dalecoz

In the Midwest of the United States, the summer of 2009 was downright cool and this past winter has been reasonably cold and snowy. I don't intend to ignite one of those stupid "alarmist/warmist" global warming debates. I do want to give a little perspective on just how variable weather can be.

Weather spends most of its time in a relatively normal range. If it's June or July or August in my part of the Midwest, it's warm and usually dry. Temperatures are usually in the high eighties, with nineties common and a few days over a hundred not unusual. Late December through early February are cold, generally with lows between zero and ten degrees, and usually at least one period well below zero.

The longer the time-range you look at, the more extreme variations you'll see. In my lifespan there have been some variations in those ranges: Extremely cold winters in the late 70s and again in 1982 through 1985, hot summers in the late 1990s. If you go back a few generations you'll see more extreme variations. My wife has seen pictures from a year in the 1920s or 1930s where her grandmother claimed that there was a year without a summer locally--with snow and frost in July and August. How widespread that was, I don't know. Go back more generations and you find years like 1816, New England's "Year Without a Summer", apparently caused by sulfur dioxide spewed from a giant volcano in Indonesia. It frosted and/or snowed in New England every summer month of that year. The cooler temperatures were apparently worldwide. Worldwide, the decade around 1816 was apparently the coldest in the last 500 years. Go back to the 1600s and you see things like Russia's time of trouble where roughly a third of the population died of starvation due to crop failures, apparently caused by a large volcano explosion in Peru.

Temperatures aren't the only thing that vary. As climatologists look at the climate record they've begun to realize that rainfall can be enormously variable, with multiple decades-long droughts in the US Southeast, and even longer ones in the west if you go back to the 1500s and 1600s, or especially if you go back further.

Why the variation? Weather is chaotic system. You're going to have extremes--sometimes day-long, sometimes a season long, more rarely decades long. Adding to the chaos is the fact that very large volcanoes in the tropics can spew sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, where it can sit blocking part of the incoming sunlight for two or three years, dropping worldwide temperatures.

As near as I can figure, volcanoes large enough and close enough to the equator to have potentially had a worldwide impact on temperature have happened on average roughly every 19 years in the last 200 years. That average is kind of deceptive though. We've gone twice that long between big volcanoes at times, and far less time at other points. It's difficult to gauge exactly how much a volcano impacted temperatures because the key is not the size of the explosions but the amount of sulfur dioxide emitted, and that can vary considerably among volcanoes of similar size.

Bottom line: Even without us screwing with it wild weather is going to happen and it would be wise to be prepared for it. Populations with little or no food reserves are asking for problems. Most years they'll be okay, but the reality is that in spite of all of our technology we're still just one big volcano away from worldwide food shortages--one decade of drought away from having the farmers in whole sections of the country financially ruined.

That's not fun to think about, and it's not something to dwell on overly much, but it is something to keep in the back of your mind, and it is something that governments should take precautions against.

Well, after waffling for nearly a month on whether or not to do it, I finally entered ABNA (Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards) yet again, this time with my 2008 NanoWriMo novel "All Timelines Lead to Rome". It's an alternate history, as you might expect from the title.

This is my third time entering ABNA, and I'm not holding my breath on getting past the first couple of rounds. The problem is the sheer number of entries in this kind of contest. The first cut takes the number of entries from up to 5000 down to 1000 based on a 300 word pitch. Eight out of every ten entries get knocked out before any of the judges even see word one of the manuscript. Then step two takes it down to 250 entries based on the first 5000 words of the novel. At that point you're down to one in twenty of the original entries surviving, and you may actually get more than a passing glance from the potential publisher.

