Showing posts with label sci-fi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sci-fi. Show all posts
Sunday, March 04, 2012
Recommended
Think Defence has been having a very good discussion (practically a CT-style blog seminar) about the Falklands. Which reminds me...I note that Bob Howard has yet to visit, despite the eldritch conjunction of an implausibly massive geostrategic commitment, the deep links between right-wing political Catholicism and the sinister occult, the Antarctic (and you know what happens down there - giant mountains embedded in ancient ice, eccentric British scientists with hovercraft, Russians drilling into lakes sealed off from the world for millions of years), and, eh, a fast-growing economy based entirely on squid.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Embassytown: a partial review
While we're on drugs, why not a look at China Miéville's Embassytown, in which an unusual one plays a big role? This isn't quite an AFOE "Premature Evaluation" as I'm actually reading it, I just haven't finished it yet. A couple of points...
Pass by reference, not by value
This is the big-idea high concept here. It's sci-fi where the sci is linguistics, and fairly hard science fiction too. The aliens - and one thing that stands out is that we've got some seriously alien aliens here - are creatures that are comparably intelligent with humanity and indeed with a couple of other species and an occasional unusually bright robot, but who don't make use of a symbolic language.
As a result, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds good for them - words are their own referents, language is limited by perception, and action is therefore constrained by language. One of the first results of contact between them and us is the development of what is essentially a creole, back-porting elements of symbolism into their vocabulary. This offers huge new intellectual possibilities but also a really awful failure mode.
After all, it's not as if they can't hear people or things speaking their language if it obeys their rules. The result is a little like a catastrophic, and accidental, buffer-overflow attack. Stuff leaks and gets incorporated into their internal thought processes.
Addiction and performance
Addiction is not a state of being, it's a relationship. This is why people rarely commit murder to get hold of coffee. It's the economic relationship, not the drug physiology, that does the work of corruption, and that works for the supplier as much as for the addict. When the aliens become dependent on a very specific product the humans can provide, this might sound like a grant of absolute power. It doesn't turn out very well for the humans, for just the reasons that suggests.
Similarly, people do the same sort of thing with their dependencies on each other. It's the diva mindset - when you can't tell "I need them" and "They need me" apart.
Diplomacy
In part this is a love letter to diplomatic culture in its weirdness and anachronism and necessity. It was fashionable a few years ago to say that the whole thing had outlived its purpose. There were a couple of versions of this. One was that as Prime Ministers X and Y could just phone each other or fly off and meet, there was no need. This was astonishingly stupid and naive and the people who pushed it - Simon Jenkins for example - should have known better, knowing as they did just how much preparation goes into summit meetings and how journalists covering them generally start, the day before the meeting, by reporting what is likely to be in the communique as the diplomats have already drafted it.
Another, less idiotic but more pernicious, was that there was nothing to discuss. Free markets ruled, businesses spoke to businesses, and for the rest, all that mattered was brute force. The neocons liked this and it went with the old US military contempt for "Foggy Bottom". Since 2007 and the roles of Ryan Crocker, Emma Sky, and the State Department PRTs in getting them out of their self-dug hole in Iraq, you don't hear that so often.
Diplomacy is the weird and paradoxical medium in which states swim. (This is a trope of the book - people and other creatures manoeuvre through language, spaceships in space and in another convenient dimension, and states through diplo-space.) At the very least, it's a continuing exercise in killing as few people as possible, like emergency medicine. Like lawyers, it's one of the things I learnt to stop hating in the Bush years.
Snark
The ambassadors in Embassytown are rather odd creatures, selected, raised, and trained to think precisely the same thing at the same time and express it with great discretion and irritating charm. Meanwhile, the embassy staff are really in charge behind the scenes. Who the hell can he be thinking of?
Pass by reference, not by value
This is the big-idea high concept here. It's sci-fi where the sci is linguistics, and fairly hard science fiction too. The aliens - and one thing that stands out is that we've got some seriously alien aliens here - are creatures that are comparably intelligent with humanity and indeed with a couple of other species and an occasional unusually bright robot, but who don't make use of a symbolic language.
As a result, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds good for them - words are their own referents, language is limited by perception, and action is therefore constrained by language. One of the first results of contact between them and us is the development of what is essentially a creole, back-porting elements of symbolism into their vocabulary. This offers huge new intellectual possibilities but also a really awful failure mode.
After all, it's not as if they can't hear people or things speaking their language if it obeys their rules. The result is a little like a catastrophic, and accidental, buffer-overflow attack. Stuff leaks and gets incorporated into their internal thought processes.
Addiction and performance
Addiction is not a state of being, it's a relationship. This is why people rarely commit murder to get hold of coffee. It's the economic relationship, not the drug physiology, that does the work of corruption, and that works for the supplier as much as for the addict. When the aliens become dependent on a very specific product the humans can provide, this might sound like a grant of absolute power. It doesn't turn out very well for the humans, for just the reasons that suggests.
Similarly, people do the same sort of thing with their dependencies on each other. It's the diva mindset - when you can't tell "I need them" and "They need me" apart.
Diplomacy
In part this is a love letter to diplomatic culture in its weirdness and anachronism and necessity. It was fashionable a few years ago to say that the whole thing had outlived its purpose. There were a couple of versions of this. One was that as Prime Ministers X and Y could just phone each other or fly off and meet, there was no need. This was astonishingly stupid and naive and the people who pushed it - Simon Jenkins for example - should have known better, knowing as they did just how much preparation goes into summit meetings and how journalists covering them generally start, the day before the meeting, by reporting what is likely to be in the communique as the diplomats have already drafted it.
Another, less idiotic but more pernicious, was that there was nothing to discuss. Free markets ruled, businesses spoke to businesses, and for the rest, all that mattered was brute force. The neocons liked this and it went with the old US military contempt for "Foggy Bottom". Since 2007 and the roles of Ryan Crocker, Emma Sky, and the State Department PRTs in getting them out of their self-dug hole in Iraq, you don't hear that so often.
Diplomacy is the weird and paradoxical medium in which states swim. (This is a trope of the book - people and other creatures manoeuvre through language, spaceships in space and in another convenient dimension, and states through diplo-space.) At the very least, it's a continuing exercise in killing as few people as possible, like emergency medicine. Like lawyers, it's one of the things I learnt to stop hating in the Bush years.
Snark
The ambassadors in Embassytown are rather odd creatures, selected, raised, and trained to think precisely the same thing at the same time and express it with great discretion and irritating charm. Meanwhile, the embassy staff are really in charge behind the scenes. Who the hell can he be thinking of?
Sunday, June 06, 2010
peering over the bows...
I want one of these. There's more here; the sheer coolth of a USB-based PCR analyser is hard to beat. Even if the potential for Wakefield-scale contamination fuckups is not to be denied.
In general, I'm trying to get up to speed on things biotech. it is true that, so far, cyberpunk has been a strategically undervalued source of science fiction, politics, and general weirdness - we keep thinking we've got to the end of computers and networks, only to find there's more weird out there - compared to biology and nanotech, which has been a bit jam-tomorrow, always promising the revolution in five years' time. I suspect this is changing, not least in the light of this and this.
That's going to be quite a boat trip for one little robot, if not a giant step for mankind for quite a while. We might have to declare Titan a planetary nature reserve, if they don't do it to us first.
In general, I'm trying to get up to speed on things biotech. it is true that, so far, cyberpunk has been a strategically undervalued source of science fiction, politics, and general weirdness - we keep thinking we've got to the end of computers and networks, only to find there's more weird out there - compared to biology and nanotech, which has been a bit jam-tomorrow, always promising the revolution in five years' time. I suspect this is changing, not least in the light of this and this.
