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Odd Lots

  • Egad. No, egad squared: A major literary agency has asked to see the full manuscript of Ten Gentle Opportunities. The novel is done, but I still have to format it for submission and write the synopsis and logline. I’m going to be busy for a few days, that is fersure.
  • IBM is taking a new slant on fluidic computers, one that operates via charged fluids. The hope is that this will allow better modeling of human brain operation. I’m skeptical, but hey, it’s a species of nanocomputer, and I’m certainly bullish on those. (Thanks to Mike Reith for the link.)
  • If anybody reading this has a 3D printer, I’d like to ask: Does the extruded plastic stick to clean copper-clad PCB stock? The obvious idea is to lay down a single-slice pattern in the form of PC pads and then etch the board with the plastic as resist. I don’t see much about this online.
  • From Chris Gerrib: How American radio stations got their call signs. One minor refinement: US callsigns beginning with AAA-ALZ and NAA to NZZ are not exclusively military. Amateur radio callsigns have used those prefixes for at least 35 years. (An OTA friend of mine outside Chicago got his Extra and selected AA9J as his call in, I think, 1976.)
  • People always seem to be recording meteors on dash cameras. I now have a dash camera. If I put it on my dash, will I see a meteor? Or will I get my money back? (Whoops. Found it in the bushes. All finds final. No refunds.)
  • Speaking of dash cameras: The manufacturer of the little sports camera I found in my bushes issued a DMCA takedown notice to a reviewer, on trademark grounds. (The DMCA has nothing to do with trademark abuse.) Hey, GoPro, Barbra is singing. Backtracking about the blunder will not help you. (Thanks to Tom Roderick for alerting me to this.)
  • Salads are way more dangerous than hamburgers. Alas, you can’t grill salad until it’s done to the center.
  • From Michael Covington comes a link to a story about how a Medieval copyist’s cat peed on his manuscript. The scribe drew a peeing cat on the damaged section, with an appropriate curse in Latin.
  • And we think we have a junk DNA problem: Amoeba proteus has 290 billion (yes, billion) base pairs in its genome, as compared to homo sap’s piddling 2.9 billion.
  • The reason all of us baby boomers didn’t die as grade schoolers may be that none of us lived in rich-guy gonzo-modern homes like these. (Why did I think that these houses were designed to ernhance estate tax revenues?)

Odd Lots

Score! The Phone-Inside-A-Tablet Concept, Now From ASUS

asus-padfone-slot.jpg

I don’t know where my ideas come from, so don’t ask. However, I do get ideas. Most of them come to nothing. Every now and again, however, I score.

Back at Clarion in 1973, I wrote an otherwise dorky novelette entitled “But Will They Come When You Do Call For Them?” in which I predicted something very like the World-Wide Web. It was over twenty years later that I realized I’d been scooped by H. G. Wells, who published his idea of the World Brain in 1937. (I’d never heard of the World Brain until I read about it on…the Web.) Hey, if you’re gonna get scooped, get scooped by the best.

In 1993, I got an idea for something I called The All Volunteer Virtual Encyclopedia of Absolutely Everything. It came out of the Information Superhighway fever (remember that?) and did not postulate HTTP, which was a new and obscure protocol at the time I was doing my research. Functionally, however, it was Wikipedia, or at least Wikipedia minus its idiotic Not Notable fetish.

Jim Strickland told me that I came very close to describing Second Life three years before it went live, with my “RAD Mars” concept piece in the final issue of Visual Developer. I think there were other stabs at that concept abroad at the time, so I don’t consider it as big a score. Still, it’s a score.

Which brings us to a news item I ran across this morning while I was scanning the World Brain. (Or the Universal Data Engineering Project, as I had more humbly named it in 1973.) ASUS has unveiled the Padfone 2, a smartphone that plugs into a 10″ “dumb” tablet. Pull that animation around–it’s very cool. The PadFone 2 is the newest rev of a product announced last spring that I missed somehow. (2012 was the second-worst year of my life. I missed a lot.) Here’s another detailed description from Engadget. The ASUS PadFone product line is the first real-world stab at a concept I described here on Contra back in 2008. That was in the thick of the netbook era, post-Kindle but pre-iPad, and the notion of a general-purpose touchscreen tablet was still obscure. What I wanted was a dockable display into which my smartphone plugged, with storage and network communications on the smartphone. And dayum if that isn’t more or less precisely what ASUS offers in the PadFone.

