was not in the minds of the people who were responsible for quickly loading in the show to make the morning performance. They weren't using a systemic understanding of the system, which meant they had no diagnostic toolkit to know when they were putting it together wrong -- or how to fix it with the audience already filing in and the show about to begin.

I've mentioned a previous workplace a couple of times. This was a place where magic spells were paramount. Instructions didn't just substitute for understanding; they trumped it. A case in point was when the institutional philosophy crashed into a simple light switch and was stumped by it.

There was a set of back-stage work lights, dim and blue so they didn't shine out and distract the audience during the show. One of the pre-show checks was to make sure these were turned on.

How did this institution train to achieve this goal? By substituting the goal of making sure the switch was turned on. They carefully labeled the switch (which sits, incidentally, right under one of the blue lights so that blue light clearly shines down on it when it is on), as to which direction it needed to be in.

Yes; the instruction had filtered itself to be not to turn on the lights, not even to turn on the switch, but to set the switch in the correct direction as per instruction.

And this actually worked okay (well, except for the frequent times someone read the checklist too fast and forgot to flip the switch, and the crew literally sat in the dark all show without thinking of mentioning it to anyone). But this just happened to be a two-way switch, with the other end of the switch down a rarely-used hallway.

And one day someone flipped the other switch to get the lights on.

Shock! Horror! The label is wrong now, and there is no way in heaven or hell to get the switch set to the right direction!

So they moved the label. This lasted until the (presumably) same helpful person flipped the hallway switch again.

Electricians were called about the mysterious broken switch. This was an emergency; they could not open the show without those backstage running lights, and there was no way to achieve backstage running lights if they couldn't tell which way the switch needed to be.

Eventually some kind soul explained about the two-way switch. Ah. Light dawns. Well, no. The other switch was firmly taped over with a big threatening notice to never, ever mess with it again. The label was restored on the remaining switch and it was back to business as usual. (Which is to say, forgetting to hit the switch and never, ever, ever thinking to look if the lights themselves were on.)



So my present theater company (aka the ones with the blacklight effect) haven't quite achieved this rabbit hole of mistaking the map for the territory. Their problem is more that that can't read a map and have never seen the territory.

There's this thing called theater sense. I don't know exactly how to put it, but it is a combination of knowing theater traditions, how things are usually done, and knowing exactly where you are. Theater sense tells you who to talk to when you have a costume problem. It also teaches you when to bring up a costume problem (or more importantly, when not.)

Our lighting volunteers are wonderful people but they don't have it. They aren't tuned to the flow of problem-solving going on between Director, Stage Manager, and other departments, and thus have no idea whether we are about to re-take a scene or are going on with the rehearsal. Heck; they don't seem to be able to figure out when we are actually doing a scene and when we aren't!

More apropos to this essay, however, is lack of any appropriate tool to figure out how the lights plug in. It seems to be a collection of fragments of instruction and bits of memory; the "boxes" need to have things in "1 and 3" and "the green cord" was one of the ones that comes from the lights.

Actually, I do have to give them credit. They correctly constructed the dimmer system, which requires that the Dimmer Packs get power (from a wall) and the Lighting Instruments then cascade down from the Dimmer Packs.

But the blacklight effect. When it was tested and failed, what we found was a power strip with three orange extension cords plugged into it and plugged in itself to another, all of them vanishing into a giant pile of twisted cords.

So, this is wrong at first glance; there's only one blacklight.

I took out my Chicken Stick and verified there was no power reaching the power strip itself. So, whatever it was plugged into was extraneous to the operation. I unplugged that.

Shock and horror. "That has to be plugged in; it's the cord going to the stage!"

Um, no. Not unless someone has been blatantly violating UL code on our extension cords. Remember gender? The stage is the lights. Whatever comes from stage will be male.

