One thing I try to do when writing a story is to pitch the technology right. The Fusion has things that the Republic, for example, wouldn’t have. Travel in the Fusion is always FTL (Faster Than Light) and always safe. It’s something the inhabitants take for granted. The Republic, on the other hand, has to rely on a network of ‘creases’ in another dimension they call ‘hyperspace’, and try to deal with the risks and anomalies that arise from using a medium they don’t fully understand.

The Fusion has such wonderful constructs as working dysons and semi-dysons, whereas the Republic can barely get by with limited terraforming and some anarchic asteroid mining communities living in low-grav. What are these societies’ timelines? On reflection, I think of the Republic as being about 400 years into the future, and the Fusion around 900 years (although the Fusion doesn’t even know Earth exists, so they might be very advanced yet contemporaneous). With such future societies, the issue then becomes making the technology advanced yet accessible.

People are fond of saying that if you plunked a person from Victorian England into the world of today, s/he wouldn’t recognise very much of it. They also quote Moore’s Law that posits, by corollary, a phenomenal increase, almost doubling, in the speed and sophistication of digital electronic devices every few years. While the law itself has proven to be true so far, I believe there’s a basic flaw in the surrounding thinking. Technology itself may have advanced, but the wholesale application of technology has not.

What I’m trying to say is, there is still no universal level of technological sophistication in the world. For every Silicon Valley, for example, there are dozens of unpowered villages, where the inhabitants live their lives in much the same way as their forebears did. Furthermore, all it takes to reduce an advanced edifice like the Valley to the level of more primitive villages is just one natural and capricious disaster. Think of any place around the world after a natural disaster, whether earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, or winter storms. Regardless of which country they took place in, the level of the subsequent technology is pretty well equivalent across locations (i.e. almost nil).

We are not as advanced as we like to think, and to say otherwise is, I feel, hubris on the part of those of us who have been exposed, and inured, to much of modern Western civilisation. On balance, if we average out every person’s experience of technology on Earth, I think we’d find that we are much less advanced than we’d hoped.

So what does this have to do with writing a sci-fi romance set four centuries in the future? Well, I try to use familiar terms so the reader can relate to what I’m trying to describe, and I do it for three reasons:

(1) I don’t want unfamiliar words to interfere with the plot,

(2) I want to establish some commonality between the present and my setting to evoke more reader empathy,

and, most importantly for the purposes of this blog,

(3) I really don’t think our applied technologies will advance at a cracking pace.

In a blog I wrote before the end of the year, I mentioned fleetingly that sf writers even 60 years ago were predicting such things as portable nuclear reactors, disposable paper clothing, meals in a pill, and fully functioning artificially intelligent robots to help us with our tedious chores. Also, by now, we were supposed to have mostly self-sufficient human bases on the moon and Mars, and beneath our oceans. It’s a measure of how much of a disconnect there is between technological advances and the human condition (sociology/psychology/politics) that we’re nowhere near there yet, despite our obvious technical and intellectual prowess. And it is that, I feel, that will keep the level of technology for humans rising only slowly and steadily across the world — and I don’t rule out some astounding stumbles — rather than in fantastical leaps and bounds.

In essence, our nature is our own worst enemy.

Both Good Morning Silicon Valley and The Register reported this one, so I couldn’t run away from it. SIGH

Women are four times more likely than men to give out “passwords” in exchange for chocolate bars.

This finding came as the result of the latest annual Infosec survey (held outside Liverpool Street Station), and was held just before the Infosec Europe conference, which is scheduled to start next week in London. Out of 576 office workers surveyed, 45% of women (as opposed to 10% of men) were willing to provide their usernamsnames and passwords to complete strangers in exchange for a chocolate bar (no details on what brand of chocolate bar). The Register was a bit more sceptical in its coverage by adding that:

Little attempt is made to verify the authenticity of the passwords, beyond follow-up questions asking what category it falls under. So we don’t know whether women responding to the survey filled in any old rubbish in return for a choccy treat or handed out their real passwords.

Oh, I really really hope so. Because the alternative is too awful to contemplate. Look, we’re women! Just hold chocolate or ice-cream under our noses and we’ll crumple faster than a modern car’s chassis in a pile-up. Aw crap!