That's going to be quite a boat trip for one little robot, if not a giant step for mankind for quite a while. We might have to declare Titan a planetary nature reserve, if they don't do it to us first.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Further adventures in globalisation
So you might remember that Thai demonstrators invaded the brand-new airport there a while ago, establishing a huge Ballardian protest-camp among the glass walls and retail space and soft-xray terrorist detectors. Their movement went on to spray the prime minister's house with their own blood, collected in buckets by their medical wing. Clearly, they have a certain style.
Which made me think when I saw this BBC story; how much science-fiction would you need to get from being stuck at the same airport due to northern Europe getting a fine dusting of Iceland, while the Redshirts and the cops and the No Colour Movement - colour revolutions have clearly reached some sort of logical end point - duke it out downtown, to actually getting the queues involved in the revolution? (The other way round is much easier, and amounts almost to a cliche.)
Which made me think when I saw this BBC story; how much science-fiction would you need to get from being stuck at the same airport due to northern Europe getting a fine dusting of Iceland, while the Redshirts and the cops and the No Colour Movement - colour revolutions have clearly reached some sort of logical end point - duke it out downtown, to actually getting the queues involved in the revolution? (The other way round is much easier, and amounts almost to a cliche.)
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Kursk
Kursk was a bit of a disappointment. A submarine control room as the setting of a play isn't a bad idea - the movies worked that out many years ago - and putting it on as promenade theatre through the simulated sub is a cracking one. But, not quite.
It did remind me to check the (excellent) Wikipedia article on the loss of the Kursk, which answered my question. The problem is that the story doesn't really provide for a good drama from the viewpoint of a British submarine; even if you accept they were present, had they decided to surface at once and steam up to the Pyotr Veliky, the best thing that could have happened would have been to launch the ineffectual Russian rescue attempt a few hours earlier, which would have changed nothing. Most of the dead were dead within seconds; the survivors survived for days, almost long enough for the eventual British and Norwegian rescue effort to save them.
This leaves the story as a pure sea-piece; the isolation of the submarine, the role of the captain, the character conflicts, navy culture, the details of control-room procedure. In fact, the set's two-level structure, laid out around the central search periscope, isn't all that far off the Navy's original submarine simulator in design. In the original, the mockup control room was on the lower level, with the periscope rising through the ceiling into a room where the images required for the training scenarios were projected onto the walls.
You could make a case for secrecy being the main theme, but again, it doesn't quite work. A minor note is that there's a fair bit of Americo-scepticism about; the presence of two Los Angeles-class boats in the area is pointedly briefed as the American "threat".
Seen as science-fiction, though, it holds up better. An SF writer, whose name I forget, once said that there weren't any wars in his books because the universe was enemy enough.
It did remind me to check the (excellent) Wikipedia article on the loss of the Kursk, which answered my question. The problem is that the story doesn't really provide for a good drama from the viewpoint of a British submarine; even if you accept they were present, had they decided to surface at once and steam up to the Pyotr Veliky, the best thing that could have happened would have been to launch the ineffectual Russian rescue attempt a few hours earlier, which would have changed nothing. Most of the dead were dead within seconds; the survivors survived for days, almost long enough for the eventual British and Norwegian rescue effort to save them.
This leaves the story as a pure sea-piece; the isolation of the submarine, the role of the captain, the character conflicts, navy culture, the details of control-room procedure. In fact, the set's two-level structure, laid out around the central search periscope, isn't all that far off the Navy's original submarine simulator in design. In the original, the mockup control room was on the lower level, with the periscope rising through the ceiling into a room where the images required for the training scenarios were projected onto the walls.
You could make a case for secrecy being the main theme, but again, it doesn't quite work. A minor note is that there's a fair bit of Americo-scepticism about; the presence of two Los Angeles-class boats in the area is pointedly briefed as the American "threat".
Seen as science-fiction, though, it holds up better. An SF writer, whose name I forget, once said that there weren't any wars in his books because the universe was enemy enough.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Cameron: Cinema: Camera
Ah, the David Cameron poster machine is on line. And it's gold dust.
Somehow, that poster seems almost designed for satire. There are excellent reasons why it works so well; it's possibly the most stylised example of a political advert I can think of. In a sense, it's a movie - not at all original, but highly competent in a limited way, and therefore a perfect subject for parody. You only need to identify a small number of controls, or variables, that define it, in order to produce a message that matches the requirements of the format perfectly but has an entirely different payload.
J.G. Ballard, of course, was very much aware that display advertising is in some ways a programming language. Hack work is one of the standard literary experiences, but Ballard's time as an ad copywriter must have been especially telling on his writing. Ballardian has a superb post on his 1960s project to create a range of content-free adverts, based on randomly cut-up texts and unrelated photos, that he placed in Vogue.
Look at either the original, or the skits; note carefully where the content is. The backdrop is soothingly grey, but not blank - it's chosen to be content-free but without being actually blank or being a block colour. Blank space or block colour are visual statements - in modernism, you're being asked to concentrate on the elements of the object you'll actually interact with, in post-modernism, you're being asked to project your own internal imaginings onto the blank space. Either way, if you make the colour field bright red, you're putting the viewer on notice that you want to say something. The blurred-out background of the Cameron posters is the colour of nothing.
In front of it, we've got the heavily retouched Dave. Look where he is. User-interface research in computing suggests that the most important part of the visual for the majority of people is to be found as follows; divide the screen in four equal quarters, then divide the top left-hand one in quarters again, and pick its lower right-hand sector. Search engines assume that over 90% of clicks land in this zone on the first page of results. (Back in 2004, ignoring this was how I did the Viktor Bout story - just keep ploughing through the Google output.)
So the big pink face goes here - it acts as a graphical and thematic anchor for the eye. Thinking of the poster as a frozen movie, the action begins here. It's also true that we're likely to pick out the monkey in the background flow of images first - before we react to anything else on the poster, we have the chance to feel the tebbly-tebbly concerned smile at a subrational, sublinguistic level.
We move on; saccading from left to right and top to bottom, the next scene is the message in big friendly letters, as Douglas Adams would say. It's worth noting that the real thing always has two sentences, and although they are united by the same typeface (Franklin Gothic), the real poster has a slightly different colour mask for the second. This signals that there is a plot relationship between them. On the original poster, Cameron promises a crisis about the budget in the first colour, then promises not to cut the NHS budget in the second. So we're setting up conflict and resolution here.
No matter that the two statements are contradictory - in fact, if they weren't, it wouldn't work as a film. We move on southeastwards - first of all, we see the whizzy logo, so we know how to recognise the next element in the plot, and then, we get the pay-off, the strapline at the bottom right-hand corner of the poster. This is important - it's the finale, and it's got to contain something actionable, in the intelligence sense rather than the legal sense.
For the first time across the vast span of three or so seconds we've spent watching this drama, we see the word "CONSERVATIVE".
THE END.
It's probably worth remembering that a lot of these are meant to be installed next to motorways or major rail routes, where we will in fact approach them at speed. Treating it as a film rather than a static artwork is therefore very appropriate.
Monday, December 21, 2009
the untrue history of the Conservative Party
Charlie Stross has done a short story that is set in an NHS facility. This done, I feel he needs to take his unique view of Britain's national institutions to its logical, strategic target. The whole project of much of his work deals with the civil service; he's had a go at the military, at industry, and now at the NHS. Clearly, the next step is the Conservative Party.
"Sir Peter Viggers...I think I've heard the name. Should I look him up in Who's Who?"
"No. Perhaps you should try Who's What."
"Who's What?"
"It's a Laundry Intranet project - run out of Section MH. It's an internal wiki, intended to gather our collective knowledge of the political establishment - something we've perhaps neglected since the Healey plan of '76. Basically we're trying to collate key facts - who's associated with who, who voted for what, what kind of pan-dimensional squidthing ate and replaced whose brain."
