SF and Nonsense

Getting physical

2012-01-31T09:37:00.000-05:00

I haven't posted recently on matters of physics and space travel. In hindsight ... I surprise myself. Because these are (related) topics of great personal interest.

In view of recent do-they-or-don't-they reports of neutrinos slightly outpacing photons -- i.e., a possible chink in the century-old edifice that is Einsteinian relativity -- here's another reminder that Einstein tended to get things right. To wit: It's been shown (again) that the rotation of a massive object produces frame dragging of space-time, as predicted by general relativity.

GP-B

After the very elaborate Gravity Probe B (GP-B) experiment, decades in the making, this subtle effect has been independently remeasured. (Decades: That puts my few months delay in commenting into perspective.) From the American Physical Society, see "Viewpoint: Finally, results from Gravity Probe B." Fascinating stuff.

But wait! There's more!

NASA began the new year by putting two probes into lunar orbit. Working in tandem, the Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) probes, A and B, will reveal details of lunar composition all the way down to the moon's very core. See "NASA marks 2012 with twin probes in moon orbit."

Grail A and B

Like GP-B, the GRAIL experiment relies on subtle effects. In the GRAIL case, the experiment tracks tiny changes in the distance between the twin probes -- subtly altered in real-time as each passes over slight inhomogeneities in the moon. After lots of math, tiny changes in separation between the probes across many orbits will yield 3-D maps of the lunar interior.

That's one past and one present neat NASA mission. What might we see in the future? To guess about that, consider where NASA is investing some of its long-range funds: "NASA Picks 3 Pioneering Technologies for Deep Space Travel." See the article for details, but the short form is: a scaled-up light-sail trial, an improved atomic clock (valuable for navigation), and lasers -- rather than radios -- for deep-space communications. Any and all could contribute to a major revolution in deep-space mission design.

Pluto Kuiper Express

Missions with that new tech should start flying about 2015 -- around the time New Horizons Pluto Kuiper Belt Flyby mission gives us our first close look at Pluto, before proceeding deeper into the Kuiper Belt. Sounds long-range to me ...

Stay tuned.

Of the Ringworld (and much smaller things)

2012-01-24T09:32:00.000-05:00

Lots of Known Space aficionados frequent this blog.

Especially if you're one of them, here's a stunning short video I happened upon, inspired by early portions of -- by my colleague, Larry Niven -- the novel Ringworld. Seriously cool. (And if you haven't read Ringworld ... you should. It's won about every SF award there is.)

I hope there will be a Part 2.

On a terrestrial scale, I was tickled to see my upcoming near-Earth technothriller, Energized, on io9's fairly exclusive list, All The Science Fiction and Fantasy Books We’re Dying to Read in 2012. It's not every day I get to rub (figurative) shoulders with Stephen King, Rob Sawyer, William Gibson, and the other luminaries on the list.

And to move even farther down the scale of things, to nanotech -- and not fictional -- consider molecular-scaled batteries.

Viruses: not just for PCs anymore

2012-01-17T10:23:00.000-05:00

As microprocessors become ever more ubiquitous, so, too, do opportunities for malware. Be afraid: some gadgets are far more personal than your personal computer ...

Let's start with malware that's been crafted to seize control of your smart phone. From Reuters, "GSM phones vulnerable to hijack scams":

"Flaws in a widely used wireless technology could allow hackers to gain remote control of phones and instruct them to send text messages or make calls, according to an expert on mobile phone security."

Why would anyone target smart phones?

"... hackers are paying unprecedented attention to the devices as smartphone sales have outpaced sales of PCs."

And about Windows phones in particular, we read that "Windows Phones message hub hit by killer SMS." More specifically: "A malicious text can be sent which stops the SMS service from working, WinRumours reports. A factory reset is the only way to remedy the issue."

How much critical data resides on your phone?

It gets worse. Ever thought about all the smart -- and, increasingly, wireless-accessible -- features in cars? From IEEE Spectrum, read about "Cars: The Next Victims of Cyberattacks":

"... the same systems engineered to keep cars from crashing—or at least to make driving less stressful—might soon be co-opted by criminals intent on attacking a single driver or causing widespread havoc. Several research groups have independently demonstrated smart cars’ vulnerability to cyberattacks via the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or cellular connections meant as conduits for entertainment, information, and communication. In a September report about the emerging risks in automotive system security, security firm McAfee pointed to an incident where a disgruntled former employee at a Texas car dealership used a remote car deactivation system to simultaneously shut off the engines of 100 vehicles ."

Or, as the LA Times would have it, "High-tech cars raise possibility of cyber attacks":

"Imagine this nightmarish possibility: Al Qaeda terrorists cause thousands of motorists racing down a freeway during the morning commute to suddenly lose their brakes, leading to chaos, death and destruction. Implausible? Maybe not, some experts warn.

"As cars and trucks have become laden with brainy devices to control such features as air bags and crash-avoidance systems, the vehicles have become increasingly vulnerable to cyber attacks, according to recent studies by university researchers and security companies."

And further down the Teflon-coated slope, consider smart prosthetics and implanted medical devices. Sadly -- but not surprisingly -- they're also vulnerable. See "Insulin pumps, monitors vulnerable to hacking":

"A security researcher who is diabetic has identified flaws that could allow an attacker to remotely control insulin pumps and alter the readouts of blood-sugar monitors. As a result, diabetics could get too much or too little insulin, a hormone they need for proper metabolism."

Now consider pacemakers that are monitored remotely ...

In Fools' Experiments (2008), I looked at neural-interface technology, integrating computers with both prosthetic limbs and the human brain. What if those interfaces were to be vulnerable to hacking? Kinda scary, I thought -- and in fiction that's fun.

In real life? Coming our way Any Day Now? That's real scary.

Much idiocy, the occasional triumph of common sense, and a look ahead

2012-01-10T09:23:00.001-05:00

So: a virologist decided to investigate how to make the avian flu (aka, H5N1) more contagious.

It apparently wasn't enough to know that the disease -- transmitted through contact with the feces of infected birds -- has killed 600 people and has a 60% human fatality rate. Now there's an airborne strain. Pleased at punch with his accomplishments, said virologist wanted to get the details published. Because, you know, no one could possibly abuse this research.

Madness.

I'm not one to advocate censorship -- few authors are -- but this is one of the exceptions that proves the rule. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity recommended against full publication. Happily, Science and the researcher went along. We can all breathe easier -- literally -- for a bit longer.

See: "Dutch Scientist Agrees to Omit Published Details of Highly Contagious Bird Flu Findings."

KH-9 spy satellite

For an example of potentially dangerous information successfully protected, see "Decades later, a Cold War secret is revealed." After long years in which these quiet heroes could say nothing about their work, the declassification must have been a relief. The work they did on spy satellites helped make the world a safer place.

As we're early in the year, some topical wackiness. "Is It Time to Overhaul the Calendar?" To avoid taxing our brains with most holidays falling on differing days of the week in different years, this proposed calendar would give us -- wait for it -- a leap week every five or six years. Yeah, that's a whole lot simpler.

What, you don't want to take a five-minute survey about your online experience ordering a two-dollar HDMI cable? Then you'll understand why "For some consumers, surveys breed feedback fatigue."

You've been good sports reading this far. To end today's post on a high note, enjoy IEEE Spectrum's "Top Tech 2012," predictions from the premier electrical-engineering journal on this year's technology winners and losers.

Tell, don't show?

2012-01-03T10:00:00.000-05:00

A standard bit of advice to aspiring authors is to show action, not talk about it. It's often good advice: showing a world explode (for example) is more dramatic than saying that it did.

Like all rules, "show, don't tell" has its exceptions. Telling can be an effective technique, too.

Following my recent trip to England I felt the urge to reread the various cases of Sherlock Holmes. My hotel in London was in walking distance of 221b Baker Street (and indeed, my wife and I did visit the Holmes Museum at that address.) But keener is having seen many of the locales in which the beloved stories take place, on land and on the Thames.

The connection with today's topic? Holmes called himself a consulting detective -- clients come to his flat and describe their cases. We don't hear the recitations from the point of view of the client (generally the one with first-hand experience), nor even of Holmes. We aren't privy to the client's thoughts at having witnessed the invariably odd events, nor to Holmes's thoughts on having heard the recitation.

What readers know of the cases generally comes from the notes of of his faithful (and often clueless) biographer, Watson. Or from the reports of the Baker Street Irregulars: street urchins dispatched by Holmes to watch things for him. Or from newspaper excerpts.

Even when Holmes does leave his flat, he's often off-stage -- out of Watson's sight -- and returns to explain what he saw and did. (Yes, there are exceptions. But even then, often not much action. And when there's a malefactor to be detained, Holmes tends to have prearranged an aide(s) from Scotland Yard to provide overpowering force.)

Most recently I reread "The Final Problem," in which Conan Doyle, having become thoroughly sick of writing Holmesian mysteries, hurled his character into a bottomless abyss. But we didn't see Holmes's fateful struggle with his nemesis, Professor Moriarty. Watson, having (once again, without clue) been dispatched on an errand, comes back to find a farewell note from Holmes and reads the signs of a struggle in the trampled ground. We know Holmes and Moriarty toppled off the Reichenbach Falls -- not by seeing it ourselves, not even by being told by someone who did see the tragedy, but by being told that the incident could be inferred.

And yet, how many scenes in fiction are more memorable? The struggle on Reichenbach Falls certainly stuck with me for decades.

(In fact that scene inspired a small but -- I like to think -- moving passage more than two centuries later and a few billion miles removed, in my 2010 novel InterstellarNet: New Order.)

Holmes's myriad fans rebelled; popular demand persuaded Conan Doyle to bring back his most famous creation. I'm very glad he did -- and that he could, precisely because of the way he'd handled Holmes's supposed demise.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be off to The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Somewhere, the game's afoot.

Maybe the Mayans had it right ;-)

2011-12-27T10:05:00.000-05:00

Submitted for your approval ...

"VW agrees to kick the "Crackberry" habit": Is it a harbinger of sanity or an omen of pending doom?

"Will China Break?" as Paul Krugman suggests? Or will the bull safely exit the porcelain emporium?

While teams of particle physicists feverishly search for a needle in a haystack's worth of haystacks, one physicist spends $2,600 for a custom Lego kit to build a 9,500-piece scale model of CERN's Atlas (A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS) detector -- part of the hunt for the Higgs boson. Heavy.

From the Department of Don't Believe Everything You Read, be sure to read "Doh! Top Science Journal Retractions of 2011."

From the Department of The Cobbler's Child Goes Barefoot, "Hackers target US security think tank."
Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (aka Stratfor) -- adviser to all manner of government agencies, international entities, and megacorps -- is the latest high-profile victim of hactivist group Anonymous. To judge from early reports, Stratfor was as sloppy with its in-house security as, well, an all-too-long list of organizations. Among the claimed disclosures: Stratfor's confidential client list.

And I'm more than a little worried about a different sort of clientele. See "Nevada brothel owner to open Sci-Fi themed hooker house for men who want to bed women from out of this world."

Despite the omens, I hope to see you back here throughout 2012.

Cosmic greetings of the season

2011-12-24T16:12:00.000-05:00

WISE Presents a Cosmic Wreath

(But as with Arthur C. Clarke's classic short story "The Star," you wouldn't want be in the neighborhood when the show began ...)

Cyberwar heats up

2011-12-20T10:15:00.003-05:00

Did you find my January cyberwar post futuristic? If so, the future is now.

From AP (via Yahoo News), here's an item from security firm McAfee: "Report: Global cyberattack under way for 5 years." To begin:

... cybercriminals have spent at least the past five years targeting more than 70 government entities, nonprofit groups and corporations around the world to steal troves of data.

McAfee Inc. said in a report Wednesday that the attacks have targeted a broad range of organizations, including the United Nations, the International Olympic Committee and companies mostly in the United States.

McAfee did not say who may be behind the attacks but says the culprit is likely a nation state.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reports "U.S. Homes In on China Spying" (the full article is only available in full to subscribers). The subtitle is more direct: "Probe Pinpoints Groups of Hackers and Ties Most to Military; Officials Prepare to Confront Beijing." The article opens:

U.S. intelligence agencies have pinpointed many of the Chinese groups responsible for cyberspying in the U.S., and most are sponsored by the Chinese military, according to people who have been briefed on the investigation.

and cites incidents traceable to the Chinese back to 1999.

From the Christian Science Monitor (again via Yahoo News) an Iranian source claims to have brought down an advanced US spy drone by hacking the UAV's GPS feeds. Other (and IMO, more credible/convincing) sources suggest this claim is bogus. See, for example, "Iran Hijacked Spy Drone With GPS Hack? 'Ridiculous,' Official Says" from Fox News or "U.S. Says Drone Crashed, Refuting Iran's Claim" (again from the WSJ; full article available only to subscribers.)

Nonetheless the Iranian claim provides a window into thinking about hack attacks on a key US miitary technology.

And yesterday's WSJ reports that "Firms Bid on NATO Cyberwar," to discuss an important ongoing procurement.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization on Monday will collect bids from some of the world's top defense companies, including Lockheed Martin Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp., to update and expand the alliance's cybersecurity abilities.

The €32 million ($42 million) contract, although valued at less than the price of one fighter jet, holds great significance because it cements the alliance's role in protecting cutting-edge infrastructure, say NATO officials.

Hopefully not a case of too little, too late.

Ditto this report from MIT (via Reuters and Yahoo News): "U.S. power grid needs cybersecurity shield."

But in a cybersecurity/public-utility mea culpa ... a few weeks ago, as part of the post Hacked off, I reported on the apparent over-the-net destruction by Russian hackers of an Illinois utility's water pump. PCmag reports that the "hacker" was a consultant for the utility, vacationing in Russia. (That's one consultant whom I suspect won't get a return engagement.)

The explanation still fails to give me a warm-and-fuzzy for the security of the national infrastructure. How about you?

Cul de sac

2011-12-13T09:45:00.000-05:00

My life is crazy-busy these days. So: what better time than today to share a few of the more interesting items from my web-clippings file?

Remember the 1993 movie Six Degrees of Separation? Neither do I. Regardless, the Kevin Bacon game proves too easy. See "Facebook Claims 4.74 Degrees of Kevin Bacon."

As the Eurozone and the EU itself crumple, Brussels bureaucrats took the time to tackle a vital consumer-protection issue. See "Europe's ruling on water preventing dehydration – another 'angels dancing on the head of a pin' moment."

(That topic has a certain Douglas Adams feel about it, does it not? How soon can we expect new workplace protections for telephone mouthpiece sanitizers?)

But truly exciting -- and now I'm not being sarcastic -- is a recent initiative of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. To wit: "Darpa seeks nanotechnology defense against novel pathogens." Consider:

Darpa wants researchers to use nanoparticles — tiny, autonomous drug delivery systems that can carry molecules of medication anywhere in the body, and get them right into a targeted cell. Darpa would like to see nanoparticles loaded with “small interfering RNA (siRNA)” — a class of molecules that can target and shut down specific genes. If siRNA could be reprogrammed “on-the-fly” and applied to different pathogens, then the nanoparticles could be loaded up with the right siRNA molecules and sent directly to cells responsible for the infection.

Take that, you increasingly antibiotic-immune little beasties.

Ambitious? Surely. But the folks who brought us the Internet (nee ARPANET) begin with more than a little credibility.

And about that Internet ... To wrap up this post, here's the study that even now you and I have colluded to validate: "Study confirms many of us go online for no reason." :-)

Where credit is due

2011-12-06T10:00:00.000-05:00

Unless this is your first visit -- in which case, "Hi!" -- you likely know that I'm a onetime physicist and computer engineer, and that I remain interested in science and technology.

It continually amazes me how few people I meet have any interest in either subject area.

Admittedly, seemingly esoteric things can fascinate me. (Like whether, as recent experiments suggest, neutrinos can travel faster than light. Like the nature of dark energy: a label of convenience for our present state of ignorance, not an explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe.)

But my fascination with the cutting edge of science isn't why others' disinterest in science and tech surprises -- and, yes, saddens -- me. Come. Travel with me to my youth.

I remember cars that got ~15 miles per gallon; polluted like crazy; picked up (badly) only ground-based radio, and in which an 8-track tape player was a coveted upgrade; lacked routing support beyond a glove box for maps (that would never refold properly); and were deathtraps in any accident.

I remember TVs that were small, monaural, black and white, low res, and could pick up (again, badly) only a handful of local stations. If you missed a show in that primitive era, that was your tough luck. It was an era before the VCR, let alone DVD, Blu-Ray, TiVo, on-demand cable, or streaming video.

I grew up before, among other things: personal computers, the Internet, iPods, cell phones (not merely smart phones), and digital cameras.

How long before? I remember fondly when transistor radios first hit the market. The revolutionary music devices of my youth -- like iPods -- were portable and pocket-sized. I loved them. Everyone loved them.

A few other things that were absent from my youth: CAT scans, PET scans, and MRIs. Genetically engineered drugs. Electromechanical prostheses. The human genome, sequenced. Statins to lower cholesterol.

And so, I remember when life expectancy was much shorter than today. Polio was a scourge -- that terrible image nearby is of polio victims, confined for the remainder of their lives in iron lungs. Cancer was a death sentence. Hunger, not obesity, was the nutritional problem.

I remember a time before the first artificial satellite, the first man in space, and the first man on the moon. (I'm not old enough to remember the breaking of the sound barrier.) I remember when no planet but our own had ever been inspected up close, and astronomers still debated whether other suns even had planets.

I could continue (a symptom of my advanced age :-) ), but I think I've made my point. There's been a lot of improvement to the human condition within less than one lifetime -- through the efforts and accomplishments of scientists and technologists.

How can anyone not find science and technology interesting? By cracky (said slapping my knee), I just don't get that.

Energizing! Explosive! Not to mention, Millennial!

2011-11-29T09:02:00.001-05:00

Publishers and authors work on different time lines. And so, two books completed nine months apart can -- and in this case, will -- be published one month apart. Just a few days ago, covers for both new novels (covers that, with total objectivity, I think are keen) appeared on Amazon. The covers having gone public, I thought: why not show off them off here?

First up: Energized, a near-future technothriller about energy shortages, alternate-energy sources, and the assets available to us in space. The large foreground object -- if you weren't certain -- is a solar power satellite. (Aside to Analog-reading visitors: this novel is an updated version of the recently concluded serial of the same name.)

Look for Energized in July 2012. (I'll have more to say here about the novel as that date approaches.)

Next up (this time with friend and colleague, Larry Niven): Fate of Worlds. AKA -- if you have good eyes, or you enlarge the cover image -- as "The Explosive Finale to the Ringworld and the Fleet of Worlds Series."

(Very explosive, and very final.)

Fate of Worlds is due out in August 2012. Expect to hear more about it, too, next summer.

But what about now, you ask. 'Tis the season to shop till you drop. Or, at least, till your mousing finger twitches. That's where "Millennial" comes in.

Analog has just released a (Kindle-only, at least for now) anthology that's entitled New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010. The ebook collects stories by many of my favorite authors -- and also "The Night of the RFIDs," a novelette of my own.

If you enjoy hard SF -- and given that you're reading this blog, I'm guessing that you do -- this new antho is something to consider for your Kindle-owning friends and relations.

Hacked off

2011-11-22T10:05:00.000-05:00

It's not only me. The list of folks being hacked -- about which we all should be hacked off -- is depressingly long. And no, this post isn't about the latest sorry litany of identity thefts or compromises of credit-card databases (as maddening as those incidents are).

It's about matters far worse.

A major factor in my novel Fools' Experiments (2008) was a hostile entity -- in this case, an artificial intelligence -- wreaking havoc on the physical world via the Internet. Born to cyberspace, the AI didn't understand the physical world, but -- justifiably ticked off, for reasons I won't go into here -- it undertook to compromise networked resources that it found to be well-protected. Someone obviously valued them.

If only network-accessible resources were well protected ...

Fast-forward merely three years. From PC Magazine: "Illinois Water Utility Pump Destroyed After Hack." On the same incident, also see, from Physorg.com: "Foreign cyber attack hits US infrastructure: expert."

And the SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) interface that provided the hacker with access to the physical-world pump? SCADA devices are common things -- widely at risk, at least in principle, to more such meddling.

It's not only the US, of course, that's under attack. Consider (from Yahoo News) that "Norway hit by major data-theft attack." Modern economies run on energy. We're told that:

At least 10 different attacks, mostly aimed at the oil, gas, energy and defense industries, were discovered in the past year, but the agency said it has to assume the number is much higher because many victims have yet to realize that their computers have been hacked.

As modern warfare, at least as practiced by the US, switches to unmanned and computerized weapon platforms (not yet, quite, to robots), how worrisome is this CBS report that: "Virus infects Pentagon drones' computers"?

