Voder-Vocoder

Tommorrow is aparently Columbus Day, in honor of the city in Ohio.

To celebrate, I’ve been listening to Guns, Germs and Steel (ISBN 0393317552) and read the last couple of chapters of Card’s Redemption of Christopher Columbus (ISBN 0812508645).

Right now I’m not buying new books because i’m in super-thrifty mode. (I did, however buy a new compass (a Brunton 26DNL) that floats for my next kayacking trip. Not that it is easy to get lost when you are on a river. You’re either going upstream or downstream. I bame the DVDs of Lost.) One book that I’m not buying due to the moratorium on new books is The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (ISBN 0812976568).

Inside the Gospel are the The Eight “I’d Really Rather You Didn’ts”, commandments for Pastafarians. I especially like number 5:

5. I’d Really Rather You Didn’t Challenge The Bigoted, Misogynist, Hateful Ideas Of Others On An Empty Stomach. Eat, Then Go After The Bastard.

I finally got around to reading Larry Niven’s 1971 novel A World Out of Time. It has a bunch of the really classic sf elements: bussard ramships, the distant future, uploads, distopia, genetic engineering, mobile planets.

The reason I haven’t read this one before now is that it has a really ugly cover. This one really needs to be republished with a better cover.

Update 2006-09-17: Since I finished the book I’m been racking my brain trying to remember where I had read about the fusion candle. It was in a Schlock Mercenary strip from a couple of years back.

The candle is the most feasible method I’ve heard for moving planets. It involves improbable engineering, but doesn’t involve impossible physics.

from pages 200-201 of A World Out of Time:

Two tubes, concentric, each a hundred miles long; the inner tube a mile wide, with thick walls if complex construction; the outer tube thinner and twice as wide. At one end, a bell-shaped rocket nozzle. At the other [...] Reworked military laser cannon, and vents, and a flared skirt, and thick stubby fins, there at the bottom end. Now temporary liquid hydrogen tanks were attached. Now the structure moved under its own power…it was a tremendous fusion motor…moving outward, circled by tiny ships…yeah.

Corbell said, “How do you move the Earth?”

“You are here to tell us that.”

“Well it’s a problem. A rocket motor won’t do the job. You need something that can pull on the entire mass of the planet, nickel-iron core and crust and oceans and air, all at once. Where do you find a force like that?”

[...] “You move something else,” Statholtz said. “The damage done by the rocket’s thrust and by mistakes you might make will not kill anyone if nobody lives on the working body. Then the working body can be moved until the world falls toward it as a rock falls to the ground. What was the working body? Ganymede?”

“Uranus. Can you stop the light show at that picture?”

The lecture froze on an “artist’s conception”: a blurred, curved arc of Uranus’s upper atmosphere. The motor looked tiny floating there. Corbell said, “You see? It’s a double-walled tube, very strong under expansion shock. It floats vertical in the upper air. Vents at the bottom let in the air, which is hydrogen and methane and ammonia, hydrogen compounds, like the air that the sun burns. You fire laser cannon up along the axis of the motor, using a color hydrogen won’t let through. You get a fusion explosion along the axis.”

[...] “Okay. The hydrogen fusions in the middle of the motor—”

“—and the explosion goes out and up. It’s hottest along the axis, cooler when it reaches the walls of the motor. The whole mass blasts out the top, through the flared end. It has to have an exhaust velocity way higher than Uranus’s escape velocity. The motor goes smashing into deeper air. You see there’s a kind of flared skirt at the bottom. The deep air builds up there at terrific pressure, stops the tube and blasts it back up. You fire it again.”

“Elegant,” says Statholtz.

“Yeah, Nobody’s there to get killed. Control systems in orbit. The atmosphere is fuel and shock absorber both—and the planet is mostly atmosphere. Even when it’s off the motor floats high for a while, because it’s full of hot hydrogen compounds. If you let if cool off it sinks, of course, but you can bring it back up to high atmosphere by heating the tube with the laser, firing it almost to fusion.”

Let’s look at the numbers. Suppose that the acceleration is 1/1000 of a gee.

F = m a
  = (8.6832 × (10^25)kg) (0.01m/s^2)
  = 8.6832 × 10^23 Newtons

Assume the exhaust velocity averages 300,000 m/s (similar to a VASMIR)

mass flow = F / v
          = (8.6832 × 10^23 Newtons)
             /(300000 m/s)
          = 2.8944 × 10^18 kg / s

Which is insanely huge. We’d probably need a bigger exhaust velocity, but I can’t imagine it being too much bigger.

