More Martian dumbness: NASA drew a giant WHAT on the red planet?

The other day my wife ordered a latte – which she then had to photograph because of the way the coffee and soy happened to mix, a kind of ‘ooer, that looks a bit rude’ shape, if you looked at it the right way.

The point being that NASA has been getting stick for apparently drawing the same thing. Thing, I did say ‘thing’, didn’t I? A sand drawing, with its Spirit rover, right there on the Martian pud, I mean pug.

Of course, by the time I went to check the JPL site, the pic had been replaced by this one… Public domain, NASA.

Purely accidental. Honestly, officer. (“Pfft, chortle, ooer, that looks a bit rude“).

OK, so if ”paredoilia’ is seeing faces in random patterns, what’s the word when people perceive what in old Devonshire dialect was a ‘tallywag’, outlined in Martian tyre trails (but only if you look at it sideways).

The good news? In 2023, four lucky people will get the chance to see NASA’s – er – artwork in person. Maybe. A Dutch fellow is looking for people to go on a one-way trip. Unlike Denis Tito’s  plan for a couple to spend a 501-day marital sojourn in a Dragon capsule, lining the walls with their own excrement, this one will involve landing on Mars. Also in modified Dragon that, I suspect, would be like living in a 1960s police phone box which, alas, wasn’t bigger on the inside.

Taking off again? Uh…no…

Conceptual artwork by Pat Rawlings of a Mars mission rendezvous from 1995. NASA, public domain, via Wikipedia.

Which means the life support system has to last forever. I expect it’ll be made of duct tape. Eventually. Oh – and the voyage’s going to be turned into reality TV.

Would I go? Plus side…

1. I’d be on a different planet from Justin Bieber and his monkey.

2. It would get me on TV along with re-runs of The World’s Greatest Loser.

3. You don’t have to line the walls with your own excrement like Tito’s crew.

4. If I wanted to be called the next Jeddak of Barsoom, I’d be in the right place, unlike now when they all look at me funny.

5. I’d get a front row seat for the next ‘NASA drawing’ on Mars.

But I have to say that the green hills of Earth are looking pretty good about now.

Would you go on a one-way trip to Mars? And what do you think NASA should draw next on the Red Planet?

 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

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

Top things I have never understood…

I have never understood quite a lot about the world. Why, for instance, it always happens that…

1. Whenever you’re in a supermarket queue, the air is inevitably shredded with hysterical cries of pain and terror. You look around for the murder scene only to discover some three year old has been told by their mum that they can’t have the chocolate bar in the checkout rack.

2.Whenever you approach an ATM machine without a queue, people hastily swarm in from the side, ahead of you, to form a queue before you can get there.

3. Whenever you do the laundry, no matter how sunny the day is, it starts raining three seconds after you peg the last shirt out.

4. The teller in the post office puts the ‘closed’ sign up just as you get to the head of the queue.

5. Trek may have predicted auto-opening doors, but contrary to what you see in Trek, they enter their ‘close’ cycle just as you get to them.

…and finally…

6. When the zombie apocalypse hits, you discover you’re one of the zombies.

Any thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

A howler to remind us how funny language is…

I thought I’d share a few more funny signs for a Monday laugh. Particularly a faded poster on the exterior wall of a Wellington supermarket, 5 metres wide and 4 high.

I didn’t have my camera. ‘Take the photo!’ I urged my wife, who had her phone.

A long standing and recognised profession in New Zealand.

Here in New Zealand a ‘boner’ is a respected profession. These gentlemen, photographed in 1910, were employed to take bones out of carcases. Hence ’boners’.  Don’t laugh.

And, as if this wasn’t enough, a howler. In every sense of the word.

Weekly, this sign seems to generate an endless procession of wandering apostrophes…

I suspect the band doesn’t belong to Howler, despite what the sign says.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

The Acme Instant Logline Generator

All novels need a logline, sometimes also known as a hook line – a single sentence that describes the plot and acts as a sale pitch to agents and publishers.

The form is usually “[Character name], [character description] has to [action] in order to [result].”

The result usually has an emotional content. Hard to winnow your story down to it? Try this. Begin with the logline instead. All you need, in fact, is a six-sided dice. Roll once for each variable and complete the sentence:

1. Roger Dodger the old Codger,
2. Peregrine Hyphen-Hyphen Folderol,
3. Snoot,
4. Adele,
5. Eric,
6. Heinz Dasistwirklicheinesehrdummelangeswortistesnicht von Abernatürlichistesjaabsolutichdenkeso of Sehrgutwerdeichgehenundhöreaufmeinekraftwerkalben,

1. a world-renowned horologist,
2. a rock god,
3. an up-and-coming railway enthusiast,
4. a truck driver specialising in cab-over series Macks,
5. an unemployed random-generator writer,
6. a rodent exterminator,

has to

1. win a challenging drag race
2. build a box-girder bridge with a toothpick
3. write a vampire fan-fic novel
4. learn how to sing and dance
5. cook a souffle
6. defeat the evil Thog monsters from Planet Zil

in order to

1. become the Ruler of the Universe.
2. rescue beloved from certain doom.
3. be home in time for tea.
4. get to Buckingham Palace and receive a knighthood.
5.  audition for ‘America’s Got Talent’.
6. finish up at the beginning again, only better for it.

Have fun.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Inspirations: Music, art, writing and unleashing the inner geek

As a writer, I have never regretted chugging through the Royal Schools of Music grade system. Music offers skills that feed directly into writing. Learning how to write a tune to words, for instance, rammed home why it’s important, even in prose, to have rhythm.

The panel of one of my analog synths… dusty, a bit scratched, but still workable. Pop quiz: can anybody identify it from this clipped close-up?

There’s a more subtle side to it, too. Music is about evoking emotion in the recipient – the satisfaction of listening, hope, despair, anger, laughter. So is writing. That’s one reason why rhythm of words is important. For writers, as for musicians, it helps evoke a response.

I still have a small collection of vintage analog synths. They all work – including my Moog, which was old and battered when I bought it in 1987. The fact that it functions 37 years after it left Moog’s Trumansburg factory is testament to the quality.

It is also an expressive instrument, meant to be played like a violin, not a piano. You can do things with pitch-bender, potentiometers and modulation wheels that give the sound life. If you have never heard a Moog 24dBa high-pass ladder filter being overdriven, you’ve missed something. Here’s someone using the filter as a resonator. Here’s Erik Norlander playing the biggest Modular Moog I’ve ever seen.

The worn out ribbon pitch-controller on my Micromoog. Apparently Bob Moog invented that device for Beach Boys keyboard player Brian Wilson.

One of the doyens of the Moog, way back, was Brit prog-rock icon Rick Wakeman. He defined the ‘rock opera’ via such classics as Journey To The Centre Of The Earth (1974), essentially a modern oratorio.

I saw him in concert, here in New Zealand, last year – and @grumpyoldrick didn’t disappoint. He spilled off a flight from the UK and gave a 2 1/2 hour show, using the Wellington City Council’s Steinway Model D, all from memory. He had the audience in stitches – he is a great comedian. Along the way he explained how he had been taught to put feeling into music. You close your eyes and imagine what you want to convey – the feeling of a summer’s day, for instance.

To me, that summed up music as art. Art is about conceptual shapes and patterns that convey feeling and emotion. Notes are flawed tools to express an inexpressible form – idea, which is emotional. The essence of art is conveying that emotion, however imperfectly, by whatever medium, to others. And that is true of writing, too. The medium is words; but the essence is emotion.

Wakeman was taught that about his art from the beginning. Others, including me, had to learn it later. The hard way.