"You mean like TheyWorkForYou, but with ineffable alien gods from somewhere we inadequately describe as hell?"
"Actually, the formal name is WhoWorksForThem. And we're beginning to worry about Tom Steinberg. But that's the idea. Haven't you ever wondered what went wrong with Peter Hain? Where they found Tony Blair? How Mandelson got like that? If William Hague is alive? Why did they have to get rid of Charles Kennedy, and why they sent him to the old Benbecula rocket range? What species George Osborne actually is? We have a remarkable amount of implicit expertise here - we're trying to crowdsource it into structured data."
"You mentioned the Healey Plan. What.."
"Technically you don't need to know. But that wasn't long after the creation of the Police National Computer under Roy Jenkins, who as you know had a Bletchley Park background. There was concern that certain field agents had...overreached. There were violations of the Civil Service Code."
"Peter Wright and all that?"
"That was one way of looking at it. Sir Peter chose to be helpful, and the Australians backed us all the way."
"You may have wondered what happened to the LEO Computers intellectual property, to the first patents on packet switching and public key encryption. After the discovery of improprieties at MH, Denis Healey launched the first effort to create a distributed database of the service's political information, based in a cover entity at the National Girobank processing centre in Bootle. The software development team were in the Inland Revenue offices decentralised to Shipley. Data entry was in Longbenton, Newcastle..."
I stared at the government tea in my Vi Reference mug. It looked like childhood - not that it was a reminder of innocence, normality, or love. No, it reminded me of school in the 1980s - it was grey. I expected Angleton to tell me that, unfortunately, there would only be enough textbooks for one between three rather than one between two. Thankfully I realised talking would be better than thinking about that...I always make that mistake.
"Wilson thought there were spies in his office. He thought coup plotters would burst through the garden windows. He was probably in the early stages of Alzheimers, they say.."
"He was more right than you might think. A highly susceptible personality - charming, slightly alienated, ambitious, not deeply principled or introspective. Healey, Callaghan, Sir Frank Cooper - they were very different men. Not enough imagination to end like the PM, but certainly the intelligence to grasp the situation once properly briefed. As were the others - Weinstock, Scanlon, Barbara Castle...it was her data centre, after all."
"So Healey wanted some kind of encrypted USENET for spooks in 1976? To trace..."
"A lot of work was done at ICL, Plessey, Ferranti, GEC-Marconi in Edinburgh and Basildon, DERA Malvern, BT Martlesham Heath, Racal, and elsewhere. You'd be surprised at the scale of the project - and some of the people involved. Mr. Ibrahim was a post-doc, newly arrived at BT MHRC. There's a notable gap in Mr Berners-Lee's career - make of that what you will. The cabinet was not informed except for the GEN-261 committee. Go-live was set for the 29th July, 1980.
We descoped a number of requirements and committed substantial extra resources in late '78 in order to bring forward an initial operating capability. As you know, the rest is history - did you know they actually burned magnetic tape drives in the car park at Martlesham? Must have been a heavy night in the Douglas Bader..."
"I read somewhere that the Queen sent her first e-mail in 1976.."
"You're not wrong - specifically, Her Majesty sent it from the Royal Signals' HQ in Blandford Forum. Sir Frank had a deep commitment to the constitutional niceties. No doubt you understand the importance of out-of-band connectivity.
Anyway, look at this photo."
"You mean...he's one of the undead?"
"Not the rest of them, you idiot!"
Update: Ken MacLeod contributes a much better ending - "Not him - the rest of them, you idiot!"
Viggers as the only human being in the 1922 Committee. I mean, who would believe that thing with the duck house? Clearly a cover story to exfil him before the tentacles closed in...
(Update: Amendment to make clear who's speaking.)
"Sir Peter Viggers...I think I've heard the name. Should I look him up in Who's Who?"
"No. Perhaps you should try Who's What."
"Who's What?"
"It's a Laundry Intranet project - run out of Section MH. It's an internal wiki, intended to gather our collective knowledge of the political establishment - something we've perhaps neglected since the Healey plan of '76. Basically we're trying to collate key facts - who's associated with who, who voted for what, what kind of pan-dimensional squidthing ate and replaced whose brain."
"You mean like TheyWorkForYou, but with ineffable alien gods from somewhere we inadequately describe as hell?"
"Actually, the formal name is WhoWorksForThem. And we're beginning to worry about Tom Steinberg. But that's the idea. Haven't you ever wondered what went wrong with Peter Hain? Where they found Tony Blair? How Mandelson got like that? If William Hague is alive? Why did they have to get rid of Charles Kennedy, and why they sent him to the old Benbecula rocket range? What species George Osborne actually is? We have a remarkable amount of implicit expertise here - we're trying to crowdsource it into structured data."
"You mentioned the Healey Plan. What.."
"Technically you don't need to know. But that wasn't long after the creation of the Police National Computer under Roy Jenkins, who as you know had a Bletchley Park background. There was concern that certain field agents had...overreached. There were violations of the Civil Service Code."
"Peter Wright and all that?"
"That was one way of looking at it. Sir Peter chose to be helpful, and the Australians backed us all the way."
"You may have wondered what happened to the LEO Computers intellectual property, to the first patents on packet switching and public key encryption. After the discovery of improprieties at MH, Denis Healey launched the first effort to create a distributed database of the service's political information, based in a cover entity at the National Girobank processing centre in Bootle. The software development team were in the Inland Revenue offices decentralised to Shipley. Data entry was in Longbenton, Newcastle..."
I stared at the government tea in my Vi Reference mug. It looked like childhood - not that it was a reminder of innocence, normality, or love. No, it reminded me of school in the 1980s - it was grey. I expected Angleton to tell me that, unfortunately, there would only be enough textbooks for one between three rather than one between two. Thankfully I realised talking would be better than thinking about that...I always make that mistake.
"Wilson thought there were spies in his office. He thought coup plotters would burst through the garden windows. He was probably in the early stages of Alzheimers, they say.."
"He was more right than you might think. A highly susceptible personality - charming, slightly alienated, ambitious, not deeply principled or introspective. Healey, Callaghan, Sir Frank Cooper - they were very different men. Not enough imagination to end like the PM, but certainly the intelligence to grasp the situation once properly briefed. As were the others - Weinstock, Scanlon, Barbara Castle...it was her data centre, after all."
"So Healey wanted some kind of encrypted USENET for spooks in 1976? To trace..."
"A lot of work was done at ICL, Plessey, Ferranti, GEC-Marconi in Edinburgh and Basildon, DERA Malvern, BT Martlesham Heath, Racal, and elsewhere. You'd be surprised at the scale of the project - and some of the people involved. Mr. Ibrahim was a post-doc, newly arrived at BT MHRC. There's a notable gap in Mr Berners-Lee's career - make of that what you will. The cabinet was not informed except for the GEN-261 committee. Go-live was set for the 29th July, 1980.
We descoped a number of requirements and committed substantial extra resources in late '78 in order to bring forward an initial operating capability. As you know, the rest is history - did you know they actually burned magnetic tape drives in the car park at Martlesham? Must have been a heavy night in the Douglas Bader..."
"I read somewhere that the Queen sent her first e-mail in 1976.."
"You're not wrong - specifically, Her Majesty sent it from the Royal Signals' HQ in Blandford Forum. Sir Frank had a deep commitment to the constitutional niceties. No doubt you understand the importance of out-of-band connectivity.
Anyway, look at this photo."
"You mean...he's one of the undead?"
"Not the rest of them, you idiot!"
Update: Ken MacLeod contributes a much better ending - "Not him - the rest of them, you idiot!"
Viggers as the only human being in the 1922 Committee. I mean, who would believe that thing with the duck house? Clearly a cover story to exfil him before the tentacles closed in...
