Russ Colson's Blog: RoadWriter Blog

Mary and I have had a delightful season of campervanning this year, with me writing as we travel and her learning to play the violin (see pictures!).  We’ve made trips to see family in Pennsylvania and Utah, a 40th anniversary excursion to explore geology and attend the WorldCon in WA, and now we are on the road to Kansas for perhaps our last excursion of the season to attend the funeral of a dear friend’s mom.  This last excursion has gotten me to thinking about what is most important in the adventure of life and how that importance should be reflected in art, music, and literature.

Some thirty years ago I read a commentary by a well-known musician (I have forgotten who), who said that any art, to be worth its salt, must be political in nature because it is only in political conversation that we really make a difference in life.  I didn’t agree back then, and I still don’t agree.

For me, art should be personal and any ancillary political aspects should emerge from that personal engagement.  Political issues arise out of the moral and ethical choice of millions of individuals, and so it is personal morality that lies at the root of all politics, not the other way around.  It is in addressing personal morality and ethics that any hope for healing of political oppression or conflict must lie.  Who really thinks, in this era of political polarization and ideological entrenchment, that we need more attention on the politics of our angry people group and less on the examination of our own soul?

I try to argue for the importance of the personal over political in the introduction to my SF short story collection that I plan to publish in February 2026, Mindful Science Fiction.  In the Introduction for that book, I make the following argument:

“Science fiction, to live up to its potential, should include less analytical exactness of technological innovation and more ethical and moral examination.  Those ethics and morals, in turn, should transcend society-level issues like authoritarianism and social justice to include the individual morality and motivations on which meaningful society-level transformations must be founded.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking, that my recently-published SF novel The Arasmith Certainty Principle, has its share of political intrigue and commentary on the tyranny of leaders who think they know what’s best for everyone despite having limited ability to listen to them.  But none of that story is based on current politics (I wrote the story some 25 years ago!). Rather (I would hope) the story is based on personal morality, ethics, and choices that transcend any particular political situation or time.

So, what elements of the personal most influence my writing? That is best illustrated by a few of my experiences over the past two months since my last posting, including my current journey to the funeral of my friend’s mom.  Three things come to mind.

1:  Life is all about relationships, and relationships transcend politics.  Sure, you have your individual life, and the goals that you set, and the legacy and value you hope to leave behind when your existence in this world ends.  But, it is in relationship, not merely independent existence and action, that that legacy and value gain meaning.  A philosophical SF book that I read last month (Unfettered Journey by Gary Bengier), even concludes that relationship, in some way, underpins the very nature of existence and free will.  Thus, my trip to a funeral for a dear friend’s mom ties me to real meaning, as does all of my campervan travels to see family with Mary, such as my visit with my 92-year-old mother and her great-granddaughter this past year.  Can’t you see meaning simply radiating from the pictures below?

2)  No life is full, or appropriately humble, without a pervasive sense of wonder at the astonishing existence in which we find ourselves.  This week, up in NW Minnesota, an exceptional light show descended on us for two nights running.  The “naked eye” reds in the northern lights were among the brightest that I’ve seen for quite a few years.  Wonder at existence is also a type of relationship—with God and the natural universe.  Check out the pictures below taken from our bedroom window!

3)  Finally, the joy and journey of life shared is an essential element to finding personal meaning and nurturing the soul.  This fall, Mary and I put up lots of garden produce together, including carrots and a first try at canning squash, seen in the pictures below.  The visceral experience of the outdoor garden, planting and watching things grow and putting food up for the winter, places us squarely in the adventure of life together, a relationship like no other, as I mention in my Little Book of Gardening in Northwest Minnesota!

So, should art and literature pursue first the personal or the political?  For me, pointing out private political preferences for everyone who agrees to agree (gaining adoring fans?) and everyone else to dismiss feels less significant than pursuing personal growth.  Recognize that it is in personal growth of many individuals that we can find the foundation for a good political system, and that all politics, in the end, is about relationship with all other people.  That is a type of personal that both encompasses and subsumes the political!

The post Life Adventures:  Personal or Political? (with pictures!) appeared first on Road Writer Blogs.

I may be turning to the dark side.

Let me explain.

Generative AI has exploded into our world, and, as a writer and philosopher, I have significant concern about how it will impact my creative contributions.  I work hard at my writing, including short stories, novels, and essays, grappling with wording, flow, and content.  The whole point of writing is that the ideas are my gift to the world, the words are mine, even the connection from one thought to another is mine.  I DO NOT WANT my thoughts contaminated by an AI, because it is my thoughts, not AI thoughts, that I have to give away!