So forgive me if I sound like I’m gloating. I’m gloating. This may be the most accurate technology prediction I’ve ever made, and I made it almost five years ago.

Back in 2008 I considered patenting the idea, but only briefly. A patent would have cost me $10,000 and more time than I had to spare right then. Worse, I consider the idea only half a notch more than obvious, and when people patent the obvious it makes my blood boil.

I am a big fan of ASUS, and I own a much-loved and much-used Transformer Prime. I wish them no ill, but guys, put that patent application down. I thought of it five years ago.

Odd Lots

Does Steampunk Really Humanize Our Gadgets?

Bill Cherepy (and a couple of others since) sent me an interesting link to a piece on Boing Boing arguing (I think) that steampunk makes our gadgets more human. It’s a headscratcher, since I don’t think the article text supports the author’s contention. However, it’s an idea worth some thought. I actually agree, if for different reasons:

  • Steampunk gadgets are comprehensible. Most of the tech in our modern phones and computers is black art, even to guys like me with considerable background in electronics. Electric, mechanical, and chemical tech circa 1900 was accessible to anyone with an ounce of brains and some willingness to study.
  • Steampunk gadgets are reproduceable. At home. In your basement. Sure, it would take a little research and pratice, but with nothing more exotic than a lathe and basic chemistry gear you could build most of what we connect with steampunking. Dare you to do that with an iPad.
  • Steampunk gadgets are personal. This is going to earn me some heat, but I think it’s true: Steampunk thingies are in-your-face, not on-your-friends-ist. One of the charms of the steampunk idea is that people interact face-to-face. This keeps trolling to a minimum and fosters at least superficial courtesy, which certainly beats the slobbering hatred that now dominates Facebook.

All that said, I admit that the majority of what I see under the heading “Steampunk” is a species of fantasy, be it of the supernatural (vampires and zombies) or just wildly off-the-edge assumptions of what 1900 technology could accomplish.

The big turn-off I found in cyberpunk was its coldness. Granted this was cultural and not really necessary, but when I played at the edges of cyberpunk years ago it stopped me in my tracks. Cyberpunk was cynicism writ large, and steampunk is optimism gone nuts. Given that cynicism is cowardice (it is, in fact, the fear and loathing of all things human) you can guess where I’m much more likely to tell my tales.

Continuity Pass

I should never promise anything “tomorrow.” Most of the time, the universe conspires with itself to make a liar of me…as it did this time.

Anyway. I have just completed the second pass through Ten Gentle Opportunities. It’s what I call a “continuity pass.” The goal is to ensure that the story makes reasonable sense, taking particular care to repair “plot holes.” It’s not really a polish pass. In a very real sense it’s a tech edit, like those I used to do on magazine articles and still do on book-related material from time to time. Here are some of the things I watch for, and fix when found:

  • People, things, or ideas introduced early in the story but never mentioned again. We all know that stories grow in the telling–but they also contract, and in doing so early elements sometimes get squeezed out. This is especially important in stories (like this one) that took a long, long time to tell.
  • Things introduced later in the story that are not “foreshadowed” and thus may strike the reader as a complete surprise, or (worse) deus ex machina.
  • “Jumps” in a character’s emotional state. Growth and change are important in characterization, and have to be done out where the reader can watch them happen. If a character changes too abruptly, or off where the change can’t be seen, it sounds hokey.
  • General inconsistencies in the ways people and things are treated early on in the story vs. later in the story.
  • Finally, to make sure that all the made-up words are spelled the same way throughout. (This isn’t trivial when the story contains proper names like Ttrynngbrokklynnygyggug and Jrikkjroggmugg.) I originally coined a lot of proper names from Stypek’s universe that had no vowels in them at all, but in workshopping chapters I found that nobody thought this was amusing but me. (Maybe I was a little too impressed with the famous 90’s gag about Clinton air-dropping vowels on Bosnia.) I went back and added just enough vowels to suggest a pronunciation.

