The Terror

I just finished reading Dan Simmon’s epic The Terror. I consider it a feat to complete any book north of 700 pages! Needless to say, any book that keeps my interest for the long is epic. I loved this book. It was just the right blend of dreary macabre and introspective torment I’ve loved in the horror genre. This may sound crazy but horror is a great literary vehicle to reach true depth.
This by the way was a fascinating blend of history and the supernatural. Simmons chose to recount the experiences of the HMS Erebus and Terror while on their fateful journey through arctic wastelands in search of the Northwest Passage. They were iced in and subsequently spent a grueling few years at the edge of the world with very little provisions and competent leadership. The author adds to their misery but injecting a horrible “bear – like” creature that methodically stalks and terrorizes them. Through the entire book we are really never sure if the thing is just some crazed polar bear or something else entirely but amazingly you end up not caring. The true terrors and evil in the book are wrapped up in the unimaginably hostile environment and the relationships among the crew. The final mutiny and fracture of the crew are where the true horrors surface. This all sounds dark and hopeless but in the end I considered the book weirdly inspirational.
So, this “thing on the ice” is basically indestructible and endlessly able to resist detection. It gets a little old as it mercilessly devours members of the crew so when one man manages to escape from it after MUCH effort, it is moving. These men are forced to endure bitter cold, starvation, scurvy, an evil bear demon, and endless work as they abandon ship and haul their boats all around the arctic circle. I think it is these extraordinary circumstances that Simmons uses to show how noble and inspiring the human spirit can be and simultaneously into what horrible depths it can plummet. And towards the end of the book you realize hell is not that starving wasteland and the devil is not that thing on the ice.

Lunch

This is a pretty mundane post to follow up my last but I've decided to start posting more. The new house has a great kitchen and it has inspired me to cook more. Lunch today also did.

I had a Caribbean jerk chicken sandwich for lunch today and it S U C K E D. It was described as a Caribbean jerk chicken Sandwich with black beans and banana mustard on a multigrain bun. Sounds exotic and interesting right? Filled with all kinds of tangy spices and flavors? Sounds like it would add some zing to this engineer’s desk job? Transport him to the island of sun and reggae?
It was the biggest bun of suck I’ve ever had to eat.

The chicken was in big chunks, VERY cold (think ice cube cold) and barely covered with a kind of jerk sauce. By barely I mean I could only taste the sauce my dipping my finger into the drops that fell off the sandwich into my tray. This chicken made deli meat taste like filet mignon. In fact, I’d rather have eaten expired sliced ham.
The roll it was on was way too big, extra dry and bland beyond belief. It had the consistency more of a fabric and I think I remember hearing the sound of fabric ripping as I bit through each pitiful bite. The experience was like taking giant bites of a bready brick that tasted like sand.
The only interesting thing was the “banana mustard” which just tasted exactly like mashed bananas with no mustard. I was lucky enough to taste the banana mash once every 5 bites. Those tiny bursts of flavor were torture. They made me realize there was a world out there of tastes and warm food. I think the coldness of the sandwich made my tongue go numb, that or I had probably swallowed it along with all my taste buds upon starting this suck-wich.

I give it a 3 out of 10. It has 1 point because it was completely cooked and the bread was not rotten. It gets 2 points because I was no longer hungry after completing the sandwich.

Life

I decided a long time ago not to make this blog too personal. Well, there are some things in one's life that you just cannot hide, nor would you want to. They are wonderful things that have the power to change you, mold you and in a sense, redirect you. It's an amazing time for me and I thought I'd like to share.

So here are a few of them.
I married the love of my life two months ago. It was a beautiful day and it has quickly seated itself as one of my happiest memories. A simple thought back to that day and everything else pales. Strangely it comes to me only in bright and emotional bursts like only my most cherished memories do. They are full of wonderful flashes of family and friends, love and laughter, and of course my beautiful bride. I will hold on to them dearly and can't wait to add to them.

We are also about to buy a new house. It is our first house and we have seen it built from the ground up. It's been a long time but tomorrow we go to close on it. It's hard to believe it is almost ours! Especially for me because my family did not have alot of money growing up. I lived with my grandparents and various houses as a child. In fact, I clearly remember thinking I wanted to buy a "nice brick house with central air and heat". Well it has happened and to top it off, my wife and I get to start our lives together in it.

I also changed my job earlier in the year. I moved to a group that I thought I might be able to grow into better. There are transition issues as with anything but nothing too serious. It is challenging and interesting and somewhere where I could be allowed to fully pursue my technical interests.

I am not a religious man but I am spiritual, and I am thankful.

