Orwell and Heinlein

If you’ve read my stuff, you might have noticed that I like to quote Orwell.

Glenn Reynolds had just excerpted and posted a link to Robert A. Heinlein’s 1973 speech to the U.S. Naval Academy.

It should go without saying that it’s worth reading the whole thing, but the excerpt reminded me of “The Lion and the Unicorn,“ a George Orwell column written in London 1941.

And I’ll leave you with this paragraph from Orwell to whet your appetite.

“In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible. Both the New Statesman and the News Chronicle cried out against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible. Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the armed forces. Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.”

It’s important to remember that, although Orwell was a socialist himself, he supported the war before it became popular among his friends.

This is what the future will be like

Found via FuturePundit Randall Parker on the decreasing value of human labor.

He rightly points out that, where some people may think job losses could be offset by more private chef positions, those careers are also threatened. And while he says they’ll be in upscale households, it’s only a matter of time before prices are brought down like computers and VCRs. These things could eventually become as ubiquitous as George Foreman’s products. And by that time, they’ll be smarter and more versatile.

I’m not altogether sure that what you see in the video is the genuine article. The system, by Moley, is still in development for rollout in 2017. It looks different (and more real) in this video, but I’m sure it’ll look more like that once it’s available in the stores.

We’ve come a long way since the Automat.

A further thought:

Imagine for a moment that on 12:01AM, December 25, 2017, a hapless parent is trying to assemble a gift with four pages of instructions written by someone with an engineering degree and a D- in writing.

Not a problem with one of these. Check the internet. Someone else might have handled this before you, and recorded the assembly on their own Moley cooking device. Just put the pieces on your kitchen counter and let it do the work for you.

Better yet, put this beside your 3D printer, and let the two devices work together. You won’t even need to buy that Christmas present.

I can’t say that this one will be good enough to handle fine tools. But give it five more years. We’ll get there.

Objects in mirror are not the self-driving singularity

I’ve been meaning to do a post on automation and its effects on employment, and then I remembered Megan McArdle’s column on self-driving trucks.

Those of us eager for the real 21st century to finally kick in had been given a kick in the shins when she threw cold water on the idea. Her analysis, and the article she comments on, are both worth reading.

To make a long story short, Scott Santens of Medium.com wrote that 8.7 million trucking-related jobs are at risk.

But McArdle says, not so fast. The technology isn’t as ready as they suggest:

You hear a lot about how Google cars have driven an amazing number of miles without accidents. You hear less, however, about how they have achieved this feat: by 3-D mapping every inch of those roads so that the car has a database of every stationary object, from traffic lights to guardrails. That allows the car to devote its processing power to analyzing the movement of objects that aren’t in its database.

Such mapping is incredibly labor intensive, which is why, according to Lee Gomes, those amazing mile counts that Google’s driverless cars are racking up “are the same few thousand mapped miles, driven over and over again.” Most of them are near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, a place that gets only 15 inches of rain a year and never has snow or ice — three common weather hazards that long-haul truckers must frequently contend with.

Granted, this is good news for truckers, taxi drivers, and their accountants, but that’s another debate.

It’s disappointing for the geeks among us waiting for the next tech leap to arrive. It sounds almost like Google’s car is little more than a souped-up Roomba.

Truthfully, I was surprised when I first read there’d been so much progress in self-driving cars. I thought it would still be a while before our computers are smart enough to handle traffic. Evidently, I was right.

I do think there are reasons for optimism. Processing power will keep improving. To me, the key is making computers smarter. That’s been happening, and it will continue, but we already knew that.

But what’s more interesting is to consider that this is part of the development process. And here’s the key: You don’t hold off software development just because the processing power isn’t there yet. There are other challenges to making self-driving cars. Companies like Google are getting those things out of the way so that the software will be ready when the hardware is.

As for those lost jobs, that’s a big problem, and worth another post.

New cover for The Time Bridge at Orion

The Time Bridge at Orion now has a new cover. I had a bad case of the flu last March when the story was first released, and always planned to replace the cover with a better one.

It’s basically the same 3D model as the first cover, but from a different angle, with different lighting effects, and a better background.

For those interested, the ship is a 3D model created with POV-Ray. The background and captions were added in later. It was all put together using GIMP.

