Rainbows in the dark

There are several reasons I really enjoy my day job: 1) I get to use my journalism skills without having to deal with the headaches and hassle of actually working for a newspaper; 2) fun co-workers and superiors who respect me and my abilities; and 3) the youthful energy and inquisitiveness of a university setting is intellectually stimulating. But the card that trumps them all is the fact that I regularly get to work on articles as nifty as this one. I mean, moonbows? What's not to love?

Famed naturalist John Muir once urged visitors to Yosemite National Park to seek the elusive, ethereal moonbow at night in Yosemite Valley.

Now, a team of astronomers from Texas State University-San Marcos has applied their unique brand of forensic astronomy to the rainbow’s nocturnal cousin, unraveling when and where this little-know natural phenomenon can be viewed in the remote California wilderness.

Texas State physics professors Donald Olson and Russell Doescher, along with Mitte Honors students Kellie Beicker, Ashley Ralph and Hui-Yiing Chang, publish their findings in the May 2007 edition of Sky & Telescope magazine, on newsstands now.

Rainbows in the dark

Although people have been watching for moonbows for centuries, this is the first time anyone has calculated dates and precise times for appearances of this unusual event.

Conditions must be ideal for moonbows to form--a bright moon and abundant water droplets suspended in clear air in opposite directions from the viewer--and because of this rarity, few people have ever seen one. Figures from Aristotle to Benjamin Franklin have written about the rare phenomenon throughout the ages, but as early as 1871 Muir wrote enthusiastically that moonbows could often be found forming in the fine spray coming off Yosemite Falls--no rain clouds required--and he described their beauty in his 1912 book, The Yosemite.

The Texas State researchers, inspired by Muir’s accounts of the spectacle, developed a computer program which would allow the accurate prediction of dates and times favoring the appearance of moonbows at the Yosemite waterfalls.

Yosemite fieldwork pays off

The research team quickly established six criteria necessary for Yosemite moonbows to form, which they modeled with their software: clear skies around the moon; abundant mist at the base of the falls; dark skies; bright moonlight; moonlight not blocked by mountains; and correct rainbow geometry. Determining the precise topography and geometry to satisfy the final two criteria in the program required on-site research, and in September of 2005 the Texas State group traveled to Yosemite.

The resulting data gained from extensive surveying and on-site topographical research paid off immediately. Upon return to Texas, Olson and his team discovered why a moonbow anticipated by photographers on the evening of June 22, 2005 failed to appear despite apparently perfect conditions. Due to the unique geometry involved, Olson realized that the moonbow did in fact appear--but not until 12:45 a.m., long after the photographers had given up and gone home for the night, thus proving the value and usefulness of the Texas State researchers’ efforts.

The team’s predictions have subsequently been tested by photographers traveling to the Yosemite Valley with spectacular results. The Texas State researchers have published their moonbow predictions for the remainder of 2007, along with additional information on the positions of the moon and factors involved in the formation of moonbows online at http://uweb.txstate.edu/~do01/.

Be sure to check out the image gallery while you're at it.

Before Cormac McCarthy gave Oprah her guided tour of the Post-Apocalypse

Upon the news of the death of Kurt Vonnegut this week, Simon Sellars, editor and publisher of the increasingly amazing Ballardian, reminded me Thursday of a bit of trivia I had forgotten. That the late author made a brief appearance, as himself, in the most un-literary 1986 Rodney Dangerfield film Back to School.



Causing me to wonder whether there have been other similar cameos by icons of fantastic literature in lowbrow pop culture that I may have expunged from my memory.

William Gibson's lanky wandering through the frame of Bruce Wagner's Wild Palms, schmoozing with Jim Belushi and Kim Cattrall.



Philip K. Dick's 1971 guest shot in Bewitched as Darrin Stephens' paranoid new boss at ad agency McMann and Tate.

The appearance of J.G. Ballard in Airport 1973, as First Class passenger Dr. Maitland, the enigmatic psychoanalyst who diagnoses the condition of pilot Charlton Heston, a grounded astronaut who endeavors to pierce the stratosphere in a bulky 747 bearing the flag of an imaginary American airline.

Samuel R. Delany's appearance as Radagast the outré Ishtari in the special extended Nevèrÿon DVD edition of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.



