Over thinking the movies, Man of Steel

Point one, Spoilers.
Point two, I did enjoy the movie and I think great many people will too.
Point three, I will have fun at its expense.
Now to the fun bit.

Generic Superman origin story opens on Krypton with the Gladiator explaining geology to the government.   The armwavium used to explain the impending doom                  is the act of mining Krypton's core for energy has hollowed out the planet. This raises a few questions.

Firstly what was the core being mined for.  And don't say Kryptonite.  I am taking a mostly uniformitarian stance. I am assuming that physics is the same over time and space and therefore what happens on earth can happen elsewhere, it is a science fiction universe so there are some rules being bent but they are bent the same way every where.

It was stated that the interior of the planet had been hollowed out to power their civilization. A civilization with enormous power needs. Flying cities on a high gravity planet demonstrate that clearly.

Option A Heat. Assumption, Krypton is a super-Earth with a similar composition.

Cooling the planets liquid outer core to extract heat would provide massive power but would accelerate the enlargement of the solid inner core. The cooling would shrink the core contracting the planet around it.  While that could cause earthquakes and volcanism it would not explode.  Mercury has experienced a similar phenomenon and will not be going anywhere for another 5 billion years.

The down side is you would have to use the heat to produce secondary energy storage media. On the upside while you're down there you would have access to stupendously large amounts of iron.  However this model disagrees with the notion of physically mining the world's core.

Option B, Thorium and Uranium Assumption, still assumes and iron rich core but not necessarily having an liquid phase outer core.  Because of Krypton's advanced age Thorium with its approximately 13 billion year half life would be the most abundant fissile material on the planet.

I have no idea if there are any processes that could produce minable deposits of fissile elements in a planetary core, secondly I doubt the volumes would approach planetary collapse scales. If they were extracting iron and other industrial materials while they were down there perhaps they could shrink the planet a few tenth of a percent. Not that Krypton would stoop so low as to use fission.

Option C, Cavorite  a form of unobtainium opaque to all radiation including gravity.  Advantage, would be ideal for building floating cities, would be valuable enough to drive planetary scale ventures.

Now none of these options explain the later explosion of Krypton.  I propose waste plutonium was stored in the core as backfill for their mining.  When the exotic alloy supports failed and the mantle and crust fell on the core the mass went supercritical and kaboom.  Bonus Kaboom if there was an excess of heavy water on the planet. Though I suspect this would mostly result in a remelted and highly radioactive core and mantle which might just be the thing to revive the economy.

Now that I have the geologic arm waving out of my system its time to pick on the more conventional annoyances.

At the time of Kryptons collapse and detonation the skies were well with seemingly self contained flying skyscrapers.  They appeared able to hover at any elevation and largely ignored aerodynamics in favour of style.  Since they clearly knew the failure was coming why could not a few city ships escape. A failure made even more senseless in the face of two technologies that would allow a hot restart of the civilization nearly anywhere.  Replicator level additive manufacturing and exo-womb technology. With those technologies in their control extinction should have been near impossible.

Since Kryptonian technology is not to blame you have to consider their culture.  With both a planned economy and planned reproduction it strikes me that a metaphor of Communism. The American vision of a communist state, grey and colourless.  Krypton is nearly all in greys, with a few speckles of gold on the big hats to show rank. In the Fortress of Solitude, the communist metaphor is delivered with a proverbial hammer in the form of the animated history of Krypton done in the style of soviet art deco. Lastly baby pod was modeled after this classic space probe body.

Place superbaby here.
Luna 9

Yet even if I accept the soviet Krypton metaphor and the empire collapsed because the center stopped managing the fringes I still have trouble with the wholesale extinction of the race.  Zod states that their culture had an empire lasting 100,000 years.  A time span longer than we have been making cave paintings, alters my view of Ka El and any other surviving Kryptonians.

From that moment on Ka El, stopped being the lost son of a dead civilization, and became the last son of a has been civilization.  For at least 100,000 years they terraformed worlds, expanded through the galaxy and failed to produce splinter cultures.  Am I to believe that not one colony broke off to pursue its own agenda, or that the terraforming was so technology dependant that one failed energy shipment dooms your world.  Am I? If yes than I am convinced that they earned their doom, and Krypton truly was a has been civilization.  They had a run and failed.  To further doom them, the only template for the kryptonian people was on one memory chip modeled after Lucy's head.  The moral of the movie, always have an off site backup.

The nitpicking list.

