Analog Science Fiction and Fact 12/01/10 Read online

  Science fiction? Fantasy? Don’t worry about it. Readers of both will be happy.

  And that’s it for this year’s gift suggestions. Safe and happy holidays, and may the new year be a rewarding one for all.

  Copyright © Don Sakers

  Don Sakers is the author of A Rose From Old Terra and Dance for the Ivory Madonna. For more information, visit www.scatteredworlds.com.

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  UPCOMING EVENTS

  Anthony Lewis

  14–17 January 2011

  ARISIA 2011 (Boston area SF conference) at Weston Boston Waterfront Hotel. Writer Guest of Honor: Kelley Armstrong; Artist Guest of Honor; Josh Simpson; Fan Guest of Honor: René Walling; Webcomic Guest of Honor: Shaenon Garrity. Membership: $50 until 31 December 2010, $60 thereafter and at the door, students (13-25) $25. Info: www.arisia.org; [email protected]; PO Box 391596, Cambridge, MA 02139.

  11–13 February 2011

  CORFLU 28 (Fanzine fan conference) at The Domain Hotel, Sunnyvale, CA. Attending: USD60, GBP40, EUR55, AUD75, CAD65; Supporting: USD10, GBP5, EUR10, AUD12, CAD10. Info: http://corflu.org/registration.html; [email protected]; CorFlu 28, 962 West Weddell Dr. 15, Sunnyvale, CA 94043 OR Claire Brialey, 59 Shirley Road, Croydon, Surrey CR0 7ES, UK (UK and European registration—GBP only).

  18–20 February 2011

  BOSKONE 48 (New England Regional SF conference) at Boston Westin Waterfront Hotel. Guest of Honor: Charles Stross; Official Artist: Gregory Manchess; Special Guest: Charlaine Harris; Featured Filker: Erica Neely. Membership: $49 until 18 January 2011; more thereafter and at the door. Info: www.nesfa.org/boskone; [email protected]; (617) 776-3243 (FAX); Boskone 48, PO Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701.

  18–20 February 2011

  CONDFW X (Dallas/Fort Worth SF conference) at Crowne Plaza Suites, Dallas, TX. Guests of Honor: Jack McDevitt, Tim Powers, Brandon Sanderson. Membership: at the door $35/$15 adult/child 3-day; $20/$10 adult /child 1-day. Info: http://www.condfw.org/; [email protected]; ConDFW, 750 South Main, Suite 150, PMB 14, Keller, TX 76248.

  25–27 February 2011

  CONDOR (San Diego area SF conference) at Town and Country Resort Hotel, San Diego, CA. Theme: “Putting the science in science fiction.” Guest of Honor: Gregory Benford. Membership: $40 until 31 December 2010; $45 until 16 February 2011; $50 at the door; kids (13-17) $20; kids 12 and under, in tow free with paying adult. Info: http://condorcon.org/html/mainmenu.html; ConDor, P.O. Box 15771, San Diego, CA 92175-5771.

  17–21 August 2011

  RENOVATION (69th World Science Fiction Convention) at Reno-Sparks Convention Center, Reno, Nevada. Guests of Honor: Ellen Asher, Charles N. Brown, Tim Powers, Boris Vallejo. Membership from 1 October 2010 until some later date (see website for latest details): Attending adult: $180; Attending 17 to 21: $100; Attending 0 to 16: $75; Supporting: $50. [Ages as of 17 August 2011]. This is the SF universe’s annual get-together. Professionals and readers from all over the world will be in attendance. Talks, panels, films, fancy dress competition—the works. Nominate and vote for the Hugos. Info: http://www.renovationsf.org/, [email protected], PO Box 13278, Portland, OR 97213-0278. Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/RenovationThe-69th-World-Science-Fiction-Convention/112169025477179?ref=ts; LiveJournal: http://community.livejournal.com/renovationsf/

  Copyright © 2010 Anthony Lewis

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  BRASS TACKS

  Dear Stan,

  Thanks for printing my letter, and for the factual correction on “bahiana.” Thanks also for recounting your math-class experience (similar to many of my experiences in school) in “The Halo Handicap.” Many of the folks I know—many of whom read Analog—find it hard to believe that any teacher could teach as poorly and wrongly as some of the teachers I’ve had; when they read your similar experience, they may at least find it possible to believe that, yes, this is routinely done to children in our culture. (Is it routinely done to children in other cultures? Are they, too, routinely told that their conceptual leaps should have waited for next year? I do not know—I would very much like to know, and I would like even more to know how and why any culture gets the idea that it should do this to children.)

  In this issue (September 2010) “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” leaves me feeling more wonder and amazement than I’ve felt from an Analog story in years. (This contrasts to Analog’s editorials and nonfiction, which routinely amaze me.)

