Pixel Scroll 11/27 The Pixel Scrolled Back from Nothing at All

I’m off to Loscon for the day — so a very early Scroll.

(1) ARTISTS AND NEW WFA. Several tweets of interest about the call for submissions of World Fantasy Award designs.

The first three of nine tweets by John Picacio responding to discussion of his blog post “Artists Beware”.

(2) FAN CRITICS OF TOLKIEN. Robin Anne Reid’s “The question of Tolkien Criticism” answers Norbert Schürer’s “Tolkien Criticism Today” (LA Review of Books).

Fans can and do write critical commentary of Tolkien’s work, and not all critics/academics distance ourselves from being fans, a distancing stance that was perhaps once required to support the myth of academic objectivity. I suspect, given Schürer’s commentary on Tolkien’s work and style as well as his conclusion, that he would not identify as a fan. But his idea that the primary audience for Tolkien scholars is only fans (instead of other Tolkien scholars) strikes me as bizarre as does the idea that fan demands would affect what a critic would say:

Just as importantly, Tolkien should not be treated with kid gloves because he is a fan favorite with legions to be placated, but as the serious and major author he is (para.22).

Since the quote above is Schürer’s conclusion, he provides no evidence for this claim that critics treat Tolkien “with kid gloves” for fear of these legions of fans.

(3) REACHER. Andy Martin observed Lee Child writing the Jack Reacher novel Make Me from start to finish. Martin, a University of Cambridge lecturer, and the author have a dialog in about their experience in “The Professor on Lee Child’s Shoulder” at the New York  Times Sunday Review.

MARTIN I was sitting about two yards behind you while you tapped away. Trying to keep quiet. I could actually make out a few of the words. “Nothingness” I remember for some obscure reason. And “waterbed.” And then I kept asking questions. I couldn’t help myself. How? Why? What the…? Oh surely not! A lot of people thought I would destroy the book.

CHILD Here is the fundamental reality about the writing business. It’s lonely. You spend all your time writing and then wondering whether what you just wrote is any good. You gave me instant feedback. If I write a nicely balanced four-word sentence with good rhythm and cadence, most critics will skip right over it. You not only notice it, you go and write a couple of chapters about it. I liked the chance to discuss stuff that most people never think about. It’s weird and picayune, but obviously of burning interest to me.

MARTIN And the way you care about commas — almost Flaubertian! I tried to be a kind of white-coated detached observer. But every observer impinges on the thing he is observing. Which would be you in this case. And I noticed that everything around you gets into your texts. You are an opportunistic writer. For example, one day the maid was bumping around in the kitchen and in the next line you used the word “bucket.” Another time there was some construction work going on nearby and the next verb you used was “nail.” We go to a bookstore and suddenly there is Reacher, in a bookstore.

(4) ACCESSIBLE CONS. Rose Lemberg adopts a unified approach to “#accessiblecons and Geek Social Fallacies”.

“Geek Social Fallacies” are in themselves a fallacy. There are many people – not just the disabled -pushed away from fandom.

It’s not expensive to get a ramp in the US with pre-planning. Most hotels have them ready because they are ADA-compliant. If you invite a person in a wheelchair to speak at a con, and there is no ramp, you ostracized them. Own it.

It’s not because it’s too difficult, too expensive, it’s not because the fan did not ask nicely or loudly or politely enough. It’s because you did NOT accept them as they are. It’s because you ostracized them. Will you own it?

Year after year, I see defensiveness. I see the same arguments repeat. It’s too pricey. It’s the disabled person’s fault. Where are our Geek Social Fallacies when it comes to access? Can we as a community stop ostracizing disabled fans already?

(5) LON CHANEY. Not As A Stranger (1955) will air on Turner Classic Movies this Thursday December 3 at 10:00 a.m. Eastern; Lon Chaney cast as Job Marsh, father of Robert Mitchum, a moving portrayal that ranks among his very best.

(6) SF SCREENPLAYS. Nick Ransome, “Writing Science Fiction Screenplays” at Industrial Scripts.

Sci-Fi is the only genre, apart from the Western, still to resist the post-modern impulse. This could be due to the fact that Sci-Fi is not a genre at all, but the actual reason that Sci-Fi so completely resists the post-modern relativity of time and meaning is because that is what it was always about in the first place. There are no realities or meanings more relative than those revealed by Science Fiction.