• As my sister pointed out if Superman can function in a vacuum and kryptonia air weakens him don't breath
• Alternately He has a Cloaca and breathing is not the only gas exchange option for him.
• The alien USB key was found not to be on the periodic table and therefore non terrestrial.  Find a better chemist. 
• Metropolis is nearly equatorial, its antipode was depicted as being in the south Indian ocean, but native net fisherman was not dressed for anything but the tropics. 
• The Phantom drive plus Phantom drive = black hole final battle would have won Stephan Hawking his Nobel Prize, if any instruments where their to measure it.  The resulting singularity would have been small enough to evaporate in a small fraction of a second, proving him right.
• On Ellesmere island, night is a season.  And 40 below is only the beginning of cold. 
• The west coast fourth wall is thin, in good ways.  Canadian Shoulders exist and only a Canadian production team would do with a logging truck and trees what they did.   
• It took 12 years but a movie came out for the american audience that depicts skyscrapers being demolished.
• During a redundantly long battle, full of hulk smash moments, was waiting for it to end so I could have more plot.  
• In the Kryptonian sky a moon is shown as already broken up with massive chunks conveniently hovering in space.  Hollywood it is time you learn about Roche limits. 
• What organ got repurposed to produce x-rays
• Did Smallville have a cancer outbreak in the late 1990s from Clark Kents uncontrolled X-ray vision.  

There are naturally endless was to pick on this movie but this was my things. 

Inspiration VS The other stuff.

Greetings.

When last I posted here I contemplated a terrible career move. I put my fingers to work because I realized it was not a joke and the conditions are favourable. The goal to finish a first draft of a novel before the money and time window starts to close. This I am taking seriously. Today, I find contemplate why this time window is being better used. And the answer is largely I said screw inspiration its time to get to work.  

Don't get me wrong there was inspiration. The inspiration for the novel is ten years old. The outline grew out of some narratives of Antarctic exploration. I toyed with, and day dreamed about various aspects of the fictional universe over the years. The first chapter was started several times over the years. Forward progress was always limited. The same mistakes kept me trapped in the first chapter.  

The first mistake, to proofread and revise freshly written work.  This sucks the momentum out of the project.  When the block you are fixing is the first chapter of many, trying to make it perfect is a waste. The full scope of the people and places in the universe is unknown, so how could you know what the perfect opening is.

Similarly I would delay because not all the technical details I needed to satisfy my intellect were filled. 

The second major mistake was waiting for inspiration.  Inspiration is great, a project of the scope which I am attempting is born of inspiration. The shape of the world the arc of the stories are inspired, but so much of what comes from inspiration for me are the big general things.   To write a sci-fi novel Grand Big Ideas are key, but they need to be connected with the little human moments.  

Now I choose to sit down everyday and write.  The skeleton created by inspiration gets its flesh when put myself down to the job of connecting A to B. I am not always sitting down on fire with ideas. Often I have a sketch of what will happen next and to whom.  I write it knowing it will not likely survive the rewrite and I may not even like the phrasing or style I just used, but I need to finish the draft. 

So I plug a head. I choose to keep myself thinking about the people and the world.  I will go for walks to clear my head, and often plot out the next 700 to 1000 words. It is a conscious choice, I fight the urge to land in a lower energy state that of not thinking about the project.  I do not spend my time being inspired I am choosing to spend my energy on being creative.  That choice has taken me from thinking 500 words is a good day to doing 1100 words on a regular basis. 

The novel exists as a nearly 4 dimensional object in my head, with past incarnations, future revisions and the central backbone. The first draft gets written with the knowledge that it falls short of what I would wish people to read. The first draft gets written so that it can be built into a book that others will find engaging.  The first draft is written with an awareness of its flaws but to keep moving I do not dwell. 

There is one other thing I know about the first draft. Each new sentence expands the world, both forward into the story and back.  This enrichment only comes from plowing ahead. That progress lets me tolerate the errors and shortcomings.  Only by writing to the end can I loop back and make the beginning and middle fit perfectly.  

Typing fast and living Cheaply.

Alexander van Houten. 

More Punctuated than Equilibrium

Greetings.

Last night I found myself reading about luck and success.  In the light of Richard Wiseman's work it would seem my actions placed me in the unlucky camp.  Specifically I sought certainty and had a rigid notion of success.  Certainly the last 4 years were built around an intended outcome that when realized proved unsatisfying.  What is on my mind this morning is why now. It is fair to say my geologic career is more punctuated that equilibrium, why did I now choose to change focus.

