Heads up if you’re a Doctor Who fan…

If you’re a Doctor Who fan, you should check out a new book based on Philip Sandifer’s blog TARDIS Eruditorum. The collected edition of his essays related to William Hartnell’s first Doctor is now available on Kindle and it’s a fantastic read, some of the best writing on Who that I’ve come across. It’s already made me reassess what I thought I knew about the characters and the history of the series, and you can’t really ask for anything more than that.

(The blog also inspired an entry I wrote on the recent episode ‘Closing Time’, although I fully admit I lack the critical vocabulary and the attention span to match Mr. Sandifer’s work.)

What’s interesting about the book is that it’s accessible and intelligent. There have been critical works published about all manner of TV shows, but, frankly, most of them disappear up their own backsides. Fortunately, Doctor Who has long been one of those shows that seems to attract and encourage fan engagement, to the extent that nowadays it’s being made by fans. This may be a fatuous comment, but some shows (like Star Trek) encourage fans to make the show real, either through cosplaying or through involvement in science, engineering or campaigns to rename space shuttles; Doctor Who encourages fans to actually create the fiction, either on TV itself or through fanfiction, comics and, probably most importantly, novels. There’s something about Doctor Who that prompts a significant chunk of its audience to engage with mythmaking and storytelling, either directly or by thinking about how stories work. The writers seem to have latched on to that as a theme, exploring the Doctor as an intergalactic legend, a mythic figure, and the benefits, problems and consequences of that. It’s interesting.

But I’m rambling. If you’re interested in how the Doctor became the Doctor, or how the cultural context of the mid-sixties affected the show, check out the book. If you’re not interested, well, check out Doctor Who anyway…

 

 

Jesús Garcia – A Mexican Hero

Jesús Garcia is an unsung hero. No, that’s not right – he’s a national hero in his home coutry, being the Mexican Casey Jones, but his fame hasn’t spread to Dudley, UK. Here’s an attempt to put that right.

It’s November 1907, and in the mining town of Nacozari, a train has pulled into the station. Not an unusual occurance, but this was the day that the train was filled with dynamite, and the day hay on the roof of one of the carriages caught fire. Dynamite and fire is never a good combination, especially not in a town of 5,000 people. The train had to be moved.

Step forward Jesús Garcia, who got in the train, cranked it up to full steam and drove it six kilometres out of town before it exploded, killing 12 people (including Garcia) but saving Nacozari. In memory of his heroism, November 7 is now commemorated as the Día del Ferrocarrilero (Day of the Railroad Worker) and, in 1909, the town was renamed Nacozari de Garcia.

It’s the sort of history people write songs about – here’s the folk song ‘Maquina 501′ (Locomotive 501) – they got the number wrong, but that’s where history enters myth. There’s a deeper treatment of the story here, which has it all – fiancee dying of a broken heart, the train exploding just a few metres from safety – so let’s take a moment to remember a man who deserves a little more fame than he has. Vaya con Dios.

Zambia vs the Martians: The Strange Story of a Forgotten Space Programme

In celebration of Zambia’s Independence Day, here’s a post I wrote a while back about one of the strangest space programmes in history…

 

Ahh, thank you Library Angel. I was only thinking yesterday that I haven’t written a Historical Randomness post for ages; this morning I update my iPod’s news feeds (because I don’t do anything as predictable as listen to music on my iPod) and there, on Discovery’s feed is the most historically random story I’ve come across in a long time. Because, ladies and gentlemen, Zambia was once about to launch a manned mission to Mars.

Well, when I say “Zambia”, I mean “a Zambian science teacher”, and when I say “about to”, I mean “was never going to”. It seems a bit churlish to point this out, because it’s such a cool story, but this isn’t a story about a great, lost technological advancement buried in the West’s ignorance of African history, this is the story of an enthusiastic amateur, two cats and a bunch of horny potential astronauts.

The background: in 1962, African nationalist parties won Rhodesia’s elections and voted for the secession of Northern Rhodesia; two years later, on 24 October 1964, the Republic of Zambia was born. Cue much celebration, but all this partying was, for one new Zambian, a distraction from the country’s real priority – Edward Makuka Nkoloso was going to get a spacecraft to Mars by 1965, dammit. Even Time magazine noted this ambition in their coverage of the independence celebrations.

This was the sixties, of course, and space was the new frontier – Stephen King has written of a childhood memory of how the adults around him freaked out at the news that Russia had launched Sputnik, and Wernher von Braun was now using the technology used by the Nazis to bomb London in the service of America’s own Saturn programme. In 1962, JFK delivered a speech at Rice Stadium, Texas, pledging to carry out a successful round trip to the Moon by the end of the decade. It was the start of the Space Race between the USA and the Soviet Union, but in Nkoloso’s mind they were also rans, trying to steal his own secrets of space travel for their own ends. After all, they just wanted to carry out small potatoes projects like getting to the Moon by 1970; he had the far more ambitious target of landing a crew on Mars by 1965 (he outlined his aims in this editorial).

Nkoloso was a school science teacher in a country where just 0.002% of the population had a degree. Establishing a secret HQ outside the capital Lusaka, Nkoloso’s space pioneers were 11 men, one 16-year old girl, a Christian missionary and two cats. Trained by swinging off ropes, rolling down hills in oil drums and walking on their hands (and yes, footage of this has made it to Youtube, albeit complete with slappable presenters), the project was derailled by the fact that the men were more interested in copping off with the girl, and things kinda fell apart when she left the project after getting pregnant.

Despite the space programme still being in its relative post-war infancy, the idea of getting to Mars wasn’t all that out-there. The aforementioned von Braun had become the chief populiser of space exploration and in 1952 he published The Mars Project, outling his ideas for a manned mission to the red planet. Remember, this is Mars we’re talking about, and the idea that it might be inhabited has long maintained a hold on the imagination, at least since Percival Lowell popularised the idea in the 1890s that Mars was covered in artificial canals (an extension of astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli’s view that the planet was covered in channels, as opposed to canals built by Martians – blame translation from the Italian). Science fiction also built on the idea that we could be invaded by our nearest astronomical neighbour – the variois tellings of The War of the Worlds is probably the best example of this.

Nkoloso went along with the life on Mars theory, believing it to be inhabited by a primative culture – hence the inclusion of a missionary in his crew, although they vowed not to force Christianity on the natives (it’s interesting to put this approach to First Contact in the context of a country that had only just emerged from colonial rule by Britain – the colonised looking to become the colonisers, maybe, whilst not making the mistakes of the past? It’s not like HG Wells didn’t draw a link between his Martian invasion and European imperialism).

At any rate, the Zambian space programme (which, I should add, wasn’t sanctioned by the government, unsurprisingly) never took off; UNESCO wasn’t keen to stump up the £7 million worth of funding Nkoloso requested from them (although it would have been a bargain compared to the Apollo programme’s $25.4 billion); they were more interested in setting up CERN (the organisation responsible for the World Wide Web and the Large Hadron Collider) and moving the Abu Simbel temple to prevent it from being flooded by the Nile). The project, such as it was, died a death and Nkoloso went on to become president of the Ndola Ex-Servicemen’s Association.

It would be easy to laugh at the whole thing, and it is faintly farcical (although it would make a fantastic film, and someone should look into it – Film Zambia?), but perhaps it’s an example of the potency of two Big Ideas – this article links it to the power space exploration has over the human imagination, and I think there’s definitely something in that, but I guess there’s also something attractive about the opportunity for the little guy, however deluded, to stand up to the big dogs, even in the shadow of colonialism and Cold War superpower posturing. After all, the US may be the only country to have sent someone to a neighbouring celestial body, but Nkoloso shows us we don’t have to believe they’re the only ones who can do it.

So when the first Zambian makes it into space, he or she should spare a thought for Edward Nkoloso and his visions of Mars. The universe is vaster than we make it, and there’s always room for bigger dreams.

Ada Lovelace Day 2011: Telling Stories

I’m not a scientist.

This probably comes as no surprise, given the contents of this blog, but I am interested in the history of science, how discoveries impacted the society around them and vice versa. That’s why I’m interested in the subject of today’s commemoration.

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, not that they had a relationship; discovering that she had a talent for maths (and earning the nickname ‘the Enchantress of Numbers’, she was the first to recognise the true potential of Charles Babbage’s primitive computing ‘Engines’ going so far as to figure out a prototype computer program. It never got used, more because of the limitations of technology, and somewhere along the line Ada’s contribution to the birth of computing became an oft-forgotten historical footnote.

And that’s why today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to celebrate female pioneers in science, engineering and computing whose stories aren’t as well recorded as their male counterparts.

For instance, the majority of staff at Bletchley Park were WRENs, working on breaking Nazi codes and operating some of the earliest electronic computers, such as Colossus; some of their memories are recorded here.

Those WRENs fall within something of a tradition, because before computers were computers, computers were people, with the term referring to a fairly menial role manually crunching numbers for navigational charts, scientific data and the like. One of these ‘computers’ was Henrietta Swan Leavitt who, while routinely counting data for Harvard College Observatory, figured out the basis of measuring distances between astronomical objects, which in turn provided evidence for the expansion of the universe. Not bad for $10.50 a week, although sadly you won’t be surprised to hear that she received no recognition for this until after she died in 1921.

The list of unsung female heroes of science goes on; Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951 – her cells turned out to be remarkably resiliant and became known as the HeLa line, used to make breakthroughs in research into AIDS, cancer and polio, amoung others; Rosalind Franklin did much of the research that lead to our understanding of the structure of DNA, but her research being published later than that of Crick and Watson’s and her early death at the age of 37 meant that her work has often been overlooked.

It would be cool if… Well, I was going to say if the next Steve Jobs was a woman, but a) it’s unclassily soon to be talking about the next Steve Jobs, and b) it’s best to concentrate on being the first you than the next anyone else. And yet there’s something in this – in the UK, men are almost six times more likely to be employed in SET occupations than women. As a UKRC research report states, “The under-representation of women in SET is increasingly seen as an issue affecting economic growth and productivity… Research suggests that diverse teams that include men and women are important to innovation and economic development.”

Novelist Neal Stephenson has written an article on ‘Innovation Starvation‘, about how we seem to have lost a sense of technological optimism and the resulting inspiration that leads us to carry out epic scientific and engineering projects. There are probably many reasons for this, but one seems fairly obvious – about half the population has become marginalised from contributing to a solution. The first programmer may have been a woman, but the general perception of computing is still that of a male-dominated industry, and that sort of perception has ramifications.

One of the potential solutions to this innovation starvation Stephenson has been involved in is a rediscovery of science fiction as a vehicle for big, inspirational ideas rather than an exploration of tech’s darker side. And maybe that will tie in to the growing visibility of women in SF fandom (another field of which there’s a false perception of it being over-whelmingly male). That puts an onus on many sci-fi writers, particularly those in more populist media like comics – write better female characters!

That’s not quite as simplistic as it sounds – we help form our society through the stories and narratives we tell, and, well, you can write education strategies till they’re coming out your ears, but I’m still willing to bet that more people have heard of Watson and Crick that Rosalind Franklin; more people have heard of Charles Babbage than Ada Lovelace. Maybe Ada Lovelace Day’s importance is simply in that we tell a wider range of stories and that they’re told well, inspirational and aspirational.

After all, Ada’s dad was a poet…

In Praise of Tour Guides: World Tourism Day 2011

(As today is the UN’s World Tourism Day, I thought I’d repost this old entry…)

As I may have mentioned here in the past, I’m an information junkie. However, I’m an information junkie cursed with a terrible Swiss Cheese of a memory, possibly caused by an old gypsy woman, and therefore I’m a fan of tour guides.

(The Glass Floor in the CN Tower can hold the weight of 14 hippos.)

We spent a lot of time on tour buses this week, mainly because a ticket lasts for something like five days and thus it’s easy transport around an unfamiliar city. The great thing about this is that it also comes with a commentary and, as I’m the sort of guy who sits and listens to DVD commentary tracks, that’s a selling point.

(The horses in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are classed as officers, and get badge numbers and official funerals.)

I enjoyed the Toronto tour guides a lot (ShopDineTour Toronto, for a free plug), not least because they pull off the sort of trick that I just can’t – they know what they’re talking about, they can remember it, and they can communicate it in an entertaining way. This is the sort of thing I struggle with – my brain has a communication and information retention firewall installed, and so when the guide on the way to Niagara Falls is reciting the history of Toronto AND making it interesting, I’m in awe. He just seemed to know vast amounts about John Graves Simcoe, the guy who founded Toronto, and yeah, sure, he’s making a living from reciting this stuff but it’s something I could never do. I’d get the script all tangled up in my brain, and then knock myself out on a low-hanging branch.

(Casa Loma, a mansion/castle just outside of downtown Toronto, was used as the filming location for Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters in the first two X-Men movies… but not the third.)

That said, I also want to give a shout-out to guides from other cities – some the people who first got my respect as guides were the US National Park rangers on Alcatraz Island, who not only knew all about the old prison there but also the oysters and fish that live around the island. It’s a cool, outdoorsy job, but it’s also got a sense of the geek spirit, in the most postive way – the idea that this stuff is cool, it’s good to be enthusiastic about it, and there’s nothing wrong with communicating that enthusiasm to the people who pay to do the tour. It’s fun.

(Yonge Street is the longest street in the world, stretching 1896 miles out of Toronto. Many dispute its claim to this, however, but I don’t care.)

And don’t forget the drivers – heck, my main regret from Niagara Falls was that they didn’t give the driver a mic as well, because he was as clued up as the guide and had a fun double-act thing going on. We were near enough the front to hear this, but it was gold. The personalities made a pretty long journey that much more entertaining.

(The city was originally named York, but when New York got too big, the Canadians renamed it Toronto so there wouldn’t be comparisons.)

But for courtesy, friendliness and entertainment value, we probably have to give the award to the guide we saw a few times throughout the week, who recognised us and said hi, bothered to tell us when the bus times were so we didn’t end up inadvertantly stranded, and, while we guessed he was a bit geeky from his first MacGyver reference, the fact that he admitted to being a comic collector in front of a bus full of people gave him geek kudos. AND he had his Toronto knowledge. You can’t ask for more than that.

(Toronto is North America’s third largest film and TV filming location, after LA and New York.)

So if you’re ever in Toronto, check out the yellow buses. They’ll even give you a free map!