Hi All,
Currently Scion of the Zodiac is available at Smashwords (paperback or pdf) and Lulu (many electronic formats). Spreading it more widely is proving interesting. In the coming days, it should make it to Kindle, Apple, and the other big stores. Or you can get those files at Smashwords and save the wait.
If you happen to like science fiction, gardening, friendly dragons, and/or native plants on alien worlds, you might like this book. Check it out.
Note: there are three ways to get it, if you’re interested. One is to buy it, which is always much appreciated. Another is to read and review it for me, which means you get it free if I get your honest feedback afterwards (this is the sweat-equity model). The third way is to be closely related to me, in which case it may just appear on your table some day soon. This is the fun part of being related to an aspiring author.
Filed under: California Native Plants, NANOWRIMO, Nature Writing, Science Fiction, writing
Hi All,
Ah, the silence of November. It was productive. Here’s what was up:
–I did my third National Novel Writing Month (NANOWRIMO) contest, and for the second year in a row, I finished the necessary 50,000 words. Since I started late and had a lot of other things going on, when I was writing, I wrote a lot. This is the start of another science fiction novel, one about time travel and conservation.
–The result of my NANOWRIMO 2009, Scion of the Zodiac is going up for publication. While I’m still shopping it around to see if any publishers want it, I decided to publish it myself and see if anyone liked it. It’s currently available at Smashwords and Lulu. Hopefully before Christmas it will be available at Mysterious Galaxy bookstore as well. The basic idea is that, if a publisher wants to option it, I’ll simply take down the current self-published versions and let them publish it.
Bottom line is: if you want to read science fiction with a large dose of ecology in it, check it out. I’ll post links as I get them.
–The next writing item on my list are those promised blog entries about native plants, to help Mike and anyone else for leading public hikes in the spring. If you have any preferences for topics, let me know.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: CNPS, CNPS-SD, Guerrilla Gardening, Seed Balls
At the CNPS-SD plant sale last weekend, I helped Amy Huie sell seeds (Hi Amy!). We had this little legalistic statement on the seed packets, about how they were for landscaping use only, not for restoration. Now as far as I know, that little phrase on the seed packet is a reminder that the seeds came from a commercial vendor, and we have no idea where they were harvested. The idea is that people can do whatever they want on their private property, but we’re not going to recommend that they scatter them in the wild.
One of the customers said, “what does this notice mean? What if we ARE planning on using them for restoration?” I questioned her, and it turned out she wanted to scatter the seeds (including California poppies) in a nearby park. According to her, it was all empty, with Eucalyptus and stuff, and (as I found out through more questions), lots of mustard. She wanted to make it more natural, and she didn’t like that we were being all legalistic. I guess she felt we were criticizing her environmental inclinations, her desire to be a Ninja Do-Gooder in its latest, most fashionable phase: the guerrilla gardener.
We’re seeing more of that guerrilla gardening thing around this year. For example: seed balls, mistakenly called seed bombs. At the last CNPS meeting, a guy handed out seed balls, after he inadvertently sparked an online discussion because someone implied that his balls contained invasives. For the record, those balls don’t contain invasives, just 8-10 species of California native plants, and at least a hundred seeds per ball.
I took one of those balls home and pitched it in the pot I grow native annuals in. The ball was an inch round of solid red clay and it didn’t shatter as it was supposed to. It bounced (surprise surprise) . The thunderstorms a few weeks ago triggered something to germinate, and at least 10 seedlings sprouted right next to each other. A week later, they were all dead. The clay had dried out, and they could not reach the soil. With the current rains, something else is sprouting on top of that ball, but I’m not holding out much more hope for it either.
Even if something does survive, there’s only space for one plant to grow in that ball’s footprint, so 99% of his seeds are wasted at the outset, never mind the ones that will strangle each other through competition. This ball was badly designed, but I’m having fun watching it, just to understand how it’s failing, in detail. I recommend this exercise to anyone who (like me) thinks seed balls are cool. Reality is cool too, and she’s a better teacher.
