Story. 

I will probably blog on this more. If I can stop my uncontrollable weeping.

A study by Saint Louis University found that a lovable pooch named Sparky and a robotic dog, AIBO, were about equally effective at relieving the loneliness of nursing home residents and fostering attachments.

I’ve written about humans getting pretty attached to their robots before, so I have to say this doesn’t much surprise me. But the confirmation for the scientific community is nice.

Bob McNichol, 57, from County Mayo in the west of the country, lost his sight in a freak accident when red-hot liquid aluminium exploded at a re-cycling business in November 2005.

“I thought that I was going to be blind for the rest of my life,” McNichol told RTE state radio.

After doctors in Ireland said there was nothing more they could do, McNichol heard about a miracle operation called Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis (OOKP) being performed by Dr Christopher Liu at the Sussex Eye Hospital in Brighton in England.

The technique, pioneered in Italy in the 1960s, involves creating a support for an artificial cornea from the patient’s own tooth and the surrounding bone.

The procedure used on McNichol involved his son Robert, 23, donating a tooth, its root and part of the jaw.

McNichol’s right eye socket was rebuilt, part of the tooth inserted and a lens inserted in a hole drilled in the tooth.

The first operation lasted ten hours and the second five hours.

“It is pretty heavy going,” McNichol said. “There was a 65 percent chance of me getting any sight.

“Now I have enough sight for me to get around and I can watch television. I have come out from complete darkness to be able to do simple things,” McNichol said.

Electron Movie

Quicktime movie courtesy of MSNBC, who in turn got it from Lund University.

So cool!

Hiccups are triggered by electric signals generated in the brain stem. Amphibian brain stems emit similar signals, which control the regular motion of their gills. Our brain stems, inherited from amphibian ancestors, still spurt out odd signals producing hiccups that are, according to Shubin, essentially the same phenomenon as gill breathing.

Well, um, okay, but they do still come from somewhere, right? I have friends who get hiccups when they drink too much. They get the hiccups a lot. And everyone’s gotten them after a heaping helping of PB&J, right? Is the idea that, when our throats get clogged (e.g. with food) that we try to breathe through gills that don’t exist anymore, because we’re humans now? That actually makes me a little sad!

Wired has a link to some funny hiccup recipes. The one I have seen work consistently is a heaping spoonful of sugar. I am kind of curious about the shot of vinegar and the vinegary derivations thereof (e.g. sucking a pickle). Hmm … PB&J is sounding pretty good right now.

But haven’t plenty of other people beforehand? I know I myself have long thought this to be the case, and I can do about as much String Theory math as a post-brainectomy Rob Schneider. Maybe the point is that he has the arithomancy to back him up, whereas fulanos like me are just talking out of their asses?

Still though, I can see how he feeds his critics. As speculative as M-Theory is now — as yet there is not a single tenet of String Theory that has been verified through experimentation — there is positively no way he can claim that the universe (multiverse, infiniverse, whatever) has no beginning. Let’s say his math bears out and the Big Bang of circa 16.2 billion years ago was not the start of all things spacey and timey — that does not prove that there NEVER was, at some point in the past (of course, I am being plebianly naive about my notions of time here, but stick with me), an even Bigger Bang that started things off. He’s just riffing. And that ain’t science.

Also, when he starts explaining how his “no beginning” theory works via a metaphor of air molecules, he totally loses me. I like to think the fault is his, not mine.

Imagine you have a room full of air, with all these molecules banging around. The vast majority of time, these molecules spread uniformly — but once in a trillion trillion years, they all end up in the corner of the room. If you look at the room and run the clock forward, they’ll eventually make themselves uniform: But it would reverse, and you’d watch them flying into the corner. Then they’d fly out again.

If this is right, it means that time runs forward for a while. Then there’s a random state without an arrow of time, then time runs backwards, and then time runs forward again. That’s the bigger picture: We’re still very far away from understanding it, but that would be my bet.

Based on his metaphor, there is no reason to believe that the arrow of time would start flipping around like the spinning arrow of a board game. Why are you running your clock forward and backward? Sure, once in a trillion trillion years, the air molecules will all clump together in one area. But you don’t need to run the clock backward to unclump them: just wait a few frickin’ seconds and, with the plain old arrow of time that we know and love, the molecules will once again distribute themselves throughout the room. Why does time go nuts? No way to know from that visualization.

But okay, let’s say the metaphor was bad but that his current math says time will stand still for a while, and then time will go backwards for a while. Um … wait. If time stands still at any given point, doesn’t that mean, by definition, that time can no longer have an arrow, ever again? Once time stops, what will motivate it to begin moving again? Unless time itself exists under the aegis of some larger “meta-time” through which it can move, how can it start again after stopping?

