Check Your Premises

I studied mathematics in school. And I loved the way Euclidean geometry started with some postulates and reasoned from them into theorems. Hopefully, you had this in your sophomore year of High School. The most controversial of these was his fifth postulate:

If a line segment intersects two straight lines forming two interior angles on the same side that sum to less than two right angles, then the two lines, if extended indefinitely, meet on that side on which the angles sum to less than two right angles.

Some thought this postulate should be derivable from the postulates. Over the course of centuries mathematicians came to understand that this postulate was either true or false based on the curvature of space. Positively curved space is what you find on a globe. Two lines of longitude may form two right angles with the equator, but they end up meeting at the north and south poles. (This is termed Reimannian geometry.) Another way this axiom is false is when you have negatively curved space. This is the space you see in pictures of black holes with those hyperbolic shapes. Einstein played with a lot of hyperbolic spaces when doing General Relativity. (This is termed Lobachevskian geometry.)

If you're near a black hole, on a globe, or on an ideal plane, Lobachevskian, Reimannian, and Euclidean models will match your observed reality, respectively.

We see this pattern of axiomatic systems repeated in other contexts. If you're better at Math than me, you can talk about Zorn's lemma and the Axiom of Choice: they work the same way. And I'm of the opinion that the existence and non-existence of God is one of those things that you can use to build two independent, logically consistent explanations for reality. Logic and proof about God's existence is not going to do anything but make you tired, you can only match up how well the system of thinking (axiomatic system) your come up with matches observed reality.

If you're still with me, consider another branch of mathematics you did not learn in grade school: Game Theory. Suppose we play checkers, chess, or poker. You can either win, lose, or tie. The winnings of any player come about pursuant to the losses from other players. These are the games we're most familiar with and they demonstrate the zero-sum games.

But there are other games in life that don't look like games. Life Insurance is a game where the insurance company bets that you won't die, and you bet that you will die. (I rather like the idea of corporate fat cats betting that bad things won't happen.) Casinos also make wagers, but they rig the odds so that your expected payout is less than the amount you wager. A few bettors may win big, but for the most part, only the house gets rich. The profits the casinos take from winning more often that the lose make this a negative-sum game.

Suppose Vikings invade a region to loot its goods. If the victims peacefully hand over the lolly and the Vikings leave with it, it's a zero-sum game. But if they rape, pillage, and burn, those incidental damages make this another negative-sum game.

How about free exchange between willing participants? You've heard business consultants tell folks to think win-win. Economists who know more than I claim that free trade creates more wealth than it consumes. 

Let's say I have a handful of radio parts, and you have a handful of grain. If you need some diodes, and I need food, we can exchange and we will both be better off. 

Our natural desire to get more value in exchanges like these motivate us to grind the wheat into flour, mix it with yeast, and bake it into bread. Or fashion those radio parts into a desirable gadget--a radio, or something more valuable. We exchange better things and we benefit more from the exchange.

Technology enables us to create value without taking from others. We start with some plastic, use electricity to heat it and extrude it into a particular pattern, then a few cents' worth of plastic become a part we can sell for dollars. Maybe a farmer uses that plastic part in his irrigation system to use less water and thereby sell more food more cheaply. 

I think that technological innovation makes free trade a positive-sum game. As it becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, the things only GM could do when I was a college student are within the grasp of makerspace tinkers today. And will be within the grasp of third-world bohemian have-nots within a decade.

I was once scolded by a famous economist when I asked whether productivity gains could solve inflation. When I asked him, one could buy a 19" analog color TV for about a thousand dollars and watch three channels. He was right about inflation. Gold was selling for a couple hundred dollars an ounce and it is well over a thousand dollars an ounce today. BUT a couple hundred dollars will buy a much nicer television that receives much more interesting programming.

I said before that the destination of economic inequality is less important than the way in which we get there. Economic Inequality is a terrible thing if life is more like a negative sum, or zero sum game: Pirates raiding villages, or Politicians (both Republicans and Democrats) enriching cronies on the backs of everyone else, or Casinos making a few rich to distract while impoverishing the rest.

Our world is a mix of negative-sum, zero-sum, and positive-sum components. When economic inequality comes about from the first two, I am justly annoyed. When it comes about from positive-sum exchanges, I remember the last thing Moses brought down from the mountain.

Thou Shalt Not Covet.

R100 vs R101

My work in progress is a novel, Steamship to Kashmir. It has an airship with Mycroft Holmes as a passenger.