And so it goes with guerrilla gardening. Seed balls are fun, making them keeps little fingers busy, and since everyone’s talking about them, they must work, right? Moreover, you get to Stick it To Da Man and Help Mother Nature by throwing something over a fence, and that just feels right. Especially if, unlike me, you’re optimistic.
Does it work? Well, that’s the awkward part: I’ve heard one story of seed balls used to sow evening primrose into a canyon restoration. So far that’s it. If you’ve got more stories, please share them.
As for designing seed balls, I’ve started telling people to a) read The One Straw Revolution so that you can see how seed balls were originally made and used (hint, it’s not quite what we’re doing now), b) to use fewer seeds and 1-2 species per ball, so that something has a chance of making it (unless you like wasting seed, which I don’t), and c) if you want that ball to shatter, don’t make it out of solid clay. Otherwise, you’re going to make a seed bomb, which, as you might guess, is going to bomb. Badly.
And while it’s nice to keep little fingers busy making seed balls, maybe we should be teaching little fingers how to grow plants successfully? That’s a little harder, but I think the lesson (“Wow! Mommy taught me how to grow plants. She’s really smart.”) might be more useful than what they’re learning from seed ball making (“ooh, I can make a mess, and it’s fun, but the plants didn’t grow.”) Just saying.
As for the would-be guerrilla gardener from last Saturday, I learned from her that her partner was helping collect seeds for CNPS. So I gently suggested that, while CNPS could never condone trespassing or doing things without permission, if they were insistent on doing something about that park, they should collect seeds from the nearby canyons and plant them. If they followed those very nice collecting guidelines that CNPS has. And after they got the mustard under control.
She didn’t purchase many seeds, and I feel a little bad about depriving CNPS of her money. Then again, do we really need more California poppies in our local parks? It’s not like they’re locally native.
What do you think?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: botany, California native plants, Environment, San Diego
Time’s fun when you’re having flies. Right now, we’re getting new tiles to replace the linoleum in our house, and I’m looking at the things I need to do for the next few months.
–Oh yes, EIR review. Fun. There’s a lot of CNPS activities on right now. For example, on October 16, there will be a plant sale at the Prado in Balboa Park. I’ll be there, and we need to sell a lot of plants.
–Rare plants. Starting in November (November 9 to be precise), I’ll be kicking off the 2011 rare plant survey season. The magic question: what to survey next year? Ideas are welcome.
–I’m trying to figure out better ways to monitor developments. It seems that one way for developers to economize is to paper over issues in developments (rare plants, etc) and hope no one notices. If you’ve got ideas about how to get around this, or if you want to join in one experimental effort, contact me here or via email.
–In the past, I’ve done some educational walks for CNPS. Since I’ll have to have a real job next spring, it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to lead walks for a while. I’m thinking about putting down some of my ideas, for other hike leaders. Tentative titles include: yes, you can talk for an hour about poison oak (especially if other Anacardiaceae are around), fun with Baccharis (or how to make Rick Halsey break a broom baccharis branch), fun with Artemisia, etc. Question is, will anyone read it? Let me know.
Probably there are a lot of other things, but I’ll save them for a later post. I’ve been neglecting this blog for a while.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Happy Fourth to all. I hope everyone gets the picnic food and fireworks that they want. Kye Ok is working this weekend, so our celebration is going to be something fairly low key in the evening. Perhaps we’ll be walking outside and watching the neighboring high school. Last year they had a fireworks display in the middle of their football field, and I hope that they do it again this year.
That’s one of the challenges being married to someone in the medical field. They work on weekends and holidays.
Back when I was fresh out of college, one reason I decided not to go into wildlife was that you have to work on the animals’ schedules, and most people don’t get that or you. Why are you banding ducks on the Fourth of July?, they’d ask. You could have all the beer you wanted if only you would be a normal person and come to my party.
Plants are more accommodating in a 9 to 5 world, and that’s one of the many reasons I went into botany. Still, I’ve gotten nasty, nasty remarks from zoologists I’ve worked with, who assume that you can go out with them at 4 am. They’ll survey their birds, while you map the vegetation in the dark… They’re done by 10 am and call it an eight hour day, while you’re just halfway into mapping. But I’m not cynical about that industry. Really.
