There’s a Neandertal living on my street…

It’s amazing how ideas for stories drift in. Back when I was a teenager, every girl at my high school seemed to have acquired a boyfriend with a monolithic face-spanning eyebrow who spoke in grunts and was capable of inflicting atomic wedgies on any passing geek in 3 milliseconds.

Proof that Ugh Ugh the Neandertal hadn’t gone extinct during the Younger Dryas, but was alive and well and living somewhere on my street.

Since then geeks have won the war for cool. Check out the ratings for The Big Bang Theory.

And we’ve learned that Neandertals weren’t an all-male species of  testosterone drenched apes who grunted, randomly smashed bus stops and stole attractive women.

Actually, we knew that anyway, though the science has changed since I did an undergrad degree in anthropology, way back when. Even the spelling has changed, at least in English – they’re Neandertals, not Neanderthals, though the taxonomy remains H. neanderthalis.

We think Neandertals emerged 600,000 years ago – check out the Smithsonian human origins site for a brief online summary. Neandertals were  bigger brained than us (about ten percent, on average), had better eyesight, and were stronger. They shared the gene we have for speech, though their different larynx and tongue mean their languages would have been different. If you’re looking for attitudes of care you’d be hard pressed to go past the ways Neandertals looked after each other.

The best description I have seen is that Neandertals were human ‘in a different way’.

A diagram I made of where paleontologists think everybody was during the last ice age, and how we moved in on the others, using my trusty Celestia installation and some painting tools.

Which brings me back to stories. I’ve just finished reading a book called How To Think Like A Neandertal, by a couple of academics – Thomas Wynn and Frederick Coolidge - from the University of Colorado. And they paint a picture of what Neandertals could have been like. Speculative, but with solid science behind it.

You can see what I’m getting at. There’s scope for some fabulous fiction. Stories better founded than Jean Auel’s. With dialogue. And Neandertals didn’t go ’ugh ugh’. Not with the Neandertal larynx. Grunting is a feature of our species, and of those mono-brows I went to high school with. All H. sapiens, the lot of them.

Embarrassing, isn’t it.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Sixty second writing tips: how J K Rowling twisted the tropes

One of the secrets to successful writing is offering something readers can identify with, but that has enough originality to be new. The same…but different.

Modern meets fantasy in another way – a pic I took a few years back of Kastel de Haar, near Utrecht, Netherlands.

J. K. Rowling’s shown us how it’s done. Back in the 1990s, Brit boarding school stories were dead, dead, dead. The world of ripping wheezes at the expense of The Beak, followed by clandestine visits to the tuck shop  with Bunter Major, was soooo 1930s.

Trad magic stories were pretty much dead too – I mean, spells, wizards and potions were so cliched. Put together, they should have worked even less well.

What Rowling did was genius – mashing up two cliches and giving them a twist. That came partly from the way she reinterpreted the spell-and wand trope, partly from the seven-story plot cycle, and partly from her style – easy, unadorned and well pitched for the readership. And now writing has its first billionaire author.

Time for the rest of us to follow suit. But not with school magic mashups. They’ve been done…

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

How Microsoft got me on to Google Chrome in one swift update

I ditched Microsoft’s browser last week, after using it for about 15 years.

For me computers are tools. I find  products that work, learn them, and that’s that. It’s irritating when software makers keep changing the interfaces. But I live with it. So I didn’t jump from Internet Explorer when alternatives came along, and it’s been OK.

Until last week when my system updated to IE 10, and most of my online apps stopped working.

It took me half an hour  to figure out it was the browser. More time to look for solutions by Microsoft. And five minutes to stop wasting time, grab Google Chrome, install it, and get going. That’s 90 minutes I won’t get back.

Have you ever had problems after an update? And did you switch vendors to get around it?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Jack Kerouac, cafe racers, writing and style

Another WordPress blogger suggested a while back that Jack Kerouac was the ‘café racer’ of writers. She was right, of course.

