Running Commentary 11/18/2024

Hello,

It's almost Christmastime. It isn't quite Christmastime yet, and it won't be until Santa Claus arrives in front of the flagship Macy's on Thansksgiving, but it's getting close enough that signs of Christmas are starting to appear in preparation. A lot of people dread early Christmas decorations because they mean the holidays are eating up the rest of the year; I really like Christmas, but I also like to keep seasonal things in their season, so as not to dilute special times. Then again, if you don't decorate early, you'll spend Christmastime decorating, and who wants that?

Anyway...

Reading...

Mace Windu: The Glass Abyss by Steven Barnes

2024 was really the year of Mace Windu; he starred in a comic series, he featured as part of the Jedi Council ensemble cast of John Jackson Miller's The Living Force, and, most recently, he got his own novel all to himself: Steven Barnes's Mace Windu: The Glass Abyss. Mace Windu is an odd character to try to tell a story about. He was created, and has largely been used, as an antagonist. Not a villain, but when Anakin’s story needed a Jedi to stand in his way, that’s what Mace was for. Similarly, when Ahsoka or Dooku needed a Jedi to focus their resentment on, Mace was used there, too. But, that said, Mace Windu isn’t a bad guy. He’s rarely actually in the wrong, though he is quite stern and inflexible. And Samuel L. Jackson certainly brought a lot of action-hero charm to the character, including his signature purple lightsaber. So Mace got his fans, including Barnes.

I don’t think Barnes quite gets Mace’s voice right in all cases, but I think he does pretty well understanding Mace’s character and self-concept. Mace is someone who finds a lot of joy in victory in combat, and is, as a Jedi, rather disturbed by this part of himself. (Compare to Iskat Akaris) He is, nonetheless, confident in his role, and that of the Jedi Order, as heroes and saviors to the Galaxy. The criminal cartels of Metagos are not nuanced villains, and present something Mace can fight against without much moral hazard (though there is some things he worries about still, because he’s as hard on himself as anyone). Altogether, we see Mace as a man wholly committed to righteousness, and all the scarier for it. Seeing this as the foundation of his character adds a great dimension to Mace’s later, less glorious moments.

This book reminded me greatly of Barbara Hambley’s Planet of Twilight. Both books feature a single, deeply developed world controlled by petty authoritarians, with a peculiar native bioecology that is hostile to outsiders. In both books the main Jedi character has his connection to the Force weakened by the life on the world. I don’t think this was intentional on Barnes’s part. (He mentions a long list of influences on The Glass Abyss at the end of the book and Planet of Twilight isn’t on it; I’d be surprised if he had read that book, given its obscurity.)

The world of Metagos is quite vividly described. Barnes is a protégé of Larry Niven, and there was a lot of the old-school sci-fi “here’s an alien world and how it works” spirit here that you also got in Ringworld, etc. Chulok were, in a way, a memorable villain, but their nature, but they really weren’t the most interesting of characters. Again, in this story, a nuanced, relatable villain isn’t really what’s called for, but I will say that a formidable staff-fighter isn’t really what’s called for either. Chulok doesn't exactly come off as the great charismatic crime lord they are supposed to be.

The climactic battle goes on for much too long, roughly the final quarter of the novel. The battle is a fine way to end the story, but I was getting tired of reading about it by the end.

Overall I wouldn't say this book was a must-read, but I appreciated it as a solid look at its main character, and as a creative bit of ancillary worldbuilding. Also, the cover art (from Oliver Barrett) is incredible, the best cover art a Star Wars book has had since the Ascendancy trilogy. 7/10

Bird of the Week

As much as I've read about birds, and watched them do things, there are still a lot of questions I have about them. Sometimes I'm able to find the answer with a bit of digging, but sometimes I find that I'm asking a question that ornithologists are also asking, and haven't fully answered yet. For instance, as is commonly understood, birds are brightly colored in order to attract mates. Sometimes the male and female of a species will look the same, and sometimes only one (usually the male) will be brightly colored to show off for the other (usually the female) who is more drably colored in order to better hide from predators. Colorful birds are taking a big risk, after all, making themselves so visible; if a person with binoculars can easily find it, so can a sharp-eyed hawk. But there are plenty of species of birds with a brightly colored male and a different looking but still brightly-colored female. Take, for instance, the Shining Flycatcher.