Now, of course, I’m sharing my life with a wonderful woman who works with those strange animals called people. And people get sick at all sorts of inconvenient times, so she has to work an inconvenient schedule. Come to our wonderful party, our relatives say (our friends know better than to drop snap invitations). Sorry, we reply. Kye Ok’s got to work, and anyway, if we’d wanted to take the 4th off, we would have had to schedule it last year.. And so it goes.
That’s how life is these days. Holidays need to be scheduled six months to a year in advance.
Still, the Fourth of July is as close as we get to a summer solstice celebration. I hope everyone reading this has a happy fourth, whatever you do.
Once a month? I’d rather blog more often than that, but I’ve gotten seduced by a beautiful little plant, the San Diego thornmint.
Actually, that’s not quite the true story. Back in the winter, I got persuaded to take on the rare plant committee for my local CNPS chapter, and so I naively volunteered to run a survey for this cute little endangered thornmint that I didn’t even know. A hundred hours or so later, I’m supervising a crew of thirty-two wonderful volunteers who are out all over San Diego County looking at historical populations of this little annual and sending the information to me so that I can collate it.
The fun really started when the thornmints communally decided (possibly through telepathy, though more likely through physiology) to bloom a month late. My carefully crafted plan to survey them in April shattered, because non-blooming thornmints are darlings things about an inch across, and they’re *hard* to spot. Fortunately, the volunteers have been great about re-aligning their weekend schedules around their childrens’ finals so that we can go out and find them. They’re out there. We’ve found thousands of the little cuties, which is good news.
But I’m not sure that the thornmints are to blame for me blogging once per month.
I’ve got a 140,000 word novel manuscript that I’m polishing to submit for publication, and I’ve been spending a lot of time learning about the ins and outs of the publishing industry. It’s a different world out there, and I’ll see how it goes. The process has similarities to publishing an academic paper or writing a grant proposal. Every publisher wants to see something different, and they may want a query letter, a pitch, a proposal including a synopsis (short, medium, or long), sample chapters or the first 10 or 50 pages, and/or an outline (which is a chapter-by-chapter synopsis up to 10 pages long). Many publishers say that they want submissions only from agents, while there are several blogs that say that following these rules doesn’t work. It’s the granting process run by English majors.
So guess what I’m writing? All of the above. That’s what’s taking the time. It’s certainly a learning experience.
Happy May!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: California native plants, spring, taxonomy, teaching
This is turning into a rite of spring. “Curing the Green Blurs” was Mike Mesler’s subtitle for his plant taxonomy class at Humboldt State University. I took that class, and TA’ed it three times, and it’s still one of my favorite classes. Nowdays, I get to do a little green-blur curing in the spring, when I lead a couple of public hikes for the local CNPS chapter. Yes, it’s a bit of a come-down from TA’ing for the great Mike, but it keeps my head in the game.
What is curing the green blurs? It’s simply learning how to identify plants. If you don’t know what you’re looking at, all those plants around you are (wait for it) a green blur. Being able to name them changes the way you look at the world around you. As I tell the people attending my walks, it’s the difference between going to a big party where you don’t know anyone, and going to a party where you have a lot of friends. The more friends you have, the more fun you have, at least in my opinion.
One thing I remember vividly is the last field trip I took in plant taxonomy lab, before the final. We just walked off campus and down the street in Humboldt, past vacant lots. The TA was quizzing us: what’s that? What’s the scientific name? What family? And of course, we were racing along, trying to be the first to get it right. At the end of the walk, the TA turned around and said, “Do you notice anything? Remember, at the beginning of the semester, we took a walk, and you didn’t know any of those plants?” That was an empowering moment. In the course of the semester, you don’t realize how much you’re learning, and that little walk through town was a great way of helping us students realize how much our worlds had changed. Great part was, I got to give about 50 other students that same experience.
I still like doing that.