By publishing industry standards, that kind of winnowing down is actually pretty good odds, which is why I keep entering. Do the best 250 entries necessarily make it to the top 250? Of course not. Tastes in writing are notoriously subjective, and even if they weren't the process of winnowing down from 5000 to 250 introduces enough room for glitches that it's almost a certainty that there will be 250 other entries that could slide into most of those 250 slots with no noticeable decline in quality. At the same time, most of the top 250--maybe ninety percent of them--will objectively be among the top ten to twenty percent of the original entries. So I keep playing. If my entry is in the top twenty percent of the original entries, I figure I have maybe a one in four or five chance of making it. That was enough to motivate me to get going on the editing I've been meaning to get to for a month, which is a good thing.

A couple of days ago I drove past a huge wind farm that recently sprang up around five miles south of where I live. As I went past a line of wind turbines stretching to the horizon, I realized that alternate energy is happening now, in a big way.

I'm a huge fan of alternate energy, as anyone who reads this blog regularly probably knows. At the same time, I'm becoming increasingly concerned that if we take the wrong paths as we push things like windmills, solar cells and hybrid cars, we'll end up with energy choices that are simply not scalable to the sizes they need to be scaled to, and we'll also end up remaining dependent on the whims of other countries for our energy future.

A big hunk of the problem is that a very high percentage of alternate energy technology is dependent on "rare earth" minerals for some crucial part of its working. As this article in the Daily Mail points out, that creates two problems: First, that means we're uncomfortably dependent on China to make much of the green energy revolution possible. Second, the methods of getting those crucial minerals are anything but green.

China controls over 90 percent of rare earth production. It isn't that the minerals aren't available elsewhere. It's more a matter of price. The Chinese have been very aggressive on pricing and most non-Chinese sources of rare earths have either closed or been bought out by Chinese companies. Now China is talking about keeping rare earth minerals for their own manufacturing, and squeezing exports. That's a serious problem for a lot of types of green energy.

As the Daily Mail points out: "The rare-earths blasted out of rocks here feed more than 77 per cent of global demand for elements such as terbium, which power low-energy lightbulbs; neodymium, which powers wind turbines; and lanthanum, which powers the batteries of hybrid cars such as the Toyota Prius.

They are also used in mobile phones, computers, iPods, LCD screens, washing machines, digital cameras and X-ray machines, as well as missile guidance systems and even space rockets. Industries reliant on the rare-earths are estimated to be worth an astonishing £3trillion, or five per cent of global GDP."

Not a good situation. As we look at alternative energy, we need to look at the production cycles of the alternatives, spot areas that would make us dependent on scarce resources or a limited number of suppliers and try to steer development away from those kinds of dependencies. It would have been easier to do that ten or twenty years ago than it will be now. It'll be easier now than it would be ten or twenty years down the road if we build infrastructure and manufacturing around alternatives that may not turn out to be as sustainable, as easy to scale up, or as green as we would like to see them be.

As I look back at the zeros (no, I'm not going to get into the debate on whether the decade ends at the end of 2009 or 2010) I find that my view of life is strongly influenced by viewing it as a kind of personal alternate history.

When a person is born, they have an almost infinite range of potential futures, both good and bad. At day one I could still have been a professional boxer, a prominent physicist, or a rocket scientist. When I arrived in the world I had the potential to have been an accountant, a soldier, a policeman, a fireman, a singer, or a lawyer. Notice the 'almost' before the 'infinite'. I probably didn't have the potential to be an astronaut or a professional football or basketball player, or an Olympic-class gymnast, but there was a very large range of things I could have been.

I could also have died in a car accident on the way home from the hospital, or grown up to become a lawyer or a factory worker. Every minute, every hour, every day, and every year, a part of that nearly infinite range of possible futures collapses into a single reality. At some point, I could no longer be a professional boxer or a physicist. I also could not die without accomplishing anything, because I had already accomplished a range of things.

It seems to me that life boils down to a process of narrowing the range of potential you's and potential me's. At birth you have all of the range of potential, both for good and for bad that you'll ever have. If you do something in life, you had the potential to do that when you were born.

