Book Review: The Great State of West Florida

This is one of those books that just grabbed at me from the bookstore shelf.  First, there's that gorgeous cover.  Then the promised story, of West Florida breaking away via legislative process from the rest of Florida to become a U.S. state in its own right seems like an interesting tale, picking up on an old thread of history (see map) and extrapolating it into the near future.  After that, the cover blurbs promising "a punk ethos, apocalyptic plot, grindhouse style and swagger."  With all that going on, it seemed a sure bet.

I have seldom been so disappointed by a book.

Ultimately, it's just the story of a family of demented, down on their luck dreamers and a bizarre representation of a clique of crypto-theocrat-politicians who worm themselves into the Florida legislature to get a secession bill passed.  After achieving this, they subsequently attack each other for no apparent reason.  It's also a love story between two teenagers who seem more of middle-aged in their prudent restraint.  (teenagers, yeah right)  Then there are the bizarre futuristic elements of robotic prostheses, a gunfight meet-up app called 'DU3L' (with which law enforcement seemingly has no problem), robotic gundogs – and all this by 2026.  As a work of speculative fiction, it is hopelessly inept.

But wait, I'm just getting warmed up here.  The real sin of this book?  Not much actually happens.  After a smash'em-up first chapter, it morphs into a beer-and-dope addled drift between dismal lodgings and low-life parental stand-ins for an orphaned 13 year old boy.  Oh, a piece of legislation gets passed, only to be handed up to the Federal level for permission to cleave off West Florida, something that seems unlikely be granted.  That's hardly a plot-driver.  Contrast this with, say, Greer's Twilight's Last Gleaming, a near-future story about a relatively peaceful dissolution of the United States following one overseas military intervention too many coupled with a trillion in Federal debt too much.  In that similarly-sized book, there are at least a half-dozen plot driving incidents.  Things happen there for reasons, some good, some bad, some unexpected, but for reasons nonetheless.  In The Great State, it's like a five year old's view of causality: grownups do stuff, that's why stuff happens.  

So why did I even bother?  At the paragraph-level, the writing's actually pretty good, with all the snap and crackle the cover promised.  It's hard not to like the grandpa-appointed cyborg Governor of a not-quite-state.  The fact that she drives a white pony car is a small personal bonus.  After that though, it's yet another extended exercise in creative writing: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Helene Pictures

I'll have a more substantive post along in a day or two, but in the meantime...

(a) we dodged a bullet, and

(b) here, have some random pics from around Apalach.

Under the river bridge.  This is normally about 3' above water level.  Boat ramps are to the right.

Another view of the river bridge from aptly-named Water Street.

Looking up Commerce Street into the Bowery district.  Only a little flooding.

Lot for sale in the Bowery, cheap.  Hip boots not included.

All I got for today.  Gonna go take a nap.

Breathe In...

... breath out.  Hurricane's on the way to the general area, but at least for this evening there was time for an after supper walk.  ps Wednesday: read through to the end.

Just a nice thunderstorm over the Gulf, seen from safely on the mainland.

It's going to be a busy couple of days, maybe even weeks.  When there's a chance for a minute of peace, I'll be taking it.  Expect an update sometime this weekend.

ps Wednesday evening: Folks, I've got a hurricane on my ass right now, let's talk later.  I just worked an eleven hour day getting ready, and Thursday and Friday aren't shaping up to be a bucket o' roses either.  We can chat next week.  For the moment though, all my family is either evacuating or set to stay in hardened buildings.  I'll be at the county EOC (an ugly block building with a hardened roof) running radios and such.  We'll all be OK.

If you're a ham or just have an SSB-capable shortwave receiver, you might try listening in on 14.325 USB, 7.268 LSB, or 7.197 LSB.  If you have UHF, try listening on SARNET-FL (only listening! – it'll be closed emergency net for a few days).  The VHF Carrabelle repeater will probably be taken off-line for safe storage, but try again in a few days.

In the meantime, any well-wishes, prayers, or setting-aside of future gifts of rye whisky much appreciated.

Somehow Not Quite Like Fall

It's not exactly the Dog Days of August, but on the other hand...

Not crisp hiking weather either.  Maybe in a couple of weeks we'll see lows touch the 60's.  In the meantime, hang in there, relief is on the way.  Real Soon Now.

One more thing, I've been hearing doom-saying about some thunderstorms down around Yucatan for a couple of weeks now.  Things aren't developing though, there's no directionality, and not even a whisper over at Tropical Tidbits or Weather Nerds.  Of course things can and will happen (Zeta 2020, I'm looking at you), and it is wise to keep an eye out, but now is not yet the time to worry this one.

Finally, go check out "Chicagohenge" over at APOD.  It's a copyrighted image, so I won't re-post  it here.  Only a click  away though, and it's quite a view.

