3 Cats Stalking

"Was a Time When" Published on Kindle, Dec 27, 2011

It's done, or at least the Kindle part is done. I published my new book last night as a Kindle book. It is available at Amazon for $3.98 and ready for immediate download.

The paper copy book will be available around mid-January.

I am very interested in getting some professional reviews of the book. If you have a blog where you discuss books or the fate of the world in the next 75 years, let me know your background and how to reach you and I will send you a review copy, either a .pdf or a paper copy (when available), free of charge.

For your information, here is my product description.

This tale began in 2006 as the autobiography of my fictional great-grandson, Sam, yet-to-be-born in 2015.

Sam would live through the greatest cultural transition ever experienced by the human race. I encased his memoirs in a short story telling of an expedition of Neu-human archeologists from a thousand years in the future, 3100 A.D., who return to the Pacific Coast searching for their roots. They find Sam's recorded life story and hear a first-hand account of the “Great Collapse” of human society as they had come to call it.

Sam Hardy's life begins at the peak of the tremendous spurt of technology and social advance in the second decade of the 21st century, powered by what many still thought at the time would be an infinite supply of energy and a stable world of commerce and trade. Sam writes the history of humanity's course through the transitions that result from expected natural disasters, resource depletion, climate change, over-population, and economic and cultural failure as his family and tribe struggle to learn to live in a new world of limited resources and crashing dreams.

There are many possible worlds our progeny could face, but in my mind the world described here unfortunately seems to be one of the more probable. My goal is to tell of some of the changes that can be expected as our society searches for its future, and as those technologies and resources on which our civilization depend fall away.

This is a tale of retrospection, as seen through the eyes of someone who lives through it and remembers that there Was a Time When things were so different. And yet, in Sam's final words, there is still hope:

“So this is goodbye. Maybe I have been wrong in my pessimism and damnation of humanity, and there really is a future for mankind on this planet. At least I have joined a group that is beginning the steps to future recovery. God willing, I will have the chance to watch that future blossom. I pray this band I join will build the roots of a better civilization than what my peers built for the last one.”

I will be discussing the book and offering ideas on other options and how to cope with the future at www.WasATimeWhen.com. Come by for a visit.

Earthquakes -- still a possibility

Ten years ago I was very interested in earthquakes and wrote a couple of novels about what it would be like when the New Madrid once again fractures. I have just put those novels into Kindle format and they are available at kdp.amazon.com. The following is the press release I sent out about this 200th anniversary of the big event in 1811.

 

200 Years Ago a Great Earthquake Killed Up to 20% of the Population Around New Madrid, Missouri - What If That Earthquake Happened Today?

Sam Penny's Novels, Memphis 7.9 (Revised), and Broken River

(now available on Kindle) describe what would happen

in a repeat of that same event today.

200 years ago, on December 16, 1811, the first of four in a series of great earthquakes stuck the New Madrid Seismic Zone under the Mississippi River, wrecking havoc over 650,000 square miles in what is now the central United States, shaking the foundations of cities from Toronto, Ontario to Boston, Massachusetts to Charleston, South Carolina.

In 2002 and 2005 Sam Penny published two novels, “Memphis 7.9 (Revised)” and “Broken River,” which described a scenario of the conditions that represented his best estimates of what the world in the affected area would be like should a similar seismic event occur today on the New Madrid Seismic Zone. Both of these books are available through [url:http://amazon.com]Amazon.com[/url]. Penny has just published Kindle versions of the books as well.

Back in 1811 over the next two months another three gigantic earthquakes struck the New Madrid Seismic Zone under what was then the western edge of our country – what now is the center of the United States of America. The first event is estimated to have been a 7.9 magnitude event focused near what is known today as the bottom of the Missouri boot-heel. A second earthquake the same size happened six hours later thirty miles north under New Madrid, Missouri.

The third earthquake on January 23, 1812 was of smaller intensity, but it was followed on February 7, 1812 by the largest event on the thrust zone, again under the shattered village of New Madrid. Aftershocks continued to shake the region for the next five years.

The 1810 census reported the population of the affected region to be about 5,000, plus as many as 20,000 slaves. This covered the cities along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, including Louisville, New Madrid, and down to Memphis. That census did not even consider the sizable Native American Indian population in the area.

Some estimates suggest that as much as 20% of the total population was killed as a result of the seismic activity and pestilence that followed. It was a small number back then, but today over 32 million people live in the threatened region; 20% would be 6.4 million.

Both of Penny's books received Honorable Mention at the MidSouthCon Science Fiction Fair and are noted for their detailed descriptions of the effects of seismic shaking along the New Madrid Seismic Zone.

