C.J. Cherryh's Blog, page 17

I got about 15 ‘joins’ last night, many with unlikely names, most from Russia, and not a personal letter to me in the lot, I’m sure. I did some clean-out of the approval queue last night and if you’re a real person and got ‘denied’ write to me…otherwise I have to assume you’re a robot. If you’re shy, all you have to say is “Hi, I’m [your name] from [place] and I want to join the site.”

Trying to keep this a fun and friendly place with no ads for Caribbean vacations or Viagra.

I’ve seen them. Tricks of the water and the light that make me, from the corner of my eye, think I’ve seen one of our lost koi. because they were always part of my field of view from my workstation. The water is warm now, and Jane and I worked yesterday at installing the protective netting to prepare for baby fishes. The store isn’t saying they have them, but they’ll hold them two weeks before sale, and it’s definitely getting time. The water’s 58 degrees and warming, and we need fishes!

named after Pairuti took a shot at Bren and demised.

And came in sweaty, overheated, and worn out.

The messy trellis by the lotus pond had to go. The espaliered apple had broken out in vertical shoots, and I trimmed those and took down the clematis vines that will now have to grow up the trellis we’re installing.

The new tree is getting a bed of heather out front—Jane did that.

And I’m hoping for fishes soon. The water that has been clear is getting murky with algae as the weather warms, but it’s all too fine to catch in the filters. I’ve run the filter since we refilled and never had to wash it once, but I think we are approaching filter-washing time. I don’t do it until the filter starts spitting water, because there is a level of dirt that actually helps trap fine particles, and I really hope I can get by without algicide this year.

When we moved out of OKC and gave up all the tanks, I missed them—so for my birthday in 2000, I got a little ecosphere egg with five little shrimp in it. And a twiggy branch. It’s a sealed system. It’s got algae, bacteria, and some tiny, tiny shrimp that live in a balanced system. It needs to be kept reasonably warm, never hot, given light, but not direct sunlight. And they’re active little things.

Eventually, of course, we did get fish tanks. And a 5000 gallon pond. But I’ve always taken care of that little egg, kept it from getting too cold or too hot. And stable. They appreciate not being moved about or disturbed too much. We lost three of the shrimp the first year, but the two remaining soldiered on. I lost one of the two a couple of years ago. The egg survived the 8 day winter blackout. But alas, the last shrimp died this spring. Aged sixteen years at least. Pretty good for a shrimp about as long as a cigarette end is wide. Pretty good for an artificial contained ecosystem.

Irony is, my college roomie and I palled around with the son of one of the German rocket scientists. His project was space station life support. We kept fish tanks. So we used to talk a lot on how to sustain a sealed system with scats (a fish that eats algae) and light. Balance was a pita. But the scats were just too large, and balancing their eating with the resources light could produce was a little too hard. We all graduated and went our ways.

But when I saw this egg back-when, I was absolutely intrigued.

Well, they had a sale on them. So I got myself another egg. Four shrimp in this one. And a twig. And some sand. I’ve set them at my work station (I’ll have to move them to a warmer spot come winter). There’s a spot of green algae that’s popped up. But that’s not what they eat. I saw one of the smaller ones on the glass without the normal white coating on his little front claws—at which they’re ordinarily busy. But he began waving his claws over the glass, and collecting white onto his forelimbs, bacteria, which are too small to see until he masses them together. Then he’ll go perch on his twig with the others. I don’t know their species well enough to know whether he eats the bacteria or whether they provide something that he absorbs. But he’s certainly industrious about it. Because he’s a crustacean, his shell is probably too hard to absorb directly, but possibly they exude something he likes.

I’ll have to find out his species and do some research.

Anyway, the egg is thriving. Getting sixteen years out of one is uncommon, and pretty well a record: the old ones Ecoglobe has on their premises are a year younger. Most demise in 5, probably due to people not taking care of them or moving them about too much.

I’ll try to get a picture of it. It’s an Emperor One Japanese Maple, a nice tall one, pretty red leaves. There’s a little worry about sun exposure with this tree—they don’t like it hot or bright, but we have those tall evergreens and some other trees about it, and a dwarf Japanese Maple about 4 feet away from it that’s done very well.

It was in the book with the kids’ visit to Tirnamardi.

I forgot to enter it in the Little Black Book.

It was where Aseida lived.

And by that you know that Jane is doing a pass through the Hinder Stars and I’m outlining basic setup for another Bren book. I can’t tell you any more, because YOU have one more book between Convergence and Resurgence. Or is it Emergence?

I put in a 1″ outer diameter water pipe for scale.

and here’s one of my kitteh sleeping, because he has such a sweet face in that mode.

Some in this generation are afraid of BIG. Big pharma. Big oil. Particularly Big Data. How valid is the fear?

Bigness isn’t a new thing. We had things so Big in the 1800’s we regulated them: one man owning all oil. One man owning all rail. Then one man got a board of directors and became that artificial One Man, the corporation—a maneuver to let a group of people acquire Bigness, and theoretically replace their leader at will. But—when they replace him—THEY generally stay. It’s a curious construct, if you think about it. The One Man becomes theoretically immortal.

