- Rolfe, Fr.
Hadrian the Seventh.
New York: New York Review Books, [1904] 2001.
ISBN 0-940322-62-5.
-
This is a masterpiece of eccentricity. The author, whose full name
is Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, deliberately
abbreviated his name to “Fr.” not just in
the interest of concision, but so it might be mistaken for
“Father” and the book deemed the work of a Catholic priest.
(Rolfe also used the name “Baron Corvo” and affected a
coat of arms with a raven.) Having twice himself failed in
aspirations to the priesthood, in this novel the protagonist,
transparently based upon the author, finds himself, through
a sequence of events straining even the omnipotence of the
Holy Spirit, vaulted from the humble estate of debt-ridden
English hack writer directly to the papacy, taking the name Hadrian
the Seventh in honour of Hadrian IV, the first, last,
and only English pope to date.
Installed on the throne of Saint Peter, Hadrian quickly moves to
remedy the discrepancies his erstwhile humble life has caused to him
to perceive between the mission of the Church and the policies of its
hierarchy. Dodging intrigue from all sides, and wielding his
intellect, wit, and cunning along with papal authority, he quickly
becomes what now would be called a “media pope” and a major
influence on the world political stage, which he remakes along lines
which, however alien and ironic they may seem today, might have been
better than what actually happened a decade after this novel was
published in 1904.
Rolfe, like Hadrian, is an “artificer in verbal expression”,
and his neologisms and eccentric spelling (“saxificous head
of the Medoysa”) and Greek and Latin phrases—rarely
translated—sprinkle the text. Rolfe/Hadrian doesn't
think too highly of the Irish, the French, Socialists, the
press, and churchmen who believe their mission is building
cathedrals and accumulating treasure rather than saving souls,
and he skewers these and other targets on every occasion—if
such barbs irritate you, you will find plenty here at
which to take offence. The prose is simply beautiful,
and thought provoking as well as funny. The international
politics of a century ago figures in the story, and if you're
not familiar with that now rather obscure era, you may wish
to refresh your memory as to principal players and
stakes in the Great Game of that epoch.
- Appleton, Victor.
Tom Swift and His Airship.
Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, [1910] 1992. ISBN 1-55709-177-3.
-
Following his adventures on
land and
lake,
in this third volume of the Tom Swift series, our hero takes to the air in his
hybrid dirigible/airplane, the Red Cloud. (When this book was written,
within a decade of the Wright Brothers' first flight, “airship”
referred to any flying craft, lighter or heavier than air.) Along the
way he survives a forest fire, thunderstorm, flying bullets, false accusation of
a crime, and an irritable schoolmarm not amused by having an airship crash into
her girls' school, and solves the crime, bags the perpetrators, and clears his
good name. Bless my seltzer bottle—never get on the wrong side of Mr. Wakefield
Damon!
Apart from the arm-waving about new inventions which is the
prerogative of the science fiction writer, Victor Appleton is
generally quite careful about the technical details—All
American Boys in the early 20th century knew their machinery and
would be all over a scribbler who didn't understand how a
carburetor worked! Here, however, he misunderstands lighter
than air flight. He describes the Red Cloud as
supported by a rigid aluminium gas container filled with
“a secret gas, made partly of hydrogen, being very light and powerful”.
But since the only thing that matters in generating lift is the
weight of the air displaced compared to the weight of the gas
displacing it, and since hydrogen is the lightest of elements
(can't have fewer than one proton, mate!), then any mixture of
hydrogen with anything else would have less lift than
hydrogen alone. (You might mix hydrogen with helium to obtain a
nonflammable gas lighter than pure helium—something suggested by
Arthur C. Clarke a few years ago—but here Tom's secret gas is
claimed to have more lift than hydrogen, and the question
of flammability is never raised. Also, the gas is produced on
demand by a “gas generator”. That rules out helium as a component,
as it is far too noble to form compounds.) Later, Tom increases the
lift on the ship by raising the pressure in the gas cells: “when an
increased pressure of the vapor was used the ship was almost as
buoyant as before” (chapter 21). But increasing the pressure of
any gas in a fixed volume cell reduces the lift, as
it increases the weight of the gas within without displacing any
additional air. One could make this work by assuming a gas cell
with a flexible bladder which permitted the volume occupied by
the lift gas to expand and contract as desired, the rest being filled with
ambient air, but even then the pressure of the lift gas would not
increase, but simply stay the same as atmospheric pressure as more
air was displaced. Feel free to berate me for belabouring such a
minor technical quibble in a 95 year old story, but I figure that
Tom Swift fans probably, like myself, enjoy working out this kind of
stuff. The fact that this is only such item I noticed is
a testament to the extent Appleton sweated the details.
I read the electronic edition of this novel published
in the
Tom Swift and His Pocket
Library
collection at this site on my PalmOS PDA in random moments of
downtime over a month or so. I've posted an updated electronic
edition which corrects typographical errors I spotted while reading
the yarn.
- Stenhoff, Mark.
Ball Lightning.
New York: Kluwer Academic / Plenum Publishers, 1999.
ISBN 0-306-46150-1.
-
Reports of ball lightning—glowing spheres of light which persist for
some number of seconds, usually associated with cloud to ground
lightning strikes during thunderstorms, date back to the classical
Greeks. Since 1838, when physicist and astronomer Dominique Arago
published a survey of twenty reports of ball lightning, a long list
of scientists, many eminent, have tried their hands at crafting a
theory which might explain such an odd phenomenon yet, at the start
of the twenty-first century ball lightning remains, as Arago said
in 1854, “One of the most inexplicable problems of physics today.”
Well, actually, ball lightning only poses problems to the
physics of yesterday and today if it, you know, exists,
and the evidence that it does is rather weak, as this book
demonstrates. (Its author does come down in favour of the
existence of ball lightning, and wrote the 1976 Nature
paper which helped launched the modern study of the phenomenon.)
As of the date this book was published, not a single unambiguous
photograph, movie, or video recording of ball lightning was known to
exist, and most of the “classic” photographs illustrated in
chapter 9 are obvious fakes created by camera motion and double
exposure. It is also difficult when dealing with reports
by observers unacquainted with the relevant phenomena to sort out genuine
ball lightning (if such exists) from other well-documented and
understood effects such as corona discharges (St. Elmo's fire),
that perennial favourite of UFO debunkers:
ignis fatuus or swamp gas,
and claims of damage caused by the passage of ball
lightning or its explosive dissipation from those produced
by conventional lightning strikes. See the author's re-casting of
a lightning strike to a house which he personally investigated
into “ball lightning language” on pp. 105–106 for
an example of how such reports can originate.
Still, after sorting out the mis-identifications, hoaxes, and other
dross, a body of reports remains, some by expert observers of
atmospheric phenomena, which have a consistency not to be found, for
example, in UFO reports. A number of observations of ball lightning
within metallic aircraft fuselages are almost identical and
pose a formidable challenge to most models. The absence of
unambiguous evidence has not in any way deterred the theoretical
enterprise, and chapters 11–13 survey models based on, among
other mechanisms, heated air, self-confining plasma vortices
and spheroids, radial charge separation, chemical reactions
and combustion, microwave excitation of metastable molecules
of atmospheric gases, nuclear fusion and the production of
unstable isotopes of oxygen and nitrogen, focusing of cosmic
rays, antimatter meteorites, and microscopic black holes.
One does not get the sense of this converging upon a
consensus. Among the dubious theories, there are some odd
claims of experimental results such as the production of
self-sustaining plasma balls by placing a short burning candle
in a kitchen microwave oven (didn't work for me, anyway—if you
must try it yourself, please use common sense and be careful), and
reports of producing ball lightning sustained by fusion of
deuterium in atmospheric water vapour by short circuiting
a 200 tonne submarine accumulator battery. (Don't try
this one at home, kids!)
The book concludes with the hope that with increasing interest in
ball lightning, as evidenced by conferences such as the International
Symposia on Ball Lightning, and additional effort in collecting and
investigating reports, this centuries-old puzzle may be resolved
within this decade. I'm not so sure—the UFO precedent does not
incline one to optimism. For those motivated to pursue the matter
further, a bibliography of more than 75 pages and 2400 citations is
included.
- Barlow, Connie.
The Ghosts of Evolution.
New York: Basic Books, 2000.
ISBN 0-465-00552-7.
-
Ponder the pit of the avocado; no, actually ponder it—hold it
in your hand and get a sense of how big and heavy it is. Now consider
that due to its toughness, slick surface, and being laced with
toxins, it was meant to be swallowed whole and deposited far from
the tree in the dung of the animal who gulped down the entire
fruit, pit and all. Just imagine the size of the gullet (and
internal tubing) that requires—what on Earth, or more precisely,
given the avocado's range, what in the Americas served to disperse
these seeds prior to the arrival of humans some 13,000 years ago?