For the original press release, go here.

I’m still pretty incensed about Larry Niven’s comment (from my last blog), so thought I’d put together this necessarily sparse little primer regarding finances. Niven thinks that a major cost haemorrhage for the United States are the “illegals” using medical facilities. However, if I may, I’d like to present the following financial reality:

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing the United States $5,000 per second. $300,000 a minute. $18 million an hour. $432 million a day.(*)

In view of that, do you really think that “illegals” using US medical facilities and then nimbly skipping out sans payment are costing the United States even the equivalent of ONE DAY of warfare? Let’s say, yes. In fact, let’s be really hard-nosed about this and state unequivocally that such payment avoidance is costing the USA a whopping One Billion Dollars a year. We all agree that’s a lot, right? Sorry, that’s only a little more than two days’ worth of warfare.

Whether you like to admit it or not, the war is the elephant in the room that nobody, apparently, can see.

One week’s worth of warfare is about $3 billion. What would one week of warfare funding do for the US economy? Do you think hospitals could use $3 billion? Schools? Infrastructure? Social services? Remember, that’s just one week of fighting we’re talking about.

The obvious objection to this is that this is American money and thus America should be able to dictate how it spends its money and “illegals” “sponging” off the system are really not on that list at all. Okay, but guys, I’m sorry to break this to you, but it isn’t American money. That $432 million a day? It’s not coming from US coffers. A lot of it’s on loan from other countries. As of June 2007, the US owed Japan $644,000,000,000, China $350,000,000,000, the United Kingdom $239,000,000,000 (now, that one raises some interesting questions for me) and sundry oil-producing nations $100,000,000,000. This comes up to a total of $1.3 trillion, on figures that are nine months out of date.

(As a side-note, from someone outside the US completely, this devaluing of the US dollar is a very smooth, sneaky trick on the part of the Fed that essentially devalues the Treasury securities that the foreign governments own (like [US government issued IOUs] on the money countries have loaned the United States). In other words, the $644 billion that Japan now holds in Treasury securities/IOUs is not worth what they were a year ago. Nyuk, nyuk to you, creditor countries.)

And, amidst all this, Niven thinks medical costs are an issue?! I suppose it’s just as well that he’s a science-fiction author because at least he can appreciate the view from that other planet he happens to be on.

Please note that I’m trying very hard not to make any moral statements on any of this; I’m looking at this purely in terms of finances. If you were a person doing this, then you’d essentially be borrowing massive amounts of money from whomever you could, to throw parties for strangers, while ignoring your own livelihood . While the grass grows, the car goes unserviced, the children starve, the mortgage debt increases, and the house slowly decays into the earth, Larry Niven comes along and tells you that someone’s sneaking into your backyard and using your barbeque. Really, is that the most serious problem you have?

I’ve been following the writings of Paul Craig Roberts(**) on the nuts and bolts of the US economy (Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan), and what he says has been consistent over the past few years, and backed up by other articles I’ve cross-referenced. The savings of US citizens is in negative territory. Health, education, public services and facilities are suffering. Jobs in manufacturing and export-type industries are down. Jobs in service industries (which don’t translate into import dollars) are the only ones that are up, thus encouraging further domestic consumption, which encourages further imports, notably from China at this point. And, at the same time, the United States is massively building up debt to other countries to fund “initiatives” in other countries, and it doesn’t look like it’s stopping anytime soon.

Seriously, I wish you only had the medical costs of “illegals” to worry about. The truth is much worse … someone shoot off a probe and tell Larry.

---

(*) Actually, the Washington Post disagrees with me on this. It says that the cost of the war on Iraq alone is equivalent to $720 million a day, or $8,333 per second (as opposed to my $5,000). I’m just trying to be as conservative as possible, to short-circuit any accusations of exaggeration.

(**) I like reading Paul Craig Roberts because he’s a conservative, and is a lot more difficult a person for Republicans to argue with than a liberal. Roberts still believes in Reaganomics, so if he’s sending a warning to Republican administrations regarding fiscal responsibility, then I certainly perk up. I, on the other hand, am neither Republican nor Libertarian nor Democratic (all of which shade the right side of the political spectrum).