When I conceptualized the airship, I looked at the Hindenburg for inspiration. Since I did not want to see the airship end in a fire-ball, I opted for a non-hydrogen lifting gas--steam. The US zeppelin program lasted several years longer, but the highest-profiles zeppelins operated by the US Navy were lost in storms.

Sadly, I gave short shrift to the British airship programs. This is unforgivable when researching a novel featuring a British airship. The Akron and the Macon as well as the Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg all get prominent mention in the articles I've read, but less so the R100 and R101. It's probably the flashy names.

I had heard of how the disastrous crash of the R101 on its maiden flight doomed British airship development. But I had not heard the story behind the story of the R101 disaster until I read this chestnut. It seems the R100 and the R101 were built by a company named Vickers and by the British civil service, respectively.

One of my surprises upon visiting the UK was seeing private-owned infrastructure where I didn't expect it. If you wait at a bus stop in my home town of Grand Rapids, the bus which pulls up will be owned by GRATA, an entity of the city government that loses money and is propped up by taxes. If you ride a train in the US, it is owned by AmTrak, an entity of the Federal government that loses money and is propped up by taxes.

Thus it makes sense to me that Britain would run two airship programs side-by-side in a competitive fashion. I may be mistaken, but it sounds like running two Apollo programs operated by Boeing and NASA, respectively.

The R101 is a good example of what can happen when political rather than economic or engineering considerations drive a project. The government does not want to be embarrassed and it will use whatever means necessary to avoid embarrassment and shift blame away from itself. Conversely, corporations do not want to lose money and it will use whatever means necessary to minimize loss and shift risks away from itself.

NASA was pushing for faster turn around time and more launches per year, and so they overrode the warnings and launched the Space Shuttle Challenger while icicles were hanging from it. The cold temperatures made the o-rings inflexible and the inflexible o-rings failed catastrophically. Apparently, the same kind of thinking was in play when the R101 took off for India. It got as far as France.

The R100 had already successfully flown to Canada and back. To minimize further embarrassment the UK government grounded it and broke it up for scrap.

To be fair, the state of mathematics and computations at the time made strength-of-materials calculations difficult and time consuming. Thus both ships were probably too weak to handle extreme weather and the UK government's decision to fly in deteriorating weather doomed the R101.

It is simplistic to say Capitalism good, Socialism bad. There are different relative advantages to each approach. If you want to get maximum performance for least expense, you want Capitalism. If you are willing to sacrifice these things for the good of the collective, you want Socialism. Even if the good of the collective requires grounding and breaking up the R100.

Just a few years after this the US Navy's airship  USS Akron would be lost in a storm, and a few years after that the USS Macon would be lost in another storm. Given the available materials and the inability of the engineers to accurately gauge loads, the R100 would have probably been lost in a storm--eventually.

Though the Germans-built airships Graf Zeppelin and Graf Zeppelin II were not lost to storms, they could not survive Herman Goring's order that they be dismantled. Perhaps the Germans knew a little bit more about structural engineering or meteorology than the UK and US.

Those Mills Closed Decades Ago

After grousing about Thunder In The East, which I hated, I thought it might serve as counterpoint to describe an old movie I liked: The Man In The White Suit illustrates a similar principle.

The original Obi Wan Kenobi was played by Alek Guinness, who was quite a handsome young buck back in the early 1950s. He starred in a humorous parody as a rather naive young chemical engineer working in for a major textile manufacturer as a laborer.

First off, because he's just a laborer, he can't get anyone in charge to pay attention to him and he has to do his research on the down-low. He has in mind to invent a new synthetic fabric that has a number of desirable attributes: it does not wear out, it rejects dirt, and it does whatever other Good Things you'd like to find in a miracle fabric.

His experiments pan out, he gets management support, and he has a tailor make a suit of the miracle fabric. Since the fabric rejects all dyes, it is a white suit. A very white, glowing suit.

Trouble starts when the union members at the mill discover that this nice young man has invented this fabric that will never wear out and they expect that after one production run of this miracle stuff, management will close down the plant. And think of the launderers who'll be idled if clothes never get dirty.

Since this movie was made in the 1950s when labor unions held great sway in Britain, this is a major consideration.

Trouble escalates when the other mill owners catch wise of this invention, and they realize they will not be able to stay in the textile business if this invention gets out. They conspire with Alek Guinness's boss to suppress the invention.

This leaves Alek Guinness with a wonderful boon to mankind that has both management and labor  in cahoots to suppress. He's kidnapped, held captive, and escapes. Only to be chased through the darkened streets of the mill town in his glowing white suit. Hilarity ensues.

Now comes the irony. All of those mills were shuttered a generation ago. They were all idled as the labor unions predicted, and the mill owners' capital investments in factories and machinery were rendered just as useless. In the story, Alek Guinness's invention does not pan out and everyone goes back to business as usual.