As life goes on, and your range of potentials narrow, a person either turns potential into accomplishments, good memories, and/or support for the next generation or fails to do so. Think of the process as being like going through a labyrinth, with no chance of retracing your exact route. Every second you make one or more choices. Some things become reality. Some thing become might-have-beens. That's inevitable. You can't avoid it. Sit in your room and procrastinate on making a decision and range of potential still goes away.

Most of the time those choices don't matter much. You turn right instead of going straight and get home half a second later. A few of them matter a great deal. You turn right instead of going straight, and either do or don't get into a head-on collision with a drunk driver. The key decisions and the unimportant ones are often indistinguishable in advance.

Every second, minute, hour, year, decade that I live, a little of my range of potentials goes away, and conversely more things become reality--accomplishments or lack thereof. At this point in my life, I'm extremely unlikely to be any of the things I listed at the beginning of this post. The potential to do those things gradually faded away. Other things became more difficult. I could probably still go back to law school if I felt like it, but it would be financially difficult and rather pointless. At the same time I raised a stepdaughter and a daughter to adulthood, wrote novels and short stories, defended an elderly relative against alleged attempts to defraud her, and enjoyed a lot of life.

I'm not unhappy with what I've become and what I've accomplished, but I'm very aware of the narrowing of the range of options as life goes on. I had the potential to become any of those things I mentioned, but not all of them. I accomplished some of the things I had the potential to accomplish and had to forgo others in order to do the things I did accomplish.

Another year has wound down, and arguably another decade. Are you happy that you've balanced dwindling range of potential with accomplishments, good memories, and raising accomplished kids? How else have you balanced foregone potential? How do you plan to use your potential next year?

Here's something strange: Apparently there was once essentially a poisonous predator bird:

"ScienceDaily (Dec. 22, 2009) — A group of University of Kansas researchers working with Chinese colleagues have discovered a venomous, birdlike raptor that thrived some 128 million years ago in China. This is the first report of venom in the lineage that leads to modern birds.

"This thing is a venomous bird for all intents and purposes," said Larry Martin, KU professor and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Institute. "It was a real shock to us and we made a special trip to China to work on this."

I'm surprised that this sort of thing didn't become common. I'm glad it didn't, obviously. It would seem like a very effective way to be a predator. Just swoop down, bite, and wait for the animal to become helpless.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091221212630.htm

And here is something that's going to be extremely unpopular: A study recently came out saying that in terms of carbon footprint (how much CO2 gets emitted) having a "medium-sized" dog is roughly twice the equivalent of driving an SUV ten thousand miles per year.

Quoting now: ""Owning a dog really is quite an extravagance, mainly because of the carbon footprint of meat," Barrett said.

Other animals aren't much better for the environment, the Vales say.

Cats have an eco-footprint of about 0.15 hectares, slightly less than driving a Volkswagen Golf for a year, while two hamsters equates to a plasma television and even the humble goldfish burns energy equivalent to two mobile telephones."

http://www.physorg.com/news180595085.html

First, this is something I never thought would get off the ground (pun sort of intended): A company is trying to get a solar power satellite into orbit and producing power by 2016. If they make it, one of the major California utilities is ready to buy the power. This is a dinky little power plant--200MW. That's about one fifth the size of an average nuke or coal plant, but if it works it'll be kind of cool. Second, as many of you know, North America lost most of its really big animals: Mammoths, horses, ground sloths, giant bears, etc. at the end of the last ice age. Now it looks as though a tiny remnant of both horses and mammoths survived several thousand years beyond the time scientists thought they had become extinct. Scientists figured that out by looking in the permafrost for the signs of the appropriate DNA, a technique that will probably turn up in a lot of other applications.

A few months back I wrote about the "Year Without A Summer". As you may recall from the earlier post, in 1816 New England had frost and often snow every month of the summer. That was probably due to the impact of the large Tambora volcano eruption in Indonesia, much larger than Krakatoa. Scientists have long suspected that there was another volcano, about half the size of the 1815 one but still huge, a few years earlier. Now that seems to be nailed down, at least to the year:1809. The volcano was apparently somewhere in the tropics.

