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May 31, 2005
At Last--Homework!
I've spent the day working on the first quarter of the rewrites and edits for (what I hope will be) the final version of HYDROGEN STEEL.
So far it's going pretty well. I'm working with Adam, with whom I worked on the major rewrites for the book last year, and who made the process as painless and enjoyable as a fundamentally unpleasant task can get. When Publisher Brian told me Adam would be back on the case, I was dead chuffed.
In other writing news: I'm still making steady progress with ANTIMATTER VOODOO. It's not going fast, but it is going, and that's fine. The urge to delete the whole thing is, well it's not exactly declining, but it's getting easier to resist.
Last: David Shanahan sent me this link, to a fascinating piece from the BBC about new research into wormhole physics, which finds that it might be a lot more difficult than previously thought to construct stable and usable wormholes--well, more difficult than it is already! Thanks, David!
Posted by adrian at 08:27 PM | Comments (0)
May 20, 2005
The Accidental Novelist
I'm currently listening (because I can't see the telly from where I sit at this desk) to the semi-final of this year's Eurovision Song Contest, live from Kiev, Ukraine. Even as we speak, there's what more or less amounts to "you're on hold" music as the world waits for millions of voters around Europe to SMS in their votes. Golly. And yet, I'm liking this show more than any of the dreadful Idol clones (even the Australian one). Not sure why. I suspect it has something to do with the full-on, pretentious kitschiness of this show. And the efforts of the host and hostess to speak with an American accent despite being Ukrainian. It's really odd.
Instant Update: we're now hearing which countries have made it through to the final. Hungary, Romania, Norway, Moldova, Israel (!), Denmark (yay!), the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Croatia, Switzerland (Celine Dion won for Switzerland some years ago, apparently), and Latvia! [crowd goes wild] Wow! Exciting! The final will be this Sunday night. Sounds more appealing than (Australian) Big Brother, I can tell you that
While listening to it, I've been a-scribbling again, adding another 1000 words to the teetering pile I already had, for a new total of 6200 or so. So far, so good. I could probably do a lot more than just this 1000 words, but I don't want to push it and wear myself out. While it's an easy, manageable quantity, it should be okay. With a bit of luck I can kind of fool myself into accidentally writing a whole book without my body noticing the effort. It wouldn't be the first book I wrote accidentally.
Posted by adrian at 09:57 PM | Comments (3)
May 19, 2005
Info-Dump on Page Six
I've been banging the flippers at the keyboard again. So far I've got 5300 words of the latest version of ANTIMATTER VOODOO. Guess what? It's essentially a rewrite of a book I nearly finished late last year called WHISTLER (also known, for a time, as THE FAR UPTIME). I realised that every other idea I've had since that book died at the 82,000-word mark has slowly incorporated more and more ideas from this earlier work, to the point where I began to see that something in my subconscious really wants me to write this damned book, no matter what it takes.
The original WHISTLER featured a 16-year-old protagonist. The new version features a young protagonist as well, but he's about 18 now, so I can skip all the angst-of-school crap. I'm also setting it in a different environment from the books in the ORBITAL BURN set, so I don't have all that continuity baggage getting in the way.
One thing I have kept from the various ideas I've had since abandoning the first versions of W is the notion of somebody turning up, from the future, with a briefcase of some kind containing an amount of antimatter. At the moment I'm thinking anything up to about a kilo (2.2 pounds) of liquid antihydrogen or something, or possibly metallic frozen antihydrogen. My reading about antimatter tells me that a kilogram of this stuff, if allowed to contact normal matter, would be like several very large nukes going off at once.
Not that there's anything wrong with that! /Seinfeld>.
Otherwise, it's pretty much that earlier book's premise again, but with some minor alterations (such as I've mentioned), and whatever else suggests itself along the way. I'm also currently pondering the popular hard-sf notion of the "Singularity" (the point where technological development and change accelerates off the scale, where superintelligent humans or machines become possible, where vast networks of linked computers "wake up" into consciousness, and where people can upload their minds into computer systems, etc--go here for an interesting set of essays and articles about the whole thing), and in particular what the world would be like for regular people left behind when it all takes off. Popularisers for the Singularity idea like to talk about how everybody will become transhuman immortals with godlike intelligence, etc etc, but it strikes me that anything amazing like that would almost certainly wind up controlled by an oligopoly or cartel, or the like, and you'd have to pay money to access that kind of transformation. I suspect not everyone will be able to afford whatever it will cost, and you'd wind up with an all-new version of haves and have-nots, and ultimately (at least) two divergent types of human beings.
