OK, so I had a new author photo taken

I am very uneasy about publishing author photos.

Go on, smile, the photographer said. ‘Say “Payday”‘.

In part it’s because I hate having my photo taken. I much prefer to be on the other side of the viewfinder. There’s also the fact that, here in New Zealand, the only time strangers approach authors recognised from photos is to have a crack at them. My last incident was so unpleasant I stopped publishing my author photo in my books.

But image counts these days. Publishers keep asking me for photos. I’ve been using photos taken by my wife, but the other day I went to see a professional photographer.

Here’s the result.

I may swap yet with another from the same session. We’ll see. Editing tool of choice for getting it sized to web use? I have Photoshop – but for this job, Irfanview is my friend.

Do you have an author photo? Have you ever been recognised from it?

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

Why I don’t like the Caveman Diet

A few years ago I was introduced to the ‘Caveman Diet’.

The theory goes like this. Civilisation is an eye-blink in our history, and we’re not adapted to the things we eat today, which make us ill in consequence. We should be eating the same food that Ugh Ugh the Cave Man scoffed in 35,000 BC – raw nuts, grains, fruit, vegetables.

To which I said then – and still say now – rubbish!

Not only are humans geared to eat cooked food, we look like we do because of it. If we had to munch raw nuts, fruit and grains all day (and it would take all day to get the calories), we’d have jaws like an orang-utan. (I had breakfast with one once, but that’s another story…)

The science is clear. An ability to control fire – which may have begun 700,000 years ago – allowed early hominins to cook. Cooking reduces the energy needed to digest food, increasing the yield. One side effect was the drop in tooth and jaw size. It was also reflected in biochemistry.

As for the ‘cave man’ diet – well, there wasn’t one. A  lot depended on where people were. Even today, African hunter-gatherers have a wider range of foods available than people living on the edge of the ice sheets.

Neandertal family group approximately 60,000 years ago. Artwork by Randii Oliver, public domain, courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The diet near the ice sheets was typified by that much maligned character, Cucu! the Neandertal. About ninety percent of the Neandertal diet was meat, and big game meat at that. Get this – Cucu! the Neandertal would head out armed with a heavy thrusting spears, and go into combat with mammoths and rhinocerii. Seriously. Skeletons have been found with upper body injuries identical, in form, to the ones rodeo riders get while steer wrasslin’. (What’s Neandertal for ‘yeeee-haaw!’?)

I’ve ridden elephants. There is no way I would want to go into combat with one, armed only with a spear. As for rhinos…well, uh…

The other issue is that there’s no return path to Ice Age foods for us.  We’ve selectively bred everything we eat today, and studies have shown that our biochemistry has adapted to suit. Today’s main wheat strain didn’t even exist 100 years ago (the guy who bred the super-wheat we use now only died recently).

The ‘cave man diet’, in short, is fantasy. Paleo-nostalgia.

So why does it work for some people? Part of the reason is that modern foods contain additives. Commercial chicken, for instance, is full of antibiotics, so if you’re intolerant to penicillins, it won’t do favours. All sorts of issues follow from immune system dysfunction – so, on the cave man diet, some people feel healthier.

So does this mean we’ll eventually adapt to being able to lie on couches with our Game Boys and TV remotes, surrounded by the detritus of chips, pizza and cola drinks?

Well, maybe, but something tells me not.

What are your thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

We live in a totally awesome universe. I like it. Do you?

It never ceases to amaze me how awesome the universe has become in the last thirty-odd years.

The Horsehead nebula, Barnard 33, as seen by Hubble. Wonderful, wonderful imagery. NASA, public domain.

Take astronomy. Back in the late twentieth century, half the stuff we know now was a pipe dream. Even sci-fi authors didn’t imagine what we’ve actually found. Exoplanets? In 1994, stuff of science fiction. There was a slight indication that one might exist around Barnard’s Star, (V2500 Ophiuchus) - now disproven – but nothing else.

Now? We’ve found hundreds – 877 as of the end of April 2013, in fact. With hundreds more lurking in data already collected. And do these planetary systems obey Bode’s Law? No they do not. They include super-Neptunes. Water worlds. ‘Eyeball’ worlds tidally locked so one face forever faces their sun. Hot Jupiters. Planets whose very atmospheres are boiling into space. We’ve even directly imaged some of these extra-solar worlds, around Formalhaut (Alpha Piscis Austrini). How cool is that?

Hubble picture of the planet around Formalhaut. NASA, public domain.

Planets are only the half of it; we’ve also found detail in nebulae that we never thought could exist. And black holes. I won second prize in a regional high school science contest in 1978 with a display on black holes – in which I outlined how the event horizon works as a direct consequence of Einsteinian physics, for which I did the math and plotted graphs. Not that I had learned any of this at my high school. I missed out on first prize – explicitly because I’d presented theoretical physics and the judges were looking for kitchen chemistry experiments. It was a high school science contest. Yes, I know that sounds like a Sheldon answer, but it’s true.

