Ten Books Lexington Green Wants To Read Again

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Lexington Green has too little time to read, let alone re-read, but he lists ten books he wants to read again — and I share my thoughts:

    1. Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine – Green’s list starts with an old work new to me.
    2. Eric Rucker Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros – I enjoyed Eddison’s work immensely, but I can’t recommend it, because it is far from accessible. Written in the 1920s, it is a work of fantasy from before the genre existed as such, and it mixes archaic English, a Norse mythological style, bits of Greek and Roman myth, a setting called Mercury, with no meaningful relationship to the planet, and peoples called Demons, Witches, Goblins, etc., that are not in any sense demons, witches, goblins, etc., but ordinary men. It’s hard to explain.
    3. Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – Green mentions how strongly Starship Troopers affected him as a boy, and how well it held up years later. I felt the same way. So, when I heard that Heinlein had written a more-or-less libertarian science-fiction novel, I assumed it would be right up my alley — but, regrettably, Moon is not on my re-read list.
    4. Homer, The Iliad – Everyone has to re-read The Iliad, right?
    5. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four – I need to read Animal Farm more than I need to re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four.
    6. Quentin Reynolds, They Fought For The Sky: The Dramatic Story of the First War in the Air – Sounds intriguing.
    7. Thomas Sowell, Knowledge And Decisions – I usually enjoy Sowell’s writing, and a number of EconTalk podcasts have reminded me to read his Hayekian classic.
    8. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace – Does anyone have time to read Tolstoy’s classic more than once?
    9. Evelyn Waugh, The Sword of Honour Trilogy – The name Evelyn Waugh always struck me as exceedingly English — like Wooster and Jeeves — and I never paid it much attention until I read about the then-upcoming James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, which borrowed its title from an Ian Fleming story that only used James Bond as part of its framing story, so Fleming could write an Evelyn Waugh-style story and get it published.
    10. H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds – Wells’ early science-fiction stories have held up amazingly well — and much better than Verne’s “harder” science-fiction. It’s hard to stay amazed by a submarine and by waterproof doors lined with India rubber.

Zenpundit calls the list of books you read over and over again your quantum library. He borrowed the idea:

The Quantum-Library is the layer that co-exists as a member of both the Library and the Anti-Library. It is something you may have read, but when read again with a different perspective it exists in another form.

I suspect that many, many folks have Tolkien in their quantum library — and Green does, apparently outside his current top ten:

The Lord of the Rings is a poetic / mythic / epic depiction of the defense of the West (especially England and its medieval inheritance) against tyranny and evil. Where most writers view the West through an Enlightenment frame, and see it as Antiquity then an interregnum followed by Modernity, Tolkien more accurately sees it as Antiquity + Christianity + Teutonic folkways and love of freedom. Modernity he has little use for. It is also a depiction of the working of Providence in History through the instrumentality of individual responses to grace, the primacy of the virtues, especially humility, and the unity of prayer and action (e.g. Sam’s prayer for water and sunlight that turns the course of the war in ways he cannot know) and hence anti-Hegelian, anti-Marxist, anti-determinist, anti-economistic.

A Political History of SF

Monday, June 15th, 2009

Eric S. Raymond explains the history of science fiction through an unusual lens — politics:

There was also a political aura that went with the hard-SF style, one exemplified by Campbell and right-hand man Robert Heinlein. That tradition was of ornery and insistant individualism, veneration of the competent man, an instinctive distrust of coercive social engineering and a rock-ribbed objectivism that that valued knowing how things work and treated all political ideologizing with suspicion. Exceptions like Asimov’s Foundation novels only threw the implicit politics of most other Campbellian SF into sharper relief.

At the time, this very American position was generally thought of by both allies and opponents as a conservative or right-wing one. But the SF community’s version was never conservative in the strict sense of venerating past social norms — how could it be, when SF literature cheerfully contemplated radical changes in social arrangements and even human nature itself? SF’s insistent individualism also led it to reject racism and feature strong female characters decades before the rise of political correctness ritualized these behaviors in other forms of art.