So I needed power to figure out which if any of the various male ends actually ran to the blacklights. Took the obviously superfluous extension cord and wriggled it out of the pile. It was far, far, under chairs, around lighting poles, back under more chairs.....until it plugged into the very same power strip it had purported to be powering.

Yeah. A perfect Ouroboros. Took that male end out of the power strip, plugged it into the wall, and the blacklights worked again. No need to figure out which was the real cord and which was another remaining error -- we needed to open the show.




But the question I started with is, how can we prevent this from happening? My method, as I showed above, is to have firmly fixed ideas of gender and topology. When I run cables, I have a sense of what each cable does and thus I am alerted immediately if something is wrong. If I'm hooking up a mic and I end up with a female XLR in my hands, I stop because I know I messed up somewhere and I need to fix it now rather than try to problem-solve it later.  (I always work backwards from stage end for exactly this reason. Also, it means I can dress the excess a the live end so if we have to move the mic, we can do so without having to pull up a bunch of tape).

But can this method -- can these kinds of methods -- be divorced from the body of domain knowledge I constructed them out of? Can you have a rule of thumb if you lack even the ability to define when it should be used -- and when it should not?

Are simplified models, arbitrary labels, "lies told to children" acceptable alternatives? Or are we going to require every volunteer we use to spend the necessary time in study to get enough grounding in the subject to where they can apply their own rules of thumb?

Myself, I can't imagine not wanting to learn. That was the biggest disconnect I had with the theater of the two-way light switch; for many of the people there, "Tell me the absolute minimum of what I need to complete this job" was their oft-stated desire. They literally rejected learning more.

In most other theaters, learning is embraced. But to people coming to the more technical end with essentially no technical background -- without even the ability to put the cords back on their home PC after dusting around it -- this appears as a monolithic, entirely daunting task. It is like someone asking if you'd like to learn to rock climb then dumping you at the foot of Half-Dome.

And I simply don't know.

The Long View

I've always had an interest in history, but insufficient patience to really do the work. That's probably still true; I've just replaced the biographies and personal accounts I used to use to liven up the dry "names and dates" stuff with short and lively audio presentations of history (via my new podcast habit.)

The toughest thing to grasp in any subject is the gestalt. That overall sense of the whole thing, the boundaries, the large-scale structures, where the basic parts fit in. And frustrating as it has proved to generation after generation of students, the best way to arrive at that gestalt is through the accretion of detail. Endless detail.

All of those endless battles and short-lived kings and tyrants and cities with ever-changing names are washing through me with very few of the specific details remaining. I've been passing back and forth through mostly the Ancient world, getting as far as Rome before dipping back again. I've been coming at it from both overviews and comparatively small pieces of the puzzle -- such as the personal history and writings of the Greco-Roman geographical historian Strabo.

(Strabo was born Greek and wrote in Greek but spent much of his life in Rome. This was the early days of Rome, when they looked back towards the Hellenic Age as the source of culture. His major error in achieving popularity over the next decades, in fact, was in failing to write in proper imitation of the classics.)

The main thing I brought away from that latter was an understanding of how Rome saw history; essentially, that they were the apex, the achievement that all history had led to. Unlike so many who looked forward to those that would come after, and hoped to leave more than just the broken feet of a grand statue for those later ages to admire, the Roman view of that time was what came after Rome would be...more Rome.

This actually helps me understand some of the things I was writing about (or at least had in the back of my head when writing); with the much later Germanic Holy Roman Emperors, the conceit of "The Dark Ages," Dante looking back at Brutus as being the greatest traitor that ever lived, even up to some of that seething mass of racial and religious mud the Ahnenerbe wallowed in.

The toughest thing for me at the moment is trying to get in my mind a real living sense of the ebb and fall of the major empires of the Mediterranean over my period of interest (4,000 BC through the first century AD, or more specifically, from King Narmer to early in the Egyptian New Kingdom). I'm just now finally getting a feel for the transitions between Minoan, Mycenean, and Greek, with Phoenician in the wings, and what is happening simultaneously in Egypt (as well as Egypt's far-from inactive neighbors).

Raider of Blue Highways

I think I've found a direction to go in that fanfic I keep talking about.

I'm not either clever enough or patient enough to come up with a new mythology of the Stargate universe that is consistent with what was shown on screen but also isn't insulting to the real worlds of history and archaeology (physics will have to fend for itself). I'm also unwilling to go too far off canon.

But even as I risk turning the story polemical as I trot out straw dogs (assuming straw dogs trot), I think it may work to bring in some of the large body of Ancient Astronaut and associated theories and treat them as the hogwash they are.

In fact, I'm looking now at doing a bit of a Foucalt's Pendulum trick (always steal from the best). Lara plays along with the treasure-hunting team of "L. Lytton Peabody" in a barely-legal exploration of something a lot like Watson Brake; earthen mound systems built by early indigenous cultures of North America. Peabody has lots of theories about Vikings and Lost Tribes of Israel and the usual roster of "Anyone but Native Americans" of the alternative history crowd, and perhaps due to his tireless self-publicity or perhaps his far-right political connections he's at least attracted half an eye of attention from the NID.

He may not know who the girl with the charming accent he found at a local diner is, but the NID does, and they have a task for an adventurer-archaeologist. Possibly (probably?) off-world.

I don't know yet why she is in Mississippi or Louisiana (prime Mound Builder sites) but I have been looking at Lafcaido Hearn, who before Kwaiden was writing about (and living in) New Orleans, and was friends with a particular famous practitioner of voudon.

So at least I get to write about something I have some interest in and information thereof. Unfortunately, although I'd love to do more with the fish-out-of-water of our British peer and heiress slumming in truck-stop towns in Middle America, my personal memories of traveling the same blue highways are out of date even for the period I'm setting the fanfiction in.



And this doesn't get me much closer to the next chapter, as even if I don't start (as I really want to) in media res, I want to cut away from Lara Croft and let the SG1 crowd struggle along alone for a while. Obviously, there's a briefing room scene to be had where Daniel can pontificate about Akhenaten (and Djoser, and Imhotep, and so on). And I'm willing to give him the credit to be re-thinking his own "Pyramids were built by aliens thousands of years earlier than anyone thinks" ideas.

But that's not where I'm going, as much as the Valley of Kings or pretty much any part of ancient Egypt is attractive. So I sort of need to get him out to Abingdon where Lara's aides and name-drop Atlantis on him and send him off on a largely-mistaken tangent.

Of course in-universe Daniel does eventually discover Atlantis. Yeah, that's Stargate for you. But that doesn't mean that Blavatsky was right or that Mu exists or that Atlantis ever fought the Athenian Republic...  So there's plenty of room for Daniel to actually get something wrong for a change. As long as I can manage to gather everyone together at Mount Shasta to play with a merely-dormant volcano and some inconvenient ancient technology while the very-real Norse Frost Giants attack...

Pigeon Chess

I'm still stalled on my Tomb Raider/SG1 cross-over fanfic, and apologies to all, but I'm going to try to work through some of my issues here. So ignore this post if you have no interest in an unfortunate collision between honest science and an honest adherence to the established canon of a fictional universe.

Military History

I was doing some random searching around for good descriptions on the working of a standard archaeological "unit" (usually a 1 meter by 1 meter pit), and came across a website for the Sand Hill site. Lots of history, good archaeology going on there to uncover the various cultures that passed through. And this dig is where? Fort Bragg.

And it took me several minutes and another web search to recapture memory of my own history. Yes, Fort Bragg. Where I'd spent three years of my life. Odd that I could come that close to forgetting the name.




I've been noticing anew, that even in this age a lot of history still ends up mired in the lists of battles and kings and generals. The coming and going of the Neo-Assyrian Empire is one page of trade routes and early Iron Age technological developments, and nine pages of battles against Nubians and Kushites and their final fall to Babylonians and Medes at Harran.

And I think I know one reason why. History is written, as they say, by the victors. But I don't mean that here in the sense John Harington meant when he said "Treason doth never prosper."* History is the reconstruction of the past through the writings of the past (as archaeology is the reconstruction of the past through the debris left behind). Oversimplified, sure. But who leaves written record? Why, pretty much the same people who wage wars.

Basically kings. Who have the funds to have stela carved, rock faces painted, troubadours hired, painters paid; and really good reasons to want their successes in wars to be prominently displayed (as well as preserved for posterity.)

Yeah, sure...a lot of the writing we find from the past is grocery bills, but those don't make as ready a story. Pulling a thrilling narrative out of the transition to three-field crop rotation is a lot more work. From the point of view of ruling nobility, who married who, who had a grudge against who, and especially who's chariots were tougher than who's is important. Important to the present (to keep conquered peoples cowed, your own taxpayers happily paying, and potential enemies cautious) and important to the future -- at least, the future of one's own line ("Before you think of invading here, remember what my dad did to your last army!") So we get stories. Big, blockbuster production stories full of blood and action. Which get entwined as well with myth, until you can't tell your Yĕshúʿa from your Joshua.

Heck, a variation of this pattern continues when we make the transition across the Industrial Revolution; when instead of a Clovis Point arising seemingly out of a culture as a whole, someone sticks their name in front of a Cotton Gin and has both the need and the funds to make sure people mention them together. Thus we shift just slightly sideways until the surface gloss of history is as much "And in 1856 Henry Bessemer.." as it is "In 720 BC, Sargon and Marduk-apla-iddina met in battle..."

History is also unwritten by the victors; from American Indian Boarding Schools to outright genocide, dominant cultures have worked to erase other languages, religions, cultures -- basically, to erase the losers from history itself. And more than one ancient ruler went around toppling statuary and defacing monuments to make sure that the only story that stuck in people's minds was their own.

This is why I gravitate more towards archaeology and anthropology. Because if you aren't looking primarily at the writing, you tend to organize more about the spread and evolution of cultural trends, the economics of trade, the science of cultivation...and less about which general won a fight on which day.




* "For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason."

Apollo, the last "good" hoax

Some of us enter the great Argument Room of the internet looking for something that fits in with our interest in science. The vast majority of professionals stay away from such arguments; they aren't career advancing, there's plenty of conflict closer to hand with people within their own field (few fields are free of ongoing controversy), and the argument itself is perpetual, more a Monty Python sketch then a purposeful debate that will end in a conclusion.

But sometimes the professionals do speak out, and that is to all our benefit, as that means describing their work and its philosophies and some of its challenges in a way people like me can understand.

Most of what little I know about engineering and a number of hard sciences comes courtesy of people -- engineers, aerospace professionals, also professionals in broadcast engineering, photography, photogrammatry, astronomy -- who saw the misinterpretations, mind-boggling stupidity, and outright lights being promulgated among the host of Apollo Hoax believers and chose to comment.

Again, correction is never going to happen. Or, rather; the people who write books, sell patent medicines or electrum bracelets, create videos for the "History" Channel, or push YouTube videos are never going to be convinced. Nor are many of their followers; the only thing more suspicious than a lack of response, in their eyes, is any response. Nor does any of this speak to the bulk of the crowd, who aren't aware that they actually have a dog in the race and thus take one view or another (more often than not, the conspiratorial view, as that is considered the least conformist) without any particular passion or even any particular attention.

I do believe, however, that the bad ideas are already out there, and they will taint everyone, the reasonable included, if there aren't counters floating around out there as well. And someone has to make those reasoned rebuttals. So I salute the Phil Plaits and the James Randis even as I (and they) understand how akin their books and blogs and other writings are oddly similar to tilting at windmills.

The hoax promulgators also have it easier in that it takes less words, less time, and a lot less math to express a bad idea than it does a good idea. When you get down to it, a lot of pseudo science (conspiracy beliefs included) replace a complex, difficult to understand, difficult to boil down concept with one that is simpler. (They also replace the random with the anthrogenic, the impersonal with the personal, and of course they prefer emotional statements over mathematical arguments!)



Unfortunately, the Apollo Hoax is dead. Really, the nerds won; unlike conspiracy beliefs involving Bigfoot or Mu, the Apollo Hoax was proximate to subjects the Nerd Horde was already primed to pontificate on; hard sciences, in particular, but also the space program.

But, really, the Apollo Hoax did itself in. It came out swinging with Bill Kaysing's book and from those first moments it had apparently decided its weapons of choice were, well, science. It came to the duel and when given weapons of choice chose the one it's opponent was already master of.

Every die-hard Apollo Hoaxie will eventually retreat to the ramparts of emotional argument and grand conspiracy and "were you there" ism. Discussions with them inevitably descend to attempts to game the discussion, then disruptive behavior, and finally angry exits. But their first entrance and their early work is framed in the form of testable scientific hypothesis.

Which is wonderful. Which is why I miss the Apollo Hoax.

Because not only are these testable hypothesis -- say, "Why weren't stars visible in photographs taken on the lunar surface?" -- they are also, to use the physics joke, questions posed in a frictionless vacuum.

Quite literally, in many cases! The nature of the project -- the alien setting, the specific physics of the situations, and the extreme mis-match between the naive expectations of the questioner and what actually arises in that setting -- conspire to create questions with very clear conditions and very clear answers.

You can argue endless whether someone "looked guilty and uncomfortable" in a press conference, but when you phrase something like "The Saturn V could not contain enough fuel to get to the Moon" you have created a simple and testable case. You've removed the engineering and all the second order factors and made what in reality is, well, rocket science into a first-order approximation. Into something as simple as plugging the weights of the system into the Ideal Rocket Equation and looking up the transfer delta-vee for the Earth-Moon journey.

And the questions weren't always physics. The peculiar conditions of the Moon, the alien look to those scenes, the emotional impact of photographs of men on the Moon, and the consistent impetus among all pseudo-science conspiracy believers to place images, and simplistic interpretation of images, foremost (since everything else takes more work and even -- shudder -- professional-level skills) means there are thousands of wonderful Apollo Hoax hypothesis that can be tested with simple geometry.

Can a flag lack a shadow? Can shadows converge? All of these are presented in specific cases which can be put to geometric analysis. (My favorite one was a Jack White, and a little hard to explain. LM, US flag, and high gain antenna photographed from some distance away, with the LM appearing in the center of the group from one photograph, and to the left of the other two in another photograph. Jack White believed this to be impossible. A quick sketch shows how it can be done -- and I leave that exercise to the reader).



The Apollo Hoax stood alone in having interesting problems you could work out yourself and learn a little science from, and putting this foremost in the argument (sure, you can calculate how large the Ark must have been, but that sort of work is ignored as pointless distraction by the people arguing various flavors of Biblical literalism.) And it offered a chance to think about space, to learn more about this fascinating project and the very real challenges they faced (and very clever solutions they came up with).

9-11 Truthers verge into science with their "melting steel" claims but they are incredibly angry people and no fun to talk to. Holohoaxers are just disgusting and don't deserve time wasted on them (sure, one could imagine a reasoned approach to holocaust denial, but scratch a hundred of them and somehow you come up with a hundred antisemitic white supremacists with fascist leanings). Anti-vaxxers are as angry as Truthers but a lot sadder about it (which I would be too, if I bought into it.) And so on and so forth.

If you wanted an argument, then the Argument Clinic is right next door to Getting Hit on the Head Lessons. But Apollo Hoax was something else, a weird mashup between a debating club and word problems in a maths text, like an impromptu orals for a graduate degree in some oddly interdisciplinary science, and that room is rarely open these days.