(Update: Amendment to make clear who's speaking.)
Sunday, November 01, 2009
optimise your social isolation more efficiently
OK, back from eComm in Amsterdam; here's something interesting. Besides all the stuff I was meant to be following for work, we had a presentation from a group of the sort of media-arts types who get a lot of coverage on Bruce Sterling's blog; in fact the whole gig was faintly Beyond the Beyond-esque when it wasn't Charlie Stross-esque. Notably, two projects struck me as emblematic of a certain kind of thinking.
The first one was the Isophone, which is a mashup of a flotation tank and a telephone. The idea is that you sink into yummy sensory deprivation while talking to someone else in the same condition; it looks like this.
Maybe it's just me, but having to take phone calls under a state of total sensory deprivation is not my idea of fun. I couldn't help imagining some sort of nightmarish prison call centre, a whole pool full of them.
Then there was Mutsugoto. Let the official description speak for itself.
Well, I think we can probably guess. Anyway, I found both of them depressing; it also struck me that too many of these projects are all about sucking information out of the virtual space and representing it on a piece of hardware in private space. Basically, a gadget that reads out Twitter feeds, that you're meant to think is your friend. Further, once you get rid of the microphone, pointing device, keyboard, webcam, etc, you're basically watching TV on your own. It's read-only communication into the private realm.
The suit faction in this field, oddly, works the other way round - the M2M (Machine to Machine) community in telecoms, the big IT types, they're all more interested in getting data from the real world and representing it in virtual space. Basically, it's all SCADA applications - monitoring the current status of CO2 pipeline valve number 58634. Flowrate, direction, valve setting and temperature, please, and when did you last have your grease changed?
What seems to be missing from this as an artistic project is sending stuff into the public space. A lot of data gets captured from the public space into the private space; CCTV is one version, promoting your demo on Flickr and taking photos of the cops is another. Nothing much seems to be sent back, though; can't we have truth-screamer robots that run about yelling out under-reported news? Of course, if you or I were to encounter one we'd probably dropkick it into a handy canal. Splosh; "Hey there! CitizenMediaBot is sinking!"
But it would at least be fun, and more fun than gazing at a waldo that turns puce when #drivel is trending again. I suspect there's scope for this with things like Layar, who were also presenting. Then, we're deep into the Strossosphere; "what do we want? Brains!" indeed.
The first one was the Isophone, which is a mashup of a flotation tank and a telephone. The idea is that you sink into yummy sensory deprivation while talking to someone else in the same condition; it looks like this.
Maybe it's just me, but having to take phone calls under a state of total sensory deprivation is not my idea of fun. I couldn't help imagining some sort of nightmarish prison call centre, a whole pool full of them.
Then there was Mutsugoto. Let the official description speak for itself.
Mutsugoto is meant to be installed in the bedrooms of two distant partners. You lay on your bed and wear a special touch-activated ring visible to a camera mounted above. A computer vision system tracks the movement of the ring and projects virtual pen strokes on your body. At the same time these pen strokes are transmitted to and projected on the body of your remote partner. If you follow your partner's movements and your strokes cross, the lines will react with each other and reflect your synchrony. Special bed linens, silk curtains and other aspects of the physical context have been designed to enhance the mood of this romantic communication environment.But what are the civilian applications? As they say.
Well, I think we can probably guess. Anyway, I found both of them depressing; it also struck me that too many of these projects are all about sucking information out of the virtual space and representing it on a piece of hardware in private space. Basically, a gadget that reads out Twitter feeds, that you're meant to think is your friend. Further, once you get rid of the microphone, pointing device, keyboard, webcam, etc, you're basically watching TV on your own. It's read-only communication into the private realm.
The suit faction in this field, oddly, works the other way round - the M2M (Machine to Machine) community in telecoms, the big IT types, they're all more interested in getting data from the real world and representing it in virtual space. Basically, it's all SCADA applications - monitoring the current status of CO2 pipeline valve number 58634. Flowrate, direction, valve setting and temperature, please, and when did you last have your grease changed?
What seems to be missing from this as an artistic project is sending stuff into the public space. A lot of data gets captured from the public space into the private space; CCTV is one version, promoting your demo on Flickr and taking photos of the cops is another. Nothing much seems to be sent back, though; can't we have truth-screamer robots that run about yelling out under-reported news? Of course, if you or I were to encounter one we'd probably dropkick it into a handy canal. Splosh; "Hey there! CitizenMediaBot is sinking!"
But it would at least be fun, and more fun than gazing at a waldo that turns puce when #drivel is trending again. I suspect there's scope for this with things like Layar, who were also presenting. Then, we're deep into the Strossosphere; "what do we want? Brains!" indeed.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
no progress since 1970, except in minor fields such as cost, safety, reliability, capacity, efficiency...
Other things I disagree quite strongly with Charlie Stross about. James Nicoll asks what happens if/when Moore's Law is exhausted. Charlie has a well-known theory about this, based on the aerospace industry's recession in the early 70s.
I disagree, at least in terms of economic, social, and literary possibility. Airliners may not go any faster than they did in 1970, but what Charlie thinks of as a "performance wall" could also be described as "the threshold of significance" or the "economic door". Concorde is the wrong example to look at; the real achievements of the time were the development of the 747 and 737 families, the arrival of autoland and modern avionics through Smiths and Hawker Siddeley, and the creation of Airbus.
Sure, they may not be going faster than Concorde, but there are a lot more of them, their marginal operating cost is a fraction of what it was, they crash a lot less, and they are on time more often. And they are chucking a lot of filth out the back, of course.
Forget Princess Margaret. Civil aviation only became interesting economically or sociologically after Charlie's performance wall - we've had David Frost commuting for the BBC from London to New York, we've had Easyjet ravers/poverty jetset types bouncing from sofa to sofa around Europe, Viktor Bout's inverted triangle trade shipping diamonds out of Africa and guns in, enabled by cheap Antonov-12s and international free trade zones, Kenyan farmers discovering they could get backload freight to Europe for pence. Before the "performance wall", people watched movies about air hostesses; after, they actually flew.
If the analogy holds true, the real change is still to come. It just feels like it's already happened...because science fiction covered it so well in advance, something it notably didn't do with the "aero" bit of aerospace. (O'Neill colonies! Flying cars! No Airbus 320s or Michael O'Learys.)
Also, what's not interesting about locomotive manufacturing?
The CE industry is inherently deflationary -- Moore's law conceals this because we double the number of transistors on a die each generation, but under the hood the prices are falling by c. 20% per annum. Once we stop being able to have more transistors, existing fab lines will be amortized and the products will be commoditized. I speculate that we'll then enter a period where the computer industry splits between (a) high-end well-designed premium kit (cf. Apple) and (b) cheapCheapCHEAP!!! (cf. the netbook sector). And then there'll be a huge recession and layoffs, just as there was in aerospace around 1970 when the industry hit a performance wall (note that airliners today fly no faster than they did in 1970 -- Concorde's champagne quaffing elite aside, travel at over Mach 0.9 is not commercially sustainable).
Ultimately the field will be commoditized and after a period of consolidation and mergers it will become as thoroughly boring to outsiders as locomotive or airliner manufacturing.
The interesting developments will then take place in the areas of networking and software...
I disagree, at least in terms of economic, social, and literary possibility. Airliners may not go any faster than they did in 1970, but what Charlie thinks of as a "performance wall" could also be described as "the threshold of significance" or the "economic door". Concorde is the wrong example to look at; the real achievements of the time were the development of the 747 and 737 families, the arrival of autoland and modern avionics through Smiths and Hawker Siddeley, and the creation of Airbus.