Nevertheless, some writers found the confines of the field too narrow, or rejected Campbellian orthodoxy for other reasons. The first revolt against hard SF came in the early 1950s from a group of young writers centered around Frederik Pohl and the Futurians fan club in New York. The Futurians invented a kind of SF in which science was not at the center, and the transformative change motivating the story was not technological but political or social. Much of their output was sharply satirical in tone, and tended to de-emphasize individual heroism. The Futurian masterpiece was the Frederik Pohl/Cyril Kornbluth collaboration The Space Merchants (1956).

The Futurian revolt was political as well as aesthetic. Not until the late 1970s did any the participants admit that many of the key Futurians had histories as ideological Communists or fellow travellers, and that fact remained relatively unknown in the field well into the 1990s. As with later revolts against the Campbellian tradition, part of the motivation was a desire to escape the “conservative” politics that went with that tradition. While the Futurians’ work was well understood at the time to be a poke at the consumer capitalism and smugness of the postwar years, only in retrospect is it clear how much they owed to the Frankfurt school of Marxist critical theory.

But the Futurian revolt was half-hearted, semi-covert, and easily absorbed by the Campbellian mainstream of the SF field; by the mid-1960s, sociological extrapolation had become a standard part of the toolkit even for the old-school Golden Agers, and it never challenged the centrality of hard SF. The Futurians’ Marxist underpinnings lay buried and undiscussed for decades after the fact.

Perception of Campbellian SF as a “right-wing” phenomenon lingered, however, and helped motivate the next revolt in the mid-1960s, around the time I started reading the stuff.
[...]
The New Wave’s inventors (notably Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss) were British socialists and Marxists who rejected individualism, linear exposition, happy endings, scientific rigor and the U.S.’s cultural hegemony over the SF field in one fell swoop. The New Wave’s later American exponents were strongly associated with the New Left and opposition to the Vietnam War, leading to some rancorous public disputes in which politics was tangled together with definitional questions about the nature of SF and the direction of the field.

But the New Wave, after 1965, was not so easily dismissed or assimilated as the Futurians had been. Amidst a great deal of self-indulgent crap and drug-fueled psychedelizing, there shone a few jewels — Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse stories (1961, retrospectively recruited into the post-1965 New Wave by their author) Langdon Jones’s The Great Clock (1966), Phillip José Farmer’s Riders of the Purple Wage (1967), Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream (1967), and Fritz Leiber’s One Station of the Way (1968) stand out as examples.

As with the Futurians, the larger SF field rapidly absorbed some New Wave techniques and concerns. Notably, the New Wavers broke the SF taboo on writing about sex in any but the most cryptically coded ways, a stricture previously so rigid that only Heinlein himself had had the stature to really break it, in Stranger In A Strange Land (1961) — a book that helped shape the hippie counterculture of the later 1960s.

An Interesting Test

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

David Foster looks at An Interesting Test:

In an old Heinlein SF novel, applicants to the Space Academy are required to take a variety of aptitude tests. One of these tests involves dropping beans into a bottle…with the eyes closed. Applicants are told that the test measures “spatial perception” or something along those lines — but it’s actually a test of honesty.

I was reminded of this scenario by an article titled For Love of the Game, which appeared in the 3/12 issue of Forbes. There’s an old test that was originally used by the military to find people with an aptitude for clerical positions. All you have to do look in a table for a four-digit number and circle it where it appears. It seems like it would be difficult for any literate person to fail at this. Yet this simplistic test turns out to have predictive power for career success across a wide range of fields, including those that have little or nothing to do with clerical ability.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics surveyed 12,700 people (ages 14-22) and then follwed them to see how well they were doing. The subjects were paid $50 to take several tests, including a traditional Army intelligence test and the coding-speed test described above. They had no particular incentive to do well on any of the tests.

