The three laws of sleep as applied to a household that contains a new baby are remarkably similar to those involving entropy. To wit:

1. You can’t win.
2. You can’t break even.
3. You can’t get out of the game.

Also note that while sleep cannot really be created, it can easily be destroyed.

HOMEWORK: Given the three laws of baby sleep, what is the individual probability that, while Misty was feeding Liza at 4:00 A.M., Eli got up? What is the individual probability that, while Stephen was rocking Liza to sleep at 4:30 A.M., Eli got up again? What is the combined probability?

Dear Internet,

We finished watching The Sopranos last night. Thanks for not spoiling us! So who’s ready to discuss the final episode now?

Anyone? Anyone?

Sigh.

ETA: Caution! Amy came to play, so we’re talking in full-bore spoilers in the comments.

Something hinky happened to our comments overnight, and we have lost a chunk of comments from about June 20th through 10:00 CDT today. We’re working to restore them from backup.

UPDATE: We figured out the problem. For those who care about technical details: Spam Karma 2 went crazy and manually spanked a bunch of comments.

Pearl Jam: Jeremy (1992)

When I think about how music videos changed between the 1980s and the 1990s, this one plays prominently in my little mental timeline. Its imagery and subject matter is very striking, and how Jeremy’s parents and his classmates are represented intrigues me. The effect is blunted somewhat by this tiny pixellated version, but VH1 and MTV haven’t really aired this video since the shootings at Columbine.

Arctic Monkeys: Leave Before the Lights Come On (2006)

This is less about suicide and more about how we have trouble connecting to other people. Which, really, is one of the underlying causes of most suicides. It’s also bleakly funny, and has less blood than the previous video.

A few years back, a group of science fiction writers announced the Mundane SF philosophy. It aimed to take the overly fantastical out of science fiction. Among the common SF tropes it decried were interstellar travel, contact with aliens, alternate universes, and the like. Mundane SF was to focus on life in and around Earth. As Geoff Ryman, one of the movement’s founders, put it,

OK, SF content is the future, but the function of most SF seems to be about avoiding the future. So much of the inherited tropes are actually highly unlikely. Take faster than light travel… there is a ghost of a possiblity there, but people have run away with it. This is because they like it. It seems to open up horizons of adventure. It also conveys the message, we can burn through this planet and escape to the stars. I don’t think we can. I think we’re stuck on Earth. I want to write stories that are stuck on earth and throw out the unlikely tropes.

I didn’t pay too much attention to Mundane SF. Geoff Ryman may have written one of my favorite books of all time, but I didn’t need his permission to enjoy non-Mundane SF. Besides, if the Mundane SF movement resulted in good novels and stories, all the better.

Today Andrew Wheeler brought the mundane SF blog to my attention, specifically a post on spotting Mundane SF in the January issues of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, and Analog. There are two sections I want to pull out.

A few years back when I learned about this Movement I was attracted to the idea. But I thought, surely there is a reasonable amount of mundane sf being published in short form. It can’t all be time travel crap.

“Gunfight at the Sugarloaf Pet Food & Taxidermy” by Jeff Carlson (Asimov’s): sort of a whimsical chase story; very little speculation and thus perhaps a bit too safely mundane

He’s dropping stories on an iron bed. If they’re too fantastic, he chops off their feet; if they’re too mundane, he stretches them.

Look, artistic manifestos are great for giving artists constraints under which to operate and a warm and fuzzy feeling of virtue for having hewn to them. Ones like the Mundane SF that focus on trappings and tropes are terrible for choosing what to read. When you say, “I’m going to read science fiction,” you’re already limiting yourself to certain conventions of the genre. When you say, “I’m going to read mundane SF,” you’re limiting yourself even further. And you’re not even making your decision in terms of quality. You’re making it in terms of furniture.

It’s like my friend’s review of the 2005 movie version of Pride and Prejudice. She noted the movie’s surprising gritty realism, the avoidance of clichéd period tropes, and the actors’ solid performances. She concluded her review as follows: “And while the two-hour movie necessarily reduces the scope of the original plot, all the essential themes are present and very little, overall, is missing. Except for Colin Firth. Zero stars.” What she meant as a joke, this blog entry is taking seriously. “This story has time travel. Zero stars.”

Every time you draw a circle around literature and say, these are the genres I like, you’re excluding great books. As you draw the circle smaller and smaller, you exclude more and more great books. If all you read is Mundane SF, then just within the wider world of SF you’re going to miss a lot. Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. Jack Finney’s Time and Again. Charles Stross’s Accelerando. Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife. Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001. Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, for goodness’ sake!

You want to encourage Mundane SF? Great. But don’t limit yourself to just reading it.

