A saturday morning fusion thread

by liberal japonicus

As is usual, the perfect open thread topic appears after I post an open thread. Looked in my google news and there this was, and because Gary Farber is in my Google + circle, it's got his seal of approval.

A short one or two sentence summary can't do this article justice, so here's a taste to get you started:

Shortly after his 14th birthday, Taylor and Brinsmead loaded deuterium fuel into the machine, brought up the power, and confirmed the presence of neutrons. With that, Taylor became the 32nd individual on the planet to achieve a nuclear-fusion reaction. 

As they say, read the rest. And then comment on what you were doing when you were 14.

Comments

[Laura Koerbeer]

Thanks for an amazing read.

It's hard to believe--reads so much like a sci-fi novel for young adults.

[wj]

Wow. Just wow.

His parents may not know where he got his brilliance. But they seem to have done a damn good job of raising him to be a reasonable human being. Which, if you have been around super-bright kids, is definitely a non-trivial accomplishment.

[wj]

Laura, I think the story you are thinking of is In Hiding by Wilma Shires. This reads a lot like it.

[Laura Koerbeer]

I have not heard of In Hiding, but if you recommend it, I will give it a try.

The other question is "What were you doing when you were fourteen?" and I'm pretty sure most of the answers will pale compared to this young man. However for the sake of fun I do hope people will share . It's fun to learn more about people.

When I was fourteen I had just read that Look ( I think it was Look) magazine article about the Haight Ashbury and suddenly I knew where I was supposed to be and what I was supposed to be doing. Sadly, I was fourteen and living in central Iowa. But I tried.

[liberal japonicus]

At 14, I was living in Maryland, thinking I was going to go into science or math. A year later, my father was transferred to Bay St. Louis, Mississiippi, slightly altering things.

[wj]

When I was 12, my father taught me how to drive the farm tractor. I promptly turned around and taught my younger brother.

At 14, for the third year running, my (younger) brother and I were essentially share-cropping. We leased a field from the neighborhood dairy, and put in hay crop (oats and vetch, actually). That included plowing and seeding, cutting it when it was grown, raking it, and hiring the guy with the baler. All worked around school, since here you plant in November, before the rains come, and harvest in June when they have stopped.

The dairy got a set number of bales (as I say, classic share-cropping), our parents got some for use of the tractor and other equipment, and we sold the rest. The money we made over the years put us part way thru college. Not totally (we worked while we were there), but it made all the difference.

[wj]

Laura, if you are trying to run it down, In Hiding was published under Wilmar Shires in Astounding magazine. (SF in the '50s was still not very open to female authors.) I belive the book version was called Children of the Atom

[Brett Bellmore]

When I was 14 I was deriving the equations for rocket navigation between planets from Newton's laws of motion and conservation of momentum, and experimenting with electrochemistry in the basement.

And stories like this still make me feel like an underachiever.

[Duff Clarity]

I ran away from home for the first time when I was 14. One of my older friends had gotten busted by his parents for drugs, so he wanted to run away. He asked me if I would go and I said, "Sure".

It was Basil E. Frankweiler meets the Ramones. We hung out all day at the art museum (since it was free) and slept in alleys at night. Eventually we got sloppy and slept in the same alley two nights in a row and the cops caught us.

They took us to the police station and whined about having to do their jobs. No one in the world whines more than a cop. My mom and step-dad came and dragged me home against my will.

A few years later they kicked me out of the house for good. I was pissed off about that, too.

14 is a horrible age when there are no farm tractors around.

[russell]

At 14 I played my first paid professional gig, at a crappy strip mall bar in my hometown on Long Island. I think we got $25 each, which was freaking amazing. All our friends who could get into the joint came to see us.

Hooked for life, as they say.

My buddies and I did like to blow stuff up at that point, but only in a sort of modest way, using whatever we could cadge from our 4th of July fireworks stashes and whatever flammable stuff they would sell us at the hobby shop. Magnesium ribbon was a big favorite, it burns with an extremely bright flame. But no, no tiny suns in the garage.

That's a very exceptional kid.

[Gary Farber]

The short story "In Hiding" is by Wilmar Shiras, and is in the SF HALL OF FAME collection, and her full novel fix-up is called CHILDREN OF THE ATOM, and although O/P, you should be able to find copies at abebooks.com.

[joel hanes]

Fourteen; the last year I carried the paper route; still mowing the neighbor's lawn and doing a little babysitting for pocket money. Junior lifesaving classes at the Y. Playing timpani in a pretty good middle school symphonic band. Like Laura, stuck in Iowa and dreaming of California (on the radio, the Mommas and the Pappas sang "All the leaves are brown.. ). I helped Charlie transform his attic bedroom to a (still drugless) den with black lights and posters and incense and a home-made light-show box. Beginning to argue with Dad about Viet Nam and about the limits for hair on my head and face. Inhaling about three SF novels per week, and every newspaper and magazine available. Mortified by acne.

