Tuesday, April 17, 2018
Earth and Moon Viewer: Solar System Explorer
With the release of version 3.0, now in production, Earth and Moon Viewer, originally launched on the Web in 1994 as Earth Viewer, now becomes “Earth and Moon Viewer and Solar System Explorer”. In addition to viewing the Earth and its Moon using a variety of image databases, you can now also explore high-resolution imagery of Mercury, Venus, Mars and its moons Phobos and Deimos, the asteroids Ceres and Vesta, and Pluto and its moon Charon. For some bodies multiple image databases are available including spacecraft imagery and topography based upon elevation measurements. You can choose any of the available worlds and image databases from the custom request form. All of the viewing options available for the Earth and Moon can be used when viewing the other bodies with the exception of viewing from an Earth satellite. Imagery is based upon the latest spacecraft data published by the United States Geological Survey Astrogeology Science Center. For example, here is an image of the west part of Valles Marineris with Noctis Labyrinthus at the centre of the image and the three Tharsis volcanoes toward the left. The image is rendered from an altitude of 1000 km using the Viking orbiter global mosaic with 232 metres per pixel resolution.
Thursday, April 12, 2018
Reading List: Antifragile
- Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile. New York: Random House, 2012. ISBN 978-0-8129-7968-8.
-
This book is volume three in the author's
Incerto series, following
Fooled by Randomness (February 2011) and
The Black Swan (January 2009).
It continues to explore the themes of randomness, risk,
and the design of systems: physical, economic, financial,
and social, which perform well in the face of uncertainty
and infrequent events with large consequences. He begins by
posing the deceptively simple question, “What is the
antonym of ‘fragile’?”
After thinking for a few moments, most people will answer
with “robust” or one of its synonyms such as
“sturdy”, “tough”, or
“rugged”. But think about it a bit more: does
a robust object or system actually behave in the opposite
way to a fragile one? Consider a teacup made of fine china. It
is fragile—if subjected to more than a very limited amount
of force or acceleration, it will smash into bits. It is
fragile because application of such an external stimulus, for
example by dropping it on the floor, will dramatically degrade
its value for the purposes for which it was created (you can't
drink tea from a handful of sherds, and they don't look good
sitting on the shelf). Now consider a teacup made of stainless
steel. It is far more robust: you can drop it from ten
kilometres onto a concrete slab and, while it may be slightly
dented, it will still work fine and look OK, maybe even acquiring
a little character from the adventure. But is this really the
opposite of fragility? The china teacup was degraded by the
impact, while the stainless steel one was not. But are there
objects and systems which improve as a result of random
events: uncertainty, risk, stressors, volatility, adventure,
and the slings and arrows of existence in the real world? Such
a system would not be robust, but would be genuinely
“anti-fragile” (which I will subsequently write
without the hyphen, as does the author): it welcomes these
perturbations, and may even require them in order to function
well or at all.
Antifragility seems an odd concept at first. Our experience is
that unexpected events usually make things worse, and that
the inexorable increase in entropy causes things to degrade
with time: plants and animals age and eventually die; machines
wear out and break; cultures and societies become decadent, corrupt,
and eventually collapse. And yet if you look at nature,
antifragility is everywhere—it is the mechanism which
drives biological evolution, technological progress, the
unreasonable effectiveness of free market systems in efficiently meeting
the needs of their participants, and just about
everything else that changes over time, from trends in art,
literature, and music, to political systems, and human
cultures. In fact, antifragility is a property of most
natural, organic systems, while fragility (or at best, some
degree of robustness) tends to characterise those which
were designed from the top down by humans. And one of the
paradoxical characteristics of antifragile systems is that
they tend to be made up of fragile components.
How does this work? We'll get to physical systems and finance
in a while, but let's start out with restaurants. Any
reasonably large city in the developed world will have a
wide variety of restaurants serving food from numerous
cultures, at different price points, and with ambience
catering to the preferences of their individual clientèles. The
restaurant business is notoriously fragile: the culinary
preferences of people are fickle and unpredictable, and
restaurants who are behind the times frequently go under.
