Just Finished Reading The Door Into Summer by Robert Heinlein

The Door Into Summer, besides being the title of a good 1967 Monkees song (with Michael Nesmith on vocals), is also a 1957 science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein.  In this story, Heinlein reverted back to his old love, which was writing about time travel and speculating about interesting scenarios that can arise from it.  Dan Davis is a talented inventor of robots living in 1970...the future from the author's perspective...and has just survived a limited nuclear war and the end of communism.  His future looks bright with his fledgling company and engagement to pretty Belle Darkin.  But Davis's business partner Miles Gentry and Belle conspire to take over the company and boot him out, leaving him with his only real friend left...his pugnacious cat Pete.  But Davis hasn't thrown in the towel: he makes financial preparations and takes advantage of the burgeoning market in "cold sleep", i.e. suspended animation, ending up awakening in the year 2000...way off there in the future.  There are all sorts of plot manipulations that happen...this is where I leave you, the potential reader, to discover what ensues.  But the bottom line is that Dan Davis uses both cold sleep and time travel to change his life and that of others, much in the same fashion that Harry Potter and Hermione Granger pulled it off in J.K. Rowling's third Harry Potter book, The Prisoner of Askaban...after reading Heinlein's book, Rowling didn't seem quite as ingenious to me as before...

The Door Into Summer has a humorous undertone throughout, and it's a book for cat lovers as the author most likely was one as well.  What stood out to me, besides the usual missed predictions about the future, was one that was eerily on target: Heinlein's (remember he's writing this in 1957) relating of the Stock Market Panic of 1987...which actually happened!  Another thing that made an impact on me was that the author, himself of no religious persuasion, seemed to be acknowledging the presence of a guiding intelligent force in the universe, one that enabled the time-travelling protagonist to avoid committing paradoxes by altering outcomes ever-so-slightly.  I enjoyed this book, but in all honesty prefer some of Heinlein's others...

Weekly Short Story...Nerves by Lester Del Rey

In 1942 it was the middle of World War II and the top-secret Manhattan Project was underway to outrace the Germans in the desperate struggle to be the first to successfully design and construct an atomic bomb.  It wouldn't be until three years later when the United States finally successfully detonated one, and then used two more on Japan to end the war...changing the world forever.  1942 was also thirteen years before the first operational nuclear reactor and 37 and 44 years before the nuclear reactor meltdowns at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, respectively.  Yet it was in 1942 when Lester Del Rey, a popular science fiction author of that era, wrote Nerves...which was about a nuclear reactor's meltdown...

Nerves is a pretty long "short" story (74 pages), appearing in the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories 4 (1942) (DAW Books, 1980).  Del Rey wrote "hard" science fiction, meaning that he possessed a considerable amount of scientific knowledge and understanding beyond what most people had...and inserted it into his stories.  Of course, in Nerves he used different words to describe what he had envisioned: "atomics" and "converter" were used in place of our "nuclear" and "reactor"...but they were in essence the same.  True, the author had the common sense to put his "converters" on Callisto, a moon of Jupiter...safely far away from Earth.  But as I read through this tale of systems failures in the presence of extremely volatile radioactive substances, I kept having to remind myself that this story was a chilling prophecy of what was to come on our home planet; even with his more advanced scientific knowledge, how could Lester Del Rey have known?

Other than the amazing feature of a nuclear meltdown written from pre-atomic times, Nerves is a pretty standard pulp fiction tale of characters testing themselves against each other and overcoming personal hang-ups.  The protagonists are two physicians, the elderly Ferrel and the young, inexperienced Jenkins, assigned to the atomics plant.  As the casualties start to come in from the developing disaster, there is a lot of desperate, quick thinking and action as they all try to stem what is already a serious accident from becoming a conflagration.  What happens...well, naturally you'll have to read it for yourself to find out...

I recently read that Lester Del Rey later expanded this short story into a novel, probably to make more money in that more lucrative market.  To me, though, Nerves was already too long...there were too many subplots in this provocative tale that distracted from the main flow.  Well, that's just my opinion...I'd be interested in hearing other viewpoints...

Some Sports and Political Comments

I'm currently watching a Mexican Liga MX (premier league) soccer game between my team, the Universidad Autonoma de Nueva Leon Tigres, and Club America...a regular season rematch of the championship finale that took place last month and which gave the Tigres an exciting, come-from-behind win on the penalty shoot-out. Right now the Tigres are in the lead 2-1 at halftime, and I am very impressed by the accurate passing and intensity of play by both teams.  Earlier today I saw the ending to an English Premier League match between Stoke City and Manchester United.  Stoke City was almost assured a 1-0 win when, with only a minute or two to go, they fouled Manchester United, whose star striker Wayne Rooney then directly scored on a distant free kick.  That impressive, improbable goal gave him the all-time record for career goals with that club.  So I've been enjoying this day off watching some good pro soccer.  And then there's what is going on in the news...

All across the country...and the world, for that matter...there are mass demonstrations protesting the beginning of Donald Trump's presidency...most of them are focused on this individual's alleged abusive behavior toward women and his many disparaging, sexist public statements...even during the presidential campaign.  And this Republican Congress has apparently decided to do just what they accused the Democrats in 2009 of doing when they held the Presidency and both Houses of Congress: ram through a whole slew of controversial, divisive legislation without any efforts to reach across the aisle to form a consensus.  As I recall, nationwide there was a strong negative reaction eight years ago...in the form of the Tea Party Movement...and the Republicans took back the House of Representatives in the following year's elections.  I see something similar again happening this time around, with only the party names switched...

On Monday the U.S. Senate should be holding floor confirmation votes for some positions...the most controversial is for Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon-Mobile CEO who has been called to task for defying American sanctions against Russia and negotiating a lucrative deal with that country for his company.  Republican Florida senator Marco Rubio garnered my respect for pointing out the atrocities committed under the watch of Vladimir Putin and for criticizing Tillerson during the committee hearing last week...I wonder whether he will stick to his principles and vote "no" on Monday...or wimp out and go along with his party, as I suspect he will do in the end...

And I couldn't finish this article without mentioning the two National Football League conference championship games taking place tomorrow.  The National Conference title game pits Green Bay at Atlanta while in the American Conference New England hosts Pittsburgh.   I like both the Falcons and Packers...I just hope it's a close, entertaining game like that great Green Bay win over Dallas last week.  In the other contest, I'm going to figuratively hold my nose for three hours and pull for the Steelers, a team that I almost always oppose...but they're playing the Patriots, featuring the Sith Lord and Darth Vader in the persons of Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, respectively.  Another Patriots Super Bowl win is simply unacceptable to me...

The Doomsday Scientist

A few days ago I was watching the National Geographic Explorer TV channel and a program was on about global warming/climate change, hosted by Bill Nye (the Science Guy).  I think it was just a year old, so we're talking pretty recently.  Toward the end of the show he interviewed a University of Arizona ecologist named Guy McPherson, who predicted that there will be no more human life on Earth by the year 2030.  Yes, that's what he said...we'll be extinct by then, and it will be due to the cascading effects of human civilization-caused superheating of the planet from built-up carbon dioxide as well as methane gas.  The seas will become lifeless and the oxygen will disappear from the atmosphere.  McPherson didn't explain all of his reasoning to Nye, but I did look him up on Wikipedia and saw his blog page, which goes into much greater detail about his somber conclusion on humanity in the near future...

In looking at the current situation we have with increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, McPherson decided to investigate the Great Permian Mass-Extinction of 250 million years ago, when almost all life on Earth was obliterated.  The trigger event for this seems to have been the eruption of massive super-volcanos in what is now Siberia, causing fires over the area and smoke and ashes surrounding the planet.  But the fires then ignited the masses of coal deposits underneath the surface, and Earth went into a long-term greenhouse effect with mass releases into the atmosphere of methane gas, much more potent in its greenhouse effect than CO2.  The oceans and the atmosphere were starved of oxygen and nearly all of the animal and plant species on Earth became extinct.  Now that process back then, as McPherson recognizes, took place over a much longer time span than the global warming going on in our time.  But in both cases, he emphasizes the concept of "self-enforcing feedback loops" that accelerated the process back then and now as well.  For example, global warming melts ice in the far north, but that ice melting exposes holes in the Earth where large methane deposits have been held dormant for millions of years.  Now they are being released into the atmosphere and speeding up the heating.  The more the heating, the faster the methane is exposed and released, which speeds up the heating further...

