Just The Caffeine Talking

Why I Have Four New Holes

"Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres . . . " — Caesar

A week ago, at about four o'clock in the afternoon, my stomach hurt. The sensation was very precise: a single point, directly under my sternum. I had been out to lunch with my son, so I cleverly deduced the cause. Obviously I had a hard bit of potato "waffle fry" lodged in the bottom of my esophagus.

I drank some milk, I ate some bread, all with the aim of pushing the irritating foodstuff past the valve into my stomach. But nothing worked, and the pain got worse. Really worse. Clammy sweating worse.

Just to make things more complicated, my talented wife wasn't home, nor was she expected home for two or three days. So I left my responsible youngest child in charge of the house and the dog, got in my car, and drove up to Franklin Medical Center for a stop in the Emergency Room.

They didn't waste any time. When a middle-aged man shows up experiencing severe pain anywhere in the torso, and doesn't have an obvious gunshot wound, the default assumption is "heart attack." They gave me nitroglycerine tablets to dissolve under my tongue, they gave me major-league painkillers, and — in response to my babble about waffle fries — they gave me some liquid Mylanta laced with lidocaine. Other than the painkillers, nothing helped.

So they did one of the two things which separate modern medicine from the desperate gropings of the era before 1900: they looked inside me. Until Roentgen, the only way to tell what was going on inside a sick person was to open him up (and before the use of anaesthetics and antiseptics, that was considerably more risky than doing nothing). And before the development of CAT scans in the 1970s, even X-ray images took hours to develop.

But on Friday, in a rural hospital in western Massachusetts, they x-rayed my chest (no sign of heart attack), CAT-scanned most of my torso, and even did an ultrasound of my squishy bits.

Bingo. There was a stone about the size of a peanut lodged in the duct leading out of my gall bladder. As is traditional when an organ gets obstructed, it was infected and inflamed. No waffle fries in sight.

After that was rather an anticlimax. Sometime during the night the stone must have shifted, because by the time I was admitted to a room for an overnight stay, the pain began to ease. I never got to try the morphine they were going to give me.

Saturday was a nightmare, but only for the part of me above the neck. I hadn't brought a book or a notepad, I was a little too stressed to make stuff up, and I can't stand watching television. So I cycled among sleep, boredom, and getting poked with things. By invoking the tragedy of a 15-year-old left home alone with nobody to look after him I managed to wheedle my way into release Saturday evening, and drove home.

I spent Sunday at home drinking clear liquids until my talented wife arrived, and on Monday morning at the start of the business day did battle with the automated telephone menu system at my primary doctor's office. Eventually I decided it would be simpler to get in the car and drive there in order to explain to a human what had happened so that my insurance company wouldn't punish me for Not Following Procedures while sick.

I also phoned the office of the confidence-inspiring doctor who had diagnosed me at Franklin Medical Center, and we set up an appointment to get rid of the problem for good and all. I was hoping he might be able to just remove the stone itself, but apparently standard procedure is to take out the whole gall bladder. It's one of those organs that you can kinda get by without — invertebrates don't have them at all.

The past week I spent carefully following a low-fat diet and swallowing the biggest damned antibiotic pills I've ever seen. Seriously: large-animal veterinarians would look at these and say "Isn't that a little much?" My urine (not to get indelicate) looked and smelled like something coming out of a Soviet oil refinery's waste stream.

This morning, my talented wife drove me back up to Franklin Medical Center's spiffy new Surgical Wing, where I was deprived of my clothing, the hair on my abdomen, my glasses, and, ultimately, consciousness. When I woke up there were four little holes in my tummy: one at the navel, one more or less over my stomach, and two close together on the right-hand side just under the bottom of my rib cage. My troublesome gall bladder was nowhere to be seen.

The surgical technique is called laparascopy, and involves the use of a tiny camera to enable the surgeon to see what he's doing, and special low-profile instruments to poke in through the little holes and grab the gall bladder. They drain out the bile and then just remove the sad little empty balloon, then stitch up. My bandages are literally large-size Band-Aids(tm).

And with that, they kicked me out. No wheedling required. I'm home, and unless I manage to do myself an injury or get a galloping infection, that's all. I'm not even confined to my bed: the doctor even said the more activity the better (with the unspoken caveat that I should hold off on the luge racing and illegal bare-knuckle boxing for a while).