  “Pupa” pleased me, too, in large part for its smooth handling of a difficulty common in science fiction writing (how to create an alien name that’s unusual enough to seem plausibly alien, without being impossibly difficult for the Terran—and often English-speaking and monolingual—reader?) but even more for an element it shared with “Leviathan”: the effect on non-humans of various human ideas (specifically, ideas of freedom and self-determination). SF is full of stories where humans learn important things from aliens who—it seems—have no need whatsoever to learn anything correspondingly important from us: it is good to see the tables turned. After all—as far as we know—Analog’s readers are all humans. Readers enjoy seeing their own species have a thing or two to teach the rest of the cosmos. Come to think of it, a third story in this issue—“Spludge”—also uses that same notion.

  Another tale, “Red Letter Day,” deserves some kind of award from whoever gives out awards for the best new twist on time-travel.

  And “Eight Miles” was a Victorian marvel in miniature. As promised, the tale left me unsure that it hadn’t really happened.

  Kate Gladstone

  Dear Dr. Schmidt,

  Your editorial in the September issue, “The Halo Handicap,” was interesting and well considered—up to a point. Toyota Motors was a good example of mistakes made by folks with a long history of not making them. Recently (early June), Major League Baseball provided another example. A pitcher for the Detroit Tigers was one out away from completing a perfect game. Then the 27th batter hit a routine ground ball and was thrown out at first. But the umpire screwed up and called him safe.

  Predictably, this umpire suffered a fate similar to what you described for Toyota, and for your long-ago schoolteacher. Expected to be perfect, the ump (who seems to have a history of making reliably good calls) made a perfectly human mistake, and had to endure scorn, ridicule, and regrets that would never have been visited on someone who screwed up routinely. Worse, his mistake was made at the most unfortunate time, so its consequences were uncommonly dramatic. If the same thing had happened in, say, the middle of the third inning, then thoughts about a perfect game would never have been an issue. The bad call would have been just like others that are made often enough, and the pitcher might have been thrilled to throw a one-hit game. Timing and circumstances can change the magnitude of mistakes in ways way out of proportion to the mistakes themselves.

  So our expectations, along with timing and circumstance, can quickly turn good people into bums. And, as you observed, it doesn’t seem fair to hold mistakes more strongly against those who don’t make many. Even more important, it’s seriously unwise to attempt to draw conclusions from too few data.

  But it’s natural and healthy to notice and wonder when something happens that seems unlikely. And if disciplined minds find themselves with too few data, they don’t just refuse to draw conclusions. They go looking for more data. The first question that comes to my mind when I see an unexpected mistake is “Why?” Yes, mistakes just happen sometimes. Maybe that’s all there is to it. But maybe not.

  A good teacher stomps on a good student at the exact moment when that student has done something a good teacher should praise and encourage? That seems very unlikely, unless there were other factors at work. Maybe this teacher wasn’t really that good, and had a history of demanding compliance at the expense of learning, but the student in question had
just never encountered or recognized this weakness in the teacher before. Maybe the teacher had some personal problems on her mind, and would have snapped at anything out of the ordinary on that particular day. Maybe the teacher had prior experience with students who liked to jump ahead, to show off things they really didn’t understand, and who needed stern discipline to avoid letting misguided self-confidence derail their learning the basics of division with remainders. Maybe she was just going with the odds when she barked at you.

  There might have been good reasons, or innocent ones, or sinister motives, or something else. It’s those possibilities, I think, or at least the questions about what other data might exist, which often bring extra attention to mistakes that come from unexpected sources.

  Were Toyota’s quality problems really just mistakes of the kind that are to be expected because no company is perfect? Perhaps. Probably. But Toyota does have that history—that long, long record of building outstanding cars. They know how to avoid mistakes, or at least to find and correct them before they’re delivered to customers. If there really are problems with unintended acceleration, that means someone designed something with flaws, and others manufactured a flawed design, and still others allowed it to pass tests and inspections, and someone else, who heard the earliest questions or complaints from customers, failed to raise a red flag (at least publicly). That’s a lot of mistakes! Any one or two of them might have been unremarkable. But all of them at once? Not impossible, of course; but it still raises questions and demands more data.

  If the computer in my home office shut down suddenly, and a light bulb in my bedroom burned out, and my toaster caught fire in the kitchen, all at once, it might be just an unlikely set of coincidences. But I’d still wonder if there was something wrong with the entire electrical system, or maybe with the incoming power to my home. (Unless, of course, the computer was frequently flaky, the light bulb was old, and the toaster was a fire hazard anyway. Then my expectations would be low, and I’d just count myself lucky the whole house didn’t burn down.) What appears an unlikely set of coincidences might actually be evidence of a common, systemic problem.

  If a car maker can build uncommonly good cars for years and years, and then make an unlikely combination of mistakes, maybe that means that Toyota has systemic problems, as well. As you said, it would be minor news if a company with a poor quality record had encountered the same problems. But we know from experience that car makers with chronic quality problems usually have systemic problems too. Incompetent management, short-term thinking, contentious labor relations, etc. And if we understand the causal relationship between systems and products in other cases, it’s only reasonable to wonder (wonder, not just assume or conclude) if Toyota might be following a general widespread pattern of behavior, rather than deviating from the specific pattern we thought we’d seen in their past performance.