The point is that back in 1978 nobody had seen a black hole. Theoretically, they could have been just that – black. Invisible, maybe, apart from the possibility of picking up a lensing effect from the way they distorted space-time.

Now we know different. They’re amazingly visual. Dynamic, exciting – shrouded in violent clouds of swirling hot gases and debris which belch X-rays as tidal forces crush and heat them.

The PIllars of Creation – star nurseries in M-16, the Eagle Nebula. Click to enlarge. NASA, public domain.

We’ve even integrated quantum theory into the mix – which was done by Stephen Hawking. Thanks to him, we know that black holes themselves radiate at particle level (it’s a consequence of superposition). Small ones radiate away to nothing, which is why the CERN supercollider won’t create an earth-swallower.

In just thirty years we’ve realised that it’s all out there – this amazing, dynamic, ever-changing universe. It’s totally different from the rather bland void, possibly populated with clones of our own solar system, that we imagined in the mid-twentieth century.

And there is so much more to learn. I think that’s pretty wonderful. I hope you do too.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

A visit to Tyne Cot cemetery and the solemnity of remembrance

It is nine years since I stood under the Menin Gate on ANZAC day, with other New Zealanders, marking our day of national memorial for the wars of the twentieth century.

My photo of soldiers’ graves at Tyne Cot, 2004.

The gate spans the Menin Road that leads out of Ypres, a town in Flanders; and during the First World War, soldiers from Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and other places walked down that road, usually to their deaths. Part of that road, not far from the town, was under German artillery fire from 1915 until 1918; Hellfire Corner, it was called, and hessian screens were raised – not to stop the shells, but to prevent anyone sniping the troops. The gate, a huge arch, is lined with the names of soldiers who disappeared, their bodies never found, in the churned muck of the trenches.

Later, my wife and I walked the quiet lawns of Tyne Cot cemetery, the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the area and a silent reminder of the lethality of the Western Front. A rotunda carried names – including those of New Zealanders – who had fallen during the Western Front campaign, and were never found.

For me that campaign defined the futility of the human condition – the way we intellectualise ourselves into corners. Militarily it was a cleft stick; the triumph of defence over offence. Industrial technology could bring men to a battlefield in unprecedented numbers. It expanded the battlefield to colossal scales. However, it could not move men on it, nor could infantry overcome the barriers posed by machine gun and wire. Once that had developed it was difficult to find a military way out, without new technologies – which were developed. But that took time, and meanwhile men died, and political solutions were never explored.

At the time, of course, it seemed rational and logical. But that is true, I think, of every war humanity has fought through its long history.

We keep falling into wars, just as we keep insisting that we must never fight them again. It is a relentless cycle which, I fear, is a part of the human condition.

As I walked those silent gravestones in 2004 – and as I sit here now remembering the solemnnity of that day, and thinking about the intellectualised rationality, the stubbornness and the horrors of the war that led to these deaths - it gives pause for thought.

What do you figure on this one?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Introducing the Acme Miracle Editorial Version Tracking Process

Welcome to the Acme Miracle Editorial Version Tracking Process, designed to create the maximum possible editorial confusion while keeping the content as far from completion as possible. As used by civil servants.

1. Insert the word ‘final’ into the filename as early as possible.

2. When it’s edited (again), create a relative qualifier. ‘New final’, as opposed to ‘old final’.

3. Move on to the ‘final FINAL’.

4. Then the ‘new final FINAL’.

5. Then the ‘updated new final FINAL.’

6. Decide the ‘old updated new final FINAL’ is better after all.

7. Ignore the ‘last modified’ date and send one of them randomly to the publisher.

8. Discover they typeset the wrong version, decide to edit one into the other.

9. Make changes. Tell the publisher that’s it.

10. Make more changes. Tell the publisher it’s just two or three little fixes.

11. Look at dozens of random pages, finding something to change every time, each of which is the ‘very last’. Send them, individually, to the publisher at erratic intervals.

12. On receiving the printed copy, open the document. Spot something. Time for a second edition. Go back to (1).

Now, I made this up for laughs…but I have a horrible feeling that it happens, in Dilbertian offices. I hope I’m wrong about that.

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

The secret footpath protocol scoring game

Ever got frustrated dodging lunch time crowds on busy city streets?

Don’t worry. It’s all part of the Secret Footpath Protocol Scoring Game, revealed here for the first time.

1. Walking very slowly, randomly drifting from left to right, oblivious to other people. One point for every person blocked.

2. Lighting a cigarette and leaving it burning so as to choke everybody behind in a fog of disgusting carcinogens. One point for everybody who tries to get away from the stinking trail.

3. Drifting to a halt, aimlessly, in front of a shop window, door or ATM machine, waiting a moment, then drifting a little further, oblivious to people. One point for everybody blocked as they try to get around.

4. Walking with iron purpose if anybody approaches from the other direction. One point for everybody forced to dodge (this doesn’t work if they’re trying to score points back the other way).

So now you know. And, of course, as you can’t beat ‘em…may as well join ‘em…

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