And my personal favorite, to be found only on the dozen or so remaining used VHS tapes circulating among strip mall used book exchanges:



The Love Boat: Lost Episodes (Volume 3). ... "Radioactive Isaac/Kleinschmidt/Beyond Patagonia."

The episode starts out as a typical variation of the formula. Following the eternally lounge Paul Williams theme, we meet the week's cast as they board. Barbara Billingsley plays a melancholy divorcee. Her kids have bought her a week on the boat; they didn't mention they bought one for Dad as well, played by Tom Bosley. Stella Stevens is Honey Spitz, a hard-partying Vegas girl searching for rescue from imminent spinsterhood. She will spend much of her time conferring with Tony Randall as Emmett Graham, a Capote-esque playwright who finds the muse in her story, and engineers a competition for her affections among Dick Shawn as a comical advertising executive, McLean Stevenson as a shy, sarcastic Midwestern arms dealer, and Marjoe Gortner as an aging rock star. And an enfeebled Jorge Luis Borges, as himself.

Four minutes in, Gopher leads the blind Borges up the plank in his incongruous vintage wool suit, hand-tailored by an Anglo-Italian master haberdasher in the Distrito Almirante Brown.

"So, Mr. Borges," says Gopher, "are you traveling alone?"

Borges' lazy, whitened eyes stare through the chipper Iowan, reimagining the universe in the nautical vignette cresting the Purser's cap.

"Can you not see the massing armies of the Heresiarchs?" queries the author.

"Uh, gee, fella, we have a lady who brought her Shih Tzu, but I don't think that's quite enough to make it an Ark. But you should talk about that with Dr. Bricker. Maybe he can give you something to help you take a nap."

As the episode proceeds, we learn that Borges and Mrs. Cleaver were married once, briefly, in the years between 1969 and 1970, adding complication to her efforts to explore a reconciliation with Mr. Cunningham. In the karaoke lounge, as Stella Stevens soothes the passengers with an otherworldly rendition of "Wichita Lineman," the episode takes a dark turn. The camera closes in on Borges' Magus eyes. The boom of nearby naval artillery rattles the ship, causing a panic. On the bridge, Captain Stubing radios out a Mayday when a squadron of Delta-wing fighters bearing strange insignia buzzes the Lido Deck. Romantic interludes are suspended as a dashing boarding party scours the ship, rounding up Robin Leach (as himself) and a handful of forgotten English character actors.

In the final scene, Isaac is in his cabin, drinking absinthe with Dr. Bricker and reading excerpts from a musty book Borges left in his cabin. The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, Thirteenth Edition (Volume XLVI: Uqbar-United States).

"The Hrönir of the perpetually broadcast American television reruns are infinite in power and proliferation," reads Isaac, "enabling those who can discover them in plain sight to recast the subtext and reinvent the world."

"What the heck's a Hrönir?" asks Dr. Bricker.

-- From "Prisoners of Uqbaristan," Strange Horizons, October 2004.

Human Habitats

"All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong." – Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built (Penguin, 1994.)

Brand also wrote The Media Lab about MIT's digital media research center. In this book, though, he describes how, for reasons out of the architect's control (the stakeholders couldn't agree on who would occupy it, or what they wanted, early enough in the design process), the Media Lab's building is a futuristic debacle. The building is pretentious, ill-functioning and non-adaptable. A huge sterile atrium "uses up so much of the building that actual working office and lab space is severely limited, making growth and new programs nearly impossible and exacerbating academic turf battles from the first day. Nowhere in the whole building is there a place for casual meetings, except for a tiny, overused kitchen. Corridors are narrow and barren...."

Then there's this zinger: "The Media Lab building, I discovered, is not unusually bad. Its badness is the norm in new buildings overdesigned by architects." Well, based on some ambitous modern buildings I've known and loathed, I'd say he has a good point here.

The thrust of How Buildings Learn is that buildings are happier places when they are flexible, adaptable, and can be retooled as their future unfolds. It's better to put every imaginable future scenario on the table, and make a new building's design generic and flexible enough to accommodate most of them, than to force a consensus about what the future will be. Odds are that the future situation in general - and tomorrow's technology in particular! - could not be anticipated yesterday.

Pretentious residential architecture comes in for some of Brand's criticism. Captioning an illustration of an elaborate new McMansion, he has this to say: "Prematurely complicated, this (pricey) house attempts to look as if it has been added on to for generations. As a result, actual add-ons will be difficult, and the fussy complexity greatly increases the construction and maintenance costs of the original house." On the other end of the pretentiousness scale, countless plain, boxy houses have worked just fine for successive generations of inhabitants who subdivided rooms and added on as needed. Such houses' porches are like pseudopods – converted into an extra room as soon as the house needs one.

As an example of fruitful residential architecture, Brand singles out the basic San Francisco Victorian house. The floor plan is simple – a couple of good-sized rooms on the first floor; on one side of the house a stairway below an upstairs hallway which opens into three or four second-storey rooms. It is a practical, sturdy and adaptable kind of house, which explains why old ones are still going strong and new ones being built in San Francisco and elsewhere.

Last Sunday, I enjoyed Easter dinner with a family of four and nine other guests in a modern Victorian house. It's in the Houston Heights neighborhood, which has a goodly amount of surviving original Victorian architecture, so new Victorians fit right in. The house is just what Brand said about the Victorian floor plan. The almost windowless outer wall beside the stairs and second floor hallway is the west side of the house, its windowlessness a sensible defense against summer heat. But the bay window in the living room's front wall, and the tall windows on the east side of the house, let in plenty of daylight. The high-ceilinged living/dining room has space enough for a table for 14 people and walls painted sunny yellow with white wooden trim. There are also nice front and back porches and a pleasant narrow yard with roses. All in all a very livable home and highly congenial to guests. And isn't livable, practical, congenial space what human habitations should be all about?

All Flesh is Grass. Print, too.

The above is the cover to my new book, The Pulp Magazine Holdings Directory, a guide to which issues of which pulp magazines are held in which libraries in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, and Europe.

In the Directory I covered 1,022 pulps.

Of those, 386 pulps are held in no (0) libraries in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Europe, and a further 145 pulps have less than five total issues extant.

38% of all pulps no longer exist anywhere. And 14% of the pulps survive only in scattered copies.

Which is to say, over half the pulps ever published in the United States are either completely gone or survive in fragmented form. (And around 60% of all surviving issues are only on microfilm or microfiche). 

(The preceding doesn't include true crime pulps or the Canadian and British reprints, which would increase the number of nonexistent pulps).

So it's not possible to go into a library anywhere to look at this:



(It's remotely possible that some pulp collector might donate this issue to a library somewhere, or open his or her collection to a stranger, but with a few prominent exceptions most pulp collectors seem to be hateful grasping antisocial illiberal pinchfists, their souls to the Devil, and the chances of a pulp collector being both generous and in possession of this issue of Zeppelin Stories are so small as to be infinitesmal).

And no member of the public can look at this in a library:



Scarlet Adventuress, greatest of the bad girl pulps, completely gone, and with it characters like Nila Rand, "the Devil's Mistress," and Kara Vania, "The Lady of Doom," and stories like "Shanghai Devil Woman," "Satan's Step-Daughter," and "They Called Her Brandy Flip."



The stories in this issue of Army Romances are "Love Thy Brother," "Flashback!" "Sweet and Hot," "Sweet Geisha," "Kiss of Dreamy Delight," "Do-Nut Girl," "When a G.I. Wants to Marry," "Dangerous Love," and "Slave of the Amazons." The titles are quite a bit at odds with the cover, but no one will ever have the chance to discover whether the cover was a salacious lie, or if BDSM pleasures are to be found in "Kiss of Dreamy Delight."



I know nothing about The Confessions of a Stool Pigeon ("By One of Them," let's not forget), but I'm sure the stories would be enjoyable in an overwrought, the-miseries-of-crime way. I'll never get to read those stories, though. 



A conservative estimate is that only 35% of spicy pulp issues--not pulps, issues--survive. One of the most popular genres of pulps is reduced to just over a third of its total output. It's likely that the missing 65% is so similar to the surviving stories that researchers can generalize about the genre based on a little over a third of what's left--but we'll never know for sure, will we?