Do you find art in music, in writing? How do you see these things?  is music inspirational for you in these ways? I’d love to hear from you.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Dennis Tito’s Mars 2018 flyby is a dumb idea and I won’t be going.

What do you think of Dennis Tito’s plan to send a married couple on a 501 day trip past Mars?

Composite panorama of Mars. Not going to be seen by the 2018 expedition, as they’ll fly past the night side. NASA, public domain.

I think it’s dumb. Three-course dumb, with a side-order of dumb.

What Tito’s apparently proposing is to jam two people into a sealed space the size of a large camper van – which means, in practise, that they will be living inside a commode after about Day 5 – soaked with radiation that will lift their chances of cancer by 3 percent. Or kill them, if there’s a solar flare. To get back, they have to endure a risky skip re-entry on Earth – where, if anything is wrong with the angle, they’ll incinerate on the first plunge or bounce into deep space forever, assuming the heat shield hasn’t broken. All that, just so they can scoot past the night side of Mars at interplanetary speeds. Uh – hello?

What happens if something breaks? Or one of them dies, leaving the other to spend eight or nine months trapped with the rotting corpse of their spouse? Ewwww.

Yeah, there’s the point of being the first humans to get near another planet, it’s heroic, the human spirit and the rest.

I took that into account when forming my opinion.

Cut-away of the modified Apollo/SIVB ‘wet lab’ configuration for the 1973-74 Venus flyby. The rocket stage accelerates them on the interplanetary transfer orbit, and once the LOX is burned, the astronauts move in and set up house (hence ‘wet’).  NASA, public domain, via Wikipedia.

Flyby is not a new idea. The Soviets toyed with schemes in the 1960s, NASA studied ways of using Apollo hardware to send a modified Apollo CSM/Skylab on a Venus flyby. It was feasible, but the engineers couldn’t guarantee the astronauts would be alive at the end.

We know now they would likely have died. The mission was scheduled for 1973-74, and there was a coronal mass ejection on 5-6 July 1974, when the astronauts would have been in deep space on the return leg – heavy radiation, months away from home.

In the event, nobody could see much science from it anyway, and Congress killed the scheme on the drawing board in 1968, along with most of the rest of the Apollo Applications Programme.

To me, that zip science return is likely true of Tito’s Mars flyby, quite apart from the marginal safety of the venture. I suppose the FAA will see it the same way.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go to Mars – but let’s do it properly. It comes down to energy. Chemical rockets don’t provide enough That’s why the journey takes so long – everything we send has to use a Hohmann-type transfer orbit.

Conceptual artwork by Pat Rawlings of a Mars mission rendezvous from 1995. NASA, public domain, via Wikipedia.

The problem is that the laws of physics are clear about what can be done, and the more exotic your energy source, the harder it is to contain and direct it. We’re already pushing what metals, plastics and even carbon can do. However, the VASIMIR electric-ion system looks promising. In theory, VASIMIR might reach Mars in 39 days with the right planetary alignments - round trip in five months. That reduces the radiation, life-support and maintenance problems straight off.

There is one catch. Solar escape velocity at Earth’s orbit is 29.8 km/sec. Peak speed during the trip is 34 km/sec. If the motor breaks before your deceleration burn, you’re on a one-way trip to interstellar space. (“Goodbyeeeeeeee….”)

What it will really take is political will. Money. And, I think, wide public engagement of the Apollo-era variety – something which, alas, may not happen again.

What do you think of Tito’s idea? Would you go yourself? What do you think of sending humans into space anyway, when robots can do a cheaper job without risk to life? I’d love to hear from you.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Note: I was going to cover UFO’s this week – but Tito’s announcement is more interesting. ‘Inspirations’ moves to Wednesdays. And coming up, more writing tips, more ‘write it now’, and other fun. Stay tuned.