Recent research by Carmit Segal of Harvard indicates that performance on the coding-speed test has significant predictive power for the individual’s income 20 years later. This is true even when holding IQ score constant. And for participants who never earned a college degree, the coding-speed measurement has more predictive power than does IQ score.

The explanation suggested by Carmit is that what is really being measured by the coding speed test is intrinsic motivation: how much effort will someone put into the performance of a task when the only reward is the task itself? Just like Heinlein’s bean-in-the-bottle test measures what someone will do when no one is watching, the coding-speed test as performed by BLS measures what someone will do when no one is paying or otherwise rewarding good performance.

25 Skills Every Man Should Know

Tuesday, September 18th, 2007

Popular Mechanics magazine has cleverly promoted its most recent issue with a list of 25 Skills Every Man Should Know — “ready for your debate”:

1. Patch a radiator hose
2. Protect your computer
3. Rescue a boater who has capsized
4. Frame a wall
5. Retouch digital photos
6. Back up a trailer
7. Build a campfire
8. Fix a dead outlet
9. Navigate with a map and compass
10. Use a torque wrench
11. Sharpen a knife
12. Perform CPR
13. Fillet a fish
14. Maneuver a car out of a skid
15. Get a car unstuck
16. Back up data
17. Paint a room
18. Mix concrete
19. Clean a bolt-action rifle
20. Change oil and filter
21. Hook up an HDTV
22. Bleed brakes
23. Paddle a canoe
24. Fix a bike flat
25. Extend your wireless network

I can’t say I can do too many of those.

Anyway, I thought I’d be clever by citing Heinlein on the subject, but Glenn Reynolds, writing in his new PM column, beat me to the punch:

Science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein once wrote: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

Robert A. Heinlein’s Legacy

Friday, July 27th, 2007

Taylor Dinerman looks at Robert A. Heinlein’s Legacy — and starts by looking at science fiction’s legacy:

Science fiction at one time was despised as vulgar and “populist” by university English departments. Today, it is just another cultural artifact to be deconstructed, along with cartoons and People magazine articles. Yet one could argue that science fiction has had a greater impact on the way we all live than any other literary genre of the 20th century.

When one looks at the great technological revolutions that have shaped our lives over the past 50 years, more often than not one finds that the men and women behind them were avid consumers of what used to be considered no more than adolescent trash. As Arthur C. Clarke put it: “Almost every good scientist I know has read science fiction.” And the greatest writer who produced them was Robert Anson Heinlein, born in Butler, Mo., 100 years ago this month.

Specialization is for Insects

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

I just re-stumbled upon one of my favorite Robert A. Heinlein quotes, from Time Enough for Love — which, I must admit, I have not read (yet):

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Adam Smith might not agree.

Robert Heinlein at 100

Tuesday, July 10th, 2007

Brian Doherty looks at Robert Heinlein at 100 and “how the science fiction master created the template for our looser, hipper, more pluralist world”:

Heinlein venerated the armed forces, most notoriously in his 1959 novel Starship Troopers, which celebrated an elite military order. Just two years later, he was publishing the counterculture classic Stranger in a Strange Land, with its simultaneously beatific, sexy, and heroic vision of Martian-inspired communal living. A rich mix of bohemian and straight-arrow values, Heinlein’s unique take on American individualism made him the bridge between such disparate ’60s icons as Barry Goldwater and Charles Manson.

Heinlein’s novels and short stories reflected the rough-hewn anti-government but pro-defense message associated with Goldwater and the conservative movement he sparked. At the same time, his writings exuded the communal desire to live in blissful togetherness, ignoring the repressive sexual and religious mores of bourgeois America. With a libertarian vision that appealed to individualists of both the left and the right, Heinlein not only set the template for the American 1960s but helped create the looser, hipper, more pluralist world of the decades since.

Read the whole article.

Jim Baen’s Top 10 Science Fiction Books

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

Jim Baen, of Baen Books, created a list of ten science fiction books that everyone should read, and I’m ashamed to say that I’ve missed a few.