Penny says, “My books are based upon analytical studies of what the new world will be like in Memphis and along the Mississippi River when such a seismic event takes place. It is not a matter of IF, but of WHEN.” The USGS estimates that in the next 50 years there is a a 25 to 40 percent chance of a magnitude 6 or larger earthquake, including a 7 to 10 percent chance of another series like that of 1811 and 1812.

The books consider both the immediate dynamic impacts of the strong seismic events that will happen in the region, as well as the effects upon society as the infrastructure of civilization falls apart around the area.

“I am pleased with the response of some who live along the New Madrid Seismic Zone in their preparations for an obvious event in their future,” Penny says, “but I am still concerned with the lack of preparation in the overall region for what could be their fate in the not too distant future.”

Penny's books are available at Amazon.com and at www.prudentrver.com. The Kindle versions of the book are available exclusively at kdp.Amazon.com.

"Was a Time When" Scheduled for Release by End of Year

Lifting that last little bit of hype, and cleaning up that last little piece of mal-adjusted grammar, just takes so much effort. This is my third, and according to some my "best," novel over the time-space of thirteen years, and I easily forget how much effort must go into that final stretch. But, I am still on schedule to have the book into POD print on Amazon and downloadable for Kindle and other ebooks by the end of the year.

If I miss and slip into January, so be it, but I will do my best to meet my schedule.

I do have a website up and running, but with few resources and links. It is called www.WasATimeWhen.com and you can go see it now.

My daughter and I had an interesting bone of contention about the title. She said it should read "Was a Time When" and the article "a" should not be capitalized. I thought it was okay to make it "A" and have pushed back on her. I am compromising: the cover will be "a" and the website domain will be "A."

So I have been providing copies of the pre-final-edit version for reviews and comments. I have been very pleased with the response and the suggestions for improving the book. In fact, I plan to make some modifications to the final copy to cover those suggestions. I am also making use of the professional editors at createspace.com (formerly booksurge.com) to create a really clean and professional looking book.

It is all looking good, and with a little bit of luck, I will have released the book on Amazon before 1/1/2012.

Just a note, for those who are into history, December 16, 2011, is the 200th anniversary of the first of the five great earthquakes to strike the New Madrid fault back in 1811. My new book has a repeat taking place in the 2030s, but that is for literary convenience and part of my story line. It could happen at anytime.

sam

NYC - Predictions

Back to one of the three cats - the climate. We are watching Hurricane Irene barrell toward New England, and some are saying it could be bad. There seem to be an amazing number of people out there who are surprised that a hurricane could threaten New York and its surroundings. There are a few that are saying they have been trying to tell people for years that there is a risk from weather such as this, but not one really wanted to listen. And definitely too many are concerned about the profits next quarter to do any mitigation for the possibility.

Count me as one of the cassandras. My daughter is reviewing my latest book (Was A Time When) and she might have noticed on page 6 of Chapter 15 entitled June, 2024 A.D., Adolescence the following bite of Sam telling of what he remembers from when he was eleven years old:

An amazing number of people in 2026 still denied that our society had a problem with energy or weather or the economy. The world kept changing around them, and they just didn't know how to handle it. It took little effort on my part to make a fortune on their stupidity. I started small with my gaming profits, and before long built that stash into a pretty good bankroll, in the millions. I moved most of the money to off-shore accounts just to be safe.

At the end of August in 2026, Hurricane Gracie hit New York City. She came toward land as a Category 4 hurricane with winds of just under 150 miles per hour, but she hit Manhattan as a Category 5. I remember how Mom, Dad, and I sat glued to the TV throughout the night watching the satellite images as the hurricane’s eye wound its way up the coast of New Jersey across Long Beach, then veered into the Lower Bay just south of New York City. Early in the morning it punched north into the Upper Bay and continued up the west side of the Hudson River. I can still remember TV pictures of the Statue of Liberty inside the eye standing so peaceful in the sunrise.

The storm surge up the East River measured thirty-five feet. Water poured from the river onto the surrounding countryside. Long Island disappeared under water, and over half of New Jersey flooded. When the storm ended over they reported fifty-three thousand people dead or missing, and authorities estimated over two trillion dollars in damage. I heard that the storm left more than eight million homeless, and the damage reached far north past Albany.

The hurricane destroyed the island of Manhattan. They never found the money to pump out the subways.

Losing the financial center of the country – and maybe of the world – broke the back of the US financial structure. China and Saudi Arabia moved out of dollars, and the world stopped denominating oil in dollars. They required gold or grain or some other solid commodity to complete any transaction..

Financially, being one of the lucky ones, I moved all my funds out of New York to Lisbon and Sydney the year before. I put most of my cash into gold equivalents. With things so unstable I started another gold fund in Johannesburg, managed it over the Internet, and learned basic commodities trading first hand.