It's not clear whether the virus was deliberately aimed at the military computers or whether it got there through the general spread of infectious malware, but "the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech's computers," Wired reported, citing three unnamed sources. (Aside: that's Creech AFB in Nevada.)

Also unclear is whether the keylogger software has revealed any secure data. But it is running on classified computer networks, Wired said.

Not very reassuring, is that? Especially when:

Wired reported that the virus was discovered two weeks ago and that the virtual pilots continue to run missions from the Air Force base.

Last for today, but certainly not least, consider this lengthy report from The Wall Street Journal: "Document Trove Exposes Surveillance Methods." The WSJ's reporter visited a trade show for commercial systems with which governments and law enforcement agencies can hoover up and examine vast quantities of electronic communications.

At the Washington and Dubai trade conferences this year, which are generally closed to the public, Journal reporters were prevented by organizers from attending sessions or entering the exhibition halls. February's Dubai conference took place at a time of widespread unrest elsewhere in the region. Nearly 900 people showed up, down slightly because of the regional turmoil, according to an organizer.

Presentations in Dubai included how to intercept wireless Internet traffic, monitor social networks and track cellphone users. "All of the companies involved in lawful intercept are trying to sell to the Middle East," said Simone Benvenuti, of RCS SpA, an Italian company that sells monitoring centers and other "interception solutions," mostly to governments. He declined to identify any clients in the region.

The article sheds some light on how the exploits are done. Such as:

Among the most controversial technologies on display at the conference were essentially computer-hacking tools to enable government agents to break into people's computers and cellphones, log their keystrokes and access their data. Although hacking techniques are generally illegal in the U.S., law enforcement can use them with an appropriate warrant, said Orin Kerr, a professor at George Washington University Law School and former computer-crime attorney at the Justice Department.

And:

Vupen, which gave a presentation at the conference on "exploiting computer and mobile vulnerabilities for electronic surveillance," said its tools take advantage of security holes in computers or cellphones that manufacturers aren't yet aware of. Vupen's marketing documents describe its researchers as "dedicated" to finding "unpatched vulnerabilities" in software created by Microsoft Corp., Apple Inc. and others. On its website, the company offered attendees a "free Vupen exploit sample" that relied on an already-patched security hole.

And:

The documents for FinFisher, a Gamma product, say it works by "sending fake software updates for popular software." In one example, FinFisher says intelligence agents deployed its products "within the main Internet service provider of their country" and infected people's computers by "covertly injecting" FinFisher code on websites that people then visited.

The company also claims to have allowed an intelligence agency to trick users into downloading its software onto BlackBerry mobile phones "to monitor all communications, including [texts], email and BlackBerry Messenger." Its marketing documents say its programs enable spying using devices and software from Apple, Microsoft, and Google Inc., among others. FinFisher documents at the conference were offered in English, Arabic and other languages.

Meanwhile, of course, the trend in popular software is to default to automatic updates (Microsoft Windows) or not even give users a choice of if/when to accept an update (the last time I checked, the popular Opera browser).

To bottom-line it, societal exposure to malware and networked malfeasance continues to grow. The occasional rogue AI will fit right in ...

(And with that cheery thought, I'll wish a Happy Thanksgiving to my US readers.

Time traveling -- the old-fashioned way

2011-11-15T10:05:00.000-05:00

None of us can travel to the past (as I've blogged: Trope-ing the light fantastic (time travel)), but that doesn't stop a person from wondering ....

I recently vacationed in England -- that's the Houses of Parliament to the left -- and my sightseeing tended toward the historical. Not exactly time travel, to be sure, but it sure carried my imagination far into the past. And I brought home some great (IMO) photos to help carry you there:

Let's begin two or three thousand years BC. Here's the famous Druid temple, celestial calculator, observatory, and/or burial site, Stonehenge. Its purpose and the timing of its construction remain uncertain -- and are apt to remain unknown unless we somehow do develop time travel.

One of the many highlights of the trip was the British Museum, which is chock-full of fantastic archeological treasures. To mention just two:

The Elgin Marbles, of which the most famous were once parts of the decorative frieze of the Parthenon, sculptures created by the legendary Hellenic master Phidias (and/or his students). Call it 434 BC. (I'd seen the Parthenon, sans frieze, about fifteen years ago. Standing on the Acropolis was also amazing.)

(And no, I won't get into competing claims on this or other museum holdings.)

And from 196 BC, the Rosetta Stone, the trilingual stele with Pharaonic decree from which linguists first learned to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics. One of the three scripts was an early version of Greek (fair enough, as the pharaoh in question was a Ptolemy, descended from one of Alexander the Great's generals).

The ancient Greeks never made it to the British Isles, but the Romans certainly did. And they soon concluded that the north of the island of Britain wasn't worth the cost of holding it. Emperor Hadrian declared (in 122 AD) that a fortified barrier be built from coast to coast -- spanning 73 statute miles -- to separate Romano-Britain from the Celtic areas to the north. Parts of Hadrian's Wall (and although not in the nearby image, also bits of its old forts) still stand.

Circa 410 AD, near the end of the (Western) Roman Empire, the Romans entirely withdrew from Britain.

Fast-forward to 1066 AD and the Norman Conquest. To solidify his hold on the country, William the Conqueror began a series of his own fortifications, of which the most famous is the Tower of London. Here are the White Tower (from the original Norman construction) and an outside view of the larger Tower complex that grew around it.

As Norman England morphed into Medieval England, construction changed, too. Here are a couple of interior shots of York Minster (completed 1472 AD): the largest Gothic cathedral north of the Alps. The image at right was shot up the great central tower of the cathedral.

What's old is sometimes new again. During the Georgian era the onetime Roman spa at Bath was rebuilt -- with a very Roman flair.

I'll end (long before I run out of imagery) with a chronological juxtaposition. In the background: St. Paul's Cathedral (competed 1711 AD), Christopher Wren's masterwork. In the foreground, the London Millennial Footbridge (that's the 2000 millennium :-) ) across the Thames.

Absent time travel, all vacations must end. Alas.

Fleet of Worlds (at last)

2011-11-08T10:15:00.000-05:00

I've blogged regularly about the Fleet of Worlds: the physical (however fictional) place; the most recent book in the series; the various species known to the Fleet's alien denizens, the Puppeteers; the exotic technologies used there (and elsewhere in Known Space); and relationships to Larry Niven's novel Ringworld and its series.

But I've never blogged about Fleet of Worlds the novel, even though it kicked off the Fleet of Worlds series (more on that below) and is among my most popular books. Fleet of Worlds was released in 2007 -- but I didn't begin blogging till 2008. I never saw a reason to look back—

Till now. Today, Tor Books (Larry's and my publisher) re-released Fleet of Worlds as a trade paperback.

What is Fleet of Worlds about?

Kirsten Quinn-Kovacs is among the best and brightest of her people. She gratefully serves the gentle race that rescued her ancestors from a dying starship, gave them a world, and nurtures them still. If only the Citizens knew where Kirsten’s people came from ….

A chain reaction of supernovae at the galaxy’s core has unleashed a wave of lethal radiation that will sterilize the galaxy. The Citizens flee, taking their planets, the Fleet of Worlds, with them.

Someone must scout ahead, and Kirsten and her crew eagerly volunteer. Under the guiding eye of Nessus, their Citizen mentor, they explore for any possible dangers in the Fleet’s path—and uncover long-hidden truths that will shake the foundations of worlds.

In short: a star-spanning, teeming-with-aliens, science-fictional epic in the grand tradition.

Fleet of Worlds was a featured alternate selection of the Science Fiction Book Club, a "Sci Fi Essential" selection of (what was then called) the Sci Fi Channel, and a finalist for the Prometheus Award. FOW has been translated (so far) into eight languages. This being the 21st century, FOW has long been available in several formats of ebook and audio book.

And FOW has been quite favorably received. Here are a few of my favorite comments from reviews:

"Needs recommending within the science fiction community about as much as a new Harry Potter novel does – well, anywhere." — Locus Magazine

"As we have long expected from Niven, it’s a great read, and Lerner—as Analog readers know—has the knack as well. You’ll enjoy this one." — Analog Science Fiction and Fact

"Let's see: Great series, grand scope and a seamless prequel with characters and politics, and ethical issues. Who the hell wouldn't read that?" — San Diego Union-Tribune

"… Delivers a very strong hard science fiction experience. It is a great novel that is not to be missed." — SF Signal

With today's post: the series coverage within this blog is finally complete (till Fate of Worlds is released in 2012, that is).

Fleet of World became a series, obviously, but Larry and I set out to write a single novel. This novel. (We didn't say "no" when the publisher expressed interest in a second book. Or to another after that. Or after that .... Per my recent post, Nails in the coffin, it can be hard to make "The end" stick.) So: if you're not in the mood for a series, that's okay. Fleet of Worlds stands alone.

Worrying about the right things?

2011-11-01T16:00:00.003-04:00

What brings eyeballs to many a website (or, in Ye Olde Days, sold printed newspapers) is trouble. Something that has, or might, or inevitably must, Go Wrong.

The retractions (if any) or stony silence when disasters don't come to pass are less obvious. Is it any wonder that anxiety is the natural mood?

For example, Radiation from cell phones can possibly cause cancer, according to the World Health Organization. Never mind that WHO had previously assured consumers there is no risk and that there is no known mechanism by which cell phones can cause cancer (the radio frequencies used by cell phones are not ionizing -- they can't cause mutations). You heard all about the "warning" at the time (end of May), right?

"Risk" being probabilistic to begin with, what is a "possible" risk? That appears to be "a risk that we can't rule out, although we sure as hell can't rule it in." Happily -- if far less visibly -- an international study decided about two months later that, "Evidence 'increasingly against' phone cancer risk."

A major review of previously published research by a committee of experts from Britain, the United States and Sweden concluded there was no convincing evidence of any cancer connection.

It also found a lack of established biological mechanisms by which radio signals from mobile phones might trigger tumors.

"Although there remains some uncertainty, the trend in the accumulating evidence is increasingly against the hypothesis that mobile phone use can cause brain tumors in adults," the experts wrote in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

Likewise, we're supposed to worry about some key materials whose supply China dominates. As in: "Rare earths: why China is cutting exports crucial to Western technologies." That's from the Telegraph, which begins by telling us:

The key to hundreds of modern technologies, from iPhones to smart-bombs, lies in the little-known rare earth metals, 95 per cent of which are mined by China. Its decision to slash exports has left the West scrabbling for alternative supplies

Rare earths elements are (no surprise) rare. But are they all in China? The BBC claims 97 percent of the supply is produced in China, but notes that "Japan finds rare earths in Pacific seabed."

How significant is the Japanese find?

The deposits have a heavy concentration of rare earths. Just one square kilometre (0.4 square mile) of deposits will be able to provide one-fifth of the current global annual consumption," said Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Tokyo.

Recovering materials from the sea floor at depths up to 20,000 feet won't be easy -- but neither, once upon a time, was exploiting crude oil from thousands of feet beneath the sea floor. Or extracting natural gas -- present in the trillions of cubic feet -- from the shale thousands of feet below the Pennsylvania farmland.

And closer to the surface, how about a a major rare-earth find in Afghanistan? From Moneynews.com, see "Afghans Dream of Bonanza in Scarce Rare-Earth Minerals." In January,

Afghan officials proudly presented what they say is $3 trillion worth of deposits scattered throughout the country, more than triple the initial dollar amount estimated by the U.S. Defense Department last June.

Afghanistan is inhospitable in its own way, of course.

The essential point remains, paraphrasing the first of Clarke's Laws (call it Lerner's Corollary):

When you read that something is going right, that may well be true. When you read that things have gone wrong, or are running out, or can't work -- that we're doomed -- that is very probably wrong.

Shortages and side effects are almost always resolvable with human ingenuity -- as long as we retain the ambition to try.

Alas, dystopias garner more eyeballs than utopias. If you want to worry about something, worry that too few of us retain the power of positive thinking.

Nails in the coffin

2011-10-26T11:00:00.089-04:00

When is a storyline complete?

Typing "The end" is no guarantee. To the contrary, that simple phrase becomes a dare, firing the "But what if ..." circuit in authorial brains. Because in fiction, as in life, few things ever truly end.

Okay, the conflict has been resolved. Big deal: life is conflict. Like streetcars, another conflict will be along any minute.

So the Bad Guy has gotten his comeuppance. The world has been saved. Yawn.

You can't keep a good Bad Guy down. He (or she) will always be plotting a comeback. You can't really kill a Bad Guy -- and I don't just mean because of soap-opera-like discoveries that bodies were switched, or the death was faked, or the wrong identical twin bought the farm. We're talking SF, here.

Maybe the corpse can be revived. Maybe a pissed-off clone or a memory upload to the Internet returns to stir things up. Maybe a loop in time or a parallel universe furnishes a just-as-evil copy. Maybe the Bad Guy's robot butler, driver, and cook decide to take over (or battle one another over) the boss's Evil Empire. Maybe ...

Prevent one nasty End of the World, and the universe will cook up another. The universe is the ultimate Bad Guy that way.

If all that wasn't "The end"-defying enough ... Wait! There's more!

There's that support character with a fascinating personality or a unique point of view. What's her story? What if she should take on a more active role?

And those thousand scraps of background detail, those throwaway bits added to the story merely as color. Any one of them might rear its metaphorical head to demand: How did this bit of tech, or culture, or conflict come about? How might someone use -- or misuse -- this heretofore only mentioned-in-passing capability/vulnerability/quirk? Suddenly, by damn, there's a whole new story in waiting ....

Then there are folks like you, challenging the author, "But what about ...? Just suppose ...? Did you ever consider that ...?"

Hence: sequels. Prequels. Companion novels. Companion series. Reboots. Re-tellings.

If flying fingers entering "The end" won't conclude a storyline, what does? Ennui. The cascade ends when the author, or the market, has had enough.

And if the author or the market loses interest in a storyline before you, the reader does? That is a real bummer.

(The cover thumbnails here are from SF novels that became popular series. To be shown does not imply any opinion about the optimal length of these series.)

Which are your favorite fictional series, SFnal or otherwise? Which series or universe met an untimely end, or continued beyond its expiration date?

Compucopia

2011-10-18T09:30:00.000-04:00

A few computer-centric curiosities from my file of virtual clippings:

Living Google-free. Impossible? (He asks ironically, while blogging on a Google property.) Here's the experience of someone who actually tried. How I Learned to Live Google-free: A quest to quit the most pervasive company on the Web (from IEEE Spectrum's Inside Technology blog).

Maintaining such independence, should you so desire, isn't getting any easier. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Google Acquires Facial Recognition Technology Company. Why? "The Web-search giant didn’t say what it plans to do with it."

What has Google had to say about such technologies?

Google has said it built facial recognition technology for smartphones into a product known as Google Goggles, but withheld it. “As far as I know, it’s the only technology that Google built and after looking at it, we decided to stop,” said Google Chairman Eric Schmidt last month at a conference. “People could use this stuff in a very, very bad way as well as in a good way."

Not that Google has a monopoly on encroaching on your privacy. Your car may be ratting you out, with a little "help" from OnStar. Even if you canceled your OnStar subscription. See "The Car as Informant," again courtesy of IEEE Spectrum. (There was enough of an uproar that OnStar is changing this policy. In a few months. Here is OnStar's press release.)

Did you read the report a few months ago that Internet Explorer users have lower IQs than users of other browsers? The scary thing is that serious news outlets actually ran with it. See "Journalists Miss Hoax Clues in Dumb IE User 'Study'," from Sci-Tech Today.

Having a background in physics and computer science, I've long been fascinated by prospects for quantum computing. I recently came upon an excellent report on the status of the technology. See "Is Quantum Computing real? The answer is yes and no. And yes and yes. And no and no." from Network World. The subtitle says it all ...

You won't find languages for quantum computing here, but the list is nonetheless interesting (to this blogger, in any case). You did wonder about the ten top programming languages, didn't you? Of course you did. So (yet again from IEEE Spectrum -- have I mentioned I'm an IEEE member?), see "The Top 10 Programming Languages: They're mostly ones you'd expect--and then there's Lua."

Finally, noting that pretty much everything -- from industrial-strength computing to Netflix movies to Google Docs to your iTunes collection -- is in, or moving to, the (i)Cloud, I'm pleased to see my alma mater taking a crack at making the Cloud more reliable and secure. With backing from the US Air Force, "New Assured Cloud Computing Center to be Established at Illinois".

(That's the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. As in, you may recall, the birthplace of the HAL 9000. Watching 2001: A Space Odyssey as a student at the U of I (yeah, I know how that dates me) was a hoot.

Inspiration

2011-10-11T12:43:00.000-04:00

A commonplace among authors (and common advice to those aspiring to write) is that ideas are "a dime a dozen." Meanwhile, one good idea can occupy an author for months, even years.

And yet, when readers email and con-goers inquire, the most frequent question asked of authors -- by far -- is "Where do you get your ideas?" (When the impetus is a random encounter, upon learning that I'm an SF author, the query becomes, "Where do you get your crazy ideas?")

That's fair. No matter how well an author handles the craft of writing, or even the world-building, what sticks with most readers is the premise or the plot. The idea, that is. The inspiration side of writing, not the perspiration side.

For example, what would John Varley's Titan be without the idea of a sentient world? Or Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series without the idea of everyone who ever lived being reborn simultaneously on another planet? Or Eric Flint's 1632 without the idea of a modern West Virginia town being transported intact into the Europe of the Thirty Years War? Or Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park without the idea of cloning dinosaurs from ancient DNA? Or (in another genre) any of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes without the idea of a private detective versed in science, logic, and attention to detail?

A Really Great Idea can carry a story, even with less than stellar execution. I recently reread the Riverworld series. The careless repetition of material bugged me -- but the idea still blew me away.

How about a Really Great Style without a good idea? Can style carry a book? I don't think so. Certainly not for this reader.

So where do science-fiction ideas come from? The classic, glib answer, inasmuch as no one really knows, is "From a vault in Schenectady." I don't know the provenance of that explanation, but I do know where I first encountered it: discussed at some length, tongue very firmly in cheek, in the forward of the Barry Longyear collection It Came From Schenectady. The cover alone is sufficient reason to own this book.

(And once you do, be sure to look inside the cover. Longyear is a master. If you're unfamiliar with his work, he's perhaps best known for the novelette "Enemy Mine," basis of the 1985 movie Enemy Mine. [That said, "Enemy Mine" is not part of this collection.] In that film, Louis Gossett Jr. puts in the best performance of the Other until Andy Serkis as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy -- and Gossett had neither CGI nor motion-capture technology.)

And if you're without a key to the vault? I find walks helpful. My neighbors know that it's nothing personal when I wander past them in a daze -- that I really am in another world.

So if you'll excuse, me, I'll be off on another walk

The red queen of cosmology and astrophysics

2011-10-04T17:36:00.000-04:00

Charles Dodgson -- aka Lewis Carroll -- was a very clever guy. I could give many examples, but today I'm thinking of the Red Queen's race in Through the Looking Glass:

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Why think about Alice's adventures?

Because of the Physics Nobel just awarded to Adam Riess, Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt for discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.

Why is the universe expanding at an increasing rate, despite the pull of gravity to slow things down? No one knows, but we have a name for our ignorance: dark energy.

Einstein sort-of predicted this effect. Before Hubble's Law and Big Bang Theory, the universe was believed to be static and eternal. So: to explain why the universe had not collapsed on itself, Einstein's Theory of General Relativity includes a term called the cosmological constant that works against gravity.

Mathematically this factor was simply a constant of integration of unknown value -- and so it looked like a kludge. After the discovery of the expanding universe and the rise of Big Bang Theory, it became common to set the cosmological constant to zero. Einstein called the cosmological constant his "biggest blunder."

The cosmological constant (which is a mathematical description, not a physical explanation) is now a leading contender for the nature of dark energy. Even Einstein should not bet against Einstein.

Lapsing from physics to philosophy ... humanity is constantly reminded by science how little we know. In less than a century cosmology and astrophysics have gone from trying to explain a static, eternal universe, to trying to explain how the expanding universe born in a Big Bang might escape either flying apart or collapsing again, to trying to explain why the universe is accelerating in its expansion.

Along the way, we lost our smug assurance (or should have) that we understand the nature of the universe. The stuff that stars and humans are made of represents only a few percent of the universe's total mass/energy. Dark energy and dark matter (a label for another aspect of our ignorance) predominate.

And what is familiar matter, that modest few percent of the universe that is like us? Do we even understand that?

It's been only a century since Ernest Rutherford postulated that the atom -- previously considered to be the smallest, and indivisible, component of the chemical elements -- consisted of electrons and a small, positively charged nucleus. (He first split the atom in 1917.) In due time, physicists further learned that nuclei are comprised of proton and neutrons, and that protons and neutrons are comprised of quarks held together by gluons.

