New York, 2140 - The Flood

New York, 2140. a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

The next day it was still windy and raining hard, sometimes pelting down, but all within the norms of an ordinary summer storm – drenching, cool, blustery – but compared to the two days before, not very dangerous, and much better lit. White gray rather than black gray. Also the tide, though the dawn began with a high tide, was no longer a storm surge. It was down to only a couple feet higher than an ordinary high tide. Now on the buildings around Madison Square there was a faint bathtub ring of leaves and plastered gunk much higher than the usual high tie mark. The surge had apparently already poured back out the Narrows and through Hell Gate into the sound. It had to have been one hell of an ebb run.

Vlade could now get back into his boathouse, and so he unsealed the door to it and began to sort out the confusion created by having all the boats floated up into each other, and in some cases crushed a bit against the ceiling. Many of them were internally flooded by this, but oh well. Could be pumped out and dried out.

Getting the boathouse sorted took half the day, and after that he could go out in the Met runabout and inspect the building and the neighborhood. The canals were everywhere filled with flotsam and jetsam, pieces of the city knocked loose and floating around. People were back out on the water, although the vapors were not running yet. Police cruiser zipped around ordering people out of their way, stopping to collect floating bodies, animal or human. The health challenges were going to be severe, Vlad saw; it was already warm again, and cholera was all too likely. The freshets of rain that came that day were a good thing in that sense. The longer it was before the sun hit the water and began to cook the wreckage, the better.

Idelba's tug now served as a good passenger ferry up Park Avenue to Central Park, where there were some new jury-rigged docks, very busy with lines of waiting boats, most of the, unloading people from downtown. The glimpses into Central Park that they got before they returned down Park were shocking; it looked like all the trees in the park were down. Which seemed all too possible, and at the moment was not the problem, but it made an awful sight. They returned to the Met and took the last load of refugees out of the building, ignoring the occasion protest, telling them the building was maxed and more than maxed, and Central Park was now becoming the better place for them to get shelter and refuge status. “Also, we're out of food,” Vlade told them, which was close enough to true to allow him to say it. And it worked to get people to leave.

Inspector Gen had been out working since the storm began, but she had come back home the night before on a police cruiser, to change clothes and catch a couple of hours of sleep. Now she asked for a ride up to Central Park, where her people said she was needed again.

“I believe it,” Idelba said. “Won't be long before New Yorkers start a riot on you, right?”

“So far so good,” the inspector said.

“Well, but it's still raining. They can't get out to protest yet...”

The boats. Photo by Elena.

Winds of Time

Winds of Time

Near the site of the Alexandrian Library there is today a headless sphinx sculpted in the time of the pharaoh Horemheb, in the Eighteenth Dynasty, a millennium before Alexander. Within easy view of that leonine body is a modern microwave relay tower. Between them runs an unbroken thread in the history of the human species. From sphinx to tower is an instant of cosmic time – a moment in the fifteen or so billion years that have elapsed since the Big Bang. Almost all record of the passage of the universe from then to now has been scattered by the winds of time. The evidence of cosmic evolution has been more thoroughly ravaged than all the papyrus scrolls in the Alexandrian Library. And yet through daring and intelligence we have stolen a few glimpses of that winding path along which our ancestors and we have traveled.

Cassandra's Mirror. Photo by Elena

For unknown ages after the explosive outpouring of matter and energy of the Big Bang, the Cosmos was without form. There were no galaxies, no planets, no life. Deep, impenetrable darkness was everywhere, hydrogen atoms in the void. Here and there denser accumulations of gas were imperceptibly growing, globes of matter were condensing – hydrogen raindrops more massive than suns. Within these globes of gas was first kindled the nuclear fire latent in matter. A first generation of stars was born, flooding the Cosmos with light. There were in those times not yet any planets to receive the light, no living creatures to admire the radiance of the heavens. Deep in the stellar furnaces the alchemy of nuclear fusion created heavy elements, the ashes of hydrogen burning, the atomic building materials of future planets and lifeforms. Massive stars soon exhausted their stores of nuclear fuel. Rocked by colossal explosions, they returned most of their substance back into the thin gas from which they had once condensed.

Here in the dark lush clouds between the stars, new raindrops made of many elements were forming, later generations of stars being born. Nearby, smaller raindrops grew, bodies far too little to ignite the nuclear fire, droplets in the interstellar mist on their way to form the planets. Among them was a small world of stone and iron, the early Earth.