And yet, among the population of restaurants in a given
area at a given time, customers can usually find what
they're looking for. The restaurant population
or industry is antifragile, even though it is
composed of fragile individual restaurants which come
and go with the whims of diners, which will be catered
to by one or more among the current, but ever-changing
population of restaurants.
Now, suppose instead that some Food Commissar in the
All-Union Ministry of Nutrition carefully studied the
preferences of people and established a highly-optimised
and uniform menu for the monopoly State Feeding Centres, then
set up a central purchasing, processing, and distribution
infrastructure to optimise the efficient delivery of these
items to patrons. This system would be highly fragile, since
while it would deliver food, there would no feedback
based upon customer preferences, and no competition to
respond to shifts in taste. The result would be a mediocre
product which, over time, was less and less aligned with
what people wanted, and hence would have a declining
number of customers. The messy and chaotic market of
independent restaurants, constantly popping into existence
and disappearing like virtual particles, exploring the culinary
state space almost at random, does, at any given moment,
satisfy the needs of its customers, and it responds to
unexpected changes by adapting to them: it is antifragile.
Now let's consider an example from metallurgy. If you
pour molten metal from a furnace into a cold mould, its
molecules, which were originally jostling around
at random at the high temperature of the liquid metal,
will rapidly freeze into a structure with small crystals
randomly oriented. The solidified metal will contain
dislocations wherever two crystals meet, with each
forming a weak spot where the metal can potentially
fracture under stress. The metal is hard, but brittle:
if you try to bend it, it's likely to snap. It is
fragile.
To render it more flexible, it can be subjected to the
process of
annealing,
where it is heated to a high temperature (but below melting),
which allows the molecules to migrate within the bulk of the
material. Existing grains will tend to grow, align, and merge,
resulting in a ductile, workable metal. But critically, once
heated, the metal must be cooled on a schedule which provides
sufficient randomness (molecular motion from heat) to allow the process
of alignment to continue, but not to disrupt already-aligned
crystals. Here is a video from
Cellular Automata Laboratory
which demonstrates annealing. Note how sustained randomness
is necessary to keep the process from quickly “freezing up”
into a disordered state.
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Earth and Moon Viewer: New Topographic Maps
Since 1996, Earth and Moon Viewer has offered a topographic map of the Earth as one of the image databases which may be displayed. This map was derived from the NOAA/NCEI ETOPO2 topography database. Although the original data set contained samples with a spatial resolution of two arc seconds (two nautical miles per pixel, or a total image size of 10800×5400 pixels), main memory and disc size constraints of the era required reducing the resolution of the image within Earth and Moon Viewer to 1440×720 pixels. This was sufficient for renderings at the hemisphere or continental scale, but if you zoomed in closer, the results were disappointing. For example, here is a view of Spain, Portugal, France, and North Africa viewed from 207 kilometres above the centre of the Iberian peninsula.


Thursday, March 29, 2018
Earth and Moon Viewer Updated
The first major update to Earth and Moon Viewer since 2012 is now posted. Changes in this release are as follows.When viewing the Moon, the default image database is the 100 metre per pixel LRO LROC-WAC Global Mosaic produced by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera Team at Arizona State University from imagery returned by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. This data set provides more than 5700 times the resolution (measured by pixels in the image) of the Clementine imagery previously used (which remains available as an option). Since the complete image database, consisting of 8 bit grey scale values, is 5.6 gigabytes in size, three smaller sub-sampled databases are automatically selected when lower resolution images are required, reserving the 100 metre per pixel data for very close zooms (as low as 1 km), where its full detail is required and only a small portion of the entire database need be brought into memory. You may observe a small pause when displaying images at this resolution. For comparison, below are views of the crater Copernicus from an altitude of 10 km. At left is an image generated from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data, while at right is the same view generated from Clementine imagery.