In its purest form, the Sci-Fi narrative presents a polarity of moral choices and asks the most difficult of existential questions. This polarity is encapsulated by the utopian (ordered, no conflict, boring) and the dystopian (messy, intriguing, human).

LOGAN’S RUN is the best example in terms of story theory because although the action begins in a utopia, we soon realise that in fact we are in a dystopian nightmare (the Act One reversal). Films like BRAZIL, DARK CITY and THE MATRIX may start with a semblance of reality (the world as you just about know it) but then fairly swiftly make us aware that we are actually in a version of hell (or rather an allegory of the world as it really is).

(7) CIXIN LIU. A Cixin Liu interview about “The future of Chinese sci-fi” at Global Times was posted August 30, however, I believe this is the first time it’s been linked here.

GT: Some Chinese fans have said they want to band together to vote on the World Science Fiction website next year. What’s your opinion on this? Liu: That’s the best way to destroy The Three-Body Trilogy. And not just this sci-fi work, but also the reputation of Chinese sci-fi fans. The entire number of voters for the Hugo Awards is only around 5,000. That means it is easily influenced by malicious voting. Organizing 2,000 people to each spend $14 is not hard, but I am strongly against such misbehavior. If that really does happen, I will follow the example of Marko Kloos, who withdrew from the shortlist after discovering the “Rabid Puppies” had asked voters to support him.

GT: Many fans believe that even if The Three-Body Problem had benefited from the “puppies,” it still was deserving of a Hugo Award. Do you agree? Liu: Deserving is one thing, getting the award is another thing. Many votes went to The Three-Body Problem after Marko Kloos withdrew. That’s something I didn’t want to see. But The Three-Body Problem still would have had a chance to win by a slim margin of a few votes [without the “puppies”]. After the awards, some critics used this – the support right-wing organizations like the “puppies” gave The Three-Body Problem – as an excuse to criticize the win. That frustrated me. The “puppies” severely harmed the credibility of the Hugo Awards. I feel both happy and “unfortunate” to have won this year. The second volume was translated by an American translator, while the first and third were translated by Liu Yukun (Ken Liu). Most Chinese readers think the second and the third books are better than the first, but American readers won’t necessarily feel the same way. So I’m not sure about the Hugo Awards next year. I’m just going to take things in stride.

GT: It’s not easy for foreign literature to break into the English language market. What do you think of Liu Yukun’s translation? Liu: Although only my name is on the trophy, it actually belongs to both myself and Liu Yukun. He gets half the credit. He has a profound mastery of both Oriental and Western literature. He is important to me and Chinese sci-fi. He has also introduced books from other countries to the West. A Japanese author once told me that the quality of Japanese sci-fi is much better than China’s, but its influence in the US is much weaker. That’s because they lack a bridge like Liu Yukun.

(8) RETRO COLLECTION. Bradley W. Schenck is pleased with the latest use of his Pulp-O-Mizer.

I ran across a post at File770.com featuring the third volume of a collection of stories eligible for the 1941 Retro Hugo Awards at next year’s Worldcon. The collection is an ongoing project by File770 user von Dimpleheimer.

Since the third volume is a big batch of stories by Henry Kuttner and Ray Cummings I followed the link and grabbed a copy, only to discover that von Dimpleheimer had made the eBook cover with my very own Pulp-O-Mizer. This put a smile all over my face. Like, actually, all over my face.

So I went back and downloaded the first two volumes and, sure enough, they had also been Pulp-O-Mized. This may be my very favorite use of the Pulp-O-Mizer to date.

(9) TEASER. A new Star Wars: The Force Awakens teaser was posted on Thanksgiving. I’m leery of viewing these TV spots because I’m already sold on the movie and don’t want to dilute the experience of watching it. YMMV.

The minute-long teaser, dubbed “All The Way,” debuted on Facebook, but will also appear as a TV spot. IT finds Andy Serkis’ Supreme Leader Snoke character telling Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren, “Even you have never faced such a test.”

[Thanks to Francis Hamit, Will R., and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jonathan Edelstein.]