Guy McPherson does not place much hope in the efforts taken today to restrain carbon emissions, and he thinks a carbon tax is ridiculous.  No, he believes we have already gone too far, and this process leading ultimately to his predicted doom in the too-near future began with human civilization thousands of years ago with the advent of agriculture...

I just heard about this guy last week and already the world's coming to an end?  Uh, please give me a little more time to ingest this!  But McPherson does seem to have his own following, a growing doomsday cult if you will.  His conclusions show to me how someone, if they package their theories in a compelling manner, can pretty much sell anything.  Listen to the folks who are global warming deniers: some of them sound pretty convincing, too.  Look, if we're all perishing in fifteen years anyway, it won't matter, in terms of our habitat on Earth, what I do now with my time or "carbon footprint", and if there is no human-induced climate change, the same is also true.  So in a perverse sort of way, Guy McPherson, with his presentation of impending and certain human extinction, is making the point for folks who want to just forget about climate change and do whatever they want with the environment, for better or...more likely...for worse...

What Kind of Hurricane Season Will We Have in 2016?

The 2016 Atlantic hurricane season will officially begin on June 1, although there has already been a full-blown hurricane: Alex, which haunted the northern Atlantic Ocean way back in January.  Meteorologists with an inside track on the data and their interpretation seem to be of the opinion that, due to their prediction of the El Niño effect giving way this summer and fall to La Niña, the number of named tropical storms as well as hurricanes will increase from last year's total.  That's not to say we'll have anything like 2005, when terrible storms like Katrina, Rita, and Wilma struck the American mainland...but tropical storm activity should pick up in the area.  Since 2005, not a single hurricane struck the state of Florida, while a few hit elsewhere: in Texas, Louisiana, North Carolina...and the northeastern coastal states.  I don't see this period of good luck for us Floridians continuing much longer, but if it's in the cards for us to be spared such an traumatic experience for yet another year...then deal me in!

The first names for tropical storms/hurricanes in the Atlantic for 2016 are: Alex (already used), Bonnie, Colin, Danielle, Earl, and Fiona.  Even if the number of storms is high, we need to keep in mind that most of them just run through their existence completely at sea, hundreds of miles from the mainland, posing threats only to islands (like Bermuda or the Azores), shipping...and careless east coast beach-goers and boating enthusiasts who ignore warnings about strong storm-generated waves and rip current...

I think we'll have a better grasp of what kind of season 2016 will be once the storms coming off the western African coast cross the Atlantic and approach the West Indies.  In years conducive to hurricane development, they continue more or less to strengthen until they hit the mainland or pass over mountainous terrain in some islands like Hispaniola or Cuba.  On the other hand, these storms have recently had a tendency to run into strong weather systems that shear the storms and diminish them into relatively harmless low pressure zones.  I'm hoping that the latter scenario prevails this time around...

It will also be interesting to see where the predominant source of hurricane development occurs.  I've already mentioned the eastern Atlantic, but also some of the worst storms in our recent memory (like Camille in 1969 and Wilma in 2005) developed in the warm waters of the western Caribbean and then moved northward.  I'm keeping my eye on both regions...

Asimov Misses Kindle's Advent by Some 26,000 Years

Sometimes I am amazed at how on-target science fiction writers from the past have been able to predict future developments in technology...and sometimes I'm just as amazed when they are terribly far off-the-mark.  Take, for example, the late Isaac Asimov's 1982 novel Foundation's Edge.  It is set some 26 thousand years into the future, when faster-than-light space travel (through "hyperspace") has been available for humanity for almost all of that time...and nuclear technology has developed on a "micro" scale.  The story's main characters of councilman Golan Trevize and historian Janov Pelorat are about to embark in space on a ship that is mentally driven, with their quest being the rediscovery of the planet Earth.  Pelorat is a rather stuffy old academician, and he wants to take his materials with him on the trip.  In italics, I have provided a short excerpt from the book at this point:

Golan Trevize asked Professor Pelorat, "Are you ready?"