In reality, the entire story is a funny anachronism because free trade has done more to toss unionists out of jobs and shutter factories than anything imagined of Alek Guinness's invention.


Yet, has the world ended? Hardly.

Pretty much everyone on the planet enjoys a much better standard of living than they did in the 1950s. New technologies and free trade disrupts markets and they force everyone to adapt to new ways of doing business, but in the end the consumer gets better stuff cheaper.

Fantasy vs Science Fiction

The lines between Fantasy and Science Fiction have never been impermeable or as well defined as one might like. I've been to Cons where this was the topic of panel discussions.

I have a simple rule of thumb: is there more polished metal or more rough-sawed wood? The former betokens Science Fiction and the latter betokens Fantasy.

Consider Babylon 5, a TV show set on a space station in interstellar space. The various alien species could just as easily be replaced by Elves, Dwarfs, Orcs, etc. Or take Conan the Barbarian, he could just as easily be a post-apocalyptic tough-guy dealing with occasional bits of technology so advanced they're indistinguishable from magic.

When you try to enforce hard boundaries between SF and Fantasy, you have to answer questions: Can you go faster than light-speed and still be SF?

What about mind-reading through ESP? There's no science to justify these story elements, but during the golden age of SF, these things were scientifically plausible. Moreover at that time science-fact notions like programmable matter and nanotechnology were implausibly magical.

Years back I wrote a story wherein characters used "mental telephony": They had chips in their heads that allowed them to wirelessly communicate without speaking. I think that was clearly SF.

Or consider time travel. I've heard some science fiction writer claim that all time travel stories are pure fantasy. If you go back in time, there is absolutely no way it won't change the present in some unpredictable way.

Chaos Theory tells us that a change as big as the mass of an electron at the opposite edge of the universe makes an observable, unpredictable difference.

Scale that up to the effects you'd get if you were to send Sid & Nell back to WW2 Greenland and you've got big trouble doing so without disrupting the time-line.

So, is Finding Time a collection of Fantasy or Science Fiction stories? Tell me what you think.

Can Raspberry Pi Save Civilization?

Last night I bought a book because 2 nights ago, I bought a computer.

I'm a big spender. I know.

The computer is a little bit cheaper than the first one I bought in 1980 that ran CP/M and booted from floppy disks. It's called the Raspberry Pi and I laid less than $40 for it. I paid half that for the book.

Reading the foreword of the book made me worried. The author described the state of the kids he's seeing entering college nowadays and how they differ from the kids entering college a decade or two ago. He lamented the fact that kids nowadays don't know much about programming.

I'm not being a cranky old man when I sympathize with him, because I learned to use a slide rule and the micro-computer revolution happened after I'd safely graduated from college. But get off my lawn anyway.

Seems that in the last decade or so, kids interact with computers that nobody can program except Microsoft or SONY or whoever the manufacturer is. Look in your pocket right now and you may find a smart phone that has a lot more computing power than ever flew during the Apollo program. But have you ever tried to write a program on it? Of course not. It's a phone, not a computer. Same goes for your Kindle, your Nook, your iPad, or a half-dozen other computer-powered devices you commonly use.

These things are locked down and you don't have the desire to open the hood and fiddle with the stuff inside. And big corporations spend money and hire lawyers to discourage you from doing that, too.

Is this right or wrong? I won't say here, because the point I want to make here is that the sociological change this makes on our society is to regard technology as a black box. If a kid can fiddle with the things at the edges of that black box, s/he may think s/he is a programmer when there's an ocean of knowledge s/he's ignorant of.

The Raspberry Pi guys decided to change that and have brought out a cheap, open computer running free, open source software. There's nothing in the hardware or the software that someone can't get at and start messing with. Instead of coming in an enclosure with tamper-resistant screws and a warranty that's void if you open it up, the Raspberry Pi has no enclosure. It is just a circuit board you plug things into.

The cool thing is that for half the cost of a pair of Adidas sneakers, a kid can start experimenting with a real, live computer. When I was a kid all you could get for that kid of money was a dozen relays that's make clicking sounds. Lame.

When I got out of college a kid's parents could spend a lot more money for a computer that would play Pong. This Raspberry Pi has all the multimedia functions you'd find in an Arcade video game, and it'll stream HD movies or music from the Internet to your TV. And all the software that makes it work comes with source code. That means kids can learn to change it to do what THEY want it to.

Will they?

Most won't, but a few will. And those few will have a head start on becoming the next generation of technologists. I hope they will be enough.