F3 Galactic Weather

            “Congratulations on your promotion, Dr. Nichols,” Jim Macomber said as Jennifer walked into the conference room.

            “Thank you, sir. What promotion?”

            The others from the Hermes, Odyssey, and Frontier satellite control teams were already there. Nina, Walker, and Charlie all grinned. Peterson, as usual, looked sour, but it was less sour than his normal expression. Interns and others lined the walls.

            “You are now the Director of Extra Solar Conditions,” Macomber said.

            “Wow, that’s, um, what does that mean?”

            “You’re the galactic weather girl,” Walker said.

Know Your Audience

            There’s obviously a writing connection to this post, but I’m actually thinking more of teaching. See, writers know their audiences pretty well. There’s mystery, fantasy, sci-fi, romance, horror, western, etc. Sure, there are subgenres, mixed genres, and even tight niches, but we have a pretty good idea of who would want to read our books. We write for them.

            But with students . . . we don’t know. I was talking with some teacher friends, and we’re at a loss to understand this particular audience. We used to. But over the past few years, it’s changed. We’ve all experienced the students who stop showing up. We could deal with that. It’s easy, we either withdraw them or we fail them. No problem. But we’ve got a new type showing up, now. They attend all classes, but never hand in assignments.

M3 Folklore or Mythology?

            We have a better understanding of folklore (which took far too long), but what is the difference between folklore, mythology, and all the rest? Well, this is actually simpler. All mythology is folklore, but not all folklore is mythology. It’s like those logic problems from the SAT: All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.

            Myths are stories, and while stories can and do accompany the majority of folklore in the world, they are not the absolute limits. Some aspects of folklore do not come from a culture’s mythology, but from practical necessity. A specific festival might have a mythological story behind it, explaining the cultural reasons for the festival, but specific traditional dishes served at the festival might not be part of that story.

F3 Power Problems

            Peterson glowered. The group of engineers he met with—he hadn’t bothered learning their names, instead calling them by names from The Fellowship of The Ring—had brought him power calculations for various batteries, none of which would meet the power requirements necessary for what Jim Macomber wanted from the nanosats.

            “It can’t be done,” Boromir said. “We could probably get a battery that could meet the power requirements for half an hour, and hour at most, but to get in the four to six hour range that you need, is going to mean more cells. More cells means more mass and a bigger form factor. And if the director wants an entire day’s worth of transmitting power, over those distances, we’re talking about another New Horizons probe.”

Summer of Reruns

            It’s summer, and I’m going back through some old favorite TV shows. Since Castle ended, and I wasn’t impressed by season 8, I figured I’d start there. I have to say, season 1 is amazing. And as I’m going through it, I’m trying to figure out what happened. What’s different between 1 and 8. Why did 8 become such a flop, and 1 was so spectacular.

            First, Castle the character is better. He morphs over the course of the seasons to be goofier, who launches into the patently absurd. Yes, he’s a believer of the absurd, or at least a hopeful believer, but what made him so good in the early seasons was that he was smart, and knew what made for an excellent story when it came to crime.

M3 Folklore, Myths, Fairy Tales, Legends?

            I was going to do a post on American mythology, but my recent experience at Comicon has alerted me that the terms of this branch of study are not clear. What is folklore? How is that different from a myth? What about fairy tales? And of course there are urban legends, too; what about them?

What is Folklore?

            Imagine a football game, which is relevant cultural knowledge. Two teams face off on opposing sides of a field. Each team consists of players in different positions on the field, who primarily play offense or defense. The team with the ball tries to drive the ball into the goal of the opposing team to score. Players move the ball by passing it to teammates or dribbling it to the other end. Once at the other end, it becomes a matter of kicking the ball past the opposing team’s goalkeeper into the goal. . . . Wait, did you think I was talking about American football?

F3 The New Frontier

            Walker Andrews looked at the data from Frontier’s nanosats in his presentation one last time. It was phenomenal, to say the least, and it really resembled a map of wind patterns across the globe, spread out over the galaxy. Well, a very small part of the galaxy, anyway.

            The nanosats had quickly gotten out of range to transmit their data back in a timely manner, if the signal even could make it back to earth among all the galactic interference. But what they had discovered was impressive.

One Down

            One month of summer is already gone. Why is it that time seems to move faster outside of the semester? I’ve still got plenty of work to do. Fortunately, I can say that I have chalked off plenty on my to-do list, but there’s more to go. Well, back to it.

M3 Eternal Athena

            Athena, like most of the Greek gods, reveals herself to have some complexity. Being the goddess of wisdom does not gain her automatic entry into sainthood. She has her moments, as we saw with Arachne.

            For one thing, Athena is very competitive. Even barring Ovid’s version of the Arachne story with its direct contest, Athena judges Arachne as if in competition. Athena bests Poseidon to win Athens. She competes against both Hera and Aphrodite in a beauty contest. The aftermath of that contest becomes the Trojan War, where she, in a symbolic fight against Ares, demonstrates that she is more skilled in battle than he is. Her involvement in the fights of heroes, to have them triumph is also part of her competitive nature. She not only wants to win, she needs to win.

F3 Customer Service . . . Again

            I was almost out of patience listening to the muzak on the phone, but it did finally give way to a person.

            “Thank you for calling Milpack Customer Service. My name is Debbie, how can I help you?”

            “Yeah. I need to send my backpack in for some repair.”

            “Can I have your name, sir?”

            “Reilly Hawkins.”

            “H-A-W-K-I-N-S?”

            “Yep.”

            “I see you have two of our backpacks. Is this the charcoal or the navy?”

            “The navy.”

            “I see. Can you describe the damage? It might be covered under our warranty.”

            “Heh, doubt it. So there’s this real douchebag takes a disliking to me. A Hothead who was showing off with his flamethrower, and he got it too close to my pack. Entire front is roasted, almost gone.”