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Saturday, May 19, 2012

Termite Queen.



“So, we all know what we have to do, then?” asked the pit boss, Yellow Thirty-Nine.


“Yay!” everyone clapped their mandibles and stomped their feet in unison.

“Okay then, let’s take this place apart!’ said Yellow Thirty-Nine. “Who’s with me?”

And they all said, ‘yay’ again and went to work with a vengeance. To them, it was just another typical day in the mound.

***

“My lady, Lord Holo,” murmured the Major, Blue Seven.

“Ah, how gracious of you to come,” said the Queen, languidly brandishing an antennae for him to kiss.

“And what a privilege upon this fine morning,” Lord Holo said, bowing deeply.

“It is time,” she said with a worried frown evident upon her massively distended face.

“Yes,” said Lord Holo.

“They will show up before the day is far along,” she said.

“We’re sealing off this chamber even now,” reported Lord Holo. “As for the evacuation, we should be able to save twenty or even thirty percent.”

“Oh, for the little ones, they depend upon us so,” she cried. “They can never understand that their deaths have such meaning, and such promise.”

“Yes, well, the plan isn’t exactly foolproof, either,” he advised. “If it’s any comfort, I share your fate.”

“And my husband?”

“With the King to guide them,” he muttered. “Or even without, we have no braver troops in the world.”

Several little ones entered the chamber and scuttled about, gathering up the most recent batch of glistening, moist eggs. They would be sealed into a special capsule, airtight and with thick walls. Preparations had been extensive, with a surrogate queen growing nicely and a generous supply of food.

She was about to speak, but didn’t. She knew they didn’t need to be told, but this batch was especially vital, with the casualties the soldiers were predicting. Familiar with the ways of soldiers in general and males in particular, even if one discounted by half, it was still going to be a bloodbath.

“Thank you,” said Lord Holo.

“Yay,” said all the workers.

The last one, Yellow Thirty-Nine, stopped and turned, waiting with bowed head before exiting the chamber.

“Seal us in well, my friend,” said Lord Holo humbly.

“Yellow Thirty-Nine,” said the Queen. “Thank you. You may approach.”

Yellow Thirty-Nine approached her in a submissive posture and licked her mouthparts.

“Thank you, my Queen,” Yellow Thirty-Nine said. “I have always appreciated everything that you did for us. I die with dignity.”

“Good-bye, Yellow Thirty-Nine,” she said with a catch in her voice, and then he turned and was gone.

“He, at least, understands,” noted Holo.

***

Try as they might, as bravely as they resisted, the clouds of rolling gas killed them in their thousands, nay, in their millions. Workers, soldiers, young and immature queens, they died as equals before the gas.

It was a battle they knew they could not win, and so they fought it to survive. They fought to show the enemy their dead.

They had a long term plan all worked out, and in the meantime, they advanced in such small increments. The enemy seemed unable to cope with their long-term strategy.

***

“Honestly Mister Jackson, that’s about the best we can do,” reported Jake Saunders. “Call us in thirty days and we’ll do it again, it’s all paid for.”

“Yes, yes,” said Nick Jackson. “I really should have patched the cracks there…my fault really, but we’re moving in another year.”

“Patch up them holes in the sheet metal,” advised Saunders. “That’s where they’re getting in. Anyway, a home inspector will find them little critters, if he’s any good. Well, good luck to you.”

Either a philosopher or a slob where material things were concerned, Nick watched the man drive up the street to another nearby residence.

“We’re still moving in a year,” he noted glumly, and that was about it for this visit of Happy-Guy Pest Control.

***

Lord Holo, Blue Seven and several of her attendants broke open the seal and cool air, still smelling strongly of gas, rolled into the chamber.

“We’ll air the place out quickly,’ Blue Seven said, noting her discomfort.

“Ah! Here is one of my men,” noted the Major.

The soldier, Green Eleven, entered and made his report.

“Our secondary and tertiary locations remain secure, Major,” he said. “Twelve surrogate queens destroyed, but all of the others are safe and secure.”

“Good,” said Lord Holo.

He looked at the queen.

“Better than expected,” he said.

“Total kill, forty percent, maybe a bit less,” advised Green Eleven. “About normal for this type of operation.”

“Thank you, Green Eleven,” said the Queen, and allowed him to lick for a moment. “And you as well, Lord Holo.”