Can we be sure that quarks aren't made of something yet smaller? String theory (without a shred of proof, to be sure, merely beautiful math) supposes that apparently pointlike electrons and quarks are vibrational modes of one-dimensional strings too small to be detected using the most powerful particle accelerator.

Bringing me back to the Red Queen race. The more science learns, the more we should understand just how little we know.

And likewise bringing me to Clarke's First (and unjustly lesser known) Law:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Consider the exciting news that scientists at CERN measured neutrinos moving faster than light. A future Physics Nobel, I do not hesitate to predict -- if the experiment is substantiated. Because if it is substantiated, physicists will -- yet again -- have overturned a core conclusion of a century's standing.

Which will prevail this time? Clarke's First Law or Einsteinian relativity?

Humans, Pak, Puppeteers: in one word

2011-09-26T13:30:00.004-04:00

An exercise: describe humanity in one word.

Choose carefully. The term you pick must apply universally across nationalities, ethnicities, cultures, technology levels, and political systems. It must apply equally across thousands of years of history, today, and well into the future. The term should also serve to predict the behavior of an individual person in any situation, independent of his or her past experiences, throughout his or her adult life.

Hmm. Humans can be cruel, selfish, and ruthless -- but we can also be altruistic, generous, and self-sacrificing. We can be curious, but we can also be oblivious to events all around us. We can be inventive or mired in tradition or anti-intellectual, slapstick or witty or humorless, adventuresome or stay-at-home. We love and hate. We can be suspicious, sympathetic, and gullible. We act both capriciously and with cold, calculating premeditation.

I'm not having a lot of luck with my own challenge.

I succumb on occasion to checking out comments about my own books, both by professional reviewers and by (via Amazon and Goodreads, for example) the general readership. Most authors do. And while it's always enjoyable to see praise, critiques provide more in the way of learning opportunities. As in: What aspects of a plot did some readers not accept? What character behaviors did some readers find implausible? What background elements might have been insufficiently described?

So: How does that exercise of authorial due diligence (or rationalization -- another human trait) have anything to do with today's challenge?

The Fleet of Worlds series of novels deals with several alien races, including the Puppeteers and the Pak Protectors first created by Larry Niven. The Puppeteers, in a word, are cowardly. The Pak, in a word, are scary-smart. If you permit the Pak a second descriptor, they are ruthlessly territorial at the clan level.

In his solo novels where Larry introduced Pak and Puppeteers, readers knew these traits because we were told of them. Certainly the traits apply. But are these traits ubiquitous and all-controlling?

Maybe not. These books directly involve very few aliens, seldom seen on their home worlds. Generally, the aliens are not point-of-view characters, so we do not see into their thoughts.

The Ringworld series features the Puppeteers Nessus and Hindmost -- whom we never see together. When human characters briefly visit the Puppeteer home world, they meet only one new Puppeteer (and he only as a hologram). Instead, we see a Puppeteer interacting with human characters or with a Kzin -- not among a Puppeteer population. We're told that both these Puppeteers are insane and not representative of their species.

Similarly, the novel Protector focuses on a single Pak Protector character, mostly seen far from home. When, in the Ringworld series, we meet a Pak Protector, she has been apart from her own kind for eons and is likely also insane.

The Fleet of Worlds series took a different tack: these novels consider alien societies, often seen on their home worlds or significant colony worlds.

The gist of a some critiques of the Fleet of Worlds series is (my paraphrase, of course): some alien is acting out of character. That is: A Puppeteer is insufficiently cowardly. A Pak is insufficiently ruthless or exhibited some bound on his intelligence

Such critiques may be correct. But -- getting back, finally, to this post's challenge -- might some aliens manage, to some degree, not to follow, like a robot, a one-word characterization? A Pak may be very smart, and yet unable to build a super weapon on demand from bread crusts and belly-button lint. A Puppeteer may be very cowardly, but still show some empathy for the rights of other beings to exist. And a certain human character prominent in the Fleet of Worlds series may have more depth than the single word "paranoid."

In the Star Trek universe, a Klingon who's not a half-human hybrid might still resist attacking against all odds at the slightest offense.

I submit that intelligent aliens, like humans, may have personal quirks, foibles, hobbies, philosophies, likes and dislikes, knowledge (and gaps in same), life lessons, and moods. Aliens, like humans, may be individually shaped by their upbringing, local culture, personal-relationship status (or lack thereof), economic/cultural status, employment, profession, and the specific political entity in which they live. That's true whether "shaped by" manifests as support for -- or rebellion against -- formative influences.

None of this post is intended as a rebuttal of critiques. The author always bears the responsibility of making his case. For some readers, we failed in that task.

But to those who are comfortable with the notion of aliens constrained by a single term ... I'd be interested in knowing the word you picked that equally describes: Adolf Hitler, Mother Theresa, Albert Einstein, Torquemada, Oscar Wilde, the Three Stooges, Socrates, Florence Nightingale, Marcus Aurelius, Buddha, and Paris Hilton.

Everything's spinning out of control!

2011-09-20T13:10:00.000-04:00

Okay, that's not a statistical finding -- maybe things are no more out of control than usual. Regardless, my files are bursting with craziness. Such as:

Seismologists in Italy are on trial for manslaughter for failing to warn of a serious earthquake. Who believes seismologists can predict earthquakes? It's madness!

As is, IMO, the growing popularity of burning food (aka, biofuels). From a recent WSJ interview with Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestle:

"The U.S. Department of Agriculture's most recent estimate predicts that this year, for the first time, American farmers will harvest more corn for ethanol than for feed. In Europe some 50% of the rapeseed crop is going into biofuel production, according to Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe, while 'world-wide about 18% of sugar is being used for biofuel today.'"

Despite burning such big portions of the food supply, food prices spike. How can such things happen? If only the world made sense!

Maybe it does. Read the full article ... Peter Brabeck-Letmathe has much to say about the intersection of policies affecting energy, food, and water. Very interesting stuff.)

My authorial persona takes note that "Authors Guild sues universities over online books."

"Authors and authors' groups in the United States, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom sued the University of Michigan and four other universities Monday, seeking to stop the creation of online libraries made up of as many as 7 million copyright-protected books they say were scanned without authorization."

And still looking at publishing, are you ready for the onslaught of spam ebooks? Again from the WSJ, in "Cherish the Book Publishers—You'll Miss Them When They're Gone" (note: "slush pile" is industry-speak for unsolicited manuscripts):

"The e-book era promises us all the pleasure of wading through the slush pile ourselves, even as the pile grows exponentially. Much of that growth comes from eager literary hopefuls making earnest efforts. But spammers are also making their contribution to the teeming digital library. As Reuters recently reported, some unscrupulous self-publishers have begun creating books by the ream merely by grabbing a few pages of text from websites and dumping them into ultraquickie e-books. The authors of such faux tomes can knock out 10 or 20 a day. And even if only a handful of people make the mistake of downloading one of these "books," the spammer still makes enough pennies to keep at it."

How gross is that?

Next up: the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, aka IEEE (of which I am a longtime member), provides details about the recent security lapses at DigiNotar, the big Dutch certificate authority. The short form: the penetration is a bigger, deeper, more serious mess than first reported. See "DigiNotar Certificate Authority Breach Crashes e-Government in the Netherlands." How scary is it to know that a certificate authority (a key element of all Internet security) couldn't be bothered to run commercial anti-virus software? And that such recklessness can downgrade a modern government to paper and faxes?

I've blogged about the state of artificial intelligence (for example, from 2008, see Trope-ing the light fantastic (AI)).

What progress have our successors made toward taking over the planet? Maybe not much, at least if the Turing test is valid as a standard for intelligence. See (again courtesy of IEEE) "Chatbot Tries to Talk to Itself, Things Get Weird." Be sure to watch the video.

And that's enough of life, the digiverse, and everything for this week.

Strange worlds

2011-09-13T12:49:00.000-04:00

Today's topic: planets and moons in recent news.

The European Southern Observatory (located high in the Chilean mountains) just released its latest exoplanet survey results. Bottom line: about 50 new super Earths, one of these worlds arguably within its star's habitable zone. (That's not to say anyone knows that HD 85512 b is habitable -- we don't know whether it has an atmosphere. But if this world has an atmosphere, the current understanding of planetary dynamics says liquid water could exist on its surface.) From Space Daily, see: "Latest Exoplanet Haul Includes Super Earth At Habitat Zone Edge."

(That article spoke to me because the novel I'm currently writing involves a super Earth.)

Here's another -- and quite different -- exoplanet. Again from Space Daily, see, "Strange planet is blacker than coal." But TrES-2b is not a giant lump of something coal-like. It's a Jupiter-like gas giant, closely orbiting its star. About 3 million kilometers close, its atmosphere heated to 1000 degrees C! So how the blazes (heh!) is that world blacker than acrylic black paint?

But worlds need not be anchored to stars. The latest observations suggest that more planets may roam free -- ejected from the solar systems of their birth, it is believed -- than otherwise. From Discovery Magazine and astronomer Phil Plait (of Bad Astronomy fame), see: "The galaxy may swarm with billions of wandering planets."

Closer to home, on the speculative side of the world-hunting biz, comes the notion (see Space.com) that a "Giant Stealth Planet May Explain Rain of Comets from Solar System's Edge." The newly launched WISE infrared observatory would be just the instrument to spot any such distant planet. The theory goes (see article for more) that a massive object far out in the (also speculative) Oort Cloud would explain rains of very-long-period comets. This theoretical remote super Jupiter reminds one of the older (and again, still theoretical) notion that our Sun has a dark companion star (nicknamed Nemesis) -- because a brown dwarf companion might also explain the long-period-comet phenomenon.

Yet closer to home, it seems Pluto has another moon. From a July NASA picture of the day, see Pluto and its four moons. For now, the newly discovered moon has the temporary name of P4. (Still, that beats HD 85512 b, doesn't it?)

Really close to home -- in space, if not time -- consider the proposal that Earth once had a second moon. From Time.com, see "Moon Jr.: Once Upon a Time, the Earth Had Two." The Moon has an odd mass distribution, the hidden (from Earth's point of view) side being quite different than what's visible from Earth. A collision between the Moon and Moon Jr. might explain that odd mass distribution. Personally, I'll wait for results from the recently launched, moon-interior-peeking Grail twin-probe mission before reading too much into Farside highlands.

And if that's not enough worlds in the news, I'll leave you with this composite representation (not photographs) of all the exoplanets discovered by NASA's Kepler probe as of February 1, 2011. All 1235 such worlds.(For a bit of explanation of the image, see "New Image Is Worth 1,235 Potential Alien Planets," from Live Science.)

For reading this far, consider yourself worldly-wise.

Uh-oh

2011-09-05T12:26:00.000-04:00

In the past couple weeks, despite the mid-Atlantic, inland location of my home, I've experienced an earthquake and been grazed by Hurricane Irene. As I type, Tropical Storm Lee is headed my way. I've taken to jokingly wondering when the locusts will come --

And yesterday, I noticed grasshoppers in my yard and garage.

It's enough to render current events quite scary.

In this morning's Computerworld: "Hackers steal SSL certificates for CIA, MI6, Mossad." With the stolen certificates, the perps had the ability to launch "man in the middle" attacks, impersonating the named intel agencies, Google, and Facebook, among notworthy organizations. Without details, the above article says Iran is implicated.

Iran is closer than ever to having atomic bombs. From yesterday's New York Times, see, "Iran Has New Equipment to Speed the Production of Nuclear Fuel, Panel Is Told." One wonders where the International Atomic Energy Agency has been. Had it not been for the Stuxnet virus (reference, my January post Cyber war), how much closer would Iran be today to having its own nukes? Iran, whose president regularly raves about destroying Israel ...

Not surprisingly, someone might want to launch a preemptive strike against Iran. Four days ago, President Sarkozy offered that prediction/warning. See the Google News translation of the Agence France-Presse article "Iranian nuclear bid could provoke attack: Sarkozy."

Meanwhile, robotic warfare moves ever closer. From IEEE Spectrum (August 2011 issue), see, "Autonomous Robots in the Fog of War." (Perhaps I'd be happier if I hadn't watched Terminator movies two nights in a row.)

And either more or less cosmic, depending on how literal you wish to be ...

after the space-shuttle fleet was retired/grounded in July (see my July post National navel-gazing),
after (from the Associated Press, on August 24th) "Russian supply ship for space station crashes,"
comes word, care of Spaceflight Now, that "Space station could be abandoned in November" (though the fine print indicates this evacuation would -- in theory -- be temporary).

Why evacuate the just completed ISS? It turns out that (a) the failed upper stage of the cargo-ship launcher is also used for crewed Soyuz modules, (b) the emergency evacuation capsules at the ISS have a fairly short shelf life, and (c) with the shuttle grounded, Soyuz launchers and capsules are the only human-rated space systems around.

Is the apocalypse, or even the hackpocalypse, upon us? Probably not. We, are, however, living the proverbial Chinese curse of interesting times.

It's tough to make predictions ...

2011-08-29T16:18:00.000-04:00

Especially about the future. (That quote is from Yogi Berra, if you didn't recognize it.)

And prediction seems as hard for the experts as for the rest of us. Consider two current events. No one predicted the recent 5.8 earthquake in Virginia. Lots of people predicted the course of Hurricane Irene -- but what practically no one got right was Irene's ground speed up the East Coast, or that the storm would significantly weaken before it reached NYC.

Or consider some ten-year anniversaries. AFAIK, the CIA did not predict the 9/11 attacks, or events anything like them. Or the sudden collapse earlier that year of the USSR.

What about between ten years ago and last week? Who predicted that in Spring 2011 a despairing Tunisian produce vendor would set off regime change across North Africa and into Asia Minor?

What these things have in common, IMO, is complexity. When we deal with chaotic systems like the atmosphere, or with the free will of millions of people, we're forced to simplify our analyses. People and weather may often behave according to probability and statistics -- but they don't always. In our daily lives, the Law of Large Numbers is more a suggestion than a rule.

It's often said that science fiction is in the prediction business. Sometimes SF authors are spot on. It's happened with elements of (near-Earth) space travel, organ transplants, and ubiquitous computer networks. So? Genre fans can as readily -- or, perhaps, more readily -- identify stories that got the future spectacularly wrong.

That's okay -- because SF isn't in the prediction business (though authors, being human, are happy to take a bow when they get something right). SF is in the "what-if" business. In the hard SF business, where we try to get the science and tech right, we do so to focus our thinking. It's harder to work through the consequences of technology X without some idea if X is even possible or how X might be brought to fruition.

I've written stories about, for example, what if the government began to track people through the RFID tags more and more commonly found in our cars, wallets, and clothing. That's not a prediction or -- even less -- a recommendation. I've written about time travel, because its feasibility has never been disproven -- yet I'd give long odds that travel to one's own past is impossible. I'm sure you get the picture.

Yogi had it right about prediction, as we who live on the East Coast learned anew over the past few days. I'll leave you with three parting thoughts:

I'm glad I'm not in the prediction business.
Prediction being such an inexact science, the what-if business is at least as vital to our planning.
Having gone through an earthquake and a hurricane in the last six days, I wonder when the blood, boils, and locusts will arrive.

Of old masters and old futures

2011-08-23T18:02:00.000-04:00

An important part of my writing regimen is ... reading. Or, more accurately, rereading.

That is: I reread stories and books that have made deep, lasting impressions, the better to understand why (or if, upon reexamination) those pieces resonate with me. Most recently, I reread classics by two masters of the genre: The Dragon in the Sea, by Frank Herbert (1955), and The Puppet Masters, by Robert A. Heinlein (1951). Both are, in quite different ways, Cold War novels. From there, the two diverge.

The Dragon In the Sea is a novel of submarine warfare, set in a future clearly evolved from the early Cold War. The West is in a death struggle with the "Eastern powers," with Russia chief among them. Dragon is an overt Cold War adventure melded with a psychological thriller, as physical and mental pressures build on one submarine's crew

The storytelling is in third-person-limited point of view (POV) -- that is, we're in the heads of every member of one sub's crew, never knowing more than they know.

Frank Herbert, of course, is a master. He breaks two cardinal rules of modern SF -- and for him, it works. There's lots of detail about futuristic submarines and the mechanics of sub/sub duels -- as much a military procedural as an SF novel. The amount of detail explicitly conveyed would be disparaged today as an "info dump."

The other surprise to the modern reader: we sometimes jump from one character's head to another within single scenes. That, too, is contrary to modern style. I'll admit that I occasionally found those (non)transitions jarring.

The Puppet Masters involves extraterrestrial parasites who take control of humans (decades before the Go'a'uld of the Stargate franchise), the takeover being all but undetectable. The novel is often taken as a parable of Cold War paranoia.

Heinlein is the master of the telling detail in lieu of narrative description. As in: "The door irised open" or "The hotel room overlooked New Brooklyn and Manhattan Crater." How are those short passages (I'm relying on memory -- they may not be quite word-perfect) for conveying in a few words this is the future, and a lot has gone on since your time?

The other difference between the two books: Heinlein used first person POV (as he often does), and we never stray from one character's head. My impression is that first-person POV has gotten rare in SF.

So: we have two near-contemporaneous old masterpieces, by old masters, on a Cold War theme -- in every way handled quite differently. It's a useful reminder not to take too rigorously prescriptions of how a story must be told or a scene set.

And a second lesson? Sociology may be harder to project into the future than technology. Both novels read well more than a half century after they were published -- except that in one aspect, they seem dated: gender relations. Herbert has a wife come flouncing into a room. Heinlein has a well-trained, kick-ass woman agent become instantly submissive when she gets engaged.

With that heads up about gender relations, both titles are highly recommended.

Tweeting with fire

2011-08-16T12:53:00.000-04:00

Tweets, Blackberries, cells ... they connect us, build communities, and are literal lifelines in emergencies. In ruthless dictatorships, these services help oppressed populations organize to present their case for freedom.

These are Good Things.

But are they Unmitigated Good Things? Is freedom of speech an absolute right, no matter what idea is being expressed and what the consequences? What about when the idea being expressed is "Quick! Let's loot a store here -- the police are busy there"?

Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously pointed out that there is no First Amendment right to falsely shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater. (He also pointed out that, "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.") And thus I segue into the issue of competing rights having -- I hope -- established my libertarian bon fides in prior posts, most recently "Privacy? We don't need no stinkin' privacy."

Consider two recent cases in western democracies questioning whether the use of netted comm represents a qualified right -- and thus, whether the need can legitimately arise to curtail some communications. We saw this recently in the UK when the prime minister, David Cameron, proposed temporarily shutting down social networks suspected of being used to organize the looting and burning in several major UK cities. Cameron was roundly criticized for acting like a Middle Eastern despot.

Ditto the Bay Area Rapid Transit authority (BART) of the not exactly conservative San Francisco area. BART briefly unplugged cell-phone stations in some of its subway stops, with the stated goal of heading off demonstrations that might disrupt transportation services and, perhaps, endanger commuters. (Note: these are cell stations that BART owns and operates under private contractual arrangement with local cell carriers, not a public utility.)

The twitter hash tag promptly went up: #MuBARTek, to liken BART with the recently ousted brutal Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarek. Mubarek's security apparatus, of course, disabled comm services in his bid to retain power. But are BART's actions and Mubarek's remotely the same? BART made a nearby out-of-the-station area available for protests. Mubarek was not as accommodating.

The right to protest perceived injustice is critically important in a democracy -- and a widely recognized right in both the US and the UK. But as Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed out (see above), rights aren't absolute, and can conflict with one another. What of the rights of shop owners to have their property not burnt down? What about the rights of BART commuters to travel in safety?

I think it's fair to debate whether interruptions of specific modes of communication -- none of which even existed a few years ago -- is the same as trampling on people's rights to free speech and free assembly. IMO, likening the BART and UK situations to brutal Middle Eastern despotic crackdowns does nothing to advance the serious, necessary, and overdue conversation about if/when/how to balance competing rights in a democracy in the light of evolving comm technology.

For more on this issue, see: "Techno-Utopians Are Mugged by Reality," by WSJ columnist L. Gordon Crovitz.

Metaphor alert

2011-08-09T12:16:00.000-04:00

Black swan events. That's the au courant metaphor for an unlikely situation that -- because of its seriousness if it does happen -- merits our preemptive consideration. Because, the theory goes, when one assumes something won't happen, one is wholly unprepared when it does.

Never mind that since the Roman poet Juvenal began all this black-swan stuff with his comment, "rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno," it's become known black swans do exist -- image at left (thanks to J J Harrison and Wikipedia). Keep that irony in mind.

(And bear with me. I will get to a technology matter, something well within the purview of this blog. And to another metaphor.)