While 1816 was the worst of the years, the entire decade from 1810 to 1819 was cold, colder than any other decade since we started keeping records. (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091205105844.htm)

Volcanoes cool climate both locally, and in the case of the big ones, globally, by ejecting sulphur dioxide particles into the atmosphere. They block enough sunlight to change the earth's energy balance for a few years. To add insult to injury they also deplete the ozone layer.

As super volcanoes go, Tambora was a relatively small one. A really big one like the Toba super volcano 74,000 years ago apparently triggered a decade of 'years without a summer' and may have been behind a human genetic bottleneck that happened about that time. If something like that happened again, well let's just say it would make Mad Max look optimistic. Fortunately the really big ones are rare, though volcanoes large enough to have an impact on civilization have happened with a fair amount of frequency.

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is over for 2009. I wrote almost all of the way until the end--stopping at a little before 11:30 pm yesterday. During the month of November I wrote 99,733 words (roughly 350 pages). I didn't finish the novel. I'm guessing I have another 25,000 words or so to wrap it up.

Writing that much in a month is not something I would recommend for someone with other work obligations, especially ones that involve sitting. It's been a tad stressful and probably a tad unhealthy. That much sitting can't be good for you. On the other hand, I got the bulk of a novel written in 30 days, which quite an accomplishment. How good is the stuff? I don't know, and won't for at least a couple of months because stuff has to cool before I can really judge it. Parts of it seemed quite good while I was writing them. Others? Well lets just say they got the plot from point a to point b.

I wrote an average of 3324 words per day, with the 'worst' daily word count coming in at 1668 and the best daily word count 6245 words. I had two days with over 6000 words and one more with over 5000 words. Most days I was in the 2500 to 4000 word range, with 14 days in the 3000 range, and only 4 days lower than 2500 words.

This seems to have answered one question for me. I've always wondered if I wrote better as a 'plotter' or a 'pantser' (as in writing by the seat of the pants). This varies from person to person, but for me, doing a lot of plotting ahead of time seemed to help. I spent a month and a half writing up world-building notes, character sketches, and plot notes. By the time I started writing the story itself I had probably already written 25,000 words about the novel. I didn't always follow the script. Characters evolved. The plot changed. The world even changed a few times. Having the notes helped a lot though. I did most of the plot notes in YWriter 5, a piece of novel writing software. I did a lot of the writing using Write-Or-Die, which really helped my concentration.

This is science fiction--sort of alternate history but with a twist. I'm going to be changing a few character names, because they are confusingly close. With that in mind, here's an excerpt:



“I’m glad I’m doing something right. Where’s Heather?”
Amelia pointed and said softly, “She’s having a little tiff with the Haigh chick. Hair will eventually get pulled, maybe even later today, but right now they’re just trying to smile and get the digs in.”
Greg spotted the two. “Amanda Haigh? Looks to me like they’re getting to be good buddies.”
“Yeah, doesn’t it?”
Heather said something and then walked away. Amanda Haigh shot her a look of pure hatred. Greg whistled. “Wow. You sure called that one. If looks could kill my darling wife would have just burst into flames.”
The crowd thinned out, and the pallbearers took the casket to a waiting pickup truck. Reuben and Terry Haigh were among the pallbearers, as was Ermaline.
It was well after noon before the graveside service and the following reception got over. At the end of the reception, Pastor Julius walked over and told them that he was taking his tour bus out to the Lyle farm with the ‘Dunnes’ and a few others. “I can’t look too close to you three. If you mess this up I need to be able to walk away from you and keep my place in the community.”
“Leaving us dangling in the wind,” Greg said.
“Dangling in the wind. That’s a good way to put it. Mind if I steal that for one of my sermons?”
“It’s a common expression where we come from.”
“That’s one thing I did enjoy about being over in your snapshot. I love words and I got to pick up nearly sixty years worth of new ways to play with them while I was over there.”
“Did you do the Peter, Paul, and Mary thing on purpose?”
“Yep. I heard one of their songs while I was over there.”
Amelia shook her head. “Old people cultural references. Boring.”
“It’s all new to us over here,” the pastor said. “The Beatles, Peter Paul and Mary, Bewitched, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and God preserve us, rap, disco, reality TV, and the Brady Bunch.”
Greg watched the Haigh family go by in a pickup truck that was nearly dragging a muffler. “You picked up a lot in a few days.”
“I wouldn’t be a pastor in this community if I couldn’t pick up culture fast. Of course we got twenty years worth of Buddy Holly instead of just a few, and overall we’ve had nearly sixty years of music and movies and television you’ve never seen too. There is going to be a lot of money made in moving that stuff back and forth between the snapshots.”
Ermaline drove by in jeep with Lyle in the passenger seat. She had changed into blue jeans and a grey and black flannel shirt. Tears were flowing down her cheeks and her long red hair flowed out behind her in the wind. Lyle glanced at Greg as the jeep went by, but didn’t smile or acknowledge him in any way.
"She's not really a Neanderthal, is she?" Amelia asked.
"Sure, why wouldn't she be?"
“But she was driving.”
“Yeah, and she comes to church once in a while and eats with a knife and fork, and she wipes her chin with a napkin after she’s done. I imagine she even brushes her teeth, though I’ve never seen her do it.”

The NanoWrite novel is still going well. I actually hit the official goal for the month (50,000 words) on November 15th. I can't keep up that pace, for a full month, but I'm still going fairly strong. I would dearly love to actually have the rough draft of this novel done by the end of the month. I'm guessing it'll come in at around 90,000 words, so that's a tad ambitious to say the least. If I hit a wall tomorrow I'll still be happy because I hit my goal.

Quality: This will need work when I'm done, but what novel rough draft doesn't? How much work? How bad is it? Hard to know when the ideas are flowing. I'll have a better idea when I go back and revise in a couple of months.

NanoWriMo is still consuming the bulk of my discretionary time. I'm up to 31,056 words with some hours left to go on day nine of the thirty days.  That's 62% of the month's challenge and roughly a third of an average novel.

The quality of writing is a bit uneven, as would be expected with writing that fast.  My main problem is that the story background is huge and a lot of it will be brand new to readers.  It's also essential to the plot. That makes it difficult to both move the story along and work in the information necessary to make it work.

The good news is that this story is set in a huge, flexible, fun playground that could easily hold more stories than I could do justice to if I wrote three novels a year for the next 30 years.  It's sort of like an alternate history but with some twists that add potential for exploring things that alternate history hasn't yet, and might not be capable of exploring, at least not in the same way. 

It's a little before midnight, on day five of my mad quest to write a novel in a month.  So far, so good.  I've written 19,006 words in the five days.  If I could keep up that pace I would be done with the 50,000 words of the challenge in less than two weeks.  Unfortunately, I can't keep up that pace. It's physically and mentally exhausting.   As of tomorrow I'm going to drop back to a sustainable pace and deal with the real world a little.

Just 4 more days after today to prep for Nano.  I've been concentrating on sketching out scenes--about a paragraph per scene.  I'm on scene 53 out of an estimated 75 to 85, and probably won't get them all sketched out before Sunday.  This Nano I'm deliberately experimenting with being a plotter as opposed to my usual sort-of pantser.  We'll have to see how that works out. I've written over 20,000 words of background notes so far, between world-building, general plotting, character sketches, and scene notes.  I'll probably have close to 25,000 by the time I start writing.  The question is: will all of that make the words flow when I start writing or will I already be burned out.  I'll let you know.

I love the world I've set up for this novel.  There are so many things to explore in it.  I have to keep reining myself in so I'll have a focused novel.  So far this has been an enormous amount of fun.