Winds of Time - Part II

Within easy view of the leonine body of the headless sphinx sculpted in the time of the pharaoh Horemheb, in the Eighteenth Dynasty (a millennium before Alexander), is a modern microwave relay tower. Between these two symbols of the Human civilisation runs an unbroken thread in the history of the human species.

From sphinx to tower is an instant of cosmic time – a moment in the fifteen or so billion years that have elapsed since the Big Bang ; and almost all record of the passage of the universe from then to now has been scattered by the winds of time.

The evidence of cosmic evolution has been thoroughly ravaged. And yet through daring and intelligence we have managed to reveal some of the secrets of the Universe.

… For ages after the explosive outpouring of matter and energy of the Big Bang, the Cosmos was without form. There were no galaxies, no planets, no life. Deep, impenetrable darkness was everywhere, hydrogen atoms in the void. Here and there denser accumulations of gas were imperceptibly growing, globes of matter were condensing – hydrogen raindrops more massive than suns. Within these globes of gas was first kindled the nuclear fire latent in matter.

A first generation of stars was born, flooding the Cosmos with light. There were in those times not yet any planets to receive the light, no living creatures to admire the radiance of the heavens. Deep in the stellar furnaces the alchemy of nuclear fusion created heavy elements, the ashes of hydrogen burning, the atomic building materials of future planets and lifeforms. Massive stars soon exhausted their stores of nuclear fuel. Rocked by colossal explosions, they returned most of their substance back into the thin gas from which they had once condensed.

We are the Glory and the Dim Memory of the Cosmos (quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Illustration: Cosmology by © Megan Jorgensen.

New York, 2140

New York, 2140

 A novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

Charlotte

Time came for the co-op members to vote on whether to accept the bid on the building from Morningside Realty, fronting for whomever. Charlotte's half-assed investigations had not been able to crack the the façade there, and in any case, no matter who was behind it, the CC&Rs of the co-op required that a vote be taken on matters like this within ninety days of their initiation, and this was day eighty-nine, and she wanted no technical infractions to cause trouble later. She had done her best ask around and get a sense of what people thought, but really, in a building of forty stories and over two thousand people, it wasn't possible to catch the vibe just by nosing around. She had to trust that people valued the place as much as she did, and toss the dice as required. In essence the vote would be a poll, and if they voted to sell then she would sue them or kill herself, depending on her mood. She was not in a good mood.

Many of the building's residents gathered in the dining hall and common room to vote, filling the rooms as they were seldom filled, even during meal hours. Charlotte gazed at the fellow citizens of their little city-state with such trepidation and political distrust that really it seemed like a new kind of fear. Curiosity also was killing her, but there was no way of telling from their faces and manner which was they were going to vote. Most of the faces were familiar or semi- or pseudo-familiar. Her neighbors. Although they were only the ones who had shown up in person, anyone in the co-op could vote from anywhere in the world, and this crowd was probably only half the voting membership. Still, the time was now, and if people were voting in absentia they would have to have already gotten their votes in. So the tally would be finished at the end of the hour. 

People said what they had to say. Building great; building not so great. Offer great; offer not so great. Four billion meant around two million per co-op member; that was a lot, or it wasn't. Charlotte couldn't stay focused long enough to catch more than the pro or con expressed, leaving the gist of people's arguments to some later time when she might give a shit. She knew what she knew. Get to it for God's sake.

New York city, Hudson Park. Photo by Elena.

So finally Mariolino called for a vote, and people clicked their clickers, which were all registered to them, and Mariolino waited until everyone indicated they had done the deed, then tapped his pad such that he had added the votes of those present to the votes of the absentees. Anyone who hadn't voted at this point was simply not part of the decision, as long as they had a quorum. And there was going to be a quorum.

Finally Mariolino looked up at Charlotte and then the others in the room.

“The vote is against taking the offer on the building. 1,207 against, 1,093 for.”

There was a kind of double gasp from those in the room, first at the decision, then at the closeness of it. Charlotte was both relieved and worried. It had been too close. If the offer was repeated at a substantially higher amount, as often happened in uptown real estate, then it wouldn't take many people to change their minds for the decision to shift. So it was like a stay of execution. Better than the alternative, but not exactly reassuring. In fact, the more she thought about it, the agrier she got at the half of her fellow citizens who had voted to sell. What were they thinking? Did they really imagine that money in any amount could replace what they had made here? It was as if nothing had been learned in the long years of struggle to make lower Manhattan a livable space, a city-state with a different plan. Every ideal and value seemed to melt under a drenching of money, the universal solvent. Money, money, money. The fake fungibility of money, the pretense that you could buy meaning, buy life.

