Return to the Clancyverse

 

I’ve written several times in these here electronic pages how I devoured Tom Clancy’s work way back in the 90s, how the books were completely different from anything I had read up to that point (classic science fiction, King, and Koontz, mostly), how technically intelligent they read, how they reflected competent, heroic, patriotic men and women. As well as real evil in the world. They were eye-opening to young me, and I burned through nine of them from 1994 to 2001, with the majority in the first three years.

Anyway, I had such a blast reading The Bear and the Dragon this time last year. I bought it for my stepfather for his birthday. It was such a change of pace from the heady, hefty readings I was immersed in at that time. I spotted two Clancy hardcovers, Patriot Games and Without Remorse, at a library book sale and picked them up for two bucks apiece.

Then, an idea came to me.

Why not read through the entire Jack Ryan series again? After all, it’s been, wow, nearly thirty years, and I enjoyed Bear and Dragon so much. After a little thought decided to jump headfirst back in to the Clancyverse, but in a unique way this time.

Now I would read the books in chronological order. Not the order the books were published, because Clancy messed around with the timeline of his main character. No, I’d read it in the chronologic order of the internal story. Start off with young Jack Ryan, then middle-aged Jack Ryan, then elder statesman Jack Ryan. It sounded quite interesting and appealing to me.

Here is the order of the books in the story’s internal chronology. The parentheses are the year of publication:

 

Without Remorse (1993)

Patriot Games (1987)

Red Rabbit (2002)

The Hunt for Red October (1984)

The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988)

Clear and Present Danger (1989)

The Sum of All Fears (1991)

Debt of Honor (1994)

Executive Orders (1996)

Rainbow Six (1998)

The Bear and the Dragon (2000)

 

In Without Remorse, Jack is a teen and it’s his father, Emmett Ryan, a detective in Baltimore, who’s more of a character, though even he is a secondary character. The novel is basically the origin story of CIA agent John Clark, played by Willem Dafoe in the Harrison Ford movies. It takes place in the late-60s / early 70s. Then the timeline skips in Patriot Games to 1983 / 1984. The final books, Executive Orders and Rainbox Six, take place in the late 90s and catch-up to the publication dates.

So excluding Bear and Dragon, that gives me ten books to read. Each is a doorstop to be honest; anywhere from 500 to 800 pages. That gives me about 7,000 pages to read, but that’s okay, because they are still page-turners for me. I imagine finishing them sometime in the late summer, and that’s acceptable because I am enjoying them immensely so far. I may post later how different they now appear to me.

I’m currently on the third book, Red Rabbit, the one and only book I have not read during the original go-round. The first two, Without Remorse and Patriot Games, each took 12 days to read this past month. This one’s taking a little longer because I am reading nonfiction alongside it. But I’m not looking at it as a race.

Red Rabbit has Jack beginning his career in the CIA. He is a rising star but hasn’t yet proven himself, which happens in The Hunt for Red October. I’m a little over halfway through, and the powers-that-be are aligning Jack to play an important role at a decisive plot point. This book’s more spycraft and espionage than Bear, Remorse, and Patriot Games were, more like a Robert Ludlum novel, which is interesting in and of itself. Kinda like an introductory course to a John Le Carre novel (whose works are on my bucket list). The first half has been slow and steadily building, with real-life figures such as Yuri Andropov as characters. I sense an action-packed climax coming though.

Anyway, that’s where I stand on my fiction reading. Professor Tolkien is still lurking about in the distance, in the mud in the mire with his boots on, smoking a pipe looking over the green be-sheeped countryside, patiently waiting for Hopper to get his act together. Hopper is thick in a nostalgia binge right now, but hopes to visit Middle-earth in the fall and winter.

Happy readings!

 

Mathematical Jerk Redux

 

I was scrolling through Twitter over the weekend and saw this pic: 

 with the phrase, “DON’T BE A …” right in front of it.

 

Yes! It took me a while to decrypt this (then I had to resort to google) but this is the mathematical expression of a Jerk.

 

No, not that kind of a jerk, not the kind the witty Twitter user was referencing. This kind of a jerk is what you’d experience if you were speeding up the highway and suddenly a force, say a huge gust of wind, pushes your vehicle quickly and unexpectedly to one side.

 

Now, “speed” here is a relative term. In physics, it’s called “velocity” because direction is generally though not necessarily indicated. Velocity is distance per time. It can be expressed in an equation relating these two variable. Throw some Calculus 101 in the mix, and you can obtain what’s called the second derivate of this equation. Since velocity is the change in distance over time, the second derivative represents the change in velocity over time. It’s called acceleration. Now, the third derivative (if you apply the derivative-obtaining technique to the second derivative) represents the change in acceleration over time. This is called “jerk.”

 

Like the beard-second, like the jiffy, math and physics has some interesting and humorous * terms. I had known about jerk from my calculus classes back in the early 90s, but had forgotten. However, I have never heard the technical terms “snap,” “crackle”, and “pop” in mathematics. Now I have and now you, if you have followed me up to this point, have also.

 

For the layman,

Acceleration is the change in velocity over time

Jerk is the change in acceleration over time

Snap is the change in jerk over time

Crackle is the change in snap over time

and

Pop is the change in crackle over time

 

And this is the Euler’s-honest truth!

 

Edit: After writing and publishing this, I see that I had done a similar blog post on it, here, on January 14, 2011, over thirteen years ago! It’s a great exhibit about the fickleness of memory. If you have a mathematical bent, I’d recommend reading that short post, ’cuz I particularly like the analogy used way back then.

Dallas Eclipse 2024

 

Just experienced the solar eclipse from my backyard. It was amazing!

Both the Mrs. and I were working from home today. In the early morning the skies were a bit overcast, and I was more than a bit worried. But when the eclipse officially began at 12:18 the sky had cleared except for some wispy white cotton balls. I donned my eclipse glasses and reclined in the patio chair, going in and out of the house every ten or fifteen minutes as I was working in my upstairs office.

A crowd had gathered in the park across the street, a very loud and festive atmosphere. I went back outside just as my wife was wrapping up a Zoom call. The ambient light dimmed to some level approximating fifteen minutes before sunset and the temperature dropped at least ten degrees. The winds picked up and the birds began their anxious chirpings. Charlie sat out with us but remained blissfully unaware of the eclipse, focused on protecting his turf from the roaming trash and recycling trucks that prowl around every Monday.

At 12:40 CST totality began, and we removed our special glasses and experienced the awesomeness of a total eclipse that no second-hand images can truly convey. Applause from the park echoed to my backyard. I took it all in: the sky a rich deep blue, the moon a cool charcoal, and the silvery corona of the sun brilliant and waving behind it. I had the distinct impression of something watching me – is this what our primitive ancestors felt during totality? An angry god casting judgment down upon them? Or was it a doorway of sorts – into a different universe, a parallel dimension? Intriguing no matter how you think of it.

This was the third eclipse I saw, but by far the most successful. The first I experienced in 1992 in New Jersey, but had no glasses; I only felt the drop in temperature and the kicked-up wind and the birds cries. In 2017, down on the beach in Hilton Head, SC, clouds obscured the eclipse past the point of viewing. This is the first time I saw the corona during totality live, and it was incredibly amazing, if ever so brief.

Some pics – and yes, I know the iPhone is not designed for such photography, but I did the best with what I had on hand.

 

Eclipse Nerd ready for a once (twice) in a lifetime event

View from my office window of crowd of 50-75 in the park across the street

View from my backyard ... 8 minutes before totality

Totality - best I could do with my iPhone