245 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 11/27 The Pixel Scrolled Back from Nothing at All

  1. I’m pretty sure there was a child incarnation of Anaander Miaani in Ancillary Sword as well.

  2. One thing Brian got right – he got the word out that A Succession of Bad Days was less than $3.

  3. (I too have no quarrel with the fact that Sweet’s covers sold books. I approve of selling books, in general. And I am genuinely happy to know that he was a good guy, and that he did cool art in his off time. I really am trying to be focused when I speak ill of some work, and not always succeeding.)

  4. Drake: the operative question is whether other beings in the universe can match our stupidity.

  5. BTW in enumerating great self pubbed novels I momentarily forgot Rudy Rucker. (Though I somehow doubt he really needs Alan Rinzler’s help, at this point.)

  6. @Peace: That was really interesting about Earth’s Fortunate Catastrophes. Thanks.

    I’m also wondering now how often intelligent life might evolve on planets that lack fossil fuels and thus a ready energy source to bridge the gap between hydro power and solar/nuclear.

  7. @Jim and others: This is where I pop in to recommend Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee’s Rare Earth, laying out a multi-part argument for why we should expect complex life to be really, really rare. It’s fascinating stuff; here as in some of Ward’s other books (he’s become one of my favorite science writers), they point out that Earth itself has often not been what we’d call “Earth-like” and explain how it will stop being hospitable to life much earlier than you might think, long before the Earth itself goes away.

    One interesting-to-me thing is that Ward and Brownlee don’t argue that life as such is likely to be scarce. They spend a fair amount of time, in fact, on how quickly life appeared once it became at all feasible. So there’s this possibility of a universe rich in worlds covered in algae and its equivalents.

  8. Thanks to those that corrected me about AM in Ancillary Sword. I was getting mixed up with the Palace scene in previous book and thinking it opened travelling in space. However a quick look at my copy of the book reveals the first paragraph literally describing what we see on the hardcover book art so there you go.

  9. I checked too. Mianaai is there, very very *very* briefly, in child form, right at the start, almost a continuation of the last scene of the first book.

    … And then is gone and the book happens.

    It’s a pretty scene, but not really indicative of *this* book.

  10. @JJ: My Earthsea books are a mish-mash of covers, so I didn’t know the Pauline Ellison covers had a spine connection like that. Cool!

    The first cover I have is this weird surreal, ugly, dark green cover from 1968 (not on the post you linked to). Shudder! The second is by Pauline Ellison; I like hers best of the ones I have. The third is by David Smee. I don’t like Smee’s cover for the first book, but the one I have (The Farthest Shore) is fine.

    Thanks for the chalk trompe l’oeil link; amazing stuff!

    @Camestros: I like Sweet’s covers for the Covenant books, but then, they were the only ones I saw for many years, and I read them young(ish). I like the third the best, while the second is my least favorite. Anyway, different tastes.

    @andyl: I’m from the U.S. and don’t feel the SubPress Leckie covers are all that great. Not bad, but not as good as I’d expect from SubPress.

  11. @Camestros:

    “While it is true that given enough dice rolls it is likely that one really unlikely dice roll will actually occur, the event as observed, is still unlikely and a rational observer is entitled to assume the less unlikely conclusion that the dice were rigged”

    A rational observer is entitled to assume all kinds of silly things, but “the dice were rigged” is not a hypothesis that makes any sense unless you know more about the context: did the unlikely event happen on the very first roll, several times in a row, in a way that is suspiciously advantageous to whoever’s rolling the dice based on the rules of the game, etc. Otherwise, if someone comes up to me and says “I just rolled these dice 5,000,000,000,000 times, and now look: four sixes!!! What do you think?”— “Stop doing that” would be a reasonable response; “The dice were rigged” would not be.

  12. re: Ancillary covers.

    Thanks to everyone who linked to the different cover art. That was intriguing. After seeing all those, though, I still like the original divided ship painting best. I’m really glad there were no people images to mess with my head movie while I read. 🙂

  13. @ David Goldfarb
    Like, on the order of .001? It might be that the probability of intelligence ever arising is really extremely remote, to the point where you would search a thousand galaxies to find even one technical civilization. And we think that the lower bound on the solution is 1, because we exist. But our nearest neighbor is outside the Local Group, and we have no way of knowing that.

    I tend toward this being the most likely explanation whether or not the technical problems can be solved.