Lord Holo approached less submissively than Green Eleven and had a long and thorough nuzzle.

She let Blue Seven have a short sniff after them.

The King returned then, triumphant.

“Yay,” said the little ones, some of whom were crowding into the chamber to see if she was well, and unable to control their own discipline. “Yay. Yay. Yay.”

“Licks for everyone! You’ve all done very, very well,” she announced in joyous celebration as they all crowded around, her consort, the workers, soldiers, and nobility.

For a precious time, they were all equal together, feasting as one upon the royal substance exuding from her body.

Author's Note: This is an old story from the archives. It uses dialog tags, which I am eliminating as much as possible in my more mature literary style. It is 895 words, which puts it in the realm of flash fiction, and in terms of science, it's not too bad. Insects use pheremones and other forms of social communication. There is some social and political commentary here as well. Hopefully it isn't too preachy. I've also added the word 'BLOG' to the end of the file name, and that way I remember not to submit it around with the claim, 'This has never appeared anywhere before.'

Friday, May 18, 2012

Time out of whack.


(Photo: AstroMSseqF_063aL Rich Murray, Wiki Commons 2.0 Generic.)


Max Planck said at certain levels, for example at very short distances, or very high temperatures, under all sorts of unusual conditions; the regular laws of physics just don’t apply anymore.

While most believe that time cannot be changed, sometimes cause and effect don’t mean much because effects sometimes happen before their causes. It is generally believed that the universe is infinite in time. It has lasted forever and will go on forever.

As a philosopher, I find myself defining my terms with ever-greater precision. So one has to ask, what is the difference between infinity and forever? Is there a difference, or are they the same thing?

There are those who believe in creation by God in six days. Some scientists have speculated about a continuous creation. Stephen Hawking described time like an anaconda, one that has swallowed a pig. He likens us to microbes, as if humans were e. coli in the belly of the pig—no matter how far we look, no matter which direction, we will never see anything more than the inside of the belly of the pig. He even speculates that the anaconda might swallow several pigs in succession, each of them traveling down the body of the serpent. It has been speculated that time might run backwards if and when the universe begins to contract back to its point of origin, a singularity.

No matter what you know about a system today, you have no way of predicting what it will be like tomorrow.

Was the universe created by vacuum fluctuations, where particles appear out of nowhere, and then subside, and energies go back to a zero state, with the universe going on unchanged? These particles have been described as ‘temporary,’ which in this case can last anything up to 10 to the power of 66 hours.

Some speculate there are multiple dimensions in space-time. My favorite is the fifth dimension, but some believe there are nine, eleven, or even twenty-six dimensions, and in theory the likelihood is that there are an infinite number of dimensions…and yet we simply don’t know how or where to look for them.

If a particle appears from ‘nowhere,’ and then disappears again, where did it come from? Where did it go to? Did it come from ‘null-space?’ Where exactly is 'nowhere?'

There is no such thing as empty space. It has been supposed there is some kind of universal frame, a vector rigging field which pervades all of space. The term ‘neo-ether’ has been used to describe the invisible something that fills the universe. We have to accept the notion that something exists everywhere. Some kinds of data remain forever unknown, for example the proofs of the existence of God. The ontological argument is that God cannot be proven not to exist, so therefore He must exist.

If you put a slot in a bead, and make a Moebius strip out of paper, and put a dot of ink on the bead, and then thread the bead onto the strip, you will note that after one revolution the bead is rotated 180 degrees. In order for the bead to return to its original position and orientation, it must go twice around the loop. A geometric circle has 360 degrees. For an electron it apparently has 720 degrees. In this case the circle is a two-dimensional abstraction that has many, or even infinite dimensions rotating around its radius…at least that’s what I say.

A force is that which makes things do things. There are so far only four known forces in the universe. These are the electrical, of which magnetism is a manifestation, then there is gravitation, which is different from magnetism. Then there are the weak and strong nuclear forces. It is theorized that all these forces existed as one super-force in 'Planck time’ at the moment of creation, which is described in event terms at something like 10 to the minus 54 seconds after the Big Bang. If all four forces evolved from the ‘first force,’ what is the likelihood that further evolution will occur? Perhaps we are witnessing such an event in our lifetimes. Time has often been described as the fourth dimension. Objects have height, width, and depth, and exist over a period of time. But this is either an assumption, or perhaps it is simply dead wrong.