I won't dwell on the current market crack-up, because people with far more qualifications than I have already weighed in on the topic. All you can bear to read about this mess is only a googling away. That said, one thing is clear: the present global financial panic originated in a black swan event. (Or two. We have both the once unthinkable S&P downgrade of US sovereign debt and the unraveling of the Eurozone to thank.)

It is a panic. As one trader observes in "Why markets are melting":

"Stocks aren’t selling because of the Washington debt deal or now even because of yields in Italy. They are selling because they are selling. Apple this week is not a company with 12 percent less business than last week; Caterpillar is not about to sell 30 percent fewer earthmovers in China or Brazil. China is not about to purchase 25 percent less iron ore."

My issue: How do these market-moving events merit the label of black swan -- that is, unthinkable? Did anyone not see these macroeconomic fiascoes coming? Has it not been a matter of public record for years that nations are spending beyond their means, are accumulating debt at unsustainable rates? Did no one have cause to notice that a demographic tsunami of baby boomers is reaching Medicare and Social Security eligibility age? Hasn't European sovereign-debt contagion been festering, and metastasizing, for a year?

Of course everyone saw these trends. The true black swan event (or psychotic episode?) would be the serious observer who didn't know disaster must strike sovereign budgets. Hence, the applicable metaphor should be, rather than a black swan event, a slow-motion train wreck.

Here's another slow-motion train wreck: inadequate storage of nuclear waste from power plants. In the Fukushima Daiichi earthquake/tsunami/meltdown falling-dominoes situation in Japan (that was a black swan, IMO), we see the folly of keeping nuclear waste above ground and in many places.

In the US, it has been the law since 1982 that the federal government will take such wastes off the hands of utilities for safe storage. Since 1998, the feds have collected 0.1 cents per kilowat-hour generated by nuclear plants, to fund this program.

And the $25 billion the feds have collected? It's in the lock box next to your social-security funds.

Good one, Ed! No, that money -- a tax on electricity users -- has been squandered. The feds have, to date, accepted no wastes from nuclear plants. The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, eons in the making, was killed off by politics before ever opening for use. And so, nuclear waste keeps piling up on the grounds of power plants across the US. And so, too, swells the eventual certain cost to fulfill the federal obligation to accept nuclear waste from utilities.

(If we're lucky, that will be the only price to be paid for this national shortsightedness. SF author that I am, it's no challenge to imagine things that could go wrong ....)

There's more about this slow-motion train wreck at "Nuclear Waste Piles Up As Repository Plan Falters," a National Public Radio story. Or from the other end of the opinion spectrum, if you subscribe to The Wall Street Journal (see start of today's article online at "Nuclear Waste Piles Up--in Budget Deficit):

"A decades-old promise to dispose of the waste has become another unfunded liability, starting with a $25 billion ratepayer fund gone astray and $16 billion or more in estimated legal judgments to compensate utilities for their storage expenses."

Again from NPR, see what can be done when there is the will: "In Sweden, A Tempered Approach To Nuclear Waste."

When a nuclear black swan rears its hideously mutated head in the US, don't say you didn't see the train wreck coming ...

Danger, Will Robinson

2011-08-02T09:45:00.033-04:00

For my non-gray-haired readers, that subject is a tag line of the campy Sixties TV series Lost in Space. We will not discuss the 1998 movie version. Not ever. You have been warned.

Today's subject is more modern dangers. Let's begin with the sadly not shocking observation that "Private browsing: it's not so private." Among the problems, browser plug-ins often fail to respect private mode.

Omitted from the discussion: no matter how robust your browser's privacy mode, your ISP knows by IP address what data goes to and from your home. (Your browser may warn you of this risk -- for example, Firefox pops up an advisory at the start of every FF private-browsing session.) Perhaps you choose to route your web accesses through an anonymizer service. If so, why do you suppose that service is any more likely to respect/protect your privacy than your ISP?

Are you unhappy that someone might poke around your Internet activities? How about foreign powers poking around inside your nation's IT infrastructure? We've already seen cyberwar incidents involving Georgia, Estonia, and Iran, and many incidents of Chinese hackers poking about inside US networks. (Last January I posted here about cyberwar.) Conventional wisdom has it that the country which would be most at risk in a full-blown cyberwar is the US -- we are, after all, the birthplace of the Internet, and so have become the most dependent on it. So: it's good to finally see that "US Cyberwar Guidelines Officially Signed." Hopefully implementation will entail less dawdling than did drafting and signing ...

As a US military official is quoted by the WSJ in "Cyber Combat: Act of War":

"If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks."

Now we're getting somewhere.

In the realm of tech and automation run amok, consider widespread facial recognition. Consider software concluding from your state DMV photo that you aren't you. (Does anyone's DMV photo look like them?) Having concluded you're misusing your own name, clearly you're guilty of identity shenanigans. What to do, what to do? Here's a thought! Let's, without recourse, revoke your drivers license.

Far-fetched? A risk only in some remote future? Hardly. Per "Here's Looking at You, and You, and You ..." we're already there (at least in the state of Massachusetts).

The flip side of privacy problems is secrecy problems. Underground hacking groups Anonymous and Lulzsec worry more about the secrecy side. They've been all over the news so I'll go to something more mundane and more directly affecting your daily life: private data monopolies. Such as ...

The days are long gone when individuals could maintain their own cars and trucks. Now independent repair shops face being locked out of the business, too, as car manufacturers hoard information (like the diagnostic codes essential to maintaining vehicles) to favor dealership service departments.

At last! A solvable problem, and again Massachusetts takes the lead. See: "Auto Right to Repair Act Fight Heats Up."

And scariest of all, half the world's population confronts cyber-Armageddon. See: "Not Tonight, Honey: Women Choose Internet Over Sex."

Because two Eds are better than one

2011-07-26T10:13:00.000-04:00

Perhaps it's impossible to be serious when Sirius rises with the sun (see: Dog Days). And though my currently running serial in Analog is Energized, the current heat wave has rendered me enervated.

(But even when I am serious, I stay current with the goings-on aboard the space station RU Sirius. If you haven't discovered Brewster Rockit, you should.)

But two Eds, you say ...

More, actually. A plethora.

I'm not Edward (sometimes, Ned) Lerner the game designer, perhaps best known for the simulator Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer. And yet, my son programs games for a living ...

I'm not, as one commenter speculated, Fred Lerner on the "Hidden History of Science Fiction" panel at the latest Readercon (see article at SFsignal). I've met Fred at cons, and he's one of the SLOF. (That's Secret Librarians of Fandom, a group so secretive that I can't find a decent web page to which to link. Trust me.) And yet, my wife is a librarian.

Nor am I (though I like to think the description applies) "Ed Lerner, man of science and taste."

And (you'll see the connection if you watch the video) I'm originally from Chicago.

I am -- paling in comparison to that video -- the Ed Lerner sporadically cited in SF-author colleague Michael F. Flynn's recent excellent two-part posting "Entitlement." Here and again, here, Mike takes on the art (mostly) and the science of crafting titles for SF stories and novels.

So there you have ... something.

With that, I'm back to work on the dark secret that is -- still only a working title -- Dark Secret. (Does that title work for you? Opinions welcome.)

In any event, I hope you found today's post Ed-ifying.

National navel-gazing

2011-07-18T14:54:00.001-04:00

As Atlantis prepares to return to Earth, ending the era of the space shuttle, we have the discouraging news that Congress may cancel the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's long-planned successor to the Hubble.

The Hubble Space Telescope is, simply put, one of the greatest observatories ever built. The discoveries it made possible are simply astonishing. The ability to service and upgrade the HST on-orbit -- done five times! -- has been one of the few unambiguously good reasons to have space shuttles. Without the shuttle, the Hubble will die, and we'll have no way to repair it the next time.

Why cancel the JWST? Money, of course. It is over budget, by a not-insignificant $1.5B. But this telescope is exceedingly advanced tech. What high-tech project hasn't overrun its budget a bit?

How bad have things gotten: Consider:

America has long forgotten how we ever got to the moon in 1969.
We abandoned construction (in 1987) of the Superconducting Super Collider, handing leadership in basic physics to the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.
By week's end, we'll have shut down the shuttle program, and -- for how many years? -- America will lack the ability even to send crew to low Earth orbit and our own space station. Fifty years after John Glenn orbited the Earth, how sad is that?

Now we're on the verge of letting our best eyes on the universe go dark, loath to replace them.

Yes, the national debt and annual deficits must be cut. To do so, spending must be cut. But, %^&$#!! it, spending on basic science and space exploration has been slashed! As I noted on May 30th, in the post Crocodile Cheers:

We can't afford to look outward, some say. We have too many problems on Earth. So: how much does NASA cost? Since 1975, NASA has never gotten more than 1.01% percent (and often much less) of the federal budget. (And it's all spent on Earth, I hasten to remind.) The 2012 request for NASA is about $18B -- about a half percent of the overall federal budget. That proposed $18B for the upcoming government fiscal year is scarcely 1% of the year's proposed deficit. Lack of money isn't the lone reason the space program has floundered -- again, read the Schmitt piece -- but lack of money is a reason.

As a citizen, I find this steady retreat from the future depressing.

Gw'oth revealed! (And other fun stuff)

2011-07-12T22:51:00.001-04:00

Several Known Space alien species have been imagined by artists, both pro and fan. But not yet every species, and I've been eager for someone to visually capture the essence of the scary-smart, aquatic Gw'oth. I think that's natural, given that the Gw'oth are prominent among my contributions to Known Space. (If this paragraph isn't obscure enough, I'll be forthright: its neat images aside, this post is aimed largely at Known Space aficionados.)

What are the Gw'oth? These aliens [singular: Gw'o] were introduced in the novel Fleet of Worlds; they went on to figure prominently across the Fleet of Worlds series. Most important among the Gw'oth are the very few individuals who together can form -- what I can't characterize further without spoilers -- into a special group called a Gw'otesht.

What do they look like? I'm happy you asked. Here's a descriptive passage from Destroyer of Worlds:

A Gw'o had five limbs arrayed about a central disc, sort of like a starfish. Spines covered the skin, again like a starfish. There the resemblance ended. A Gw'o's skin changed colors like a squid or octopus. Its appendages were flexible, like those of an octopus, and hollow like tubeworms. Tier after tier of sharp teeth ringed the inner surface of each tube. Eyes and other as-yet unidentified sensors peeked out from behind the teeth. Almost certainly Gw'oth had evolved from some type of symbiotic carnivorous worm colony. Yes, Gw'oth had become familiar, singly and in groups. Except--

Fascinated and repulsed, Sigmund examined a pile of writhing Gw'oth. The archival image was flat -- in the era of Explorer’s visits, the Gw'oth had yet to develop holography -- and for that Sigmund was grateful. Those piled, pulsing tubes, ends swallowing one another, the throbbing flesh, the occasional limb disconnecting and groping free of the twisting mass (to breathe?) came just a little too close to ... what? A spill of loose intestines? A nest of snakes having an orgy?

I took a bit of a vacation last week, during which I dropped by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. And what did I discover at the MFA but -- most extraordinary! -- the Dale Chihuly exhibition of blown-glass sculptures. Through the Looking Glass, the exhibition is called -- but Alice was not the fictional character who came to my mind.

So: you see me here with a Gw'otesht on a lunch break.

The Gw'oth are predators. Happily they settled for those purple worms instead of my arm :-)

(Chihuly calls this piece "Orange Hornet and Eelgrass Chandelier." I prefer"Gw'oth Behaving Badly." You may quote me.)

The next day, at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, deep in the evolution exhibit, I came across this coral cluster. If Gw'oth hung around in groups long enough to form collective fossils ...

Down the hall at the HMNH I met a Pak breeder -- or, as they are mundanely known, Homo habilis. At least I encountered one's skull.

(My apologies on the poor focus. The glass case confounded the sonar-based auto-focusing mechanism of my camera.)

It wasn't raining or unbearably hot for my entire Boston visit and I did get outdoors. This spectacular frigate, the USS Constitution, aka "Old Ironsides," is the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world. The Constitution was built in Boston, where it was launched in 1797. This warship, among the first built for the fledgling US Navy, famous for its exploits during the Barbary War and the War of 1812, has long been one of the city's premier tourist attractions.

Deservedly so ... great technology transcends obsolescence.

All roads lead to nonsense

2011-07-04T13:30:00.000-04:00

SF and Nonsense, that is. And, of course, some roads are more heavily traveled than others ...

In an April post, I looked at which posts and topics on this blog attract the largest audience. Funny thing: that self-referential post quickly became one of the most frequently viewed items here. Today I'll analyze SF and Nonsense another way: where viewers come from. (Not individually. I don't know that, nor would I want to. But I'm delighted when visitors comment here or email me.)

Since Blogspot began sharing statistics with their bloggers, they've accumulated a year's worth of information. First up, mining that trove of data: popular referring URLs.

Dramatic drum roll ...

The winner by a mile: Asimov's magazine SF-authorial blogger list. For the past couple months, SF and Nonsense has been one of Asimov's featured blogs. (If that's what brings you, then ... howdy, Asimov's reader! But SF and Nonsense won't be a featured blog forever ... if what you see sometimes piques your interest, here's the link to bookmark.)

The runner-up source link is the Analog magazine blogger list. Because I'm in the MAFIA (as in: Making Appearances Frequently In Analog -- see my membership buttons), I'm not surprised. And though it's been a while, SF and Nonsense has twice been an Analog featured blog.

Coming in third as a source of referrals, also not a shocker: my own website.

And a few honorable mentions:

the news page at the unofficial (fan-maintained) website of Larry Niven, with whom I collaborate on some novels.
my January cloud-computing post translated to Dutch (with my blessing) by the Netherlands website Computerworld.
The front page of popular SF news-and-reviews website SF Signal.

Looking at referring sites rather than individual referring URLs, the Analog and Asimov's websites remain prominent. Also high on the list is the Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) website that -- among many other things -- hosts my (and many other) members' webpages.

The most frequently referring entity -- by far -- is Google. (I see queries from Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines, of course, but Google is the 800-pound gorilla of search.) Many of these referrals involve queries on aspects of Known Space (the scary-smart aquatic alien Gw'oth being a popular search) and, quite often, various of the Fleet of Worlds series novels. Lately I'm seeing bunches of queries for another sequel. (That will be Fate of Worlds, apt to be released in mid 2012.) And there are searches on my name and the name of this blog, of course.

How about geographically? Ways exist to block that information, and some visitors have. (As you might expect, given how often I blog on the topics of privacy and network insecurity, I'm fine with that.) With that caveat, it looks like about three-fourths of page views originate within the US, about 4% each come from Canada, the UK, and Germany, and about 2% each come from the Netherlands, Russia, and Australia. The rest comes from ... all over the place. (See image at left.)

So, bottom line, what do I conclude? That viewers arrive here by intent, whether from SF-related websites or via science/tech- and SF-related searches. That this blog reaches eyeballs across the globe.

For an SF author, there are worse things :-)

You can't make this stuff up ...

2011-06-27T22:17:00.000-04:00

I never expected to encounter a sentence like: "Genetically Engineered Cell Shoots Out First-Ever Biological Laser."

Do cellular lasers sound trivial? They're not. Consider:

Aside from implying the future possibility of a self-healing laser that requires no battery, this breakthrough could allow doctors and scientists to view the inner workings of individual cells without a microscope.

I instantly thought of an application not mentioned in the article: laser-based communications among medical nanobots. Visible light spans the wavelengths from about 380 to 780 nanometers -- while cells (and cell-sized machines, once we have them) are of the scale several thousand nanometers. Had cell-based lasers been thought possible a few years ago, I might well have used them for the nanobots in Small Miracles. (Instead I used chemical signaling -- just as natural cells do.)

The next topic is scary, but the headline is ironic: "LightSquared Network Faces Interference of Its Own Making."

LightSquared is a company in the process of deploying a national-scale Internet service reliant on satcom. Their business plan calls for reselling bandwidth to retailers (e.g., Best Buy) and telecom carriers (e.g., Sprint Nextel). The problem: the LightSquared network as proposed will interfere with GPS receivers! The FCC sent LightSquared back to the drawing board. In a matter of days, LightSquared announced plans to change the frequencies they will use. Big money is at stake -- in both telecom and GPS industries -- so this mess will be interesting to watch. (I like my GPS receiver. I hope no one messes it up.)

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization has decided that cell phones "may" cause cancer. To which the Wall Street Journal opines: "The U.N. promotes a needless cancer scare." Consider:

Some facts might help here. While cell phone use has surged since the 1980s, both the incidence and mortality rate for brain and other central nervous system cancers in the U.S. have fallen slightly. About 22,000 Americans were diagnosed with brain tumors in 2010, in a country of 270 million mobile phone users.

AFAIK, the wavelengths used by cellphones are of the wrong wavelength to directly damage cells. (The mechanism presumed by those who see a cancer/cellphone link is heating. Is anyone on the phone long enough to heat their brain with their cell phone?)

To end on a cheerier note (and moving away from cells of all kinds), consider this list of "10 Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True." These are significant predictions that Verne, Twain, Wells, and other quite-a-while-ago writers got essentially right.

Hackpocalypse now

2011-06-20T23:52:00.005-04:00

Is it only me, or is the world becoming eerily (and scarily) reminiscent of Neuromancer, Snow Crash, and True Names?

That is: is conflict moving from the physical to the virtual domain? Are freelance hackers and ad hoc groupings of same obtaining more and more influence over our daily lives? Is hacking the new, preferred choice in asymmetric warfare? Are we neck deep in a new, scary era?

It sure looks that way. Consider these recent events:

Starting small ... ever-behind-the-curve Sony was nailed again, as Daily Tech reported on May 25: Sony Loses Yet More Customer Records, 3 More Sites Hacked. Nor did Sony learn anything. From Ars Technica, on June 2nd: Sony hacked yet again, plaintext passwords, e-mails, DOB posted.

Lockheed Martin is one of the biggest aerospace firms. Yahoo News reports on May 29 that: Lockheed Martin hit by cyber attack. LockMart builds F-16, F-22 and F-35 fighter jets, the Aegis naval combat system, and THAAD missile defense, among other rather sensitive items.

It's not only LockMart, of course. Yahoo News also reports on May 31 that: U.S. arms makers said to be bleeding secrets to cyber foes. As in, "The Defense Department, which runs its own worldwide eavesdropping, spying and code-cracking systems, says more than 100 foreign intelligence organizations have been trying to break into U.S. networks."

On June 3rd, from PC Mag, we have Report: Gmail Attacks Replicated on Hotmail, Yahoo. These are spear phishing attacks that Google says are aimed at "reporters, activists, and government officials."

Also on June 3rd, this time from Livescience, the depressing report that Most Major Websites Leak Private Data, Study Finds. Some snippets:

While each website might be leaking only a small portion of your information, the powerful tracking tools that receive it are able to patch all those small tidbits together into a pretty clear picture of who you are and what you are interested in.

That's the finding of a study of more than 100 popular websites used by tens of millions of people that found three-quarters directly leak either private information or users' unique identifiers to third-party tracking sites ...

From the New York Times, on June 11: I.M.F. Reports Cyberattack Led to ‘Very Major Breach.' Yup, the International Monetary Fund. Do you, your pension, or your 401k own any financial securities? Then be very afraid.

"Because the fund has been at the center of economic bailout programs for Portugal, Greece and Ireland — and possesses sensitive data on other countries that may be on the brink of crisis — its database contains potentially market-moving information. It also includes communications with national leaders as they negotiate, often behind the scenes, on the terms of international bailouts. Those agreements are, in the words of one fund official, “political dynamite in many countries.” It was unclear what information the attackers were able to access."

From the Washington Post on June 15: CIA Web site hacked; group LulzSec takes credit. The article also notes that, "In recent weeks, LulzSec has claimed credit for hacking or bringing down Web sites belonging to PBS, Sony, the U.S. Senate and the Atlanta chapter of InfraGard, a public-private partnership between the FBI and the private sector dedicated to sharing information and intelligence to prevent hostile acts against the United States."

How is all this happening? It doesn't help that the "SecurID" tokens on which many large organizations rely for authentication are less secure than once thought. From IEEE (that's the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), on June 8th, see RSA Tries to Quell Customer Anger by Offering New Security Tokens.

On June 15th, Richard Clarke, security and counter-terrorism adviser for presidents Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43, had an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal on China's Cyberassault on America. A snippet:

"Senior U.S. officials know well that the government of China is systematically attacking the computer networks of the U.S. government and American corporations. Beijing is successfully stealing research and development, software source code, manufacturing know-how and government plans. In a global competition among knowledge-based economies, Chinese cyberoperations are eroding America's advantage."

Just yesterday (June 20), Nextgov reports that LulzSec Hacktivists Declare War on .Gov Websites; Feds Stand Ready. I retained the second clause in that headline out of a sense of completeness, not from any great confidence that the Feds are ready.

