Original Ideas

Not long ago I posted this on X (formerly Twitter):

I thought it was a pretty original idea. (Plus only two people saw it when I have over 19,000 followers, what's up with that?)

Then someone posted this in response:

(I assume they mean the television show Person of Interest.)

I thought it was a pretty original idea. But I guess not.

As a writer, you try to come up with new, original stories. But it's hard or nearly impossible. You can't read all books (or even all science fiction books). You can't watch every television show and movies. How do you know the brilliant idea you came up with wasn't written about 80 years ago in Astounding Science Fiction magazine.

One time I was coming up with an idea for a story. And it was coming together nicely in my head. Then I realized it was the plot of the movie Forbidden Planet, which was based of Shakespeare's The Tempest. And The Tempest was written 400 years ago.

I thought my Adept series of books (First book Hammer of Thor) was pretty unique. Then someone said they reminded them of The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher, first published in 2000. Hammer of Thor was published in 2011. 

The weapon my main character, Rick Bailey, carries in Treasure of the Black Hole (and subsequent novels) I think is pretty unique. It reacts to his thoughts and has a distinctive aiming system. So far, no one has told me that it reminds them of something else they've read or seen. (He first uses the weapon in his timeline in The Smugglers of Mars.)

I doubt any idea is 100% unique. But you can take a unique angle on it, maybe. 

Do you think there's any new ideas in the world? Let me know in the comments below.

Two Tutus to Tie Dye

A tutu

The power of the internet!

For about five decades I've had this phrase in my head: "Two tutus to tie dye."

I knew I'd heard it somewhere when I was a teenager (actually younger I found out) and found it hilarious. But I had no idea where it came from

So one day recently, I googled "Two tutus to tie dye." And I found it. 

Someone in this group said it's from 1972's "Rock and Roll Classroom" (So I was 11 or 12, not quite a teenager). I had a title. So I searched for "Rock and Roll Classroom" on YouTube. And I found it! Had to scroll through a lot of stuff but eventually I came to the whole thing. The part about tie dying starts at 3:22. "Two tutus to tie dye" is said at 4:13. The whole thing is 4:41 long.

I'm thinking it was played on the radio. How else would I have heard it in 1972?

I'm not sure how you would tie dye a tutu since they are made of tulle (usually) which is basically fine netting. But it's a joke about tie dyeing a tutu so that's okay. 

Have you had a phrase stuck in your head for years that you don't remember where it came from? Let me know in the comments below.

Temperature

I was watching The Fifth Element the other day. Don't ask me why. It's not a great film and the Chris Tucker part stops the narration dead. For more about that, see here.

There's a scene early in the movie when a military spaceship is confronting an object. And someone says their instruments are registering -5,000 degrees. I don't know what units of measure they are using, but in no existing temperature system can you get a reading of -5,000 degrees.

Anyone who knows much science knows that the lowest temperature something can be is 0 Kelvin (-273.15 C or -457.87 F) or absolute zero. While temperatures can go into the trillions of degrees (Quasar 3C 273, powered by feeding supermassive black holes, their intense gravitational pull and friction heat their surrounding accretion disks to an astounding 10 trillion degrees Celsius), cold can only go until there is no heat any more. 

Cold is simply the absence of heat (as dark is the absence of light). You can add heat all you want but you can only take away heat until there is no more. Reaching absolute zero (no heat) takes infinite energy. The coldest natural place is the Boomerang Nebula. It is roughly 5,000 light-years away in the Centaurus constellation. With a staggering temperature of 1 degree kelvin, it is colder then the 3 degree background radiation of the universe. Humans have made things colder.  A cloud of chilled rubidium atoms was cooled to 38 picokelvin (38 trillionths of a degree above absolute zero).

So, nothing can be -5,000 degrees. In defense of the movie, they didn't say the object was -5,000 degrees, they said their instruments were reading that temperature. So maybe it isn't that bad.