The numbers are better for the romance pulps--59% of all romance pulp issues survive--but only two issues (of 175) of Cupid's Diary survive, less than a third (of 146 issues) of Live Stories survives, 0 issues (of 118) survive of Romance, and less than a quarter of all issues of Ranch Romances survive--and Ranch Romances published 854 issues from December, 1924 to November, 1968.

And, finally, consider the hero pulps, which is what most people think of when they see or hear the word "pulps."



The undisputed Big Names among pulp heroes were The Shadow, Doc Savage, the Phantom Detective, and The Spider. All 325 issues of the seven pulps The Shadow appeared in survive. All 181 issues of Doc Savage/Doc Savage Science Detective survive. All 170 issues of The Phantom Detective survive.

But The Spider? 118 issues, Oct. 1933-Dec. 1943. 10 are held in libraries. Oh, many more than those ten have been reprinted--there's a handy list of reprints which tells you which issues were reprinted, and where--but for poor academics like me, paying $25-$35 per reprint isn't feasible.

I could go on, but it would just get (more) depressing.

Of course, all of this is a good corrective to a writer's dreams of immortality. If stories about the Spider can so easily vanish, what chance does the average author now have? One of the best selling fantasy authors of all time was the Reverend Charles Monroe Sheldon, who wrote In His Steps in 1899. By 1934, it had sold 8 million copies. (In His Steps is a Utopia about what the world would be like if everyone followed Christ's teachings--and Utopias are generally classified as fantasies). There are several hundred copies available in libraries around the United States--but do you know anyone who's read In His Steps?

In other words:

I met a reader from an antique bookstore
Who said: Two vast and poetastering series novels, parts two and seven
Stand in the dollar bin. On the back of one,
Half-obscured, a bearded visage protrudes, whose smirk
And curled lip and sneer of self-satisfaction
Tell that this author well those passions read
To best exploit his audience, written in these lifeless things,
His hand which mocked them even as his bank account fed.
And on the title page these words appear:
"My name is ****** ******, Best-Selling Author:
Look on my sales, ye critical darlings, and despair!"
None of his other books remain. Round the decay
Of that bloated series, boundless and cluttered,
The doorstop trilogies stretch far away.

Dr. Ballard, please call surgery

Bondage photos inside astronaut's car

Associated Press
April, 10, 2007

ORLANDO — A police search of former astronaut Lisa Nowak’s car turned up bondage photos on a computer disk, British currency and pills, according to documents released today by prosecutors.

A judge last week agreed to unseal some of the documents in the Nowak’s case.

She is accused of trying to kidnap a rival for a space shuttle pilot’s affections.

Nearly all of the 16 images found on the disk depicted bondage scenes, according to a forensic examination report by the Orlando Police Department. Some of the images showed a nude woman while others were drawings.

The documents did not make clear if Nowak was the woman in the photos or who the disks belonged to.

Also found were nearly $600, 41 British pounds and four brown paper towels with 69 orange pills. It was not clear what the orange pills were. Investigators also examined two USB drives found in the car that contained family pictures, digital movies and NASA related materials.

They concluded that information found on the disk or the two USB drives did not have any direct evidence related to the attempting kidnapping, the report said.
Nowak’s attorney, Donald Lykkebak, declined to comment Tuesday on the newly released documents.

Nowak was arrested in February after police say she drove from Houston to Florida to confront Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman. Authorities have said Nowak had an affair with Shipman’s boyfriend, Bill Oefelein. She pepper-sprayed Shipman through a partially lowered car window, an arrest affidavit said.

Police said they found a BB gun, new steel mallet, a knife and rubber tubing in Nowak’s possession. Nowak, 43, pleaded not guilty to attempted kidnapping, burglary with assault and battery. NASA released Nowak from the astronaut corps a month after her arrest.

