Weekly Short Stories Contest and Company! discussion

Sometimes, writing a book can include some less creative and more strictly logical details. It would seem a little foolish to write a story set in DC that involves jumping off of skyscrapers or which fails to include someone getting lost. Some basic research will help evade those eggs being chucked at your face, but some times you need a specific bit of information that just seems out of your reach for whatever reason. This is where we can help each other out in that department.

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My first question: What is the electronic sign that runs off of wind turbines in the United States? I've heard it mentioned several times, I'm fairly certain it is in New York or Los Vegas, but I can't remember which or what company was advertising on it.

Nevermind, I figured it out; it was the Ricoh billboard in Time Square. Perfect for my story.

Now to figure out how long it should take to melt a brain ...

Anyone else have a question?

I think this thread is an excellent idea! I don’t have a question at the moment, however.

Edward, I love it!!! You have no idea how useful this would be. I do actually have a question, though it's not a research question as it is more a question of opinion. If one were to write a story set in Atlantis, were in the ocean do you suppose Atlantis would be placed?

Interesting fact about Atlantis: Similiar stories actually appear in just about every ancient civilization lore (as does the flood that wipes out the world, but that's another matter). Sometimes it's a city of high technology, magic, some mix, or a city of demons - but the one core element that never changes is that it is an island that disappears over night.

The actual Atlantis legend refers to an island in the Mederterranian Sea; it was a Greek myth.

My favorite explanation is that the island teleports. Oh, and it's the island on Lost, obviously.

That's awesome!!! A teleporting island... hah! I'll see if I can squeeze it in...
If I can't, the Mediterranean Sea might be a close second, though.

If there was a place that the legend of Atlantis is a dim memory of, it was possibly a small civilization that existed on the island of Thera, in the eastern Mediterranean, and that was wiped out about 1,600 B.C. by a volcanic eruption that destoyed a large part of the island.

A difficulty with legends is that our concept of history--the notion that what actually happened in the past matters--dates back only to the Enlightenment, in the 1700’s. As strange as it may seem, before that, the mindset we have come to take for granted--that values chronology and verifiable facts--didn’t exist, and people were just as happy with what was made up (though they wouldn’t have thought of it that way). For people before the dawn of science, history was a result of a communal process of mythmaking. That’s a huge problem in Biblical studies because scholars mistakenly assign our history-oriented mentality to a past that didn’t have it and that was incapable of drawing the modern distinction between the products of mythmaking and things as they actually happened.

If there was such a civilization as Atlantis, it’s likely that it was in or around the Mediterranean, if only because that was the known world at the time. There’s speculation that the eruption on Thera brought about the demise of the so-called Minoan civilization, on Crete, about seventy miles from Thera, and it may be reasonable to assume that the civilization on Thera (whatever it was) resembled that on Crete, if only because it was coeval and nearby.

A modern American going back in time to a period as recent as the Victorian Age would find himself a stranger in a strange land not only because because the landscape has been changed so much but because the mind of the people in that age was so different from ours. There was no such thing as childhood back then. A woman’s only source of love and affection was other women. A woman was a man’s property, and her lot in life was to have children and manage a household. Romantic love between man and wife wasn’t at all common, but is something modern. The notion that animals should be treated humanely or that the environment should be protected would have seemed ridiculous to a person of the 19th century.

Imagine going back to a time even more remote than that, in which people had no sense of history, in the way we do--in which people, by our standards, had very little in the way of what we take for granted as reasoning introspection, little capacity for conscious thought. Such people would seem childlike to us, their reasoning asleep.

Go a little further back than the Victorian age and women weren't considered property and owned property themselves.

The ancient Greeks wrote the tragedies, which were brilliantly ironic. Their entire culture was built on city-states that were free to rule their city as they saw fit. That's where logical thinking and philosophy were "invented" (in an organized fashion).

And you refer to the Bible stories being hazy half-remembered legends of people who didn't care to learn the truth, but actually the Hebrews were obsessed with their past. They didn't start carefully passing down histories until around Abraham and then didn't start writing them down until Moses, but thereafter they would constantly read their histories out loud and carefully recorded events as they happened.

Also, the Old Testement has tales of romantic love. Even if it didn't happen often, it was still a concept in ancient times, and obviously during the 1800s (Jane Austin).

