Funeral for a friend.

It’s never easy to watch a former friend die. It’s not that easy to watch an enemy die either.

A lot of uncomfortable thoughts went through my mind as I sat by Steve’s bed.

I thought of how I had deserted my fine feathered friend, giving up on my role as a superhero in order to make some real money as a Canadian journalist. Perhaps I had become jaded, cynical.

Maybe I just got tired of busting corporate polluters. It was always the same thing with Steve.

He was always going after climate-change deniers, who were in his opinion at about the same moral and intellectual level as Holocaust deniers, or taking down abusive cops who stood idly by with their thumbs up their asses, laughing like hyenas while disabled people were driven out of their homes, and according to Steve, “Seeing all them miserable bastards walk free while their victims were marginalized, labeled, and ultimately destroyed by the very people who were responsible for their service and protection.”

Well. I was young back then and I guess we all did some foolish things…

If you can’t beat them, join them, right?

We all have to make a living, right? I got tired of living like a piece of shit, never having anything nice, unable to pay the rent or afford a good girlfriend. And who wants a bad girlfriend?

So I guess you could say I sold out my principles for a job. I gave up my freedom for bread. I gave up my integrity for a big fine car and a fancy house. I have the best food and the nicest clothes. Not that I needed the money, but I even married a rich man—just the icing on the cake, really. I don’t care if he blows the pool boy when I’m not around. He looks good in public and doesn’t ask too many questions about my own little peccadilloes.

But Steve had never seen it that way. And oddly enough, Steve had never condemned me for it either.

As Steve once said, “Many are called, few are chosen.”

I have to admit that one made my guts flip over when I heard it, but I don’t think it was meant unkindly. Steve could so easily offend, with his regard for truth, and his complete disgust with the crass, bourgeois materialism, the profligate consumerism, the conspicuous waste of the middle class, coddled and ultimately spoiled by decades of maternal Canadian social policy.

The most unimaginative and uncompetitive people in the world, really, except on a hockey rink.

Steve hadn’t regained consciousness in the last three days.

We were waiting for the end, the doctor and I.

Steve was suffering from ‘an accelerated frame of reference in relativistic terms,’ to quote Doctor Baldur Dash.

It was quite a mystery as to how it all happened. So far I hadn’t found the time to inquire further. Surely Steve had some friends? Someone that I could ask? What had Steve been working on recently? Where had he gone? Who was he after? Poor old Steve, better known as The Heron to tabloid crud-writers, was always after some member of the government, or what passes for corporate leadership in this country.

Steve was always after someone—and generally speaking, someone was always after him.

These people never go down without a big jet of ink, a good squirm, and one last, long, drawn-out slither.

While he wasn’t quite dead yet, his body was slowly collapsing in front of our eyes…sucked into itself as it passed into some other realm of null-space.

“Won’t be long now,” said the Doctor.

The beeps stopped beeping and the monitor showed a flat line.

The doctor looked at me. I shook my head, feeling that it was I who was killing my old friend.

But Steve had stated his desires clearly and firmly in his will, something very few superheroes ever think of. We all think we’re immortal, don’t we? But we all have to grow up someday.

No ‘extraordinary means,’ would be used to keep him alive beyond his allotted time on this Earth.

* * *

Three or four of us stood around as the casket was lowered into the roadside excavation.

Steve was to be used as backfill in a sewer-repair project. Considering how long and hard Steve had fought for the disabled, the mentally ill, the permanently unemployable, and working poor families in this here community, it seemed appropriate. Anyway, none of us wanted to buy him a plot. I suppose the others couldn’t afford to chip in, and I didn’t see why I should. The others drifted away, leaving me alone with a muddy hole in the ground and The Peacock eyeing me suspiciously from across on the other side.

“What brings you here?” She asked harshly. “Slumming? Come to have the last laugh?”

She was wearing a body stocking in November. They say poverty breeds virtue, but that’s an anti-Canadian attitude. Only extreme wealth and power gives a person the proper perspective to put the world and its dirty, stinking, penniless foreign people and unwanted regular Canadians in their rightful place.

“Steve still owes me fifty bucks. I suppose I’ll never see it now.” And then I turned and walked away.

I’m busy and duty has been attended to. Tonight I have to report on how we're going to cut corporate taxes below zero. Someone important will explain it to me. (I hope.)

My editor has been all over me like a dirty shirt, as I've been stalling for a few days on an important assignment, the one where I explain how the oil-sands are not really polluting at all and how everything is the fault of the Americans, or the Chinese, or the working poor of this nation. I sure wish I could have stuck around to find out what happened to Steve, but if it was a serious threat, I would be notified by authorities, and instructed on how best to downplay it in the evening news. Until then, why think about it?

I don’t get paid to think, just talk. I read the news with a straight face, and take myself very seriously indeed.

It’s not a particularly tough job, but someone’s got to do it.

Passive Discoverability. WTF?

Passive discoverability? I thought that only worked with Claymores and punji sticks.