Sadly, my list of recent hacking-related problems is much longer. Nor am I the only one noticing. Livescience (this time on June 10th) reports that 2011 Set to Be Worst Year Ever for Security Breaches.

Welcome to the Hackpocalypse.

=====
On a personal -- and far less cosmic -- note, this is my 200th post. Something of a milestone ...

The time has come, the walrus said ...

2011-06-13T13:51:00.000-04:00

... To talk of many things.

For shoes and ships and sealing wax, continue here. For more recent arcana to have caught this SF author's eye, read on ...

"Criminal Minds Are Different From Yours, Brain Scans Reveal." (I like to think that my visitors do not have criminal minds.) I read with interest that:

"One test on the participants at age 3 measured their response to fear – called fear conditioning – by associating a stimulus, such as a tone, with a punishment like an electric shock, and then measuring people's involuntary physical responses through the skin upon hearing the tone."

I await the day someone scans the brains of anyone who'd test three-year-olds with electric shocks.

Colleague David Brin has an interesting essay on the difference between fantasy and SF. His thought-provoking thesis? That SF presumes we humans can learn from our mistakes -- that there is such a thing as progress -- while fantasy assumes the opposite.

Given my mixed feelings at the recent announcement that Kindle books now outsell all print books on Amazon, how appropriate is it to read that "Researchers Create A Schizophrenic Computer"? I can look forward to outsourcing my worrying!

Having written about nanotech in both factual and fictional contexts, I was delighted to see this alert via Physics World: "From seawater to freshwater with a nanotechnology filter." A key snippet:

"CNTs (carbon nanotubes) can realistically expect to have water permeability 20 times that of modern commercial reverse-osmosis membranes, greatly reducing the cost and energy required for desalination. Additionally, CNTs are highly efficient at repelling salt ions, more so because specific chemical groups can be attached to them to create a specific "gatekeeper" function."

From the Department of Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction, we have, "Bikini-clad Zombies Spook Connecticut Residents."

Only slightly more unexpected, the DoTISTF reports that two of my solo novels made the highschoolers' summer reading list at the Kinkaid Academy. Yup, for students taking the fall AP Robotics class, two of my novels, Small Miracles and Fools' Experiments, share the list with, among others: I, Robot (Isaac Asimov), 2001 (Arthur C. Clarke), The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (Robert Heinlein), and that quintessential cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson). Way cool.

As was my long-after-the-fact discovery that the cinematic version of my short story "Grandpa?" made it onto the curriculum of the Los Angles Film School. The Grandfather Paradox is now part of an LAFS unit on the Mathematics of Time Travel. The producer's notice is here (and the Canadians among you can stream the movie here).

And for those of you looking beyond the imminent era of hideous, mercury-tainted compact fluorescent light bulbs to the promised halycon era of white-light LEDs ... check out this cautionary piece from the Department of Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud: "LEDs Filled with Toxic Substances, Study Says."

One more reason to mourn the passing of incandescent bulbs ... and, perhaps, to stock up.

Antimatter matters ... the hole truth(?)

2011-06-07T15:00:00.006-04:00

Follow-up to my January post Antimatter matters ... the talented folks at CERN, who previously brought us the Large Hardon Collider, have learned to store antimatter effectively indefinitely.

(What is antimatter? Take two particles of identical mass and equal but opposite electrical charge. By convention the rarer type of the mirror-image pair is dubbed the antiparticle. When a fundamental particle, like an electron, meets its antiparticle, a positron, the pair transforms into electromagnetic energy. Proton/antiproton encounters also transform into energy -- but since protons and antiprotons are not fundamental particles [they're composed of quarks and antiquarks, which are], the transformation is a multistep process. The bottom line: you can't store antimatter in a regular-matter box.)

Back to the news ... "Ephemeral Antimatter Trapped for Amazingly Long 16 Minutes," reports Livescience.com. What makes this story newsworthy is that the antimatter being stored is atoms of antihydrogen. Positrons and antiprotons are electrically charged; suspending them in a vacuum -- so that they don't encounter any normal matter -- is no different in principle than storing electrons or protons in a vacuum. That is a trick routinely managed in particle accelerators worldwide, using magnets to interact with the particles' electrical charges.

Combine a positron with an antiproton (or an electron with a proton) into a simple atom and the electrical charges offset each other. A storage container for antihydrogen must interact with something other than electrical charge, because the atom, being neutral, doesn't have any overall electrical charge.

Interact with what, then? Tiny spinning electrical charges -- and they don't come tinier than charged subatomic particles -- generate tiny magnetic fields. The two spinning particles that comprise an atom of hydrogen or antihydrogen are slightly separated, and that separation creates a magnetic dipole. The CERN antimatter trap interacts magnetically with the trapped antihydrogen atoms.

Per my previous antimatter post, creating and capturing even a single antimatter particle takes some doing (and beaucoup money). Hence, CERN is dealing with only a few antihydrogen atoms at a time. Less science-y articles -- like this, from a USA Today writer -- alas likened the latest achievement to the Dan Brown book Angels and Demons, a present-day novel that employs antimatter in bomb-equivalent quantities. A wildly exaggerated production level for antimatter is not too egregious as literary license. This is: characters in Brown's novel imbued the antimatter with all manner of theological significance. It was pure (with extreme euphemism) poppycock.

(I set my antimatter-intensive novel, InterstellarNet: New Order, well into the next century. I used magnetic confinement, as CERN ended up using, with new wrinkles I think will come along given a century of R&D advances. With much better justification, I: NO has more than enough antimatter for some really big explosions ...)

The big mystery about antimatter is why the Big Bang didn't create antimatter and familiar matter in equal amounts. If both forms of matter had been created in equal amounts, soon enough they would have obliterated one another. Happily, the universe did not turn out that way, which we know because ... we're here to puzzle about it.

Or maybe antimatter is an illusion.

Paul Dirac, one of the visionaries in the early development of quantum mechanics, extended QM to incorporate special relativity. The extended theory is called quantum electrodynamics (QED -- gotta love the name). One of QED's predictions was the existence of antiparticles. In short: Dirac was a very bright fellow entitled to comment about the nature of antimatter.

He suggested that antiparticles are virtual. Suppose that perfectly ordinary electrons and protons (and other particles) have completely filled the lowest energy states in the universe: like water seeking its own level. Call those particle-filled states the "Dirac Sea." What we experience as the universe is, effectively, made from the higher-energy particles above the sea. Islands, as it were ...

Occasionally an energetic event -- say, a proton-proton collision at CERN -- knocks, say, an electron from its invisible-to-us-in-the-normal-course-of-affairs low-energy state within the Dirac Sea. What our instruments report as an electron/positron pair created out of the energy of the collision are (a) the knocked-loose electron and (b) the absence of that electron in the normally unseen low-energy state. A bit of froth in and above the sea ...

The absence of an electron from the sea exposes the opposite charge of some proton in the sea. The apparent movement of the positron is the movement of electrons as the vacancy moves (thus successively uncovering the positive charge of one hidden proton after the next). The eventual apparent recombination of electron and positron is merely an electron reoccupying the vacancy in the sea. Like any particle dropping from a higher energy level to a lower one, the electron emits a photon to carry off the difference in energy. That photon is what we conventionally describe as the energy released by particle/antiparticle mutual destruction.

If positively charged virtual particles rings a bell ... they should. Electronics engineers deal all the time in electrons and "holes." Holes are the positive charge carriers -- quite virtual -- that move through a chunk of semiconductor. Holes are mobile "missing electrons." (Skeptical? The computer, iPad, or smartphone on which you're reading these words is packed with transistors designed on this principle.)

Suppose there is a Dirac Sea. Why don't we see it, only disruptions of it? I don't know. Of course we also don't see dark matter (unknown stuff inferred from the motion of stars in galaxies and galaxies in clusters) or dark energy (unknown stuff inferred from the accelerating expansion of the universe). I find the concept of a Dirac Sea less mysterious than the other two phenomena.

Hmm ... could the unseen particles of the invisible Dirac Sea be dark matter? The math to assess the possibility is beyond me, but on a purely Occam's Razor basis, I like it.

Thought-provoking stuff, this antimatter ...

Crocodile cheers

2011-05-30T17:07:00.000-04:00

I've progressed from bemused to troubled to angry at the spate of breathless headlines heralding some "final" activity of a space shuttle. A typical example: "Shuttle Endeavour gone forever from space station." The launch, docking, undocking, and landing of each shuttle in the fleet is getting this kind of treatment. Oh, and the dispersal of the shuttles to museums draws press attention, too.

Why am I so cranky? Because endings are pretty much the only aspect of the U.S. manned space program to get much media interest. What doesn't draw much media attention?

Anything happening in space.
The embarrassment of paying monoply prices to the Russians for the next few years to ferry US astronauts to/from the largely US built space station.
The frustrated plea of Harrison Schmitt -- last man (with Eugene Cernan) to stand on the moon; the only scientist (Schmitt has a Ph.D. in geology) to visit the moon; ex-senator -- to Scrap NASA Completely. (It's not that Schmitt is against space exploration -- far from it. Read the article.)

For decade after decade astronauts have spun their (virtual) wheels, endlessly circling Earth, while the media -- and, too often, NASA -- seem content to bask in old glories. Let's look at a couple major space-centric anniversaries:

In 1989, on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, George H. W. Bush called for a return to the moon and ultimately a manned landing on Mars. Twenty-two years later, we're no closer even to the lunar return.
A few days ago marked the fiftieth(!) anniversary of the JFK "go-to-the-moon-this-decade speech." The media are nostalgic about that, too -- and remarkably incurious why a moon mission seems daunting and impractical now.

Per the latest administration and NASA pronouncements, American astronauts will land on and return from an asteroid in 2025, and land on and return from Mars in 2035. Will this plan survive the next change in administration -- or will this latest plan, too, fall by the wayside like return-to-the-moon missions? Without public enthusiasm for space exploration -- for which media attention would surely be helpful -- I don't see it happening, any more than Bush 41's announced (and then never fought for) lunar return ever happened.

We can't afford to look outward, some say. We have too many problems on Earth. So: how much does NASA cost? Since 1975, NASA has never gotten more than 1.01% percent (and often much less) of the federal budget. (And it's all spent on Earth, I hasten to remind.) The 2012 request for NASA is about $18B -- about a half percent of the overall federal budget. That proposed $18B for the upcoming government fiscal year is scarcely 1% of the year's proposed deficit. Lack of money isn't the lone reason the space program has floundered -- again, read the Schmitt piece -- but lack of money is a reason.

Because astronauts went to the moon, we finally understand how it happens that Earth has such an unusual satellite. (The short version: a Mars-sized rock smacked into the young Earth.) If astronauts visit some asteroids, we may begin to develop some sense how to deflect a big space rock when, inevitably, one is again on course to wallop Earth. Maybe we'll learn how to turn space rocks from hazards to cornucopias. If astronauts ever visit Mars, we have a hope of understanding whether life ever existed anywhere besides Earth. By striving for these goals, we'll develop presently unimaginable technologies, just as the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs did (and I have in mind advances in microelectronics more than Tang or Teflon) while inspiring a new generation of engineers and scientists.

An ambitious space program can deliver worldview-shifting discoveries, revolutionary new technologies, vast new resources, inspiration for a new generation of scientists and engineers, and the chance to avoid the fate of the dinosaurs ... and when does the media speak breathlessly about any of those benefits of an active space program?

Wouldn't it be nice if the media obsessed less about anniversaries and lasts, and focused instead -- for a change -- on possible new firsts in space?

MOONSTRUCK and PROBEd; ENERGIZED, and now BETRAYed

2011-05-24T10:15:00.000-04:00

I've had an interesting few months. My out-of-print first two novels, Probe and Moonstruck, returned to print. My latest novel, Energized, began running as a serial in Analog (look for Energized in book format next year). And the fun continues ...

Today sees Betrayer of Worlds re-released in mass-market paperback format. (It's been available in hardback, ebook, and audio formats). Here's what I had to say when BOW was first released.

Of Betrayer's post-publication reviews, here's my favorite:

"Rescues, captures, kidnappings, reluctant temporary alliances, backdoor negotiations, propaganda campaigns, bluffs and double-bluffs, alien and cross-species politics, and, of course, betrayals. Lots of betrayals ... One hopes that Niven and Lerner come up with some additional twists and turns." —Locus

Want to know more? Click through to Amazon.

Because this is a what-has-Ed-been-up-to summary, I'll conclude by mentioning that Larry and I have turned in the manuscript for Fate of Worlds -- the conclusion of both the Fleet of Worlds series and the Ringworld series. I anticipate a mid-2012 release for Fate, too.

Now it's time for me to start research for my next book -- about which, no hints yet. Sorry. It's too early even to commit to a working title.

Buzz (and buzz kill)

2011-05-18T17:28:00.000-04:00

Need a jump start some mornings? I know I do.

As Prof. Farnsworth oft said on Futurama: "Good news, everyone." There's no longer any reason to wait till after showering for a caffeine fix. Not when you can (or so the manufacturer claims) get caffeine from your soap. (Really. I'm not making this up, whether or not the Shower Shock people are.)

And you'll want to be awake before you leave home, because there's a new threat to our networked world: GPS jamming. The notion of inexpensive jammers messing with my GPS ... that's very upsetting. As is the possibility (see the same article) that 4G LTE mobile broadband services will interfere with GPS on a wide scale.

But the bigger buzz kill is a recent blog post by SF colleague Kristine Kathryn Rusch. In "Writing like it's 1999," she paints a picture of authors needing to become their own agent, publisher, and promoter combined. (And when, you might ask, are we supposed to write?) I like to think there's some hyperbole involved, and that prospect for traditional publishing isn't quite as harsh and bleak as Kris portrays it.

But I can't dismiss her viewpoint out of hand. Like two-headed calves and the sky raining stones, there are portents of a (publishing) apocalypse: The Wall Street Journal reports that 99-Cent Titles From Unknown Authors Put New Pressure on Big Publishers. Like ebooks outselling mass-market paperbacks -- and the Association of American Publishers ought to know -- authors bypassing publishers is surely a sign of ... something.

Now if you'll excuse me while I get some coffee and a bar of soap ...

Caught in our own web

2011-05-10T11:00:00.005-04:00

As a writer, I consider hacking and awkwardly timed system crashes grossly overdone as plot devices. As a netizen, I find both all too common. (For a recent discussion, see "It's a mad, mad, interconnected, discombobulated world.")

And wherever one looks, there is another (or a continuing) problem:

Do you own stock? You might be horrified to know that "Hackers Gained Access to Nasdaq Systems ..." but not (yet) the trading systems.
If you do own stock, I hope it's not shares of Sony. Sony now admits to losing personal data in the hack of its Playstation Network and has been sued. Estimates for the impact of the PSN outage on Sony run into the billions.
Like your shiny new 4G cell phone? Verizon's 4G wireless network recently had a national outage.
Apple's undeclared data gathering from iPhones is more egregious than first reported. It turns out that even if you disable location services, your iPhone still gathers location data on you.

With all the demonstrated holes in so many key networks, how do you feel about having a networked robot in your house? They are (finally) coming: see "The Best Robots of CES 2011."

How far-fetched is it that the Bad Guys will soon try to spy on us through locomoting networked platforms in our own homes? Be very careful what apps you install in your little automated helper.

Alien probe (no, not that kind)

2011-05-06T11:00:00.006-04:00

Twenty years ... yowza. That's how long it's been since Probe, my debut novel, first saw print.

Sadly, Probe has also been long out of print.

So: I am pleased to say that Probe is once more available (with new foreword and afterword), this time in a classy trade paperback edition and -- something scarcely imaginable in 1991 -- as an ebook. The nearby cover is from the new edition.

What is the probe of the title? The hero's own Prospector spacecraft, prowling the Asteroid Belt for mineral wealth? The alien derelict that Prospector had the (mis)fortune to come upon? Something the military does not want found? Or is it something really out of the ordinary?

It's best that I not answer that. Instead, here's what some reviews had to say:

"With a scientist's background and a novelist's eye, Ed Lerner has written a fast-paced thriller sure to please techno-junkies, sci-fi lovers, and anyone who simply enjoys an exciting yarn."

-- Pete Earley,
NYT bestselling author of Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring

"... A fast-paced, hold-on-to-the-edge-of-your-seat thriller."

-- Illinois Quarterly

"... A page turner, sprinkled with ample doses of the heart of darkness that shadows all human endeavors ... good old-fashioned flight and chase and murder, abetted and enhanced by futuristic technology."

-- The Journal

Curious? Check out a sample of Probe or check the Amazon page (for print and Kindle editions) to see the reader reviews from the first edition.

Still crazy after all these (13.5 billion or so) years

2011-05-03T09:40:00.000-04:00

The universe is a strange and wondrous place. (Is it the only place? Not according to multiverse theory. Consider that topic grist for some future post.)

Just in this universe, moving progressively farther from home, we see:

The first images from orbit around Mercury, taken by the MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) probe. That surface looks pretty well pounded, doesn't it?

(The mission name needs work, though. I'm not a fan of highly contrived acronyms.)

Then there is recent evidence of a superconducting superfluid within neutron stars. (The image at left, from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, is the shock wave of Cassiopeia A having gone supernova -- a mere eleven thousand light-years from Earth. Cassiopeia A is the brightest radio source in the sky.)

Deep inside that image is a neutron star.

Farther away -- and, perhaps weirder -- look at this mysterious green blob deep in space, including a stellar nursery where none such should exist. (How far away? About 650 million light years. Image from the Hubble Space Telescope.)

Of course looking at light that originated far away in space is like looking far back in time. That raises questions of how it all began ...

How did the universe begin, anyway? As cosmologists would have it, in a very Big Bang. That theory explains much -- but to explain some attributes of the observed universe (e.g., its comparative homogeneity when viewed at a very large scale) Big Bang theory also requires the kludged addition of cosmic inflation. Perhaps worse, Big Bang theory has no explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe, also known (putting a label on our ignorance) as dark energy.

A new variation of the Big Bang idea proposes that the universe adds dimensions as it expands. As this speculation -- too preliminary and hand-wavy at this point to dignify as a theory -- would have it, the universe began in a one-dimensional string.

As the universe expanded the string meandered about (um ... meandered in what?), folding on itself, and thus gave rise to a second dimension. (Hand-wavy, as I said.) Later, the 2-D plane folded all over itself to give rise to our familiar 3-D world. And just maybe, what appears in the large-scale structure of the universe as accelerating expansion is instead the birth of a fourth dimension. Not that cosmologists are holding their breaths waiting for my approval, but I'm far from convinced.

A mad, mad, mad, mad (and very energetic) place, our universe ...

It's a mad, mad, interconnected, discombobulated world

2011-04-25T17:38:00.000-04:00

Early this year I posted about cloud computing. (This has been one of my most popular posts and was syndicated by the Netherlands edition of Computerworld.) The moral of that post was: no one watches out for your data like you (should).

Cloud computing, also known as "software as a service" envisions that most people and most organizations will outsource the provisioning and maintenance of computer hardware and software to specialists. You don't generate your own electricity, the argument runs, so why would you want to run your own computer center?

Never mind that with solar panels and windmill generators, a still small but growing community is moving toward providing their own electrical power. Including big IT shops like cloud-app provider Google.

Having mastered the running of very large data centers and handling very large user communities, Amazon entered into cloud computing as a "side" business. It generates a mere half billion or so this way in annual revenues.

So there was more than a little notice taken when Amazon Web Services had a massive outage last week, affecting lots of companies large and small. From the NY Times, see "Amazon’s Trouble Raises Cloud Computing Doubts."

Nor was Amazon alone last week in IT embarrassment. Gamers galore are furious that Sony's Playstation Network (PSN) has been down for days, stopping them from playing a range of online video games. That hacker-caused outage, now in its fifth day, affects an estimated 75 million people. See PC World's "Sony Yet to Determine Scope of PlayStation Network Attack." And Betanews reports that Sony Can't say if PSN hack put personal info at risk. Reassuring, eh?

The PSN situation brings to mind another Internet-ish interdependency SNAFU. Netflix streaming is a wonderful thing. The service is hosted on Amazon, as it happens, although Netflix prudently contracted for back-up services in/from enough data centers to circumvent Amazon's oops. It once was the case that to stream movies from Netflix's outsourced servers through a PS3 to my TV I put a Netflix-provided CD-ROM into my game unit. Worked like a charm.

Last fall Netflix terminated support for the streaming CD-ROM. To continue streaming from Netflix via my PS3, I had to enroll in PSN. Remember, it's Amazon's servers, not Sony's that host Netflix. So: with PSN dead in the water, Netflix streaming continues to work (after some funny faux log-ins). I'm glad I can still stream -- but livid that Sony has the market power (over a little company called Netflix, market cap a mere $13 billion) to force me to join their gaming network.