Jim Baen’s Top 10 Science Fiction Books:

  1. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
  2. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
  3. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller
  4. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
  5. Dune by Frank Herbert
  6. Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague deCamp
  7. Against the Fall of Night by Arthur C. Clarke
  8. Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein
  9. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
  10. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain

100 SF Books

Sunday, July 23rd, 2006

Theordore Sturgeon once defended science fiction, a genre that includes some truly awful works, by noting that “Ninety percent of everything is crud.” This instance of the Pareto principle is known as Sturgeon’s Law or Sturgeon’s Revelation.

Phobos Entertainment presents a list of 100 SF Books that fall into the non-cruddy 10 percent:

  1. Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke
  2. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
  3. Dune by Frank Herbert
  4. Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
  5. Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
  6. Valis by Philip K. Dick
  7. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
  8. Gateway by Frederick Pohl
  9. Space Merchants by C.M. Kornbluth & Frederick Pohl
  10. Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
  11. Cuckoo’s Egg by C.J. Cherryh
  12. Star Surgeon by James White
  13. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick
  14. Radix by A.A. Attanasio
  15. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
  16. Ringworld by Larry Niven
  17. A Case of Conscience by James Blish
  18. Last and First Man by Olaf Stapledon
  19. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
  20. Way Station by Clifford Simak
  21. More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
  22. Gray Lensman by E. E. “Doc” Smith
  23. The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
  24. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
  25. Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock
  26. Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
  27. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
  28. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
  29. Heritage of Hastur by Marion Zimmer Bradley
  30. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
  31. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
  32. Slan by A.E. Van Vogt
  33. Neuromancer by William Gibson
  34. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
  35. In Conquest Born by C.S. Friedman
  36. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
  37. Eon by Greg Bear
  38. Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
  39. Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
  40. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
  41. Cosm by Gregory Benford
  42. The Voyage of the Space Beagle by A.E. Van Vogt
  43. Blood Music by Greg Bear
  44. Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
  45. Omnivore by Piers Anthony
  46. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
  47. Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement
  48. To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer
  49. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  50. The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold
  51. 1984 by George Orwell
  52. The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyl And Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
  53. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
  54. Flesh by Philip Jose Farmer
  55. Cities in Flight by James Blish
  56. Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe
  57. Startide Rising by David Brin
  58. Triton by Samuel R. Delany
  59. Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
  60. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  61. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  62. A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter Miller
  63. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
  64. No Blade of Grass by John Christopher
  65. The Postman by David Brin
  66. Dhalgren by Samuel Delany
  67. Berserker by Fred Saberhagen
  68. Flatland by Edwin Abbot
  69. Planiverse by A.K. Dewdney
  70. Dragon’s Egg by Robert L. Forward
  71. Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh
  72. Dawn by Octavia E. Butler
  73. Puppet Masters by Robert Heinlein
  74. The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
  75. Forever War by Joe Haldeman
  76. Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison
  77. Roadside Picnic by Boris Strugatsky & Arkady Strugatsky
  78. The Snow Queen by Joan Vinge
  79. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
  80. Drowned World by J.G. Ballard
  81. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
  82. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
  83. Upanishads by Various
  84. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
  85. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  86. The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
  87. The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
  88. Mutant by Henry Kuttner
  89. Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
  90. Ralph 124C41+ by Hugo Gernsback
  91. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
  92. Timescape by Gregory Benford
  93. The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
  94. War with the Newts by Karl Kapek
  95. Mars by Ben Bova
  96. Brain Wave by Poul Anderson
  97. Hyperion by Dan Simmons
  98. The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
  99. Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch
  100. A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

I haven’t read the entire list — not by a long shot — but I can second many of the lists recommendations — and I can disagree with a few as well: Frankenstein and Snow Crash may be influential works, but they’re not necessarily good.