Inspirations: I have seen the sign, and it is funny

It’s a funny old world, if you look at it. Last weekend my wife and I found this in a café:

Meanwhile my brother-in-law found this on a freeway while visiting Pittsburgh, and remarked: ‘I guess if it’s an emergency, it’s an emergency…’

Then there’s the sign I found in Napier, New Zealand – a significant gauge of the sign-writer’s abilities. Gauge. I did say ‘gauge’, didn’t I.

Not to mention grocer’s apostrophes  in Wellington (took these with my iPAQ, a Hewlett Packard PDA that used the i prefix before Apple did…but isn’t in the league of my SLR):

Have you seen any funny signs around lately?

 Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Inspirations: steampunking with Dr Grordbort

One of the benefits of living in Wellington, New Zealand, is that I share a city with the talented folks at Weta. One of whom, Greg Broadmore, has made a splash lately with his steampunk-themed stories of early twentieth century male idiocy, ray guns and – uh – other ray guns.

There’s something fundamentally cool about steampunk. Cool stylings. Cool nostalgia for a ‘future past’ that never was. The sense of optimistic hope. And Broadmore’s world has more. It’s a homage to the golden age of science fiction – not just the ray guns, but the hostile Mars, the murderous robots, and the ravening jungle-Venus of Stanley Weinbaum in particular. He also skewers the late nineteenth century world of pipe-smoking, topee-hatted English military adventurers with a predeliction for brandy, whose rah-rah ‘boys own’ mentality led to such embarrassments as the Battle of the Shangani River (1893), when 50 British mercenaries with 4 maxim guns slaughtered 1500 Matabele warriors armed with spears – an appalling moment that shocked period sensibilities. ‘Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun…and they have not’, Hilaire Belloc intoned a little later in The Modern Traveller (1898).

Last week I went with a couple of friends – one we shall call Mentis Fugit, the other a professional artist who we shall call Ars Gratia Artis, to an exhibition of Broadmore’s original artwork and some of the artefacts – including the Moon Maiden diorama – in the central city.

The Pomson 6000. Photo: Mentis Fugit.

The ray guns have been around a while. I haven ‘t bought one  – if I’m going to spend $1000 on a ray gun, I want it to work. But this was a chance to see the originals. There were dozens of paintings, somefamiliar, others not, with ray guns on plinths, dioramas and large-scale statues.

Photo: Mentis Fugit

It was pretty impressive. Broadmore has a lot of talent, a lot of imagination, and a particularly brilliant sense of humour. A pretty inspiring event all up. One, in fact, that inspired us to have a conversation that almost, but didn’t exactly, sound like this:

Ars G:  He did them in Photoshop.
Me: How can you tell, old bean?
Ars G: You just can, that’s all. They’re Giclee prints. Very expensive to make, they are. Looks like he’s custom made the frames, too.

Photo: Mentis Fugit

Mentis: I say, isn’t that the Pomson 6000? Jolly good ray gun, by Jove.
Me: Ray gun? Great Scott – you mean the kind of weapon that turns the target into a petrol attendant named Ray?
Ars G: It’s only a model.
Me: Ssssh!
Ars G: It is! It’s just got bits stuck on. Nice weathering. But ray guns don’t work anyway.
Mentis: They did once, old fellow. I say, back then, science worked in big strokes. Now it’s molecule, molecule, molecule.
Me: By Jove, cast your peepers over there chaps, that’s rather spiffing, the Moon Maiden looks just like Liv Tyler.
Mentis: Rather, old boy.
Ars G: Do you really want to be photographed here?
Me: Bit of a ripping wheeze, by jove! Looks like bally jerry copped a spot of flak sausage-side.

Photo: Mentis Fugit

Mentis: Look here, Bigglesworth, I can’t quite follow your banter there.
Me: Oh, can’t you? Sorry Algy. Banter’s a bit off today.
Mentis: I say, rather it is, old chap, I really would get that banter checked out if I were you.
Me: Is all this stuff for sale?
Mentis: Looks like it.
Ars G: I think I’ll pick up a catalogue.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2012