Okay, I’ll admit I’m a teensy bit paranoid. I’ll also admit I love teh teknologee. And what I watched yesterday profoundly disturbed me. [EDIT: I tried to embed a YouTube video here, but I obviously haven't got it all worked out yet. Just go with the link; it will open in a new window.] Herewith, the Big Dog, developed by Boston Dynamics.

First, it’s kinda eerie watching a robot that resembles two skinny athletes stuck in a metal carapace with one of them constantly having to walk backwards, but if you can get past that, then the engineering is wondrous. That’s the only way I can put it. Having done Artificial Intelligence as part of my Computer Science degree, I have an inkling (or even a nano-kling, when I consider how out-of-date that little piece of education was) of what it would be like to design and program a robot such as the Big Dog and boy, am I damned impressed. Damned impressed! However … (if it’s a blog of mine, you knew there’d be an “however” there somewhere, didn’t you?). Well, let’s compare it to a real mule (the sterile horse-donkey hybrid) and see.

1. Cost. According to Boston Dynamics, the Big Dog was developed as a “mule” for soldiers, to help carry equipment in inhospitable terrain. I shudder to think how much the Big Dog cost to develop, and all that money for nothing more than a mule? I mean, come on people. You could drop actual mules into inhospitable terrain and have the animals function better than the Big Dog. How much does a mule cost? Maybe several hundred per animal (? I’ll admit I’m guessing here), almost self-replicating if you do your planning right. Whereas … well, I don’t know how much the Big Dog costs, but I doubt you’ll find it on special at K-mart for even a paltry $9,999.00, and they don’t make Tiny Puppies in their spare time.
2. Maintenance. The real mule needs some maintenance, of course, but it has pay-offs. You can form an affinity with the animal, and get it to exceed its capabilities for short periods of time if trust has been developed, for example. If push came to shove, you could keep your team alive by eating it. You can’t eat the Big Dog and it would probably be a bitch to maintain in the field. And who knows what its weight tolerances are?
3. Weight distribution. Did you notice the four packs of gear that the Big Dog was carrying? The things that make it resemble a mutant from “The Fly”? For optimal function, they would have to be evenly distributed over the robot. And if you’ve been anywhere near the military, you’d know that the weight distribution of your accompanying Big Dog would take precedence over even seeing to your own sustenance or hygiene needs, for example. Seems a lot of trouble to go to for nothing more than a hideously expensive robot. The real mule, admittedly, also needs some load-balancing, and I have no data on the relative load-balancing “intelligence” of a mule versus a Big Dog, so we might just call that one a draw.
4. The payload of the Big Dog. According to the video, the weight of the Big Dog is 235lbs (106.8kg) and its payload capacity is 340lbs (154.5kg). Mules weigh from 210kg to 400kg, according to Wikipedia. From a thread on the carrying capacity of mules:
   

   A light load for a mule is up to 230 pounds [100kg]; a medium load, 231-460 pounds [105-209kg]; and a heavy load, 461-690 pounds [209-314kg]. A mule can drag 3,450 pounds [1,568kg].

   So, right there, even allowing for a generous margin of error, a real mule trounces the Big Dog.

5. Noise. Yep, real mules make noise, but have you heard that buzzing, like a silencer on a chain-saw coming out of the Big Dog? I’m sure Boston Dynamics have done something with it since but, on a quiet day, I bet you’ll still hear it coming.

So, if it makes no sense to have a robot mule when there are cheaper, organic alternatives around, what could it possibly be used for? And the idea, even before I knew the Big Dog’s intended use or who funded Boston Dynamic’s research, flashed in my head as the video unrolled.

Imagine, if you will, hostile, enemy terrain. You want to clear the area, but you don’t want to use your own soldiers to do it. Wouldn’t it be so very very easy to equip a Big Dog with a ring of motion and infrared sensors, mounted weaponry on each corner, and snakes of ammunition in the packs below? Watch the Big Dog delicately manoeuvre over piles of urban-like rubble, and jump agilely over the equivalent of small walls, and tell me that I’m in Cloud Cuckoo Land on this one. If any civilians get killed in the cross-fire, the Big Dog has the advantage of being a robot, and you’re not going to put a robot on trial, are you? Besides, robots don’t take incriminating photos of other robots doing nasty things to people, or blog about it afterwards, so there’s another complication nipped in the bud right there. And robots, sure as hell, don’t do things like this. The solution to all this embarrassment is quite militarily elegant when you think about it.