This is not the first time I have had a layoff.  This is not the first time I have wanted to write.  This is not the first time I have had time off and some cash.  And this is not the best time, that would have been in January 2012 when I was favoured with a large one time cash surplus.  So what changed.  Why did I wake up this morning and know I was getting up to write.

The answer comes in two parts.

 Firstly I did not know the four year experiment would end in unhappiness.  When I went to BCIT, the experiment was still starting yes I had written off field work but I needed to test where I could fit in the industry.  The assumption being tested was if I found the right position in the industry I could be happy there. Even as recently as January 2012 the data was inconclusive. I did not yet know that work would get no better. This winter and spring proved conclusive, I was happier there, than doing fieldwork, but not happy.  Then I got laid off.

Secondly control.   Careful planning had gotten me to where I was, but the weighted random number generator that is the price of gold drove me backwards.  I could plan all the passionless career moves that I would need to remain in the geology/GIS field but as long as I am tied to the mining sector my job security is at least partly governed by stock markets random number generators.   I no longer want to be governed by that boom bust cycle.

It is the twin motivations, the failed experiment and my setbacks being too far beyond my control that are driving my new motivations. The four year experiment proved that I can engineer my own success. The exploration industry has shown I want to fail on my own terms too. I now want to control more of my successes and more of my failures and I can not do that while gold's value bounces around as people try to measure their insecurities.

So I get up to write.  If the words suck it is because I did not try to make them better.  There are a lot of ifs, and my optimism is at least partly tied to my bank balance.  But It was my motivation to get up.  Getting up is normal but to get up earlier rather than later so I can get to work on the project that is magical.

So remember live cheap and type fast.

From here.

Where Do I go from here.

When last I wrote here, I had explored where I had ended up and looked at some places I passed through on the way. A needed exploration of what was tried.  While I no longer want the same jobs I have held in past it is not all regret.  There were some good adventures and I am happy that I have settled in Vancouver.   The pressing question is where do I go from here.

 That question lacks a clear answer.  The first response in looking for jobs is to try to find something the same yet different.  There is a comfort in knowing there is familiar work around.  Yet reading those job postings is dull.  Being technically capable, does not make the job interesting.  I read them and know some time after the learning curve levels off I will bore and my indifference will surface.

To make matters worse the job postings that best fitted my skills and experience were both in the oil and gas sector.  I am only indifferent to getting gold out of the ground, I might be actively hostile in dealing with the burning stuff, and burning stuff extraction and transport industries.  And yet my historic failure of imagination  leaves me unable to see myself in the roles described in other job description.  The process has only just begun, I will seek out jobs because well between boredom and the need for cash flow something will have to be found.

As I write this line it has been three weeks almost to hour since I had the talk at work.  The lack of work is a mixed blessing.  At first a relief, there was a pent up need for a vacation I never could get myself to take, I was feeling spent overall.  But I was used to filling a chair for eight hours and providing useful services for up to 6 of them.  The first week sailed by before I started to wallow in intellectual doldrums.  As my brain scrambled for something to engage upon it tripped across a novella I started years ago and had last touched last October, it has been dominating my thoughts since.

Its terrible timing to take to writing pulp fiction.  Both from the standpoint of my own professional best interest and on the simple fact that it is never a good time to try to become a write, now is worse than usual.  Yet when I look back at inspirations, personal heros,  the names that cross my mind are not geologists, cartographers or prospectors, they are writers.   So I fail to answer the questions of what job I want and fail to imagine where my career is going, I can answer a different set of questions. Those answers doom me to a fate of poverty and drudgery.

Yet here is a field I have studied when left to my own devices, a hobby I have toyed with since forever.  I have read and absorbed countless books.  Talks and books on writing have made me think I could do that.  Many free hours up north were spent learning a few things about writing.  Perhaps I spent too much time learning a few things about the business without product of my own but that is past.      So thinking about what I always wanted to do I find a body of unfinished work.  

For ten years three major stories have been spinning around my head.  There are others but they lack form.   Three tails lodged in my brain for as long as I have been chipping at rocks and pining for chance to go home.   Currently I have picked up the one that is the easiest to write. Yet I know its a terrible tactical move.  No matter how fast I write how well I write, I will have an eviction notice before I have a rejection letter.  Yet foolishly I have let these ideas lodge themselves in my brain.

There has been an underlying assumption in the majority of the professional choices I have made since I got my undergrad degree. Safety.  I took the suring things when I could get them, I planned the last 4 years on making my life more secure.  And those choices became increasingly passionless.   Is it time to take a risk.