Sure, they may not be going faster than Concorde, but there are a lot more of them, their marginal operating cost is a fraction of what it was, they crash a lot less, and they are on time more often. And they are chucking a lot of filth out the back, of course.
Forget Princess Margaret. Civil aviation only became interesting economically or sociologically after Charlie's performance wall - we've had David Frost commuting for the BBC from London to New York, we've had Easyjet ravers/poverty jetset types bouncing from sofa to sofa around Europe, Viktor Bout's inverted triangle trade shipping diamonds out of Africa and guns in, enabled by cheap Antonov-12s and international free trade zones, Kenyan farmers discovering they could get backload freight to Europe for pence. Before the "performance wall", people watched movies about air hostesses; after, they actually flew.
If the analogy holds true, the real change is still to come. It just feels like it's already happened...because science fiction covered it so well in advance, something it notably didn't do with the "aero" bit of aerospace. (O'Neill colonies! Flying cars! No Airbus 320s or Michael O'Learys.)
Also, what's not interesting about locomotive manufacturing?
Sunday, May 10, 2009
IP over Mud
Remember cows with blogs? Sure ya do. This week I was talking M2M technology again, but with people who are way more hardcore about it than Scottish farmers wanting to give their cows RSS feeds, or even wind turbine engineers wanting to monitor the state of their bearings and power-control electronics. Putting control logic on the seabed is problematic, but putting it at the end of a drill, thousands of feet below it, at silly temperatures?
That's science fiction, but the scary bit was the communications question. You can't really do anything like that with radio, so they modulate the flow of drilling mud up to the surface to squeeze out a few bits/second of bandwidth. Seriously - it's called mud-pulse telemetry. Of course, as you can only hope for 3 or so bits a second at the depths in question, this is why the control logic needs to be down at the drill and largely automatic.
We are, of course, talking oil here, and specifically the ultra-deepwater stuff BG Group has hacked out a speciality in. What struck me is that people constantly talk of the supposed complexity and difficulty of utilising renewable energy, and they tend to assume that oil is simple to extract. Intelligent drills and mud-pulse telemetry to you.
That's science fiction, but the scary bit was the communications question. You can't really do anything like that with radio, so they modulate the flow of drilling mud up to the surface to squeeze out a few bits/second of bandwidth. Seriously - it's called mud-pulse telemetry. Of course, as you can only hope for 3 or so bits a second at the depths in question, this is why the control logic needs to be down at the drill and largely automatic.
We are, of course, talking oil here, and specifically the ultra-deepwater stuff BG Group has hacked out a speciality in. What struck me is that people constantly talk of the supposed complexity and difficulty of utilising renewable energy, and they tend to assume that oil is simple to extract. Intelligent drills and mud-pulse telemetry to you.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
ranting in Clerkenwell
So, Chris "Chris" Williams, J. Carter Wood, and I met up in London to attend the aftermath of this ORG event. A good time was had, even though we didn't find Charlie or Cory at the Three Kings; we heard of how I made an epic fool of myself in Berlin, how policemen are exported, an uncharacteristic moment of feminism at the Daily Express in the 1920s, British advisors to South Vietnam, and Chris's vow to avoid sit-ins until his kids have grown up. The crowd was unusual; a mixture of tall and skinny fashion-twits and politicised computer-folk. Which is roughly what it's like in my head, I suppose.
Ballard, appreciated
I've been reading J.G. Ballard on and off for years. The first thing I read of his was the short story My Dream of Flying to Wake Island, which was included in an anthology edited by (of all people) Frederick Forsyth. I remember vividly the weird, inspiring force of it. Much later I got into him seriously; our local library held a surprising amount of his science fiction.
It was permission to wonder at what mental processes underlay the bizarre things that powerful and respectable people were constantly doing, to treat the present in the same way that other SF writers treat the future and most other writers treat the past. (This is, of course, the distinctive achievement of the New Wave he co-founded.) And, no matter how weird and sinister this history of the future became, Ballard offered us no fear of the future.
I regularly complain that British culture is ridden with compulsory nostalgia. In fact, it seems to me that every citizen is required to complete a term of national service in the past and to remain on the reserve in case of a worrisome outbreak of futurity. I wonder what power relationships this nostalgia conscription serves. Ballard, at least, offered an opportunity to desert from compulsory nostalgia, and a compelling vision of reality-as-fantasy that actually seemed to respond to the forces that govern the future - who fucking cares, after all, about tedious British politics and official literature? (That the Grauniad Review asked Martin Amis of all people to reflect on Ballard is the final, confirming stamp on this.)
The Ballardian environment: someone asks Slashdot for advice about assembling a cluster of servers in tropical jungle, nobody seriously asks why. Brazilians borrow a US Navy tactical communications satellite, which turns out to operate entirely in the clear and unsecured, because who'd do that?
A right-wing US politician advises his colleagues to emulate the Taliban because they
Surprising numbers of people believe that spoof rightwing TV blowhard Stephen Colbert is a real rightwing blowhard.
Hedi Slimane photographs the cadets of Saint-Cyr; surprisingly basic drugs reactivate an immune mechanism we stopped using 7 million years ago - and what else? In California, people are knocking down houses that were built last year and the swimming pools are famously turning green.
Somali pirates pursue cocaine-white glassfibre Monegasque superyachts; pirates with media spokesmen, that is. RIP, JGB; if you prefer, that is.
It was permission to wonder at what mental processes underlay the bizarre things that powerful and respectable people were constantly doing, to treat the present in the same way that other SF writers treat the future and most other writers treat the past. (This is, of course, the distinctive achievement of the New Wave he co-founded.) And, no matter how weird and sinister this history of the future became, Ballard offered us no fear of the future.
I regularly complain that British culture is ridden with compulsory nostalgia. In fact, it seems to me that every citizen is required to complete a term of national service in the past and to remain on the reserve in case of a worrisome outbreak of futurity. I wonder what power relationships this nostalgia conscription serves. Ballard, at least, offered an opportunity to desert from compulsory nostalgia, and a compelling vision of reality-as-fantasy that actually seemed to respond to the forces that govern the future - who fucking cares, after all, about tedious British politics and official literature? (That the Grauniad Review asked Martin Amis of all people to reflect on Ballard is the final, confirming stamp on this.)
The Ballardian environment: someone asks Slashdot for advice about assembling a cluster of servers in tropical jungle, nobody seriously asks why. Brazilians borrow a US Navy tactical communications satellite, which turns out to operate entirely in the clear and unsecured, because who'd do that?
A right-wing US politician advises his colleagues to emulate the Taliban because they
"went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes."We know, meanwhile, that the people who did this were the CIA, working for the politicians he supported. As Ballard himself said, of course it's obscene and intended to be so.
Surprising numbers of people believe that spoof rightwing TV blowhard Stephen Colbert is a real rightwing blowhard.
Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements.Accident, or is he deliberately feeding them bad lines? Perhaps that's how Bush got elected.
Hedi Slimane photographs the cadets of Saint-Cyr; surprisingly basic drugs reactivate an immune mechanism we stopped using 7 million years ago - and what else? In California, people are knocking down houses that were built last year and the swimming pools are famously turning green.
Somali pirates pursue cocaine-white glassfibre Monegasque superyachts; pirates with media spokesmen, that is. RIP, JGB; if you prefer, that is.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
alternative Yorkshire
25 years; the strike was the first political event, indeed one of the first events, I actually remember. At least I remember power cuts and TV news broadcasts with the number of weeks the miners had been out counting up. After that, I recall Chernobyl - they set up a radiation monitor in the car park and my mother was interviewed on TV in front of it - and Gorbachev (we had a photo of him, complete with birthmark!), and then, it all starts rolling past.