And in yet another recent kerfuffle, Apple and Google were caught capturing location data from iPad, iPhone, and Android users. (Okay, not literally caught -- if you set up location-based services like GPS navigation, you were forewarned. But last week was the first time most people seemed to notice.)

So: the beloved gadget you bring everywhere is tracking and reporting back to the mother ship everywhere you go. That data is supposedly anonymized upon upload, but in some fit of stupidity, personal location data is stored on devices unencrypted. If you lose your iPhone, or someone hacks it -- it is a smart wireless device, remember -- your comings and goings are disclosed. From Yahoo News, see, "Q-and-A: Smartphone location tracking."

On a much less cosmic scale -- but IMO still a perversion of technology and an abuse of market power -- a "feature" on new Blue-Ray Discs. Movie previews on VCR tapes were mildly annoying -- but easily fast-forwarded past. Movie previews on old-style DVDs were more annoying, because the fast-forward function could be locked out by software during previews (although it wasn't always). The latest release of the BD standard brings us ... networked previews. That's right. No longer are the previews on the disc you buy or rent constrained to what fits on the disc with what you paid to see. Now your BD player will locate your Internet connection and download more previews to inflict on you. With fast-forward still locked out, naturally.

What's the moral of this post? That in concept and execution, our networked world remains very much a work in progress.

And what's the authorial moral? That while the thirty-second computer break-in on which so many TV and movie plots rely is the first resort of the lazy writer, the opposite -- a world where data are always secure, where no one unauthorized can get at data, and where no one holding proper authorization ever misuses the data to which they have access -- truly would be science fiction.

Authorial angst

2011-04-19T11:52:00.000-04:00

Writing science fiction for a living does not preclude occasional discomfort with change.

Take Google's grab for the right to digitize and display everything ever written. That, essentially, is the agreement Google struck with the Authors Guild -- a group that, despite its name, does not represent all authors. By making every book searchable, Google would have more online content with which to sell ads. How much negotiating power do you suppose the typical author has vs. Google about sharing that ad revenue?

Yes, the agreement "allows" authors the right to opt out. That's not good enough! Such terms would stand on its head the totality of copyright law and precedent. As in, the author has the rights to what he has created, unless and until he agrees to grant those rights to another party.

Happily this agreement keeps getting rejected by the court. The latest rejection was a few weeks ago. Science-fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), of which I am a member, offered this guest editorial recently on the subject. (Michael Capobianco is an ex-president of SFWA.)

In other the business-of-writing news, the Association of American Publishers reports that ebooks now outsell paperbacks. That only confirms what I'd been seeing with my own titles, at both bn.com (Barnes and Noble's online presence) and Amazon.

With ebooks selling so well, the pricing of ebooks has recently become very important to authors. So: how much should ebooks cost? The marginal cost of duplication -- i.e., effectively free? Some people think so (as they did of songs and movies, too), and that can't work. Someone must pay for the work of writers, editors, and artists -- or not a lot will be written to be read. That's why the current skirmishing between publishers and book-selling outlets is so important to authors. Here's an interesting essay from SFWA about the competing wholesaler vs. agency models for pricing of ebooks once they leave the publisher.

If that's not enough future shock for one day, I'm back to the far future to work on Fate of Worlds.

Postscript (or is that post post?)

2011-04-12T11:00:00.012-04:00

Last summer, without any fanfare (or while my attention was elsewhere, also a possibility), Blogspot began providing its clients with detailed statistics about their blogs. When I noticed the stats feature and clicked through, I found a wealth of interesting info about SF and Nonsense.

So: today's post is a quick look at past posts. I was sometimes surprised. Maybe you will be, too.

The most popular post by a significant margin is Betrayer of Worlds. That post went live on October 12, 2010, to announce the publication of a new novel. Betrayer of Worlds is a well-received book and the latest installment in a well-received series, so I wasn't totally surprised by the related post's popularity ...

Although I was by the second most popular post. That turns out to be Trope-ing the light fantastic (life-sign detectors), uploaded on February 15, 2009. LSD first appeared in the middle of my series on SFnal tropes. What's the draw for that specific post in the blog series? I don't know, or even have a guess, but something in that post appears to have staying power. (Theories welcome!)

Betrayer of Worlds is among my collaborations with Larry Niven. Most-viewed posts 3, 4, and 5 are from among announcements of my solo novels.

Representing my InterstellarNet series are posts InterstellarNet: New Order (September 30, 2010) in third place and InterstellarNet: Origins (March 29, 2010), tied for fourth. (Caveat reader ... InterstellarNet: Origins is the first book in that series.) The other half of the fourth-most-visited tie is Real nanotech. Real medicine. And zombies. (August 3, 2010), announcing the re-release in paperback of near-future nanotech thriller Small Miracles.

So people reading my blog visit pages about my books. I'm pleased by that, of course, but not shocked. But what besides my books and life-signs detectors brings readers?

To answer that question, I looked for themes common among often-visited posts. One popular theme jumped right out: posts about aspects of Known Space. Known Space is the background common to all the Niven/Lerner Fleet of Worlds series books and some of Larry's other projects. Popular posts in this category include:

Of fleet Fleets and Known Space on reading orders among related books (February 1, 2011)
Of Gw'oth and Jotoki on distinctions between similar looking aliens (September 15, 2010)
Ring(world) around the betrayer pointing to interviews Larry and I separately did last October when Betrayer of Worlds was issued on the 40th anniversary of Larry's magnum opus, Ringworld

Some of these popular posts predate the new Blogspot statistics feature. Those posts had the full nine months (or so) in which to rack up eyeball count. Some comparatively new posts made the hit parade anyway. I assume those will keep drawing viewers. But what about very recent posts?

In visit statistics looking only at the past month, most posts already mentioned also pop up high in the rankings. But from that last-month-only view, I sense some up-and-coming challengers:

There is a tide in the affairs of spacefarers ... relates astronomy news to some of my fiction (March 22, 2011)
Countdown to Armageddon / A Stranger in Paradise announces my second short fiction collection (May 26, 2010)
It's the tsunami, stupid considers the media's disproportionate focus on Japan's nuclear issues amid the far greater tragedy of the earthquake and tsunami (posted just April 5, 2011 -- this post spiked in just the past week)
Head in the clouds about cloud computing and the user's responsibility for his or her own data (January 3, 2011).

For context, I've mentioned twelve posts. This is my 189th post, my first having been made on August 25, 2008.

Do you have a favorite topic or post on this blog? Do you remember which post first drew you to SF and Nonsense? Comment away!

It's the tsunami, stupid

2011-04-05T11:21:00.000-04:00

Political strategist James Carville, seeking to maintain focus in Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, hung a sign in the campaign headquarters. The sign read: It's the economy, stupid.

Short and sweet -- and directly on point.

In the aftermath of last month's disasters in Japan, I feel the need (not that this blog has Jim Carville's influence!) to point out: It's the tsunami, stupid. Contrary to the conclusions one might draw from ongoing press coverage, the Fukushima reactors are not a major source of catastrophe in Japan. Not even close ...

As I write, the dead-and-missing tally stands at 28,000. The death toll from radiation leaks? Zero. (Two workers were found dead on the site, but are believed to have died of injuries sustained in the earthquake.)

It's easy to find alarmist stories about radiation leaks from the Fukushima plants -- Google away; take your pick -- but fewer that put the incident into any sort of perspective. The Wall Street Journal, to its credit, was quick, as in its piece "Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl," published just three days after the quake.

It took the Washington Post three weeks, but they eventual published a sober article contrasting the health risks of nuclear with other means of generating electricity. See: "Nuclear power is safest way to make electricity, according to study." A choice quote: "In the months after the world’s worst nuclear disaster, in Chernobyl in 1986, about 50 people died. In the next-biggest accident, at Three Mile Island in 1979, no one did."

The highly condensed version:

mining coal and drilling for petroleum are dangerous. In its coal-mining article, Wikipedia indicates ~30 deaths/year in the US -- and sometimes as high as 6,000/year in China. (They mine a LOT of coal in China.)
Burning coal leads to deaths among the public from pollution. Many more fatalities can be attributed to burning coal (e.g., deaths from asthma attacks and emphysema) than to radiation leaks.

Should nuclear plants be phased out because, in some hypothetical worst case, there could be worse problems? I'll answer, emphatically: No! It's the tsunami, stupid. The dead and missing would have been dead and missing with or without nuclear plants in the area. It would be much more logical to say (though I'm not saying it) that the event's lesson is passenger trains should not travel along coasts. Several trains filled with passengers evidently washed out to sea.

Tech is the solution, not the problem. Without tech and the prosperity it enables, many more surely would have died. It takes tech and prosperity to build earthquake-resistant buildings, to deploy tsunami early-warning systems, to dispatch search-and-rescue teams from around the world, to mobilize aid contributions from around the globe, and to rebuild.

How much technology would we have without reliable sources of electricity? How much prosperity?

Not everyone has had a near-jerk "nukes are bad" reaction. Environmental activist George Monbiot reached the opposite lesson in his think piece, "Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power."

I hope his open mind is contagious. Because if the lesson of the Sendai quake is "no nukes" and the lesson of the BP oil-platform explosion is "no offshore drilling" and the lesson of the next disaster is "no XYZ" ... pretty soon we'll all be fuming in the dark.

What we don't know

2011-03-29T11:40:00.000-04:00

The loose ends in science are at least as interesting to me as what we (think we) know.

Take the Higgs boson, the elusive quarry of the biggest experiment in science: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The Higgs boson is the remaining particle predicted by the highly successful standard model of nuclear physics -- and yet to be detected.

A very weird thing, the Higgs boson, so weird/elusive/mysterious that it's developed the nickname of "The God Particle," from the book of the same name. The Higgs boson is said to give the attribute of mass to some subatomic particles.

Because the LHC's latest round of experiments has yet to detect the Higgs boson, its mass is statistically likely to be above 207 GeV / c^2. (GeV = giga [billion] electron volts.) That division by c squared, where c = the speed of light in a vacuum, comes from the mass/energy equivalence relationship, the famous E = mc^2.

For reference, a proton's mass is about 938 MeV/c^2 (MeV = million electron volts). A neutron is slightly more massive, at 940 MeV/c^2. An electron's mass is a mere 511 KeV/c^2 (KeV = thousand electron volts). These particles must get their mass from other mechanisms (e.g., from the so-called strong force) and/or only partially from the Higgs. As I say, weird.

How weird is it that physicists don't know the mass of the particle for which they're looking? Here's the not-quite secret of the standard model: it relies upon about twenty parameters that are, as far as present theory knows, completely arbitrary. These parameters are determined by measurement. So in the latest round of LHC experiments, physicists have just about convinced themselves that the Higgs boson is not to be found within the mass range of 144 - 207 GeV/c^2.

Imagine a detective saying, "I've about convinced myself that the suspect probably doesn't weigh between 144 and 207 pounds." It wouldn't sound like said detective knew who he was after, now would it?

In The Trouble with Physics (highly recommended, by the way), physicist Lee Smolin names five grand challenges that have stymied theoreticians for decades. Among the five is "Explain how the values of the free constants in the standard model are chosen in nature." As in: why do particles have the masses that they do, and why are forces between particles the strengths that they are? Basic stuff that we can measure but in no way understand.

Don't get me wrong. I think the standard model has been a remarkable bit of experimental science. It has guided many searches for subatomic detail. But if we don't soon find the Higgs, for sure something will have been proven incomplete in the standard model.

Just as Newtonian gravitation, though it answered all scientific needs for centuries, was eventually supplanted by the more complete Einsteinian model of gravity (aka, General Relativity), so, too, the standard model may have to give way to a more complete, more basic, model of subatomic reality.

And won't that be exciting ...

There is a tide in the affairs of spacefarers ...

2011-03-22T11:40:00.001-04:00

Fate of Worlds is at an exciting point -- it's hard to tear myself away from working on the first draft. So: to make this a quick post, I'm sticking to a couple of keen bits of space news. (In a year or so, the Known Space fans among you will thank me.)

First, NASA recently released the highest res image ever of the entire lunar far side (a small version of which is shown at left). It's a composite image assembled from thousands of detailed images captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter -- from an altitude of only about 30 miles! Seriously cool.

And much farther from home ...

... the latest survey of the Kepler mission reports finding 54 more or less Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of sunlike stars (that is: by virtue of these planet's orbits, liquid water can exist on the planetary surfaces). After fun with numbers, the survey suggests that across a larger sample, the prevalence of such planets around sunlike stars will turn out to be 1.4 to 2.7 percent. Multiply those numbers by estimates of the numbers of stars of various types in the Milky Way, and you get around two billion Earth-like candidates in just our galaxy. Alas, that's a prediction of only about two candidates within 100 light-years of us. Where's an FTL drive when you need one?

Of course sunlike stars (not precisely defined in the above-mentioned articles, but, presumably, yellow [G class] stars) are far from the most common stars. Red dwarfs [M class] are far more prevalent. (See here for more on stellar classification.)

The Kepler search hasn't yet checked out red dwarf stars. With good reason: red dwarfs, being dim and cool, have very small habitable zones. Any planet in such a close orbit would be tidally locked to its sun -- just as the moon is tidally locked to Earth. (See, there is some relation between parts of this post.) An atmosphere-bearing, tidally locked planet in the habitable zone of a red-dwarf star would have very tempestuous weather: extremely hot on the planet's sun-facing side and extremely cold on the planet's sun-shunning side. Great air masses would endlessly move between hemispheres, just as (but to a greater extent than) air masses circulate between Earth's tropics and polar regions. That said, such planets might have narrow liveable regions in the twilight strips near the edge of permanent darkness. (The home of the Drar, in Destroyer of Worlds, is such a world.)

But imagine an Earth-like moon of a Jupiter-like planet, with that quasi-Jupiter in a red dwarf's habitable zone. (Artist's conception at left by Luciano Mendez, under Creative Commons license).

The planet would be tidally locked to its sun and the Earth-like moon will be tidally locked to the planet, but -- and here's the key point -- the Earth-like moon is not tidally locked to the sun. Further, tidal flexing of the moon, driven by the planet -- the mechanism that keeps water oceans liquid (beneath world-spanning icecaps) on Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus -- can add energy (above what the star provides) to the moon's environment. In InterstellarNet: New Order, Kv'ith (home world of the Hunters, a species sometimes known to humans as the Snakes) is just such a moon.

Despite the call of Fate of Worlds, I've managed a tide-y post. (You may groan.) Now I'm back to work ...

Searching the solar sytem's attic

2011-03-15T13:38:00.000-04:00

Where is everyone?

That simple question is the essence of the Fermi Paradox, posed (if only, perhaps, apocryphally) by nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi. More expansively: if life arises naturally on suitable planets, then why -- with so MANY stars around us -- hasn't intelligent life contacted or visited Earth? If aliens haven't, maybe the premise about life arising naturally and then intelligent life following naturally is suspect.

(Regular readers of this blog know that as an SF author I'm interested in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and in First Contact scenarios. This post is about one small aspect of the science of SETI. If you're curious about my fictional uses of SETI, check out my InterstellarNet series and Moonstruck posts.)

Traditional SETI, based on listening for radio signals, has been noticeable for its lack of success. It turns out listening isn't the only SETI option. There's a SETI offshoot called search for extraterrestrial artifacts (SETA). A subset of SETA is search for extraterrestrial vehicles (SETV). The dressed-up term for it is xenoarcheology. Like astrobiology, xenoarcheology is a science for which, to date, there is no proof of the existence of its subject matter.

Finding (or thinking one has found) physical evidence of aliens is an SF staple. Consider, for example, the black monoliths in the acclaimed 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I've always been partial to the cover at left, from James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars.

The SETV argument goes like this. Signaling across interstellar distances takes a lot of energy. Sending that (expensive) signal yields a benefit only if someone hears it. Sending a space probe is much more energy efficient -- albeit slower -- than beaming across the light-years. The visiting probe can gather data independent of the tech level of any creatures in the visited solar system. The probe can also choose to announce itself with a locally transmitted signal. Proponents of SETV advise us to look around our solar system for alien spacecraft.

IMO, for the SETV conjecture to merit consideration, one must assume either that:

the aliens have far better propulsion tech than humans (probes that can speedily cross light-years, then signal home or return with findings), or
that the aliens have a very patient civilization that's expected to be much longer-lived (and static?) than anything we humans have accomplished.

To amplify briefly on that second bullet point: I can't see humans sending probes across light-years at chemical rocket speeds because they might report back something interesting in thousands of years. In thirty-three years, Voyager 1, the most distant man-made object, has reached a point almost 18 billion kilometers from the sun. That sounds impressive --but Voyager 1 has traveled less than 0.1% of the roughly 40 trillion kilometer distance to our sun's nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri. (No, Voyager isn't headed that direction.)

Where would one look for an alien artifact? Robert Freitag, a chief proponent of the artifact hypothesis, suggests some criteria in THE SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL ARTIFACTS (SETA). If a probe is smart enough to do its job, Freitag suggests, it will first figure out what planet to watch. Presuming (which Freitag did) that the aliens are something like us, they'd spot Earth. Then they'd want locations that could watch Earth:

for long periods of time,
without interruption, and
in conditions safe for the probe.

So: not on Earth itself. A probe on Earth can't see much of Earth, and is subject to (among other dangers) earthquakes and weather. Not in low Earth orbit, because such orbits can decay. Not in the Van Allen belts -- too much wear-and-tear on the probe. (I don't find that argument compelling: if the probe survived cosmic rays -- unsheltered by any star's heliopause, for the duration of its journey -- I'd expect said probe to be fairly radiation-hardened.

We should be looking for alien spacecraft, Frietag says, in:

Geocentric orbits located between two Earth-centred concentric spheres of radii 70,000 km
and 326,400 km;
Selenocentric orbits between 3000-58,100 km lunar altitude;
Stable synodic libration orbits around Earth-Moon Lagrangian points L4 and L5;
Earth-Moon halo orbits near collinear Lagrangian points LI and L2; and
Sun-Earth L4/L5 Lagrangian orbits.

Personally, I'd add the Earth-facing side of the moon. Once the period of late bombardment had passed -- call it about 3.9 billion years ago -- the moon's surface became fairly safe.

There's not a lot of weather or seismic activity on the moon. There's plenty of sunlight for energy (any probe that can cross light-years can surely store power for two-week lunar nights) and material for many kinds of self-repairs. Viewing is uninterrupted and is from a comparatively close distance -- certainly closer than the sun/Earth L4/L5 points.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured images of Apollo landing sites. Maybe someday soon the LRO will spot something even more interesting.

It will take a concerted search, though. The moon, even "just" the Earth-facing side, is a big place. And nothing says the hypothetical probe will be anywhere near as large as an Apollo landing stage.

Maybe squinting will help :-)

Not about Charlie Sheen ...

2011-03-08T12:27:00.000-05:00

... Except to the degree it's true of each of us.

Panspermia (from the Greek, literally "all seed") is the hypothesis that primitive life exists throughout the universe and thus that life on Earth may have originated elsewhere. Panspermia theory doesn't contradict evolution, because evolutionary theory deals with how life changes, not how (or where) it began.

Did life come to Earth on, say, a meteorite? While panspermia is not exactly the scientific mainstream, it has had prominent advocates over the centuries, including physical chemist Svante Arrhenius, physicist Lord Kelvin (aka, William Thomson), and astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle. It's commonly accepted that organic chemicals are widely dispersed in space, but there's been no proof of extraterrestrial life. (In 1996 President Clinton made a statement to announce NASA might have found fossilized bacteria in a meteorite of Martian provenance ...

but those findings were later downgraded to inconclusive.)

Now there's a new (March 5th) report: Exclusive: NASA Scientist Claims Evidence of Alien Life on Meteorite. These latest findings are from Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Briefly, he reports finding microstructures within a meteorite reminiscent of cyanobacteria. Ditto biochemicals.

Haven't heard a thing about it? Far from the fanfare of the Martian-meteorite announcement, this report is, so far, largely ignored (and when acknowledged, widely dismissed). Because of the once-burned-twice-shy principle? Maybe. Some of the skepticism (Scientists Dubious Over Claim of Alien Life Evidence in Meteorite) is on the petty side: "It [the Journal of Cosmology] doesn't exist in print, consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s ..." says P.Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris. The aesthetics of the web design -- yeah, that's what's important here.

Here is Hoover's article at Journal of Cosmology, if you want to take a look: Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites

Am I convinced? Not yet. The meatier (heh!) objection to the finding is that the semblance to bacteria is to cyanobacteria -- aka, blue-green algae. On Earth such single-celled lifeforms live in water and produce oxygen -- luckily for you and me. That doesn't sounds like the environment inside an ancient meteoroid. (Meteoroids are in space; they change names to meteorites when they fall to Earth.) But an apparent planetary origin is not necessarily a show-stopper: celestial impacts move rocks between planets all the time. That's how the Martian meteorite of the 1996 announcement came to be found in Antarctica.)