Ducati ‘Paul Smart’ 1000LE, one of only a handful imprted into New Zealand. In some senses it’s more stripped sports bike than classic cafe racer. I took this photo for a book I was writing on bikes in 2008.

That got me thinking – as good blog posts should. Cafe racers were simple, honest motorcycles, quintessential cool. They captured the freedom of lifestyle; road legal bikes you could race on the track. For me you can’t go past the Vincent Black Shadow. The first superbike and, for me, quintessential café racer. Those beasts could drag-race jet fighters – and win, at least until the jet took off. They appeared in 1948 and weren’t beaten for speed until Kawasaki turned up with the 750 Triple in 1973.

The message I got from the post was that Kerouac’s style – his approach, his authenticity, the feel – relates to writing in the same way that café racers relate to motorcycles.

Those three words again  – cool. Fast. Authentic. Kerouac was all these things. There was no doubt about cool.  The beat crowd defined it.

Speed? Kerouac blew On The Road through his typewriter in three weeks. And his stories were fast, too; On The Road, again, pushed at breakneck speed. Authentic? Kerouac went steps further than Hemingway when it came to authenticity. Sometimes what he wrote was literally real.

His was a quest for self in a youth generation who had spun out of the Great Depression and sought all the joy they could find in life.

He wrote real. Authenticity to himself; authenticity to reality as he saw it. Just like a café racer and the riding experience.

Can we learn from this? Absolutely. If we can find something that symbolises our style, like the café racer symbolises Kerouac, what can we then learn about ourselves?

Extending the point (as I always do), I wonder about other writers. J. K. Rowling, for instance, who I’d classify as the ‘family car’ of writers – a bit cliched in terms of ideas, but absolutely solid, reliable and competent (I can hear the scream from the Harry Potter fans…but I mean, magic wands and school stories? Reinvented cliche…but still cliche.)

Or Robert A. Heinlein, who was always looked on as an SF writer but really was an American writer, generally – tackling all the issues that needed tackling. Another realist. Solid. Conservative, yet with a twist that got you thinking. Full sports bike, maybe – Ducati? As opposed to someone like Michael Moorcock, whose writing I’d envisage more like a trail-bike – scorching off on his own very interesting direction with eager joy.

Who’s your favourite author…and what mode of transport – with lifestyle – do they remind you of?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

ANZAC Day 2013: remembering why we fought

It’s ANZAC Day this week in New Zealand – 25 April,  our equivalent of Memorial Day in the US or Armistice Day in Britain.

It’s iconoclastic. Most nations remember their military dead on days when a war ended – typically, for Commonwealth countries, 11 November, when the guns fell silent over the Western Front in 1918.

But not New Zealand and Australia. Here we remember our war dead on the day we began our first big overseas military campaign, the ground assault on Gallipoli that began on 25 April 1915.

The day is tied into our national identity. That wasn’t always the case. When the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) embarked on that campaign it was to do duty for Empire – for Britain, a country we called ‘home’ even though most of our young men had never been there.

I used to write histories of our twentieth century wars. In my final foray into that field, Shattered Glory (Penguin 2010), I explored the virtually spontaneous celebrations on 25 April 1916, the anniversary of the landings – at which time the Gallipoli campaign was turned, by sleight of hand, from an ignominious defeat (which it was) into a triumph of New Zealand’s contribution to Empire.

It became nationalist towards the end of the war, a spontaneous focus for grief flowing from the terrible death toll of the Western Front, New Zealand’s most lethal campaign of all time and the definition of what the First World War meant, socially and historically.

Of late, 25 April has become New Zealand’s de-facto national day – a moment to remember those who gave their lives – the young men who were never wearied by age.

To me it is also a day to ask a simple question. Why? Why did they go to war?

It is easy to suppose that young men were fooled by Boys’ Own images of war as glorious, a superior sports event that showered honour on soldiers, family and especially school.

I have found letters and diaries suggesting that this may have been true for the Boer War of 1899-1902, our first military campaign. But not the First World War. Not really. Most of the young Kiwis who went to fight even in 1914 knew what war entailed, even if they had yet to learn the true lethality of industrial age fire-power. That lesson had been driven home by 1916; and certainly most of their sons were cynical enough in 1939, when Europe again plunged into war and New Zealand’s young men flocked to sign up.