The analysis of orality versus literacy by Walter Ong in his excellent book Orality and Literacy undermines the 'historical' validity of the Hebrew's obsession with history. In oral based societies the obsession was real enough, but the record was fluid and changed very rapidly — it often was completely transformed within a single generation. And while writing was at that time coming into existence, the society was still primarily an oral one, as the mechanism of literacy was very limited. Harold Innis in his interesting book The Bias of Communication examines how the mechanisms of communication create value and 'bias' in the society.

We as children of a literate society have a poor notion of the fluidity of history. I might compare it to how a blind person understands colour: yes, our intellect thinks it understands it, but the real life experience required to truly understand it is lacking.

As for the male/female dynamic in history, our historical record is confused by myth and projection as well as class separation. The women of the actual historical record are largely those of myths of romantic love, anima projection good and bad, and their ideals as adopted by the leisured class who were the ones who have created the historical record. Since most of that history is biased by it being written by the powerful within the successful colonial societies (mostly men), our literate history is also horribly skewed. The working stiffs male and female, the conquered and the vanquished have had virtually no voice: in our official history they simply do not exist.

Oh, yeah, oral histories were probably extremely inaccurate, but we were talking about whether or not ancient folk cared about history - or did I misunderstand your intention, M?

I thought Jane Austin was poor. That's not ancient history, but still a look at lower class mentality in a time when it wasn't common for them to have a voice in writing. Her stories are all about high class people, but it still says something about her own mindset that all her stories were about the tension between a practical marriage and a romantic one.

There was no historiography, in the sense we think of it, in which scholars try to piece together a bigger picture from the available evidence. There was no notion of such a thing. Outside of folklore and legend, the closest thing to history in ancient or medieval times was memoirs such as Caesar’s Gallic Wars, or a recounting of things read and heard, such as Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica. I don’t mean that these sources aren’t exceedingly valuable, but the synthetic intellectual process of working from the particulars of concrete evidence to ideas that make sense of history is something modern, as is the sense that the actuality of what happened is something worth knowing.

I don’t mean that, for instance, with something like the fall of the Roman Empire or the happening of the American Civil War, the actuality of what took place can ever be grasped in such a way as to really make sense of it. The very notion, however, that such an attempt might be worth making is something distinctly modern.

I don’t mean that pre-modern people didn’t care to know “what had actually happened” in the past. What I mean is that they didn’t have the developed consciousness to do anything other than accept as truth what little they were taught. The “what actually happened” that we value knowing would have seemed unimportant or irrelevant to them, and the notion that it should matter would have been impossible for them to grasp. The ordinary person didn’t have the intellectual apparatus to question most things at all, and the rare person who had some measure of objectivity had very few resources to work with.

When I was trying to figure what events actually lay behind the New Testament, for instance, I came at last to the realization that there was no way to find those things out from the New Testament itself because it wasn’t at all what it appeared to be. Any historical sense I seemed to make of it was only what I found myself reading into it. I couldn’t help but wonder why. It took me a long time to figure out that I was projecting onto the past a way of looking at things that would have been utterly alien to the people of that time, and for whom the many developing variations of what, in the hands of the Catholic Church, later became the New Testament, had served a purpose unrelated to documenting actual events (though the events related may actually have occurred). What’s worse, the development of the synoptic gospels from the hypothesized original sayings of Jesus is such a tangle of complications that it takes a real commitment merely to wade through even a summary explanation.

Even in modern times, when there is plenty of available evidence and minds to make use of it, “history” is less understood than remade to suit the tastes of the times. Nowadays, the Civil War is something that was fought to free the slaves. That would have come as a big surprise to both the North and the South of the early 1860’s. Neither side wanted the war or had the same ideas about why it was being fought. The South wanted independence from a country that was rapidly industrializing and turning its citizens into automatons. Lincoln wanted to preserve the Union, but the North didn’t have it’s heart in it, and Lincoln was certain, and had good reason to be, that if he lost the election of 1864, his successor would gladly have ended the war by suing for peace. Bruce Catton has pointed out the likelihood that on no battlefield of the war could the men fighting have stated why they were fighting. A Confederate might have said he was fighting to protect his home. The real victory of the North was to extend the empery of the industrialists. The South had to industrialize to fight the war, and in the process it became the very things it had seceded in order to escape.