Pluto now in the rear-view mirror

We’re only now, after almost sixty years of the space age, finally getting an up-close view of Pluto. It’s not quite as dramatic as seeing the first images of Mars that the Mariner missions gave us, which redrew the maps we thought we had of Mars. But it’s the last major stop within the solar system. Everything from here on is either a whistle stop, or too far away for mere rockets.

Rand Simberg gives his general rundown here. I thought this was interesting:

It’s several light-hours away from earth, so the initial data won’t arrive until later today. The data won’t even start its journey back to earth until the spacecraft has departed the system because, while it can point at Pluto to take pictures, or point at earth to transmit the data, it can’t do both at once. Also, because of the distance from the sun, the only way to power the system was with a nuclear “battery,” and its transmitter has only a few watts of power. So even with the giant dishes of the Deep Space Network at Goldstone in California, and other locations, the data rate will be very slow, and we won’t have all of it for months to come.

So, it’s not merely the speed-of-light lag we’re waiting for. The engineers needed to account for every watt of power when they planned the mission. If you’ve seen the movie, or read the book, Apollo 13, you may remember how much thought had to go into measuring the amount of power they had to work with.

Update Sept-10-2015: The First Pluto Photos From New Horizons’ Massive Data Dump. “The probe is so far away that it can only send data at a rate of around 1 to 4 kilobits per second.” Fortunately, computers can be patient.

Solar power ahead

FuturePundit Randall Parker reports a company predicting “by 2017, we’ll be under $1.00 per watt fully installed.” He reminds us that, “solar cost $4 per watt about a dozen years ago.” Let’s hope this pans out.

We may very well get to Ray Kurzweil’s prediction of getting 100% of our power from solar by the end of the 2020s.

July 16th note: This doesn’t mean we’re at, or near, the electric vehicle tipping point.

I didn’t think we were, but Geoff Ralston says we are, and Alex Tabarrok of MR disagrees. But Tabarrok mostly disagrees that a lack of gas stations would rapidly become a factor. It’s food for thought anyway.

Star Trek Continues: The White Iris

Star Trek: The White Iris
Star Trek Continues released their fourth episode online today: The White Iris

I’ve got my gripes, such as breaking the rules by having a holodeck on the Enterprise of the original series. They did a few other stupid things, but some are appropriate. It’s reasonable to do some stupid things if the 1960s TV series would have done them, too. After all, the premise of this show is to extend the original series with a similar look and feel.

This episode recreates more guest characters from the original series. I hope they continue to do more of that. The City on the Edge of Forever is begging for a full sequel of its own.

You can also catch it here on YouTube.

Or, if you’re new to Star Trek Continues, you can read my first post on the topic, which has links to the three earlier episodes.

Everything I Need to Know [On War] I Learned in Kindergarten

Glenn Reynolds links to PM’s 6 Reasons Why ‘Starship Troopers’ Is the New ‘The Art of War’. That’s too good not to link here.

Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, published in 1959, is aging remarkably well. The tome chronicles the early military career of Johnnie Rico, who fights alien arachnids while clad in a heavily armed exoskeleton. The troopers drop from orbit one by one to wreak havoc on whatever target the Sky Marshal deems worthy of the attention. It’s a cool adventure novel with a soldier’s eye view that doubles a treatise on modern warrior culture, the limits of military technology, and the awful glories of fighting infantry. There’s a reason military academies like West Point recommend cadets read the book.

Like Sun Tzu’s masterpiece, Heinlein’s abounds with quotable axioms. You may not hear overly intense car salesman quoting from Starship Troopers anytime soon, but here are six reasons why the book is a practical guide to 21st century warfare.

He’s right. Starship Troopers holds up very well today.

The Art of War often makes me think of those little books you find in the greeting card section of a store. It’s much more than that, and I apologize for not being able to resist this blog post’s title, but I still get that feeling.

If you haven’t read The Art of War, you can find it free on Amazon.com or Gutenberg.org or in free audio at Librivox.org.

The Time Bridge at Orion


The story is up:
The Time Bridge at Orion

I’ll say more later, but I’ve got the flu.

…

Okay, the flu was miserable. Nuff said.

A 17,500 word story is a novelette by some standards, or a novella according to the Science Fiction Writers of America. I’m just calling it “a story” for now. I don’t yet know how this story will make it to a paperback edition. I will look for a solution.

The story itself takes place about where the first book ends, with Göring in deep space awaiting an opportunity to travel forward in time. This is more space opera than One Thousand Years, but there are also some important historical items, as those are always important to me.