Voder-Vocoder

Remember the iPod? Why do you think it was so prone to scratching and going all gunky after a year in your pocket? Why would Apple build a handheld technology out of materials that turned to shit if you looked at them cross-eyed? It’s because the iPod was only meant to last a year!

Cory Doctorow (source)

It’s not good photography. But it might count as art.

So I’ve had this setup for a scifi novel kicking around in my head for a while.

The story begins on earth, roughly 30 years from now. Explorers arrive from interstellar space and tell the Earthicans that they need to buy material to refit, refuel, and relaunch their starship. They will trade information and technology for the material, but it will not be cheap. Earthicans must put tonnes into orbit for each small bit of tech. Fortunately, the project bootstraps itself. Once earth acquires fusion power and a skyhook, they will be home free.

Side plot: Earth of the future is pretty bad. Wars over energy are routine. People are starving in the US. NASA is long since de-funded. The explorers are sad, but detached. Their mission is not charity.

The other main plot: We tell the story from the point of view of the interstellar explorers, whom the Earthicans never get to see face-to-face. The explorers are solid-state beings living in the computers of the starship. This is the only way to build starships, there is no room on board for living beings.

But the explorers were once physical beings. They live in a rich virtual world, where they envision themselves as the crew of a scifi starship from television shows from their own past.

Possible ideas for conflict: Maybe the effort to restart a space program that will undoubtedly cause short-term deaths. Maybe the new space race leads to wars on earth, even as the end of war is within grasp. Maybe most Earthicans hate and fear the ETs and do not want to trade with them. Maybe once Earthicans find out that they are not “alive” as they understand it (re: culture of life), Earthicans refuse to trade with them.

Side plot: The explorers mission is—so far—a failure. They have visited half-a-dozen systems in search of more advanced technology. So far they have found nothing. They and other groups of explorers find a lot of empty systems and some dead civilizations (most died off with a nuclear holocaust, others at other stages in civilization). Several declined civilizations (These are tough for the explorers: they must spend a lot of time and become archaeologists in search of tech they don’t know exists or not.) And several civilizations like earth, that have become stagnate. As much as they act indifferent to the humans, they are secretly collecting as much information as possible (TV signals, later they tap into the Internet (how?)).

Bibliography:

• Childhood’s End. Aliens who don’t reveal themselves for fear that earthlings will fear them.
• The Fountains of Paradise. Space elevator. Starship
  refit.
• Anything to do with Transhumanism. Uploaded Solid State
  intelligences.
• Star Trek: First Contact + Enterprise. 21st century Vulcan/Human
  interaction.
• Contact. Of course. I never liked the ending, though.
• Battlestar Galactica. Can a toaster be a person?

Note: I list a bibliography to (1) resolve any accusation that I steal ideas from somewhere. Of course I do. (2) list those works that I would like to disassemble. Most of these have underlying assumptions that wish to explore.

project notes

Hello, my name is Hal, and I’m a computer geek.

I’ve been trying to limit my spending on computer hardware of late. I have mostly been successful. But that didn’t stop me from spending $30 on a whim last night.

I had been using my flash drive a lot recently, and was getting sick of reaching around my case to blindly fumble wityh the USB port. The same goes for every other USB perifrial, such as the external HDD or the camera.

I either needed to get a case with front ports or a hub. I bought a Belkin F5U233-APL USB2 4-Port Hub.

It was, I think, orignally designed to act as a dock for an ipod shuffle: it has a port on the top of the device. This port works well for any bulky USB device.

Did I mention that I love the concept of USB? There is a limit on how many USB devices one computer can handle. 127 devices. Maybe you don’t remember the bad old days, when computers had one paralell port and one serial port. If you tried to add more devices, you ran into IRQ issues and had to start playing with jumpers. My family had two computers, networked using a paralell-port nullmodem. But we also had two printers which used the paralell ports as well. The system worked, but there were kludges involved.

Version 2:

When I made the second, I did it on thick watercolor paper instead of thin drawing paper. The inking went a lot faster because I used a better pen. I also made a point to draw fewer lines, under the assumption that I could do more shading with the wash. I also used a different brush for the second one. That was a mistake, I should have used my better brush.

2004-10-28/2005-09-13

Okay, this is just a rough sketch. I’ve learned that I need a lot of proactice with the ink and maybe a better pen.

source.

I got a package from the folks today. It contained a few xeroxed articles and, strangely, two seven-inch sticks of bamboo. “Bamboo? What the huh?” I thought, then rushed out the door to work.

This evening, I bothered looking through the articles. The bamboo, it seems, is the answer to a question I had asked Mom about ink+watercolors drawings. According to the article (Mom didn’t give me a proper reference):

The ‘pen’ I use is generally a matchstick thrust into a short length of bamboo, which I then sharpen with a razor blade or craft knife—the actual shape is the one that works best in a situation…

Ah ha. I need to pick up some india ink.

I had originally asked her: how do I draw this.

Many cities are designed on a Cartesian plan: north-south streets and east-west streets. Madison is on a double-Cartesian plan: N-S, E-W, NW-SE, and NE-SW streets all jumbled together.

If you want to go northeast, it is nice to be able to get there, but it does tend to make the city confusing.

So I’ve been thinking about other ways of doing it. instead of four and instead of eight direction, how about six? E-W, NW-SE, and NE-SW, where NW is really closer to 60 degrees, not 45 degrees.

You would end up with something that looks like a honeycomb. Then I pull in another idea: If neighborhoods are well-defined, does that make neighborhoods more cohesive? Would it help if I put definite borders between them? Why not space them a bit? Put in parkland to separate them.

Here’s the plan:

white = urban (residential/commercial) and high-density suburban zones.
dark green = parkland (either wooded or grassy)
light green = paved bike and walking paths.
heavy black lines = major boulevards (connects neighborhoods)
light black lines = avenues (minor streets not pictured)
blue lines = mass transit (elevated rail or subway) (connects neighborhoods)

The scale is on the order of one to two miles. This does not take into acount the unique topography of every location. The plan would need to be adapted.

Has anyone ever built a city with mass transit designed in from the beginning? Is it always an afterthought?

The thing I love the most about this plan is that one could walk from one end of the city to the other and never leave parkland.