A Hoist to the Heavens

Saturday, March 11th, 2006

In A Hoist to the Heavens, Bradley Carl Edwards looks at the economics of a space elevator — “a superstrong, lightweight cable stretching 100 000 kilometers from Earth’s surface to a counterweight in space”:

It all boils down to dollars and cents, of course. It now costs about US $20 000 per kilogram to put objects into orbit. Contrast that rate with the results of a study I recently performed for NASA, which concluded that a single space elevator could reduce the cost of orbiting payloads to a remarkably low $200 a kilogram and that multiple elevators could ultimately push costs down below $10 a kilogram. With space elevators we could eventually make putting people and cargo into space as cheap, kilogram for kilogram, as airlifting them across the Pacific.
[...]
For example, 95 percent of the mass of each mighty Saturn V moon rocket was used up just getting into low-Earth orbit. As science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein reportedly said: “Once you get to Earth orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere in the solar system.” With the huge cost penalty of traveling between Earth and orbit drastically reduced, it would actually be possible to quarry mineral-rich asteroids and return the materials to Earth for less than what it now costs, in some cases, to rip metal ores out of Earth’s crust and then refine them.

Top 20 Geek Novels

Monday, November 21st, 2005

The Guardian did a small on-line survey to discover the top 20 geek novels:

1. The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams 85% (102)
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell 79% (92)
3. Brave New World — Aldous Huxley 69% (77)
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip Dick 64% (67)
5. Neuromancer — William Gibson 59% (66)
6. Dune — Frank Herbert 53% (54)
7. I, Robot — Isaac Asimov 52% (54)
8. Foundation — Isaac Asimov 47% (47)
9. The Colour of Magic — Terry Pratchett 46% (46)
10. Microserfs — Douglas Coupland 43% (44)
11. Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson 37% (37)
12. Watchmen — Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 38% (37)
13. Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson 36% (36)
14. Consider Phlebas — Iain M Banks 34% (35)
15. Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert Heinlein 33% (33)
16. The Man in the High Castle — Philip K Dick 34% (32)
17. American Gods — Neil Gaiman 31% (29)
18. The Diamond Age — Neal Stephenson 27% (27)
19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy — Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson 23% (21)
20. Trouble with Lichen – John Wyndham 21% (19)

I can maintain some geek cred by noting that I’ve read more than half the list — but I certainly lose some points by not having read any Philip K. Dick (yet).

Marines in Spaaaaaace!

Monday, September 19th, 2005

Marines in Spaaaaaace! describes “the U.S. Marine Corps’ futuristic plans to deploy through space”:

The effort is called Hot Eagle, and it could be the first step forward in the Marine Corps’ hopes for space travel. Within minutes of bursting into the atmosphere beyond the speed of sound — and dispatching that ominous sonic boom — a small squad of Marines could be on the ground and ready to take care of business within 2 hours.

I should point out that Heinlein’s Starship Troopers has been on the Marine Corps’ doctrine, training, and tactics reading list for some time.

When Science Fiction is Science Fact

Saturday, August 13th, 2005

When Science Fiction is Science Fact describes what happens when a sci-fi story predicts the future a bit too well:

The story in Astounding that had caused such uproar in the Manhattan Project was typical of science fiction yarns of the time. Written by author Cleve Cartmill it was called Deadline and described an earth-like planet, in which a commando, albeit one with a prehensile tail, was assigned to destroy a giant bomb. The story was packed with technical data describing ‘atomic isotope separation methods’ and the dangers of being able to control the explosion of a U-235 bomb. While the bomb described in the story didn’t exactly resemble that being constructed in Los Alamos, the story’s descriptions of difficulties in separating uranium into fissionable and non-fissionable isotopes did speak of one of the major problems currently under investigation at the Manhattan Project. The federal authorities believed that these references could only have come from classified research.

Counter-intelligence agents were immediately sent round to Cartmill’s house in Los Angeles, but Cartmill assigned all blame to his editor, Campbell, who had provided him with the technical details. When Campbell was asked how he had come upon such classified information he explained that he was a physics graduate from MIT, and that he had come up with the idea by basing all his suppositions on information freely available to the public. He calmly showed where he had found out about Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman’s discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 and how he had worked through the normal extrapolation process so common in his magazine’s stories.

