July 26, 2011
August 4, 2009
2009 Indian SF Workshop At IIT-K: Part 2 (Being There)
"You will, I am sure, agree with me that … if page 534 finds us only in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable."
Sherlock Holmes in The Valley Of Fear (1888)
For those who came in sideways: this is a continuation of Part 1 (Getting There).
I’ll admit it. The prognosis is not good. If it took me 3,000 words to cover a distance of three days, then obviously, dear reader, you have clambered onto a slow horse. The only consolation I can offer is that you could have been on Tristram Shandy, who took two-and-half volumes to traverse one day of his life.
But this should be brief. I was all set to narrate the events of the three weeks at IIT-K, when the Brain reminded me that I’d issued some promissory notes at the workshop. One of them was that the workshop would be a safe place. A place where any kind of story could be written. Tears, exultation and civilized screaming were permitted, but there would be no fatwas, retaliations, arsenic or pistols at dawn. Most importantly, what happened in Kanpur would stay in Kanpur.
Which puts me in a bind. Whereof I wish to speak, thereof I cannot. Hereof, I’ll have to be sneaky.
A typical day ran from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM, with ninety minutes for lunch (1:00-2:30), and two fifteen minutes breaks. About three hours per day were spent on the critiques, which left about four hours at the instructor’s discretion.
Ah, the critique sessions. For me (and regrettably, for the students too), the critiques were the best part of the day. We tried to do three critiques per day. I preferred to do the critiques in the morning, whereas Vandana and Suchitra reserved them for the afternoons.
The participants were serious about the critiques. For me, it’s what made the workshop a success. Their writing changed. It got more ambitious. Experimental. One writer produced a story that was told in the form of schoolbook exercises. Another reached deep into himself and the myth of Holika, reached for the look in a witch’s eyes as she burns, poor helpless bitch, and produced a postmodern rendering: terrifying, unforgettable and unforgiving. There was a story in which guilt turns memory into music, there was a story about unstable threesomes, one about gigolo robots, there were Stories No One Got, stories with a new interpretation of Sita, clueless lesbians, kings with red horns, shoot-outs with centaurs, stories where old Indian myths were used as stirring spoons rather than spice… with three stories per writer, fifteen writers and three weeks, not to mention the daily reading assignments, we were soon awash in stories.
In the third week (Vandana’s week), two of the students proposed that the authors’ names be withheld from the stories. Naturally, the author had to offer a faux-critique of his/her work. I found the results fascinating. The participants were mostly unable to identify who had written which story. The routine gasps of “You wrote that?” undid a lot of smug categories. People simply wouldn’t stay put in their assigned slots: X-is-good-but. Y-writes-stories-that. Z-has-an-unfortunate-fondness-for.
How does critiquing work when it works? Not sure. The Brain has a quantum-mystical theory, accurate to several decimal points. But it’s a digression, and despite what my friend Tristram Shandy says about digressions (“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine—they are the life, the soul of reading!”), I must resist the impulse and plod on.
July 26, 2009
2009 Indian SF Workshop At IIT-K: Part 1 (Getting There)
What a blast! I’ve been around the sun a few times (all right, many times), and there’s always something new and cool in every trip, but this particular chakkar is turning to be really special. A year of firsts for me. I’ll have my first novel out this year. And this is the year we were finally able to hold the first Indian SF Workshop. The first Great Indian SF Workshop That Still Has No Name. It’s exactly the kind of thing I wanted to do when I grew up– okay, that’s a lie; I wanted to be a famous theoretical physicist renowned for his humility– but bloody hell, I’m glad things have worked out the way they have.
I should have blogged about the workshop on a daily basis, but here’s the catch: if you’re blogging, you’re not doing other things, and those three weeks at IIT-Kanpur were filled with doing other things. Vandana Singh put up a couple of lovely pieces on her experiences at the workshop, and that finally shamed me into action. I've followed the historian's policy of making up what s/he cannot remember.
Saturday, June 13, 2009: I’ve parked my corpus at Tej’s Abode, a cool boutique hotel in GK-II’s S-block in Delhi. I’ve been told to say “GK-2” and “S-block.” My elder brother, who’s under the impression I was raised by courteous Swedish yodelers, gave me a lot of unsolicited advice on how to survive in Delhi, including the nugget that I should never, ever, ask to be taken to “Greater Kailash 2”:
“You might as well hand them your wallet.”