I just finished deleting over 250 messages from one of my less used e-mail accounts, some of them nearly a month old and unread.  The basic problem with e-mail is that (a) Even with good spam filters it's easy to end up with more e-mail than a person can deal with even if they devote several hours a day to it, killing their productivity, but (b) People send important info by e-mail and expect you to act on the information they send.

E-mail addresses proliferate relentlessly if you don't keep them in check.  I have:

Personal e-mail
Writing/Website response e-mail
Work e-mail
Gather,  Facebook, LJ and Goodreads  (social networking sites of various kinds) e-mails.

I'll admit that I don't keep up with all of those e-mails.  I can't spend the kind of time it would take and keep up any kind of writing.  So, if you e-mail me and I don't get back to you immediately, don't assume I don't like you or that I'm ignoring you.  Chances are I'm concentrating on writing or the day job and I'll get back to you eventually.

Point of Divergence members may remember a science fiction short story I wrote several years ago that starts out with a pastor mysteriously disappearing from a fast moving car. One of the key parts of the story was a camera system that captured peoples' lives. That part appears to be coming true. A camera in a pendant is going to be available that takes pictures every thirty seconds or whenever it senses that the person has met someone new or entered a new environment. The initial market is Alzheimer's victims--giving them essentially an artificial memory to supplement their failing real ones.

There is speculation that people will also use them for 'life-blogging' once the price comes down from it's current $800 or so. The system is already on sale to researchers, with a consumer version coming in 2010,  Obviously this has serious privacy implications, as well as implications to fiction writers--all kinds of plot twists could come out of this.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17992-new-camera-promises-to-capture-your-whole-life.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

I think I may be straying from the spontaneous "Sit Down and Write a Novel in 30 Days" idea of NanoWriMo this year.  I haven't started writing yet, (except for a little 499 word snippet I won't count toward my November word count) but I've been plotting, world-building and developing characters off and on for over a month.  

So far I've written 6573 words in my World-building exercises, and another 3508 words in plot brainstorming.  Add in another thousand words or so in character sketches so far and I've already written the equivalent of considerably over a fifth of my 50,000 words. 

This is the most ambitious plotting I've ever done for a novel.  I don't know how it will affect the actual writing.  The impact could be to make the writing a lot smoother.  It could make it harder not to toss in extraneous backstory.  I might even burn out before I get to November or in the middle of the month.  This is uncharted territory for me.  I'll let you know how it works out over the next six weeks.

Sometimes everything seems to come apart at once.  The past couple of weeks, we had the crud (probably a flu) sweep through our household.  My wife and daughter were both down in bed with it.  I had some mild symptoms but seem to have fought it off so far.

As the family recovered from the flu, the family vehicles started getting sick.  My daughter's beater went in for repairs (over $600 and that just took care of the urgent stuff).  Before it got fixed, my wife's van went belly up.  Water pump went out, but with no detectable immediate symptoms. By the time we got to the garage it had overheated badly enough that there was enough damage it would have been pointless to repair it.  It was past time for it to go (over 150,000 miles on it), but suddenly we were down to one car to get everyone to and from work and school.  That's been a tad time-consuming.

On the good side, I'm making good progress on getting ready for NanoWrimo.  David Johnson and Robert Alley have been enormously helpful on the world-building, as has kathy from my NanoWrimo writing group.  As soon as life settles down a bit I have to pull everything together on the world-building and shift my primary emphasis to getting the characters and plot solid. 

The NanoWrite project is by far the most ambitious thing I've ever seriously approached.  Two out of the three people I've discussed it with have said that I could write for the rest of my life exclusively on this idea and not come close to doing it justice.  We'll see. I'm going to try to do it justice.

I did NanoWriMo (National Novel Writers' Month) for the first time last year.  It worked out very well for me. I wrote 73,000 words, of which probably two-thirds turned out to be usable, and I actually enjoyed the process.