It may be that I’m really reaching here because I’m such a science-fiction lovin’ geekgirl at heart and maybe I’ve watched the Terminator movies a few too many times for my own mental health, but the final frame really stayed with me for a while:

Big Dog is a product of Boston Dynamics, with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Have a nice day, folks.

I was putting together a blog on a serious topic that I might post later on this month that touches briefly on education, and I happened upon a survey about the decline of literacy in Western English-speaking countries. Whenever a survey comes out about the decline of literacy in a country, you can bet that the newspapers will be full of the usual suspects. In this particular round of finger-pointing, computer games were singled out as particularly heinous.

What absolute poppycock! I am a firm believer in computer games. I’m also rather partial to comic books … ah, graphic novels. It was a computer game that gave The Wast the motivation to read, that tones his fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination, that gave him ideas for artwork, that builds his expertise in problem-solving, and contributes to his decided preference for electronic (techno) music. No downsides here.

When we were talking to his teacher recently about him (at the parent-teacher meeting), she mentioned that TW tends to get perturbed when he gets something wrong, and she worries that he’s taking things too seriously. We told her he used to be a lot lot worse, and we mitigated the problem with computer games. She looked at us, confused, until we explained. In the past, every time he did something wrong, TW would burst into tears and be inconsolable for up to an hour. He regarded every mistake as some kind of personal slight and would obsess (hmmm, wonder where he gets that from?) for an entire day over every little error. J and I knew we had to do something about it. So, as one strategy, we started playing computer games.

Our deep affection for Hamumu software originated from this era. We downloaded Spooky Castle, a terrific FREE game that we recommend to anybody btw, and began playing it ourselves. It wasn’t the first game we’d ever played, but it was the first that caught TW’s eye. From watching us, he moved to co-controlling (”You control the firing button and I’ll move Bouapha around, okay?”), then he took over with us sitting by his side, then we moved away completely and let him play by himself. To our utter amazement, we discovered that he would attempt a difficult level time and time again, until he defeated all the monsters, usually without asking for help. Where was the young boy who collapsed into fits of tears whenever something went wrong? Here he was, quite serenely restarting levels and explaining his strategies for defeating the Super Zombies. Over the course of months, he finished Spooky Castle and we bought him Dr. Lunatic Supreme with Cheese and Kid Mystic, and the latest is that he’s bought Loonyland and the Legend of Sleepless Hollow with his own money and happily plays them all hours of the day. He writes stories around the games he plays (another firm favourite is the Czech game, Jets ‘n’ Guns Gold … good stuff!), creates his own comic books, and draws his own posters. It has helped his problem-solving and built up his persistence. In all, he plays computer games for around 4 hours a day, I think, although I haven’t taken that much notice.

By now, I’m sure I have many parents up in arms, but hear me out. Has his schoolwork suffered? He gets up at seven o’clock in the morning on weekends (on his own initiative) to complete his homework, sits down with me to discuss his worries over his Malay language classes, and gets straight As in class. So we see absolutely no need to restrict his game-playing in any way.

I’m not saying that this solution will suit everyone — every child is different. But that’s exactly my point. Just as I wouldn’t try to force every parent to sit their kids in front of computers for 4 or 5 hours a day, I also resent being told that game-playing is bad for every single child on Earth. These sweeping generalisations, and knee-jerk attempts at curtailing certain activities, cause more harm than they’re worth.

If I was in a particularly verbose mood, I could also launch into a discussion on the narrow-minded tactic of solving the symptom of a problem, rather than its root cause, and the beauty and creative energy from diversity, but I’m not up to it at the moment.

And lastly, speaking of games, rest in peace, Gary Gygax, from an old-time occasional D&D player. (And thanks xkcd. Great strip.)

So it seems that Tata Motors have decided to roll out compressed-air cars (using technology from Moteur Development International, based on the ideas of Frenchman Guy Negre) this year (summer 2008) in several countries (France, Spain and India). I’ve got a picture of several models here that I purloined from the Popular Mechanics site. Voici pour vous:

Don’t you want to just rush out and get one now? But first, the details:

• 90 cubic metres of compressed air drive the engine’s pistons. Atmospheric temperature is used to increase the engine’s efficiency, and the cold exhaust air is used for air-conditioning.
• Refilling the air tank is estimated to take 2-3 minutes at specially designed “bowsers”. Cost of one tank is EUR1,50 == USD2.30 (and rising) == SGD3.20. Range of one tank is approximately 200-300km == 124-186mi.
• Maximum speed is around 68mph == 109kph.
• To boost performance, a liquid fuel component can also be added (petrol, biodiesel, diesel), turning the vehicle into a hybrid
• The engine also uses one litre of vegetable oil, with a change recommended every 50,000km.
• The body is made of fibreglass over a tubular chassis. There are no keys, just an access card that can be read as you approach the vehicle.

For further details, go to Impact Lab for a nice wrap-up. Oh, and it looks like the car will be released in the USA next year, with an expected price of around USD17,800 (and rising … have you looked at the US currency exchange rates lately?). Already there are naysayers. Some commenters mention that Guy Negre has been trying to get this technology to work for more than a decade, so what makes anyone think it’s actually viable? Others worry about corrosion in the air-tank. And others still are sceptical of a publicised vehicle range of more than 100km.

Me, I’m worried about safety. If you want to see what happens when you put driving licenses in the hands of essentially clueless people living according to some ancient cultural trope that the richer you are, the more you’re entitled to do whatever the damn hell you want without a single thought to anyone else, come to south-east Asia. Here, you will see Mercedes drivers, obviously in cars too big for them to handle, attempt a u-turn and somehow, amazingly, end up blocking traffic going in both directions. (They often start their turn from the far lane, you see.) Here, too, you will see people in cars sweep blithely by, while pedestrians remain standing at a crossing in the pouring rain, because they have a nice car and you’re just a walking peasant, so guess what you can do with your attempt to cross the road, never mind the thick white stripes on the bitumen and the fact you and your shopping are a sodden mess on the footpath? And I have never seen so many people take so many attempts to reverse park. Honest, I watched one woman try for 15 solid minutes, before she just backed a wheel onto the curb, locked up the car and went shopping. As I said to J, I was soooo tempted to walk up to her and demand her keys just so I could park the damn car myself, and put myself out of my misery. (Yes, believe it or not, I like parallel parking. I consider it a mathematical problem, each one unique. “Can I use my experience from the last park to negotiate this one? Or is there something I need to vary, taking into account the length of the car and length of the space?” Seriously, I really am that boring.)

So, getting back to the issue at hand, I’m a bit leery with taking a fibreglass car out on the road in these here locales. (And if anyone from India would like to comment on the state of driving there, I’m all ears.) You have small cars that the big cars ignore, the big cars driven mostly by incompetents, the scooters and bikes that whizz in and out of traffic like they’re off on some giant swarming exercise, the buses that know only two speeds, the large vans with their trays often filled with manual labourers on their way to or from work, the delivery trucks, the container trucks. And that’s before you even confront the drivers who can’t even stick to their half of the road, much less remain in their own lanes; the other drivers who think that as they’re driving a Mercedes/Audi/Volvo, they’ll survive an accident, so who cares about anyone else; the truck drivers who like nothing more than overtaking slow traffic on blind curves (this is a national pastime in Malaysia); and so on.

Thus, upon sober reflection, I probably won’t be buying one of those cars anytime soon. But god, how I’d love to.

The Wast has now gone down in family history as a major destroyer of communal assets. We always thought that Little Dinosaur would hold that honour (hence her other nickname of ‘Shiva’) but, not willing to be outdone, The Wast came through by destroying not one, but two, of our computers. We treat our computers a bit like furniture — we move them around, load different systems, tweak things here and there, as the mood and circumstance grab us. So one of the fallen computers was mine, then was used as the family server, then went to being the family gaming machine, then fell into neglect, before being resurrected for TW. And he thrashed the disks. At the end, all you could hear on boot-up was a small whine followed by a clunk, and you could just imagine those heads balefully looking out over all that platter space they had to seek and giving up hope. It was rather sad.