The investigators were not appeased. Cartmill was placed under observation, his mail was opened and he and Campbell were subjected to days of interrogation. The Manhattan Project’s security chief wanted the Office of Censorship to shut down the magazine entirely because “such highly particularised stories on secret weapons are detrimental to national security”. But, to their credit the Office of Censorship refused, stating that “editor Campbell’s…observations on the subject matter are those that can be produced by any person with a smattering of science plus a fertile imagination, who may be in the scientific fiction publishing business”.

Indeed it was not even the first time that science fiction had trod such classified ground. In 1914 in his story The World Set Free, H.G. Wells had written of the devastating power of an atomic bomb, and had predicted the splitting of the atom to within five years. As recently as 1941 Robert Heinlein’s story Solution Unsatisfactory had talked of using U-235 in a controlled explosion “that would be a whole air raid in itself, a single explosion that would flatten out an entire industrial centre”. Ultimately Astounding was let off the hook and its suggestion of the near-term practical possibility of an atomic bomb was put down to coincidence. However Campbell was warned not to publish any more stories containing “any reference to uranium and atomic power”.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

The Devil’s Rocketeer

Tuesday, March 1st, 2005

The Devil’s Rocketeer looks at the subject of a new book, Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons:

John Whiteside Parsons, an early innovator of rocket technology, is not widely remembered today. Insofar as he is remembered, moreover, it is often not in connection with rocket science but rather with cultism, mysticism and black magic. Parsons was a figure of two worlds. He helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the aerospace company Aerojet, and also engaged in arcane rituals and mysterious practices. He died gruesomely in a perplexing explosion in his home laboratory in 1952 at age 37. [...] Parsons’ life makes for a colorful, if sometimes disturbing, story. Its diverse cast of characters includes rocket pioneer Theodore von K?rm?n, science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein, mystic Aleister Crowley (reputed to be “the wickedest man in the world”), and L. Ron Hubbard, who subsequently founded Scientology.

Circadiana: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask)

Sunday, January 23rd, 2005

Circadiana: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask) opens with this summary of human sleep (and sleep research):

Until not long ago, just about until electricity became ubiquitous, humans used to have a sleep pattern quite different from what we consider “normal” today. At dusk you go to sleep, at some point in the middle of the night you wake up for an hour or two, then fall asleep again until dawn. Thus there are two events of falling asleep and two events of waking up every night (plus, perhaps, a short nap in the afternoon). As indigenous people today, as well as people in non-electrified rural areas of the world, still follow this pattern, it is likely that our ancestors did, too.The bimodal sleep pattern was first seen in laboratory animals (various birds, lizards and mammals) in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, i.e, before everyone moved their research to mice and rats who have erratic (un-consolidated) sleep patterns. The research on humans kept in constant conditions, as well as field work in primitive communities (including non-electrified rural places in what is otherwise considered the First World) confirmed the bimodality of sleep in humans, particularly in winter.An excellent quote from Robert Heinlein:
Waking a person unnecessarily should not be considered a capital crime. For a first offense, that is.

This is so true:

The “owls” are constantly being treated as lazy, though they are more likely to be sleep-deprived (cannot fall asleep until the wee hours, then being rudely awoken by the alarm clock after just a couple of hours) and spend more hours awake (and presumably productive) than “larks” do. If you are asleep, this means you need it.

I didn’t realize these accidents were sleep-related:

People have always tried to self-select for various schedules, yet it has recently started to enter the corporate consciousness that forcing employees into unwanted shifts has negative effects on productivity and safety, thus bottom line. See Chernobyl, Bhopal, Exxon Valdese and Three Mile Island accidents — all caused by sober but sleepy people at about 3am, just like thousands of traffic accidents every year.