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We are very excited to announce that on April 22nd, we were married at City Hall in San Francsico!
Our wedding will be in Taiwan, sometime in the spring or summer of 2006. Once we figure out when it will be, we'll let you know.
Our announcement is a flash presentation you can see here.
Yours truly,
Kai-Hua Cheng and Matthew Fitzpatrick
There is a river trough the middle of the park which has cut walls (in some places > 1000 feet high!) through the copperry marble mountains in the park. There are tons of amazing bright blue pools and when you walk along the pathway there are places where you look straight up and can't see sky because the walls are so high!
The public albums are -
]]>The MT and CPG css never played nice together, so I cheated and just used an image map :)
]]>My reading is pretty focused on scifi, i've found i have a preference for dystopian/steampunk fantasy, but i've still read a bit of space opera, cyberpunk, comedy and the "hard" stuff.
In the mid 90's I had seen a cartoon called Red Planet (based off of a heinlein book). Somehow this cartoon confused itself in my mind with the Mars Trilogy, so i had never read the KSR stuff until a co-worker recommended it to me.
My steampunk bigotry and preconceptions of the Mars Trilogy as a shallow children's story were a disservice to this great epic! I'm quite grateful for the recommendation!
My summary and review is below, some spoilers included, so if you haven't read it i'll give my conclusions here and you can skip the review until you're done with the books.
The Mars Trilogy is very good. If you have time to read a 3 book series and you're interested in hard scifi, you'll enjoy these books and find the series a rewarding way to spend your time.
]]> The story follows the adventure of earth's colonization of mars. An expedition began as a scientific effort, with 100 of the world's leading scientists traveling to mars to build an international scientific society modeled after the research facilities and political structures of the South Pole.Martian society develops and spurs an amazing explosion in technological development related to interplanetary travel, life support, agriculture and biology. A longevity medicine is developed - increasing the human life span by an order of magnitude.
Mars develops two political parties. One group (the greens) aims to terraform the planet in order to support larger populations and a human inhabitable environment without requiring space suits or domed cities. The other (the reds) is a party supporting the preservation of mars as a sort of geological park, to be used for scientific study and education only.
Earth's population exceeds the planet's carrying capacity, and the need for external resources to maintain order and sustainability on earth creates huge pressures on the scientific community of mars. The earth's economies are controlled by gigantic transnational companies, whose growing power is displacing traditional nation-state authorities. These transnational companies fund much of Martian developments, and use their vast resources to counteract the elements of the emerging Martian society which appear to be the antithesis of the economic and social paradigms which are the basis for the transnationals' existence.
Conflict arises between Martian society and earth, fueled by earth's demands for resources, profit and emigration. The conflict culminates as civil war, where the ambitions of the Martian colonists meet with failure, but at the cost of major destruction to Martian infrastructure. The original group of 100 scientists is largely slaughtered by terran powers, and the remaining few go "underground" in hidden communities in remote areas of mars.
As the Martian infrastructure is slowly rebuilt, the underground expands as new generations are born and immigrants turn "native". An economy develops around gift-giving and builds a financial culture around resource sharing.
The moderate elements of the two Martian political parties (red and green) reconcile and a hybrid party is created. The hybrid party (the blues) becomes a super-majority amongst the Martian population. The majority of residents of mars become involved in the alternate economy and progressively more open underground society led by the remnants of original 100 scientists.
An environmental catastrophe consumes much of the attention and resources of earth governments and transnationals. The Martian underground sees this as an opportunity for a second revolution - this time more organized and experienced. The second revolt meets with success and mars becomes sovereign under a treaty with the UN guaranteeing resources and an emigration quota to earth.
The remaining members of the original 100 settling scientists take senior political and social roles in the new country, and cope with the complexities of longevity treatments, emigration politics, the new socio-syndicalist government and economy, and the series closes out as they start to settle down and build families.
I had been expecting a space opera, where the characters were eclipsed by action-sequences and unreal dialogue. However, KSR illustrates each persona with a web of personal issues and problems and contrasts that with the professional and political ideals and actions of the characters. This builds a lot of depth to the characters and sense of reality to the dialogue.
The coverage KSR gave to the economics of Mars was a nice touch. He highlights the principles of his system very well, and wonderfully balances the ideals of the system with the characters who create them. I would have liked more clarity on the details of the economy (some things are bought, other things are communal property. One buys a job, but then the job entitles them to more communal property and token money), it wasn't clear to me how many of the characters could afford to do what they did throughout the story line.
One very interesting idea KSR brought up about the transnational companies, was that the growing populations caused governments to grow to a point where they were too inefficient to operate, so the executive branches of government outsourced the other branches to the transnationals. A very cool and frightening idea!
The politics of mars wasn't very believable to me. It was a big focus of most of the book, but I just for the life of me couldn't take the red party as realistic. It just seems too absurd to accept that a large fraction of humans on mars did not want a human-livable environment. The socio-syndicalist stuff was pretty nice, but I won't feel comfortable about a utopian society with a heavy-handed government (the protagonists supported the death penalty!). I'm still a space-opera libertarian at heart, and that's how I like my utopias.
Two of the half-dozen or so main protagonists I didn't feel were effectively characterized, and it was annoying enough for me to talk about!
Frank Chalmers was unrealistically inhuman, a shallow insecure creature motivated by ego and lust for power. Chalmers was a thoroughly anti-social person, he was just too negative. If he had been real he would have jumped off a bridge or been arrested long before he became a world-class scientist and flew to mars.
The other main character I had problems with, with was Ann Clayborne. This woman was the leader of the Red party of mars. She was focused like a laser on a single issue (Red Mars) and she never had any human or social characteristics until after she experienced brain damage from longevity treatment at about 3/4 of the way through the last book. Again, the lack of any reasonable human social characteristics made this character very hard to relate to or believe.
One thing that always irks me in fantasy is when magic is used as a plot device to get characters out of situations without explanation, logic or consistency with the story. (The technology in star-trek is a perfect example). KSR rarely falls into this pattern. Technology is used mostly to build the scene and timeline, and doesn't touch much on the plot or characterizations. There are a few exceptions to this which I found annoying (ecotage and some of the terraforming wizardry), and only one of them was truly painful (liberation of sax from the torture prison).
Excluding some of the more bizarre terraforming wizardry and ecotage (ecological sabotage - using the environment and weather as a weapon) concepts, I felt that the technology added a huge layer of realism to the story. It was a wonderfully detailed and thorough framework to build the story around, and makes the series stand out to me in comparisons to others. I'm not a formal scientist but I read a lot of sci-fi, and I found it very pleasant for KSR to be consistent and creative and accurate and sometimes even educational :)
This series was very entertaining and I enjoyed spending my time reading the books.
I've been so busy running around preparing for the big move i haven't had much time to test it, but when i got a little tired of packing this weekend I snuck out and took a panorama on the charles with my fisheye and the 1d mk II. It's not really a good test of the camera, since the wide angle has lots of distortion and it's very downsampled to be viewable on the internet. But it was cool to see the extra fisheyeness on the 1.3 crop factor sensor (vs my drebel). I think it turned out pretty well:
The fence you see growing out in a wide V is actually a straight line of fence directly in front of the tripod. The V shape is distortion created by mapping 180 degrees of fisheye frames into the panorama shot. I used photoshop CS to do a photomerge (PS works better for pano factory on the very wide angle merges). There were originally only 3 frames with about a 40% overlap (the fisheye is so wide!). I took the shots at f16 on the canon 15mm f2.8 fisheye lense. ISO 100 on the 1d mark II, exposures varied from 1/80 to 1/100th of a second.
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