Thing #314159 That I Won't Worry About This Week

Or for the next couple hundred years, for that matter: Kessler Syndrome.  [TLDR: A chain reaction of satellite collisions that release more flying debris that collide with more satellites, until an entire orbital altitude band is left completely unusable.  Most likely in the most useful ones, because that's where the satellites already are.  If any of this rings a bell, it was a plot device used in the book Retrotopia and the movie Gravity.]

So I was talking with a Knowledgeable Person about such things this just-passed summer, and when the Kessler topic came around his reply was "Yeah, don't worry about it.  Takes too much energy to change orbits."  Vigorous handwaving ensued.  "OK, but has anyone run some Monte Carlo simulations to get a rough idea?  What are the numbers here?"  He didn't know, didn't consider it worth worrying about.

Wait, wait, let's break for a Heinlein quote:

What are the facts?  Again and again and again – what are the facts?  Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history" – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places?

Well, as it turns out more than one research group has done some calculations.  Here are links to three of the better papers: 1, 2, 3.  The results are not actual facts mind you, but reasonable estimates based upon the best numbers we currently have.

Bottom line?  Two hundred-plus years.  So don't worry about it.  Here's a plot from the second link.

Really, don't worry about it, at least not for now.  It'd be like someone in 1781 worrying about what technology-driven problems could be happening by now – possibly a lack of suitable timber for ships' masts.  Of course I'm not saying that we shouldn't keep track of such things, and if a solution is not within easy reach by say 2200 we ought to step up the mitigation efforts.  What's more, these estimates might be off by... probably not more than a factor of two (i.e., 121 years).  However even that's beyond the foreseeable future.  So keep an eye out, but really, for now don't worry about it.

How the Higgs Field Causes Mass – sort of

Article at Quanta.

Well, it's better than the soup, molasses, or duck tape fairytales.

Mathematical Groups Explained – sort of

Over at Quanta.

Mathematicians are like cats: they do arcane, often inexplicable things, that ultimately turn out to have some meaning or utility.  But what that might be is frequently not intuitively obvious without some study.

Hurricane Michael Repairs Underway

Six years after Hurricane Michael, repairs to Leslie Street are underway.  Details at WOYS blog.

A very long road to fix a very short street.  Hey, better late than never.

I Felt a Great Disturbance in the Force

James Earl Jones, RIP at 93.  Find the article yourself at your favorite news outlet.

I don't usually tag the Star Wars series as scifi, but hey, what else fits better here?

Hoo Boy, We're Back to This

Cat Becomes Well-Cited Scholar With New Scam Method

6.5 minute explanation over at the zootubes, watch it and weep.

This is what happens when a blind metric replaces human oversight.

A Case of the Late Summer Busies

Many small things going on this week, and none of them were particularly interesting.  Easiest way to knock out a blog post is with a bullet list:

• Work continues installing the radios into the FCEM mobile EOC trailer.  Painfully slow progress, but it doesn't help to rush these things.  Program and test gear, install a couple of items, measure for the next step; wash, rinse, repeat.  It doesn't pay to get too far ahead, because it's hard to guesstimate (say) coax cable lengths before we sort out where the radios and antennas are going.  And most of that is cut-to-fit work.
• New tool bag!  Behold.  Just big enough to hold field electronics tool basics yet small enough that it's not bulky and not tempting to over-stuff.
• I'm giving the mountain bike front brake one more good spray-down with brake cleaner before I either (a) order a bunch of new parts, or (b) take it to the shop and say "Here, y'all deal."  The squeal is only there under hard braking, but that's enough to make riding unpleasant.  Kind of a barking airhorn sound with a side order of fingernails on a chalkboard.
• I really need to order some new mountain bike gloves and shorts, but I'm waiting until these brakes get sorted.  There's nothing so maddening as the one-week-later-oh-one-more-thing shipping charges.
• Re-watched Sam Fuller's Big Red One, about one squad in the First Division during WWII.  Reportedly one of the few war movies that gets things about right.  In fact I watched it twice, once with and once without the restoring director's commentary.
  

After all that, it's been rainy and there hasn't been much chance to go biking.  Then there's what's showing in the embedded graphic, which may or may not amount to anything.  Let's hope that it doesn't.

Definitely September.  Stay tuned, because fall adventure weather is right around the corner.  I want to get a bunch of these lingering items wrapped so that I can go have some fun outside.  Soon.

Definitely September

I'm just waiting for hiking weather to start in a month or so.  Scallops... total bust, St. Joe Bay is completely cleaned out.  Mullet fishing is picking up though.  It's still hot, but it's backed off about eight or so degrees from the real summer heat.  So now it's... fall?  At least, it's now "meteorological fall," i.e., starts by definition on September 1st.  "Astronomical fall" begins on the fall equinox, which this year falls (sorry) on September 22nd.

Honestly, the Sept-Oct-Nov fall has always felt right to me.  It coincides more closely with the start of school years and other fall-associated activities, even if thermometers still bump 90F most days around here.  Shoehorning Christmas into a fall time slot because it comes a few days before the winter solstice just seems wrong.

But what season is this weird hot-shorter-days-in-between-time really?  We all know that one: