A speculative mind

  (This is a continuation and conclusion of last week’s blog) So, why do northern spotted owls like old growth? They don’t “like” old growth; they are adapted to life in an old growth forest. Thousands of years of evolution have honed their bodies and their behavior to be successful in that habitat. Can spotted owls fly to a different kind of habitat? Of course. They are birds. They can fly wherever they want, and frequently do. It is possible to find one in a second growth forest or even in a clear-cut area. Just like it is possible to find me at the beach, or in a desert, or on a mountain, but I don’t live there. Spotted owls live in old growth forest. That is where their major prey types are to be found: mainly flying squirrels and red tree voles. They can eat other things but this is the diet that gets them the energy they need to be able to reproduce. It takes a lot more energy to nest, produce offspring, and raise those offspring, than it does merely to survive. Having lo...

  Many years ago, I had a job for the US Forest Service as part of the Spotted Owl Survey. This was before the spotted owl was listed as a threatened species under the endangered species act, but there were a lot of people betting that spotted owls would be listed. A number of years before, the Forest Service selected the spotted owl as an indicator species for old growth habitat. An indicator species is like the canary in the coal mine for habitat types. There are lots of different kinds of habitats, old growth forest being one of them. With all of the different organisms living in a given habitat it becomes very difficult to tell if your actions are harming the habitat as a whole.   The idea is that if your indicator species is doing well, then the rest of the organisms in the habitat should also be doing well. Personally, I think that is a bit simplistic to think that you can tell the health of the habitat by looking at one species. There could be tens of thousands of diffe...

  There are three plays by Shakespeare that are collectively referred to as the “problem plays.” They are not called problem plays because there is anything particularly wrong with them, or because they are problematic. ( To be fair, there are things in these as in other Shakespeare plays that a modern audience might take issue with, but that is not why they are called problem plays).  They are called problem plays because whether they are comedies or tragedies, they deal with societal problems. They have dark subject matter and they tend to be cynical. They juxtapose broad comedy with harsh dramatic situations (I suspect another reason they are called problem plays is because they are difficult to categorize). Resolutions tend not to be clear-cut. The good guy doesn’t necessarily get the girl, and the bad guy may not be punished. It was unusual for a playwright of the time to write plays like this. Comedies were supposed to be funny all the way through with a well-defined hap...

  Time for some classic science fiction. Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delaney shared the 1966 Nebula award for best science fiction novel with Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. Reading Delaney can often be a mind trip. He is at times poetic (the main character is a poet) and at times experimental (I remember I had trouble making it through his later novel Dahlgren ). In Babel-17 he delves deep into psychological mysteries and the nature of consciousness.  Despite all that, the story is very readable. The civilization we are following, “The Alliance,” is at war with the ambiguous and undescribed "Invaders.” The Alliance has discovered an invader code: Babel-17. This code gets broadcast right before  “accidents” that happen on military installations or to people or equipment that are important to the Alliance. The generals feel these accidents are not accidents. The Alliance have asked the brilliant Rydra Wong to break the code, but after a preliminary investigation, she...

  Peter F. Hamilton’s A Night Without Stars is a sequel to The Abyss Beyond Dreams , which I reviewed a few weeks ago. Most of the story takes place many decades after the first book, so most of the characters are new. Though some characters come from the Commonwealth which has developed a functional version of immortality by downloading their brains into a new body or a machine body. But the people stuck on the planet Bienvenido have been sealed off from the Commonwealth for thousands of years (by their reckoning). Bienvenido is cut off from everything, having been cast out of the Void into intergalactic space. I am glad that this takes place so far removed from the first book because Svlasta (the protagonist from that book) grew increasingly hard to like as that book progressed. Thankfully he is long dead before most of the events of this book take place. And yet, we find ourselves with another troubling protagonist in A Night without Stars . Chaing is a security officer. His ...

  How to write science fiction? Well, here are a few tips.   To start with, you don’t get there by watching science fiction movies or television or video games. If you want to write science fiction, you need to read science fiction. And not just science fiction: Reading literary fiction will strengthen your diction, Read histories and mysteries, Biographies and classics, Everything you read, Will strengthen your mastery. Okay, so it’s not the greatest poem, but you get the idea. Reading is the best training ground. Next, if you are really going to be writing science fiction, you should have a better than passing acquaintance with science. You don’t necessarily have to have a science degree, but you need to have paid attention in school and maybe done some self-learning. For example, if you want to write a space opera then you should have an understanding of things like gravity and inertia, Newton’s laws, relativity, and how they might affect a ship or other bodi...

  Clearing Hurdles: The Quest to be the World's Greatest Athlete by Dan O’Brien and Brad Botkin, is the story of O’Brien’s life. Dan O'Brien won the Gold Medal for the decathlon in the 1996 Olympics at Atlanta. Biographies and autobiographies are not going to be very interesting if the subject in question has led a charmed life throughout with few challenges to overcome. It is the bad things that have happened in their lives, the journey overcoming the odds, that make the story interesting. Dan O'Brien certainly had his share of “interesting.”. Dan was an orphan. He was biracial living in a conservative small town. He did get adopted and that was a stoke of good luck. His family was poor but relatively happy. He went to college in Idaho and was not ready to be on his own in the world. He partied. He struck up a fond relationship with alcohol. He had shown great athletic promise in high school and had gotten a scholarship at the University of Idaho, but it wasn’t long bef...