The Western Hemisphere was, in fact, prior to the great extinction at
the end of the Pleistocene, (coincident with the arrival of humans
across the land bridge with Asia, and probably the result of their
intensive hunting), home to a rich collection of megafauna:
mammoths and mastodons, enormous ground sloths, camels, the original
horses, and an armadillo as large as a bear, now all gone. Plants
with fruit which doesn't seem to make any sense—which rots beneath
the tree and isn't dispersed by any extant creature—may be the
orphaned ecological partners of extinct species with which they
co-evolved. Plants, particularly perennials and those which can
reproduce clonally, evolve much more slowly than mammal and bird
species, and may survive, albeit in a limited or spotty range,
through secondary dispersers of their seeds (seed hoarders and
predators, water, and gravity) long after the animal vectors their
seeds evolved to employ have departed the scene.
That is the fascinating premise of this book, which examines how
enigmatic, apparently nonsensical fruit such as the osage
orange, Kentucky coffee tree, honey locust, ginkgo, desert
gourd, and others may be, figuratively, ripening their fruit
every year waiting for the passing mastodon or megatherium which
never arrives, some surviving because they are attractive,
useful, and/or tasty to the talking apes who killed off the
megafauna.
All of this is very interesting, and along the way one learns a great
deal about the co-evolution of plants and their seed dispersal
partners and predators—an endless arms race involving armour,
chemical warfare (selective toxins and deterrents in pulp and seeds),
stealth, and co-optation (burrs which hitch a ride on the fur of
animals). However, this 250 page volume is basically an 85 page
essay struggling to get out of the rambling, repetitious,
self-indulgent, pretentious prose and unbridled speculations of the
author, which results in a literary bolus as difficult to masticate
as the seed pods of some of the plants described therein. This book
desperately needed the attention of an editor ready to wield the red
pencil and Basic Books, generally a quality publisher of
popularisations of science, dropped the ball (or, perhaps I should
say, spit out the seed) here. The organisation of the text is
atrocious—we encounter the same material over and over, frequently
see technical terms such as indehiscent used four or five
times before they are first defined, only to then endure a
half-dozen subsequent definitions of the same word (a brief glossary
of botanical terms would be a great improvement), and on
occasions botanical jargon is used apparently because it rolls so
majestically off the tongue or lends authority to the account—which
authority is sorely lacking. While there is serious science and
well-documented, peer-reviewed evidence for anachronism in certain
fruits, Barlow uses the concept as a launching pad for wild speculation
in which any apparent lack of perfect adaptation between a
plant and its present-day environment is taken as evidence for an
extinct ecological partner.
One of many examples is the suggestion on p. 164 that the fact
that the American holly tree produces spiny leaves well above the
level of any current browser (deer here, not Internet Exploder or
Netscrape!) is evidence it evolved to defend itself against much
larger herbivores. Well, maybe, but it may just be that a tree lacks
the means to precisely measure the distance from the ground, and
those which err on the side of safety are more likely to survive.
The discussion of evolution throughout is laced with teleological and
anthropomorphic metaphors which will induce teeth-grinding among
Darwinists audible across a large lecture hall.
At the start of chapter 8, vertebrate paleontologist Richard Tedford
is quoted as saying, “Frankly, this is not really science. You
haven't got a way of testing any of this. It's more
metaphysics.”—amen. The author tests the toxicity of ginkgo seeds by
feeding them to squirrels in a park in New York City (“All the world
seems in tune, on a spring afternoon…”), and the
attractiveness of maggot-ridden overripe pawpaw fruit by leaving it
outside her New Mexico trailer for frequent visitor Mrs. Foxie (you
can't make up stuff like this) and, in the morning, it was
gone! I recall a similar experiment from childhood involving
milk, cookies, and flying reindeer; she does, admittedly, acknowledge
that skunks or raccoons might have been responsible. There's an
extended discourse on the possible merits of eating dirt, especially
for pregnant women, then in the very next chapter the suggestion that
the honey locust has “devolved” into the swamp locust, accompanied by
an end note observing that a professional botanist expert in the
genus considers this nonsense.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of interesting material
here, and much to think about in the complex intertwined evolution
of animals and plants, but this is a topic which deserves a more
disciplined author and a better book.
- Mack, John E.
Abduction.
New York: Ballantine Books, [1994] 1995.
ISBN 0-345-39300-7.