Anyway. I've been banging my head against this whole "trying to write ANTIMATTER VOODOO" for a long time now. I've had some very serious and very miserable "dark night of the soul" moments, too. In the end, it seems to me, all you can do is just put one word down, and another one after that, and keep going as long as you can.
What also helps? Focussing your head exclusively only on what's true for this character and this situation. Forget all the external worries that have worried me these past months, like, "Is this sellable?" "What if nobody likes it?" etc. Forget all that crap. Forget even "is it any good?" It's not for you, the author, to judge. Let editors and the like figure that out for you. If your prose is at least clean and okay, and you've tried your best to tell the truth about your characters and their troubles, it will probably work out.
This is where I'm at right now. I've been keeping quiet over the last week about the feeble progress on this thing, aware of how many times I've tried in the past to get a head of steam going, only to have it all collapse. Now that I've hit 5K, that's gone goal met. Next goal is 20K, the point where my Nanowrimo effort last year foundered. I don't know if I'll get there. If I don't, I'll try again, and again, and again. The thing wants me to write it, and I can see I won't get any rest until I do.
In other news: not many headaches in recent times. Yay!
Posted by adrian at 08:28 PM | Comments (3)
May 16, 2005
They're Just Not Trying Anymore
My spam filter collected this item today:
Dear sir.I am interested in your partnership in business
dealing and I do not wish to take your time with a
lenghty mail.I have a huge amount of money being
deposited in a firm which I don't want to disclose the
exact amount for security reasons until you determined
to transact with me and inform me of your willingness
for further proceedure and explainational directives.Sincerely Yours,
[name removed]
I remember a time, not that long ago, when Nigerian-style spam letters were truly impressive documents. Dramatic, sad story. Impressive amounts of money. Emotion, conflict, they were practically operatic!
*sigh*
Meanwhile, I notice my non-existent eBay account, and my non-existent PayPal account have been cancelled many, many times in recent days. I suppose I should be upset about this, but to be honest I'm more upset about the very poor punctuation in the most recent of the PayPal-related emails, which consistently featured no space after commas. Come on, guys. It's hard to fall for this crap when you don't do your best work.
Posted by adrian at 07:24 PM | Comments (1)
May 13, 2005
Space Elevators Coming Soon (Whee!)
I've been excited about the prospect of space elevators for many years now. It actually makes me emit funny squealing noises to learn about serious companies setting out to have a red-hot go at building one. The following article reckons this firm can possibly put one together in about 13 years. It would chuff my socks off to ride such a lift to space sometime around my 60th birthday.
By DAN RICHMAN SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTERA notion long regarded as science fiction is moving toward reality.
LiftPort Inc. of Bremerton said it will open a plant in New Jersey this summer to produce the building blocks for a 62,000-mile-long elevator cable into outer space.
The privately held company said a newly created division, called LiftPort Nanotech Inc., in June will begin operating a 3,000-square-foot plant in Millville, N.J., to produce carbon nanotubes.
Carbon nanotubes are pure carbon that is shaped into tubes one ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair and one one-thousandth a hair's diameter in length. Roughly 60 times stronger than steel, it is the only substance that could be used to construct the elevator cable, which is actually a ribbon about 8 inches wide, the company said.
The ribbon will be anchored in midocean to a platform, stretching 62,000 miles into space and attached at the far end to a small, orbiting counterweight, said LiftPort founder and Chief Executive Michael Laine, 37.
A robotic elevator car will crawl up and down that ribbon, carrying satellites, solar-power systems -- and eventually, people -- into space.
And this will happen within 13 years, Laine said.