And fairly prone to swallow the competition. The Bigness, not being physically constrained to one body or one lifetime, can virtually ingest others of its kind.

Or NOT of its kind. It can diversify, immunize itself against the ups and downs of buggywhip technology in one limb of the corporation—

And increasingly divorce itself from the interests of any one of these components. It’s business becomes maintaining itself. Bigness is its primary interest. And morality can only be applied by vote of the majority.

The Big Corporation is also—virtually immortal. Or at least tends to outlive real people.

So, IMHO, the modern age has cured its original problem by creating a problem. But IS it altogether a problem?

Enterprises fail on a number of grounds—mistaken concept, mistaken direction of search—or inability to sustain the search for, say, a cure for cancer, because of the limits of a human lifetime; or the limits of budget; or the sheer scale of the operation; or the inability to share information. One Man can be on the right track. But gets old and dies. Or runs out of money. Or doesn’t talk to the woman in Russia who has a test result and an idea.

Corporations, being in a sense immortal, and having huge finance, and a vast web of connections, can apply these to the problem and make advances much faster than single operations. Corporations can afford to risk a bit. Corporations which have a culture of morality in their boardrooms can take risks with the sweeping authority of ancient kings—a decree saying, we’ll take a chance on that research. We’ll fund that exploration. We can do that.

And lately…there’s a new force in the works. Big Data. It’s a tsunami of information, that in a sense ‘corporatizes’ the world population, so that we know x-number of shoppers bought y’s. X-number returned them. Sally Smith is one of x-number of people with a y-allergy. Sally herself is merged into a tick that may move industry in a way Sally’s phone call can’t. But in another sense, the fact that Sally phoned the manufacturer is itself data: if one person called, there are 10,000 out there that had the same problem but didn’t. We have virtual One Man getting information on ‘virtual Sally’ and Sally becomes significant to a corporate decision to investigate a problem.

We generate data every time we log on, use a credit card, make a phone call, even—thanks to DNA research—every time we touch an object. Sit on a sofa. Nick a finger.

We shed bits and bytes the way a cat sheds fur, constantly. In a sense, Sally sheds pieces that could inform us she is allergic to y, but Sally herself is data along with the motions and actions of all customers. Finding Sally can be amazingly precise—if someone were motivated to find Sally. But Sally’s importance has nothing to do with her holding city office or her knowledge of bookkeeping or her driving record—none of that matters to the corporation that sees her as part of that allergy statistic. We ALL become so statistical that we disappear into numbers and calculations. Sally is world-affecting with no one interested in knowing her name. Sally’s circle of family and friends knows her in a very different way, and that’s Sally in close focus, the ‘real’ Sally, who is not a construct, who is a textured human being with a lot of quirks and differences from average. Sally’s sons and daughters will be wholly different people, generating their own blizzard of data, significant in corporate boardrooms for complete different statistics.

It’s a weird world we live in.

It’s a tumbling cascade of changes wrought by data, new discoveries, massive undertakings, new social institutions.

We don’t cease to be important as individuals because we belong to a data-group. We actually contribute to these changes without knowing we do—we have our particular impact without knowing it, sometimes for good, sometimes neutral, sometimes negative. We’re obsessed with ‘celebrity’ as if that were real, but meanwhile we DO steer decisions in ways we likely will have no awareness of. Everyone of us touches every other one, even when continents separate us and time changes us. The nature of Big Data is information, but the information tends to become chaotic and full of irrelevancies when you sift down to the individual particles. Can Big Data target an individual? An individual stands out in Big Data only by the determined action of someone to find him or someone with his traits. Most of us do not have traits that unique. Our name is generally Legion, in almost all the categories in which our personal data falls. Find us? Maybe. But why?

I do genealogical research. A lot of data on individuals is at my fingertips. I can find out things about people I never met that are just amazing.

Until I run up against a woman in the 1600’s, who I know specifically shares my DNA. I know a lot about her. But because her church wrote her down only as Ellenor Scholes, wife of William Scholes—the line breaks here, forever, unless some family somewhere knows her father’s name. She’s only Ellenor. All other data is lost.

So she disappears. We know something of her influence on subsequent generations, but she, herself, has no face.

I think I’d rather leave records.

Spring is springing forth, and the pond has water. It’s not as crystalline as we like but it’s alive, in the sense that the biological filtration is proceeding, and when it has fish, it will be good. The chemistry is good.

The weeping cherry is going strong.

You may recall the post with Jane sitting in the empty winter pit of the pond. Here it is with water.

And here are some random shots of the back garden. Peonies are close to blooming, particularly the tree peonies, which are dark red when they bloom. They’re always among the first.



Here the dark red shoots are a regular peony coming forth, not forming distinct buds yet, a little behind the tree peonies in timing.

In the front yard, the magnolias are breaking into bloom: the star magnolia.

The pink magnolia



And the redbud, state tree of Oklahoma: we had to have one. Those will be reddish purple small blooms, followed by heartshaped leaves.



And in back,the lotus pond: lotuses are slower than the water lilies: one lily has two leaves on the surface and others are reaching, in the big pond, but these sleepy sorts haven’t stirred yet.