- Enabled zooming in as close as 1 km for all image databases which support such high resolution:
- NASA Blue Marble Monthlies (Earth)
- NASA Blue Marble (Earth)
- NASA Visible Earth
- Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter 100 m (Moon)
- Updated all documents to current Web standards for character set specification in XHTML 1.0 files.
- Updated all documents to use Fourmilab's standard CSS style sheet, justify text, and employ Unicode typography for quotes, dashes, ellipses, and other special characters.
- Upgraded all of the Named Lunar Formations catalogue pages, which were gnarly mid-1990s HTML 3.2 to XHTML 1.0 Strict, with a consistent and much better looking style sheet. The list of Lunar Landing Sites has been updated to add post-Apollo impact and soft landing missions. All links in the catalogues now select the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imagery rather than Clementine.
- The View above Cities page now selects the NASA Blue Marble Monthlies image database.
- The Earth and Moon Map Explorer now uses the NASA Blue Marble Monthlies for the Earth and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imagery for the Moon.
- Converted legacy .gif images to PNG everywhere (except for a few animated GIFs, for which there is no alternative).
- To support the very large grey scale Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter image, a new version of the internal Earth Viewer Image Format, EVIF4, has been added. While previous versions of the format supported colour-mapped images with separate day and night imagery (either in the same file: EVIF1 and 2, or in separate files: EVIF3) with 16 bits per pixel, in EVIF4 pixels are 8 bit grey scale values and the night image is synthesised on the fly by shading the pixel values, either smoothly or sharply depending on whether the body being viewed has an atmosphere. While this format is presently used only for the LRO images, it may prove useful for other grey scale data such as radar maps of Venus and Titan. Users may apply gamma correction to images generated from EVIF4 databases to adjust contrast as they wish.
- All documents are now XHTML 1.0 Strict or Transitional, and all have been validated for compliance by the W3C Markup Validation Service.
- A number of stale and broken links have been fixed. All citations of books on Amazon now point to the most recent edition.
- The HTML generated by requests to Earth and Moon Viewer is now XHTML 1.0 Strict and validated for standards compliance. Embedded CSS improves the formatting of result documents.
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
JavaScrypt Updated
I have just posted a new version of JavaScrypt, the first major update in thirteen years. JavaScrypt is a collection of Web pages which implement a complete symmetrical encryption facility that runs entirely within your browser, using JavaScript for all computation. When you encrypt or decrypt with JavaScrypt, nothing is sent over the Internet; you can run JavaScrypt from a local copy on a machine not connected to the Internet. JavaScrypt encrypts with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) using 256 bit keys: this is the standard accepted by the U.S. government for encryption of Top Secret data. (While JavaScrypt is completely compatible with AES, it has not been certified by the U.S. National Security Agency as an approved cryptographic module and should not be used in applications where this is a requirement.) Companion modules provide a text-based steganography facility and generation of pass phrases and encryption keys. This update is 100% compatible with earlier releases of JavaScrypt: encrypted files can be exchanged by the old and new versions with no difficulties. The updates bring JavaScrypt in line with contemporary Web standards.- All HTML files are now XHTML 1.0 Strict and verified for compliance.
- There is a uniform CSS style sheet for all pages and the style is more pleasing to the eye.
- Unicode typography is used for characters such as quotes, ellipses, and dashes.
- All JavaScript files now specify “use strict” and are compliant with that mode.
- <label> containers are used on check boxes and radio buttons so you can click the labels as well as the boxes.
- Added the option to generate signature for pass phrases using the SHA-224 and SHA-256 hash algorithms in addition to MD5.
- Citations to books on Amazon have been updated to reference the latest editions and links changed to the current recommended format.
Thursday, February 15, 2018
Reading List: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
- Lewis, Damien. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. New York: Quercus, 2015. ISBN 978-1-68144-392-8.
- After becoming prime minister in May 1940, one of Winston Churchill's first acts was to establish the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was intended to conduct raids, sabotage, reconnaissance, and support resistance movements in Axis-occupied countries. The SOE was not part of the military: it was a branch of the Ministry of Economic Warfare and its very existence was a state secret, camouflaged under the name “Inter-Service Research Bureau”. Its charter was, as Churchill described it, to “set Europe ablaze”. The SOE consisted, from its chief, Brigadier Colin McVean Gubbins, who went by the designation “M”, to its recruits, of people who did not fit well with the regimentation, hierarchy, and constraints of life in the conventional military branches. They could, in many cases, be easily mistaken for blackguards, desperadoes, and pirates, and that's precisely what they were in the eyes of the enemy—unconstrained by the rules of warfare, striking by stealth, and sowing chaos, mayhem, and terror among occupation troops who thought they were far from the front. Leading some of the SOE's early exploits was Gustavus “Gus” March-Phillipps, founder of the British Army's Small Scale Raiding Force, and given the SOE designation “Agent W.01”, meaning the first agent assigned to the west Africa territory with the leading zero identifying him as “trained and licensed to use all means to liquidate the enemy”—a license to kill. The SOE's liaison with the British Navy, tasked with obtaining support for its operations and providing cover stories for them, was a fellow named Ian Fleming. One of the SOE's first and most daring exploits was Operation Postmaster, with the goal of seizing German and Italian ships anchored in the port of Santa Isabel on the Spanish island colony of Fernando Po off the coast of west Africa. Given the green light by Churchill over the strenuous objections of the Foreign Office and Admiralty, who were concerned about the repercussions if British involvement in what amounted to an act of piracy in a neutral country were to be disclosed, the operation was mounted under the strictest secrecy and deniability, with a cover story prepared by Ian Fleming. Despite harrowing misadventures along the way, the plan was a brilliant success, capturing three ships and their crews and delivering them to the British-controlled port of Lagos without any casualties. Vindicated by the success, Churchill gave the SOE the green light to raid Nazi occupation forces on the Channel Islands and the coast of France. On his first mission in Operation Postmaster was Anders Lassen, an aristocratic Dane who enlisted as a private in the British Commandos after his country was occupied by the Nazis. With his silver-blond hair, blue eyes, and accent easily mistaken for German, Lassen was apprehended by the Home Guard on several occasions while on training missions in Britain and held as a suspected German spy until his commanders intervened. Lassen was given a field commission, direct from private to second lieutenant, immediately after Operation Postmaster, and went on to become one of the most successful leaders of special operations raids in the war. As long as Nazis occupied his Danish homeland, he was possessed with a desire to kill as many Nazis as possible, wherever and however he could, and when in combat was animated by a berserker drive and ability to improvise that caused those who served with him to call him the “Danish Viking”. This book provides a look into the operations of the SOE and its successor organisations, the Special Air Service and Special Boat Service, seen through the career of Anders Lassen. So numerous were special operations, conducted in many theatres around the world, that this kind of focus is necessary. Also, attrition in these high-risk raids, often far behind enemy lines, was so high there are few individuals one can follow throughout the war. As the war approached its conclusion, Lassen was the only surviving participant in Operation Postmaster, the SOE's first raid. Lassen went on to lead raids against Nazi occupation troops in the Channel Islands, leading Churchill to remark, “There comes from the sea from time to time a hand of steel which plucks the German sentries from their posts with growing efficiency.” While these “butcher-and-bolt” raids could not liberate territory, they yielded prisoners, code books, and radio contact information valuable to military intelligence and, more importantly, forced the Germans to strengthen their garrisons in these previously thought secure posts, tying down forces which could otherwise be sent to active combat fronts. Churchill believed that the enemy should be attacked wherever possible, and SOE was a precision weapon which could be deployed where conventional military forces could not be used. As the SOE was absorbed into the military Special Air Service, Lassen would go on to fight in North Africa, Crete, the Aegean islands, then occupied by Italian and German troops, and mainland Greece. His raid on a German