    Looking at our biosphere’s history, simple life evolved almost immediately after the planet cooled somewhat and is probably fairly common in the universe. Complex life took a couple of billion years to get started and didn’t really take off until about 600 million years ago.

    Then look at our line’s evolution. Many animals use tools and a few even pass on some knowledge to their offspring/family group.

    We are a fluke, though. Brains are expensive organs and most animals evolve just enough to succeed in their environment. It took a series of odd environmental pressures applied to just the right organism at just the right times to end up with the homo genus brains. It took another series of pressures and mutations to get the homo sapien brain and we came within a few thousand individuals (by some hypotheses) of going extinct. (My personal head canon is that the near extinction event was probably what supercharged our species by concentrating some traits in a small population.)

    Whether the remaining homo erectus or neanderthalensis populations would have continued on a similar path to technological civilization is an interesting question. I doubt it, unless they underwent further evolutionary changes. We are, imo, different from them, though. They had been living in Eurasia for hundreds of thousands of years doing essentially the same things. We came boiling out of Africa less than 100,000 years ago and spread to every continent and island (absorbing or out competing the other homo species) in a few millenia, innovating and inventing at every turn.

    That very contingent history that produced an intelligence capable of a technological civilization seems like a really, really unlikely series of events that will not be reproduced on this planet with any other species (if we disappear) and is unlikely to happen on any other life-bearing planet.

  14. I did find the lecture I was referencing to earlier, heard it all the way back in March! It was spoken by Dr Kelsey Johnson, number 5 is the topic pertaining to the Drake equation and you can find it here:
    Link at Cosmoquest

    The whole thing is worth a listen if you have the time.

  15. Eli on November 29, 2015 at 10:09 am said:

    @Camestros:

    “While it is true that given enough dice rolls it is likely that one really unlikely dice roll will actually occur, the event as observed, is still unlikely and a rational observer is entitled to assume the less unlikely conclusion that the dice were rigged”

    A rational observer is entitled to assume all kinds of silly things, but “the dice were rigged” is not a hypothesis that makes any sense unless you know more about the context: did the unlikely event happen on the very first roll, several times in a row, in a way that is suspiciously advantageous to whoever’s rolling the dice based on the rules of the game, etc. Otherwise, if someone comes up to me and says “I just rolled these dice 5,000,000,000,000 times, and now look: four sixes!!! What do you think?”— “Stop doing that” would be a reasonable response; “The dice were rigged” would not be.

    If you knew that there had been a very, very large number of dice rolls, sure. Otherwise no. If you see somebody roll four sixes you are wiser to assume ‘rigged dice’ than ‘maybe there were an awful lot of dice rolls’.
    If at some point in the future we’ve discovered a gazillion earth like planets teeming with life and we map out the distribution of just-how-smart creatures on those planets get and we are way off at one end of the distribution then I’d find it plausible 🙂

  16. It does seem like at this point that *if* we find a planet teeming with life it’s quite possible all the life will be algae, or some equivalent.

    ETA: It would stil be a very, very exciting discovery.

  17. Peace Is My Middle Name on November 29, 2015 at 1:52 pm said:

    It does seem like at this point that *if* we find a planet teeming with life it’s quite possible all the life will be algae, or some equivalent.

    True – if we ‘discovered’ Earth by sticking a pin at some point in its existence then odds are we wouldn’t find intelligent life.

  18. If at some point in the future we’ve discovered a gazillion earth like planets teeming with life and we map out the distribution of just-how-smart creatures on those planets get and we are way off at one end of the distribution then I’d find it plausible

    We do have some data, though.

    There are several examples of animals evolving extremely modified bodies and behaviors. Flight has evolved at least 4 times, land animals returning to the water has happened at least 4 times, water animals developing the necessary changes to survive on land has happened at least 3 times, etc.

    How many intelligences capable of technological civilization have evolved on this planet in 4.5 billion years? The dinosaurs didn’t do it in more than 120 million years of being the dominant animals.

    The glimmerings of such intelligence has only manifested in one family in all of Earth’s history* and only one species of one genus of that family actually developed said intelligence after some very contingent events.

    This doesn’t prove the point one way or the other. We definitely need info from other earth-like planets. But this data does say that high intelligence is not a trait that has been commonly selected for in Earth’s history.

    *That we know of. There may have been primitive, tool using dinosaurs a la australopithecines.

  19. junego on November 29, 2015 at 2:30 pm said:

    We do have some data, though.

    There are several examples of animals evolving extremely modified bodies and behaviors. Flight has evolved at least 4 times, land animals returning to the water has happened at least 4 times, water animals developing the necessary changes to survive on land has happened at least 3 times, etc.

    How many intelligences capable of technological civilization have evolved on this planet in 4.5 billion years? The dinosaurs didn’t do it in more than 120 million years of being the dominant animals.

    The glimmerings of such intelligence has only manifested in one family in all of Earth’s history* and only one species of one genus of that family actually developed said intelligence after some very contingent events.

    I’ll concede the contingent events that get us from our ape cousins to our current Donald Trump watching form. However, the distance from chimp to human is small in time. So it isn’t that hard to get from chimps to us, even if it depends on some coincidences and overcoming some contingent obstacles – like our baby heads being a bit on the big size, making childbirth difficult and dangerous.
    But there are lost of smartish animals about. Lots of sociable mammals for example. Some very smart birds out there also (e.g. crows), so I’d be optimistic about how smart dinosaurs could have been. Some quite bright cephlapods also, so it isn’t even a vertebrate trick.
    Moderate smarts is fairly common. Super smarts is very niche but the the gap between the two (i.e. from us to monkeys) isn’t that big in terms of time. It is rather like the example used in text books on evidence: there is a sense in which a 2.49 metre tall person is evidence that nobody is 2.5 metres tall but in fact it is the other way. Lots of near misses.

  20. The glimmerings of such intelligence has only manifested in one family in all of Earth’s history* and only one species of one genus of that family actually developed said intelligence after some very contingent events.

    This statement is not well-supported. Tool use and manufacture is widespread — elephants, bears, diverse birds, mustelids, etc. — and not at all unique to humans. There really isn’t a big gulf between human intelligence and the intelligence of diverse other creatures.

    The thing about human intelligence was a social arms race in conjunction with a metabolic shift away from muscle and toward brain tissue. That’s only really practical if your reproductive fitness depends on being smart AND you don’t have other constraints that cap the brain development. The thing about us wasn’t the arms race, it was the lack of a cap.

    Encephalization quotients have tended to increase over evolutionary time; it’s not clear what that suggests about the likelihood of a “lack of a cap” takeoff in an already social species.

  21. Graydon on November 29, 2015 at 3:26 pm said:

    The thing about human intelligence was a social arms race in conjunction with a metabolic shift away from muscle and toward brain tissue. That’s only really practical if your reproductive fitness depends on being smart AND you don’t have other constraints that cap the brain development. The thing about us wasn’t the arms race, it was the lack of a cap.

    I agree with most of what you said there but I disagree about the lack of a cap. We have a cap in terms of giving birth to babies with enormous heads. I suspect that similar issues have applied over time – maybe there have been a plethora of species that have evolved that were as smart as our recognizably human ancestors. However the social arms race benefits individuals rather than a species as a whole and consequently everybody getting smarter does not necessarily translate to a reduced chance of extinction. Maybe lots of really smart species never got past some near-extinction event.

  22. @Jim Henley

    OMGerd! That is either very cool or bl$$dy awful! I may have to download a sample and find out. Will report back if I don’t pass out laughing. :^}

  23. Those “Tales of the City” covers are gobsmacking. That they form a picture both of the front covers AND the spines shows a lot of work and love. Kudos to them. And what a lovely series that was.

    RIP Mr. Sweet, but gosh… those covers just SCREAM “70’s/80’s Extruded Fantasy Product”.

    @Kendall: I liked the cover for “Sorcerer of the Wildeeps” better than the book!

    @Stevie: Thanks for the offer. I shall in return offer to buy you a ticket to any festival in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, be it San Fran itself, Oakland, San Jose, Berkeley, or even east to Sacramento and the State Fair, or south unto the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Might start small with the county fair and various wine tastings.

  24. @ Camestros
    Lots of near misses.

    Granted, but in all this time only one like us…ever. That datum doesn’t say “Oh, it’s just an easy little change” to me. The examples I gave for flight, back to water, etc are big changes, and they happened several times each.