So we moved him to another machine, which had gone through a similar timeline, and he burnt out the CPU, although the disk remained intact. This is important and will come in handy later. (He’s tough on computers and both of them were, admittedly, getting a little long in the tooth. That’s 8 years old, in case anyone was wondering.)

Well, we did the only thing you could do under the circumstances — we built him a new computer. This one was not as highly spec’ed as Monster, with only a 2.4GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM, 460GB of new hard disk, a graphics card, DVD burner, all in a shiny black case with 3 transparent sides and bling (blue neon fans and transparent blue power supply with UV switches. Yum). TW can add more bells and whistles with his own pocket money if he wishes.

While I am adamant that every system in the house will eventually run on Linux, J is a bit more sanguine about Windows and we had no guarantees that TW’s favourite games would play under Linux, Wine or no Wine. So, the expedient decision was made to use the Windows license from one of the thrashed machines and load it on the new machine until I had completed my appropriate knowledge-gathering of Wine (a Windows emulator that runs under Linux) and its capabilities.

And everything went swimmingly … until we tried to activate our copy of Windows XP. For which, I may add, we had a legitimate license. Now, before I continue, I have to say that I know that data from Windows machines are uploaded to the great Windows servers around the world. In this way, they can track who has, and hasn’t, legitimate copies of software running on their machines. I also know there are ways around this but, to be honest, it’s just too much of a hassle for me, and I’d prefer to just buy a machine every now and then with an installed copy of the hole-ridden poxy software and be done with it. (Which is how we got our first of a handful of legitimate licenses.)

As a Linux supporter, you can imagine how I felt when our legitimate, single-user, version of purchased software threw up a message that we had activated Windows “too many times”. The air was rent blue with amazing conjugations and much descriptive prose, and I left it to J to call the Microsoft help desk to get the problem sorted it. He did so and was treated like a criminal as he tried to explain, three times, that no, he didn’t have one version of XP simultaneously loaded on several machines … XP had been loaded on three machines successively, and we were now on our third machine, the other two having self-destructed in quiet desperation. (I paced angrily. “Check your servers, you £*%%s! You know we don’t have multiple versions running.” Which is a bit unfair, because I doubt the average Helpdesk person has access to that kind of information, and I’ve worked in Support and know just how rude irate customers can get. To my credit, I was only muttering it in the background in the next room, not screaming it into the phone’s mouthpiece.)

Eventually, J must have convinced somebody of his innate honesty, because we were charitably given The Activation Code and we completed activation … followed by days of installing patch after patch (2,500 of them! I kid you not … download-install-reboot, download-install-reboot), followed by the essential anti-virus and firewall software.

Now, is there any other industry other than ones associated with electronic rights, that treats its customers so shabbily? The “too many activations” message is not one that was displayed after careful cross-checking against both database and usage statistics. No, it comes up when an edition has been installed multiple times, period. No verification required. It stopped us dead in our tracks until we pleaded our case to a complete stranger who had it within her power to withhold the code, and thus usage of something we had legitimately purchased, on an arbitrary whim. Guilty until proven innocent.

Forget good faith. Hell, if there was any element of “good faith” in the transaction whatsoever, Microsoft should be paying us for risking our precious personal data with such a sloppy, inelegant, resource-hogging, insecure pile of steaming code masquerading as an operating system. I’m moving as fast as I can on the Wine investigations … I just wish there were more hours in the day.

UPDATE: Once Little Dinosaur saw how much fun The Wast was having on his new computer, she wanted to know where her computer was. So I dug out another of my old laptops (if you work in IT, you tend to accumulate laptops), scavenged the hard disk from one of TW’s previous little full-contact performance testing bouts (100GB’s worth, no less!) and loaded Edubuntu on it. The tagline for Edubuntu is “Linux for Young Human Beings”. Awwwww. We named her machine PrettyPony and she loves it. TW’s is, of course, named DarthVader.