"With this I am", Pelorat said and held up a square wafer about twenty centimeters to the side and encased in a jacket of silvery plastic.  Trevize was suddenly aware that Pelorat had been holding it since they had left his home, shifting it from hand to hand and never putting it down, even when they had stopped for a quick breakfast.

"What's that, Professor?"

"My library.  It's indexed by subject matter and origin and I've gotten it all into one wafer.  If you think this ship is a marvel, how about this wafer?  A whole library!  Everything I have collected!  Wonderful!  Wonderful!"

The "wafer"? I don't know how you would call it, but to me it's nothing less than a Kindle, which came out in 2007...only 25 years after the publication of Foundation's Edge.  Yet the good professor compares its level of technology favorable to the hyperspace-capable spaceship...something that in our own present minds has to be thought of as next-to-impossible.  I don't think that Isaac Asimov, not to mention other science fiction futurist writers of his era, understood the upcoming information technology revolution and how quickly and pervasively it would affect the world.  On the other hand, almost all of them had humankind traveling widely in space by our time and establishing settlements on the moon and other planets...

2015 Atlantic Hurricane Season Predicted to be Light

After last month's forecasts by various meteorological organizations of a very subdued Atlantic hurricane season for 2015, it is interesting that, more than three weeks before the official beginning of that season, we may have our first named storm.  For the last few days, there has been a tropical disturbance, starting in the Bahamas and affecting South Florida, and then drifting northward in the Atlantic just east of the Florida peninsula.  It looks as if it may well strengthen,  not to mention finally hit the mainland, most likely long the coast of South or North Carolina.  If its sustained winds reach 39 mph, it will be named "Ana".

Besides Ana, the first named Atlantic tropical storms in 2015 will be Bill, Claudette, Danny, and Erika. The experts don't expect the number to get far beyond that, though, since the Atlantic Ocean temperatures have been much cooler than usual and, as a result, work as a retardant to the development of tropical storms.  But even with that in mind, it only takes one hurricane hitting a vulnerable area point blank for a disaster scenario to occur.  So the storm hovering out in the western Atlantic right now can serve as a wake-up call for those us who live in the coastal eastern states....

My Take on This Year's Major League Baseball Season

Last Sunday, the 2015 edition of Major League Baseball began its regular season with the supposedly revamped and drastically improved Chicago Cubs once again stumbling and losing to the St. Louis Cardinals.  Oh well, they have 161 more games to try to pick things up!  The main teams I have decided to follow this year are few in number: just the Florida teams: Tampa Bay Rays and Miami Marlins.  The Rays lost their long-time manager Joe Madden to the Chicago Cubs this year and don't seem, by anyone's estimation, to have any bright prospects this year...most likely they'll finish last.  The Marlins, on the other hand, have been greatly hyped in the media as being an upcoming team that could sneak into the playoffs as a wild card entry.  Who knows what will ultimately happen...we have six full months of games before we'll know how they end up.  I just decided to follow these two, for better or worse, because of the simple fact that reruns of their games will usually be televised after I get home from work a little past midnight.

I did watch some so-called baseball experts on of the sports channels, and they seem to think that Washington, St. Louis, and Los Angeles are the teams to beat in the National League, while Seattle, the Chicago White Sox (?), and a resurgent Boston should prevail in the American.  For me, it seems that Baltimore and Toronto are the best in the American League East while Detroit should win the Central.  The AL West should go to the Los Angeles Angels...who gets the wild card spots for the playoffs is something I'm not ready to predict, for either league.  In the National League, I tend to agree with the "experts" about the divisional winners, except perhaps in the West.  There the Dodgers should face stiff competition from defending World Series champion San Francisco and a new-look San Diego.  It should be an interesting season, but I don't think I'm going to spend as much time and effort following it as I did last year...