So because babies are so lumpish at the beginning, we tend to christen ours with a variety of nicknames to fit whatever the situation warrants. Eli had a whole bunch that I can’t remember anymore. We’ve given Liza a bunch too and here is a list of a few:

Our Little Frat Boy – Because she drinks like a fish, burps really loudly 5-6 times and passes out.
Lady Bumbo-Snuzzler – Because Dan said it would be a good English hyphenated name.
Liza Bug – This is mostly my name for her because she has about 12 onsies with bugs on them that say cute things like, “My name is Lulu and I’m a ladybug.”
The Donkey – Because she sounds like one when she’s eating.
Grub – This is a bedtime nickname because she looks like one when she is all wrapped up in her swaddle blanket.
Scrabbler – This is our description of what she does when she is very tired. It involves lots of writhing, squiggling and grunting. Also there are fists clinching and unclinching which causes scratches and red marks on the baby bearer’s neck and chest. This is her most annoying behavior.
Scrabbler Grub – As you can guess, a combo of the two listed above except because she’s swaddled she doesn’t do the fist thing, instead substitute a bit more squirming, grunting and add a bit of crying until you can get a binkie in her mouth.

There are few things more futile than a game of Candy Land.

A game of Candy Land followed by a game of Chutes and Ladders qualifies.

I’ve been trying to teach Eli to play Settlers of Catan, but he just hordes his sheep and makes baa noises.

Version 2.0 – 10 May 2007

• Lowered the thresholds on warnings and alarms significantly. While this may increase the number of false alarms, this should help prevent critical errors or program crashes.
• Added new audio alarms that sound when anything is in the output queue. Previously queue contents could accumulate with little to no notice, requiring users to perform a manual check.
• Increased the program’s sensitivity to potential buffer overruns on input. Excess data is now regurgitated during processing. This can take up to an hour, even on new hardware.
• Greatly improved the random number generator. The program now requests input at irregular intervals instead of the approximately three hour intervals of version 1.0.
• In contrast, the Karp sequence is now far more deterministic. Users wishing to reset error conditions and prevent additional alarms should use the swaddle, side, and swing functions in that exact order.
• Downgraded the swaddle function’s utility when used in isolation.
• When the program is in sleep mode, it will continue to process buffered input. If bad input or potential buffer overruns are detected while in sleep mode, a grunt-like warning will sound. Triggering the burp function will keep the program in sleep mode without requiring the user to re-run the Karp sequence.
• While prior versions of the program could be run concurrently with other processes at an equal priority level, version 2.0 is explicitly designed to run with other child processes. Doing so requires roughly four times the resources of either process running independently.
• Changed the default color scheme from blue and green to pink and yellow.

When I was about 12, I got a copy of “Dr. Who – The Game of Time and Space,” the board game from Games Workshop. In it, you moved around the galaxy, visiting worlds and trying to reconstruct the Key to Time. You had to fight classic Dr. Who villains like Daleks and Cybermen. In fighting them, you compared their strength to your defence. Ever since, I have trouble spelling the word any other way.

I have no idea when or why I started spelling the word as “grey”.

In junior high, I discovered that some people wrote their sevens with a horizontal bar across the vertical part of the 7, and that they wrote their 1 with a serif at the top instead of a plain line. I thought that was cool, and began doing it regularly. My math teacher in high school saw that I did that and asked if I’d been an Army brat.

I got a degree in theatre arts, and still have a tendency to spell theatre that way.

As part of that degree, I spent a semester in the UK studying theatre arts. Most UK phrases I learned never stuck with me, although I’m always on the lookout for a chance to use the phrase “panto horse”. One that didn’t is “with something in,” as in the sentence, “I don’t like banana bread with nuts in.”

The space community talks about things being on orbit, much as New Yorkers will talk about standing on line. I’ve written things for public consumption where I’ve mentioned “repairs to Hubble on orbit” and had friends say that it should be “in orbit”.

What are your affectations?

SF author Charles Stross crunches the numbers and explains how difficult space colonization is.

The long and the short of what I’m trying to get across is quite simply that, in the absence of technology indistinguishable from magic — magic tech that, furthermore, does things that from today’s perspective appear to play fast and loose with the laws of physics — interstellar travel for human beings is near-as-dammit a non-starter. And while I won’t rule out the possibility of such seemingly-magical technology appearing at some time in the future, the conclusion I draw as a science fiction writer is that if interstellar colonization ever happens, it will not follow the pattern of historical colonization drives that are followed by mass emigration and trade between the colonies and the old home soil.

He also looks at colonization in the solar system and comes up with a similarly gloomy outlook. Based on my back-of-the-envelope fact checking, his reasoning and conclusions look solid. The comments are long and involved, but bear Charlie out as well.

The most entertaining bit of the comment thread are the people saying that he’s wrong, not because his math is wrong or his reasoning is flawed, but because science fiction authors shouldn’t be so pessimistic and should believe whole-heartedly in the colonization of space.