When I was reading Smashwords founder Mark Coker’s Book Publishing Predictions for 2013 on the Smashwords Blog, there was nothing revolutionary there until I got down near the end and read the words ‘passive discoverability.’ I’ve never heard that term before. This story has been extensively re-posted and re-blogged. I went looking for a sensible definition of the term.

Mark talks about ‘viral catalysts’ in his Secrets to E-Book Publishing Success, which I have read. He’s saying that ‘passive discoverability’ and ‘viral catalysts’ are the key to marketing books in the near future.

But what the hell was he talking about? Was he really saying what I thought he was saying? Is he saying, “Publish your book and then don’t do anything?”

Also, are other expert sources correct when they say that ‘spamming’ on Twitter, posting on Facebook and other social platforms, doing author interviews, swapping blog posts, signing up to review books on Goodreads and Shelfari, giving writing tips, and all that sort of thing really doesn’t help?

If so, what a relief. I was getting sick of it, also all that crap about being nice to everyone all the time, and respecting people of all different crackpot beliefs, all sorts of kooky and odd-ball cultures…it was getting a bit much. And it’s not really me, is it?

It’s not really me. ‘Cause I just don’t give a rat’s ass, when you get right down to it.

But honestly, folks, it’s going to be ever so hard not to do it, when everyone else seems to be doing it, and by their own eminently-trustworthy and genuinely-cheerfully enthusiastic accounts, they appear to be enjoying some success. My heart sank when I read those words, ‘passive discoverability.’

Was it all for nothing then?

Previously, in ‘The Law of Rapidly Diminishing Returns,’ I have speculated that while at first an author might sell a few books, over time your small social media market pool is saturated—everyone who wants to buy your book has already done so, and therefore you have to keep clicking on new followers, making new friends, and signing up for new platforms to the point where it no longer makes sense in terms of the time spent to do so. Where once you had a thousand friends and sold ten books in a month, (your first month,) now you need ten thousand friends to sell a hundred books, (in your first month,) and then you need a million friends to sell a thousand books…in your first month, with rapidly diminishing returns after that.

So what the heck is ‘passive discoverability?’

Pit full of punji sticks.

I Googled around and here’s what I found. Passive discoverability has one major application in the information technology sense. It’s a way of scanning your own network to check for security breaches.

Basically, you scan your network and look for changes. If you didn’t make those changes, somebody else did. It requires an extensive and accurate network mapping system. Clearly that doesn’t really apply here.

There were other entries. Like this one from Digital Body Language. Here the author is saying that the proper use of search engine optimization will help your story come up in active searches, (without you bringing it to a wider audience by cross-posting, or spamming your Facebook friends.) But in a more subtle sense, it’s a way of linking a change of perception to another story that might be passed on by word of mouth, surely the most effective form of advertising and promotion.

The key thing to understand is that it has to be somebody else’s mouth.

Techniques of passive discoverability include:

Having your books available on as many platforms as possible.

Good covers and good blurbs.

Books in a genre that people actually want to read.

Good reviews. See: How to sell ebooks on iTunes from Smashwords Blog. (My only question is how to reconcile this with passive discoverability.)

So you need:

Proper tags and key words in product description.

Use of key words in blog posts, assuming you have links to books in the blog—see right column.

The regular addition of fresh, new, original content to your blog or website.

The regular publication of new books.

It can still include posting your informative, entertaining or useful blog content on as many sites as possible, where it can be discovered.

It still includes building up an audience, even though passive discoverability doesn’t rely on active tweeting of direct links to books and or other products. The very fact that my Twitter bio has a link to my blog brings traffic. A small percentage of new followers come to see who I am. Some stay to read a story, and no doubt some click on the odd book…just to see what I am doing as much as anything.

So that’s what they mean when they say passive discoverability.

Portent describes older advertising models as ‘interruptions,’ which is certainly true of TV and radio, perhaps to a lesser extent newspapers, which are all ‘up front’ (not so linear,) and also divided into sections.

It’s about giving people what they want, and showing them that there’s plenty more cool stuff here as well.

According to Portent, “…passive discoverability is about having a conversation, not yelling…”

And let’s be honest. Passive discoverability worked just fine when we were young and strong and good looking and enjoying the dating scene in a previous life…no it didn't.

By the way, if you really loved me you would re-post, re-tweet, and click on them social media buttons.

Comments are always welcome, or if you have any other suggestions, please feel free to do so.

Special Bonus Section.

Writing tip: never be boring. Marketing tip: be nice to everybody. No matter how much it sucks.

AND; Here’s how to go from three hits a day on your blog to an average of 200. Does it sell books? It’s hard to say without some control blogs and un-promoted books to compare it to.

Probably not, though.


Photos: Top, Wiki Commons, centre, Joe Loong, National Museum of the Marine Corps, bottom, author photo.

Entropy.

Neolithic farmers got back about ten or twenty calories for every calorie they expended in work. In those cultures, ninety percent of human power, call it the labour force, was involved in food production. Now, the human energy involved in food production is maybe ten or fifteen percent. Modern farmers using machinery, fertilizers and pesticides use about eight calories for every one produced. By the time these foodstuffs reach the table, twenty to thirty calories have been ‘burned up’ to produce every single calorie consumed. This is the result of entropy in the food chain, which can be described in different ways.