I even reject the use of MSWord grammar check when writing my novels, and will no-doubt ignore the corrections suggested by my host server’s AIs concerning this very post (yes, I know it is coming) telling me that my sentences are too long (80% of your sentences contain more than 25 words, which is more than the recommended 25%), that my paragraphs and topical segments are likewise too long, and that my key phrase is not repeated sufficiently frequently or evenly throughout my essay.  No doubt I’m turning away readers right and left, but, by golly, the words and style are mine (and you can know they are not AI because AI don’t make those mistakes!)

However, it takes me a year to write and edit a novel.

What if an AI can do it in minutes, and, because it’s been trained on the most popular and successful stories of all time, it will do a better job, or at least a job that far more people prefer?

Now extend that to art, music, science, and basically all creative innovation.  Humans can just sit around on the beach drinking Piña Coladas (non-alcoholic of course), and living the good life, right?

I would hate such a world even if humanity were able to solve the problem of wealth distribution that such a world would create.  I want to have creative input into my world, and generative AI has the potential to make that unneeded.  That terrifies me.

We aren’t there yet.  Right now, you have to nurture the AI along, tell it what you want and help it focus when it goes in the wrong direction.  But for how long?

A Hugo winner at the Seattle Worldcon that I just attended commented that her field of book cover art is undergoing existential terror.  Yeah.

But, at the same time, my niece, an artist well known in the fanfiction community, tells me that she likes AI for its potential to extend and expand her artistic abilities.

So, will generative AI increase or decrease human creativity?

The answer to the question, of course, is ‘yes.’  Generative AI will decrease (usurp?) human creativity in some areas, but make new opportunities in other areas (true at least for the current state of AI capability).  But will the new areas outweigh the loss of the old? I don’t know.

So, given all of my reservations, why in the world would such a noble Jedi as me turn to the dark side?

Because, I have just discovered that generative AI allows me to create art, and better art, than I would be able to otherwise do.  I have always created my own book covers for my self-published “contemplative writings” work (Ordinary Man Books).  Mostly I use my own photos, and the covers are fairly simple.  Recently, I began work on the covers for a couple of contemplative short story collections and realized that my vision for creating scenes from my own stories exceeded my artistic abilities.  So, I played around with Adobe Firefly, combined with some other image editing tools, just to see what I could do.  It allowed me to implement my artistic vision when I would not have been able to do so otherwise.  I really liked the result!  Suddenly, with a little help from Firefly, I can imagine scenes from my stories and bring them to life!

I haven’t decided yet whether to use my book cover efforts or not.  Although I really like the result, I’m an amateur at book cover design, so what would I know?  Also, AI cover art Is held in very low esteem in the science fiction community, and, although Firefly was trained on licensed and paid-for artwork (unlike some generative AI trained on work without permission), and my effort deprives no artist of work since I was going to create my own covers regardless, the negative attitude in the SF community doesn’t really take any of that into account.

I have other reasons for hesitation.  Yeah, maybe I’m ok with allowing generative AI to help me implement a vision for a piece of artwork that I lack the artistic skill to otherwise create.  However, I can imagine that someone else might feel the same way about writing—that they have a vision for a story but not the writing chops to implement that vision and AI can help them.  I’m quite uncomfortable with AI input into writing. 

The message of a story is carried in the writing, not just an overall vision.  It is through the writing itself that I communicate with the reader.  My contribution to writing is in the line-by-line way that I tie ideas, characters, and philosophies together, making it truly my step-by-step thoughts, not merely some grand vision of a story.  I don’t want my writing polluted by AI and, what’s more, I don’t want to read stuff that is coming from an AI that has simply been trained (perhaps without compensation to creators) on all the writing that came before it!  Even if technically very skilled at writing, an AI is still just a machine, regurgitating, in some way, what it’s been fed.

But wait!  Although it’s true that an AI bases its creative generation on work that came before it, that’s no different from me!  As I ponder how to write an acknowledgement for a novel, I realize that my own contribution is not solely my own but is influenced by every book I’ve ever read and every person whose life has crossed mine, including parents, siblings, teachers, friends, colleagues.  Even strangers.

So I, too, have learned from both the masters and the common folks who came before me.

The AI genie is out of the bottle.  We can’t go back, however much this old-codger heart might want to.  But I think we should be very careful and thoughtful in going forward, and not simply be driven by the economic need to move faster than the other giant tech companies.  Such reckless progress could be both dangerous and unjust.

However, the economic drivers of AI advancement are also out of the bottle, aren’t they?

The post A Creative’s Capitulation to Generative AI, or How I Became Darth Vader appeared first on Road Writer Blogs.

Mary and I are off on another adventure, this one for our 40th anniversary together!  Our primary objective is to explore the Channeled Scablands, a spectacular geology feature of Washington State formed when a glacial ice dam broke in Montana and spilled a million billion gallons of water across the landscape of Washington toward the Pacific Ocean.  After that, we plan to head on to the World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle.  However, while enroute, we’ve also stumbled upon a few other wonders, like the wind-formed loess hills of the Palouse, gold with wheat ready for harvest!

Mary and I have shared so many adventures over 40 years together, canoeing, hiking, bicycling, camping, raising a family, writing books, gardening, doing research, and of course puzzling over every mysterious geology feature we came across in our travels, whether in Washington, Ireland, France or even in our own home state of Minnesota.

What a romance!

Some people seem to think (in fiction at least) that “romance” is code for sexual activity.  How limiting!  In my marriage, and also in my fictional stories, “romance” is code for shared adventure!  That is why Mary’s and my current adventures together have inspired a breakthrough in my efforts to chart-out book three of my Quelly Clary science fiction adventure series.  Falling in love is not enough for a romance.  Anyone can fall in love anywhere, anytime.  But true love grows from shared adventures with puzzles to solve, dangers to face, and stories of life to share!  My heroes, Quelly and Barry (“Barn”) McAdams, will find all of that together as they journey across the forsaken landscape of future Earth, pursued by the alien gods trying to kill them before they can transform human destiny forever!

But, let’s get back to my current romance of 40 years, the ongoing adventure of life shared with my one true love!  What are some of our adventures in the Channeled Scablands of Washington and do they stand up the spectacular tales of 40 years together?  Of course!  We found canyons in the middle of the wheat-covered Palouse hills, a waterfall in a basalt amphitheater, another truly gigantic waterfall with the water long vanished, river potholes of unimaginable size, caves cut in basalt by ancient turbulence, current ripples thirty feet tall, and much more!  Check out the pictures below!

Above: Fields of wheat ready for harvest have painted the hills gold just east of the Channeled Scablands.

Above: Mary on our 6-mile hike to Rock Lake in the Cheney-Palouse tract on the Eastern Edge of the Channeled Scablands of Washington.  This lake is in a deep channel carved by the raging floodwaters that formed when Glacial Lake Missoula spilled out of Montana, crossed Idaho, and headed across Washington toward the Pacific Ocean. 

Above: Palouse Falls, one of the former channels of the great ice age floods that tore across much of Washington, now host to just a tiny little stream!

Above: Mary at Dry Falls, once one of the greatest waterfalls on Earth when the glacial dam in Montana broke and the entire contents of Glacial Lake Missoula spilled westward toward the Pacific Ocean in torrents that towered hundreds of feet above the top of the modern waterfall scarp!

Above: Mary and Russ in a science fiction landscape left by the raging torrent of the ice age floods as they tore across the landscape on the way to the sea.

Above: Russ at a Mega Pothole, carved by “tornadoes” of water (kolks) formed in the channel of the ice age floodwater that ripped the basalt columns out like matchsticks!

Above: Mary in a basalt cave formed as the torrent of water plucked rock from the walls surrounding the Grand Coulee.  I (Russ) once told a student who claimed to have seen a non-lava-tube basalt cave, that “no, I don’t know how a cave would form in basalt without it being a lava tube.”  What I didn’t know!–it only takes a few unimaginably giant ice age megafloods!

Above: Giant Mega Ripples, formed when vast mountains of floodwater poured over them on its way to the Pacific Ocean (pictures is a bit fuzzy due to distance, but with temperatures in the shade reaching 100 degrees, we decided not to get closer!)

Learn more at Ice Age Floods’ Geologist|Bruce Bjornstad!

The post 40th Anniversary Adventures in the Campervan! appeared first on Road Writer Blogs.

There is always some impetus that drives or beckons a person to do what they do.  For some people, that might be hunger, literal or metaphorical.  For others it might be attention, or influence, or power.  For some, perhaps wealth or comfort of living.

Me?  I have always hoped to give something away that others truly want.  Sadly, I am quite awful at giving gifts.  However, I’ve tried to give other things.  I spent my life as a professor trying to give away understanding of the nature of our world (some of my students might have wanted it!).  I wrote (and still write) science fiction stories that I hope can bring joy or insight or wonder.  Sadly, so far, it isn’t clear anyone wants them!  My daughter tells me that it doesn’t matter if you sell your work for a lot of money, but rather if even one person reads and enjoys it, that counts.  I agree.  Her words sound like my uncle from some three decades earlier.  He had spent his life trying to break into the country music industry, without success.  In the end, he said “When I was young, I was terrified someone would steal my music.  Later on, I just wished that someone would.”

Yeah, having just one person who truly wants my stories might be enough.  The problem is, in the modern world where getting attention is the primary currency of life, if a story gets no traction, then that small fraction of people who might truly want to read it won’t ever even know that it exists.  Even my grandchildren probably won’t read it unless it rises higher in their attention!

As I emerged from thoracic surgery after a cancer scare a couple of years ago, I realized that I would like to have something more tangible than stories to give my grandchildren.  Not just money or stuff, but something with meaning.  Like the beautiful wedding quilts with embroidered birds that my grandmother made for my brother and I with her own hands.

I came upon the idea of putting together sets of rocks and fossils, along with notes about the stories that each tells of the earth.  I built six equivalent sets (optimistically preparing for grandchildren not yet born!), choosing mostly hand-sized samples rather than the tiny kiddie-set samples you can buy online or at stores.  Samples ranged from quartz crystals that I collected in Arkansas on my first geology field trip as an undergraduate at the University of Kansas to dinosaur bones that Mary and I collected on a joint research project at a Cretaceous bone bed in South Dakota.  We added a few items like trilobites on recent campervan trips and had to pick up some samples I’d left back at my old home place in Kansas (another campervan trip in July of 2024).  I bought forty-two satchels in six different colors to hold the sets, reserving one last spot in each of the collections for a fossil fish from the world-famous Green River Formation—a fossil that I had never collected but had always longed to.

Thus, this past June, Mary and I stopped in southwest Wyoming near Kemmerer on a campervan trip to visit with family in Utah and paid real money for the privilege of breaking rocks with hammers for eight hours in the hot sun!  It’s such a delight when a rock splits open to reveal a fish that lived millions of years ago that no human eye has ever seen!

We had to get six fossils of course, for the six sets, and I think we got samples that were reasonably equivalent.  Here they are!

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Isn’t time interesting?  We don’t really know what time is or where it comes from, but, as we grow older, we start to feel its irreversibility.  What’s more, we humans love to write and read stories that play with time, perhaps more commonly than any other science-fictiony idea.

Mary and I encountered time on our maiden 2025 campervan voyage over Memorial weekend.  We first traveled south to the Cleveland area to visit with dear friends of some decades back.  They were perhaps our first close friends when we moved to Minnesota over thirty years ago.  We were all young together back in those days.  We explored ideas, faith, and life together.  When we got together again, it felt like we stepped back into that friendship.  Of course, we first had to share with each other the passing of the years:  the children who have grown up and begun their own lives, the careers that have bloomed, and faded, and bloomed again, the joys and the challenges.

Time is so full of life and remembrance.

Then we headed into northern Minnesota to prep for a science teacher workshop we plan to offer in July.  We stopped at an outcrop in Gilbert MN to look at a world-famous pillow basalt flow (ok, so only world-famous to geologists).  Check it out in the picture.  The black lines around the pillows are the formerly-glassy areas where the emerging lava froze in contact with the deep ocean water. 

Whoa!  Volcanoes erupting deep beneath an ocean…in Minnesota?  What wonders time has wrought!

Later, we stopped at a borrow pit and checked out the glacial sediments (see picture), telling us that mountains of ice had replaced the former ocean at some point in the past.  And in-between those two points in time lay iron deposits that could only form in a world with limited oxygen, mountain ranges that rose and eroded away, vast sand plains traversed by winding rivers, a continental rift that featured new volcanoes (not under an ocean this time), the coming and going of more oceans including a final sea that crept into Minnesota during the age of the dinosaurs.

Such a span of time seems greater than the little human brain can comprehend.  The Grand Canyon, famous for its stories of vast time, records just a portion of the time that can be read in the rocks of Minnesota.

Time is so humbling and majestic.

While we’ve travelled, I’ve been working through editorial revisions for my novel in progress, A People Joined Asunder.  My protagonist, a self-taught geologist, is trying to figure out the meaning of mysterious stratigraphic records on board a vast ship that may hold the key to surviving a coming alien attack.  Perhaps those records also hold the secret to the meaning of time.

Isn’t time interesting?  Thousands of science fiction stories on time, and I still want to read (and write) more.  That’s because we still don’t know what time is or where it comes from, and we marvel at how it transforms us and our world.

If you really love time and geology, you can check out some of my online ‘field trips’ through Minnesota geology (for science teachers and others) at Selected Geology Stories from Minnesota-Part 1 and Selected Geology Stories from Minnesota-Part 2.

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In reading my series on finding Truth in a post-truth world, you might think, Wait!  What about spiritual truth?  All your essays seem to address scientific evidence and reasoning, but isn’t spiritual truth more about revelation and faith than evidence?