They did not go because it was glorious. They went because it was necessary.

We forget how close the world was, then, to a new dark age. In the 1930s democracy was but one of three competing systems, and it was on the back foot. In New Zealand of the day, the government of Michael Joseph Savage opposed fascism wherever it stood, even at risk of annoying a British government that felt appeasement was a cheaper option. But Savage was right. So was Winston Churchill, a politician, writer and historian who knew very well what both Nazi and Communist flavours of totalitarianism stood for. But such voices of warning were not heard until almost too late. And for a while in 1940-41, as Britain and her Comonwealth stood alone as the last main bastions of civilised western democracy outside the United States, things stood on a knife edge.

New Zealand’s part in that war took our fighting division from Greece to Crete to Egypt to the Western Desert to Syria, to Libya, Tripolitania, Tunisia, and finally Italy and – in the last hectic days of the struggle – Trieste. They did so under a remarkable commander, Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Freyberg, VC, DSO (3 bars), etc. (It is nearly a decade since Penguin published my biography of this incredible man; I still think it is one of my best books).

Other Kiwis fought with our navy, with the Royal Navy and with the Merchant Marine. Still others fought in the skies, with the RNZAF and RAF among other services. And we had a presence in the Pacific, where a New Zealander, Major-General Sir Harold Barrowclough, led forces that included a US contingent under Richard M. Nixon. Yes, that Richard M. Nixon.

All this was done not for glory, or rewards of heroism, but because it had to be done. Whatever it took. The alternatives – a world dominated by Nazi evil, fuelled by what Churchill called the ‘dark lights of perverted science’, were too horrible to contemplate. And we knew it.

Today we must remember those who died to make the world a better place, safe for democracy - who helped make the modern world what it is. Both here in New Zealand – and around the world.

Please join me in remembering them.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

A small tribute to the world’s greatest geek

In 1902, when Guglielmo Marconi broadcast the first radio signals across the Atlantic, Hungarian-American scientist Nicolai Tesla smiled. ‘Nice effort,’ he reputedly said. ‘Pity he’s infringed 19 of my patents.’

Nikolai Tesla with some of his gear in action. Public domain, from http://www.sciencebuzz.org/blog/monument-nearly-forgotten-genius-sought

Next time you flip on a light or use your smartphone or listen to the radio, watch TV or do just about anything in today’s teched-up world, spare a thought for the guy that made it all happen. Tesla. The world’s greatest geek. And the archetypal mad scientist – eventually complete with lab coat and shock of unruly hair.

Tesla flourished in the late nineteenth century and was responsible for discovering alternating current – with all that this implies. He explored everything to do with wave-forms, which are the basis of just about everything we do today with technology. He also figured out applications for what he learned – he had hundreds of patents to his name.

He didn’t always get it right, but that was part of the territory in this infancy of electricity. His key discovery was that high-frequency alternating current can be broadcast, wirelessly. That’s how transmission works – we give it many names, radio, TV signals, wireless, Bluetooth, but it’s all the same thing; high-frequency electromagnetic signals, broadcast in a wave.

The problem is that the power it carries isn’t high, compared to the power needed to transmit, and thanks to the inverse-square law it drops off pretty quickly with distance (double the distance, quarter the power). I have vivid memories of watching a bare fluorescent tube held inside a 25,000 volt AC field, less than a metre from the transmitter. It lit up, wirelessly – but not brightly.

Nikolai Tesla in 1895. Public domain, from Wikimedia Commons.

Tesla thought the issue might be solved. He also thought it should be possible to harness the difference in electrical potential between ground and upper atmosphere –and his kudos by the 1890s was so great he was able to get hardware built – including a huge tower soaring into the skies above Long Island.

That didn’t work either. Nor did his earthquake machine.

But we can’t condemn him for that. The basis of everything we take for granted today – AC electrical systems, everything based on any broadcast from wireless computing to radio to TV to radar to microwave ovens, all came out of Tesla’s pioneering work. All? All.