We're learning more every day about how hardy life, especially primitive life, can be. Extremophiles have been found that thrive in boiling water, in radioactive environments, in strong acids, and in the pores of deep rock. Earthly bacteria can stay dormant for long times and then be revived. See: Bacteria: The Space Colonists for an interesting article and lots of citations.

Has the recent announcement convincingly proved anything about panspermia? No, but neither has anything been disproved. Stay tuned.

The winds of change

2011-03-03T23:35:00.000-05:00

I'm often amazed at the perception that wind power is free and clean.

Not free, because the windmills/generators must:

be built, generally in some remote area (say, in the middle of the High Plains or miles off the coast),
have high-capacity transmission lines extended to them (and power lines take longer to build than the wind farms themselves),
have back-up power provided for them (for when the wind isn't blowing),
have storage provided for them (so that power from night-time wind can be used when it's needed -- often, during the day),
be supported by a national grid made more robust to cope with the variability of the wind-driven power, and
be maintained (including those new transmission lines, storage, etc.).

Still, some say, the wind is free. It's true: in a strictly monetary sense, wind-as-fuel is free. No, if one takes into account what economists call the "externalities." Those are costs that society bears but the asset owner does not. (In the same way, pollution from fossil fuels traditionally has been an externality for the gasoline refiner -- not so much once air-pollution-abatement controls were mandated.)

So what are some externalities of wind power?

They're eyesores, at least to many. (I think they're neat looking, but I haven't had to live near them.) See "In Holland, land of windmills, flap over wind farm."
Apart from the (previously mentioned) monetary cost of high-capacity power lines, there are questions of land use. We all know how popular power towers and high-capacity lines are. The NIMBY(*) outlook applies here, as in: why should I have unsightly power lines pass through my yard, park, county, or state if the power is being delivered far away. (Unrelated to wind generators, there's recently been a huge fight about a new power line through a corner of my county. IMO, it's largely been about this "why me? I don't need the power" issue.)
They affect the weather. See, for example, "Wind Farms Alter Local Weather."
The turbulence from one wind farm can interfere with another, miles away. See "A Less Mighty Wind: Three reasons wind power could wane."
They eat birds. As in, "Wind turbines taking toll on birds of prey." There's a double standard about bird slaughter, too. Whenever there's an oil spill -- the exception to routine operations -- you can count on TV footage of slimed birds. How much TV coverage have you seen of birds routinely getting chopped up by windmills? Never mind that the toll from windmills is far higher. See "Windmills Are Killing Our Birds: One standard for oil companies, another for green energy sources."

(*) NIMBY = Not in My Backyard.

You can extract from the foregoing list plenty of reasons why wind power isn't squeaky clean, either.

Am I anti-wind power? Not at all. From an energy-independence point of view, I like wind a lot. But only with eyes open to the ways in which wind power (like any means of power generation) is imperfect ...

I'd like to see wind power deployed where it makes economic sense, not because of subsidies. While some wind projects make sense, others will turn out to be as ill-considered as burning food -- aka, ethanol -- is now generally recognized (outside Iowa) to be. See: "Al Gore: Ethanol Was Not a Good Policy."

Every use of energy -- including transformations from one form, like wind or sunlight, to another, like electricity -- has side effects.

As someone said (darn if I can find the attribution): you can't change just one thing. The beginning of wisdom in energy policy is to look around for all the impacts. Like past energy fads -- think: shale oil, ethanol, nuclear, and hydro power -- wind power will (one assumes) come to be seen in a less rose-colored-glasses manner.

While we find our way to cheaper (never free!) and clean(er) energy, I'd like to see us continue to invest in what works and will keep the lights on.

A new phase of the Moon(struck)

2011-02-26T22:23:00.001-05:00

My second novel, MOONSTRUCK, went in and out of print long before the days of this blog. Way before Kindle, too.

I'm delighted to report that MOONSTRUCK is available once more, in a classy trade paperback format and now also for the Kindle. That's the new cover on the left of your screen.

And the story? I could tell you, but these review snippets describe it *so* well ...

"Take one part Tom Clancy, one part Hal Clement, and one part Larry Niven, shake well, and you've got Edward Lerner's edge-of-your-seat day-after-tomorrow just-what-ARE-the-aliens up to thriller, MOONSTRUCK.

It's a rollicking good read, in which the puzzles all go snick-snick at just the right moment, and the suspense never lets up. Highly recommended."

— Robert J. Sawyer, author of Rollback

"In his novel Moonstruck, physicist Edward M. Lerner operates proudly in the classic hard-SF tradition of ... Robert A. Heinlein."

— Scifi.com

"Moonstruck is a rapid fire technothriller that puts fresh thrills into the first contact tale. Fast, original, and will keep you guessing to the very last page.

— Robert A. Metzger, author of Picoverse

(An aside to my longtime readers: MOONSTRUCK first appeared as a serial in Analog, in 2003.)

Curious? Check out a sample of MOONSTRUCK or go to the Amazon page (book or Kindle) for more editorial and reader reviews.

And (barring surprises) coming up in a month or two ... the re-release of my long out-of-print first novel. Look for another update post when PROBE is re-released for its twentieth anniversary.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar ...

2011-02-22T11:46:00.000-05:00

... Sigmund Freud is said to have said.

And so, by the power vested in me by the State of Analogy, surely an SF author can declare that sometimes an SF story (or TV show or movie) is just a story, and that it's okay to simply be ... fun.

In that spirit, take a gander at this paean to SF corridors from the Den of Geek. It's a neat post with great visuals from classic SF movies.

Urbin dot net offers an entertaining compendium of SFnal quotes. (Who wouldn't love, for example: "First things first -- but not necessarily in that order" -- The Doctor, Doctor Who.)

And from the world of steampunk, check out Seven Replica Rayguns Made from Recycled Materials.

Sometimes movies are so bad they're great (else what's an MST3K for?). Check out Screen Junkies list of the Ten Worst SF movies.

Since our theme is fun, there's also fun to be had mocking bad science. For that, check out Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics. It's a great source of info for both specific issues (like why -- in real life, as opposed to movies -- every car crash doesn't produce a fireball) and movie reviews. Their #1 pick --so bad it's good -- was The Core.

Go have fun.

The monopsony cometh

2011-02-17T11:11:00.000-05:00

I realize authors always claim that times are tough ... but these times are.

Yesterday brought the bankruptcy filing of Borders Books. Borders, of course, is the the #2 bricks-and-mortar bookseller in the country -- and for a couple of months, they haven't been paying publishers. Many publishers, consequently, haven't been sending them new books. (Under the circumstances, why would they?) About two hundred stores will be closed over the next several weeks, possibly more. The remainder of the chain, operating under bankruptcy-court protection, is likely to be very conservative in their restocking decisions -- to the extent, still to be determined, that publishers take the risk of resuming shipments. For the thoughts of another author on the subject, see A Bankrupt Borders Makes Everyone Poorer, Especially Authors.

Monopsony (if you've been wondering) is the flip side of monopoly: a market with only one buyer. Book retailing isn't quite there, but we're getting awfully close. It is the nature of chains to centralize decisions -- such as what books to offer. A hundred independent booksellers represent one hundred prospective outlets for an author. A chain of a hundred stores often represents just one purchaser's to-stock-or-not decision. And if for whatever reason a chain or two passes on a book? Not good for that book's prospects.

What of online booksellers? I'm guessing you know that one buyer has the lion's share of that market. Even if there were more viable online ebook sellers (one of Borders' problems being they lacked a successful online presence), online sellers have yet to reproduce the browsing/serendipity feature of brick-and-mortar bookstores. It's far from clear how non-bestselling authors can draw the online eye of prospective buyers.

And ebooks? They're changing the market, too, and not always in a good way. See, for example, from The Wall Street Journal: Authors Feel Pinch in Age of E-Books. Or, from Livescience.com: e-Book Piracy Surges, Says Study. As in, "Every day people type between 1.5 and 3 million Google queries for pirated e-books, an increase of 54 percent over queries logged one year ago, according to a new study by Attribute Research."

I'm an SF author, and so I'm also concerned with a second consolidation: SF publishers. Of any longevity, only three magazines. Of SF book publishers with access to reasonable distribution channels, not many more. So before reaching the dearth of bookstores, there's the gauntlet to be run of too few publishers.

I'm feeling rather dystopic today ...

Creative Destruction

2011-02-11T13:11:00.001-05:00

"Creative destruction" was economist Joseph Schumpeter's capsule description of capitalism. In a few words: good ideas and well-run companies ride roughshod over past-their-use-by-date ideas and badly run companies. Wealth from failed businesses and industries shifts to more productive uses in new enterprises.

(Contrast with: Uncreative destruction, as when governments bail out imploding companies, throwing [your] good money after bad. Seen any of that recently?)

We saw -- and continue to see -- a great deal of creative destruction as work shifts from labor-intensive processes onto computers and the Internet. As Alan Greenspan (former chairman of the Federal Reserve) once observed (citation), "From the development of the textile loom two centuries ago to today's Internet, output per hour has increased fifty fold."

(Disclosure: here we segue to a commercial announcement.) My first collection of short fiction was computer-themed. I named it, appropriately enough -- or, anyway, so I think -- Creative Destruction.

The title story (i.e., "Creative Destruction") is set in my InterstellarNet universe, about which I've posted before. The original/standalone novelette-length version of "Creative Destruction" (versus the expanded version that forms a section of InterstellarNet: Origins) was in a year's best anthology and also serialized in the daily newsletter of Telcom World 2003. (That's not just some random techie gathering. Telecom World is sponsored annually by a United Nations agency, the International Telecommunication Union. Speakers are folks like IT corporation CEOs and national telecom ministers.)

The longest story in Creative Destruction is "Survival Instinct," a novella about artificial life. Expanded and updated, "Survival Instinct" became the core of the novel Fools' Experiments.

Those two stories originally appeared in Analog. Four others also first appeared in Analog, one first appeared in the anthology Future Washington, and one was original to the collection. You'll find full details about Creative Destruction on my website.

Creative Destruction isn't new -- in fact, it came out in late 2006 -- so you may wonder why I bring it up now. Thank my publisher. Following the release of my second collection, (Countdown to Armageddon / A Stranger in Paradise), they just decided to offer a discount for both collections bought as a set. It seemed worth mentioning here. (Naturally you can buy the books separately, and both are also available for the Kindle.)

Since I'm being entirely self-promotional this post, I'll mention that SFcrowsnest, a premier British spec-fic website, recently released its "hyper hundred" for 2010. In a list including SF, fantasy, and horror titles, compiled from reader votes, I'm quite happy to see Small Miracles appearing at 47. And once I knew to look, it turned out that Fools Experiments was #8 on the 2009 list.

Techno-copia

2011-02-08T12:04:00.000-05:00

Several items of likely interest to the SF (and just S) readers of this blog ...

What if robots could share what they learn? Is that a step toward Skynet or just towards less dumb robots? Check out RoboEarth: a Worldwide Web for Robots.

(Robots interacting with the real world is a hard problem. My grad-school days are long passed, but back then I shared an office with a guy whose doctoral dissertation involved programming a robotic arm to ... stack blocks.)

On a slightly larger scale, and from the Department of Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud, comes the forecast of a New Climate Change Worry: Space Tourism Soot. So I'm supposed to worry about 1,000 suborbital flights per year, when the current number is ... none? Still, it'll be nice when we have space elevators. If only world records for the longest carbon nanotube weren't denominated in centimeters ...

On a quite different scale, it appears that galaxies are more complex than astronomers thought. As in: the Hubble has seen the apparent rejuvenation of very old galaxies. See: Giant Rings Around Galaxies Perplex Astronomers.

From the Department of Overstatement (but still cosmic and interesting), see Scientists re-create Big Bang in lab. No one has produced a new universe, but physicists at the Large Hadron Collider briefly created a quark-gluon plasma like what existed very early in the life of this universe. Primordial soup, anyone?

And still in a cosmic frame of mind, tantalizing hints about the nature of dark matter. See Has Dark Matter Finally Been Seen? Time Will Tell. The data are at once inconclusive and tantalizing.

(I've always had a warm spot in my cerebral cortex for the WIMP theory of dark matter. WIMP is clever, unlike quark. Naming a particle for a nonsense line in Finnegan's Wake? Really?)

May your galaxy not by superannuated, your dark matter mysterious, your space adventures sooty, nor your robots homicidal.

Of fleet Fleets and Known Space

2011-02-01T15:00:00.006-05:00

Readers often email me to discuss fine points of Known Space lore, including how the Fleet of Worlds series of collaborative novels relates to other books and stories within Larry Niven's Known Space future history.

(No spoilers herein. In this post I'll say little or nothing about plots. For per-book descriptions click embedded links to go to the book-specific Amazon pages. For books in the Fleet series, you can also click the book covers on the right-hand side of this post page for more description.)

Erroneous web references abound that Fleet/Juggler/Destroyer of Worlds are a trilogy (they're not), and that Betrayer of Worlds is the first of a series (a new sub-series is more accurate, in that Betrayer introduces a new main character), and wondering if the series is complete (it's not quite -- more on that before I finish this post).

Other online articles -- from mainstream reviews to fan sites to blog posts -- offer conflicting opinions as to whether and how individual Fleet of Worlds series books relate to earlier-written Known Space stories -- and even to each other.

You know what? I thought I'd offer an opinion. Being a coauthor imparts some qualifications, right?
First things first: Larry & I write the Fleet of Worlds books to be standalone. We wrote Fleet of Worlds itself without plans for a second book. Each time that our publisher expressed interested in another book, we undertook it with the same standalone philosophy.

Did we ever think about what might go into another book? Of course. Did we ever leave anything unresolved with the expectation of picking it up in a later book? No. When we left something unresolved at the end of a book that was simply art imitating life: some issues get settled and others -- not even necessarily recognized by anyone at the time -- emerge later.

As one measure of the intended separateness of the novels, consider this: each focuses on a different alien species:

Fleet of Worlds -- Puppeteers
Juggler of Worlds -- Outsiders
Destroyer of Worlds -- Pak
Betrayer of Worlds -- Gw'oth

(That's not to suggest there is but a single alien species per book. Puppeteers, for example, are in every book. The Gw'oth are in every book but Juggler.)

At the same time, these books are a series. Characters recur (sometimes). Settings recur (sometimes). Technologies, societies, and astropolitical (not a word, perhaps, but it should be) situations evolve from book to book. If you read the books of the series in publication order, you'll see subtle connections.

So: the simplest reading order for the set is:

Fleet of Worlds (published 2007)
Juggler of Worlds (published 2008)
Destroyer of Worlds (published 2009)
Betrayer of Worlds (published 2010)

What about chronological order? That's almost the same.

Fleet of Worlds (after the prologue, Earth dates: 2650-52)
Juggler of Worlds (Earth dates: 2637-2660)
Destroyer of Worlds (Earth date: 2675 [except the epilogue])
Betrayer of Worlds (Earth dates: 2780-81)

Fleet and Juggler overlap chronologically. Astronomically, they start -- literally -- light-years apart, and don't converge for quite a while. So which goes best first? I'll say Fleet, but that either order works.

Speaking of chronological overlap ... Fleet of Worlds and Juggler of Worlds are contemporaneous with some early short fiction of Known Space, primarily the stories involving intrepid starship pilot Beowulf Shaeffer (best source: the collection Crashlander, spanning 2641-2655). Also germane: the novelette "The Soft Weapon" (2656).

The fun here is in exploring different points of view. So, for example, what Shaeffer experiences in Crashlander as a series of physical (and physics) challenges, paranoid-but-charming secret agent Sigmund Ausfaller sees as ever more devious alien plots. The thing of it is: both men are correct. So: read Juggler of Worlds and Crashlander in either order.

Each of the Fleet of Worlds series books bears a "before Ringworld" subtitle of some sort. Some readers wonder whether to read Ringworld (and/or its sequels) before Fleet of Worlds and its sequels. If you're going to read only one book of Known Space, read Ringworld -- it's my favorite, and the inspiration for Fleet of Worlds came from Ringworld.

That said, Fleet/Juggler/Destroyer/Betrayer are all prequels to Ringworld. Reading any of the Fleet of Worlds books before Ringworld (and/or its sequels) won't expose anyone to major spoilers. Ringworld opens in 2850 -- that's about 70 years after Betrayer of Worlds. The final Ringworld series book, Ringworld's Children, takes place in 2893.

There's one final Known Space book that figures prominently in the mix, called Protector. Setting aside the prologue, Protector opens in 2124 and closes in 2351 -- before any of the books I've mentioned in this post. (I'm less familiar with these dates. Here I'm using info from Marc Carlson's excellent The Up To Date Known Space Chronology.) Trust me, Protector is related.

What about the ongoing (dozen or so volumes as I type) Known Space books in the Man-Kzin War series? Those are entirely unrelated to the Fleet of Worlds books. That's by design.

Let's suppose you want to undertake an epic Known Space reading extravaganza. (There are far worse ways to spend your time.) What's the best reading order? I'd go more-or-less chronological:

Protector
Crashlander
Fleet of Worlds
Juggler of Worlds
Destroyer of Worlds
Betrayer of Worlds
Ringworld
Ringworld Engineers
Ringworld Throne
Ringworld's Children

By the time you're done, hopefully Larry and I (and our publisher) will have finished with Fate of Worlds. It is subtitled (drum roll, please) Return from the Ringworld.

I'm looking forward to that end-to-end read, myself.

Antimatter matters

2011-01-25T12:37:00.000-05:00

One of the biggest mysteries of physics (and life, the universe, and everything) is this: why is anything even here?

In physics, the question crops up at two levels. First, why did the Big Bang happen? Second, once the Big Bang did happen, matter and antimatter were, per theory, created in equal quantities. So: why didn't the universe's matter and antimatter eradicate each other and leave behind nothing but energy?

(I'm not complaining that we're here. Merely puzzled.)

I have no answer for either question, but I admit to an interest in all things antimatter. When matter and antimatter (of matched particles, like proton/antiproton or electron/positron) meet, the result is horrific explosions. Mass and energy stand in a fixed relationship, per what is perhaps the best-known equation in physics -- E = mc squared (sorry I can't enter a superscript on blogspot) -- so we know exactly what radiation results: gamma rays with very specific energies. (It's a bit more complicated for proton/antiproton annihilation -- some secondary particles are produced along with the gamma rays. For electron/positron encounters, though, the byproduct each time is simply a photon carrying 511 KeV of energy.)

SF writers like antimatter because matter/antimatter annihilation is the most compact way to store energy -- whether for superweapons or to fuel interstellar travel. The challenge is in having any antimatter to store. Antimatter has to be created one antiparticle at a time. E = mc squared being a symmetric relationship, we have to provide a lot of energy to create a little antimatter. Then we have to store that antiparticle without it touching anything ... or boom.

Antimatter is produced, antiparticle by antiparticle, in extremely high energy collisions of regular-matter particles inside huge particle accelerators. Using magnetic fields, the (for example) positrons are captured from the subatomic debris. The antimatter is then held isolated by magnetic traps -- if the antimatter touches the wall of a physical container: bye-bye, antimatter.

As you might expect, antimatter produced this way doesn't come cheap. In a 1999 article, NASA said they could produce antimatter for $1.75 quadrillion an ounce. (Passing note: industrial-scale antimatter production plays a big part in my novel InterstellarNet: New Order.)

So here is a truly keen recent headline: Antimatter caught streaming from thunderstorms on Earth. Positrons, to be specific: the tell-tale gamma rays of their subsequent destruction have been caught in satellite observations.

Alas, capturing antimatter in the middle of an upper-atmosphere lightning storm doesn't seem practical.

Cyber war

2011-01-17T16:15:00.003-05:00

If you visit this blog with any regularity, you'll know that I'm a technophile. That said, for all the many wondrous things technology offers, it also creates new ways to become vulnerable. One vulnerability I particularly monitor is attacks on our increasingly networked infrastructure.

Recent years have offered inklings of cyber warfare.

In 2007, after Russia took umbrage over Estonia removing a Soviet-era war memorial, Estonia blamed Russia for a massive denial-of-service attack on government servers.
In 2008, the Georgian government claimed Russian cyber attacks accompanied the more visible aggression of bombings and troop incursions.
In 2010, Google and many other American companies were attacked by Chinese hackers. Almost immediately the rumor was that at least the attack on Google was geopolitically motivated, orchestrated by the Chinese government. A recent WikiLeaks data dump of American diplomatic cables backs the theory of Chinese leadership involvement. And it was Google who hacked right back, although as far as I've read, the counter hack was (perhaps wisely) limited to collecting evidence.
A case can be made that the 2010 WikiLeak disclosures were a form of nongovernmental cyber war waged against the U.S. government (and/or other governments whose laundry was aired by these leaks). See "Why WikiLeaks Is Unlike the Pentagon Papers."