I did get ripped off, but it was well within class-warfare limits.
I told Kaushal, the efficient day-manager at Tej’s Abode, that I had a morning train to catch, and that it was a 6:15 AM train, yes, the Lucknow Shatabdi, and that I really had to catch it, because I really had to be in Kanpur for a workshop. So. 6:15. We chatted a bit about phones and hotel bills and wireless codes. I made sure to set the cell phone’s alarm for 4:15 AM. Actually, it’s unnecessary. Once I set an alarm, the Brain always wakes me a few minutes earlier, as if to demonstrate that it could also run a hotel or two. Pretty freaky, this human time-sense thing. Why should wetware have any clue about the number system we use to mark how many times one needle goes around another? Suppose I used a binary clock? Wake me up at 00100.01111, please. I suppose it’d probably piss off the Brain.
Sunday June 14, 2009: Missed the damn train! My bloody fault too. I had woken up at 4:15, was ready by 5:00, waited till 5:15, then headed downstairs. Mahesh, one of the guys who worked there, had been sleeping, but woke up, listened calmly to my panicked shrieks, explained that nobody had told him anything about getting any taxi, took charge of the situation and ran out to hail a cab or a rickshaw or a passing camel.
February 11, 2007
Future: Are We There Yet?
iPod. iPhone. iYawn. It’s embarrassing. Have we lost track of the future to such an extent that a bloody phone is enough to get us running in excited circles? Is this what the future has boiled down to? A few pathetic comm devices? Cars that continue to look like sports shoes? Makeup that’s monsoon resistant? Travel tech in which waiting to go somewhere takes longer than actually getting there? Is this the bloody future that we stayed awake for? Where do we go for a refund?
Clearly, it’s time we got back to inventing the future. Once, the Americans could be trusted to pump out the future that lies under our collective feet. But after watching Jobs and Gates and Bush do their annual Turkey dance, I think it’s time we outsourced the drilling. So here’s a list of my requirements to the Nnamdi’s, Wei Lei’s, Renato’s, Laxmi’s and Ibrahims of the world. No need to gift-wrap, but I’ll need a quote on the shipping please.
Keep in mind I’ve left out most of the really practical stuff like being able to live in geometries of my choosing (Kobayashi-Kresling, of course; then I could unfold like a flower), or to write software the way we write plays (suck on that, Gates) or eliminating aspects of quantum mechanics (way too many Bosons) or on-demand corporeality (it’s such a drag being meat all the time). I’ve even given up on flying cars and food pills and paper underwear. No, this list is mostly Popular-Mechanics stuff, only more ambitious. It’s just a few dot-crashes away.
I want:
- An exoskeleton. Walking is too slow, and a car is too fast. A bike is too much hard work. Basically, an exoskeleton would be like a moon suit for Earth, only sexier and easier to take off when you meet the right person.
- Electronic paper that’s often mistaken for ordinary paper. ’nuff said.
- Topological tech. Take a coin. Gesture. Voila. It’s a cylinder. Click. Now it unrolls into a papyrus sheet. Tap. It’s a rigid surface. So on and so forth. I’m reasonable. I’m not asking for a complete implementation of point-set topology. I just want materials that aren’t too committed to a fixed geometry. Down with Platonic solids and their originator.
- Artificial islands. I know there are already a few. But I want hundreds, thousands of them. I want enough to make a genuine market in places possible; a market in futures, so to speak. Let places bid for talent, rather than the other way around. This means of course we’ve to invent a lot more people, since people make places.
- About 50 more years added to the human lifespan. Actually, I want a few thousand. But immortality is secured one second at a time.
- Devices that are clever, not smart. Science is not about generating facts or theories. Science is a technique to generate new techniques. Science is about being able to do more and more. Not doing it per se, mind you, but having the choice to do it. In other words, science is about making us cleverer, not smarter. I want devices that are able to do science.
- A clear understanding of how the brain works. This is a theory request. It’s embarrassing we don’t have a better explanation than "and then it multiplies by zero"! How can stuff that’s mostly liquid think? That’s what I want to know.
- Everything that’s ever been printed made online. And free.
- Sensoriums. See, I like to wear my Internet. But at the moment, it’s basically a pair of goggles. The eye-net, as it should be called (because you’re pretty much toast if you can’t see) should become the ear-net, nose-net, tongue-net and touch-net. Now throw in some AI and add cinnamon to taste. Voila. A sensorium. Did you get my licks on the topic? Here, sniff this.
- A laptop that’s not also a male contraceptive. Seriously, Nnamdi/Wei Lei/Renato/Laxmi/Ibrahim, I know Convergence’s the future and all, but do you think it’s possible to keep the gonads cool en route? The Germans have a word, Mösenstövchen, which refers to the effect of a heated car-seat on a woman’s, um, nether regions. Don’t force them to invent a word for the effect of laptops.
Life begins with a gleam in the eye, mood music, and moisture in all the right places. So do futures. Marvin Gaye’s done his job. Let’s get liquid, people.
May 14, 2006
Review: 20 Cases Suggestive Of Reincarnation by Ian Stevenson
The homepage of the Univ. of Virginia’s Division Of Perceptual Studies quotes Thomas Jefferson:
"I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led."
It is a fine quote, exactly the sort of postprandial statement one can imagine Jefferson making at Monticello, with a glass of Chateau d’Yquem in one hand and Sally in the other. They don’t make presidents like him anymore.
But perhaps they do. That is, if Dr. Ian Stevenson is right.
Ian Stevenson‘s a medical doctor (internal medicine) trained at McGill University, the author of many peer-reviewed articles, and a former chaired professor at UVa. Dr. Stevenson’s pursuit of the truth has led him into very odd territory. In the 60s through the 80s, he investigated cases in India, Ceylon, Brazil, Alaska, and Lebanon that were "suggestive of reincarnation."
There’s a rough pattern to these reincarnation stories. A child– usually between two and four years of age — begins to claim that he/she is actually so-and-so, now deceased. Parents resist said claims. Eventually, contact with so-and-so’s family is made. Dénouement follows. At some point, ranging from 3 weeks to twenty years, Stevenson shows up with his tape recorder and interpreter. He interviews the families, cross-checks claims, classifies events into a typology, and then re-conducts the interviews with a second translator. The book describes twenty representative cases. His conclusion:
"In the cases of the present collection we have evidence of the occurrence of patterns which the present personality is not known to have inherited or acquired after birth in the present life. And in some instances these patterns match corresponding and specific features of an identified deceased personality. In such cases we have then in principle, I believe, some evidence for human survival of physical death. I say in principle, because I continue aware [sic] of particular weaknesses in the present cases."
In short, there are events suggestive of reincarnation. I think he’s mistaken. But whatever one may think of his extraordinary conclusion, the book will induce respect. His case reports are painfully detailed, monumentally tedious and reassuringly detached. It’s shoe-leather research rather than arm-chair research. It’s Masters and Johnson sans lubrication. The book is a lovely testament to what empiricism is all about.
Assuming the evidence is not manufactured out of whole cloth (in which case the book ranks with great literature), there’s a neat little puzzle to be explained. Some of the cases are rather disquieting, especially the cases of Pramod and Swarnalata. Stevenson’s methodology is not that of the doctor or the physicist but that of the detective.
March 31, 2006
When Prayers Attack
Well, it’s official. If you’re scheduled for a coronary bypass, and the local Ned Flanders is busy organizing the congregation to pray for you, order the bastard to cease and desist immediately. Science has determined that intercessory prayer may significantly increase the risk of post-surgery complications for you.
This month’s issue of the American Heart Journal has a paper by Benson et. al. on the effectiveness of intercessory prayer. They begin the paper by saying:
"Intercessory prayer is widely believed to influence recovery from illness, but claims of benefits are not supported by well-controlled clinical trials. Prior studies have not addressed whether prayer itself or knowledge/certainty that prayer is being provided may influence outcome. We evaluated whether (1) receiving intercessory prayer or (2) being certain of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with uncomplicated recovery after coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery."
And their conclusion?
"Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications."
In English: Prayer is ineffective at best, and knowing that you’re being prayed for can be a risk factor as well.
The doctors are to be commended for three things: (1) for having the cojones to study the supernatural; (2) for giving "intercessory" a slightly sinister connotation; and (3) for making the Universe a slightly funnier place.
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