Monsters and the Imagination

I've just finished reading the book River Monsters which is a companion to the Animal Planet TV series of the same name. Most of these “monsters” are large catfish which have bit people on occasion. None of these are creatures which actually feed upon people, but most have taken a chomp from time to time.

One of the thing's that struck me about this book and its subject is how easily the human psyche allows itself to believe in the danger of nature. It's as if we as people are able to create tales of monsters from fragmentary sightings of beasts and an occasional bite. It doesn't help either that rivers are usually murky, and any glimpse of a large fish is likely to be incomplete. The author, Jeremy Wade, makes a fairly convincing case that these large fish are basically just that, large fish that happen to be somewhat hazardous because of their size.

There are, of course, animals that are somewhat dangerous. I personally find the idea of salt water crocodiles pretty chilling, a beast that can attack you in the water or crawl up on land and get you. They do attack people and, I believe, kill a few people a year. Then, of course, there are sharks, our great bugbear of the water. Interestingly the most deadly animal by far is the mosquito, a creature that hardly makes a grown man flee in terror. Next up are bees, and I know I have a couple of nests of them on my small bit of property. My children still play outside without hazmat suits.

While I don't want to minimize that harm that some of these creatures have done, it's amazing how outsized our terror towards these creatures has become. We kill so many more of these beasts than they hurt us the fear does seem a bit weird. On the other hand, without this fear, what would the SyFy channel do for original programming?

What is a Geek?

A great article on what it means to be a real geek. This is good news for those of us actually born with the stigma of geekishness, as opposed to all those darn posers.

Great Articles On Science In Science Fiction

Aint-It-Cool-News.com is a great website for fans of science fiction and other geeky movies. These days it's one of the most quoted websites for movie quotes. Recently one their writers, Andy Howell, did an interesting rant of the science in the 2009 Star Trek movie. He points out what's nonsense, what makes sense as a plot device, and what actually works. Give it a gander. There's also a good followup on the article too.

I like a good analysis like this. It goes beyond the whole, “That sucked,” or, “That was stupid because…” reactions and gets into the nitty-gritty of the movie.

Speaking, Finally

I will be speaking at the Desmond Fish Library in Garrison, NY on Saturday, at 2 PM on June 25th. This will be my first public speaking engagement, and I'll be discussing the ideas in this blog and my upcoming book, Teach the Fantastic. Here's a link to the site.


My apologies for the lack of recent updates. The end of school year stress tends to take a toll on my creativity.

Is This What a Tesseract I Like?

When I teach A Wrinkle In Time, I want to convey the experience of a tesseract to students. This video comes pretty close to my ideal.

Realistic Science Fiction or Didactic Thinking?

I'm working my way through Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I say “working” because the book really requires work. It doesn't hold my interest the way other novels do, but I do appreciate its value as a text that has influenced people. I'm going to offer some criticisms on it, keeping in mind that I'm only on page 129 out of 1074. Since I haven't gotten too far into the novel (and the plot moves slowly), I'll stick with what I've read.

The characters have some serious problems. The protagonists all seem to share one characteristic, which is the inability to care about other people. That's not a poke in Ayn Rand's eye; it's something she makes very clear. This quality, a lack of sympathy towards one's fellow man, is a lynchpin of her philosophy. She believes that a person's only purpose is to be true to that one person and what he does; all other things are secondary and superfluous. “Altruism”, or living one's life for others, is a crime against oneself.

The problem with this concept, and like many flawed philosophical ideas it has a few grains of truth, is that mankind is not just an individual animal, working for personal goals. Evolutionary scientists have made fairly clear that early man was able to survive because he lived in hunter-gatherer and then later agricultural communities. While people may have been motivated partially by a notion of personal achievement, it was the community itself which enabled human beings to thrive. Ayn Rand rejects this idea of man being a communal animal, instead populating her novels with heroes who completely reject this notion.

As a teaching tool, Atlas Shrugged can be an interesting springboard into the conversation of the individual verses society. Where do the responsibilities of the individual end and where do those of society begin? While I personally find the idea that human beings have no responsibility to others amoral, that is an important question for a young person to figure out.

I would also wonder how questions of class might figure into this. Atlas Shrugged seems populated mostly by the wealthy, those least in need of altruism. Someone who grew up poor would not have most of the advantages of her heroes, and for this very reason might reject this philosophy. After all, if a society has no responsibilty towards its people, what place is there for public schools and colleges? What chance would a poor person have of succeeding?

I think a follower of Ayn Rand might be able to say  that a society has no business doing these things. It's up to the individual to make whatever he/she will out of his life. Yet this philosophy would also seem to stack the deck against the poor, so I don't think it would work well as real policy. After all, the first three words of the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution are “We the people…” which suggests that a secure society cannot be establish by individuals working for their own purposes, it has to be an expression of a common purpose. Within that framework people, of course, can work for their individual goals (“…the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”), but the nation  as a working communal structure must come first.

Technology and Its Literacy Minuses

I sometimes wonder as we charge full-speed into the techno-utopia that is our electronic future whether we understand what kind of future we are creating for ourselves. I remember in the 1990s when the internet was first hitting critical mass it was being hailed as a creator of literacy, a thing that required people to type which would, at the same time, force people to engage with text. That seemed exciting at the time, until the first time I saw somebody do Instant Messaging. I was struck by how sloppy the writing was with it. Little did I know that that type of writing would soon become the established norm for the internet.

This is, of course, nothing intrinsically wrong with sloppy writing; I do it myself from time to time. What concerns me is that the sloppy writing which people, especially young people, are doing now is becoming the established norm. Facebook English is becoming standard internet English. As a teacher I can only fight that so much, and railing against it isn't going to make any difference. What's happening right now is a deep cultural trend, and one which I am not encouraged by.

I do hope that improved writing begins to prevail in general internet writing. This may be a utopian dream, and I'm certainly not going to hold my breath, but I do hope so. I find myself very discouraged reading comments off a news article or even reading the posts some of my friends make on some of the websites we share. I know going on a rant will serve little purpose besides making people uncomfortable and making myself unpopular. In the end, all I can do is to just keep writing well and hoping perhaps something will stick.

I'm not feeling too positive this morning. Maybe I need another cup of coffee.