Mike is a great teacher, but it’s a hard class. Three hours of lab, six hours of lab per week, and most people came in on Fridays or weekends to practice. Oh, and there was a quiz every week. The lab final was six hours long (ID 80 plants on sight, key out 6, including a composite and a grass) Average grade? B, no curve. And almost every biology student at HSU took that class, so we had 80 students (or more) every semester. I still think Mike is a genius, because he got students who had little botany background to do so well.
So Mike, if you’re reading this, THANK YOU! And if you want to learn plants, this is still the best way to do it. In my humble opinion, of course.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Wow, what a month. I haven’t posted anything on here for awhile, due to a lack of responses. Now that I’m hearing that people are reading these things (at least a few people), well. An audience helps. More soon.
Filed under: Uncategorized
There were a bunch of other things bugging me about Avatar.. Some of my fussing was unfounded.
This had to do with the fun of designing a livable moon that orbits a gas giant. Pandora, or the world I’m working on: Nysus. This has to do with three things: Roche limits, Hill Spheres, and tidal locking.
I’m a biologist, so I actually have to look these up. Fortunately, Wikipedia has the relevant equations, and when I was designing Nysus, I set up simulations in Excel to figure it all out. Right now, based on my memory of the movie, I’m trying to figure out if they got it right.
Here are the issues:
The Roche Limit is the minimum orbital distance where a moon breaks up due to stresses from the gravity of the big planet. That’s where Saturn’s Rings came from. The fun part is that the rigid Roche Limit is based on the densities of both the gas giant and its moon, so on a soft and fluffy gas giant, the rigid Roche Limit’s actually inside the gas giant. While Pandora’s ridiculously close to its primary, it’s outside the Roche Limit, because it’s orbiting a gas giant: Polyphemus.
The Hill Sphere is where the gravity of the gas giant and the gravity of the sun are equal. If a moon’s orbit is outside the Hill Sphere, the sun yanks it away. Pandora doesn’t have this problem.
A moon that’s anywhere near its primary tends to be tidally locked so that one face of the moon always faces the primary. From that moon, the primary basically sits at one point in the sky, never rising or setting.
If you want a 24 hour day on your exomoon, it’s got to orbit its gas giant primary every 24 hours.
One thing I noticed fiddling around is that, while the equations are complicated, things tend to be proportional. If your moon is orbiting a big planet, it goes a little faster, so it’s further away from the planet. Assuming you don’t fiddle with the density of the gas giant, it gets a little bigger, and it so the gas giant appears roughly the same size in the sky.
Now, we get to that fascinating question: how long was Pandora’s day? If it’s 24 hours, Polyphemus covers 25-35% of the sky, not half the sky, which is 90 degrees. If Pandora’s day is 12 hours, Polyphemus covers 40-50 degrees.
Now in the movie, Polyphemus sometimes covers something like 90% of the sky, and sometimes there’s a lot of blue sky showing. This suggests that Pandora actually is spinning, which is not a good thing. If by some weirdness, Pandora actually rotated with respect to Polyphemus, it would have truly godawful tides. How big? I don’t know, but when I calculated them for Nysus (which as about a 48 hour day), the tidal bulge was around five kilometers high. If Polyphemus is rotating, that means the tidal range is several kilometers. As I said, it’s bad. Fortunately, moons get tidally locked pretty fast.
And then we have the issue that the Alpha Centauri system has two stars, not one, and B’s orbit around A is highly elliptical and takes about 80 years to complete (distance varies between 11 and 35 AU, roughly). Therefore, the energy input to Pandora would vary enormously over that time, but it’s more than what Earth experiences. I’m not yet sure whether it’s possible to have a livable planet in this system, but since we only saw one sun, I think it’s safe to say that a real Pandora in the Alpha Centauri system would be weirder than James Cameron imagined. Oh well.
Yes, I’m late. I saw Avatar a bit over a week ago. Not that I’m going to bash James Cameron for the details of the movie. Nor do I think that the Na’vi were, well, what the title says.
I’m more interested in what the movie says about science and scientists.
For one thing, kudos to James Cameron for getting one thing right. Most botanists these days are women, and most of them are extremely competent in a variety of fields. Many even look like Sigourney Weaver, although there is slightly more diversity of skin color among today’s botanists.