I see that I’ve gotten way off whatever path I started on.

Hm, that's a lot to think about.

I actually knew the thing about the Civil War. For some reason, when I explain why I probably would've fought for the South, people don't contradict me; they just hastily change the subject.

"became the very things it had seceded in order to escape." That sounds like the plot to one of the books I never finished.

I just got back in. Somebody set fire to the big pile, and a neighbor and I had to drag a hose out there. Usually, we burn that pile right after a rain or when it’s raining.

For the South, the Civil War was a lost war for independence. The South felt that, with industrialism, the North had veered from the principles on which the country had been founded. The South seceded partly in an attempt to preserve what it thought the country was meant to have been. It doesn’t seem to have been a popular war in the North, but was a war the President insisted on. My impression from what I’ve read is that the South believed in its cause and, ill-equipped and undermanned, fought until it had exhausted its resources in men and material.

Slavery was the issue without which the war wouldn’t have happened. Slavery went against everything the republic stood for. To say that the Civil War was fought to abolish slavery, however, is to misunderstand the war. Few people in the North wanted slavery abolished because the prospect of assimilating the slaves into the population was terrifying. The people who fought the war wouldn’t have considered slavery an issue. In the bigger picture though, it’s as though the war happened because slavery couldn’t survive it. The Civil War was the first modern war. The rule of modern warfare is that you must win, at all costs.

I have some good resource materials on modern warfare. Marine Corps doctrine is sometimes so surprising that it's funny, such as, "When outnumbered, attack."

Hm, I'm trying to figure out some of the side effects of having a town on the verge of becoming a ghost town in twenty-first century America. I have things like unrepaired roads and such, though I'm not sure how extensive that would be if the local government was still (tenuously) intact.

>>Hm, I'm trying to figure out some of the side effects of having a town on the verge of becoming a ghost town in twenty-first century America. I have things like unrepaired roads and such, though I'm not sure how extensive that would be if the local government was still (tenuously) intact. >>

...much as Detroit is? Might be worth looking at some of the urban decay going on there. You might also want to look at this:

...full of useful stuff like that without pumps, the NY underground system would flood in 24 hours, and how quickly buildings decay. I remember there's one segment explaining in detail how quickly a house falls apart without heat and maintenance.

I think I read somewhere that American military strategy can be summed up in one word: Swarm - never send one man (or plane, or tank) when you can send a 100.

Edward, Tony's pointing you in the right direction. Think about the things you take for granted: water coming out of faucets, lights turning on, sewage being flushed away. When you walk along a city street, look at all the steel manhole covers you see, and reflect on what each of those is linked to in the running of a city.

For example, what goes into not only delivering water but what keeps it safe.

Kyra wrote: "Edward, I love it!!! You have no idea how useful this would be. I do actually have a question, though it's not a research question as it is more a question of opinion. If one were to write a story ..."

Plato suggested just outside the Straight of Gibralter.

That book sounds like a lot of help, Tony. Thanks. I watched a few episodes of that show "Life After People." Sounds like the same thing, but the narrative was so over-dramatic that I couldn't take a word they said seriously. It might've been accurate, but the presentation made it sound far too fantastical.

It may be that the kind of people who remain in a town affect the way it declines. A town in which there isn’t much vandalism may not outwardly show decline as rapidly as one in which there’s a considerable lawless element. It seems to me that the kind of town it was before its decline may have a lot to do with what it’s decline will be like.

In other words, looking at the worst parts of Detroit is probably more informative than a book on simply no humans being around.

I don’t know that I would say that, but it might be informative in a different way. Also, climate can have a lot to do with how quickly buildings deteriorate. For instance, wood doesn’t rot as quickly in dry climates. It’s amazing how much is left of some the Old West ghost towns.

We went to a Ghost Town on our way to California. There was a Suicide Table XP

I'm trying to find a type of document that would be found in a public place (like a county records office) that might have no digital equivalant.

A secret collection of historical documents that can not be placed digitally on the computer because of some sort of symbol or code embedded in the paper, hidden in a ledger under a dusty shelf.
Or, you know, something more common.