The school science faculty was trying to keep Szymeczek and me engaged by giving us access to the radioactivity experiments equipment, but drawing the attenuation curves for various shielding substances was _boring_. So for jollies we built a repeatable gasoline fireball generator in his back yard, and scorched the tree limbs forty feet up until his parents made us stop.

It's probably just as well for the neighborhood and our own health that we had no access to enriched uranium, but we were nowhere near Taylor's level of sophisticated comprehension.

[dr ngo]

At fourteen I was starting in a new HS, in a new city, and it turned out all good. Smaller school, easier for a then-shy kid (about 1.5 years younger than all my classmates) to start over and fit in. Two and a half years later, when I graduated, I had not only won various academic prizes - always on the cards - but made friends, sung in the choir, and run for student body office, making a short speech at the election assembly in front of 100s of people, and did OK. I was ready for college and, beyond that, real life (OK, academic life - not quite the same thing, I admit). And none of that would have happened if I had stayed in the same bigger, "better" HS where I started.

So it was, in retrospect, a very good year.

[Slartibartfast]

At 14 I was playing a lot with the same kind of stuff russell was playing with, and starting to work on my linear accelerator.

Which was not of my own design, I have to add. And I never finished it. Turns out that one really difficult part of building partical accelerators is pulling a sufficiently hard vacuum.

Plus, once you get enough energy going, you have to worry about shielding and procedure, which is not really my strong suit.

The carbon arc furnace, on the other hand, was pure childish destruction of metallic objects. Who knew you could wreak such havoc with a couple of curtain rods, some oven mitts, a pair of old batteries and some zipcord?

[McKinneyTexas]

what you were doing when you were 14.

Struggling to understand and communicate with the opposite sex. Not much else.

[hairshirthedonist]

My buddies and I did like to blow stuff up at that point, but only in a sort of modest way, using whatever we could cadge from our 4th of July fireworks stashes and whatever flammable stuff they would sell us at the hobby shop.

Why on Earth did I think I was going to be the only one around here who was like this at 14?

When I turned 14, I had recently informed my mother that I was not coming back to Phoenix after spending the summer with my father in New Jersey (i.e. my original and always my real home, to this day). Making that decision, which my mother now knows was absolutely the right one, having long ago realized the train wreck she had married after divorcing Dad, is one of the few things I can say I got completely right, even in the face of predictable familial upheaval. (I was otherwise clueless....)

I often wonder what would have become of me if I had just "stayed with the program." I probably would have eventually made the same decision, only later, after something forced me to do so reactively rather than proactively. In any case, I think it would have been much uglier.

[Rob in CT]

At fourteen I was suffering high school (including what McTex mentions, but with a side order of "try to avoid getting beat on or humiliated today"), getting good grades (though I was in, or entering, coast mode), but definitely not playing around with fusion reactions. And it wasn't for another two years that I began to do anything worth of story-telling (mind-blowingly stupid automotive antics).

[McKinneyTexas]

When I turned 14, I had recently informed my mother that I was not coming back to Phoenix after spending the summer with my father in New Jersey

Tough duty for a kid.

"try to avoid getting beat on or humiliated today"

Yeah, that too. Not a huge issue most of the time, but it could be unpleasant.

[russell]

Tough duty for a kid.

No kidding.

Most folks who came up with divorced folks have crappy stories to tell, but not that many had the burden of (or courage for) making that kind of decision for themselves.

Why on Earth did I think I was going to be the only one around here who was like this at 14?

OK, last Christmas my wife and I went to a friend's holiday party. At the end of the night, a small handful of couples were sitting around the living room. For some reason the topic got onto youthful mayhem, and every single guy in the room had stories to tell about, basically, blowing stuff up, or setting fire to stuff, or in some way or other generally wreaking havoc as a form of entertainment.

Among the folks present were our friend's daughter, who has been living in Scotland for about 10 years, having gone to St Andrew's for undergrad through PhD. She was there with her Scots fiancee. So, as reality check, just to make sure it wasn't some weird American Y-chromosome genetic abnormality, we asked him about his experiences.

And, indeed, he had spent his youth blowing sh*t up. Why?, his fiancee asked (apparently this was all news to her).

"It's fun to smash things" was the obvious reply.

[sapient]

At 14, I also played my first professional gig. It was my last professional gig. Actually, I probably played about 3 before I decided that music (or any kind of public performance) was not my strength.

But what really interests me is the "blowing things up" motif combined with the kids talk trash using "rape" thread. I know some vey young adults (men and women), but don't know anyone who exploded anything. Whereas, many kids my age did explode things (and I even knew of people who claimed to have blown up animals, but no one ever would have admitted that to me). So which is worse? I would suggest that blowing up "things" might be somewhat okay, but blowing up animals means that the person is a sociopath. "Playing" rape seems awfully weird but, in my day, people didn't really comprehend rape, so they wouldn't have "played" it. Isn't "play" a way to process reality?

Anyway, didn't know which thread to comment on with this thought.

[russell]

what really interests me is the "blowing things up" motif combined with the kids talk trash using "rape" thread.