-
I started this book, as I recall, sometime around 1998, having
picked it up to get a taste for the “original material” after
reading C.D.B. Bryan's excellent
Close
Encounters of the Fourth Kind, describing an MIT conference
on the alien abduction phenomenon. I made it most of the way through
Abduction on the first attempt, but ran out of
patience and steam about 100 pages from the finish line while reading
the material “recovered” from “experiencer” Carlos, which is
the literary equivalent of a Vulcan mind meld with a custard pudding.
A mercifully brief excerpt with Mack's interpolations in parentheses
goes as follows (p. 355).
Their bodies go from being the little white creatures they
are to light. But when they become light, they first become
like cores of light, like molten light. The appearance (of
the core of light) is one of solidity. They change colors
and a haze is projected around the (interior core which is
centralized; surrounding this core in an immediate
environment is a denser, tighter) haze (than its outer
peripheries). The eyes are the last to go (as one
perceives the process of the creatures disappearing into
the light), and then they just kind of disappear or are
absorbed into this. … We are or exist through
our flesh, and they are or exist through whatever it is
they are.
Got that? If not, there is much, much more along these lines
in the extended babblings of this and a dozen other abductees,
developed during the author's therapy sessions with them. Now,
de mortuis nihil nisi bonum
(Mack was killed in a traffic accident in 2004), and
having won a Pulitzer Prize for his
biography of T.E. Lawrence in
addition to his career as a professor of psychiatry at the
Harvard Medical School and founder of the psychiatry
department at Cambridge Hospital, his credentials incline one to
hear him out, however odd the message may seem to be.
One's mind, however, eventually summons up Thomas Jefferson's
(possibly apocryphal) remark upon hearing of two Yale
professors who investigated a meteor fall in Connecticut and
pronounced it genuine, “Gentlemen, I would rather believe that
two Yankee professors would lie than believe that stones fall
from heaven.” Well, nobody's accusing Professor Mack of lying,
but the leap from the oh-wow, New Age accounts elicited by
hypnotic regression and presented here, to the conclusion that
they are the result of a genuine phenomenon of some kind,
possibly contact with “another plane of reality” is an awfully
big one, and simply wading through the source material proved
more than I could stomach on my first attempt. So, the book
went back on the unfinished shelf, where it continued to glare
at me balefully until a few days ago when, looking for
something to read, I exclaimed, “Hey, if I can make it through
The Ghosts of Evolution,
surely I can finish this one!” So I did, picking up from the
bookmark I left where my first assault on the summit petered
out.
In small enough doses, much of this material can be quite funny.
This paperback edition includes two appendices added to address
issues raised after the publication of the original hardcover. In
the first of these (p. 390), Mack argues that the presence of a
genuine phenomenon of some kind is strongly supported by
“…the reports of the experiencers themselves.
Although varied in some respects, these are so densely consistent
as to defy conventional psychiatric explanations.” Then, a mere three
pages later, we are informed:
The aliens themselves seem able to change or disguise their
form, and, as noted, may appear initially to the abductees
as various kinds of animals, or even as ordinary human beings,
as in Peter's case. But their shape-shifting abilities extend
to their vehicles and to the environments they present to
the abductees, which include, in this sample, a string of
motorcycles (Dave), a forest and conference room (Catherine),
images of Jesus in white robes (Jerry), and a soaring
cathedral-like structure with stained glass windows
(Sheila). One young woman, not written about in this
book, recalled at age seven seeing a fifteen-foot kangaroo
in a park, which turned out to be a small spacecraft.
Now that's “densely consistent”! One is also struck
by how insipidly banal are the messages the supposed aliens
deliver, which usually amount to New Age cerebral suds like
“All is one”, “Treat the Earth kindly”, and the rest of the
stuff which appeals to those who are into these kinds of things
in the first place. Occam's razor seems to glide much more
smoothly over the supposition that we are dealing with
seriously delusional people endowed with vivid imaginations
than that these are “transformational” messages sent by
superior beings to avert “planetary destruction” by “for-profit
business corporations” (p. 365, Mack's words, not those of
an abductee). Fifteen-foot kangaroo? Well, anyway,
now this book can hop onto the dubious shelf in the basement
and stop making me feel guilty! For a sceptical view of the
abduction phenomenon, see Philip J. Klass's
UFO Abductions: A Dangerous Game.
- Job, Macarthur.
Air Disaster, Vol. 3.
Fyshwick, Australia: Aerospace Publications, 1998.
ISBN 1-875671-34-X.