airbase on occupied Crete took out fighters and bombers which could have opposed the Allied landings in Sicily. Later, his small group of raiders, unsupported by any other force, liberated the Greek city of Salonika, bluffing the German commander into believing Lassen's forty raiders and two fishing boats were actually a British corps of thirty thousand men, with armour, artillery, and naval support. After years of raiding in peripheral theatres, Lassen hungered to get into the “big war”, and ended up in Italy, where his irregular form of warfare and disdain for military discipline created friction with his superiors. But he got results, and his unit was tasked with reconnaissance and pathfinding for an Allied crossing of Lake Comacchio (actually, more of a swamp) in Operation Roast in the final days of the war. It was there he was to meet his end, in a fierce engagement against Nazi troops defending the north shore. For this, he posthumously received the Victoria Cross, becoming the only non-Commonwealth citizen so honoured in World War II. It is a cliché to say that a work of history “reads like a thriller”, but in this case it is completely accurate. The description of the raid on the Kastelli airbase on Crete would, if made into a movie, probably cause many viewers to suspect it to be fictionalised, but that's what really happened, based upon after action reports by multiple participants and aerial reconnaissance after the fact. World War II was a global conflict, and while histories often focus on grand battles such as D-day, Stalingrad, Iwo Jima, and the fall of Berlin, there was heroism in obscure places such as the Greek islands which also contributed to the victory, and combatants operating in the shadows behind enemy lines who did their part and often paid the price for the risks they willingly undertook. This is a stirring story of this shadow war, told through the short life of one of its heroes.
Saturday, February 10, 2018
Gnome-o-gram: Experts
Ever since the 19th century, the largest industry in Zambia has been copper mining, which today accounts for 85% of the country's exports. The economy of the nation and the prosperity of its people rise and fall with the price of copper on the world market, so nothing is so important to industry and government planners as the expectation for the price of this commodity in the future. Since the 1970s, the World Bank has issued regular forecasts for the price of copper and other important commodities, and the government of Zambia and other resource-based economies often base their economic policy upon these pronouncements by high-powered experts with masses of data at their fingertips. Let's see how they've done.
The next time you hear a politician, economist, or other wonk confidently forecast things five or ten years in the future, remember the World Bank and copper prices. Odds are the numbers they're quoting are just as bogus, and they'll pay no price when they're found to be fantasy. Who pays the price? You do.You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Sunday, February 4, 2018
Reading List: Life 3.0
- Tegmark, Max. Life 3.0. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. ISBN 978-1-101-94659-6.
-
The Earth formed from the protoplanetary disc surrounding the
young Sun around 4.6 billion years ago. Around one hundred
million years later, the nascent planet, beginning to solidify,
was clobbered by a giant impactor which ejected the mass that
made the Moon. This impact completely re-liquefied the Earth and
Moon. Around 4.4 billion years ago, liquid water appeared on
the Earth's surface (evidence for this comes from
Hadean
zircons which date from this era).
And, some time thereafter, just about as soon as the Earth
became environmentally hospitable to life (lack of disruption
due to bombardment by comets and asteroids, and a temperature
range in which the chemical reactions of life can proceed),
life appeared. In speaking of the origin of life, the evidence
is subtle and it's hard to be precise. There is completely
unambiguous evidence of life on Earth 3.8 billion years ago, and
more subtle clues that life may have existed as early as 4.28
billion years before the present. In any case, the Earth has
been home to life for most of its existence as a planet.
This was what the author calls “Life 1.0”. Initially
composed of single-celled organisms (which, nonetheless, dwarf
in complexity of internal structure and chemistry anything
produced by other natural processes or human technology to this
day), life slowly diversified and organised into colonies of
identical cells, evidence for which can be seen in
rocks
today.
About half a billion years ago, taking advantage of the far more
efficient metabolism permitted by the oxygen-rich atmosphere
produced by the simple organisms which preceded them, complex
multi-cellular creatures sprang into existence in the
“Cambrian
explosion”. These critters manifested all
the body forms found today, and every living being traces
its lineage back to them. But they were still Life 1.0.