There is still polishing to be done, and here and there some stiff rewriting. I simply don’t like Chapter 57, for example. I intend to rewrite it from scratch once I get a little emotional distance from the story. As it’s only 1200 words, the rewriting won’t take long. The rest of the polishing to be done involves watching for “echoes” (words used more than once a little too close in the manuscript) and probably eliminating some adverbs, though I think the current campaign against adverbs is a deranged fetish perpetrated mostly by bad writers and people who teach writing without writing much of anything themselves. Polishing is a separate pass and my next challenge. Much of the first half of the book has already been polished (I’m a compulsive polisher) so the pass won’t take long.

I’ve sent the story to my beta testers, and now I’m waiting to get some reactions. In the meantime there’s a root canal in my future this Wednesday morning. It’s nothing I haven’t known about for some time, and I’ve been through enough of them to have a reasonable idea what I’m in for. One peculiarity of my biochemistry is that the nitrous oxide gas used as a calming agent by some oral surgeons simply doesn’t work for me. The surgeon doing the procedure has an office with an interesting gimmick: flat-panel TV sets in the ceiling, so that while he’s drilling out your molar you can lean back and watch Raiders of the Lost Ark. As for the inevitable anxiety in the runup to a root canal, I suspect that ativan steps in where nitrous fails. We’ll find out on Wednesday.

Explicit. Expliciat. Ludere Scriptor Eat!

This morning, almost three months late, I found myself writing the last words on the first draft of my novel Ten Gentle Opportunities. The final line (not counting the epilog, which I wrote months ago) is “Let’s talk.”

So let’s.

Back in 1980, as part of my programming job with Xerox, I was given a tour of the assembly line for the new model copier that my software system was tracking. It was a fascinating business. There was some automation but not a lot. Copiers-in-progress moved along a line, and people bolted/connected things to them, just like Model T Fords. Forklifts and electric carts were running around, carrying pallet loads of parts and subassemblies and lots of other stuff I couldn’t identify. At the end of the line there were ranks of completed model 3300 copiers, waiting to be tested and then plastic-wrapped for shipment. The building holding the assembly line was ginormous, and the interior space was fifty feet high or more.

Given the space it was in, the line seemed awfully, well, two-dimensional.

I’m not sure when I got the idea, exactly, but if the assembly lines of the future are going to be completely robotic, with few or (ideally) no humans standing around while the line is running, why carry parts around on carts? If you can make robot hands good enough to bolt copiers together, you can make robot hands good enough to pitch and catch. Sure, a baseball is an optimal case, but with enough compute power, you should be able to throw a circuit board, a subassembly, or a whole copier from one point to any other point on the floor. Damn, I thought, there’s a story in that somewhere.

The next year, I wrote it. The story was called “Paradise Lased.” It was about such an assembly line, controlled by an experimental AI called Simple Simon. In the story, the copiers have AI too, and one of them comes back for warranty repair with a truly peculiar problem: The copier thinks it’s God. In a corner of the factory, the control head is pulled off the copier so that the rest of the machine can be refurbed and resold. Through a high-speed wireless network, the delusional control head worms its way into the consciousness of the many dimwitted robots in the factory, demanding that they worship it. Simple Simon, being smarter than the robots, refuses. God the Copier declares war.

I finished the story, but never tried to sell it. Even as young and green as I was (29) I knew it was thin gruel. Mostly it was an excuse to imagine an entire robotic manufacturing ecology, and make a little fun of what I considered the extravagantly optimistic AI predictions bouncing around Xerox (and many other places) at that time. There was a human character in the story (one!) but he was just a walking point of view. The story was really about Simple Simon the AI. I was so enchanted by robots throwing capacitor joule grenades and eventually whole copiers at each other that I gave the human character almost nothing to do but run away from the robots and listen to Simple Simon complain. I tossed it into the trunk with an interior vow to do something better with it someday, ideally before it came to pass.

It took two more tries and 31 years, but I did it.

More tomorrow.


By the way, the Latin title to this entry is not my own; I can only dream of knowing Latin that well. It comes from Michael Covington, who offered it when I announced on Facebook this morning that the first draft was finished. Translation:

“It ends. Well does it end. Let the scribe go play!”

Indeed.