Well, some might think so, but I am not convinced.  I can’t speak to the evidential foundation for other faiths, but for my own Christian faith, scripture is full of the ideas of testing and reasoning.  I argue that blind belief is not faith at all, and, in fact, has been the source of much darkness and evil in the history of faith.  No, true faith has been tested and made subject to reasoning.  As the book of Hebrews states, faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.  The Greek word translated as ‘substance’ means to set under or support.  The Greek word translated as ‘evidence’ means proof or evidence.  Reasoned evidence and supporting substance are the foundations of scientific investigation, making faith not unlike science in this way, and much more than simply the belief in things hoped for or not seen!

To have true faith, we must have substantive evidence that persuades us.  Paul the Apostle speaks often of being persuaded (not simply told or inspired).  In 2Ti 1:22 he is persuaded (Greek=convinced by argument) that Christ is able to keep that which has been committed to Him.  In Ro 8:38 he is persuaded that nothing can keep us from the love of God.  In Rom 14:14 he is persuaded that nothing is unclean of itself.  Repeatedly in Christian scriptures we are admonished to test ideas (not just accept, believe, or trust).  1 John 4:1 says to not believe every breath of air, but to “test the spirits whether they are from God.”  1 Thessalonians 5:21 says to “test all things and hold on to what is good.”  And again, in Deuteronomy 18:22, “If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the Lord does not take place or come true, that is a message the Lord has not spoken.”  Testing and comparing claims to observable reality are the foundations for investigative thought, not unlike scientific investigation, making faith and science far better aligned than some people might think.

Consider the odd phrasing of I Corinthians 8:20, which might be taken to mean that our search for spiritual truth should be ongoing and open to new understanding, not unlike the approach to truth in science.  The passage reads “Whoever knows anything knows nothing yet as he ought to know it.”  What can this contradictory statement mean but that we should not remain complacent in the presumption that we already know something but rather continue to pursue better understanding through ongoing investigation and thought?

Finally, let’s consider the famous “armor of God” passages in Ephesian chapter 6, metaphorically speaking of our spiritual walk as a battle against forces of darkness.  Isn’t it interesting that the only offensive weapon cited, a sword of the spirit, is identified as the Word of God, perhaps suggesting that our approach to battle against evil in the world should be viewed as more like persuasion than physical conquest?

You might have anticipated that this essay would explore my own ‘reasons to believe’ in my pursuit of spiritual truth.  Many people over the ages have offered their version of ‘proof’ of their spiritual beliefs, creating an entire field of theology with its own name:  apologetics.  I have, indeed, thought about these things, although I’m not going to share my own internal arguments here.  I do want to suggest to you that faith must be tested to be true faith, and that evidence and reasoning are as important in our walk of faith as in our walk of science.  Untested beliefs become little more than wishful thinking (and sometimes dangerous or destructive wishful thinking at that) and are no different from any of the other “fake news” of our post-truth society.  A need to test beliefs, in both science and faith, means that “truth” is something deeper, and more permanent, than simply the belief of the majority, a factor easily manipulated by wishful thinking, favored propaganda, or authoritative edict.

The post Even More on Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World:  Spiritual Truth appeared first on Road Writer Blogs.

Fruit of the spirit includes behaviors like patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control.  That sure makes one think about social media and politics, right?

Not.

The survival-of-the-fittest search for attention and influence on social media, or in politics, is a microcosm of evolution.  Those who rise above a certain threshold win the day, winner take all.  Quite like the survival of the fittest in biological evolution—those who can secure the resources and overcome their adversaries win.  The rest, well, we can still dig up their fossils.

In social media, and the political world, we like to attach ourselves to powerful people, the gobblers-of-resources, the bullies, hoping we can survive and thrive with them.  In such a harsh and competitive environment, can the social media world ever evolve to become more sedate, contemplative, and kind?

Maybe.

Below I offer an edited snippet from my Work in Progress (WIP), A Little Book of Becoming, a reflection on how science informs my faith.  Maybe you can find in it some hope.  Or perhaps, more likely, a warning.

____________________

Scripture speaks well of characteristics that seem contrary to that which would maximize the survival chances of the individual, saying for example that strength is made perfect in weakness, that the meek shall inherit the earth, that we should turn the other cheek and offer kindness and hospitality to strangers.  It claims that there is no law against love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  It offers core ideals of purity, peace-lovingness, consideration, submissiveness, mercy, and good fruits.  It encourages us to be impartial, sincere, compassionate, kind, humble, gentle, patient, long suffering, and slow to anger…

Yet, the testimony of science would seem to be quite different.  It is the strong, the self-interested, that are most fit to survive.  The weak, the meek, even the unfortunate victim of chance calamity, has no opportunity to pass on thoughts or genes…

How can these be reconciled?

Take note that self-interest does not equal selfishness. Selfishness begins when self-interest overrides the interest of the larger purpose or entity.  When one acts without concern for—or equal valuing of—others, that becomes selfish…In both civil and moral law, it is clearly seen that we already possess the nascent ideals of selflessness, but they are easily tipped over when we are greedy (valuing our own prosperity more than that of others) or when we are afraid (perceiving the ‘other’ as an enemy).  Then, we will torment those in our power, take for ourselves what we want at the expense of others, and empower monsters to lead us so as to gain what we want without personal guilt.

Seeing, then, that the impetus of short-term evolution favors the selfish, and that our nascent ideals are easily overrun, how can we avoid the problem that selfish interest can be chosen by natural selection, at least in the short term, at the expense of the meek and selfless?

The answer might be time.  Even science reveals that in the longer term there is survival advantage to becoming altruistic, otherwise how can we explain the existence of altruism in ourselves or other creatures?  Consider, for example, the ants who often act almost without self-concern in defense of their hill, or who offer their bodies as a bridge for the colony across a torrent even if they themselves are lost.  Also, we see that many humans, although not all, routinely act with kindness to strangers, fight for the downtrodden, and provide help for the poor.

So, a trend toward altruism is seen in the nature of our world, but it requires the passage of time to overcome the short-term benefits of selfishness…We stand now at the threshold of transformative becoming and soon will have the power to edit who we become through manipulation of genes and introduction of technologies.  This puts our becoming centered in the arena of ideas and choice since we will have to decide, collectively, what we become…

_____________________

As suggested in my snippet above, maybe the history of biological evolution offers a possible template for ultimate victory of contemplation and kindness.  Natural selection has, over vast times, sometimes selected the submissive altruistic over the powerful bully.  My daughter commented recently that generosity of spirit and acceptance of diversity is one of the greatest of human traits, providing a kinder, gentler life, a greater chance of group survival, and the irony that it is tolerance for diversity that allows the oppressors and bullies to survive at all!

Let’s hope and plan so that the core of kind gentleness can survive our tolerance for the lack of it, and that our choices going forward are wise ones.

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What stirs reader imagination or exploratory longings more than a good adventure story about a lost civilization?!  Your starship lands on a primitive world where you discover mysterious structures half buried in the jungle that hint at forgotten technological prowess. (Star Trek, anyone?).  Floating down the river on your noble quest, your fellowship of travelers passes through a portal guarded by towering statues of forgotten beings —what lies beyond? (Lord of the Rings, anyone)?  As you pursue your doctorate in geology, your excavations uncover what looks like a giant spaceship imbedded for untold years in solid rock—what does it mean? (Babylon Five, anyone)?

Whoa!  That’s the kind of story I want to read!

If I want to write stories like that, I need to engage in that kind of discovery!  While travelling in our campervan toward Erie Pennsylvania to visit family and watch the total solar eclipse (my second) last spring, Mary and I stumbled upon a wonderful camping spot in Cuyahoga Valley National Park.  When we awoke the next morning, we took some of the trails through the surrounding woods, and found decayed locks for the Ohio and Erie Canalway (picture above) built a hundred years before, as well as the remnants of the canal along the old Towpath, now-abandoned and emerging from the moss and leaves like the statues of ancient beings, telling of ways of life, and mighty deeds, from another time.

How did they build it with such precision so as to maintain proper water flow for hundreds of miles through the forest?  How did they manage to circumvent the waterfalls and cataracts along the river?  How did they do it with only horses and humans?  Mysterious, inspiring, imagination-stirring!

To write the unexpected, I have to be out in the world, hunting for the unexpected!  What a delightful discovery for this plains-boy, to find, unexpectedly, such evidence of past achievement half hidden in the forest “back east”.

Be sure to check out Science Fiction and the RoadWriter Life,  Part 1:  Finding Trilobites.

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Honestly looking for truth is nothing at all like honestly wanting to be right.  Wanting to be right encourages people to shout loudly and try to undermine the credibility of others.  It discourages reconsidering your thinking because that might mean that you were wrong.  In contrast, looking for truth involves lots of watching and listening.  And changing your mind.

A few years back I encountered a survey in the news that addressed a question for which there could be no supporting evidence, yet lots of people had opinions on it!  Sadly, although I tucked this into my mind at the time as a watershed learning event for me, I failed to document the survey and so I’ve lost track of its details, but it was a subject for which it seemed clear to me that, not only were no data available, but there could be no data that bore on it.  Yet 80% of respondents had firm opinions, about half one way and half another.  Only twenty percent had no view.  Twenty percent.  That is the percentage of people, I realized, that were actually thinking about the question and not just choosing an answer that fit their political or cultural inclinations.  Shortly after I read this survey, a bunch of studies came out (during COVID times) about how evidence does not sway people one way or another because they are too deeply entrenched in the views of their people groups (“tribes” they were called).  Only changing their people group could change them, and so arguing from evidence is pointless.  The message was, forget reasoning and evidence, you should be out there on social media trying to change the world through a tidal wave of cultural influence.