 Find a job what leaves me with enough energy to consider writing more frequently.  The mind numbing technical jobs have contributed to the sharp decline in blog posts.  While I am trying to get my bearings I will live cheaply and type quickly.

In the words of Spider Robinson.
Do The Next Thing.

Cheers.

There and Back Again.

Greetings again.
This is the second post on digesting my lay off.  Here I will ramble about various factors that lead to my ending up here, and perhaps more importantly find a way of avoiding that fate again.  Not simply the fate of getting laid off but the dissatisfaction that came with jobs I have had in the past.

Getting laid off, and having it happen after I was at my best is not an isolated event.  Its not at all surprising considering the industry I landed in.  I took my second exploration job just after I finished my undergrad.  Gradschool was considered, but after the better part of 7 years chewing through my undergrad I was spent.  So I took a job with a gold company in the Northwest Territory.


The opportunity to develop my career was there, the drive was lacking.
Work was not bad at first, and I can see the tone of this blog change over time as the stagnation set it, but it was largely routine technical work.  Ultimately I am too much of a home body to endure collecting data for someone else's project while living on the far side of the middle of nowhere.  It cannot be ignored that I saw too many folks in the field who were sacrificing access to friends and family for the job, when those were the things I most wanted.

   

  The failure to connect with several branches of a field enforces the notion it is not for me.  Leaving me with the question what do I want do when I grow up.  So far I have a far better idea of what I do not want to do.  Those technical but repetitive jobs are a mental cul-de sac that leave me spent and angry, this is true whether it is clicking a mouse in MapInfo or taking notes of drill core. Those posts lead to periods of slow decline and burnouts.

 This leads me to believe that I want more control and intellectual engagement in my work.   Beyond that I have little vision as to what an exciting engaging job could be.  In a paragraph deleted from the first draft of this I rambled about the assumption that I would  become an academic.  It fit everyone's image of me and it is the only professional sphere where I can imagine what the work is like.   However, assuming defaults is not the goal of this post.  I want to cast aside a few things and reassess from there.  So here then is a list of the knows.

One, I have always had a deep and abiding interest in space exploration.  I think I read Red Mars 5 times.  The sense of place that book built made me think of mars as a place.  It has contributed to my love of deserts.  I used to spent too much of my spare time keeping track of as many deep space missions as I could.

Two, I have read too much science fiction. And sometimes think that with my melange of science knowledge and science fiction ideas I should become a paper back writer.

Three, if you ask me to describe my dream job, I can't. I can image working in academia only because I have spent enough time around such things as to have some image of what a career there could look like.  If you ask me what I could see me doing in the public or private sector I have no clue.  There is a complete failure of imagination there.

4, The most creative period in my life was a brief period in Kelowna nearly ten years ago.  I had finished the semester, I was working part time and was waiting for my field job to start.  I had a computer that barely ran, no internet connection and time.  It was during this period I started to develop the stories I still have to finish writing.

5, As awful as my grammar and spelling are, I still find the act of writing one of the most satisfying things I can do.

6, Work this spring was made extra difficult by many friends and acquaintances posting their academic or professional milestones, while my work was staying the same.

This list is incomplete and inconclusive.  There is one conclusion I can draw, many of the choices that left me unhappy were safe bets.  The devil I knew, because jumping outside the box was too intimidating.  When you have been moving around the same box for 9 years and not finding either security or happiness its time to get a ladder.

Nine Years Spent.

Greetings.
I have come into some more time recently.
On the eve of my ninth year working in the mineral exploration sector I got laid off again.   This is similar to the fall of 2008, where market forces drove my employer to abandon the camp.   All in all I am rather sanguine about this.  At some level I was always waiting for it.  I knew I was the most expendable person in the office and the least engaged.

There were many draft posts about my relation to my now former job, and the industry I have worked for. These were either never written or were incomplete overly cautious fragments of the whole.  Any readable narrative is incomplete, however, it will become clear why this state of play is more a relief than a burden.

There are many factors that cause tension between me and the mining exploration industry, there are the obvious things such as working in the ass end of nowhere, repetitive jobs and long hours. Then there are the less obvious stressors, the right wing bias behind everything, common global warming denial, and more.
 Detracting from my motivation is the fact they are trying solve a problem I am indifferent to.  To make people rich through finding a possible or real gold mine does not drive me. I honestly don't care about getting more gold out of the ground  It emberases me to have stayed so long in professional world I fit so poorly into, this then is the story of my last best hope for the industry.