    I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I think it could point to development of a technological building intelligence as a pretty rare event that may happen as a spandrel to other evolutionary adaptations, which may mean it’s not selected for until very late in the process. So maybe “lots of near misses” is the ‘normal’ level of intelligence evolution usually creates within some number of species. Our level may just be an accidental and unlikely effect that only happens, on average, once per 100 billion planets that develop complex life.

    Obviously this is all total speculation, but, given the data, it seems to be as viable as extrapolating that there could be dozens or hundreds or thousands of tech civs out there just because we have developed one such in 4 billion years.

  25. junego on November 29, 2015 at 4:49 pm said:

    @ Camestros
    Lots of near misses.

    Granted, but in all this time only one like us…ever. That datum doesn’t say “Oh, it’s just an easy little change” to me. The examples I gave for flight, back to water, etc are big changes, and they happened several times each.

    I think what it means is that being super smart is not a great move in terms of species survival. As a species you evolve language and the capacity to deal with abstract ideas beyond what you actually encounter (probably because language results in the capacity to combine ideas in a flexible way) – but without a lot of humans working together that capacity doesn’t get you a big advantage in finding stuff to eat.

    Put another way. Super smarts isn’t that hard it is just that the pay-off in terms of species survival is so long term that you don’t encounter species that lasted to the our-big-brains-are-a-distinct-advantage-now phase?

  26. @Camestros Felapton —

    I agree with most of what you said there but I disagree about the lack of a cap. We have a cap in terms of giving birth to babies with enormous heads.

    Sorry, I was unclear. Not talking about difficulties with birth; lots of primates (eg., green vervet monkeys) have similar difficulties. Was talking about the metabolic exchange between muscle and brains. Chimps are about twice as strong as we are, pound for pound, and it’s down to a very simple metabolic signalling pathway change. Most organisms can’t make that tradeoff because getting that much weaker (slower, etc.) will reduce reproductive success more than the big brain increases it. You need the social and the tool-use and the metabolic freedom for the social arms race to act.

  27. @ Graydon

    How many intelligences capable of technological civilization have evolved on this planet in 4.5 billion years? The dinosaurs didn’t do it in more than 120 million years of being the dominant animals.

    The glimmerings of such intelligence has only manifested in one family in all of Earth’s history* and only one species of one genus of that family actually developed said intelligence after some very contingent events.

    Putting back the part of my quote that defines what kind of intelligence I was talking about, only helps me a little. I overstated my case a bit there…oops. Got a bit carried away with hyperbole. It doesn’t negate my main point, though.

    You’re correct that other animals from other classes/families use tools. We don’t actually know whether or not other tool using animals are capable of developing a technological civilization with sufficient brain and social development. All we know is that none but us have done it in hundreds of millions of years. Evolution/mother nature doesn’t seem to ‘value’ that niche and/or there is some barrier that makes it difficult to reach that niche.

    As far as an arms race versus socialization versus a “cap” versus whatever else, again, doesn’t negate my point that our development was very contingent and never happened before to any other species, unlike with flight, back to water, out of water, etc. So, apparently, such development is extremely rare, at least on this planet. It may be that whatever factors contributed to only one species developing such a civilization on Earth may mean that it’s extremely difficult to develop such a set of characteristics at all, anywhere.

  28. @ Camestros
    Put another way. Super smarts isn’t that hard it is just that the pay-off in terms of species survival is so long term that you don’t encounter species that lasted to the our-big-brains-are-a-distinct-advantage-now phase?

    EXACTLY! That’s my point. Why expect to find technical civilizations all over the galaxy when evolution doesn’t seem to favor that adaptation on Earth? We’re probably a weird, rare, oddball development, not part of an evolutionary ‘norm’.

  29. @ Graydon
    re: metabolic pathways

    What advantage did we gain by changing this metabolic path from the chimp form?

  30. @junego —

    There’s only ever one advantage; relative rate of reproductive success. 🙂

    In hominins, it looks like being social is more important than anything else. Human brains are brutally expensive; something like a fifth to a quarter of your total metabolic load runs your brain. So the hypothesis from the genetic changes is we switched from supplying energy to muscles to supplying energy to brains because a)it was possible (as it is not in chimps; no upright posture so tool carrying is a problem) and b)the runaway arms race for social success (and thus reproductive success) did the rest.