Years later I actually met Scargill, at a conference of economics students; it was some testimony to his oratory that he was cheered to the echo by an audience that included about fifty per cent Young Conservatives. Perhaps it was the other fifty per cent. The organisers certainly aimed for stimulation - the other keynote speakers were John Redwood and Patrick Minford, of all people. Around the same time I met my first Scargill-hater, who actually was an ex-miner. History is like that.
Here is the man himself's version. I don't know the detailed history well enough to criticise it, although it strikes me that his idea of cutting off the coal supply to the steel industry, a sort of John Robb-ish cascade-failure attack, was based on a fundamentally false assumption. Namely, it assumed Thatcher cared what happened to the steelworks; as we now know, she was just as keen to screw them as she was the miners, and not much better with regard to the downstream steel-consuming industries either.
But one thing I don't think anyone has mentioned about this is that whatever had happened in 1984, there could only ever have been a stay of execution for ten years. In 1995, the starting gun for serious climate fear was fired when the IPCC scenarios crossed the 95% confidence interval into significance; and as James Hansen says, it's the coal. Essentially lumps of carbon, with some added toxic heavy metals for laughs, and there's so much of the stuff that we won't run out before we cook the planet.
Consider the alternate history for a moment; NACODS walk out as well, the government is forced to give in. Thatcher, of course, doesn't quit, but there is either a 1922 Committee coup or else she loses the 1987 election, or perhaps there is a repeat of 1974 - she calls an election for a mandate to take on the miners again, and loses. Neil Kinnock walks into Downing Street, either in a Labour government or a coalition with the Liberals and SDP.
Where do we go from here? The TUC-driven European turn in the Labour Party hasn't happened yet, but neither has the D-Mark shadowing and ERM fiasco. The Labour Party has taken a goodly dose of the new social movements, as in the original time-line, but the prestige of the NUM on the Left would be immense.
But whatever happens in the Kinnock-Steel government, at some point in 1995 the Chief Scientific Advisor walks into the Cabinet Room, and about ten minutes later, all hell breaks loose. After all, in this scenario we've been merrily burning much more coal than in the original timeline for the last ten years, and the coal lobby is the strength of the Left.
The political implications would be more than weird. The activist Left, all other things being equal, is heavily green-influenced, so it ends up against the miners. The mainstream Labour Party is wildly conflicted. And the rightwing science-dodger ecosystem has no choice but to support the miners; Anthony Browne and friends in Doncaster, probably with bags of Exxon-provided cash. Thrill as they try to tack between screwing the government and keeping their North Sea investments.
So the strike 2.0 happens in the late 90s/early 2000s, with mobile phones and the Internet on the protesters' side (flashmobs at Ferrybridge), tasers and pervasive CCTV on the police side, and all the party affiliations surreally flipped. God knows how that would have played out.
Someone ought to write the book.
One thing this brings up is just how necessary social democracy is; sometimes, it's not enough to be right, and huge impersonal forces are going to work their will, like the steadily rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And then, it's up to the society we create around ourselves whether the changes that will happen will be humane or brutal and tragic.
Years later I actually met Scargill, at a conference of economics students; it was some testimony to his oratory that he was cheered to the echo by an audience that included about fifty per cent Young Conservatives. Perhaps it was the other fifty per cent. The organisers certainly aimed for stimulation - the other keynote speakers were John Redwood and Patrick Minford, of all people. Around the same time I met my first Scargill-hater, who actually was an ex-miner. History is like that.
Here is the man himself's version. I don't know the detailed history well enough to criticise it, although it strikes me that his idea of cutting off the coal supply to the steel industry, a sort of John Robb-ish cascade-failure attack, was based on a fundamentally false assumption. Namely, it assumed Thatcher cared what happened to the steelworks; as we now know, she was just as keen to screw them as she was the miners, and not much better with regard to the downstream steel-consuming industries either.
But one thing I don't think anyone has mentioned about this is that whatever had happened in 1984, there could only ever have been a stay of execution for ten years. In 1995, the starting gun for serious climate fear was fired when the IPCC scenarios crossed the 95% confidence interval into significance; and as James Hansen says, it's the coal. Essentially lumps of carbon, with some added toxic heavy metals for laughs, and there's so much of the stuff that we won't run out before we cook the planet.
Consider the alternate history for a moment; NACODS walk out as well, the government is forced to give in. Thatcher, of course, doesn't quit, but there is either a 1922 Committee coup or else she loses the 1987 election, or perhaps there is a repeat of 1974 - she calls an election for a mandate to take on the miners again, and loses. Neil Kinnock walks into Downing Street, either in a Labour government or a coalition with the Liberals and SDP.
Where do we go from here? The TUC-driven European turn in the Labour Party hasn't happened yet, but neither has the D-Mark shadowing and ERM fiasco. The Labour Party has taken a goodly dose of the new social movements, as in the original time-line, but the prestige of the NUM on the Left would be immense.
But whatever happens in the Kinnock-Steel government, at some point in 1995 the Chief Scientific Advisor walks into the Cabinet Room, and about ten minutes later, all hell breaks loose. After all, in this scenario we've been merrily burning much more coal than in the original timeline for the last ten years, and the coal lobby is the strength of the Left.
The political implications would be more than weird. The activist Left, all other things being equal, is heavily green-influenced, so it ends up against the miners. The mainstream Labour Party is wildly conflicted. And the rightwing science-dodger ecosystem has no choice but to support the miners; Anthony Browne and friends in Doncaster, probably with bags of Exxon-provided cash. Thrill as they try to tack between screwing the government and keeping their North Sea investments.
So the strike 2.0 happens in the late 90s/early 2000s, with mobile phones and the Internet on the protesters' side (flashmobs at Ferrybridge), tasers and pervasive CCTV on the police side, and all the party affiliations surreally flipped. God knows how that would have played out.
Someone ought to write the book.
One thing this brings up is just how necessary social democracy is; sometimes, it's not enough to be right, and huge impersonal forces are going to work their will, like the steadily rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And then, it's up to the society we create around ourselves whether the changes that will happen will be humane or brutal and tragic.
Blogging Rugby League: while you're playing it
Manly-Warringah RLFC's successful trip to the UK in the last few weeks, which saw them beat Leeds for the World Club Challenge, was assisted by an interesting piece of technology. All the players have been wearing networked GPS data loggers during the games, so Statto gets a live feed of data on precisely where they move, how fast, and what they're doing. And just how hard they go in; there's a three axis accelerometer in there too. It's the work of their conditioner Dean Robinson.
Aussie clubs have been very good with statistics for years; in the 1990s, the Brits were still very impressed with themselves for counting tackles while the Aussies were looking at how you could measure the energy battle and coach to tire the other side out. But this impresses even me.
Weirdly, in a sense their team is blogging all the time it's playing. Discussion ensues, over here. They used to say that you can smoke while playing a game but not while playing a sport, but then, the legendary French fullback Puig-Aubert used to bum fags off the fans and he was in the French World Cup winning side of 1951. It's probably true that you can blog while playing a game, etc, but as you can see, technological change is even getting rid of that distinction.
In a surveillance society, you can be a star blogger without even noticing.
Aussie clubs have been very good with statistics for years; in the 1990s, the Brits were still very impressed with themselves for counting tackles while the Aussies were looking at how you could measure the energy battle and coach to tire the other side out. But this impresses even me.
Weirdly, in a sense their team is blogging all the time it's playing. Discussion ensues, over here. They used to say that you can smoke while playing a game but not while playing a sport, but then, the legendary French fullback Puig-Aubert used to bum fags off the fans and he was in the French World Cup winning side of 1951. It's probably true that you can blog while playing a game, etc, but as you can see, technological change is even getting rid of that distinction.