Research is never done

One upcoming project of mine uses Venus as the setting. It isn't the Amtorian's action-oriented pulpy Venus, though, but rather the singularly hellish world that we now know is a far cry from the "Earth's twin" entry in most science textbooks from the 1950s and 60s. The rub, though, is that I'm not a planetologist or an astronomer or have any science background beyond a keen interest in space science developed while I was still in elementary school. Which means that most of the real research materials I have access to--from various popular (to not-so-popular) science books on Venus to articles in Icarus and the like are often so far over my head I feel like I'm sitting at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. There's a reason why my chosen profession is journalism after all. Fortunately, there are plenty of mailing lists and message boards around where I can pick up on really interesting developments in space science written in a language even semi-competent lay people (such as myself) can comprehend. Such as this recent update on the ESA's Venus Express mission:

Tracking alien turbulences with Venus Express
European Space Agency

New images and data from ESA's mission to Venus provide new insights into the turbulent and noxious atmosphere of Earth's sister planet. What causes violent winds and turbulences? Is the surface topography playing a role in the complex global dynamics of the atmosphere? Venus Express is on the case.



Venus' atmosphere represents a true puzzle for scientists. Winds are so powerful and fast that they circumnavigate the planet in only four Earth days - the atmospheric "super-rotation" - while the planet itself is very slow in comparison, taking 243 Earth days to perform one full rotation around its axis.

At the poles things get really complicated with huge double-eyed vortices providing a truly dramatic view. In addition, a layer of dense clouds covers the whole planet as a thick curtain, preventing observers using conventional optical means from seeing what lies beneath.

Venus Express is on the contrary capable of looking through the atmosphere at different depths, by probing it at different infrared wavelengths. The Ultraviolet, Visible and Near-Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIRTIS) on board is continuing its systematic investigation of Venus' atmospheric layers to solve the riddle of the causes for such turbulent and stormy atmosphere.

The images presented with this article focus on Venusian atmospheric turbulences and cloud features, whose shape and size vary with planetary latitudes. At the equator, clouds are irregular and assume a peculiar "bubble"-shape. At mid latitudes they are more regular and streaky, running almost parallel to the direction of the super rotation with speed reaching more than 400 kilometres per hour. Going higher up in latitude, in the polar region, the clouds end up in entering a vortex shape.

With its multi-wavelength eyes, VIRTIS can observe the atmosphere and the cloud layers not only at different depths, but also both in the day-and night-side of the planet - a characteristic that allows an overall assessment of the "environmental" causes that can be at the origin of such an atmospheric complexity.

At the equator, the extremely violent winds of the super-rotation are in constant "battle" with other kinds of local turbulences, or "regional" winds, creating very complex cloud structures.

One type of regional wind is due to the strong flux of radiation from the Sun reaching the atmosphere of the planet on the day-side. This flux heats up the atmosphere creating convective cells, where masses of warm air move upwards and generate local turbulence and winds.

On the night-side there is obviously no flux from the Sun, but the clouds' shape and the wind dynamics are somehow similar to that we see on the day-side. So, scientists are currently trying to understand if there is any mechanism other than "convection" responsible for the equatorial turbulences, both on the day- and night-side of Venus.

For instance, VIRTIS imaged clouds over Alpha Regio, an area close to the equator. This area is characterised by a series of troughs, ridges, and faults that are oriented in many directions, with surface features that can be up to 4 kilometres high. There might be a connection between the surface topography and the local atmospheric turbulence which is observed in this area. This and other hypotheses are being investigated by the Venus Express science teams using data from several instruments.

Actually, the Venusian topography may play an important role also in the global atmospheric dynamics. Understanding this surface-atmosphere connection is one of the major objectives of Venus Express - something to be verified in the whole course of the mission.

In many ways, advances in science make a writer's job more difficult. Unless you're working on an outright pulp throwback, you no longer have the free hand Burrough's did to invent a spectacular setting on an unknown world cloaked in clouds. Robot probes and increasingly-sophisticated ground-based observations have done away with the steamy, jungle-covered Venus of yesteryear. On the plus side, science has helped a great deal, unveiling mind-boggling environments never dream possible a century ago. The settings are far more exotic than anyone ever dream possible, just in disturbingly harsh ways. Instead of inventing a consistent world, now writers educate themselves on the actual conditions and environment there--and this gives rise to all sorts of narrative potential.

The pitfall, of course, is that if you cut corners in your research, some sharp-eyed reading is going to call you on it within five minutes of your story seeing print. So much the price of progress. But hey, I love this stuff and would read it anyway. Writing at least gives me the opportunity to use "I'm working" as an excuse.