In the cases of Estonia and Georgia, the attacks were brute-force distributed denial of service attacks. In the Google (et. al.) case, the attacks were more subtle, looking for information -- like the email accounts of Chinese dissidents. Wikileaks's attack is in the form of disclosing heretofore classified information.

Now comes visibility into perhaps the most consequential and sophisticated cyber attack yet. It is increasingly clear (though denied by all parties) that the Iranian nuclear program has been delayed, perhaps for years, by the Stuxnet worm, and that the US and Israel partnered on a very precisely targeted cyber attack on the Iranian uranium-enriching centrifuges.

I can't help but believe that the world is a safer place for a delay in the Iranian nuclear weapons program. I can't help but be pleased that this result was achieved without the messiness of a bombing campaign. And I can't help but wonder (with some concern) where the cyber warfare trend is taking all of us.

Cyber vulnerabilities -- and that their consequences could extend far beyond computers -- isn't a new topic for me. In Fools' Experiments, first published in 2008, a character comments early about how dependent society has gotten on its software -- and our exposure when software goes wrong.

Intentionally being vague here to minimize spoilers, things in the novel develop to attacks on and through networked infrastructure. Including -- before fictional things get even direr -- one cyber attack very much like the Stuxnet assault on the Iranian centrifuges.

It's kinda eerie ...

Getting smashed

2011-01-11T13:08:00.001-05:00

No, not a New Year's Eve hangover retrospective. Rather, reflections on the near-term prospects for particle accelerators (what in my youth we called atom smashers).

UPDATED FEBRUARY 1, 2011

First came word that the brand-new, scarcely operational Large Hadron Collider would will shut down for maintenance throughout 2012. Then CERN, the trans-European organization that runs the LHC, announced the shutdown will last more than a year and that they'll also be shutting down the rest of their accelerators in 2012.

UPDATE (2/1/2011): CERN has reconsidered. The LHC will continue running in 2012. Yea!

Now comes word that FermiLab plans to turn off the Tevatron later this year.

Finding the Higgs boson (last missing piece of the otherwise very successful Standard Model of particle physics)? Characterizing dark matter? Proving or disproving supersymmetry and maybe finding a shred of evidence for (or against) string theory? Being utterly surprised by things in the subatomic realm we don't even suspect? Fugetaboutit.

I see much waiting ahead for any of those aspirations toward understanding the basic underpinnings of the universe. How many technological marvels must also wait as a result?

In an era of deficit spending, once again basic science (but hardly anything else) is deemed unworthy.

Head in the clouds

2011-01-03T15:00:00.001-05:00

One of the hottest ideas in information technology these days is "cloud computing."

The expression originates in an early Internet convention: customer-centric drawings that showed detail of Internet connectivity only at the end points. That is, you're likely to care how your computer (or phone) connects to the Internet. You're likely to care about the server that's providing a function to you. And the gear that lies between? The redundant components and fail-over mechanisms and keen in-the-background software that make the Internet resilient? For most end users, not so much.

To network engineers, those "between" things -- routers and comm links and protocol stacks and specialty servers for background functions like domain-name look-ups -- are, collectively, "the cloud." And so, many a network diagram (like the one nearby) shows connections into and out of a featureless cloud.

Cloud computing carries the "you don't want to know" model a bit further: now the server(s) providing functionality also disappears into the cloud. No longer need you store, say, your calendar, spreadsheets, or word-processing documents on your PC, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Advocates say: store everything "in the cloud." Access your data from anywhere and edit them "in the cloud."

Some cloud-computing examples? Google Apps (such as calendar, word processing, and spreadsheets). Office Web Apps (Microsoft's online version of Office), and BitTorrent file-sharing services.

Cloud computing, in other words, is ... the return of the mainframe. Cloud computing, IMO, has the same pluses -- and minuses -- old mainframes had. Centralized management: good. Centralized software maintenance: good. Loss of personal control: bad. And -- this item very bad -- cloud computing is far more exposed to networked mischief than most mainframes ever were.

(Aside/disclosure/life lesson: back when I was in grad school and dinosaurs hunkered down in big data centers, I developed a major application on a university time-sharing system. Came the head crash, and the data center's back-up processes turned out to be ... worthless. Nada was recovered. Fortunately I had an old printout covered with scribbles: every change I'd considered, made, unmade, revised, or rejected over the previous month-plus. And so I learned early in my career -- the person most concerned with the safety and security of my data had better be me.)

With cloud computing, your data becomes a small part of the holdings of a gigantic server farm ... somewhere. Is your data more or less secure on your PC or as part of a big, juicy target?

Just as Willie Sutton famously robbed banks "because that's where the money is," the $%#@!!s who write malware will surely turn their sights on server farms "in the clouds." Security firm Kaspersky Labs reports a Trojan targeting Rapidshare. And cloud computing seems like a great way to host -- and spread -- malware.

If cloud computing tempts you, here are some questions to ponder:

Which target is more likely to attract bad guys: your PC or a monster data center filled with the personal data of millions and the business/customer data of many corporations?
Would you like to control if/when you upgrade to a new version of an app, or cede that decision to a service provider?
Can cloud-computing businesses manage the safety and integrity of their huge data collections -- their customers' data -- any better than have other corporations? (Consider that just last month McDonald's and Walgreen reported break-ins to their customer data.)

I didn't like mainframes in the day, and I don't see how re-branding them as "cloud computing" improves them.

(All that said ... if this post makes you rethink keeping your data in the cloud, also remember who is responsible for protecting your data: you. Make that: YOU. Up-to-date virus checkers, good computing hygiene, and regular backups -- including off-site copies -- are essential.)

Spacing out

2010-12-27T11:41:00.000-05:00

As the year wraps up, some miscellaneous space news ...

One of the most fascinating results to come from the Apollo program concerned the longstanding puzzle of the origins of Earth's moon. (Our moon is anomalous, most visibly because it is so large compared to the planet it orbits.) The conclusion, based upon rock samples collected on the lunar surface: the moon likely resulted from the cataclysmic collision of a Mars-sized object with the (then very young) Earth.

This year's semi-related news item concerns Phobos, Mars's largest (but still tiny) moon. (The nearby picture is a [color-enhanced] image of Phobos taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.) Phobos likely formed from a smaller impact with Mars itself.

The space-shuttle fleet will be retired in 2011. For the foreseeable future, the US will have to pay the Russians for crew rides to the International Space Station. As disappointing as is that situation (I've commented on it before), at least getting supplies to the International Space Station aboard American spacecraft just became more credible with the successful test flight of Space-X's Dragon.

For those of you wondering when the next dinosaur-killer-class asteroid is due, some new data. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope found -- among other interesting things -- ~25,000 new asteroids, 95 of them classified as near-Earth objects, during its first six months of operation. None of the newly spotted objects is considered a threat to Earth. The statistics of the survey are encouraging.

Looking further ahead, DARPA (with a small contribution from NASA) is starting to look at how to build a starship. See: The Hundred Year Starship fund.

And here's a neat new way to find small exoplanets. As exoplanet hunting goes, one of the older search methods (and the method used by NASA's Kepler mission) looks for periodic dimming attributable to large planets crossing in front (from Earth's point of view) of stars. The transit timing variation method looks at changes in such transit times attributable -- after lots of computation -- to the tug of planets to small to be detected directly.

I didn't intend this post as any sort of year-end summary, but if you're in the market for such a thing, here's Space.com's list of top 2010 space stories.

History sniffing

2010-12-22T11:23:00.000-05:00

My concern/dismay(/obsession?) about privacy -- or modern lack thereof -- has been fed again ...

It seems that the websites you visit can access (through your browser) the history of other websites you've visited. The practice is called "history sniffing," and I, for one, find it disturbing.

For more on the study, see Visited porn? Web browser flaw secretly bares all. It begins:

Dozens of websites have been secretly harvesting lists of places that their users previously visited online, everything from news articles to bank sites to pornography, a team of computer scientists found.

(History but not passwords. That's something, of course.)

A related article at PCmag, Web Surfing Activity Vulnerable to 'History Sniffing' Report Says,
explains:

Why is this important? Researchers said that Web site owners can use this information to see if you have been visiting the Web sites of their competitors. Advertising companies can also used the data to build user profiles, while criminals could watch which banking sites you use to know which fake banking site they should use for a phishing attack.

The ray of hope (back to the first article) is that:

The latest versions of Google Inc.'s Chrome and Apple Inc.'s Safari have automatic protections for this kind of snooping, researchers said. Mozilla Corp. said the next version of Firefox will have the same feature, adding that a workaround exists for some older versions as well.

Whereas the PCmag article adds Firefox, saying:

The report found that the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari block history-sniffing attacks. Internet Explorer, however, does not currently defend against history sniffing.

Internet Exploder behind the curve? What are the chances?

(Surfing in private mode does protect your history -- but also keeps you and your browser from later making use of the history of where you've been.)

I wish it were better news ...

Ring(world) around the betrayer

2010-12-13T22:00:00.006-05:00

(Updated December 14th)

The release (last October) of Betrayer of Worlds led to several interview requests, which Larry and I divvied up. For those of you curious about things like how the book came to be written, how we work together, or about Larry's massively award-winning Ringworld -- to which Betrayer (and the rest, so far, of the Fleet of Worlds series) is a prelude -- here are a few items that you may find interesting:

My latest radio interview (now a podcast) at Fictional Frontiers (I open the show).

Larry's interview on Sci-Fi Talk, Betrayer of Two Worlds.

Larry's interview/retrospective for the Post and Courier: Ringworld Continues.

A December 14th update: Larry's interview on SciFiNow.

My SFsignal interview about Betrayer and much more.

More directly on the topic of Ringworld ... the Ringworld 40th anniversary retrospective at Tor.com has had a bunch of interesting posts. And surprisingly thought-provoking, here's an essay comparing and contrasting Ringworld with the TV series Lost.

Of cabbages and kings

2010-12-07T11:10:00.001-05:00

The time has come, the blogger said, to talk of many things. You guessed it: another potpourri posting.

JAXA, the Japanese space agency, has lost contact with its Venus Climate Orbiter. Perhaps this is only a temporary setback. JAXA's recent success with an asteroid-sample return mission shows what can be accomplished with perseverance (and a fault tolerant design)(and luck).

(This image, if you wondered, is a radar map of Venus composited from data captured by NASA's Magellan probe).

But wait, there's (much) more!

Among WikiLeak's recent torrent (no pun intended) of diplomatic cables is the allegation from one Chinese source that the Chinese government was behind last January's Google hacks. It's not just the U.S. -- there's plenty of embarrassment to go around. And cause for worry (as former White House national-security adviser Richard Clarke does) about the potential threat of cyber warfare.

As for worries ... do you lie awake at night wondering why the universe supposedly made with matter and antimatter in equal parts hasn't reduced you and your laptop to gamma rays -- and if/when it will? Me neither. Still, it's nice to know people continue to work on that puzzle. An interesting theory (without, AFAIK, any data yet to prove or disprove it) attempts to explain both why we see a universe of just matter and the origins of dark matter. Read on about the (highly theoretical) X particle.

Following up on my post of November 9 about the mysterious missile(?) contrail near LA, the Pentagon now says "only an airplane.". If you consider "There is no evidence to suggest that this is anything else other than a condensation trail from an aircraft" anything more than a wink-wink, nudge-nudge statement about what they do know. Or that if the cause of the contrail WAS an aircraft, the combined assets of NORAD and the FAA don't know what airplane.

And as for news on the publishing front, Google has finally launched its ebook store. It supports most formats and devices but Kindle.

Rocky and giant and dwarf ... oh my!

2010-11-30T13:15:00.003-05:00

I refer, of course, to the current official categorization scheme for planets -- and what isn't a planet.

(That's not the moon. Earth is only there for scale. Read on.)

In our solar system the rocky -- or as some prefer to call them, terrestrial -- planets are Earth and its close neighbors: Mercury, Venus, and Mars. The gas-giant planets, of course, are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The dwarf planets -- not really planets -- include Ceres (in the main asteroid belt) and a cast of, probably, hundreds in the Kuiper belt.

It is into that last/new/contentious category that the International Astronomical Union reassigned -- many say, demoted -- Pluto in 2006.

Much has been written about whether Pluto is, or is not, properly a planet. Most of it, IMO, has been silly. I was delighted to encounter a cogent, clear-thinking piece on the topic on Space.com, entitled Fighting for Pluto's Planet Title: Q & A With Planetary Scientist Alan Stern.

The whole interview is well worth reading, but most compelling to me is the observation that rule three of the IAU 3-part definition of a planet -- the rationale by which Pluto was reclassified -- is time- and location-dependent. An apropos quote: "Earth — the one object I think everyone agrees is a planet — is too small to clear Pluto's zone in the age of the solar system, and would not be a planet by the IAU's way of thinking."

So: let's hear it for Pluto.

And with so many planets, dwarf or otherwise, likely waiting to be discovered in the Kuiper belt, wouldn't Goofy also be a great [dwarf] planet name? Why shouldn't well-known cartoon characters supplant ever-more-obscure mythological names as the inspiration for celestial bodies?

To all you planetary astronomers out there: here's a list of Warner Brothers toon characters to get those nomination juices flowing ...

Buy a Book Saturday!

2010-11-23T09:48:00.000-05:00

The latest shopping innovation for the upcoming holiday season -- choose the winter festivity of your choice -- is Small Business Saturday. SBS is being held for the first time this year, on the day after so-called Black Friday, on November 27. The basic concept: don't just shop. Make an effort, at least this one day, to explore and patronize small businesses in your area. It's nothing against big/chain stores -- they'll do fine.

Who is a smaller business than the solitary author toiling at home in his/her office, pounding away at a keyboard? So: while you're out shopping, buy a book! Or two! Support an author or two or more (and I'm not saying me, or even others in the genre -- but IMO, living authors would be nice).

You're obviously a reader -- what makes a better gift than a book/ebook/audio book? (And if you don't see the book you had in mind, ask the bookseller to order it for you. Most booksellers will be more than happy to oblige.)

Buy a Book Saturday! Nourish the meme -- and the rest of the mind! Spread the word!

Of a fleet (of worlds) passing in the night

2010-11-16T13:00:00.002-05:00

A recurring theme in reader emails and some reviews of Fleet of Worlds series books is, "Why don't the [your choice of crafty Known Space species] notice the Fleet as it barrels through space? Even today, astronomers see stars across great distances, and the worlds of the Fleet (with one exception, discussed below) are lit by artificial suns.

The traditional answer (found in Ringworld, long before my entry into Known Space) is that no one thought to look between the stars. People (and Kzinti, and ...) hunted for Puppeteers on some as-yet undiscovered conventional world orbiting a sunlike star.

What about before the Fleet set "sail" (not that, pre-Ringworld, anyone in Known Space suspected world-moving technology could exist)? Puppeteers had long ago relocated their planets to new orbits far from their sun -- which had undergone late-in-life expansion into a red giant. Any artificial suns close to planets would be very hard to spot from a great distance against the backdrop luminosity of a red giant!

In short: the Fleet went undetected because everyone looked in the wrong places.

But there's a second, more quantitative answer. I'm not sure it needs to be spelled (numbered?) out in the context of storytelling, but I think it's worth relating somewhere. So here goes.

The short answer is: the artificial suns are small.

Life on Earth depends on sunlight -- but Earth does not receive much of the sun's light! The two relevant parameters:

Earth's average orbital radius (149.6 million kilometers, in scientific notation, 1.496 E8 km)
Earth's radius (6,378 kilometers, aka 6.378 E3 km)

A sphere sized with Earth's orbital radius has a surface area of 2.812 E17 km sq. Earth's cross section (defined by the intersection of a plane with Earth's equator) is a mere 1.278 E8 km sq.

The ratio is (1.278 E8) / (2.812 E 17) = 4.5 E -10 (and note the negative exponent!)

Earth intercepts about 1/20th of a billionth of the energy emitted by the sun.

The worlds of the Fleet of Worlds are Earth-like. To a first approximation then, the Puppeteers need to supply each world with as much energy as the solar energy Earth gets. If the artificial suns orbit close to the worlds they warm, then about half of the energy they put out will reach the world below. So, (in round numbers), the artificial suns that warm and light one world will together emit 1/10th of a billionth of the energy emitted by our sun. Four such artificially maintained worlds will emit 4/10s of a billionth of the energy emitted by the sun.

The fifth world, the Puppeteer home world [Hearth], is heated solely by its own industrial waste heat (derived from fusion using heavy hydrogen in Hearth's oceans). To a first approximation, that involves as much energy as is used to light and heat the Fleet's farm worlds. So: we're up to 5/10s of a billionth of solar output: 5.0E-10 of solar output.

For comparison, the smallest, coolest red dwarf stars emit only about 1 / 10,000 the energy of what our sun emits. The energy emitted by all five worlds of the Fleet is but 5 millionths as energetic as the dimmest red dwarf!

So there you have it: another reason not to notice the Fleet of Worlds, unless the (insert here: name of preferred high-tech species) is very close and very observant.

All that said, what if you happened to get close? (The Fleet is far from Earth, far from the boundaries of what humans arrogantly call Known Space). Would you -- especially with far-future advanced instruments -- see the worlds of the Fleet? Identify them as something very special?

Hell, yes.

Relative to the galaxy as a whole, they're zipping along at relativistic speeds.
The light they emit varies very quickly (because the artificial suns orbit close to the worlds, the worlds orbit around each other, and the emissions of the suns vary to mimic day/night and annual cycles).
One world, lacking suns, puts out as much energy as any of the others, but mostly in infrared (the waste heat).

No way would the discoverers not be very curious.

And no wonder the Puppeteers got more terrified than usual once they abandoned their traditional hiding place ...

NORAD knows. How could they not?

2010-11-09T14:08:00.000-05:00

During rush hour last night, a rocket was seen streaking across the sky over Los Angeles. The military professes bafflement. AFAIK, the FAA has had nothing to say.

California is end-to-end airports and Air Force bases -- including Vandenberg AFB, from which the Air Force launches missiles. With all those radars, how can the military not know exactly from where last night's rocket was launched and where it came down? I have to believe they do know. Hopefully, because they launched it (surely not meaning to send it over LA), and don't care to fess up. Regardless, because if anyone other than the US military launched it and the military can't track/trace it, that would be really scary.

I wonder if we'll ever get a truthful explanation?

A whole Pak of trouble

2010-11-02T08:30:00.001-04:00

Pak are humanity's (fortunately only fictional) cousins: lean, mean -- and scary smart -- fighting machines. In Destroyer of Worlds (which I first announced here), the Pak were the latest menace to confront the Puppeteers, aboard the Fleet of Worlds, and their human allies.

As of today, Destroyer of Worlds is out in paperback.

I've been delighted with the reviews since the novel debuted. To mention only a few:

"Fun, fast, and full of ... remarkable aliens."
— SFrevu

" ... An absorbing mix of problems and puzzles and conflicts, space battles and interrogations and negotiations, shot through with fresh takes on familiar tropes and themes."
— Locus

"You'll find plenty here to enjoy. There are bizarre aliens both old and new; there's more advanced technology than you can shake a neutron star at; there are ideas to make your head spin."
— Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Curious? Check out a sample of the novel on the publisher's website or click through to Amazon.

Good times

2010-10-25T13:00:00.002-04:00

I spent last Saturday at one of my favorite cons: Capclave. It is (as the website describes), "a small relaxed literary convention," and always very pleasant. My three panels were "The Mule, Muad'dib, and Men Who Stare at Goats," "World Building: Planning and Execution," and "Military Science Fiction."

"Mule" -- despite an odd title -- dealt with a serious SFnal topic: humans with extraordinary abilities, and how we might get to Human 2.0. I'd not done a panel on that topic before, and enjoyed the change. (Small Miracles deals with nanotech in humans, and was certainly related, but the panel tended to go down the genetic-engineering path.)

"World Building" and "Military SF" are con staples -- and both applied very closely to Betrayer of Worlds, newly released, so I enjoyed those panels, too.

The GoH this year was Connie Willis, a great author, excellent con panelist, and entirely charming person.

Capclave is hosted annually by the Washington Science Fiction Association (WSFA). Quite a few of the Analog MAFIA (that's, "Making Appearances Frequently in Analog") live in the area, and Capclave is a reunion of sorts every year. You may be relieved to know I don't go around wearing my MAFIA buttons.

Finally, I was also interviewed about Betrayer of Worlds by satirical SF author William Freedman.