In a surveillance society, you can be a star blogger without even noticing.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
a genuinely sinister drug
I liked this (via):
And then I jumped under a tram. No. In fact I thought someone should write the book before someone actually invented it, with whatever nightmarish meat-hook consequences that would have. Then I forgot all about it at wheels-up, until now, when the approach of the next 3GSM brought it slithering to mind.
Although technically speaking releasing testosterone precursors on the world’s trading floors to try to rally valuations wasn’t criminal as such, the affected traders lobbied to declare it illegal. But governments liked the idea too much, and oxygen masks were forbidden.I think it was at last 3GSM I suddenly thought of the possibility of someone inventing a sales drug - a pill that would fill you with energy and induce repetitive behaviour (always be closing, right?), whilst at the same time making you hypersensitive to others' emotions...but completely indifferent to them, and also completely incurious about what you were doing. The street, or the Street, would probably call it Animal Spirit.
(Electronic traders were of course immune, but they knew floor traders would be bullish and that was enough for them to become so, too. Soon there was no need to spend on the chemicals anymore.)
And then I jumped under a tram. No. In fact I thought someone should write the book before someone actually invented it, with whatever nightmarish meat-hook consequences that would have. Then I forgot all about it at wheels-up, until now, when the approach of the next 3GSM brought it slithering to mind.
Tuesday, December 02, 2008
will you stop fiddling with that thing?
Cool; an application that uses rules you give it to generate weird and three-dimensional graphics. (Via Sterling, who else.) This comes to mind, though; what if it could generate STL computer-aided design files? They are the kind that the RepRap's host software eats, I think. And making them in hardware, you have to admit, is just that crucial bit cooler.
Especially when the RepRap ends up surrounding itself in increasingly tiny interlocking cubes, like that spider in the J.G. Ballard story whose web is made of brain tissue, and which eventually goes mad and strangles itself. Hey, you'd get an Arts Council grant for the film, if not the installation. A tad messy even for an art establishment that loved Tracey Emin.
Especially when the RepRap ends up surrounding itself in increasingly tiny interlocking cubes, like that spider in the J.G. Ballard story whose web is made of brain tissue, and which eventually goes mad and strangles itself. Hey, you'd get an Arts Council grant for the film, if not the installation. A tad messy even for an art establishment that loved Tracey Emin.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Is this the CIA? Is this the IRA? Is this the UDA? No, it’s the Grauniad…
An interesting document was turned up in the course of the row about John Brennan, the CIA officer who was the Obama team's original choice as intelligence chief before he was dropped as being insufficiently opposed to torture, under a volley of criticism from the blogosphere. ("Opposition was mostly confined to liberal blogs," said the NYT.) Here's an interview he did with PBS television.
Miaow. So catty you could throw him a ball of wool!
Yes. Yes. Which is also why it's important to maintain a independent career-path there, like it is in the civil service. I was very surprised to learn that had Brennan been appointed, he would have been a rare bird as a career spook in charge of The Community. Mind you, the three best MI5 chiefs - Guy Liddell, David Petrie, and Martin Furnival-Jones, in my opinion - were respectively an army officer, a cop, and a professional spook, so British experience doesn't necessarily corroborate this.
Clearly it was right to drop him; but it worries me that getting rid of the neocons and torture fans will require people who are a) clued-in about the intelligence service, b) committed to cleaning up, c) ruthless bureaucratic thugs, and if possible d) personally untainted.
Regarding intelligence and independence, meanwhile, this blog has often said that one of the main reasons why the UK got involved in all this is that we don't have an independent reconnaissance satellite capability. Out of the major powers in Europe, the UK, Spain and Italy went to the war; neither the UK nor Spain has an imagery satellite, and Italy launched one jointly with France a few months after Iraq. France and Germany both have their own synthetic-aperture radar sats, and didn't go to the war. Poland, Romania, et al have large armies but no recce capability and they went.
But perhaps this isn't as significant as it used to be. It appears that The Guardian is the first newspaper to become an independent space-faring power. Seriously.
What might have happened or not happened had somebody tried this earlier is a very interesting question. Of course, finding the Sirius Star is a fairly easy challenge - we know where to look, she is a huge and unambiguous target, and she is nicely contrasting with the sea in a part of the world where the skies are usually clear. We still need SAR capability of our own, quite possibly more than we need Trident, and IKONOS won't sell you that.
[INTERVIEWER]:Just before 9/11, in that summer and the spring, how hard was Tenet pushing on the terrorism threat?You heard the guy - they didn't appreciate the threat from Al-Qa'ida because they were busy ginning-up a war with Iraq. And who was responsible for this?
[BRENNAN]:I think he was pushing at every opportunity he had. ... George and [former CTC Director] Cofer [Black] were very much of a mind-set that we can't sit back and wait; we need to do things. We need to do things in Afghanistan. We need to go after Al Qaeda. We need to ratchet up the pressure on the Taliban.
George took several trips out to Saudi Arabia and other places to try to gain support from the Arab states to try to put pressure on the Taliban to give up bin Laden and others. George would knock on any door. He would pursue any course. I think what he was trying to do, prior to 9/11, was to make sure the administration was focused on that.
[INTERVIEWER]: And were they?
I think they were aware of the issue. I don't think they, in fact, appreciated the seriousness of it, because I think they were trying to get their ducks in a line on a number of fronts to include Iraq prior to 9/11.
[INTERVIEWER]: When did you get the first hints ... that there was this movement in the direction of Iraq ...?
[BRENNAN]: The train started to leave the station before the election of 2000, with the neocons putting things out. There was a real focus that we needed to do something about Iraq. It was gaining momentum and strength. And with [Iraqi National Congress founder Ahmad] Chalabi and [former Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard] Perle and others feeding those fires, I do think they just had a complete lack of understanding of the complexity of doing something like that.
They're very outspoken and vocal about the need to take action. It's easy to execute; if there is criticism that is being made of this administration, [it] is that the decision to take action is only part of the challenge. It's the follow-through; it's the strategic planning afterward. Those areas really need to be paid attention to, because the U.S. military [has] no problem as far as just decimating the Iraqi army, but the people like Chalabi and the other neocons, and people like [then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy] Doug Feith, who I think has a very superficial understanding of some of these issues -- I don't know how much time Doug Feith has spent in the Middle East or in Iraq, but it's a very, very complex society.
Miaow. So catty you could throw him a ball of wool!
[INTERVIEWER, talking about Paul Pilar and the Iraq NIE]: He told us that ... even at the time, he wasn't aware about how politicized it was, but he was -- especially as he looks back on it, especially around the "white paper" -- really embarrassed, I think is the word he used at how faulty it was. Did it feel that way at the time, or does it just look that way in hindsight?Ah, I see. The facts were being fixed around the policy. The intelligence was being, ah, sexed up. Recognising this ought to be the criterion of seriousness for anyone seeking a post in the intelligence/foreign policy complex, or indeed anything else. That Brennan does so and says so openly is a very strong mark in his favour, as is this:
[BRENNAN]: At the time there were a lot of concerns that it was being politicized by certain individuals within the administration that wanted to get that intelligence base that would justify going forward with the war.
[INTERVIEWER]: Could I ask you who?
Some of the neocons that you refer to were determined to make sure that the intelligence was going to support the ultimate decision.
That's where the issue of maintaining an independent intelligence organization is so critically important, because departments have certain policy objectives and goals. If you have a department such as the Department of Defense that controls the intelligence function as well, there is a great potential for that intelligence to be skewed, either wittingly or unwittingly, in support of policy objectives.
Yes. Yes. Which is also why it's important to maintain a independent career-path there, like it is in the civil service. I was very surprised to learn that had Brennan been appointed, he would have been a rare bird as a career spook in charge of The Community. Mind you, the three best MI5 chiefs - Guy Liddell, David Petrie, and Martin Furnival-Jones, in my opinion - were respectively an army officer, a cop, and a professional spook, so British experience doesn't necessarily corroborate this.