It’s all my ISP’s fault. If they didn’t offer unlimited subdomains as part of my hosting deal, I wouldn’t have even thought about it. But it was there, after my initial “what the hell am I going to do with a subdomain?” question, bubbling away in my cunning, reptilian brain, filtered by geekgirliness. (That’s copyright me, by the way. I’m hoping it’ll end up as popular as “truthiness”.)

At first, it was only a little step … the carving off of the blog to its own little empire. Then, as I started to struggle with putting the podcast on feed from my main site, it all became too difficult, and a voice said to me: say, why not create another subdomain for the podcasts? This, I have done. Behold, it is here. I’m still working on getting all three domains inter-related, which is going to be a major pain if I have any major updates I’m contemplating, but it should mean easier access for you to my various bits and pieces. You are worth it, aren’t you?

So that was my punishment for the past couple of days — creating the podcast site. Now, it’s your turn. After that wonderful review of Combat! from Maria Zannini, she is interviewing me at her blog. It was a great interview and I had a lot of fun, so I hope you enjoy it too! Thank you, Maria; you’re a great friend.

Summary for today:

Maria interviews me: mariazannini.blogspot.com
My main website: www.ksaugustin.com
My blog (here, that is): blog.ksaugustin.com
My podcast: radiofreebliss.ksaugustin.com

I’m in search of a medicinal scotch next.

** Because ‘Back to the Future’ was a tad too obvious. **

The moon was back in the news this past week so I thought I’d blog about that, rather than my regular scheduled topic. The attention is due to Google’s $30m Lunar X prize, and yes I’m referring to that Google. It sounds like a lot, but US$30 million is a pittance for the giant of search engines when you think of all the attendant publicity that’s going to occur in the next few years. Hmmmm, starting to get a bit snarky, aren’t I? Okay. According to the prize’s website, the money goes to the the team who manages to:

land a privately funded robotic craft on the Moon that is capable of roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters [sic] and [send] video, images and data back to Earth.

Before I continue, let me take you back to … oh, let’s say 1966. What was the world’s state of play in that year? Well,

• India and Pakistan sign a peace agreement (but neglected to tackle Kashmir … an opportunity lost)
• the United States of America was still involved in the Vietnam War
• Robert Menzies had just resigned as Prime Minister of Australia
• Ian Smith still governed Rhodesia

All those things set the time clearly for me, but are all political aren’t they? Let’s see if I can find something else:

• PanAm is still a viable US airline
• Hewlett-Packard releases its very first computer
• IBM releases DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory). Yes, the precursor of all that RAM you read about in PCs nowadays
• The world’s first effective rubella vaccine is introduced
• Andrew Warhol is still alive
• The Beatles were still together (Yellow Submarine album)

The following books were released:

• The Comedians by Graham Greene
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
• A Dream of Africa by Camara Laye
• Rocannon’s World by Ursula K le Guin
• The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
• The Thirty-First Floor by Per Wahlöö

and the following TV shows had just started:

• Batman (the Adam West version)
• Star Trek (Classic, with William Shatner)
• also The Green Hornet (with Bruce Lee), The Monkees, and Mission Impossible (the original series)

Okay, got the picture? (The snapshot is thanks to reading at Answers.com, by the way.) Why am I harping on 1966? Because that’s the year Luna 9 landed on the Moon and sent back postcards (five black-and-white stereoscopic panorama photos of the lunar surface).

The mention of the Lunar X prize gives me the opportunity to correct a few misconceptions that have been bugging me for a while. It was the Soviets, not the Americans, who put the first man-made object on the moon, way back in 1959 (Luna 2), just as they put the first probe into Earth’s orbit in 1957 (Sputnik), and just as they put the first man into space in 1961. Everybody knows about Yuri Gagarin, but it really is troubling that the space programme of the Soviets (developed without the kind of help from, as Jon Stewart once put it, the “ageing Nazi scientists” that the USA had) has somehow been forgotten.

The Soviets had a very healthy and successful lunar exploration programme that began in the late 1950s and went right through to 1976, centred primarily around … tell me if this sounds familiar … self-contained robotic probes. And now, almost 50 years — or, half a CENTURY — later, we’re trying to replicate that?! Doesn’t it all sound a bit retrogressive to you? Surely after five decades of technological advance, we should be a teenier step further along the space exploration timeline?