My International funds continued to do well by any measure, and I possessed a good supply of Chinese Yuan and gold stashed away in a Singapore bank built high above the bay. Rising sea-levels would not catch me.

Just wanted you to know I wrote this excerpt over five years ago, only a year after Katrina visited New Orleans. So the current story in the news is not all that new. It will be interesting to see how close I come in my prediction -- okay, I am off by 15 years and the intensity is down, but that is because of the limitation placed on the timing of my story. What will be the impact on New York City? We will know in a few days.

Oh yes, Irene is only a Cat 2 at this time and will probably fall to Cat 1 before land-fall. But things like this do happen, even though the full effects of climate change are not yet upon us.

sam

Nature Doing Its Part On The Mississippi River

The human race is responsible for its effects on the earth, but sometimes Nature takes a strong hand in changing our future.

The lower Mississippi River from the confluence with the Ohio is no long a natural river. It is a manmade water channel. There are levees and dams and control structures to make it go where we want it to go. One of the results is that the elevation of the bottom of the river has risen, almost to the point where the river is running down the top of a long hill from Caruthersville to the Gulf of Mexico.

With the massive floods now flowing down the river, no place is more critical than the place where the Mississippi wants to change its channel over to that of the Atchafalaya River a few miles above Baton Rouge. The Army Corps of Engineers have been fighting with the River at that point and built the Old River Control Structure in the 1960s. Then it built other dams to help control the flow to help the original structure. It was tested in 1973, but the upcoming test will be much more this weekend.

There is an excellent discussion of the Old River Control Structure on the Mississippi River at Jeff Master's blog in Weather Underground. I recommend you take the time to go read it

Back in 2004-5 when I was doing the final research on my novel Broken River, Alice and I drove up and down the river and over the Old River Control Structure itself (it carries the highway). We looked over the different structures the Corps of Engineers had built and read a lot of the material that was available at that time. The bit about how closely the structure came to failing in 1973 was well documented. It was because the Mississippi River had gouged out a huge hole over 100 feet deep right in front of the structure and was eroding away the sand and mud leading up to the floodgates, sort of like teeth losing the gum and bones that hold them in place.

We drove downriver following the Atchafalaya to see the alternate/preferred water-path to the Gulf of Mexico. The little towns below the structure on the Atchafalaya River were sleepy little communities, and there were orchards and fields all around. Lots of horses as I remember. The channel of the Atchafalaya itself was only about 100 yards wide. The levees were huge, especially when you saw them from behind. On the other side the Mississippi River is over a mile wide in low water season.

There is a scene in Broken River about a school bus taking kids on an outing and parked in the parking lot next to the sound end of the Old River Control Structure when the earthquake starts to shake the levees. The Mississippi is at flood stage, though I did not have it as high as it is now. But that shaking made muck and quicksand out of the levees and the underpinnings of the Structure. The pressure of the water simply moved the huge dam aside like a large door. The kids were alright, but marooned on an island surrounded by the River.

I have this niggling fear of what could happen if the earthquake of 200 years ago happened now as I described in my novels. My books would become instant best sellers, but the price to the country would be ruinous. But this could happen without an earthquake. We live in a dangerous time.

USA to See Japanese Debris in Next Three Years

One of the effects of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami is a vast field of debris floating across the Pacific Ocean. Within three years it will be hitting the western USA and Canadian coast. The debris field contains parts of houses, eighteen-wheelers, whole boats, and even body parts.

Members of the U.S. Navy's 7th fleet, who spotted the extraordinary floating rubbish, say they have never seen anything like it and are warning the debris now poses a threat to shipping traffic.

Go to the article "Cars, whole houses and even severed feet in shoes: The vast field of debris from Japan earthquake and tsunami that's floating towards U.S. West Coast" at the Daily Mail Online for the full story. Some of the pictures are truly awesome. Maps project where the debris will be in one year and in three years.

This story is a forecast of the near future. It is a situation that will affect the USA. How should we prepare?

Sam Penny, the Prudent RVer

Plans for 50 Tools for a Future

The folks at Open Source Ecology are working on a Global Village Construction Set. The goal of their efforts is to provide the open-source plans for 50 basic machines that can be built and maintained by small enclaves in a future world with few sources of outside help or resources. It is technologies for building post-scarcity, resilient communities.

Implicite in their plans is the assumption that some amount of today's technologies survive. It does require metals (you can use scrap for that resource) and energy from several suggested sources. As time goes on some I hope some of the more basic tools and technologies can be recovered and described.

I like the basic idea that the plans for the proposed tools should be open-source. That basically means anyone can use those plans without having to pay someone else some form of a royalty.

This group has some pretty big ideas for what they want to accomplish, and they need support, both in money and in physical work. It is a good effort that needs more publicity.