A thousand pounds of grain fed to cows produces one hundred pounds of beef, which when consumed by one human, produces one pound of corresponding flesh. It’s a ten-to-one ratio from one level to the next of the food web according to a well-known theory. One wonders if it’s ten-to-one when it’s a whale shark eating krill. But for every thousand pounds of krill ingested, there probably is a ratio of ‘productive work.’

In the example of the cow, much of the benefit of eating the grain went to wasted work—the animal walked around in a field, it mooed, it wagged its tail to keep off flies. Much of the energy burnt was consumed buy the very act of eating and digestion. It was wasted energy in the sense of entropy in the food chain. The whale shark didn’t spend all of its energy ingesting krill, it also propelled itself continuously through the water in order to obtain that krill. The whale shark is burning food energy to produce more food just as we do. Incidentally, the thousand pounds of grain would have done more ‘work’ if we simply consumed it as grain. That’s because ten people each could have consumed one hundred pounds of that grain and it would have gone into the making of one corresponding pound of flesh. This is a simplistic view, but bear with me.

If you go back to hunter-gatherer cultures, it’s estimated they spend about twenty hours a week providing food, shelter and clothing for themselves. It’s been called the original affluent society, because the people want for nothing and have plenty of free time to enjoy the most important things in life, which are friends and family.

Admittedly, they live in grass huts and go around mostly naked. In our eyes they are poor. But one of the costs of modern society in all of its energy-richness, is that we tend to take up all the slack in a thousand meaningless activities designed to burn off all of our own surplus of free time. We are also an affluent society.

At one time in the exploration and extraction of fossil fuels there was a ratio of about a hundred-to-one in terms of entropic value. Nowadays it’s more like ten-to-one. For every one calorie of energy expended, we now only get ten back in terms of caloric value, whether it’s for automotive fuels or home heating. The great thing about fossil fuels is the caloric value. It is amazing that a single gallon of gas can push that big heavy vehicle at highway speeds for thirty or forty miles. It really is a kind of miracle when you think about it, and I think that’s why so many of us simply take it for granted: because it’s kind of incomprehensible how all that energy, all that work can come out of such a small amount of some aromatic fluid. Try imagining that with a gallon of water. Theoretically, there’s all kinds of energy locked in there.

***

The indications are this ratio will deteriorate further still, in fact, that’s one reason why the price of energy is both high in historic terms and volatile in terms of everyday markets. Another reason is increasing demand, due to the increasing complexity of our systems. Thirty years ago, very few people in China owned a car. Now it is becoming much more common.

The system is becoming more complex.

The more complex a system becomes, the more demanding it becomes.

***

Political events, such as a revolution in the Middle East, often have an immediate impact on energy prices, with a trickle-down effect on other industries. Simply put, if the price of energy goes up today, the price of sowbellies is going up not too far down the road. Modern society has replaced human energy with chemical and nuclear energy to perform much of its work. These models are models of abundance at low efficiency. The typical auto engine has an efficiency of twenty –five to thirty percent. The most modern nuclear reactors have an efficiency estimated at forty-five percent.

Simply doubling the efficiency of what we already have would solve many of our energy needs for the immediate future. The effect of thermodynamic entropy is so strong that this seems unlikely to be achievable using known processes, both technical and theoretical. This is an entropic aspect of knowledge itself. It takes more energy to learn what we need to know than it might generate in added efficiencies. That’s why old technologies linger. It’s not that they are the best, they are simply more efficient in achieving immediate goals in terms of pure cost-benefit analysis. As you might expect, the efficiency of some of our modern institutions isn’t particularly high. They merely work and solve an immediate and ongoing need, essentially because no one has any better ideas. All new ideas involve risk, and at least old technologies involve easily-understood risk factors. In entropic terms, it’s easier to keep the old thing going rather than get the new one up and running.

The trouble with entropy in the societal sense is that we have to keep the whole shebang going, or we return to barbarism. We have no choice but to stay ahead of that entropic curve. We can conceive of no other choice. Perhaps that is a truer statement.

Social entropy means that the more we attempt to impose our artificial order, the more complex the system becomes, and thus the greater the rate of breakdown of its constituent parts—classic thermodynamics applied to fairly large and heterogeneous groups of people, much of whose energy is dissipated in seemingly random, even nonsensical activities. Many have little to do with providing for material needs. This might include religion, or tattoo parlours, or the jewelry industry, or the glamorous international world of cheese connoisseur magazines. They must have some benefit to society, however intangible. They contribute to GDP. In some weird sense, GDP, gross domestic product, is a measure of the ‘work’ output of a social system, not in caloric terms but monetary terms.

(Photos, top: Social entropy at work, ‘Villa Miseria,’ by Aleposta. Wiki Commons. Lower: ‘Prairie Rainbow Canola Flax,’ by Saffron Blaze. Wiki Commons.)



http://secondlawoflife.wordpress.com/2007/07/28/entropy-and-the-food-chain-part-i/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_entropy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor