Brightly Lit

Over at What-If, Randall Munroe considers the question about how many fireflies it would take to create as much light as the sun.

It turns out that the number, while huge, is finite: Three followed by 31 zeroes. Munroe simply figures out the output in lumens of the average firefly, compares it with the lumen output of the sun, and does a bit of basic arithmetic.

Not only is the number not outlandishly huge compared with some other numbers in the universe, it turns out that a firefly is brighter than an amount of the sun equal to it in weight. In other words, 20 milligrams of firefly is brighter than 20 milligrams of sun, although probably a lot easier to keep in a jar.

Of course, arranging the fireflies to produce the light output is a trick, since the outer ones would block the light of the inner ones if they were just in a clump. They would have to be in a hollow sphere with their heads facing inward -- which leads to the interesting situation of a sphere of moons as bright as the sun.

One way to get around the need to coordinate an immense hollow sphere of bug bums is to imagine one giant firefly with a luminous patch able to generate the light of the sun. According to Munroe's calculations, such a firefly would be as large as the solar system, but would have the unfortunate design flaw of instantaneously collapsing into a black hole. Not just any black hole, but a black hole larger than any black hole that has ever existed -- technically it would be too big for a black hole but if we're positing a firefly the size of a solar system we're already ignoring most of the laws of physics and so why not keep misbehaving?

Black holes evaporate very gradually in Hawking radiation, meaning that they eventually cease to exist. The "firefly black hole," larger than any other known, would evaporate last and would wind up being the last thing in the universe before everything decays into a random assortment of wandering photons, neutrinos, electrons, and positrons. Meaning that despite Gail Berman's best efforts, when everything else is gone, there would still be a little bit of firefly around.

Now that's shiny.

Assortment

-- Some scientists studying the way the Pacific Beetle cockroach feeds its young -- unlike most insects, it bears live offspring instead of eggs -- have determined that its "milk" could become an excellent source of nutrition if it is found to be safe for human consumption.

I will starve myself right to death if people start putting that in food.

-- Business Insider lists 13 signs that you may be working with a psychopath. If your current job involves getting either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump elected president, you might or might not be working with a psychopath, but you are dern tootin' likely to be working for one.

-- Some folks have decided to roll the dice on the idea that Alpha Centauri has an earthlike world in its orbit and build a space telescope that will be able to take a picture of it. The project, called Mission Centaur, hopes to have its telescope in orbit by 2019 and begin photographing the HZ, or "habitable zone" of the Alpha Centauri A and B system ("Alpha Centauri" is actually a binary or two-star system. If you want to get picky, it's a three-star system that contains the red dwarf Proxima Centauri as well). Donations and fund-raising will help them do so.

Alpha Centauri is the closest star to our sun, only four light-years away. Still, anything found in its orbit would be a strict look-but-not-touch scenario. The fastest spacecraft flying today would still take 10,000 years to reach it, and by then we probably would have developed much faster ways to get there.

-- The Smithsonian Institute is looking for a beer historian. It's planning an exhibit on American craft beer and needs someone to research that history and prepare the exhibit. No word on sampling, but if that's a part of the job then changing your name to Norm Peterson might get you a second look.

Fighting the Forces of Evil

As Ghosts of War opens, members of the Taskforce, the extra-legal super-clandestine group fighting terrorists by doing whatever it takes to win, are still adrift following the events of The Forgotten Soldier. The government officials who give them their missions are unwilling to reactivate them after one of their members went rogue and began his own vendetta.

So Pike Logan and Jennifer Cahill, two civilian members of the Taskforce who operate an archaeological/historical items research and recovery service as their cover, decide to take on a job proposed by two Israeli secret agents with whom they've worked in the past. The job is simple: Help provide a cover story while the agents verify the authenticity of a medieval Torah scroll thought lost in the Holocaust. But the Israeli agents had a backup mission, and the Torah scroll is also on the shopping list of a shady Russian oligarch trying to stay one step ahead of the ruthless Vladimir Putin. His method? Destabilize U.S.-Russian relations to the degree that the two nations actually threaten war, which will cause other oligarchs to band together and oust the Russian leader. But he's more successful than he thought he would be and now war looks like more than a threat -- and Pike and Jennifer are right in the middle of it.

Even though the scale of the threat outweighs just about anything he's done with Pike and the Taskforce to date, the scope of the book remains smaller. Taylor writes most of his story around Pike and Jennifer as well as Aaron and Shoshana, the Israeli team. While the Taskforce pair still have some wrinkles in their relationship, they are Ozzie and Harriet compared to the Israelis -- but the latter want to navigate their way into a relationship they both desire but don't know how to create. The presence of someone from Shoshana's past doesn't help them at all.

Taylor gets credit for trying, as usual, to examine some of the real-world consequences -- political and personal -- of an agency that operates in explicit denial of the ideals and laws of the nation it wants to protect. He's less successful at exploring the relationship waters that the two pairs of agents and lovers are trying to navigate. He gets where he wants to go, but lacks the finesse that could tighten up and bring a shine to this part of his story. Still, he's offering a quick-paced action yarn where heroes act heroically, banter a bit and take care of the business at hand. And he's doing it with enough skill and nuance to stand out from the crowded shelves of similar yarns that leave a lot to be desired.

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In 2010, Power Down introduced Dewey Andreas, a former covert operative disillusioned with his work and his home nation who finds himself called back to work to face a threat that could cripple the country for decades. Since that interesting debut, Ben Coes has kept Dewey humming in adventures that haven't quite lived up to the promise of Power Down even though they feature some great character-building flavor.

First Strike, the sixth Dewey Andreas novel, starts out as strongly as any have before in the series. What if the terrorist group known as ISIS started out as a misguided attempt by U.S. intelligence to create a counter-weight to the jihadi forces sweeping the Middle East? And what if the brilliant mastermind of the group used that fact as leverage to keep the pipeline of weapons and resources flowing? What would happen when that arrangement finally came to light?

Well in a world with Dewey Andreas, the first thing to do would be to send him to Syria to meet with a possible ISIS defector to get information that confirmed the relationship. Although he does, and U.S. intelligence uses that info to stop the latest massive shipment, Dewey is caught and faces a brutal execution. Rather than cleave to the usual "I ain't skeered" attitude of he-man heroes in situations like this, Coes gives Dewey a healthy fear of his fate. Which makes his desperation in his escape that much more believable and heightens the tension as well. This part of First Strike is easily the best and ranks at the top of any of Dewey's adventures.

But the second half of the book, which deals with the ISIS leader's attempts to force the U.S. to give him his weapons shipment by taking over a dorm at Columbia University, is completely pedestrian, silly, cruel and paint-by-numbers Flag-Waving Patriotic Thriller 101. When we've gone a few pages of Dewey and company trying to figure out how to break into the dorm without getting any more people killed, Coes seems to think we need a reminder of how eeeeevil the terrorists are so they commit another atrocity on another poor innocent cipher. These incidents develop a significant cut-and-paste feel, down to similar language -- we cut to the hostage scene at least three times by being informed the air on the un-air-conditioned floor is "fetid" with the heat of so many bodies.

In the end, First Strike almost seems as though it's two unrelated short novellas mashed together under one cover -- Dewey's Syrian mission is a first-rate espionage thriller, but the Columbia hostage dorm segment belongs in a much lesser book.

Focus Time

At last, our long national nightmare is over, and both the primary season and the major party conventions are behind us. All we have to do now is hold out until the general election, and then we will only have to do the work of ignoring one of these two greedy egotists; the one that wins. The media will do the work of ignoring the one that loses for us, since no one ever cares what the second-place finisher thinks.

Not For Sale

The other day I visited a Hastings Entertainment store, which was closing as a part of the chain's bankruptcy. It wasn't able to find enough of a niche in the world of e-books and Amazon online sales to continue. That's an unfortunate reality of the free market, but the market remains the best way to measure what people want. So maybe the blame lies elsewhere.

A family was shopping, and one of the children, a girl of about eight or nine, had been given one of the books she would be getting with the family purchase. She dropped to the floor in a cross-legged second and dove in, immediately engrossed in whatever story she held while the others browsed.

Jeff Bezos will never be able to sell that, no matter what technology comes under his company's command. 

Test Pattern

Traveling today. Blogging tomorrow.

It's Olympic Time!

Two weeks to go until the 2016 Olympic Games begin, and they're already earning gold medals in stupidity and embarrassment:

-- The Australian team declined to move into their rooms in the athletes' Olympic Village because among the amenities the Rio de Janeiro-based games offered were not-just-low-but-no-flow toilets and accent puddles conveniently close to power cables and light switches. The mayor of Rio, demonstrating that the phrase "clueless politician" translates quite well into Portuguese (político ignorante, if you're curious), offered to get a kangaroo to jump up and down in front of the building to make them feel more at home. Because we all know that when we think of pampered athletes whining about homesickness, Australians are the first group that comes to mind.

-- The International Olympic Committee followed up a report on widespread doping among Russian athletes in recent years by choosing not to ban the entire team from the Rio games.

Instead, individual Russian athletes will have to pinky swear to their individual sport governing bodies that their strength, speed and skill come from good food, clean living, taking their vitamins and saying their prayers. Actually the IOC said that each sport will determine which Russian atheletes may compete and outlined the criteria to be used for that determination -- reminding the sport federations that previous clean tests should not by themselves be considered enough proof of cleanliness.

Some folks said that the Aug. 5 opening date means there will not be nearly enough time to complete this more rigorous scrutiny, but the International Tennis Federation proved them wrong by clearing all eight Russian tennis players just several hours after the IOC announcement based on their previous history of clean tests.