Jump the fence

And find some resurrection.

Alexis has it right. The unexpected and incongruous appearances of nature amid the dim din of urbanity give us portals we too rarely look through.

Spring is breaking out with gusto across the Northern Hemisphere. After the long grey dormancy, green nature and frisky wildlife dance across the secret interstitia of the cityscape, providing the perfect antidote to break the postmodern haze for those who can slow down long enough to widen the aperture of their senses and take in the rich light.



Practitioners of speculative fiction persistently imagine a post-urban future in which mankind's disregard for the environment leaves a vacant tablet of desiccated and silent nature as grey as its abandoned concrete superstructure. The most recent compelling example being Cormac McCarty's The Road, its central character a devastated landscape populated only by nature's ghosts.

Surely these kinds of speculation are just another variation of man's hubris, the anthro-centric notion that we have the power to destroy nature. I think it more likely that, if humanity receded back into the caves of abandoned tenements, nature would rapidly tear down the evidence of human hives, cracking the concrete and healing the wounds of the earth with adaptive genius. My evidence for this supposition is the wonders I see every day in the midst of my own busy metroplex.



There are the myriad species that in my short life have adapted to human environments and flourished. The turkey vultures that hang glide through the thermal release of hot interstate blacktop and feast on roadkill. The peregrines and hawks that carom off the currents between the skyscrapers and fetch the tiny mammals who live off restaurant trash. The grackle who loiter at streetside cafes and scam their way into free french fries. Alexis' monk parakeets, the descendents of escaped pets who colonize the arc lights over the intramural fields north of my house.



More importantly, every city harbors pockets of wild nature. Most downtowns channel pre-settlement rivers and streams under the concrete skin of the city, like Austin's Little Shoal Creek, or the Hartford River, which eccentric canoeists aquatically spelunk with headlamps, studying graffiti like Neolithic cave paintings. In Austin, covert nature is all over the place. The secret tunnel city of the voles buried in the tall grass under the Loop 1 Mopac freeway. The schools of black tadpoles in the toxin-rich creeks that drain North Austin into the Colorado River. The opossum that scavenge alley trash after dark. The screech owls that greet early-rising writers with alien hoots in the pre-dawn moonlight. And the river itself, where, below the dam, a canopy of tall virgin timber on the banks hosts a fresh array of fauna that has settled in to the latest paradigm.



Most of the Lower Colorado, our geographic spine, has been dammed up since the 1930s, producing three riverine "lakes" within the city limits that are more landscaping features than natural environments. But on the other side of the Longhorn Dam that holds in "Town Lake," the Colorado returns to its natural channel, providing a refuge habitat for all sorts of shallow water-feeding birds and river predators. This stretch of the river is pure urban negative space — only a thin stand of trees protects it from dense industrial uses on either side — starting in the middle of the East Austin barrio, passing the mothballed Air Force base that now serves as Austin's spiffy airport, industrial pits, invisible factories, then southeast to Moorcock country.



In late spring, the herons and egrets stand in the shallows beneath the dam like predatory supermodels, waiting for the bottom-draining pour-off to deliver the big bass from the cool bottom of the lake. Mexican guys from the neighborhood hang out there too, casting their rods in the deep containment tanks, occasionally producing mutant catfish.



My preferred canoe put-in is under the Montopolis Bridge, a mud parking lot under the shade of transecting freeway overpasses leading to Houston, Bastrop, the Hill Country and the Airport, a popular neighborhood beer drinking, wading, and water spraying off-roading spot, where the Cub Scout finds used hypodermic syringes from time to time. At the edge of the lot there is a battered sign marking the area as the "Colorado River Preserve."



On the shaded exterior right angles of the concrete overpasses, huge colonies of cliff swallows have built their condomiums of mud and spit, feasting at dusk on the big bugs that swarm the arc lights.



Downriver, it is a world of wild green. Secret lagoons full of turtles the size of tennis rackets, baking themselves on little islands of dumped concrete, the young displaying their fresh canvases of nature's body art. An osprey flies low, a white Stuka dappled in dark muddy browns, carrying a dripping freshkill rat in its talons. Further down, a pair of osprey work on making eggs in one of the tall trees.



It's their world, we're just living in it.