I agree, it's an interesting mix of tendencies toward mayhem, of various sorts. They're all experiments in violence, of various kinds. IMO the 'various kinds' part is the key.

My *personal take on this*, and that is all it is, and nothing more, is that it's less anti-social - much less - to blow up random collections of inanimate objects than it is to (a) blow up animals or (b) engage in rape play or rape language.

The kind of 'blowing stuff up' that I think we're talking about here definitely has a destructive aspect ("it's fun to smash things!") but it also includes a sort of general-purpose anarchic limit-pushing aspect, and a testing of physical prowess - i.e., just being able to make something happen - and also a natural curiosity about things - i.e., 'what would happen if'. It's more fun if 'what would happen' involves flames and smoke, but it's also interesting to simply know what would happen, regardless of the pyrotechnic quality of the result.

Blowing up, or setting fire to, or generally torturing animals, as opposed to, frex, a 2 liter plastic bottle, or a pumpkin, demonstrates a disturbing lack of empathy. Potentially, dangerously so.

Rape play and rape language demonstrate a willingness to, or interest in, or at least curiosity about, dominating others through force, especially sexual force.

So, perhaps all are ways of processing reality, but the reality they process are not the same.

Ideally, nobody gets hurt when you fire the potato gun, or hurl the pumpkin, or blow up whatever unfortunately object is handy, or incinerate the metal object. Although, the possible danger of somebody getting hurt is certainly part of the fascination. But it's not the objective.

In the other cases, somebody getting hurt is the point.

[sapient]

"In the other cases, somebody getting hurt is the point."

Honestly, I don't know what "play" signifies. If I were caring for a child who I saw or heard pretending to rape someone, I would be horrified, and would take the child aside and discuss with him/her that rape is a horrible act, that it is a crime. I would discuss the violation of a person's humanity, etc. I would pay attention to whether the child showed other indications of wanting to hurt other people.

I made a comment on the other thread, so I will go over there to continue this subject, rather than carrying on this dual thing. But kids "play" in order to figure out stuff. Leaving aside my probable reaction, I don't think that kids understand what rape is. They are, of course, interested in sex, which they don't understand either.

I didn't know what "rape" was when I was a kid. I'm not sure I understood what it was even when I knew about sex. I only heard euphemisms, and was probably pretty old before I had any idea what it was, much less appreciated what it was. The thought of sex was scary (exciting, but disgusting at the same time). "Rape" was just a variation of something completely unknown.

On the other hand, animals and pain are very real and immediate. Something is wrong when a child doesn't appreciate the horror of hurting some creature who can feel pain.

In both of these situations, I would assume that a child needed some immediate intervention. I think (trying to think objectively) that I would worry more about a child who was interested in hurting animals than a child who (without any experience of sex) would be interested in "playing" rape as a part of "playing" war.

Anyway, I'll look in at the other thread - sorry to have mingled/mangled this one.

[hairshirthedonist]

Although, the possible danger of somebody getting hurt is certainly part of the fascination. But it's not the objective.

The mosh pit, when done right, frex. (You know, back when I was in the pit and everyone made sure anyone who fell was picked up immediately - because my generation was better than those snot-nosed punks that came later.)

Hurting living things just for fun is fncked up. If you do that as a kid, you'd better figure out quickly that it's not fun, because it turns your stomach and feels wrong. Otherwise, watch out, World.

[McKinneyTexas]

Many young boys into early manhood wrestle, fight (sometimes), play sports and games that involve physical contact. Some of us hunted and fished. Going exploring, catching frogs or snakes or just generally doing something adventurous is part of being a boy. Some girls were on board with this when I was young, but most were disinterested.

If there is a norm for this kind of behavior, it stops/stopped at cruelty to animals, roughness with either smaller kids or girls and destruction of someone else's property.

That said, I remember teasing girls. It seemed harmless at the time, but probably wasn't. It wasn't something I did a lot, but it happened. Of course, by junior high school, the tables turned and I could and often was crushed by a look or a word from a seemingly more confident, more established young girl.

I knew a kid or two who was cruel to animals just for the hell of being cruel. Some people think hunting is cruel. I don't and never have, assuming you plan to eat what you kill, you obey the rules etc. I can see a kid who tortures animals morphing into an adult who objectifies others and uses them regardless of how they feel or whether they consent. Compelled sexual relations would be a subset of what someone like this would be capable of inflicting.

This relates to misogyny and racism indirectly. It takes a special class of person to be so desensitized to others that joking about rape or degrading someone because of their skin color is acceptable.

The more Doc S posts about rape, the more I revisit some of the stories I've heard about men I've known who were sexual predators, but not in a traditionally criminal way. From what I know of these men, their behavior isn't a violent crime, probably not even a crime at all. But it's still awful, and probably actionable on the civil side, as if that was any kind of remedy or redress. It isn't and couldn't be, thinking as I am of what one man in particular does/did to coerce sex. There is no way to make that right or to visit on him what he deserves.