Clearly it was right to drop him; but it worries me that getting rid of the neocons and torture fans will require people who are a) clued-in about the intelligence service, b) committed to cleaning up, c) ruthless bureaucratic thugs, and if possible d) personally untainted.
Regarding intelligence and independence, meanwhile, this blog has often said that one of the main reasons why the UK got involved in all this is that we don't have an independent reconnaissance satellite capability. Out of the major powers in Europe, the UK, Spain and Italy went to the war; neither the UK nor Spain has an imagery satellite, and Italy launched one jointly with France a few months after Iraq. France and Germany both have their own synthetic-aperture radar sats, and didn't go to the war. Poland, Romania, et al have large armies but no recce capability and they went.
But perhaps this isn't as significant as it used to be. It appears that The Guardian is the first newspaper to become an independent space-faring power. Seriously.
From a vantage point 423 miles above the Earth, the lawless waters of the Gulf of Aden appear tranquil and the 330-metre-long ship sitting low under a £68m cargo looks like a tiny green cigar floating on an inky ocean.I love the "commissioned by the Guardian and hurtling over Africa at four miles a second" bit. That's incredibly science-fiction, and in a good way - Arthur C. Clarke would be delighted. This has been possible for some time; who else remembers poring over GlobalSecurity.org's IKONOS or DigitalGlobe shot of the day in the bullshit-rockin' autumn of 2001? But as far as I know, this is the first attempt by a media organisation to acquire overhead imagery on an operational timescale. Hey, it's Tim Worstall's worst nightmare - Polly Toynbee in spaaace!
These pictures, taken by a satellite commissioned by the Guardian and hurtling over Africa at four miles a second, show the Sirius Star, the Saudi supertanker which 12 days ago became the biggest prize ever seized by the Somali pirates who have claimed the Gulf of Aden as their hunting ground.
What might have happened or not happened had somebody tried this earlier is a very interesting question. Of course, finding the Sirius Star is a fairly easy challenge - we know where to look, she is a huge and unambiguous target, and she is nicely contrasting with the sea in a part of the world where the skies are usually clear. We still need SAR capability of our own, quite possibly more than we need Trident, and IKONOS won't sell you that.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
World of Charlie Stross Watch
Zombies march on Sarah Palin campaign event, as they do in Halting State (although this seems to have been planned well in advance, and that was a flashmob). Charlie couldn't predict Sarah Palin, however; politics can always outweird science fiction.
Relatedly, the BT 21CN network upgrade always promised to unearth a ton of weird things in the way of surplus real estate. And the daddy of them all, the fortified Kingsway long-lines exchange under High Holborn is on the market. Originally built as a deep air-raid shelter, with a view to later being part of the Central Line, it became part of Special Operations Executive and then, in 1954, one of four major long distance switching centres that got deep bunkers. The others are or were in Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow. The Manchester facility, codenamed GUARDIAN as in the newspaper, caught fire a few years back, causing a major outage across much of the North West.
There's video, too; what struck me is that the entire site is painted Light Straw, BT's standard colour for absolutely everything (including vans when I was a kid), throughout. Supposedly they rejected the first Ericsson AXE digital switch because it didn't come in light straw.
Among other things, the Kingsway site was the terminal for the first transatlantic telephone cables, and like all really cool stuff, was imported into the science-fiction canon in 1980 by James Herbert, who gave it mutant rats. Read the whole thing; there are some great stories - they locked the facility down for nuclear attack in October 1962 and didn't come up for two weeks, occasionally it overheated and bits of the walls melted, the canteen originally served a three-course dinner and had trompe l'oeil murals of tropical islands for windows, there was at one point a pub down there as well, and supposedly the original builders were "from another European country and didn't know where they were".
Or *what* they were? Seriously; it's so Laundryesque it's not true, especially because the SOE department that was down there packed up lock, stock and barrel on VE Day and BT was never informed what they had been up to. (The Laundry, of course, is a section of SOE that somehow didn't get shut down in 1945 by the career spooks in SIS.)
But the really spooky and science-fictional detail is this: there are no rats.
Relatedly, the BT 21CN network upgrade always promised to unearth a ton of weird things in the way of surplus real estate. And the daddy of them all, the fortified Kingsway long-lines exchange under High Holborn is on the market. Originally built as a deep air-raid shelter, with a view to later being part of the Central Line, it became part of Special Operations Executive and then, in 1954, one of four major long distance switching centres that got deep bunkers. The others are or were in Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow. The Manchester facility, codenamed GUARDIAN as in the newspaper, caught fire a few years back, causing a major outage across much of the North West.
There's video, too; what struck me is that the entire site is painted Light Straw, BT's standard colour for absolutely everything (including vans when I was a kid), throughout. Supposedly they rejected the first Ericsson AXE digital switch because it didn't come in light straw.
Among other things, the Kingsway site was the terminal for the first transatlantic telephone cables, and like all really cool stuff, was imported into the science-fiction canon in 1980 by James Herbert, who gave it mutant rats. Read the whole thing; there are some great stories - they locked the facility down for nuclear attack in October 1962 and didn't come up for two weeks, occasionally it overheated and bits of the walls melted, the canteen originally served a three-course dinner and had trompe l'oeil murals of tropical islands for windows, there was at one point a pub down there as well, and supposedly the original builders were "from another European country and didn't know where they were".
Or *what* they were? Seriously; it's so Laundryesque it's not true, especially because the SOE department that was down there packed up lock, stock and barrel on VE Day and BT was never informed what they had been up to. (The Laundry, of course, is a section of SOE that somehow didn't get shut down in 1945 by the career spooks in SIS.)
But the really spooky and science-fictional detail is this: there are no rats.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
more unwritten books
This is fascinating - a drug that up-regulates the rate of neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons, in your brain, which may be a treatment for depression. Obviously the risks are around what happens to the new neurons. I can't help thinking there's a science fiction outcome in this somewhere.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Two cows
He imagined that satellite broadcasting might help a hundred Indian villages save two cows a year and understood what an impact that might have. Says a commenter at PZ Myers' place, on the occasion of Arthur C. Clarke's death. Two cows a year; now that's genius. I can't presume to say whether this came true; I don't have any data on satellites and Bos indicus. But I do have some numbers on fish.
Brough Turner likes to keep track of this stuff, and here's an actual peer-reviewed study. You can get a presentation version here (pdf). On the coast of Kerala, not all that far from Clarke's home, mobile phone networks deployed in stages down the coast between 1997 and 2000; this graph shows what happened next.
Price is on the Y axis, time on the X. Not just that, but the improvement in allocative efficiency led to an 8% increase in the fishermen's profits and a 4% drop in the price to the customer; at the same time, the quantity of fish going to waste went down from 6% of the catch to near zero.
VSAT.
Ericsson RBS2111.
I was given Of Time and Stars as a very little boy; I am frankly terrified by the number of people posting all over the Web to say how much it inspired them with the sense of wonder and joy of science...what future was it preparing us for?
Brough Turner likes to keep track of this stuff, and here's an actual peer-reviewed study. You can get a presentation version here (pdf). On the coast of Kerala, not all that far from Clarke's home, mobile phone networks deployed in stages down the coast between 1997 and 2000; this graph shows what happened next.
Price is on the Y axis, time on the X. Not just that, but the improvement in allocative efficiency led to an 8% increase in the fishermen's profits and a 4% drop in the price to the customer; at the same time, the quantity of fish going to waste went down from 6% of the catch to near zero.
VSAT.
Ericsson RBS2111.
I was given Of Time and Stars as a very little boy; I am frankly terrified by the number of people posting all over the Web to say how much it inspired them with the sense of wonder and joy of science...what future was it preparing us for?
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