New back-of-the-envelope calculations on this subject:

Let’s say we want to calculate how much thrust you need to move Uranus to Earth’s orbit using a standard Hohmann transfer orbit. Ler’s only calculate how much thrust it would take to put Uranus into the transfer orbit, ignoring the second half of the problem—taking it out of that orbit.

radius at aphelion = ra = 2.9*(10^12) meters
radius at perhelion = rp = 1.5*(10^11) meters
gravatational constant = gc = 6.67*(10^(-11))
Mass of Sol = ms = 2.0*(10^30)
Delta-Vee at aphelion =
	sqrt(gc*ms/ra) * (1-sqrt(2*rp/(ra+rp)))

I used bc to do this calculation:

#!/usr/bin/bc -ql
ra=2.9*(10^12);
rp=1.5*(10^11);
gc=6.67*(10^(-11));
ms=2.0*(10^30);
deltavee=sqrt(gc*ms/ra)*(1-sqrt(2*rp/(ra+rp)));
print deltavee, "\n";
quit;

The answer was around 4700 m/s. Since the exaust velocity of our engine is 300,000 m/s, we need to use around 1/63rd of the total planetary mass to move it. (300000/4700 = 63).

I read Blind Lake today. New hypothesis: RCW does not write bad books.

I’m awake. The neighbors have stopped playing OK Computer through the wall. And I just finished Robert Charles Wilson’s Chronoliths.

The Plot is similar to Spin. Un-understandable cosmic event effects the life of Johnny Everyman, along with the rest of the planet. Eventually, decades later, we find out what the hell happened. Character developnent ensues.

What intersts me is that The Chronoliths plugs directly into this century’s zeitgeist, even though it was published in August 2001.

* * *

I am a little worried that the two of RCW’s books I’ve read have similar plots and themes. But then again, most authors do that.

Books I read in the last month or so.

Vernor Vinge. A Fire Upon the Deep
Vernor Vinge. A Deepness in the Sky
Vernor Vinge. The Peace War
Vernor Vinge. “The Cookie Monster” ++ (read for free! 19617 words, 120 kB)
Vernor Vinge. “True Names”
Vernor Vinge. “Bookworm, Run!”
Vernor Vinge. “Fast Times at Fairmont High”
Robert Charles Wilson. Spin ++
Ken MacLeod. Learning the World
Charles Stross. Accelerando ++ (read for free! 145713 words, 856 kB)
Charles Stross. Singularity Sky
Charles Stross. Iron Sunrise
John Scalzi. Old Man’s War
John Scalzi. Agent to the Stars ++ (read for free! 97239 words, 532 kB)
Arthur C. Clarke. Rendezvous with Rama
Gordon R. Dickson. Way of the Pilgram
Charles Matthews. Teach Yourself Go
Janice Kim. Learn to Play Go, Volume I

“++” denotes that you should go read this one immediately.

* * *

The queue:

Dan Simmons. Olympos
David Brin. Kiln People
Robert Charles Wilson. The Chronoliths
John Scalzi. The Ghost Brigades

I just completed my reading project for the last two weeks. I read four of the five nominees for the 2005 Hugo Award for Best Novel. The fifth book was the Nth book in a N-book fantasy sequence; I opted not to read that one.

Kudos go to the Madison Public Library, for making this all possible.

1) Old Man’s War, John Scalzi, ISBN 0765315246, 2005.

This is a fairly simple adventure story and a homage to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (if you are thinking about the movie and not the book, you are misguided and ignorant. Go fix yerself). The twist is that the military recuits are old people given new bodies. Question: aside form their frail old bodies, does the experience of the elderly give them an edge in battle? Who the hell knows. My father quotes my mother’s sister’s husband’s late father: “This getting old business ain’t for pussies.”

The Old Man’s universe is full of clichéd aliens who want to eat human beings for breakfast. In this sense, it reminded me of Futurama. I suspended disbelief and enjoyed the ride. The characters had an odd point of view: humans fighting humans is pointless and wasteful, but humans fighting aliens is the way the universe works: get used to it or someone will eat you. It is hinted that the Consu keep this part of the galaxy in a perpetual state of war for their own perverted reasons. And this book offers no explanation for the Fermi Paradox. Can a book about aliens be considered serious sci-fi if it doesn’t aknowledge this querstion?

Good book, but it doesn’t deserve the Hugo. There is a sequil, which I will read at some point.

See also: Scalzi’s Blog

2) Learning the World, Ken MacLeod, ISBN 0765313316, 2005.

I had wanted to read this for a while, since I’ve enjoyed MacLeod’s other books. This is yer basic Humans-of-the-future- make-first- contact-with- an-industrial-level- alien-species book. The humans come from a post-human society, but are still fairly human. One of the major problems I had with this book was that I didn’t really understand the goals of the various political factions within the human expedition. It was explained, but I never really internalized the reasoning.

A neat touch was the fact that one of the protagonists had a blog which the author used to shed light on her actions and how she related to the other characters. I think that MacLeod failed to use this literary tool to its greatest extent.

Overall, I really did’t understand the human society at all. Why do stars turn green? I can’t imagine a Dyson swarm that only contains chlorophyll plants. MacLeod has dealt with the technologocal singularity before, but in this book, he ignores that concept completely. I expected more from him.

Overall, this story doesn’t compare to some of MacLeod’s other books, for example the Cassini Division.

See also: MacLeod’s blog

3) Accelerando, Charles Stross, ISBN 0441014151 2005.

If I’ve got the singularity on my mind, the culpret is Accelerando. This book is a series of nine interconnected short stoiries that deal with how we get from here to the singularity and how the singulartity is a trap that many alien societys fall into.

