#10. So, Andor is Amazing
This newsletter is not about Star Wars.
So Andor: amazing. Here are spoilers, but read it anyway.
If you haven't been watching the show, it's all of the lead-up in the five years before Star Wars Ep IV: A New Hope. It's all about the Rebellion forming and the sacrifices that people made so that, in A New Hope, Luke Skywalker could blow up the Death Star.
The show is amazing. Dare I say: it's my favorite Star Wars ever? Better than Empire Strikes Back? It is.
The main arc of season two involves the Empire doing some shenanigans on a planet called Ghorman, which has minerals they need to build the Death Star. Extracting the minerals will destroy the planet--but this is a thriving, vibrant planet! So what the Empire does is to fan the flames, needle and harass, get the Ghormans to protest the Empire, and then, when tempers are highest, they force the protestors to fight back--at which point the Empire Stormtroopers massacre them.
Because you can't take a planet away from good, normal people, but you can totally take a planet away from violent dissidents, right?
Mon Mothma, a prominent Senator in the Galactic Senate, and a hidden supporter and leader of the rebellion, finally determines, in the wake of the massacre, that something needs to be said. And, in front of the Senate, and broadcast Empire-wide, she makes the following speech:
"Fellow Senators, friends, colleagues, allies, adversaries. I stand before you this morning with a heavy heart. I’ve spent my life in this chamber. I came here as a child. And as I look around now, I realize I have almost no memories that pre-date my arrival and few bonds of affection that cleave so tightly.
"Through these many years, I believe I have served my constituents honorably and upheld our code of conduct. This chamber is a cauldron of opinions and we’ve certainly all had our patience and tempers tested in pursuit of our ideals. Disagree as we might, I am hopeful that those of you who know me will vouch for my credibility in the days to come.
"I stand this morning with a difficult message. I believe we are in crisis. The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.
"This Chamber’s hold on the truth was finally lost on the Ghorman Plaza. What took place yesterday… what happened yesterday on Ghorman was unprovoked genocide! Yes! Genocide! And that truth has been exiled from this chamber! And the monster screaming the loudest? The monster we’ve helped create? The monster who will come for us all soon enough is Emperor Palpatine!"
But this email was not about Star Wars.
New and Interesting Things This Week
#1. We have a new pope! I like him quite a bit, and you've heard all the jokes about him being not only an American pope, but a Chicago pope. Pretty neat, and I'd like to see the faces of the Italian chefs in the Vatican when he asks for a deep dish pizza. Anyway, you know how they send up black smoke if they voted and haven't decided, but white smoke if they have decided? This article explains the chemistry of how they ensure the smoke is the right color. (Hint: white smoke is mostly water vapor.)
#2. You know how back in Ye Olde Times the alchemists were always trying to turn lead into gold. Well, scientists have finally done it! Yes, at a huge expense, and for an incredibly short period of time, scientists created the very smallest lead-to-gold transmutation. How? They used The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and they shot molecules of lead (82 protons each) in both directions, not to crash into each other, but to come just close enough that one molecule of lead stole some of the protons from the other molecule of lead, leaving one molecule with just 79 electrons! GOLD. Read all about it here.
#3. Did you know that not only are hieroglyphics hard to read (they were impossible to read until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone) but 50 years ago Egyptologists discovered something called "crypto-hieroglyphics"? Basically, there are tricks (like, suddenly "read this backwards" etc) in the hieroglyphics that a regular reader (who is already pretty well-educated) wouldn't notice, but one of the very elite could read. An Egyptologist in Paris, Jean-Guillaume Olette-Pelletier, noticed this on one of the obelisks that the French took from Luxor and planted in their capitol city in Napoleon's time. He's publishing a paper about what the crypto-hieroglyphics say. (But, to be honest, they seem kinda boring, like telling the elites the superior way to leave offerings to the gods. Not all secrets are maps to hidden treasure.)
#4. Mars, they think, has liquid water below the surface. This is of particular importance to me as I'm working on a science fiction novel that uses a Martian aquifer as a plot point. They discovered this because of Marsquakes: they have instruments on Mars, like we do on Earth, that measure seismic waves, and, according to their studies, the waves can only be explained if they're traveling through liquid. Neat!
Distractions and Diversions
My dad and brother just went on a zany cruise that took them up the coast of Japan and then across the Pacific Ocean, through all its rolling seas and 30 degree air, to Seattle. During this, we would text back and forth but could never figure out WHEN we were texting them, because time zones are weird, plus they crossed the International Date Line. You would think that time zones could just be split up evenly, like by longitude, but they're not. This great video from Hank Green explains some of the weirdest time zone maps.
I love the archaeology of the Southwest, and one of my favorite YouTube channels is The Trek Planner. He pores over Google Maps in vast expanses of wilderness, and if he finds something weird--an unnaturally straight line or circle, for instance--he'll hike out to it and see what it is. He never tells you exactly where he goes, because there's an unspoken rule that you don't leave maps of hidden archaeological sites, but it's fun to join him virtually on his hikes. This one is particularly awesome.
If you've read my books, you'll know that I love me some androids. There was a movie that came out a couple years ago, The Creator, which was a fair-to-middling movie, but which had INCREDIBLE visual effects. And they managed to do it on a remarkably small ($70 million) budget. In this episode of Corridor Crew's "VFX Artists React", director Gareth Edwards (of Rogue One fame) explains how they got the androids to looks so amazingly lifelike. Really, even if you don't care about this movie, this behind-the-scenes is neat.
And that's about it for me. To learn more about me, take a look at my website.
"Valley!
Highland!
Let me spend my every day there!"