She stood up, and Mariolino nodded at her. As chair it was okey for her to speak, to sum things up.

Grey City. Photo by Elena.

Champollion and Ancient Egypt

Champollion and Ancient Egypt

In 1801 a physicist named Joseph Fourier was the prefect of a departament of France called Isère (Fourier is now famous for his study of the propagation of heat in solids, used today to understand the surface properties of the planets, and for his investigation of waves and other periodic motion – a branch of mathematics known as Fourier analysis). While inspecting the schools in his province, Fourier discovered an eleven-year-old boy whose remarkable intellect and flair for oriental languages had already earned him the admiring attention of scholars. Fourier invited him home for a chat. The boy was fascinated by Fourier’s collection of Egyptian artefacts, collected during the Napoleonic expedition where he had been responsible for cataloguing the astronomical monuments of that ancient civilization.

A hieroglyphic inscription roused the boy’s sense of wonder. “But what do they mean?”, he asked. “Nobody knows”, was the reply. The boy’s name was Jean François Champollion. Fired by the mystery of the language no one could read, he became a superb linguist and passionately immersed himself in ancient Egyptian writing.

France at that time was flooded with Egyptian artifacts, stolen by Napoleon and later made available to Western scholars. The description of the expedition was published, and devoured by the young Champollion.

As an adult Champollion succeeded; fulfilling his childhood ambitions, he provided a brilliant decipherment of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. But it was not until 1828, twenty-seven years after his meeting with Fourier, that Champollion first set foot in Egypt, the land of his dreams, and sailed upstream from Cairo, following the course of the Nile, paying homage to the culture he had worked so hard to understand. It was an expedition in time, a visit to an alien civilization.

“The evening of the 16th we finally arrived at Dendera. There was magnificent moonlight and we were only an hour away from the Temples: Could we resist the temptation? I ask the coldest of your mortals! To dine and leave immediately were the orders of the moment: alone and without guides, but armed to the teeth we crossed the fields… the Temple appeared to us at last… One could well measure it but to give an idea of it would be impossible. It is the union of grace and majesty in the highest degree. We stayed these two hours in ecstasy, running through the huge rooms… and trying to read the exterior inscriptions in the moonlight. We did not return to the boat until three in the morning, only to return to the Temple at seven… What had been magnificent in the moonlight was still so when the sunlight revealed to us all the details.

We in Europe are only dwarfs and no nation, ancient or modern, has conceived the art of architecture on such a sublime, great and imposing style, as the ancient Egyptians. They ordered everything to be done for people who are a hundred feet high (Champollion). Image : Fantasy Haunted of Magic Castle Witch © Meg Jorgensen (Elena).

Reflections About Brain

Reflections About Brain

The brain is a tissue. It is a complicated, intricately woven tissue, like nothing else we know of in the universe, but it is composed of cells, as any tissue is. There are, to be sure, highly specialized cells, but they function according to the laws that govern any other cells. Their electrical and chemical signals can be detected, recorded and interpreted and their chemicals can be identified; the connections that constitute the brain's woven feltwork can be mapped. In short, the brain can be studied, just as the kidney can (David H. Hubel, neuroscientists).

Suppose that there be a machine, the structure of which produces thinking, feeling, and perceiving; imagine this machine enlarged but preserving the same proportions, so you could enter it as if it were a mill. This being supposed, you might visit inside; but what would you observe there? Nothing but parts which push and move each other, and never anything that could explain perception (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz).

Now, for the first time, we are observing the brain at work in a global manner with such clarity that we should be able to discover the over-all programs behind its magnificent powers (J.G.Taylor B. Horwitz and K.J.Friston).

The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, howsoever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently. We may, if we like, by our reasoning unwind things back to that black and jointless continuity of space and moving clouds of swarming atoms which science calls the only real world. But all the while the world we feel and live in will be that which our ancestors and we, by slowly cumulative strokes of choice, have extricated out of this, like sculptors, by simply rejecting certain portions of the given stuff. Other sculptors, other statues from the same stone! Other minds, other worlds form the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who may abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish, or crab! (William James).  

Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend (Albert Szent-Györgui).

Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thoughts. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness, are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others (William James).

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom (Bertrand Russell).

Feel the fear and do it anyway (Susan Jeffers).

Witchcraft and the supernatural in general pertain to Gothic mysticism.  Photo by Elena.