Today his name is commemorated in an electric car. And the ‘Tesla Gun’ out of Wolfenstein, which could turn Nazis into small slices of steaming salami with one zap. Cool. Well, hot, actually. And all without a power cable. Wish I knew the trick.

Tesla thought he did. And for some reason Thomas Alva Edison apparently didn’t like him.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Celtic history conspiracies, anyone? No? Good.

As humans, I fear, we suffer from an uncanny ability to intellectualise ourselves into believing things that are really, really stupid.

Take the crackpot theories about secret history that have become popular ever since Charles Fort was a lad. Every country seems to have their variations – ‘ancient astronauts’ building pyramids, hidden past civilisations in the Americas, even Atlantis discovered in Google Maps, having eluded everybody on the planet including Google’s mapping teams.

Never mind that the ‘city’ on the Atlantic floor was actually an artefact of Google’s digital mapping process. Or that the ‘Atlantis’ legend itself has been shown to have come from Egypt, and was really about the destruction of Santorini (Thera) and the Minoan civilisation by volcano.

Here in New Zealand, crank ideas have included efforts to ‘prove’ that that everybody from Phoenicians to Celts arrived before Polynesians (always, wrongly, called ‘Maori’ in these accounts). The ‘proofs’, as far as I can tell, pivot on assigning human patterns to natural rock formations, or identifying boulders shifted by a county council during excavations as an ancient observatory. Literally joining the dots, though in a peculiar way.

Like overseas theories of similar ilk, these tell us more about the people proposing them than anything real. What’s more, some of these ideas – Celtic especially – float on a repugnant racial agenda, underscoring what’s actually going on.

New Zealand is far from alone. All this begs the question. How do these ideas gain traction?

Unconscious incompetence plays a part; often these theories are presented by people who are flat ignorant of the state of understanding of the field – so ignorant they don’t know how ignorant they are. That’s coupled with the assertion that ‘I don’t know myself, therefore nobody can know.’

A friend of mine argues it’s the result of people trying to fit the universe into their heads, it’s just a pity their heads are so tiny. It’s to do with their own sense of place, of identity; with constraining the wild unknowns of the world and controlling them – with, in effect, feeling secure, in their own way.

The other tack these fringe theorists try is claiming deliberate deception, a ‘conspiracy’ among ‘the establishment’ to ‘hide the truth’.

I’m part of that establishment, so any denial I make isn’t going to wash. Apart from one small point. Here in New Zealand, certainly, my experience has been that academic historians loathe each other – most of the ones I’ve run across regard the work of their peers as an assault on their own personal self-worth that must be avenged in kind. There is no chance whatsoever of a ‘conspiracy’ even being agreed on – still less sustained – in this viciously hostile intellectual environment.

Again, I think, the ‘establishment conspiracy’ notion is part of that phenomenon of the fringe thinkers keeping the universe small – of cutting the ‘system’ down to size.

Ultimately I don’t think there’s much point arguing against any of the crank theorists. They won’t accept rebuttals; and for every theory that is exploded – sometimes by simply falling out of fashion - a new idea always seems to arise to take its place.

But I still think it’s a pity. As I always say, the real world -  including its history – is wonderful and amazing enough, and still full of great and awesome things to discover, without us having to create fantasies about it.

What do you figure?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Does Thatcher’s death mean the 80s are really over?

Former British PM Margaret Thatcher’s death this week has not, it seems, provoked a sense in Britain or even around the world that the deceased can do no wrong.

The ‘Iron Lady’ steered Britain away from a failed post-war course. But the cost was division, bitterness and dispossession. She polarised; and the bitterness re-emerged this week to the point where the Telegraph apparently had to shut down its twitter stream.

Thatcher was not alone. Many developed nations, one way or another, had their ‘Thatcher’ in the 1980s. Including my country, New Zealand.

It was unsurprising. Thatcher’s brand of conviction politics – certainties based not on pragmatic understanding of human nature, but theoretical dogma – was on the rise around the world. It was of its time, framed in the ideological oppositions of the late twentieth century, the moment when the new generation got hold of the tiller on various ships of state around the western world and, probably unintentionally, steered their societies unerringly into a riotous exaltation of self.

Eighties glitz and glam; a photo I took in a Wellington central city mall at the height of the yuppie boom, 1987.

On the back of it the eighties became an age of arrogance, of asserted certainties, of big hair, big shoulder pads, wedge-shaped cars, over-priced and under-sized food, greed, status, displays of power – and bad behaviour.

Was it any good for us? I was in my early twenties when New Zealand followed the Thatcher lead. There were winners, other young twenty-somethings around me who partied up large – for whom the display and assertion of power was an end in itself. The future didn’t matter. What counted was now.

And there were losers. Anybody over 40 was a has-been, unemployable – a dinosaur. Failures. Because they were old. Because they hadn’t made life exciting. Whatever.

Some of the young, selfish, upwardly mobile and badly behaved party animals in white shirts and wide ties crashed and burned in 1987. I don’t know where most of them are now. For myself, I recall it was hard to get work.

I survived; so did others who thought the same way I did. But it wasn’t easy. And every visit I made to my home province brought heartbreak; closures, derelict buildings, a sense of gloom – even as city office workers partied up amidst chromed, neon-lit bars with their revolting ‘goldfish laybacks’ (don’t ask) and Corona beer swilled straight out of the bottle.

With hindsight, I think that whole social mix of the eighties was symptomatic of its time, the antidote for the world wars that had dominated the first half of the twentieth century; a reaction to the safe, solid, protected, grey societies that followed. It made a selected few from a new generation into winners. But I cannot forget the way it also dispossessed. And the generation who had made that 1980s world possible – who had laid their lives on the line to defeat fascism and make democracy safe – were the generation who lost. A twentieth century phenomenon.

We’re well into the twenty-first now. The Cold War is long over. New technology is transforming the way we interact – and the way we can produce and earn. And yet, I have to wonder. It seems to me that the eighties, fundamentally, tapped into an aspect of the human condition. It’s always been around, one way or another, for our entire history. Sometimes society lets it out. And I wonder if that particular genie has really been put back into the bottle, even today.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Why go for woo woo when we have science? Checking out New Zealand’s amazing Moeraki Boulders

I am often amazed at the way perfectly explicable – if unusual – parts of the natural world get layered with what, politely, we might call ‘woo woo’.

Here in New Zealand we have a few – the ‘Kaimanawa wall’, for instance, a few ‘stone blocks’ that are meant to be part of a pyramid and therefore proof that a ‘pre-Maori’ nation existed in New Zealand, despite a total lack of any other evidence, including the rest of the supposed ’pyramid’. Actually the wall is part of an inigbrimite outcrop, naturally formed about 330,000 years ago and since cracked.

Best of them all, though, are the Moeraki boulders, which have attracted enormous speculation, probably because they are well known and easy to get to.

Back in 1848, early settler land buyer and moa enthusiast Walter Mantell – the man whose father, back in England, found the first ever dinosaur fossil – reached Kohekohe beach in New Zealand’s deep south. And beheld an extraordinary sight.

I took this photo of the Moeraki boulders in 2007. They fact that they are not perfect spheres is evident. Note the septarium (split) visible across the top of the boulder in the foreground.

It was strewn with boulders, some up to 3 metres across, weighing 7 tonnes or more, all roughly spherical. Just what they were – and how they got there – has been one of the more remarkable stories of New Zealand’s history.  Not because there is any mystery – but because of the way so many people seemed to think there should be.

Maori explained them by allegory; they were the remnants of calbashes and other cargo held by an ancestral canoe which, legend put it, piled up on this part of the coast.

Settler scientists had the physical origin pinned by 1856; the boulders were natural formations that had eroded out of the bank bordering the beach. That did not stop speculation from people who either didn’t know, or wouldn’t accept, the scientific explanation.

One of the silliest notions was that they were counter-weights for raising sails on 1200-foot long Chinese super-junks. Alas, there was not a shred of evidence, such as any sign that such vessels ever existed. (Technically, a wooden vessel that long would break in the first swells – it’s to do with the required strength of hull girder vs the tensile strength of wood. That is why even short sailing ships had a distinct sheer line, and really big ships had to wait on iron and steel – but I digress.)

Even sillier is the notion that they are alien eggs, some of which have hatched. Or some sort of alien dropping, anyway. Scarily, 27.2 percent of those who responded to an online straw poll thought this was the actual answer.

The reality? There’s no mystery. Spherical objects aren’t common in geology, but they occur. Similar boulders have been found on the Hokianga Harbour in northern New Zealand. There are other formations in Wyoming, Utah, North Dakota and also ‘Bowling Ball’ beach in California, among other places.

In fact the Moeraki boulders are septarian concretions of sand, clay and mud, held together with calcite, which formed in mud about 60 million years ago.

The shape – which is not perfectly spherical – is an outcome of the way this material diffused. It was an imperceptible process that took about four million years – maybe 55,500 human lifespans. To put that in another perspective, to make a 3 metre boulder in that time the calcite need have diffused at only 0.00075 mm a year.

This natural origin makes those boulders utterly ancient, utterly precious – and explains why it’s illegal to damage or deface them.

To me this is way cooler, and way more interesting, than silly explanations involving mystery ancient civilisations or aliens.

What’s more, spherical objects on a smaller scale – much like grapes – have been found on Mars by the Opportunity rover – evidence of past water flows. How cool is that?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Fashion week makes me think laterally about the obsession with skinny

A photographer’s flash went off nearby as I walked down Wellington’s Lambton Quay yesterday. I soon discovered why. It’s Fashion Week, and the streets are filled with models on outdoor photo shoots, out in the crowds.

I had no idea it was happening. Of course, you’re talking here to a Kiwi bloke. I randomly purchase clothes, then randomly pluck them from the closet. She Who Must Be Obeyed occasionally points out which shirt goes with what trousers, as opposed to conglomerations of jeans and t-shirts, or odd shoes

What’s more, my favourite model is Thunderbird 2. I am not kidding (hey, every bloke of A Certain Age knows exactly what I am talking about…)

My favourite model. I’ve had this Dinky toy of it since I was a kid. For some reason, I’ve never tossed it out…

But I digress. It got me thinking about the fashion industry with its curious images of what constitutes ‘normal’ and ‘overweight’ for women. it seems to me this tells us an awful lot about what is wrong with western society in general.

Go back half a century and look at Marilyn Monroe, who symbolised western ideals for one and maybe two generations. She was a Size 16, which I believe is known as ‘plus’ size today.

Today? Apparently Size 0 is obese and models are required to survive on cotton wool balls soaked in orange juice, protein shakes and still have to dehydrate themselves for two days in order to get ‘the look’ (hmnn… lots of protein, starvation stress response, no water…’kidney failure’…).

What’s more, both men and women are relentlessly conditioned to think this is normal for women. I still recall someone informing me, years ago, that any woman who didn’t look like the ‘supermodel de jour’ was a ‘blimp’.

The science is clear; people come in all shapes and sizes, and somebody who’s an endomorph (round), under no circumstance, is going to look thin. No matter how little they eat. No matter how much they exercise.

In a way it isn’t surprising. History is rife with examples of social trends, fashion and otherwise, that deny the human condition one way or another. And today the image is also driven at us with all the force of mass media and the power of industrial-age marketing.

Yet there is something else. For 99.99% of all human history, the human condition has involved a struggle to find food. Being fat was a sign of wealth – status. Also fertility; look at the neolithic Venus figures, for instance. Or the paintings of Pieter Paul Rubens.

Today, industrialised society – the same industrialisation that is leading us inexorably down the path of global climate change – has also solved the problem of finding enough food to eat. So what does society do? We create a social ideal for women of being unhealthily skinny, instead.

What, as a society, have we lost perspective of here? What do you figure?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013