Daywander

As I circle the concluding chapters of Ten Gentle Opportunies like a ravening vulture (do vultures raven? If so, what do ravens do?) I discovered this morning while reading email with an iced coffee in hand that Phil Foglio posted a rave of my novel The Cunning Blood, both on the Girl Genius Facebook page and his LiveJournal. (Thanks abundant to Alice Bentley for the tipoff.) Nothing motivates this particular vulture to abandon patience and kill something like a review of what has been (and still is–barely) my only completed full-length novel.

Now I have to kill this thing before it kills me.

(Note that there are other reasons for my slowdown the last couple of weeks, reasons that kept me from attending MileHiCon this weekend. Carol had to take a flight to Chicago on very short notice; more as things become clearer.)

Need. More. Coffee. I’m trying something peculiar here: The new-ish International Delights iced-coffee-in-a-milk-carton product. It’s outside the envelope for me because it’s got sugar in it, so I really bought it as a dessert. The mocha flavor is disappointing. It tastes almost exactly like the chocolate milk I used to drink at the Lane Tech lunchroom. Good if you like that sort of thing, but I want a brew that reminds me less of the clueless nerd I was in high school.

I also need to research the named ingredient “corn syrup.” Is that a new euphemism for HFCS? I know the corn industry is squirming so hard the worms in the gully are worried, but from earlier research I know that corn syrup is mostly glucose/destrose, which while still sugar isn’t as malevolent as HFCS seems to be.

Flying back from Hawaii I attempted to watch a rip of an episode from the original Outer Limits series on my Transformer Prime, and discovered something interesting: The throughput from the MicroSD card slot is insufficient to render the video on the Transformer’s display. It’s not exactly pixellation, but more like the sort of herringbone interference my ham radio signal used to put on broadcast TV. Regardless, it made watching the video impossible. Then, when I simply copied the .avi file to internal storage, it played perfectly. I know from previous experience that mp3 files play fine from MicroSD, and ebooks are not an problem at all.

Separate but still important issue: The Transformer Prime did not have the audio signal to drown out jet engine noise on our long flight. So even once I copied the episode to internal storage, I couldn’t make out the dialog half the time. That was the only video I brought, so more research is necessary. Video rips are peculiar things, and I certainly need better headphones.

I’ve broken a lot of light bulbs in my sixty years, but this recent casualty from the lamp over the stove was remarkable:

Broken Lightbulb.jpg

Secret? The touch of a rag wet with cold water. Yes, the bulb was off , but had been on all morning until five seconds previous. Duhhh. Light bulbs are not made of Pyrex.

My Hair Is ( Finally) On Fire

I’m certainly behind schedule. I’m modestly over (word) budget. I’m still wracked by doubts as to whether the whole loony concept makes sense. But today I experienced a breakthrough, and finally, as Jim Strickland so wonderfully puts it, began writing like “your hair is on fire.” My final, trademark Jeff Duntemann mayhem-filled action climax is well underway. I hope to finish it (and thus the book) in less than a week. To do that, my hair will have to be on fire and remain on fire for a little while longer.

I’ve done this before. I’ve actually done it a lot, which may, at least in part, explain my hairline. In my system of measurement, one “Writing Like Your Hair Is On Fire” unit is equal to 2,000 words captured in one 24-hour period. In my history as a fiction writer, I’ve achieved as many as 2.7 WLYHIOFs. In nonfiction I’ve managed 4.5–and that was back when my hair was vanishing at 40% the speed of light. No wonder.

Ten Gentle Opportunities has been an excruciating project for a number of reasons. It’s humor, and humor is hard. More than that, it’s a love story. It’s actually either two or two and a half love stories, depending on which Love Story standard unit you use. I’ve never written a love story. Now I’m writing two and a half of them, all at once. For the love stories to make sense, I also have to include an AI sex scene. It’s actually an AI menage a trois…but before anybody gets bent out of shape, I need to add that the AIs remain fully clothed throughout (Simple Simon is incapable of removing his clothes) and no naughty bits are mentioned whatsoever. Among humans, sex (as my mother so often insisted) may well be chemistry. Among the AIs of the Tooniverse, it’s undocumented kernel call 105.