The temporal force may be considered the fifth force discovered thus far in the universe. It is speculated that another force exists in the universe, one that cannot be measured or quantified in any way. It has been called ‘God’s Love,’ for want of a better term.

Much effort has been expended in the search for the so-called ‘God Particles,’ but to no avail. As a scientist and a philosopher, I have no problem with the notion that God created the Universe, but I doubt if it can be proven except anecdotally.

With the Planck force, there would be more energy than you can safely imagine.

Wormholes have been described and accepted theoretically by scientists. They are about 10 to the minus 33 centimeters in diameter, with a duration of 10 to the minus 43 seconds. You can create a wormhole by heating a volume of space to 10 to the 27th degrees Kelvin or compressing some matter down to the black hole or neutron star densities. Don’t try this at home.

Heisenberg stated the ‘uncertainty principle.’ It is a statement of probabilities, and uncertainties. You know the electron must be there, but you can never say where it will be at any given point in time.

According to the Feynham diagrams, when a particle goes from point A to point B, it splits into two and one of them must be going into a separate universe. Essentially what he’s saying is that a particle can be in two places at once—but where?

A diagram of all possible paths the particle may take looks like a girl’s braid of hair.

Just as when you sprinkle iron filings around a magnet, revealing magnetic lines of force, it has been postulated that there are temporal lines of force.

If you follow the lines of force—i.e. timelines, no problem. If you cross the temporal lines of force, energy builds up and a puncture is made in the fabric of time. At some point there is too great an imbalance in the system, but reality heals the wounds made in itself.

An object crossing time lines builds up potential as it moves. The pull of an object snapping back to its own time would release a huge amount of energy in the space-time continuum or matrix. Hence the mass limitations, which permits only very small objects such as the particles mentioned in the vacuum fluctuations part of our theory to elude the laws of space and time conservation. Time is subjective, perhaps even imaginary.

Time is closely linked to our perception of it, although many would tell you ‘there is only one moment’ as a fundamental truth. This is ‘the past is gone, the future never gets here’ line of thought. Perception is reality, and truth very often depends on who you ask—or who is asking. An acceleration is a force measured over time—therefore time must exist—or you can’t actually have an acceleration. Is it the same time all over the universe? Or the further away from the singularity you go, is it earlier? Or later?

If you burn 100g of matter, you may well end up with 10g of ash, and release 90g of gasses, which should be confirmed by Avogadro’s Law. If you put 100 Newtons of energy into a system, you shouldn’t get any more than 100 Newtons out of it. A body at rest tends to remain at rest unless some external force acts upon it. A body in motion tends to remain in motion unless some external force acts upon it. This is the Conservation of Momentum.

Does time follow the laws of conservation? One might assume that it does, however, if we know anything at all about the universe, is that ‘anything is possible.’ If time exists in the form of quanta, then it may be likened to a dotted line. In the gaps, the norms of physical and chemical laws may not apply.

This may be written as a corollary of Murphy’s Law. “If anything can happen, it probably will eventually,” in a universe where nothing is impossible. If we believe that the universe sprang forth from a singularity, either time existed before it, or it was created at that moment. Also, was space created at this time? Or did it exist previously, therefore giving the new universe somewhere to expand into?

If time sprang forth from the singularity, there is no such thing as a parallel universe.

They must all be on a slight angle from each other. There might be an infinite number of alternate universes. Each of these would be reality to an observer encapsulated within them. Incidentally, if there were two singularities, then two time-lines might cross or intersect. This would allow crossing from one time line to another, but only theoretically.

I can’t prove that. My instinct tells me there would be paradoxes that are irreconcilable. In my opinion, time does not stretch out ahead of us. It's like we are on the end of a timeline that is progressing forward. In that sense, we have the ability to change the future, at least for ourselves, and of course everything we do affects something else in the universe.

Author's Note: While this is by no means the full story, nor even particularly up to date, this represents research from various sources. A very small part of it ended up in my upcoming book, 'Time-Storm on A-5,' which will be available in a couple of weeks as an e-book in various formats and on various platforms. Shortly after that, it will be available as a 5 x 8 paperback on Amazon and Createspace.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Active versus passive blogging.