The early chapters might have been written by Cory Doctrow (in fact, the UK version of the cover has a picture of Doctrow on the cover, refering, supposedly, to the fact that character Manfred Macx wears glasses just like Doctrow.

The thing I hated the most about this book is that I don’t like any of the characters much at all. Manfred Macx and his daughter Amber are somewhat likeable, but I don’t like the people they associate with at all.

The episodic narrative structure allows the story to span several centuries, but allows some stories to sag, pulling down the overall quality. I especially disliked the last story, as it revealed nothing about the central nature of the universe.

Interesting concepts: (1) the metacortex. (2) Legal systems evolve and can change in ways similar to computer systmes. A legal system is the platform on which lawsuits run. (3) AIs can be people under our current legal system, if they are recursivly-owned corporations. (4) Economics 2.0 dehumanizes any entity that wishes to participate. (5) Post-singularity digital beings crave processing power (and consequently, energy), memory, and low-lag bandwidth. Therefore, they will want to live in small-sized Matrioshka brains, and not be prone to explore the galaxy.

This book has the greatest neat-idea density of all the nomimees.

See also: Stross’s blog

4) Spin, Robert Charles Wilson, ISBN 0765309386, 2005.

This is the most literary of the nomines. There was more character development and the images were effective.

The plot is interesting. Anonymous Aliens (the hypotheticals) encase the earth in a giant buble which blocks communication with the outside world and slows down time by a factor of 100,000,000:1.

Interesting ideas: (1) Terraforming Mars can be cheap if you have 100,000,000 years to wait. (2) Most civilizations drown in their own wastes shortly after achieving technology. (3) The universe belongs to self-evolving von-Neuman machines in Stellar Oorts. (4) The fourth-stage of human life is a nod to the Niven Pak Protector, but less inhuman.

Most importantly, I liked the protagonist. I could both identify with and respect his motivations.

I’d give this one the Hugo, if I were a voter. Alas, I avoid fandom like the plague.

I had a thought while reading The Wheel of Time a while back. The series is based on a world with cyclic time, with seven history-destroying cataclysms separating the ages from one another. Some ages have technology, some have magic, some have some combination of the two.

I noticed that there seem to be a lot of fairly effective herbal medicines in use. These must be the result of some genetic engineer thousands of years back deciding to splice the genes for every useful pharmaceutical into various plants. While the drug industry wouldn’t survive the fall of civilization, the plants would.

That’s not a bad idea.

I loaned someone my copy of Data Structures & Problem Solving Using Java by Mark Weiss a while back. I forgot who, and I want the book back.

UPDATE: It would appear that Chris Wilson has it.

Convoluted Story:

I had an hour or so to kill on the westside between shifts this week, so I stopped in the big bookstore they have. Glancing through the new fiction paperbacks, I saw Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Someone had recommended it some time ago, saying “it’s more political than I would have expected.” I forget who.

So I picked it up, read the first two chapters, and fell asleep in the comfy chairs they have. After they called me back into work, I bought the book.

I don’t know why I liked the book, but here’s a guess: the protagonist is flawed in ways that I can identify with.

I wanted to read up on the source material, which has fallen into the public domain. So I downloaded the text from Project Gutenberg.

The best way I have to read ebooks is on my palm m105. I can do this flat on my back, which is how I like to read anyways. I’d get a fancier PDA, but I can’t justify spending money if all I do is read books on the damn thing.

The m105 has some advantages and disadvantages. It was relatively cheap at the time it was released, and made a nice graduation present from my parents. It uses 2xAAA batteries, so I don’t have to worry about the lifetime of a rechargeable.

On the other hand, it uses old-fashioned RAM for its memory and when the batteries die, the memory is all lost. So every time that happens, I have to reinstall databases and applications. I’ve tried to make that as easy as possible: The directories $HOME/Palm/Docs and $HOME/Palm/Apps contain PalmDoc ebooks and Palm applications. The pilot-link tools make re-installing everything easy. PILOTPORT=/dev/ttyS0 PILOTRATE=115200 pilot-xfer -i ~/Palm/Docs/* ~/Palm/Apps/*

I do wish I had one of the models that relied on a removable Flash drive and not RAM.

I just read Stephen Baxter’s Manifold Space. I picked it up on the theory that it wouldn’t be as depressing as Baxter’s other novels. I’m not sure why I expected that. The ending was just as just as morbid as the others. Plot summary: life sucks, then you have depressing adventures in space, then you die, then the human race becomes extinct, then the universe is destroyed.

It’s the anti-startrek.

I picked up Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper’s Building Harlequin’s Moon. I’m only a third of the way through it.

Impressions:

1. It reminds me a bit of the brainstorming I was doing the other week, without the aliens.
2. It sets up a situation where you can almost understand why people create an abomination: slavery. Until, of cource, the protagonist gets sold down the river.
3. It also has a theme of a society that has found that it can not safely advance its technology anymore. If the technological singularity exists and is to be feared, then this is a theme we need to think on.