Sadly I did not get to take my stone(s) home with me. There are apparently some tiresome regulations about proper disposal of biomedical waste, so I won't be able to wear it on my watch-chain.

Until my innards adjust, I still have to follow a low-fat diet, and I have painkillers in case I need them. I did have to bail out of one writing-workshop meeting this weekend because my talented wife refuses to drive me to it. I think she's being over-protective. They're just little holes. She went down into a cave in France after passing a kidney stone.

 

Word of the Week

This week's Word of the Week is: Cholecystitis.

 

Comic Timing

My talented wife was leaving early this morning on a trip, and I was getting ready to drive her to meet her ride. She glanced outside and said, "Ugh. It's raining." But then she brightened up and added, "At least it isn't snowing."

Five minutes later, as we were about to leave, I opened the door and saw snow falling. 

When the weather has the comic timing of Jack Benny, it's hard to complain about having to drive in a snow shower.

Aristocracy in Space!

Why are there so many aristocrats in science fiction?

They're all over the place. In books you've got David Weber's Honor Harrington (who works for a Royal space navy and eventually becomes a Countess), Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan (a Count who works for an Emperor), Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Rod Blaine (the son of a Marquis, who works for an Emperor), Frank Herbert's Paul Atreides (son of a Duke, and later Emperor himself).

In films you've got Princess Leia from Star Wars, and Princess Aura from Flash Gordon. And on television Star Trek was positively infested with aristocrats. The Federation and the Romulans were practically the only civilizations in the Galaxy which weren't run by some kind of autocrat.

I'm puzzled by this because science fiction began as the most anti-aristocratic literature there has ever been. Between Wells's working-class/lower-middle-class emphasis on self-improvement and a rational new world of Science, and Verne's bourgeois love of "self-made" men rising in the world by pure merit, science fiction's DNA is staunchly egalitarian. Transplanted to America, it thrived among readers not unlike Wells and Verne themselves — working-class and petit-bourgeois strivers reading about the marvels of Radio! Airplanes! The Atom! Thinking Machines! Spaceships! And it worked, too: many of those striving young men actually did become successful in the new technologies.

So where do the aristocrats come from?

Well, one answer is that it's simply easier to have a society in which authority is individual rather than collective. Miles Vorkosigan works for the Emperor, and the chain of command is very short and clear. (Although Mrs. Bujold did show us some nice parliamentary maneuvering in A Civil Campaign.) There's no bureaucracy in the way.

It's more satisfying when evil authority is individual, too. When Paul Atreides takes revenge on his father's murderers in Dune, he can hardly track down and wipe out every soldier involved. Putting him in a society with an Emperor and a wicked Baron means there's a single neck to sever, so to speak.

Another reason for the aristocrats lies in those two first examples of noblewomen in science fiction films. Since time immemorial, what have heroes of romance done? They save Princesses. So a Planetary Romance has to include at least one monarchy with a Princess in need of saving from something. It didn't take long for that trope to be subverted, reversed, parodied, deconstructed, and who knows what else, but the seed had taken root.

In more recent years, the hereditary aristocrat has taken on a new form, especially in film: the autocratic corporate executive, who can scheme and plot if he's the bad guy, or reward the hero if he's the reasonable authority figure. He can even have a spoiled but good-hearted daughter if there's saving to be done.

I doubt we'll ever completely outgrow aristocrats in fiction, whatever form they take. Humans are social creatures, and we form hierarchies. One of the most ancient and satisfying stories (Heinlein called it "The Little Tailor" plot) is of someone rising in status and gaining a high-status partner. Whether you call it A Princess of Mars or Pride and Prejudice, that story will be with us as long as we are human.

 

For stories about bourgeois and working-class strivers, check out my ebooks Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!

Search For The Old Ones

One of the great revolutions in human thought was the concept of "Deep Time" — the notion that the Earth and the Universe are vastly older than recorded human history, and even the origins of the human species lie long before the invention of writing. Charles Lyell, the Victorian geologist, was probably the first person to really understand the true age of the Earth, and his ideas in turn informed Charles Darwin's theories of the evolution of species. 

But the first fiction writer to really grapple with the concept appears to be H.P. Lovecraft. In his novel At the Mountains of Madness he threw a crew of Antarctic explorers into a face-to-face confrontation with the original creators of life on Earth, a tentacled species called the Old Ones whose history spans not a paltry few thousand years, but close to a billion.