For those of you not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it's just a challenge.  You publicly commit to writing at least 50,000 words during the month of November. That's a short novel--actually probably unsellable in today's market, but it is a novel.  That sounds like a huge accomplishment, and in a way it is.  Unless you write fast it can eat up your month.  I've gradually geared up to writing fast, and when I'm in the groove I can often write the average number of  daily words to get to 50,000 (roughly 1667) in a little over an hour and a half.  That makes it doable, though it's a stretch and if my muse suddenly goes on strike partway through the month (see last post) I may have trouble getting it done.

So how am I gearing up for Nano?  Well, while you can't actually write on the novel before November 1st, the rules allow preparation.  You can think through characters, do world-building, plot, and figure out what key locations in the story look like, among other things.  While I can write seat=of-pants style, the results are much better if I do a LOT of groundwork first.  In this case I'm going to make preps my main writing priority for October and hopefully have at least a brief (paragraph or two)  sketch of each scene, each major character, and each major location.  If I can go into more depth on the characters and the plot I will. 

As you could probably guess, the novel will be AH, with a twist I haven't seen done anywhere else, hopefully brand new.  I'm already excited.  I hope I can sustain the excitement and the focus for the next 2 months.  Wish me luck.

The last couple of months have been some of my best writing times so far in my life.  I finished the rough draft of a novel in mid-to-late August, took a little break, and then wrote 20,000 words in two weeks toward finishing a novel that had been sitting at 58,000 words (roughly two-thirds done) and haunting me for the last 5 years.  Then, this past Thursday, my muse decided to take a vacation.  Oh well.  It's been a good run and it may be good for me to take a few days off and catch up with real life.

Here's the setup.  On November 1, 1941,  Tojo shuffles off this mortal coil and you’re now in his hot seat.  The plans for an attack on the western Allies are well in train.  You have the advantage of hindsight so you know that the path you’re on will destroy Japanese military power.

Let’s assume that victory in your eyes is to maximize Japanese military power and that you have considerable powers to tweak Japanese decision-making, though no more than Tojo did.  You are under the same economic and political constraints that he was.  Your Japan will run out of oil in less than a year unless the oil embargo ends.  It will run out of money to buy that oil sometime in 1942 if the embargo is lifted.  You are under political constraints that prevent too much in the way of concessions to China.

Time is not on your side.  Japan is temporarily militarily powerful because the US is occupied in the Atlantic, because Japan cheated on the naval limitation treaties, and because the US doesn’t have its army trained or equipped yet.  The Soviets are occupied fighting the Germans, which frees up a large number of Japanese divisions that would otherwise have been tied up in Manchuria.  None of that will last, with the possible exception of the Soviets being tied up and you know it. 

If Japan goes through with its attack on the western Allies, it frees up the tough, well-equipped Soviet divisions that led the Soviet counter-offensive that historically pushed the Germans back from Moscow in December 1941.  A Soviet victory over the Germans eventually would put Japan in an untenable position militarily.

You can’t postpone the Japanese offensive by an arbitrary number of days or weeks without consequences.  For example, postponing the attack on Pearl Harbor by a month would mean crossing the north Pacific in late December/early January, which would be problematic.  Pushing the offensive against Malaysia back a month or two would risk pushing the offensive into the monsoon season, which would make it much more difficult.

The US buildup in the Philippines is also a constraint.  When the historic Japanese attack happened, the US was frantically building up fighter airpower in the Philippines, as well as bringing in B17s.  They were also bringing in additional ground forces, including a substantial contingent in the “Pensacola convoy” which was actually on its way to the Philippines when war broke out.  They were also training and equipping a much-expanded Filipino army.  Historically, the Filipino forces were easy meat for the Japanese.   Given  more training and better weapons that might not be true.  Wait too long and the Philippines would become a tougher nut to crack.

The attack can’t be pushed forward much either without consequences.  The Pearl Harbor attack required special military ordinance like special torpedoes and special armor-piercing bombs that were barely ready in time for the historic attack. Actually, in the case of the special armor-piercing bombs (actually modified naval artillery shells), Japanese industry wasn't able to produce as many as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor could really have used and the Japanese actually ran out of those bombs by the end of their attacks.