-
In the early 1970s I worked for a company that
sold remote batch computing services on
UNIVAC mainframes. Our
management visited Boeing headquarters in Seattle to pitch for some
of their business (unlikely, as Boeing had their own computer service
bureau at the time, but you never know unless you try). Part of the
presentation focused on how reliable our service was, averaging
better than 99.5% uptime. The Boeing data processing manager didn't
seem too impressed with this. He asked, “When you came up
here from San Francisco, did you fly on one of our airplanes?” “As a
matter of fact, we did.”, answered the president of our company. The
Boeing guy then asked, “Well, how would you feel if I told you Boeing
airplanes only crash about once every two hundred flights?” The
meeting moved on to other topics; we never did get any business from
Boeing.
Engineering is an art we learn from failure, and the aviation
safety community is the gold standard when it comes to
getting to the probable cause of a complicated disaster
and defining achievable steps to prevent it from
recurring. There is much for practitioners of other branches
of engineering to admire and learn from looking over the shoulders
of their colleagues in air accident investigation, and Macarthur
Job's superb Air Disaster series, of which this is the third
volume (Vol. 1,
Vol. 2) provides precisely
such a viewpoint. Starting from the official accident reports,
author Job and illustrator Matthew Tesch recreate the circumstances
which led to each accident and the sometimes tortuous process through
which investigators established what actually happened. The
presentation is not remotely sensationalistic, yet much more
readable than the dry prose of most official accident reports. If
detail is required, Job and Tesch do not shrink from providing it;
four pages of text and a detailed full page diagram on page 45
of this volume explain far more about the latching mechanism of the
747 cargo door than many people might think there is to know, but
since you can't otherwise understand how the door of a United 747
outbound from Honolulu could have separated in flight, it's all
there.
Reading the three volumes, which cover the jet age from the de
Havilland Comet through the mid 1990s, provides an interesting view
of the way in which assiduous investigation of anomalies and
incremental fixes have made an inherently risky activity so safe that
some these days seem more concerned with fingernail clippers than
engine failure or mid-air collisions. Many of the accidents in the
first two volumes were due to the machine breaking in some way or
another, and one by one, they have basically been fixed to the extent
that in this volume, the only hardware related accident is the 747
cargo door failure (in which nine passengers died, but 345 passengers
and crew survived). The other dozen are problems due to the weather,
human factors, and what computer folks call “user
interface”—literally so in several cases of mode confusion and
mismanagement of the increasingly automated flight decks of the
latest generation of airliners. Anybody designing interfaces in
which the user is expected to have a correct mental model of
the operation of a complex, partially opaque system will find
many lessons here, some learnt at tragic cost in an environment
where the stakes are high and the margin of error small.
- Hawks, Tony.
Round Ireland with a Fridge.
London: Ebury Press, 1998.
ISBN 0-09-186777-0.
-
The author describes himself as “not, by nature” either a drinking or
a betting man. Ireland, however, can have a way of changing those
particular aspects of one's nature, and so it was that after a night
about which little else was recalled, our hero found himself having
made a hundred pound bet that he could hitch-hike entirely around the
Republic of Ireland in one calendar month, accompanied the entire way
by a refrigerator. A man, at a certain stage in his life, needs a
goal, even if it is, as this epic quest was described by an Irish
radio host, “A totally purposeless idea, but a damn fine one.” And
the result is this very funny book. Think about it; almost every
fridge lives a life circumscribed by a corner of a kitchen—door
opens—light goes on—door closes—light goes out (except when the
vegetables are having one of their wild parties in the
crisper—sssshhh—mustn't let the homeowner catch on). How
singular and rare it is for a fridge to experience the freedom of the
open road, to go surfing in the Atlantic (chapter 10), to be baptised
with a Gaelic name that means “freedom”, blessed by a Benedictine nun
(chapter 14), be guest of honour at perhaps the first-ever fridge
party at an Irish pub (chapter 21), and make a triumphal entry into
Dublin amid an army of well-wishers consisting entirely of the author
pulling it on a trolley, a radio reporter carrying a mop and an ice
cube tray, and an elderly bagpiper (chapter 23). Tony Hawks points
out one disadvantage of his profession I'd never thought of before.
When one of those bizarre things with which his life and mine are
filled comes to pass, and you're trying to explain something like,
“No, you see there were squirrels loose in the passenger cabin of the
747”, and you're asked the inevitable, “What are you, a comedian?”,
he has to answer, “Well, actually, as a matter of fact, I
am.”
A U.S. edition is now available.