Speed and Innovation

I bought yet another video game for the PS3 the other day. It’s called Killzone 2 and it is amazingly fun. One thing that blew me away were the graphics. Now, these are good, some of the cut CG scenes look like reality… but better. Like a brighter more dramatically and visually stunning reality. I am floored by the progress in the video game industry. It’s programmers are running neck and neck with computer hardware processing power and speed. They create an incredibly complex simulation complete with physics and artificial intelligence. They are free to imagine any world they wish, any game mechanic, any situation as long as it sells. No limitations. It’s only going to get better. If I could invest, it would be in this industry. The game I bought was developed for about 30 million dollars. Someday soon, it will rival the movie industry. Even in this economic climate, the game industry has only expanded.
Anyway it got me thinking about computers and the electronics industry in general. There is just no stopping it, the progress in this field is blistering. There are no checks, it’s just the free market running like crazy. No government agency to say this or this is unsafe. No entity to monitor anything really. I mean electronics may control critical things but the electronics industry itself has no resistance from anything. Other high tech industries do… Aerospace and Medical for instance.
Over simplified maybe but that’s the idea. So what is the future full of? Doctors? Pilots? Engineers?

Programmers.

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

My most recurring nightmare is being stranding submerged in the darkness of the deep ocean. I am terrified not because I cannot breath but because I am in a strange environment. I look around and can see deep into the nothingness, there is only a faint glow of bluish sunlight . That and one other thing is there with me, the shadows. Huge shadows roam about, slow and steady below me, below me and away from light. It paralyzes me with amazing fear. They are alien. Not ET alien, ET is a known, seen it a thousand times. No, it’s not a whale or even a menacing shark but it’s something else. All I can see are it’s huge eyes, dead and unblinking.
It gets closer.
Closer and I feel it against my feet. It’s skin is thick and rough. There is nowhere to go, and I try desperately to implode out of my skin. I want to leave. There is a real world out there, and it’s full of light and smiles, not dead eyes and darkness. It’s pulling me further down. The light is gone. It is completely black around me. The blackness of space and nothingness. I wish it was space but I know they are all around me. Another bumps into me, uncaringly, unknowingly.
And I wake up.
These are my subconscious fears and terrors. But what is it really? It’s fear of the unknown. But what is really known? Think of the cuttlefish. Cute name but completely and utterly alien.
The cuttlefish looks like Martian sea life. It even has greenish blue blood. This is because it uses copper to transport oxygen instead of iron like we do in our hemoglobin. It has three hearts, two pump blood to its two gills and another to the rest of the body. It’s eye is totally different from all vertebrates, pursuing its own independent line of evolution. It focuses not by reshaping the lens (like us) but reshaping the entire eye like the focus of a camera. They can change to almost any color, mimic any pattern (even dynamic ones) and imitate even texture. They are very intelligent (by product of the brain power needed to run the skin colors) and can learn from conditioning, even through observation.


Next month we go diving in the Caribbean waters off Belize. I am both excited and terrified. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Miracles

If you think about it, the most interesting place in the solar system is… Earth, hands down. It is home to to a level complexity and organization that is simply unfathonable. I mean compared to the deserts of Mars or the clouds of Jupiter, Earth is like finding a jumbo jet full of ipods in the middle of the Sahara. (Another amazing thing is is it got there because that’s just what sand does given enough time, but I’ll talk more about that later.)
That analogy doesn’t do it justice though, not in the slightest. Biolgical diversity and complexity is.. well it’s unreal. Your brain alone has… get this.. no you can’t, and neither can I but it’s 500 trillion connections. The number is higher at a younger age topping 1*10^15 or 1 quadrillion connections at age 3. This number is over 71 thousand times the age of the universe in years. And that’s the age of well, everything. And it’s more than the number of stars in our galaxy. 10,000 times the number of stars in our galaxy.
We are each a miracle in the truest sense of the word.

Science as ephiphany

Ok, I've decided to start posting to this blog again! I got a new iphone so I've been in a very social media kind of mood.

I'm a nerd and proud of it. I bought a DVD of a lecture by Richard Dawkins done in 1991. I saw the first hour of it this evening and it was very good. It's called Growing Up in the Universe and is part of an annual series of Oxford Christmas lectures given first by Faraday. He used the term growing up in the universe to refer both to humanity's evolution over millions of years and to our own personal understanding of science and nature. He does a great job in conveying the wonder of the natural world. He even starts out by using a surprisingly effective metaphor with what else but my favorite man made object... a space ship.
He says imagine stepping into a spaceship bound for some far off star system. You'd go into a freeze or sleep for millions of years and then step out onto the surface of an alien planet. But behold, the planet is brimming with life... countless plants and animals. Birds and fish and all types of extraordinary wildlife. Well, that's kind of like what has happened here, with us. We have been asleep for millions of years only to wake up to a beautiful world. It really is amazing and in all too short a time we have to close our eyes again. How lucky we are to see it, don't you think?