It’s All Noise and ‘Good Morning, Mr. President’

Yes, I watched most of the inaugural yesterday; I didn’t think it was possible for Aretha to deliver a bad performance, didn’t think it was possible for a President and a Chief Justice to screw up such a simple oath, didn’t think it was possible for someone to write poetry worse than Angelou’s and certainly didn’t think it was possible for Obama to deliver a relatively uninspiring speech. Just goes to show you how wrong you can be sometimes.

Political theater at its worst in some respects – but I’m not complaining, not really. For the first time in eight years I’ve got the President I wanted and voted for and maybe even the President that the American people deserve. Certainly a President we need. I was much inspired by his statement that we can no longer sacrifice the ideals of the Constitution for so-called security. Finally. Someone who reads the Founding Fathers AND pays attention.

Do you realize that this morning, most likely in a little under two hours (EST) Obama is going to be hearing “Good morning, Mr, President” for the very first time?

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Variety SF pointed me to this interesting article from the New Scientist. Can you say “Good morning, Mr. A. Square”? The piece is about a new concept that suggests our universe (well, actually, our experience of our universe) may be analagous to a 3D hologram projected onto a 2D surface. The discovery was made as the result of ‘noise’ interfering with a gravity wave detector – much like the ‘noise’ interfering with radio transmitters that led to the discovery of the Big Bang’s background radiation. (A point made in the article but also one that I recognized all by my little ol’ self.)

The thing I found most interesting was the statement that the projection is ‘blurry’. Kind of like me reading without glasses. Seems that there has to be a one-to-one correspondence between ‘information’ contained within the volume of the universe and the ‘information’ projected onto the surface of the universe; since the volume is greater than the surface area, the only way to resolve this cosmological conundrum is for the ‘bits’ of information within the volume to be larger than the ‘bits’ on its surface – which results in blurriness. Take a 2000 x 2000 pixel image and re-size it down to 200 x 200 pixels – everything in the original is still in there, its just ‘blurry’.

Pretty cool. I think I need to re-read Abbot’s Flatland.

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Visions of Paradise mentions that Locus has a piece by Fred Pohl (whom others are pointing out has started a new blog) in which he describes some of the award-winning works he originally published in If and Galaxy magazines when he took over editorial duties there from H.L. Gold.

Considering that my weekly piece on the Cordwainer Smith website starts today and the fact that Pohl was responsible for popularizing Smith through the pages of those magazines, this isn’t all that bad a segway to mentioning the weekly piece…

Pohl’s selections were stellar: Simak’s Way Station won a Hugo: Vance’s Dragon Masters Hugo and Last Castle Nebula: Norstilia by Smith (no award but should have been: a bunch of Niven, several famous Ellisons and Heinlein’s award winning The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Podkayne of Mars.

Most of the stuff Fred selected would either win a major award, be nominated for a major award or become a regularly anthologized classic. He’s had a lot more influence over the field than most folks realize.

And he wrote some damn fine novels to boot.