Predicting Fiction

      Space ethicist and astrophysicist Erika Nesvold is concerned that space workers might be particularly vulnerable to exploitation in the same way isolated workers are on Earth: "The workers [Thai fishermen] would be taken out to sea. Their passports would be taken away. They could be out there for years; there were lots of abuses that weren’t being monitored. She could foresee the same thing happening if you’re going off to work in space on a rocket you don’t control. No one’s there monitoring the situation."

      Ms. Nesvold likens the situation of workers in space to the people who built the early transcontinental railroads in the U. S.: "...the work took place in isolated, hazardous environments with hazardous technology -- at the time, it was explosives -- and the supply lines were tenuous. Chinese immigrant laborers were exploited. There was a lot of prejudice against them; they were not paid equally to other, white railroad workers; and when they tried to protest, because they were so isolated, the companies would do things like cut off their supply lines to break a strike."

      If that sounds familiar, it might be because you read or watched The Expanse, in which Belters, who live and work on space stations, asteroids and similar built environments, face that kind of treatment.  This is a major driver of the plot.

      She's written a book about space ethics and there's an interview with her at Wired.

Up A Ladder

      I'm going to go try to replace a vent cover.  The hinged slats have fallen out and we're pretty sure birds are getting in.  This isn't good.

      Update: the replacement is the wrong size.  It's for a larger-diameter duct.  Sticking a new cap on the old duct was going to be an ugly job anyway.  The birds are in a nesting mood and there's rain on the way.  I stacked the new cap over the old one -- with the flaps out of the old one, it fits -- installed four screws and we'll go with that until the weather's more predictable.  It's not pretty but you can't see it from the street.

Maybe Take A Walk Instead

      I've seen a few bloggers posting their "conversations" with AI chatbots, sometimes on heavy subjects indeed.  Fun as that may be, there's no one inside the box.  It's just a fancy way of taking to yourself.  While I understand that many people appear to feel that there's no one inside other humans, too, that's no excuse.

      Alexa and I occasionally have little "talks," but it's just a silly game, pushing buttons to find any Easter eggs the programmers put in.  The supercharged version isn't different, other than having no intentional surprises.

      Get outside.  Get some sunlight.  Touch green growing things.  Who knows, you might possbly exchange a few words with a real human being, even if their views are not a hundred percent in lockstep with your own.

Oh, That

      You spend your whole life walking around in a robot made of meat and no matter how careful you are, at some point you start thinking, "Man, this thing's a little messed up," and either trying to take better care of it or wishing you had.

      The warranty's nothing much and it will inevitably break down and leave you stranded.  So enjoy the ride while you can, even if the world around you is going nuts.

Language As Resistance

      It wasn't very long ago that a lot of Ukrainians spoke Russian.  Even after independence from the former Soviet Union, many families spoke Russian at home.

      Russia's invasion has changed that.

      Y'know, if you go to a part of the world where the people are notable for their stubbornness and start pushing them around, you shouldn't be surprised when they start pushing back.

The Helpful Bowl

      The ancient Egyptians made them and nobody's sure just why.  They look like the hieroglyphic symbol for "to offer," but what these little bowls that stand on two human feet and tip slightly forward were offering and to whom is a mystery.  Free mints?  Offerings for revered ancestors?  For the gods?  Were they tip jars?  Nobody knows.

      At one time, you could buy modern copies of them.  I didn't, and now there don't seem to be any for sale.  But I'd own one if I could.  Someone needs to make a version that walks over to the nearest person and curtsies; these days, it wouldn't be that difficult, though making sure it doesn't walk off tabletops might take some extra work.

They're Freaking Out In Ohio

      There was a nasty chemical spill in a recent tank car derailment and the railroad decided to burn it in order to get the track cleared as quickly as possible.  It made a nasty mess including a thick plume of ill-smelling smoke.  People were evacuated and it's been all over the news.

      Politicians have been pointing fingers at one another, blaming the previous administration's policy changes or the present administration's people (and sometimes the other way around, presumably for variety).  The folks who live there are understandably upset -- and they want their wells tested, right now!

      While that's probably a good idea, well water is old water.  How old depends on how deep the well is and what your subsurface geology looks like.  A good rule of thumb is that ground water percolates along at about ten feet per year.  Contaminant plumes move at that rate or a little slower, depending on the contaminating substance.  So it could be a long, long time before someone only a quarter of a mile away from the burn site gets a nice hit of vinyl chloride in their tap water.

      Sure, test your well now -- but don't assume you're in the clear if it comes up clean.  The way to monitor a mess like this is to sink test wells (or take test cores) around the source, figure out where the plume is heading and how fast it is moving, and then keep on monitoring.  That won't be cheap.

      When I was young, many streams and some rivers in the part of Indiana where I lived were very interesting colors and degrees of opacity.  Some got that way naturally -- Indiana limestone will give you milky water, some (most) of the rivers are yellow-green and the newer reservoirs where we went swimming tended to murky brown or worse.  But there were no few rainbow-surfaced creeks, places where the runoff or streams picked up all manner of things from agriculture and industry that don't naturally show up in most water.  Over time, we cleaned 'em up.  People got their wells checked -- and if they had any reason for concern, they kept on sending in samples to be tested, at regular intervals.  (Layers of clay and limestone gave us different aquifers at different depths; there were a number of old flowing artesian wells within a few miles of the house where I grew up, but our well was shallow and gave rusty, hard water, safe but ugly even after the water softener.)

      Wells aren't especially mysterious but how water gets into them, from where and how quickly is not quite as straightforward as some people seem to think.  That hasn't had a lot of clear-headed coverage in the aftermath of the mess in Ohio. 

Yeah, No

      Just try to be nicer to one another.

I Keep Following The News

      I keep up with the news but more and more, I don't much want to comment on the news.  Too much of it is too awful, and divisions over what it all means and where we're headed are too deep, even before you get to the "Unless we do..." part.

      Writing that practically guarantees I will see or read something between now and tomorrow morning that I will want to share my opinion about -- saber rattling* from Vladimir Putin and the North Korean government, natural disasters in Turkey and New Zealand, yammerheads and nitwits everywhere.  The older I get, the less convinced I am that it does any good to talk about it, whether to praise constructive responses or point with alarm at danger and destruction.
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* A "buckler" is a small shield; to "swash" is to swagger or wave a sword about.  And now you know what a "swashbuckler" does, sometimes going so far as to to slap the flat of his sword against his buckler.  Presumably this causes considerable rattling.  It's 2023 and our metaphorical language is still dressed like a hoplite or a hussar, with the occasional dragoon carefully keeping his powder dry and not going off half-cocked.

Fan Club

      I will state here, for the record, that the basement radon exhaust fan is on circuit breaker number one -- just like most of the overhead lights and at least two receptacles.  Oh, and the floodlight for the back yard.

      The fan was last replaced a few years ago, but in January it began to thrum and grumble, varying with the outside temperature and whatever obscure moods it got into.  It's on the other side of the outside wall from the head of my bed and I was starting to have dreams about submarine engine rooms and being run over by gear-grinding 18-wheelers.  So I ordered a new fan and waited for warmer weather.  Today was warmer; Tam and I just finished installing the new one.

      Could have sworn we marked it last time.  There's a big "1" on the vertical pipe now.  There's no room on the legend label in the breaker panel to include the full list of things on that breaker -- but I'm glad I have made low-current choices for the remaining lights on it and avoid using the receptacles.

Writing Activity

      Mostly, other people's activity: I'm swapping critiques with other writers in a couple of local organizations.  This is a little like what a copy editor would do, and a little like what a friendly editor would do: you go reading through, looking for (and marking) wrong words, typos the computer can't catch, continuity errors, characters not behaving like themselves, plausibility problems, storytelling glitches and so on.  Some of it it pretty subjective.  But you don't go rewriting them the way you would have written it; the idea is for people to sound like themselves, only more so.

      It's time-consuming, and one of the things you learn as you go is how to read critically -- which you can then apply to your own work.  Since you're swapping one for one, you also get immediate feedback on what other people see when they read your work.

      One of the groups has a deadline approaching, so stories are piling up and I need to go through them.  I'll get back to the usual blogging as things slow down.

Prior Restraint

      The Indiana legislature never did quite manage to set pi to 3 and make it stick; but they appear to be convinced they can tie the First Amendment in knots with impunity.

      There's a bill working its way though the House that would make it a crime to get within twenty-five feet of a sworn officer making an arrest.  "So what," you might think.  "We shouldn't crowd them."  And not getting yourself too close to a fraught interpersonal situation involving armed individuals is generally held to be a good idea; I can't argue with that.

      But twenty-five feet?  The average city street is fifteen to twenty feet wide!  Under that proposed law, you can't drive past a sidewalk arrest; you can't walk your dog down the sidewalk if the police have a car pulled over on the other side -- and you sure can't stand across the street, holding up a cell phone (or a still camera, or a TV news-type camera), recording what's going on.  (And here's the deal: we're all The Press, even without that keen card stuck in our hatband like Clark Kent.)  If your house is close to the street, you'd have to stay off the front porch and keep the curtains drawn if police should happen to nab a suspect right outside.*

      It's already a crime in Indiana to interfere with an arrest -- even interfering with officers performing their duties can get you a ticket or a trip downtown and a date with a judge.  They're granted broad leeway in what might constitute "interference," too.  So what's the new law do?  Here's one thing it does: it makes any images you grab part of the evidence against you.  They're not going to be on the front page or the evening news.  It also constitutes a license to grab any "guilty bystanders" police deem to have committed the crime of being twenty-four feet away from an arrest.

      This is flag-waving, rah-rah stomping on the Bill of Rights to create a law police don't need and will find only too easy to abuse for their own convenience.  They can already arrest meddlers; the gawkers and lookie-loos might be annoying (pity's sake, stop staring and drive.  I've got dinner waiting!) but they don't rate arrest.  You're allowed to look at things happening in public spaces.  You're allowed to take pictures of them.  There is no special police veil, no magic night and fog for Johnny Law.  Quite the reverse.
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* BTDT.  When something kind  of awful -- and still a little unclear -- happened in the neighborhood a while back and police arrived to arrest at least one of the people involved, they sat the person down on the step where the walk leading up to Roseholme Cottage T's off the sidewalk.  Is it 25 feet away?  Maybe, maybe not.