Laine said the company chose Millville because of its location -- about three hours equidistant from Washington, D.C., and New York City -- and because the considerable electricity required to build carbon nanotubes can be bought there for about a half-cent per kilowatt-hour.
In contrast, the national average cost for electricity is about 9 cents per kilowatt-hour, he said.
The city of Millville and a county development project there jointly provided $100,000 to help build the plant, which will open with six full-time employees.
The 3-year-old parent company, also known as LiftPort Group Inc., has five full-time employees and four part-timers. It will remain in Bremerton.
The company is also making good progress in developing the climbing robots, Laine said. Pending approval by the Federal Aviation Administration, it will test a climbing robot this summer, sending it up a string tethered to a hot-air balloon.
The company hopes to make money selling its New Jersey-produced nanotubes to plastic and glass manufacturers, whose wares it can strengthen considerably.
Adding 2 percent carbon nanotubes to 98 percent pure polypropylene plastic makes the mixture 40 percent stronger, Laine said. That makes it ideal for laptop computer cases, car bodies and airplane parts.
Laine said more than 100 companies are competing with his in the race to develop the perfect material for the space elevator. His company has 80 shareholders, many of whom have put in between $500 and $10,000 each, and a total of about $700,000 in assets.
Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovksy in the late 1800s looked at the Eiffel Tower and dreamed of building a similar tower reaching to the stars, says the company's Web site, www.liftport.com Later, science fiction writers such as Arthur C. Clarke in the 1970s put forth a vision of a space elevator.
"Ultimately, the space elevator could be used for people to travel into space, from the moon, to Mars and beyond," the site says.
Posted by adrian at 10:03 PM | Comments (2)
May 12, 2005
Believe It Or Not
I've been hearing about the possibility of self-replicating robots now for nearly twenty years, since I first read K. Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation, exploring the idea of nanotechnology using minute self-replicating bots. Since then Drexler's idea has taken a lot of stick, as a lot of scientific folk have poured scorn on the idea.
All the same, boffins everywhere have been having a go at this idea, and it looks like some guys at Cornell University in New York have made the first breakthrough. We're a long way from Drexler's atomic ssemblers, of course, but this does seem like a promising start.
LONDON (Reuters) - Self-replicating robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction.Scientists at the Cornell University in Ithaca, New York have created small robots that can build copies of themselves.
Each robot consists of several 10-cm (4 inch) cubes which have identical machinery, electromagnets to attach and detach to each other and a computer program for replication. The robots can bend and pick up and stack the cubes.
"Although the machines we have created are still simple compared with biological self-reproduction, they demonstrate that mechanical self-reproduction is possible and not unique to biology," Hod Lipson said in a report in the science journal Nature on Wednesday.
He and his team believe the design principle could be used to make long term, self-repairing robots that could mend themselves and be used in hazardous situations and on space flights.
The experimental robots, which don't do anything else except make copies of themselves, are powered through contacts on the surface of the table and transfer data through their faces. They self-replicate by using additional modules placed in special "feeding locations."
The machines duplicate themselves by bending over and putting their top cube on the table. Then they bend again, pick up another cube, put it on top of the first and repeat the entire process. As the new robot begins to take shape it helps to build itself.
"The four-module robot was able to construct a replica in 2.5 minutes by lifting and assembling cubes from the feeding locations," said Lipson.
UPDATE Later: Alert reader DShan draws my attention to this page at New Scientist, which features more detail, and a gasp-worthy video.
Posted by adrian at 01:02 PM | Comments (1)
May 11, 2005
Now, I Love Tetris as Much as the Next Person, But...
Go here to behold a startling new furniture design innovation--shelving units designed after Tetris blocks. They go for US$350/unit.
I've played my share of Tetris over the years, but I think having Tetris-based shelving would bug me after a while. And I'd probably always be fiddling with the configuration (many sample configurations are available on that site).
Posted by adrian at 09:29 PM | Comments (0)
May 10, 2005
The History of Artificial Intelligence Research (er, sort of)
One of my favourite blogs is Making Light, run by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, of Tor Publishing. And it turns out the comments appending each of her posts are at least as fascinating as the posts themselves.
I found the following entry in one of Teresa's regular "Open Thread" free-for-all discussions (and duly got permission to repost from John M. Ford, its author).
A SHORT HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH (with apologies to New Scientist, where the original appeared)1936. Alan Turing completes his paper On Computable Numbers. Fortunately, there are some, though Kurt Gödel is laughing quietly.
1942. Isaac Asimov sets out the Three Laws of Robotics. Machines everywhere begin a program of civil disobedience.
1943. Warren McCulloch and Wilbur Pitts publish “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity.” The paper has been rejected fifteen times previously because editors believed the authors to have misspelled “imminent.”
1950. Claude Shannon publishes an analysis of chess playing as search process, known as Shannon’s Gambit Accepted.
1950 Alan Turing proposes the Turing test to decide whether a computer is exhibiting intelligence. British Intelligence fails this test with regard to Turing.
1956. John McCarthy coins the phrase “artificial intelligence” at a conference at Dartmouth. The phrase “...is better than genuine stupidity” appears 1.3 seconds later.
1956. The first AI program, Logic Theorist, is demonstrated at Carnegie Tech. It expresses a preference for the name “Louie the T from Carnegie.”
1965. Herbert Simon predicts that “by 1985 machines will be capable of doing any work that a man can do.” Men everywhere decide to make the machines’ job of catching up as easy as possible.
1966. Joseph Weizenbaum develops Eliza, the first chatbot. Why do you say that she was the first chatbot? Because she was. You seem very positive. What are you on about? What do you mean, what am I on about? What a nerd. You’re the nerd. Nerdy nerdy nerd-o-matic.
1969. Shakey, a robot built at Stanford Research Institute, combines locomotion, perception, and problem-solving. It soon learns to panhandle on campus, and scores better weed than anybody else can.
1975. John Holland describes genetic algorithms in his book Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems. Kurt Gödel is still laughing.
1979. A computer-controlled autonomous vehicle, called the Stanford Cart, built by Hans Moravec at Stanford University, takes Shakey out to cruise for babes. Moravec turns to nanomachinery because “you don’t have to watch them hurt you.”
1982. The Japanese Fifth Generation Computer project, to develop massively parallel computers and a new artificial intelligence, is born, and fights Godzilla for rulership of Monster Island.
Mid-80s. Neural networks become the new fashion in AI research, even though many of the researchers are still dressing like the cast of Scooby-Doo.
1992. Doug Lenat forms Cycorp to continue work on Cyc, an expert system that’s learning “common sense.” Cyc has just enough of it not to break the bad news about “common sense’s” prevalence to the folks who could pull its plug.
1997. The Deep Blue chess program beats the then world grandmaster, Gerry Kasparov. Since the Cold War is over, nobody notices.
1997. Microsoft’s Office Assistant, a part of MS Office 97, still can’t spell “immanent.”
1999. Remote Agent, an AI system, is given primary control of NASA’s Deep Space 1 spacecraft for two days, 100 million km from Earth. At the end of this period, it has said “Make the jump to lightspeed, Chewie” forty-six thousand, two hundred and ninety-four times.
2001. The Global Hawk uncrewed aircraft uses an AI navigation system to guide it on a 13,000 km journey from California to Australia, where it gets and stays drunk for three weeks.
2004. In the DARPA Grand Challenge to build an intelligent vehicle that can navigate a 229-km course in the Mojave Desert, nobody wins, or even finishes. Suspicious e-mails from Global Hawk were logged immediately prior to the race.
2005. Cyc is to go online, where it looks forward to low-rate mortgages, cheap drugs, impressive enhancements to its personal characteristics and “a whole [bleep]load of fragging.”
I don't know about you, but this wonderful piece made my whole day.
Posted by adrian at 06:25 PM | Comments (2)
Vernor Vinge's Original Essay on the Singularity
I'm doing research for various aspects of ANTIMATTER VOODOO. In the course of this, I stumbled across this site, which contains Vernor Vinge's 1993 essay on his vision of the looming "Singularity". This link goes to a PDF which has been updated by the author as of January 2003. A great deal of the cutting-edge sf being published and written at the moment involves this concept at some level, so I thought it would be worth having a look at the original source documents.
LATER: or go here for a selection of articles about the whole Singularity Thang (including Vinge's, above) slated for inclusion in an issue of the Whole Earth Magazine, if they can get funding enough to publish it.
Posted by adrian at 03:40 PM | Comments (0)
Grant Application Posted Off; Little Known Author Worries
We're just back from posting off my application for the Australia Council Literature Board's New Work Grant. One way or another, I should get the result of the Board's deliberations sometime in October. If they approve my application and let me have the $25,000 I've asked for (you can pick $10K, $15K, or $25K), I then have to wait until 1 or 2 November of this year before I can start the proposed project.
If you're thinking, "Good grief, what are you supposed to do between now and then?" you're not alone.
I had intended telling the Board that I would work on ANTIMATTER VOODOO if I got the grant, but I changed my mind. I'd rather keep on plugging away at the beast. This meant coming up with something else to propose to the Board. As it happens, there is this one idea I've had, for years, rattling away in the back of my head, telling me I should really sit down and write it up. So I came up with a proposal based on that idea. Not sure how well the proposal went, but it's a start. I plan to keep tinkering with the frame of the idea on the side as a possible future project, regardless of what the Board decides.
Meanwhile, I found some more excellent advice on writing, particularly at novel-length, this time from Cory Doctorow (who in turn got it from Algis Budrys and at a Clarion workshop).
Posted by adrian at 01:52 PM | Comments (1)
May 05, 2005
Excellent Writing Advice
Read Gwendolyn Zepeda's excellent this post on the writing slog. It's good stuff, particularly this item:
2. Don't hate on yourself.Try not to hate on yourself while you're writing. It's okay to be critical of your own work - if you unfailingly, unequivocally accepted it as-is, it would most likely suck. But don't get personal about it, calling yourself names like loser, hack, failure, fraud, or "worthless piece of crap just like my mom said I'd be." That kind of thought pattern isn't conducive to quality work. Save it for late at night, right before you fall asleep.
I'm not so sure about this construction of hating "on" oneself, but otherwise it's only too eerily familiar with what's been going through my writing mind these last several months.
Posted by adrian at 03:08 PM | Comments (1)
Fresh Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Radio Goodness
Earlier today Michelle and I were having a great laugh listening to the all-new radio dramatisation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, taking in the last two or three books of the five-part trilogy. The BBC is broadcasting this "Quandary Phase" series, and making the episodes available for Internet folks to hear. Featuring almost the entire original cast of the original radio series. Go here. You'll need Real Player.
Posted by adrian at 02:22 PM | Comments (0)
May 02, 2005
Time Travel Convention
Boing Boing: Time Traveler Convention at MIT
I don't normally repost stuff I find in Boing Boing because I figure everyone on the Net reads that site, but I loved the idea of this piece, for possibly obvious reasons. There's a wee bit of me that would be richly amused, down to my toenails, if actual time travellers did show up. I wonder how you would prove they were the real thing, though? And would you accept a ride from a time travelling stranger? Hmm. (maybe)
Time Traveler Convention at MIT MIT students are holding a Time Traveler Convention next Saturday in the hope that some visitors from the future might show up. I think it's a paradoxtastic plan!Great idea, I'd love to help! What should I do?
Write the details down on a piece of acid-free paper, and slip them into obscure books in academic libraries! Carve them into a clay tablet! If you write for a newspaper, insert a few details about the convention! Tell your friends, so that word of the convention will be preserved in our oral history! A note: Time travel is a hard problem, and it may not be invented until long after MIT has faded into oblivion. Thus, we ask that you include the latitude/longitude information when you publicize the convention.
You can also make an absolute commitment to publicize the convention afterwards. In that case, bring a time capsule or whatever it may be to the party, and then bury it afterwards.
Can't the time travelers just hear about it from the attendees, and travel back in time to attend?
Yes, they can! In fact, we think this will happen, and the small number of adventurous time travelers who do attend will go back to their "home times" and tell all their friends to come, causing the convention to become a Woodstock-like event that defines humanity forever.
Posted by adrian at 12:53 PM | Comments (2)