"Flycatcher", of course, can mean one of three different things: Old World, tyrant, or monarch flycatchers; the shining flycatcher is a monarch-flycatcher. It lives in mangrove forests and other wet, tropical woodlands throughout northern Australia, Papua, and eastern Indonesia. The male of the species are the namesake glossy blue-black, while females are brown-backed, blue-capped, and bright white underneath. While she is less vividly colorful than the male, she is, of the two, probably the more easily spotted in a tree.

The coloration of female birds is not, I've found out, an especially well-studied thing, outside of the few species, such as the phalaropes, wherein females compete for male attention, and in that case it's basically treated the same as the coloration of males of more typical species.¹ The reason for this gap in study is, so far as I can tell, that the scientific study of birds, as it is now practiced throughout the world, was first practiced in Europe, and the birds of Europe mainly come in one of two well-understood cases: either as colorful male - cryptic female pairs or as identical looking pairs. That became the prevailing idea of bird coloration, and exceptions to it (the torrent duck, the cerulean warbler, and the shining flycatcher, just to name some of these that I've drawn) all come from other parts of the world, so they didn't get factored in initially. Something similar happened with birdsong, another showy aspect of birds; the only female birds that singe in Europe are those of species were male and female look alike, such as the European robin, so it was long thought that only male birds sang; this is actually only the case in about a quarter of songbird species.² Singing, it turns out, is not merely a trick for courtship, but something more complex that communicates various things in various contexts; maybe coloration is the same. I struggle greatly to differentiate female dabbling ducks by species, and given the widely-known phenomenon of hybridization between duck species, it might be that the ducks themselves struggle with this, too. The male and female shining flycatchers each look quite distinctive among birds of their genus, so maybe not being fully drab and camouflaged helps the female shining flycatcher identify herself. I'm not sure, and I'm not able to study the birds for myself to get an answer. But I'm not going to complain about an extra sort of pretty bird just because I don't understand it.

To science, the shining flycatcher is Myiagra Alecto. The genus name is Greek for "fly catcher";³ the species name is that of one of the Furies, spirits in Greek myth who avenged crimes.³ That name was given by C. J. Temminck in his supplement to the Comte de Buffon's illustrated list of the world's birds. Temmink made a few mistakes in his description: he placed this and a few other monarch-flycatchers in the genus Drymophila, that of the ant-birds of South America, and he incorrectly stated that both the male and female looked alike; his description is that of a male.⁴ He doesn't give reasoning for the name he gave, but Alecto was portrayed as robed in black, so I suppose it is a reference to the male's dark, glossy feathers.

Curation Links

The Simple Secret of Runway Digits | CGP Grey

[VIDEO] Ahead of the holiday travel season, let's have this again: why are airport runways labeled with such random-seeming numbers? Because the outer core of the Earth is a swirling mass of liquid iron. There are, of course, a few layers between that question and its ultimate answer, which this video gets into. (17 minutes)

Metal Machine Music | Laurent Dubreuil, Harper's Magazine

“Lyra D’Souza and David Mimno, building on research that established how LLMs memorize text, recently showed that the poems memorized by ChatGPT were most often those featured in the Norton Anthology of Poetry (with a preference for the 1983 edition). I imagine that the moment the transformer recognizes poetry (which could occur at the most rudimentary level, on the basis of typography and line breaks), it simply calls to itself bits and pieces of these other works, adding connective tissue and substituting synonyms. This strategy makes for undeniably ‘probable’ and ‘typical’ continuations that are ‘new’ in some sense. But is this the sort of language use and creative work that it is billed as?”

Is your fear of radiation irrational? | Geoff Watts, Mosaic

A look at the social appraisal of ionizing radiation, being, generally, “avoid exposure at all cost”. Radiation is a) dangerous in well-known cases and b) undetectable to human senses, even at deathly high levels, so an abundance of caution is warranted. But practical notions of radiation safety are not as well understood by the public, leading to panics and what ammounts to superstition around radioactivity, either radical avoidance or, in the case of a few contrarians, deliberate exposure.

The Oyster Diaries | Nancy Lemann, The Paris Review

[FICTION] “The worst things that happen, you don’t see them coming. That’s what makes them the worst. One of the vagaries of age is a loss of the ability to see or detect things that are right in front of you. Usually it’s when you’re cooking and you can’t find the oregano. But this is a metaphor with a bigger meaning—like when you don’t notice that your husband has turned into a Hieronymus Bosch painting.”

See the full archive of curations on Notion