Actually, technically there is nothing in a public records place that cannot be digitized. On the other hand, as a labourer within which these kinds of documents are a part of my daily work, the rule of our society by accountancy and MBAs means that many documents that might be wise to digitize are not in an effort to save money.

Thanks, Guy, that helps a lot; that opens up a lot of possibilities. I assumed that was the case, but had a hard time finding a resource that would admit it.

Kyra, I like that idea for something like magic spell that can be digitized, but is useless in its digital form. Great idea, but not what I'm looking for.

Thank you. I think. Honestly, I'm no help with research.

Edward wrote: "I'm trying to find a type of document that would be found in a public place (like a county records office) that might have no digital equivalant."

What about something odd happening to the document when it was digitised? Like a section always appearing blurry, no matter what digital capture media was used?

Random facts:

It takes twelve pounds of pressure to break a finger. It takes eight pounds of pressure to pull the trigger of many guns.

The IRS has a contingency plan to continue collecting taxes in case of a nuclear attack.

Did you know that butterflies don't pee; they excrete a water like mist.

Huh...interesting, Kat.

Kat wrote: "Did you know that butterflies don't pee; they excrete a water like mist."

Don't some butterflies also pupate without mouths and live for only a day or so?

Tony wrote: "What about something odd happening to the document when it was digitised? Like a section always appearing blurry, no matter what digital capture media was used?"

That's not a bad idea. Not what I went with; in the end I just had a file stuck in an area that's already been digitized. It doesn't belong there, so in theory it'll just be consistantly overlooked for a long while.

So, here's an interesting question that I've been debating about with my friend for a while: In my recent story Damsel in Distress how would the FBI prosecute the Asian?

Note, and this is covered in other stories, that the federal government does have systems in place to convict someone on cases involving biovis, but they prefer to avoid it. It requires the jury of peers coming from a pool of citizens known to be aware of biovis, which can look supicious if overused. But would they have to go that extra length, or could they convict the Asian in a normal court?

I am, by no means, any sort of tactical prodigy. I'd imagine the best thing to do would be to catch him by surprise somehow, not give him a chance to use his abilities before they can subdue him. I can't imagine how, though; I'll look your story over again and get back to you.

How would you convict not capture. I'm assuming he's already been captured.

Yeah, capturing is a pretty easy thing to figure out. I'm talking about prosecuting given that biovis is not a widely known thing - and something that the U.S. government want to keep quiet. (Most of the protagonists don't really care, but the government does.)

Edward, I am not familiar enough with what you mean by 'biovis' to address your research question. My quick google didn't clarify it in the context you are using it here. (Something to do with the collection of information via smartphone technology?)

Keeping in mind the limits of my understanding of biovis, a very typical government approach is to manufacture charges. If you want 'reality', that is the way to go. A good example is likely the wiki-leaks guy, Assange, getting charged for sexual assault a few months after causing the American government considerable (but mostly unpublished otherwise), embarrassment.

Oh, sorry, it's my "scientific" word for magic.

This isn't really a research issue ... This is the wrong thread, sorry. This is a hypothetical question, really.

LoL! No problem.
But with magic, the same approach to convicting people is made as with modern law: write a set of rules that delineate between right and wrong. Then if they don't meet the rules you toast them. Historically it was done with great ease. For example, throw the woman into the lake and if she swims she's a witch and will be burnt. And if she drowns, then she wasn't and, with some of God's spare blessing, will be blessed with an early arrival at the pearly gates.

The trick is that it is in modern-day America and the U.S. government (for some reason) thinks they have to protect the general public from the truth of biovis's existance. In this particular case, they want to prosecute someone who killed without using a convential weapon and without touching the victim. They can easily get him on conspiracy to (whatever collection of charges accompany taking people hostage - endangerment, unlawful confinement, etc.), but they really want him on the murder.

The easy part is getting the right detectives, prosecutor, and judge on the case - they'll have those people standing by for these cases whenever they absolutely have to bring up magic in the case. The hard part would be getting the right jury (how would they figure out who is in the know without revealing the truth to those who are not) and, especially, how to make sure the defense attorney isn't stumbling on to the wrong case.

The FBI already caused a media circus by giving select agents (those "in the know") the authority over other agents to simply take over their cases. Now they want to make those cases seem as legimate as possible, though a few people have noticed odd jury-forming processes.

Okay, working on the jury first (I should really come up with a better thread for this), the question is what are the questions. If I remember my judicial proceedure correctly (and I might not), juries start as large pools that are slowly whittled down by question-and-answer proceedures by a whole lot of people (including the prosecution and defense). There would have to be a method of discerning who among the potential jurors knows of biovis.

First, they'd increase their odds by choosing people known to be aware of biovis or associates of those aware as the bulk of their original pool. They'd also choose random people and somewhat avoid those that had already served in their juries to not arouse suspicion. Then they would, among the other, normal queries, ask a few vague questions that may indicate knowledge of biovis without actually revealing. As the jury is whittled down, their questions become more direct.

I just need to figure out what those questions might be.

The defense lawyer is a much tougher puzzle, since the suspect can choose their own. Obviously, it would be in his best interest to choose a lawyer who actually knows the subject matter, but how would the courts garuntee it's a lawyer aware of biovis without causing an uproar over legal rights? Hm ...

This is going to keep me up all night.

Sorry, Kggelen, can't help you. If my father were alive, he'd have been the man. He had a master degree in Russian history. Good luck ***

fushigi alert. As I was typing this I am hearing on my radio show The Signal about Regina Spektor's childhood emigration from Russia and the very poor conditions her parents faced because of their being Jews. Now I'm listening to her song All the Rowboats.

It is when out of the blue, two or more completely unconnected things come together to form a connection of some kind. So, by chance of timing I came to this thread, and began to comment. At the same time as I'm writing an empty response to the conditions in Russia Laurie Brown is introducing a Regina Spektor song by talking about her past living conditions in Russia.

I blog these fushigi things. This one is a simple one, but they are frequently very elaborate and quite often involve the WSS and the radio show 'The Signal'. If you are curious, here's the link to my blogged definition of a fushigi . And here's a link to my last blogged fushigi, Shakespeare, The WSS and a Wack of fushigis.

I love her songs too. I have her album in my ipod and replay it frequently. The CD is in my car almost constantly.

Kggelen wrote: "I have to write an essay about WW1 for school, and I need to know about life in Russia at that time and the recruitment process."

According to Serge Lenz: The Tzar owned everything every business every piece of land. If you were in his favour you could be granted a piece of land or given a licence to produce something e.g. liquor where a percetage of the surplus would go to him - but this could be taken away from you at any point if you lost his favour.

Also according to Nicolaj Gogol: People were property (slaves) and the ruling class who owned them would be taxed in accord with how many serfs they had. (In Gogol's Dead Souls the main character is committing a tax fraud buy buying up dead souls.)

Since before Ivan the Terrible the ruling class had been Swedish not Russian, so the Russians were ruled by a small class of people that once had invaded their lands.

As for the recruitment process it was probably voluntary but trust me the last army you wanted to be in was the Russian one - unlike the German and Austo-Hungarinan army where you rose through the ranks through your aptness and ability, the Russian army favoured a British system wherein you could buy your military grade, meaning many of their officers had never done any military service.

The Germans beat them through perhaps the biggest espionage coupe in history.

But you have to check the verity of this the time line is somewhat protracted on this information and there may have been some liberalisation during this time period.

Who knew finding a reliably degenerative and fatal blood disease that is non-infectous and diagnosible post-mordem would be so difficult? I think I'm close, but I wouldn't turn down any help.

Never mind, found a perfect match: Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Technically, it's a brain disease, but it is caused by a mutated protein in the blood called prion, which mutates other proteins to be like it and creates holes in the brain. Death occurs minimally weeks after symptoms arise, sometimes up to a year, and it can only be transmitted via blood transfusions and brain transplants.

The best part is that the situation in my story mimicks at least one symptom, so the police can fool themselves into thinking that it's just a normal disease while looking into reckless blood donation institutions, while the heroes have enough evidence to investigate it as magic.

Prions can be ingested to cause the disease; that's what Mad Cow Disease (BSE) is all about, and scrapie in sheep.

You might also want to look at a disease called KURU: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhea...

Would it be medically possible to murder someone with an empty syringe? Wouldn't injecting an empty syringe cause an embolism and death when it reached the brain? Or would the symptoms be more like a stroke?
And would such an injection - literally a pin-prick - be caught in an autopsy?

Gosh, I sound gruesome.