Sam, the Prudent RVer

The Biggest Cat-Fight Yet

In my last post I bemoaned the fact that the Nature Cat was rearing her head with the awesome earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Now we are watching the Nuclear Cat come into the fray. It has become the biggest cat-fight yet.

I am not sure our society will survive this cat-fight very well. In fact, I expect this month to be remembered as the worst month in the history of the earth, until an even worse month comes along.

Folks, things are very rapidly going from bad to worse, even faster than our governments and other agencies can respond. It is time to start preparing, but I don't yet understand how to prepare myself.

We have a nuclear catastrophe in Japan, and it may spread radiation at some level around the globe. While that contamination will be a problem, I believe the impact of the catastrophe will be felt in the economic arena even worse. As a result of the economic fallout, people will starve or die of thirst or be caught up in riots and revolutions.

The earthquake and tsunami were terrible, and some are estimating that nearly half a million may have perished in the natural disaster. But that was a localized occurance. Pity the poor who live there now, for they are without power and food and water. But they are a small portion of the population of Japan, a miniscule fraction of the population of the earth.

But our society has been built on more and more complexity and now runs on the principal that all parts must work, and work right. When major supply lines go down, other operations stop. The Chevy truck plant in Louisiana shut down because they cannot get a component from Japan because the electrical power supply there is not sufficient to keep industry going. That is just a start. More will come, and at some point society will realize they are screwed, and then they will panic. I can only guess how bad the results may be. They will not be nice.

I will try to focus in future posts on what to do now, how to survive, how to build an attitude that you can live with. For now, I want to curl up in my hole and sleep, maybe for 20 years or more.

sam

 

On Trusting Economic 'Experts' on the Future of Energy Supplies

I have a dilemma. My intellectual background is rooted in the American educational system. I learned early to listen to what the experts had to say and to believe. Since my own field of expertise became physics and engineering and computer science, I have developed a strong bias to believing the world is what the other engineers and physicists and computer scientists say it is. The educational level and experience of the 'experts' in those physical sciences matter.

My dilemma is that when I try to apply the rules of intellectual expertise to other disciplines, too many times I cannot trust those other experts. Take for instance, economics, where self-proclaimed experts in that field comment on the physical world of which I have long-time experience. Too much of the time their background and education levels in economics does not seem to be correlated with an understanding of the real world. So, after 70-plus years of trying to bridge the gap between soft-science experts and physical-science experts, I have concluded that the majority of economists in particular believe in a web of pseudo-science that allows them to ignore the fundamentals of the physical world. They are too often following the teachings of someone from long ago who did not have the oppportunity to consider the limits of the world we now live in.

My dilemma really hurts when I discuss issues of energy supplies with other physical scientist/engineers who apparently have complete faith in the conclusions of the economic experts.

Most of the current economic theory is based upon an assumption of limitless resources. Therefore, they can forecast limitless growth. But in the physical science of medicine, we know that when the bacteria in a petri dish consume all the food there is, they all die. The explosive growth of the colony of bacteria ensures its demise.

There are a few mavericks in the economic arena who are working on theories of how an economy survives when there are limits on growth, and their studies will soon become most important. Until then, I don't trust most of the economic experts who tell the world there is nothing to worry about on the future of energy supplies.

It goes by several labels, but the one I learned about a few years ago was Peak Oil. Now it is upon us.

 

Barrels and Drums, or Drums and Barrels

Definition: one (1) Barrel of Oil is forty-two (42) US liquid gallons of liquid measuring 158.987294928 liters. This is based on the 1870s wooden barrel used to transport liquids around the world. It is NOT the 55 gallon drum that became a standard during World War II. The 42-US-gallon oil barrel is a unit of measure. However, such wooden barrels are no longer used to transport crude oil -- the industry now uses tankers and pipelines.

The modern day 55-gallon steel drum (known as the 44-gallon drum in Britain and the 200-litre drum elsewhere) resulted from military shipping requirements in World War II, the first war in which trucks, cold rolled steel, stamp or pattern forging machinery and welding were widely available. The drums helped win the Battle of Guadalcanal in the first U.S. offensive in the South Pacific Theater. The U.S. Navy could not maintain control of the seas long enough to offload aviation fuel for U.S. aircraft ashore, so the drums were often transported to the island on fast ships such as destroyers and shoved over the sides (or, time permitting, lowered in cargo nets). Aviation fuel is lighter than seawater, so the drums floated, and Navy Seabees in small craft corralled the drums.

There has been confusion about the true size of a barrel of oil, and some have assumed that the 55 gallon drum had become the standard. NOT TRUE. The real present day measurement is the old 1870s definition: 42 US gallons.