ESPN Analysts Display Lack of Probability Knowledge

Yesterday, on ESPN's Sport Center, they were going on about how badly the Los Angeles Lakers are doing so far this year, going winless in their first five games.  One point they brought up was the upcoming schedule for them, with Kobe Bryant and company favored to lose each of their  next eight games.  There were actual percentage probabilities given for the Lakers to win each game, with the figures hovering around the 30th and 40th percentiles.  Then one of the announcers got to the point of all this, which is that they may well lose all eight games and start the season off at 0-13.  I beg to differ...

I didn't get all of the percentage predictions of each game (I wonder how they even arrived at them), but I think I'm being pretty conservative at saying they averaged about a 35% winning probability given for each game (it's probably higher).  That means that the losing probability for each game is .65: for the Lakers to lose all eight of their next games, you would need to take that probability to the eighth power:

(,65)(.65)(.65)(.65)(.65)(.65)(.65)(.65)=.032 , or 3.2%

In other words, even though the Lakers may be heavy underdogs in each of the next eight games with only a 35% average chance of winning each one, the probability of them losing ALL eight games is only 3.2%!

This is a glaring example of how otherwise very intelligent and educated people can falter the minute they go any distance in interpreting statistical data or anything dealing with probability.  Will the Lakers actually lose their next eight games?  Maybe, but it's not very likely given the input data...

Florida Gators 2014 Football Schedule, Prospects

It's still a little more than three weeks until the 2014 college football season begins for the University of Florida, but I thought I might took a look at their schedule and try to divine what their prospects for success are.  Like last year, in which the Gators began well at 4-1 until skidding uncontrollably to a dismal 4-8 finish, this year's start promises a similar rosy early picture...at least for the first three games.  On August 30 and September 6, Florida hosts two smaller colleges: Idaho and Eastern Michigan State...and on September 13, they play at home again against Kentucky.  Chalk up an early 3-0 record for them, nothing that impressive considering their opposition, but certainly helpful in reversing last season's negativity and giving Florida an early advantage in giving them postseason bowl eligibility.  It's the September 20 game at Alabama that's going to present the most problems for them, though.  I see them losing that game and, hopefully, not much more.  I say this because, quite frankly, players tend to get injured against Nick Saban's Crimson Tide, especially quarterbacks (Texas' Colt McCoy in 2009's national championship game and the Gators' John Brantley in 2012).  I want Florida to survive the Alabama game without sustaining too many injuries to key players, because they can still do quite well the rest of the way if their starting team is still essentially intact.

After a bye week, Florida will travel to Knoxville on October 4 to play Tennessee, a team that they were fortunate to come from behind and beat last year.  For Florida to win it again this year, though, I have to go on faith that they are a much improved team...for the Vols probably will be, too.  They will have a shot at beating their annual rival from the West Division, LSU, on October 11 when they return home to play them.  Depending on how healthy Florida is at this stage, I give them a shot at winning this one. The following week they will remain in Gainesville to play Missouri, a team that last year shocked them in mid-season with their performance and set the Gators firmly on their devastating slide of seven straight losses.  I see a different result this time around.  After that, it's another bye week and Florida will go on to three straight crucial East Division games that will ultimately determine their fate for this year (three games that they lost last season).  On November 1, Florida will face Georgia in Jacksonville.  On the 8th they will play Vanderbilt in Nashville.  And on the 15th South Carolina comes in to Gainesville.  I see Florida at this stage gaining some revenge on the Commodores for last year's upset loss...and the Gators winning one of the two games against the Bulldogs and Gamecocks.  And that concludes their Southeastern Conference regular season.

On November 22, Florida plays what should be an "easy" opponent at home, Eastern Kentucky.  But last year's "easy" late-season foe, Georgia Southern, beat the Gators!  Don't expect that to happen again, though.  The 2014 overall regular season ends on November 29 when Florida travels to Tallahassee to play Florida State, a game that in all probability will go to the Seminoles...but should be closer than last year's blowout.  The football schedule also includes the SEC championship game for Florida (should they win the division).  The way I see it, Florida has a good shot at going 6-2 in the league and might be in a tiebreaker situation in the East...so who knows whether they'll make it this far.  But being the guarded optimist that I am, I see the Gators turning it around in 2014 to finish the regular season at 9-3 and returning to a reasonably prestigious postseason bowl appearance...