And once one starts looking into the history of life on Earth, the question does arise: why did it take so long for an intelligent species (us) to evolve? There's no strong reason why intelligence couldn't have appeared in some contemporary of the dinosaurs — or even a species of the Carboniferous era, as far from the dinosaurs in time as they are from us. They had brains; why didn't some species get a bigger one? (My explanation is that intelligence is simply not as inevitable or even as advantageous as we like to think. That's also my solution for the Fermi Paradox.)

The famous British TV series Doctor Who imagined intelligent reptiles from Earth's deep past, dubbed the "Silurians" because TV writers are terrible about looking things up. (There were no reptiles in the Silurian age.) They weren't bad chaps really, they just woke up from hibernation and were horrified to find their planet overrun by primates. 

All good fun. Except . . . 

Why are we so sure that we are the first technological civilization on Earth? In a paper for the Journal of Astrobiology, scientists Gavin Schmidt and Adam Frank tackle the question of how we might identify signs of past civilizations. We think of our cities and roads as durable things, but geology laughs at that. Over sufficiently long timescales, all artifacts get ground into dust. Schmidt and Frank identify some markers for past civilizations . . . and consider some otherwise mysterious events in Earth's prehistory which fit those markers. Hmm . . . 

You can download the paper here.

There's No Pleasing Some People

I do most of the grocery shopping for my family. Yesterday I went on my usual big monthly run to the discount club, to stock up on stuff that comes in large packages. One of the items my talented wife asked me to pick up was cereal.

So I bought cereal.

Was my return with cereal greeted with cries of rapture and gratitude? Were there squeals of delight? No. I got a lot of guff, that's what I got. You give someone magic-cupcake-flavored rainbow unicorn cereal, and you get guff. Rank ingratitude, I call it. Next time they'll get Grape-Nuts and like 'em.

Huh?

Can anyone explain why my Thursday post apologizing for missing a week of posting got more than 600 hits? That's about ten times more than anything since my gripe about Marty McFly's dad.

Still Bunk After All These Years

So here's an article from Quillette about "social constructionism" — in particular how postmodernists have applied the concept to the sciences, and how bad an idea it is. I was amused to see that one of the examples cited in the piece is Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's book Laboratory Life, because that book was one of the course readings in my introductory History of Science course at the University of Chicago. I even wrote a paper about it (on a typewriter, so no copy survives).

What I remember about the book was its thundering disingenuousness. The authors reduced the work of a biochemistry laboratory to nothing more than making measurements and writing papers, which got them funding to do more measuring and writing. I was struck by the fact that the concept of information simply never came up in Latour and Woolgar's analysis.

It's particularly odd since of course that is exactly how the two authors would describe their own work. They weren't hanging around someone's lab taking notes, then writing a book for which they were paid. If you asked Latour and Woolgar what they were doing, they'd answer that they were gaining, and communicating, an understanding of how science works — in short, they were producing information. Just like the subjects of their study!

Way back in 1985 I concluded that social constructionism was bunk, and nothing I've seen in the past thirty years has changed my mind about it. Glad to see contemporary commentators are catching up with 19-year-old me.

If you're looking for entertaining stories guaranteed to be 100% bunk-free, check out my ebooks Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!

We Apologize For The Interruption

Apologies for my absence. I was traveling and didn't have the time (or reliable Internet access) for 'blog posts. But because I was traveling on my own, I wound up having a lot of time to think about various things, and one of them was this 'blog. Up to now I have focused on "long form" pieces here, and used Facebook for any "here's a cool link" posts. I have decided to change that. From now on, everything goes up on the 'blog. I'll still link it to Facebook, but I want to keep more material in a medium I can control better.

So: expect more short "here's something" posts, some of which may have a little more political content than this 'blog has featured in the past. No full-bore polemics, though. I don't want to be a Moron With A Bullhorn.

I will still be doing longer pieces as I think of them, and the Random Encounter Tables will return. I'll be going back to my shelves for more Lost Games, and I'll be doing more book reviews.

Just to kick things off in this new, improved manner, here's a neat video! If these guys aren't crazy (and they did build the greatest airplane ever) the energy world is about to be flipped over like a card table in a tornado.

 

 

For some stories which aren't going to revolutionize the energy world, check out my ebooks Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!