Aaaarghhhhh!

Argument and reason is the only superpower that I have!  It’s what I devoted my career to doing and where my natural inclinations lie.  And now you’re telling me that it is useless because evidence and reason have no power to persuade?  What about science—isn’t it all about evidence and reasoning?  And what about science fiction, which can support that link to evidence and reasoning as I argue in a previous blog:  Assigning Blame for Public Science Skepticism.

Ok, maybe it’s true that the 80% are not swayed by evidence and reason.  But what about that twenty percent who are actually thinking and looking for what is true?  How can I talk to them?

More importantly, how can I become part of that group?  Or maybe to state it better, how can I be part of that group a larger percentage of the time?  Is that group out there pushing their views on social media?  Or are they spending most of their time in silence so they can actually listen and think?

Hmmm.  Perhaps I need to cut this blog short and go think about it for a while.

The post More Thoughts on Finding Truth:  You have to actually want to find it! appeared first on Road Writer Blogs.

When I taught science classes regularly at Minnesota State University Moorhead, I often assigned writing exercises, particularly my “One-Page Science Paper” which engaged students in multiple writes, reviews, and rewrites.  My own experience with writing assignments in college had often involved producing twenty or more pages, as though making it longer encouraged better writing.  I thought that the opposite might be the case; by limiting the length of the article, as is typical in real science writing for publication abstracts and papers, students could focus on good writing rather than ‘filling up the space,’ which rather encourages a failure to prune, and even invites repetitive or unnecessary material.  Writing short is often harder than writing long.  I had a student one year who felt so unable to prune his essay that he chose to remove all margins and literally overlap the lines of text in order to fit it on a single page (embarrassingly, I had done a similar thing in writing a two-page abstract for the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference one year as a graduate student)!

Good science writing involves the three Cs:  Correct, Clear, Concise (For a while in the early days of my teaching, I called it the four Cs, including “complete” in the list, but eventually realized that nothing is ever complete in science, especially in a one-page paper!).  This contrasted, of course, with the three Fs of writing:  Feely, Flowing, and Flowery which students often gravitated toward, thinking that ideas presented concisely and clearly need to be doctored up to make them more interesting.  For my One-Page writing assignments, I gave students a guideline offering ways to meet the three Cs—I reproduce a version below, including real student writings with suggested corrections.

I would argue that “concise and clear” often proves a better goal than “flowing and flowery” in science fiction writing as well.  Science fiction writing and science writing are both like gardening. They can both sometimes benefit from proper pruning, making room for air movement and flowering, and preventing too much humidity and fungal growth.

Think about it!

……….

Writing Correctly, Clearly, and Concisely

By Russ Colson

With editorial comments on real student examples

……..

Say what you mean, use the correct words, and be precise

Ecologists have found that hot water in the creek had killed off over 50 acres.

An acre is a dimensional quantity, not a living thing.  How can it be “killed off”?

Plants in a 50 acre area around the creek died, apparently because of the high temperature of the water.

……….

Text should be Concise

Say what you want to say with as few words as possible and in the most straight-forward manner.

The experiments we did progressed through three different types.

can be simplified with little or no loss of information to:

We did three types of experiments.

………

Omit unnecessary text:

Don’t overuse adjectives.  “Wonderful”, “awesome”, and “tremendous” may be fine in a travel brochure but are of minimal value in a scientific description.

The amazingly tremendous power of a volcano is truly awesome, the highlight of natures spectacular fireworks.

The energy of a volcanic eruption, which can produce a tower of dust 50 miles high and destroy life over 1000s of square miles, could, if harnessed, supply power to Moorhead, MN for more than a month.

Don’t tell us that the volcano is impressive.  Rather, convince us it is impressive!  The latter takes more work.  The first sentence above can be written in about 23 seconds with minimal effort.  The second sentence requires at least an hour of library research, computations, and thought.

……….

Avoid the empty introduction:

Studies done over the past several years have done several things.  One is that there is…

This sentence introduces nothing.  We don’t know what studies were done, how they were done, who did them, or what their goal was.  We don’t know any accomplishments or conclusions of the studies.  We don’t know when they were done, how long they took, or the span of years from which they will be cited.  We don’t know the topic of the ensuing paragraph.  The only bit of information in the sentence is that we will be considering past studies.  It is indeed reassuring that we will not be evaluating the results of studies yet to be completed!

……….

Text should be correct, meaningful, and to the point.

It has been found by scientists who have devoted their lives to carefully studying these things, that in order to melt a rock it has to be really hot such that the temperatures of molten rock are really incredible.

That scientists devote their lives to their work presents a nice sentiment.  And I suppose (if you don’t want to research your topic) you can infer that “the temperatures of molten rock are really incredible” by seeing Anakin Skywalker burned by lava in Revenge of the Sith.  But the sentence above really tells us nothing at all about the temperature at which rock melts.

The temperature required to melt rock is generally 1000 to 1300 degrees Celsius.

……….

Not just the facts please, give us some reasoning.

The Mid-Ocean Ridge is very young.  We know this because of rocks and minerals found along the ridge. 

This paragraph purports to give us the reasons and evidence for the belief that the Mid-Ocean Ridge is young.  However, does it convince you that it is young?  It doesn’t convince me because it offers no explanation of how the rocks and minerals reveal the age.  What do the rocks and minerals have to do with it?  What aspect of the rocks and minerals suggests the ridge is young?  How is it measured?  What is the reasoning process that connects the facts to the hypothesis that the ridge is young?

……….

Be specific and exact in describing and explaining your subject.

Most people are jolted by a bolt of lightning and not directly hit by it.

Since when have most people been jolted by a bolt of lightning?  Have you been jolted by a bolt?  How many of your friends have been jolted by a bolt?  I maintain that most people are not jolted by a bolt of lightning.

Most injuries from lightning result when people are jolted by a nearby lightning strike but are not directly hit by it.

……….

For humans, when inhaled into the lungs, high concentrations can have effects that include respiratory problems.

Solution to respiratory problems:  Stop inhaling humans!

The subject of this report was particulates in the air.  However, the word “particulates” doesn’t appear in this sentence.  The noun of the sentence is “humans”, which introduces a problem in the meaning!

……….

It is believed today that our ancestry was separated from us nearly 8 million years ago.

We may misunderstand our lineage, or we may be very different from our ancestors, but we cannot become separated from our ancestry!  Also, “today” is implied by “is believed” and can be omitted.

Most anthropologists believe that the human lineage branched from closely related primates nearly 8 million years ago.

……….

Avoid “anthropomorphizing” nature

Ground to cloud lightning was not believed until 1939.

What opinion did the lightning have that nobody believed?

Remember, theories do not try to explain anything (people explain and construct theories).

Science does not “discover”, “develop”, “imagine”, or “go out to Jupiter on the Voyager mission”.

……….

We must protect our rain forests from growing industrial bureaucrats.

Use of the words “must” and “industrial” suggest a political agenda (which is fine in itself, just don’t confuse it with science).  In addition, a bureaucrat is a person (just how big has he or she grown!); “bureaucracies” is the term implied by the context of the sentence.  As discussed above, it is important to use exactly the word you need.

Based on the known importance of rain forests as a carbon dioxide sink, and considering that increased carbon dioxide concentrations have the potential to increase world temperatures, many people believe that it is prudent to avoid destroying large tracts of rain forest.

Note that more careful statements may require more words, as in the example above.  Correctness should not be compromised for the sake of conciseness.

……….

Don’t tell us what scientists say, tell us why they say it.

(Don’t write a paper as though you are a journalist reporting the statements of scientists.  Write it as though you are a thinker reviewing the reasons for believing something.)

Argument-by-authority is ultimately unsatisfying because you can always locate some “authority” with a different view.  Therefore, science writing should present evidence bearing on a particular question, allowing the reader to make a judgement based on data and reasoning, rather than some arbitrary balancing of the views of “experts”.  By focusing on data, you also avoid the prospect of your report becoming incorrect and outdated.  As new data lead to new interpretations, old interpretations may be discarded, but the data and reasoning remain as important foundations for new understanding.

Scientists have determined that the dark areas of the Moon are made primarily of basalt.

Chemical analyses of samples returned from the Moon indicate that the dark areas of the Moon are made mostly of basalt.

……….

Some scientists assert that the dark areas of the Moon are made primarily of basalt.  However, other scientists still claim that the Moon is made of green cheese.  And so, the matter remains unresolved.  (Ok, I made this one up—not student work!  But I’ve seen plenty of conceptually-similar writing where student reports ‘give up on understanding’ if agreement on a topic is not absolute.)

Clearly, if the reasoning and data behind each view are not reported (chemical analyses of returned samples vs “golly, don’t those big dark spots look like holes in cheese?”) or if who is making the various claims is not considered (99.9% of all geologists at research institutions and universities all over the world vs one political scientist who also predicted that 1990 would be the year that Kansas sank into the sea) no conclusion can be drawn.  However, most people, given the data and reasoning, will draw the same conclusion about the composition of the dark areas of the Moon, even if agreement is not absolute.

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