The answer in this particular case is, of course, political will. For both empires’ space programmes, the 1970s (for various reasons) spelt the death-knell for lunar habitats and all that kind of space-geek candy. If there’s anything that so starkly illustrates the way human will trumps technology, it’s the space programme. Likewise, whenever I hear about a “ground-breaking technological advance that will change the very way we live”, I always try delving into the human factors behind it … like the ageing baby boomer generation and Viagra. Yeah, couldn’t see that one coming (no pun intended). * snicker * The human factors determine the technology, which then determines other, consequent, human factors. But the human factor was there first … always is.

So now we have those factors coming into play again (Google, fame, sense of romance, entrepreneurship, government apathy) and we’re back to where we were HALF A CENTURY AGO (just in case you’d forgotten). Oh joy. Can’t wait. Be still my racing heart, etc. etc.

POSTSCRIPT: A great book on the invisible topic of the Soviet space programme is Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration by Brian Harvey. We have it in our library.

I was flicking through a recent issue of Wired magazine and noted that one of their coolest geek toys was a standalone tabletop induction cooktop panel that you could pick up for a mere US$1400. Induction cooking is very cool. You can turn on the hotplate and put your hand on it and, as long as you’re not wearing iron-based jewellery (I wasn’t going to chance it while wearing my wedding band, tbh), the plate will feel cool. Yet, put a saucepan of cold water on the same plate and it will boil within 30 seconds. I remember a vivid ad which showed an egg, half on the induction hotplate, the other half in a cross-sectioned saucepan. The half in the saucepan was frying nicely while the half that was slopped on the hotplate remained raw. This side-effect (the hotplate not the saucepan) has the further advantage of being easy to clean because no food ‘cooks’ on the hotplate, and I’m all for lazy cooking.

The way induction works has to do with magnetic fields and electrical resistance, so I won’t go through it here. (I know, I really am restraining myself! Aargh, losing battle … electricity is used to set up a magnetic field which causes heat due to resistance within the non-pure base of the iron-based saucepan. And that’s all I’m saying.) However, I will show you our cooktop.

Isn’t it a beauty? How could we not buy one? It even lights up with flashing blue LEDs when the power is on and I’m a sucker for flashing blue LEDs. Akira is a local Singapore brand, which explains why it was cheaper than the usual Japanese imports. During the Chinese New Year sale at a local Carrefour store, we paid SG$109 for it. And included with the hob was a saucepan with glass lid. That works out to about US$76 or EUR52 for the set. And the speed of cooking is blinding, much faster even than gas. So fast, in fact, that prep work is essential.

Of course there’s always a downside: my earthenware pots — not containing any iron — can’t be used with induction cooking, and neither can my Pyrex dishes. And the hotplate has questionable value for a wok. Also, aluminium/aluminum pans can’t be used either. This is not a problem for us, because most of our cookware is cast-iron or the heavy-bottomed steel-copper type, but it may be a problem for you, so check your cookware and review your cooking habits first if you’re thinking of investing in this energy-efficient über-cool gadget.

When we finally move to a place of our own, I’ll be bugging J for an induction/gas hybrid cooktop. But I don’t think I’ll have to do too much persuading because he’s sold on it too. And did I tell you that, because of its energy efficiency, the electricity bills will be lower? Win-win for safety, clean-up and money. And that’s exactly the way I like it.

UPDATE: In the interests of good science, I put my wedding-band hand on a working induction plate set to boil water. Y’know, there’s always that conflict between rationality (my wedding ring is gold, which should not contain any iron compounds, therefore it will not heat up) versus emotion (put my hand on a hotplate that can boil water in less than 30 seconds?! Are you crazy?!). I’m happy to report that my hand, and ring, survived intact. Ah, the things I do for my readers.

FURTHER WARNING: While the hotplate remains cool until something iron-based is put on it, the plate retains the heat of the saucepan after it’s done. While heat dissipation is quick, the plate is hot after cooking. Or, to put it another way, if you don’t believe me and want to try the hand-on-the-hotplate trick for yourself, do it before you begin cooking, not after, or you may get a nasty burn.