That last point I am sure is my ignorance, but I will also bet that it is based on a larger ignorance about time. Time is the biggest mystery in the infiniverse. We can’t even define it very well. We can only talk about it practically: that is, in terms of clocks and the measures we use to codify it. But as to what time is? No idea.

Frankly, I believe that the arrow of time is more immutable than current String- and M-theorists credit it. I am more than happy to be proven wrong, but please, someone, prove something about time that helps us really understand its nature and function.

Me? I am cautiously hopeful. That Castro is ceding power (after 49 years, mind you) may indicate that Cuba is really set to change in positive ways. Already American agribusiness sees in Cuba a ready trading partner. And with trade may come conciliation. And with conciliation comes the lifting of trade embargoes, the removal of travel restrictions. I would get to see my family.

Castro’s decades of human rights violations are well-documented, but at the same time that he did monstrous things to his own people, he also maintained Cuban autonomy against the constant pressure of the greatest economic power in the world. He refused to allow Cuba to become a vassal state to the United States — something that I think ultimately is a good thing (see Bastista years). I wonder if Cuba after Castro will be able to maintain its cultural independence. Maybe Cubans, starved for so long, will succumb to the influx of goods and money that a post-Castro Cuba could see. Maybe they will become even fiercer ideologues than before, turning Castro into an icon comparable to Che. Or, perhaps, as history progresses, each will happen, in turn.

I think, so long as Castro remains alive — or at least as long as the government successfully fools into thinking he’s alive, hee hee — we won’t see uprisings, revolutions, or even marked changes in Cuban policy. But his death, I fear, may turn out to be the strike of the match that lights the powder keg that is the Cuban/American relations. And I pray John McCain is not our president when that happens.

Among the many disheartening points of the article:

• Ellen Daltow is having much too hard a time finding a full-time editing gig! :) (Though she’s doing just fine as an anthology editor and as co-curator of the KGB bar’s Fantastic Fiction monthly reading, so maybe she doesn’t want to edit a magazine right now.)
• Isaac Asimov didn’t consider a pulp magazine “successful” unless it had a minimum of 100,000 subscribers. Holy shit.
• Even the most important pulp magazines of the day (Asimov et. al.) hover around subscriptions of circa 20,000. (Asimov apparently the highest at 23,000).
• Online journals, especially ones that don’t publish something every day, just can’t seem to land a number of advertisers to make them self-sustaining. (One of the comments of the article points out, however, that a flash magazine that utilizes RSS feeds can make use of things like Google AdSense and perhaps do a little better.)
• Nonprofit magazines like Strange Horizons depend of fund-drives that in turn depend on the deep pockets of a few generous donors. This may be changing — Strange Horizons seems to be attracting more small donors — but for now, a few philanthropists are bearing the lion’s share of the burden for keeping it and magazines like it running.
• Simon Owens suggests that the single-advertiser model, where one business/organization/whatever bears the costs of publication in exchange for exclusive advertising, may be one of the best ways for magazines to sustain themselves in today’s market. He sites Chizine as one of the biggest success stories for this method, and, indeed, it sounds like a pretty sweet setup for editor Brett Alexander Savory: his sponsor, Leisure Books, doesn’t interfere with the editorial process and covers the publishing costs.
• Number of dead magazines, according to Ralan.com: 649. /weeps openly

Can short fiction turn a profit? Maybe — but the numbers will be a helluva lot smaller than they used to be. I think there are plenty of obvious reasons why: the flood of entertainment options, especially “push” entertainment like movies and TV and YouTube, coupled with the advent of interactive entertainment, most likely lead the pack. Reading just takes a larger initial investment in terms of mental energy than a lot of other art forms require up front.

At the same time, more books are being published than ever before, and books still have the power to take possession of the public imagination (The Da Vinci Code, Harry Potter, even the His Dark Marterials Trilogy and the controversy it caused [though it really only caused a controversy when the first book was made into a movie … sigh]). In short, writing still matters. So why is it so hard for magazines to pay authors anything more than slave wages, or their hard-working editors anything at all? There’s got to be a way, dammit! There must be a way!

But the best thing to come out of it was the comment posted by ZombieFodder, who mentioned that, if you didn’t get your weird fix for the day, you could go take a look at Miss McDonald.

This is ZombieFodder’s (and my) favorite pic:

So it’s “Miss” McDonald? Not “Mrs.?” Is she Ronald’s sister? Estranged wife? Former love slave now suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and unable to differentiate her identity from that of her captor?