Clearly we have been doing something right. Photo by Louis.








Like many writers, I have a blog on Google’s Blogger. Others use WordPress or another service provider. I actually have four blogs, as well as being on blogging sites. Some of these include Hubpages, Squidoo, (where I have nothing posted,) then there’s Tumblr, Pinterest, and some other places. You can blog on Goodreads, Book Blogs, and probably others.

Passive Blogging.

The trouble with a blog is that it tends to be passive. We put share buttons on them so that anyone that enjoys the content or finds it useful can share it with friends or followers.

That’s fine as far as it goes. How did the readers get there in the first place?

By signing up for Networked Blogs on Facebook, when I post a story or article on Shalako Publishing’s blog, it automatically pops up on Facebook on my Shalako Publishing author page.

That’s all well and good. This resulted in a few page hits a day from people using search engines, and a small spike here and there when I posted something. A very small number of people are actually signed up to follow the blogs—maybe a dozen on Shalako Publishing and exactly three follow the ‘badpoetsclub.’ When I post something new, a few of them probably do check it out.

Getting blog followers is quite difficult. It takes a moment to sign up, but readers don’t necessarily want to be bombarded through their inboxes with post after post. It doesn't take long before people turn off notifications altogether, which is why I blog twice a week, and try to keep it relevant.

How then, was I to get more page-views? This is important, as the material posted on the blog says a lot about us, and of course I have all the ads down the right side where people can click and take a look at my books in various places. While it is hard to estimate just how many people click through and look at a book, or how many of those actually click on the ‘buy button’ on Amazon, Smashwords or iTunes, we can say this much: some will. I also believe that ‘interest,’ the very fact that someone looked at your book, has some weight in the ‘product presentation algorithms.’ If someone buys your book, and then another one, the next guy that comes along may see the proverbial, ‘people who bought this book also bought this one,’ or ‘people who looked at this book also looked at this one.’ You want your book to be in there.

Active Blogging.

So all we have to do is drive up those numbers, right? Bearing in mind this is all part of a larger strategy.

What I have been doing is to look at older posts. Some of them can be rewritten, enhanced, perhaps relevant links added to them. If I have an old story on the hard-drive, I can take a look at it, stick it up on one of my four blogs, and see what happens, for surely posting new content regularly is one way to build an audience, (or drive up hits.) I routinely do this with all new content now. But the older materials can be recycled to some extent. I have the poetry blog, a French-language blog, and a blog which I never promote. That one has had 150 page hits, mostly indexing hits by search engine bots, and it serves as a control blog—that’s how many hits you get in a given time period with a static, totally passive blog which is not updated too often.

Technique.

So what we do is to click on the title of the story. Then we copy that URL with our mouse. Then we close down our blog for a while and fire up Tweetdeck. On Tweetdeck, I manage three Twitter channels, and I can post to Myspace, LinkedIn, and Facebook. I’m putting out on six channels, and this is to a total of several thousand people, not all of whom are viewing at any given time.

What this means is that you can repost later, at a different time. Make your writing work for you.

Then I go and post on Reddit, Digg, and any other place where I can get away with it. I say that because Squidoo for one is looking for all-original content. The basic technique is to blog twice a week on Shalako Publishing, but by reposting and recycling, we can make it do the work of ten passive blogs. If it takes an hour to write a good post, and another ten minutes to ‘spread it around,’ that ten minutes of time is a good investment because it multiplies effectiveness by a factor of about ten times.

Watching your stats.

Watching stats might sound boring, but you can learn a lot. I saw that an old post, ‘Kobo not recognized by PC,’ was getting the odd page hit. It was just a short little story. Clearly, people were having trouble figuring out their Kobo…they were Googling it to find out what to do.

After some thought, I searched through my e-mail and found Kobo’s response to my question. I stuck it in the story. After more thought, I engine-searched and found Kobo’s help page on their website. So I added another line to the story and put that link in there as a service to people who were obviously having the same problem as I was. Also, having links in a story, and traffic generated by them, drives up our ranking with the search engines, for those people who randomly search or have just heard our name somewhere.

There is no single solution to generating traffic.

Getting results and data from experiments.

What we are doing is getting results and data from our experiments.