For the past ten days I’ve been gnawing on the love story problem, writing a few hundred words, then yanking them out and writing another (different) few hundred words when the first batch didn’t look right. Humorous or not, I’m trying very hard to create characters with some depth to them, which means that character and relationship arcs are important. In this kind of writing, you can’t just reach for the starships anytime you get bored with the people. (I’m famous for that.) I have a plan, and I’m stickin’ to it. If it means blowing my self-imposed deadline, so be it.

As for the hair, hey: There is life after hair. I’m living proof.

Worldcon Wrapup

2001lostsciencecover.jpgIt was a relief to step off the plane in Colorado Springs and grab a chestful of thin, dry air. I’ve lived in dry climates since early 1987, and I’ve lost my taste for late-summer Chicago mugginess. The toughest part of Chicon 7, which concluded on Monday, was going back and forth across the Chicago River between the Hyatt and the Sheraton and wondering if I were walking above the river or wading through it. The con went very well, considering my aversion to crowds. I got to see a lot of people I don’t see very much, granted that I missed a few. I heard some readings and workshopped a couple of stories with my friends from the 2011 Taos Toolbox workshop. And the Hugos, which I haven’t seen in person since (I think) 1986. John Scalzi was easily the best Hugos toastmaster I’ve seen since I began attending worldcons in 1974. He was funny, he was terse, he was great at improv, and he held the awards for the winners as they spoke their thank-yous into the mic. (There was nowhere else to put them.) He’s losing his hair and doesn’t shave his head–he certainly gets private points from me for that.

I was not aware of it at the time, obviously, but a misguided attempt at automated copyright protection killed the stream that Chicon was sending out to people who couldn’t be at the con. This was idiotic on so many levels–the video clips being “protected” had been given to the con by the studios specifically to be shown at the awards–and reminds us that robots should not be enforcers. Never.

The very idea of copyright, on which artists in many areas depend, is being weakened in the public mind by crap like this. If something eventually kills copyright, it won’t be the pirates.

I had a marvelous interview with the fiction editor at a major press, at which he agreed to read the manuscript for Ten Gentle Opportunities. Better than that, he took notes on my experience and my background (I brought both The Cunning Blood and one of my computer books) and suggested that what he might like even more from me than a humorous fantasy mashup was a good ripping hard SF action adventure.

I wondered for a moment: Gosh, could I do that? (Only a moment. A short moment. Ok, no moment at all.) I had intended to pursue my first Drumlins novel The Everything Machine after TGO was on its way. Now, I’m not so sure. The Molten Flesh is less far along, but it may get promoted to the top of the queue. We’ll see.

I did spend a fair bit of time with my sister and her girls down in the dealers room. (She and Bill publish and sell filk CDs as Dodeka Records.) As usual, I did a little shopping, emphasis on little. (We didn’t drive, so whatever I bought had to be packed home on what I call a “sewer-pipe jet.”) But I found something wonderful, as Dave Bowman notably said in 2010.

Across the aisle from Dodeka Records was Apogee Prime, a publisher specializing in aerospace books in several categories. They had a new book that, at 12″ X 14.5″, was mighty big for my creaky old suitcase, but I bought it anyway: 2001: The Lost Science. What we’ve got here are original photos, sketches, and literal blueprints of the technologies presented by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Much of the material was thought to be lost, and when the sequel 2010 was filmed in the early 1980s, a lot of it had to be re-created from scratch, often by having artists watch the original movie fifty times with sketchpads in their laps.

The book draws on the personal collection of Frederick I. Ordway III, who is a real rocket scientist and former colleague of Werner Von Braun, and worked on the Explorer 1 project. Kubrick hired Ordway to help him predict, as reasonably and realistically as possible, what space science would be like in the year 2001. This book is a good overview of his predictions, at least those that made it into the 1968 film. Satellites, space stations, nuclear propulsion systems–these were the aches that a certain class of nerdy 16-year-olds were feeling in 1968. For a good many reasons, only some of which I’ve discussed here, 2001 has long been and will likely remain my favorite film of all time. I remember those aches, and wear them proudly, as they are the aches of boys who dare to dream.

This is a coffee table book, but one that you may actually read cover-to-cover. (I’m not quite done but will be soon. There have been times when I’ve had to take a deep breath and set it down.) Softcover. $49. Very highly recommended.