    Note that figuring out that standing upright happened before the increase in brain size was the great success of 20th century paleoanthropology. It’s not what had initially been expected. Also note that we live about three times longer than a mammal with our body mass “ought” (on the basis of some very consistent mass/lifespan graphs) to live. There’s been selection for ability to perform cultural transmission. So this is genetic confirmation of something that was already unsurprising.

  31. Rev. Bob: Alas, I watch too little TV to take advantage of the bonus multiple points. I may just have to stick to my best-guess-without-thinking-too-hard football predictions. At worst, you get 10 points just for answering each question.

    Re: Kinuko Craft – I became aware of her work when I began seeing it on Patricia McKillip covers – Ombria in Shadow is a particularly good one – and then I realized it was her art adorning my paperback copies of The Darkangel and A Gathering of Gargoyles. Her art is a fantastic match for both McKillip’s and Meredith Ann Pierce’s mythic fairy-tale narration styles.

  32. @Nicole: “I watch too little TV to take advantage of the bonus multiple points.”

    There are websites that catalog sound samples and trivia answers, if you’re into that. I usually record the opening minute or so of a prime-time HGTV hour-long show on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday to my iPad, since I have a way to play it and switch over to the app for audio check-in. Each of those HGTV samples works for up to five days, at a max of 12 hours/day, instead of being restricted to the usual ends-at-8am window. Remember, the app doesn’t listen to see if you’re still watching the show…

    I use the Monday sample between Tuesday afternoon and Thursday morning, the Wednesday from Thursday afternoon to Sunday morning, and the Saturday from Sunday afternoon to Tuesday morning. It’s a little bit of scheduling effort three days a week, but otherwise it’s just, “Oh, I’m not maxed out and not checked into anything? Check into the sample for some 4x points.”

    Wednesdays are good for the next couple of weeks because there’s a high-value show (10x) with big-payoff trivia (250/question for 6K/hour). That’s over half your daily points in one hour.

  33. re: Discworld book covers, I don’t remember if the Marc Simonetti Discworld covers were mentioned here or if I stumbled across them somewhere else, but his artwork is IMHO superior to Kidby. (Also IMHO, a squirrel with it’s tail dipped in paint would produce artwork superior to Kirby.) As little as I care about collecting deadtree fiction any more, I’d love to have a full set of high-end hardbacks with his covers.

    http://art.marcsimonetti.com/127814/1270280/illustration/sir-terry-pratchett-s-discworld

    (The most genius one is the cover for Small Gods.)

  34. Peace Is My Middle Name:

    I think that some of the popular arguments for why Earth is unusually suitable for life are valid, but others are post hoc. (By the original proposers, not by you.)

    For instance:

    A magnetic field is very useful for keeping an atmosphere (look at Mars, which has had most of it’s atmosphere blown away by the solar wind) but not absolutely necessary. Look at Venus, much closer to the Sun than either Earth or Mars, less massive than either, but with a much denser atmosphere than both, and no magnetic field to hold it in place. Swap the position of Mars and Venus, and instead of a cold (probably) lifeless rock, Mars would be—a warm, lifeless rock. But Venus in the position of Mars would still have it’s thick atmosphere and would be a temperature suitable for Life As We Know It. (It might need to be a bit closer or further out—I’m sure someone has done the math.). If Venus has retained an atmosphere this long, I have very little doubt that the more massive, cooler Earth would have retained a large part of its atmosphere even if our magnetic field had disappeared early in it’s history.

    Axial tilt—this is one of the post hoc assumptions—that since Earth has a 23 degree tilt, then a 23 degree tilt is hospitable to life. But we have absolutely no evidence that a tilt of 0 or 5 or 15 or 50 or 75 degrees isn’t just as hospitable. Even a 90 degree tilt doesn’t preclude complex life—it could just dig in and hibernate during the dark winter months. Look at the Earth—not only do we have massive amounts of ice near the poles and punishingly harsh winters in many inhabited areas, but we are actually upset about the idea of that going away!

    Having a large moon to stabilize or axial tilt is related post hoc assumption. It is possible that the moon does increase our axial stability (though IIRC there have been recent studies that say this effect has been overstated) but that doesn’t mean that our world would have no complex life without a moon. Changes in degree of axial tilt would be a challenge to life, but plate tectonics causes similar stresses over similar time periods (millions of plant or animal generations) and complex life is obviously up to the challenges of continental drift.