Conversely, the old Hollywood trope of Scientist-As-Cannon-Fodder is alive and bleeding. In my checkered career here in southern California, I’ve come to the conclusion that most (not all!) Hollywood types have a fundamental contempt for reality, including some who have made misguided forays into conservation work. Any group that regards reality as good, sacred, or inherently valuable is a second-class citizen in most movies. That’s at best. They are more likely to be cannon fodder, monster bait, or monster spawners. James Cameron is definitely better than this (dude made six documentaries after all), but as I note at the end, the tropes had to be served.
No, what I was interested in was how they made Pandora. It’s a spectacular set, but you know, it was a set. What was missing was, well, evolution. And that got me thinking about how we deal with evolution in our society, and how we get that little cladistics revolution out of the biology departments and into matinee movies and fiction bookshelves.
Before your eyes glaze over, let me ask you: if Pandora actually existed, how would life have evolved on it, especially the Na’vi?
Yes, I know exactly why the Na’vi looked like cat-humans (see the end paragraph). I was trying to figure out how they could have evolved. The other big terrestrial vertebrates (like the direhorse) had six limbs, secondary lung thingies on their chests, four eyes, and two neural internet connections. The flying things like the banshees had four limbs, four eyes, secondary lung thingies on their chests, and two internet connections, and the prolemurs had six limbs (top two fused to the elbow), two eyes, one internet connection, and I didn’t see their chests.
Now, any cladistically-trained biologist would plot those traits on something like an evolutionary tree and start giggling. There’s no easy way they could share a common ancestor. Loss of eyes and limbs, sure, conservation of blue skin as an ancestral trait, fine, but loss of lung openings? Hunh? Does that make sense for highly active arboreal humanoids? Not really. And those neural connections. What kind of evolution drove those connectors, and why do you need fewer if you’re presumably more intelligent. That’s so, well, Apple. I mean, free lifelong internet service, with postmortem archiving in the Wood Wide Web is great and all, but how could it have evolved, and why are the plants and animals using a common internet protocol? The only thing I could think was that it was some sort of fungal infection that affected animal brains and plants as well. But then, I would think that way.
No, the critters of Pandora, fascinating though they are, still look like they came out of an art department. A very well-read art department, but not one that’s familiar with the idea of evolution favoring common body plans and repeated themes of development and evolution.
And that’s what I mean about getting evolution out of the biology departments and into the movies. What would Pandora have looked like if they’d taken an extra few hours and laid out some common evolutionary themes to follow as their design book?
Well, that’s where the title of the piece comes in. Where were the non-Na’vi primates? The prolemurs? That’s it? We needed sky blue cat-monkeys! And what about those secondary lung spiracle thingies? It’s possible to put them on a primate. It would have been possible to put a reduced form on the Na’vi, even. Just put two spiracles on the chest wall, and have their chests bulge heroically as they inhale. You could even explain those superfluous mammaries on the female Na’vi as secondary lung extensions to support the respiration required by carrying a fetus. So, when a female Na’vi inhales, her bust swells by one or two cup sizes. That would have been guaranteed to titillate, no, mesmerize the 16 to 35 year-old male demographic that movie makers reportedly prize. It probably would have annoyed everyone else though.
And that’s kind of the point: James Cameron ain’t stupid, and he managed to persuade investors to cough up $237 million plus to let him make Avatar. To do so, he had to use all the tropes that would be guaranteed to sell movies. Even if he had thought about nipple-breathing Na’vi, they would have been cut, because something that weird and borderline kinky could have damaged Return on Investment. After all, if he got too carried away, there would have been a tense closed-door meeting with investors, followed by a drastically revised script. He had to play it safe. And by playing safe, he’s raking in the loot.
So, the question for us life scientists and others is: so how do you get real science into popular culture? Wouldn’t it be cool if we could actually get people to use evolutionary themes as part of the basic design work? Wouldn’t it be even cooler if creative types were actually praised for incorporating science into their work, instead of just grabbing superficial images?
What do you think? How do we get there from here?
Frank Landis' Blog 