 The job, I got sent home from was the job I had described in my grant application, prior to applying to  BCIT four years ago.  Land a desk job in an industry where I had past experience and apply my recent training.  Everything about this plan was reasonable and logical but the execution was flawed and passionless. In the end I had landed exactly where I had planned to go and stayed there.  It was still an improvement at first.    

The job was a blessing after after bouncing between some no fun at all geology contacts I was happy for some security and work that kept me in the city. There was an undeniable satisfaction in having achieved a goal set two years prior through planning and work. Heck at the beginning I had an office.

As with any new venture the learning curve keeps things interesting.  The level of engagement was high at first, it faded over time.  There were only so many problems to solve in such a small office.  To make matters worse, I  had not quite enough freedom.  I was stuck working under the company IT contractor, a man who equates, tens of cups of coffee a day with being well rested and equates doing lots of things at once as being productive. While he gets lots done, much of was support for outside ventures.  Naturally he sucked at delegating.

This left me with either the option of trying to work around him and come up with my own fixes or wait for him to focus long enough on solutions related to in office problems. In the end, I would try to implement my own fixes and then change gears and work with his plan, neither got the attention needed.

During my post, I spent a lot of time with a software suite called MapInfo.  A collection of bugs and patches intended to display and interpret mappable data.  At first I was cursed with a compatibility bug, our old edition was incompatible with windows 7.  Later we updated and it ran smoother.  Even when it ran smoothly the style of the workflow and interface proved irritating for me.  Producing any thing was a series of short attention sucking jumps from one point of view to another.  Forever changing my focus and shortening my attention span.

This endless string of micro tasks fragmented my already flighty attention span.  It would often take the better part of an evening to slow my brain down enough to read a novel, to decompress enough to write was almost always out of the question.  It chewed at me, a slower drain on my resources than the stress of isolation in the bush but it built up.  I felt I was getting dumber over time, I never got my head out of that cycle long enough to consider my next move.  Office drone work took just enough that I could not reevaluate.  It made me feel a little depressed for a long time.

In a timey whimey way this brings me to last week.  Things had been slowing down for a while. I was spending more time on low priority longer term projects because there was little pressing work to do.  Heck I estimate that the small project took about 6 hours to produce and that was the only concrete thing coming out that week.  On Wednesday of the week I was downright depressed, even hung over I can't recall the morning passing so slowly.  By 10am I felt like 6 hours had passed.  Thursday saw me over caffeinated, with an attention span of a small bird for ever jumping from view to view.  All I really wanted these last few unproductive weeks was to be outside in the cool sunny weather.  Friday was greeted with the question of why am I getting up to go to the office, and the question of what the heck am I going to do Monday.  I could not tell you what I did Friday morning, it likely amounted to little.  I do know that after lunch I actually tried to cook up a going forward plan, collect all my loose ends and turn them into some project that could sustain my interest into the summer and have me ready for the field season prep.  I did not come up with much.  It was in the process of trying to cook this up when I got summoned.

Now I am free of that job.  I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up.  But I have added one more thing to the list of things I don't want to be.  I want out of the Mining Exploration Industry for good.  This MapInfo job was my last best hope, It failed.  I am still open to work related to environmental sciences, geology or geospatial systems but mining exploration is something I am going to stay away from.

Coda
It has been just shy of 9 years since I took my first student job on an exploration project.  The pattern has been the same since. At first the thrill of a new project in a new place. Field work can be great, but the thrill wears off quickly.  Soon I am left drained, doing a repetitive job somewhere far from everyone I know.   This describes very nearly every field job I have ever done, the only thing that changed was the burnout time shrank.  

The four year experiment that ended in the secondary boardroom last week was not an outright failure.  While I no longer want to work for that industry, I am in a better position not to.  I have yet to take stock of what I have learned and what it could be applied, but I am less pigeon holed than I used to be.  

The Baroness

I have a roommate of sorts.  Mind you she weighs less then 3 kg and is covered in fur but company she is.  The Baroness, had the name Poppy at the SPCA, that did not stick with me. Something more regal was required.  Something reflective of the cat human power dynamic. So she became The Baroness.
Well her full and proper name and title is Lady Baroness von Soft Paws of Gallifrey.

The Baroness introduced herself to me at the shelter looking me in the eyes with her huge amber ones and reaching out and touching my beard.  You do not say no to a cat with a pink nose a sad face and curious paw.  I have seldom said no to her since.