  If a teacher does something that seems out of character, that might be just an anomalous point on her overall data chart. Or it might be that there were flaws in the data we’d previously noted, and that our conclusions and expectations needed to be reconsidered.

  Please understand, I don’t claim to know the answers to any of these questions. I just think the questions themselves are proper and necessary. Unlikely events are sometimes just signs that we’re not very good at knowing what’s likely. And they deserve special attention, if only for that reason.

  I liked the example of the baseball umpire for a couple reasons. First, it was clear and simple, with no controversy about what actually happened. The video replays left no doubt. Second, it offered a look at the “Halo Handicap” in reverse. Perfect games are so rare in baseball that even coming close to one is a big deal. Perfection wasn’t expected, so when it got to be late in the game, and a bit of baseball history seemed within reach, the whole world (except maybe the opposing team) was rooting for the pitcher to make it. And even when he came up short (officially, the ump’s call was law, right or wrong, and the batter was safe at first), he was still given popular credit for accomplishing something special.

  So our tendency to attach special importance to unlikely events can turn people into heroes, too. And maybe the only real handicap at work is our own natural longing for perfection in any form. A car maker we can trust. A teacher who always gets it right. A pitcher throwing a perfect game. Those things move us. They inspire us. We love almost anything that even comes close. And, of course, we’re hurt and disappointed when others fall short of what we hope for, or when our own hopes and dreams turn out to be unrealistic.

  But I’m not sure that’s a problem. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s just the way it should be.

  Kirk Gordon

  You make some good, thoughtful observations. But to clarify my personal example, my teacher did not “snap” or “bark”—she simply marked my answer wrong, as calmly and professionally as if it really were, which it wasn’t.

  As for the Toyota example, while I’m not familiar with its intimate details, I do know that the “chain of errors” you describe is not particularly improbable or dependent on multiple people making mistakes they should have been able to recognize. If you make a design change in a complicated mechanism, it can sometimes cause a failure mode that nobody would anticipate on the basis of past experience and that doesn’t show up until the mechanism has been in use for a prolonged period. Once that has happened a number of times, designers and inspectors will know new things to watch for in the future—but the first time, they can’t and won’t know that a problem is going to develop.

  Stan,

  I think there might be a slight fallacy in your thinking, regarding “The Halo Handicap” in the September issue of Analog. The idea that we sort of forgive people who routinely make mistakes for making another one versus people who don’t when they make one, is actually quite rational. It is not whether the two entities deserve to be treated the same or differently but a case of what we expect of them. I would not likely buy a ticket on an airline that routinely lost aircraft on cross-country flights but would not hesitate to fly one that had a perfect record. So I would be less than enamored if the latter crashed. It has to do with what I expect from the source.

  Don’t get me wrong. I understand what you’re saying. In 1951, I attended a punched card accounting school at Fort Benjamin Harrison near Indianapolis, Indiana as a member of the U.S. Army. On the final exam, I answered a question that asked: How many punched card positions can this machine compare on at one time? The correct answer was sixteen, but I answered thirty-two. Why? I had read the programming instruction manual outside of class and had learned that the two sixteen position comparators in the machine could be coupled to provide a thirty-two position effect for some operations.

  When I questioned the instructor about this anomaly, I was told that, “technically my answer was true, but I hadn’t been taught that in class.” I was upset of course, since that was the only incorrect answer on my final exam. In that case, I still ended up on what is usually referred to as the “Dean’s List,” and my CO was quite impressed, though he gave me a royal chewing out for not mentioning it when I returned to my unit.

  Years later when my ire had slackened a bit, I realized the instructor was correct. That’s part of the problem of being an instructor. Perhaps the class should have been warned that examinations following a course of instruction are testing the student’s retention of the content of the course, not knowledge gained elsewhere or outside opinions. But this practice of warning students is rarely followed. I suspect instructors don’t usually like to look like their protecting themselves from malpractice lawsuits.

  Leonard R. Cook

  Goleta, CA

  I can’t agree that your instructor was “correct.”If the question was how many can the machine do and it could do 32, the correct answer was 32, whether he had taught you that or not. I’ve seldom heard such a blatant admission that a test was designed to measure parroting ability rather than relevant knowledge, and I see n
o pedagogical justification for such a practice—especially without the warning you suggest.

  Copyright © 2010 Stanley Schmidt

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  Is quitting ever the wisest course?

  By Shane Tourtellotte

  Marcia Balbi tapped the shoulder of her freedman, just as the wagon rolled through the Porta Superior town gate. “I’ll get off here, Alastor,” Marcia said. “You collect the new plough and drive it home. I’ll walk back.”

  “Yes, domina,” said Alastor, unruffled; he was used to this arrangement. He reined in the oxen long enough for Marcia to step down, then drove straight ahead. Marcia cinched up her stola to keep its hem out of the dust and mire and made a right turn toward the familiar workshop, the clang of metal already reaching her ears.