Incidentally, our ‘Kobo not recognized by PC’ story pops up on page one of the the Google results, and we did that without even half trying. If I had more tips and information to put in that story, I would do it in a heartbeat.

The Shalako Publishing blog had about 5,900 hits in two or three years of blogging. Not too impressive, right? The badpoetsclub had 100 hits last month in total.

This month I’ve gotten about1,400 hits on Shalako Publishing. Just to replicate the experiment and the results, I posted a couple of poems and got 39 page hits so far today on badpoetsclub, including one comment, which happened within minutes and was completely unexpected.

Comments add weight to your blog.

Encourage people to comment on your blog.

Comments also add weight in search engines, as well as activity of any sort. With a scientific application of some pretty basic principles, we are well on our way to somewhere between 15,000 and 35,000 page hits this year on our blogs. That’s a lot better than a couple thousand a year.

If one in a hundred clicks through and if another one in ten buys a book, this will have a significant result on sales, and of course name recognition and blog followers are good things too.

Comments are always welcome, and if you have some simple tips you would like to share, please feel free to do so. I don’t have a donate button, but you’re always welcome to share, re-post, or link to this post within your own blog. Please have a look at my books, I'm a professional writer with 29 years of experience and there might be something there for you.

P.S. Here’s one criticism of this blog: not enough pictures.

For more on this subject, go to ProBlogger.



Monday, May 14, 2012

What if UFOs are real?



While there is absolutely no material or physical evidence of life in or about other star systems, it’s always good to talk about UFO’s and the likelihood of life on another world. That way, we’ve all had a bit of a heads-up. Also, I get a big kick out of those who think an alien civilization will come down and “save us from ourselves.” Sure they will.

But what if they’re socialists?

Our much-prized private property rights might not be safe from taxation. The big corporations in their civilization might not have a whole lot of regard for the Monsantos of this world.

And what if they’re capitalists?

We may get negotiated right out of a place at our own dinner table. You know, like when you consult for the next five years with the disabled and then screw them out of a place at their own dinner table...in some hasty, band-aid solution which coincidentally occurs just before election time.

Worse yet, they could be missionaries, coming to save our souls. Golly, that one just doesn’t bear thinking about. We’re not talking Christian or Muslim fundamentalists after all. We’re talking some kind of kooky alien fundamentalists.

If aliens exist, we are talking sapient beings and not just space-faring amoebas.

To build an inter-stellar or inter-galactic vehicle, i.e. a 'ship,' requires an incredible investment in time, money and effort. The motivation would have to be compelling.

(Are we that good-looking?)

Any alien species that finds it easy to cross time and space would be less of a threat.

We don’t have anything they can’t get cheaper someplace else. But what if they take us as pets? Give us to their children at Christmas, (or their cultural equivalent.) Then they tire of us and kick us out into the streets? We could end up as feral humans, living on some alien riverbank amongst the broken concrete, shopping carts and tall, weed-like organisms.

I can’t believe they came all that way just to cut up a cow—there’s an easier explanation for that, e.g. women’s cosmetics and anti-aging creams. Those cow udders are chock full of hormones and stem cells. I grant you that much.

In the next fifty or one hundred years, rich people will begin the colonization of space, beginning with the international space resort, then a nudist colony on Mars or possibly a sexual tourism hot-spot on a moon or two of Saturn.

The asteroids could be exploited for their minerals or Disney could maybe buy one and finally have a planet of their own.

If we were to meet an alien, the first question some of us would ask might be something like this:

“Do these slacks make my bum look too big?”

If a little green alien pointed a ray gun at me, and said, “Take me to your leader,” I would of course take he, she or it to Mr. Stephen Harper. Let him freakin’ deal with it. (Not my job.) They can speak to each other on their own exalted level, which the rest of us will obviously never be able to comprehend.

And what’s with all this sexual stuff? Apparently the little buggers aren’t exactly shy about poking sticks up the backsides of the inhabitants. They like doing the colorectal exams and the prostate exams and stuff like that. Are you really trying to take over the Earth? Why not just use the undoubtedly-superior weaponry on your ship? Too easy, huh? Just like a challenge, huh?

So I am unequivocally ambivalent about the whole alien thing. But I’ll try to keep an open mind.

And the search for intelligent life in the universe continues.

END

Photo: Wiki Commons.