Japan is dependent on imported raw materials.  As soon as you declare war you are short of merchant ships to supply the Home Islands, even if you can capture sources of raw material because the Japanese merchant marine is too small to supply the islands, and a considerable percentage (25% from old and possibly faulty memory) of the tonnage coming into the home islands is on foreign flagged ships.  Shipping will become even more of a bottleneck in the war, because every new foothold your army takes is one more drain on scarce cargo shipping.  You don’t have enough tankers to ship enough oil to the home islands, even if you can take enough oil wells.

Speaking of oil, if you’ve done your homework you know that Japanese estimates of their oil requirements during the war are way too low.  You’ll run out of oil if you don’t go to war.  You’ll run out of oil if you do.

A couple of the most common Japanese if-only's probably wouldn't work.  Careful studies of the time-line on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack seem to indicate that a Japanese third-strike on December 7 wouldn't have worked.  There weren't enough hours before it got dark.  Night-time carrier landings in early World War II were doable but very dangerous, especially with damaged  planes.  Also, enough Japanese planes had sustained minor damage that made them unflyable for later that day that a third wave would have been far weaker than the first two.

A Japanese invasion of Hawaii immediately after Pearl Harbor is also a non-starter, for a long list of reason, including problems fueling the ships for a landing force, coordinating that force with the aircraft carriers, the fact that the Japanese navy didn't have enough fuel to stick around and support that attack beyond maybe December 8, and the fact that no Japanese commander could be sure that the Pearl Harbor of their world would be as helpless after the attack as ours was.  As soon as you change Japanese plans in a substantive way it starts having an impact on what exactly would happen at Pearl Harbor.  A couple of divisions of Japanese soldiers sitting  in slow transports off a Pearl Harbor where the US battleships were mostly at sea or on the alert when the Japanese attack came would be a recipe for a Japanese disaster.

Low-Hanging Fruit: You can know a few useful things: (1) Not to fritter away the Japanese advantage in carrier numbers in the lead-up to Midway. (2)That you need to expand the Japanese pilot training program to replace their wartime losses.  That’ll take a maybe two years to pay off, but it will make a huge difference when it does pay off. (3) Protecting and optimizing the use of the merchant marine is key to keeping Japan in the war. (4) Expanding the Japanese defensive perimeter deeper into the Pacific is counterproductive because you’ve got to supply these guys and once the US builds up a big enough fleet of carriers, land-based air power on the islands can be suppressed and the Japanese forces on most islands can be bypassed to wither away for lack of food and ammunition.

  
So, what do you do?  Can you start in November 1941 and do better than the Japanese did historically?  If you want to push your takeover back a month or two, feel free, but the more you push it back, the more constraints you run into.  Among the constraints, you don’t want to start hostilities until as many Japanese merchant ships as possible are back in Japanese-friendly waters.  That will take a while because the US was procrastinating on letting Japanese ships through the Panama Canal and the ships for the most part had to go around South America or around the horn of Africa.

Many of you have probably read about the newly discovered species of giant (cat-sized) rat found in a 'lost world'--a volcanic crater in New Guinea.  Several other less spectacular species and sub-species also live only in the crater.  The animals show no fear of humans because apparently none of the locals go into the crater.

This discovery is not an isolated event.  Science knows far less about animals--even fairly large ones--in the tropics than most people realize.  This New York TImes article points out that in 2005 approximately 5400 mammal species were known to science.  Since then, 400 new ones have been found.  Most of these new animals were overlooked before because they are small obscure animals in hard-to-get-to places.  A few of them are more striking, including several new types of monkey. 

Look for more of this.  In a lot of the tropics science is in a race to catalog what is there before it stops being there.  In all likelihood we're losing that race in at least as many cases as we're winning it, and many of the newly found species will probably be gone within my daughter's lifespan--maybe even mine if I live long enough.