    Also related to the moon is the effect of tides—it has been argued that tides are critical for stirring the ocean in the shallow, near-shore continental shelf, and without the moon these waters would be more nutrient and oxygen poor, and therefore less suitable for complex life. I have no doubt that this is true, but even without our moon, the Earth would still have daily tides from the Sun, as would any other planet with oceans. Maybe not as strong as our lunar tides, but still useful.

    Tl;dr—don’t rule out the possibility of complex life on planets with no magnetic fields, no moons, and high axial tilts.

  35. @ Graydon

    Thanks for the info on the muscle strength discovery. Fascinating paper here (for anyone interested and still paying attention to this thread 😉
    Divergence of Human Muscle

    And here is a good analysis in non-technical language.
    Did Big Brains Sap Our Strength

    I have heard/read that one hypothesis for an energy saving change to ‘pay’ for a larger brain was diet and digestive system changes – more meat/fat, less roughage, eventually cooking our food to predigest equalling higher energy food, more easily digested and a smaller gut.

    Apparently this is another candidate for how evolution adjusted our body to support a resource-hungry and bigger brain by changing muscle metabolism so we ended up half as strong!

  36. Darren Garrison on December 1, 2015 at 5:19 am said:
    re: Discworld book covers, I don’t remember if the Marc Simonetti Discworld covers were mentioned here or if I stumbled across them somewhere else, but his artwork is IMHO superior to Kidby. (Also IMHO, a squirrel with it’s tail dipped in paint would produce artwork superior to Kirby.) As little as I care about collecting deadtree fiction any more, I’d love to have a full set of high-end hardbacks with his covers.

    http://art.marcsimonetti.com/127814/1270280/illustration/sir-terry-pratchett-s-discworld

    (The most genius one is the cover for Small Gods.)

    The first two images of Twofeather are rather racist. I would not be happy having those on my bookshelf.

  37. Twoflower, I mean. *sigh*

    I expect the artist was just doing a caricature style, but that particular caricature has baggage.

  38. I expect the artist was just doing a caricature style, but that particular caricature has baggage.

    You mean luggage…

  39. @junego –

    I have heard/read that one hypothesis for an energy saving change to ‘pay’ for a larger brain was diet and digestive system changes – more meat/fat, less roughage, eventually cooking our food to predigest equalling higher energy food, more easily digested and a smaller gut.

    I’ve heard that one, too, and while it has a certain appeal compared to orangs or gorillas I’ve never really liked it for chimps.

    Chimps eat, well, lots of things — raw meat, fruit, leaves, insects, fungus — but humans eat everything. Bird’s nests, fermented puffins, natt?, everclear, your more robust cheeses, and capsaicin peppers are not the culinary habits of a digestively delicate species. (Acorns. Manioc root. Some really ugly fish and shellfish. Cooking and forethought certainly help with this, but we’re collectively willing to eat everything.) So I find I like the muscle hypothesis better; they’ve got a mechanism and it conforms better with the observed habits of the two species.

  40. @ Graydon
    So I find I like the muscle hypothesis better; they’ve got a mechanism and it conforms better with the observed habits of the two species.

    I am interested in the muscle hypothesis, too, because it does make sense. The diet hypothesis is also still viable, though. There was almost certainly more than one adaptation that allowed for feeding a larger brain. There were a whole suite of changes that our bodies made in mostly small incremental steps, most of which had to be beneficial or, at the least, neutral. A small change in diet that allowed for a slightly more energy-hungry brain that allowed for better tool use that allowed for a mutation in muscle metabolism that reduced energy use that allowed for a slightly larger brain that allowed for more social cooperation that allowed for…etc.

    There is good evidence to support the diet/gut hypothesis, too. Our diet is appreciably different from chimps, less than 5% of theirs is meat and 20+% is leaves. We can’t even digest leaves for the most part. Looking at teeth wear in Austrlopithecines vs homo erectus shows a distinct change in diet, mostly away from leaves/roughage and, it’s inferred, to include more meat.
    Wild chimp diet

    There was also a mutation in human jaw muscles that reduced our bite strength and may have facilitated a bigger brain by allowing the skull plates to remain unfused much longer than in chimps.
    Jaw-Dropping Theory

    This would necessarily have required cooking/diet change just for our survival.

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