What is Life 1.0? Its key characteristics are that it can
metabolise and reproduce, but that it can learn only
through evolution. Life 1.0, from bacteria through insects,
exhibits behaviour which can be quite complex, but that
behaviour can be altered only by the random variation of
mutations in the genetic code and natural selection of
those variants which survive best in their environment. This
process is necessarily slow, but given the vast expanses of
geological time, has sufficed to produce myriad species,
all exquisitely adapted to their ecological niches.
To put this in present-day computer jargon, Life 1.0 is
“hard-wired”: its hardware (body plan and metabolic
pathways) and software (behaviour in response to stimuli) are
completely determined by its genetic code, and can be altered
only through the process of evolution. Nothing an organism
experiences or does can change its genetic programming: the
programming of its descendants depends solely upon its success
or lack thereof in producing viable offspring and the luck of
mutation and recombination in altering the genome they inherit.
Much more recently, Life 2.0 developed. When? If you want
to set a bunch of paleontologists squabbling, simply ask them
when learned behaviour first appeared, but some time between
the appearance of the first mammals and the ancestors of
humans, beings developed the ability to learn from
experience and alter their behaviour accordingly. Although
some would argue simpler creatures (particularly
birds)
may do this, the fundamental hardware which seems to enable
learning is the
neocortex,
which only mammalian brains possess. Modern humans are the
quintessential exemplars of Life 2.0; they not only learn from
experience, they've figured out how to pass what they've learned
to other humans via speech, writing, and more recently, YouTube
comments.
While Life 1.0 has hard-wired hardware and software, Life 2.0 is
able to alter its own software. This is done by training the
brain to respond in novel ways to stimuli. For example, you're
born knowing no human language. In childhood, your brain
automatically acquires the language(s) you hear from those
around you. In adulthood you may, for example, choose to learn
a new language by (tediously) training your brain to understand,
speak, read, and write that language. You have deliberately
altered your own software by reprogramming your brain, just as
you can cause your mobile phone to behave in new ways by
downloading a new application. But your ability to change
yourself is limited to software. You have to work with the
neurons and structure of your brain. You might wish to have
more or better memory, the ability to see more colours (as some
insects do), or run a sprint as fast as the current Olympic
champion, but there is nothing you can do to alter those
biological (hardware) constraints other than hope, over many
generations, that your descendants might evolve those
capabilities. Life 2.0 can design (within limits) its software,
but not its hardware.
The emergence of a new major revision of life is a big
thing. In 4.5 billion years, it has only happened twice,
and each time it has remade the Earth. Many technologists
believe that some time in the next century (and possibly
within the lives of many reading this review) we may see
the emergence of Life 3.0. Life 3.0, or Artificial
General Intelligence (AGI), is machine intelligence,
on whatever technological substrate, which can perform
as well as or better than human beings, all of the
intellectual tasks which they can do. A Life 3.0 AGI
will be better at driving cars, doing scientific research,
composing and performing music, painting pictures,
writing fiction, persuading humans and other AGIs to
adopt its opinions, and every other task including,
most importantly, designing and building ever more capable
AGIs. Life 1.0 was hard-wired; Life 2.0 could alter its
software, but not its hardware; Life 3.0 can alter both
its software and hardware. This may set off an
“intelligence
explosion” of recursive
improvement, since each successive generation of AGIs will be
even better at designing more capable successors, and this cycle
of refinement will not be limited to the glacial timescale of
random evolutionary change, but rather an engineering cycle
which will run at electronic speed. Once the AGI train pulls
out of the station, it may develop from the level of human
intelligence to something as far beyond human cognition as
humans are compared to ants in one human sleep cycle. Here is a
summary of Life 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.
- Libertarian utopia
- Benevolent dictator
- Egalitarian utopia
- Gatekeeper
- Protector god
- Enslaved god
- Conquerors
- Descendants
- Zookeeper
- 1984
- Reversion
- Self-destruction
Thursday, February 1, 2018
Reading List: Starship Grifters
- Kroese, Robert. Starship Grifters. Seattle: 47North, 2014. ISBN 978-1-4778-1848-0.
- This is the funniest science fiction novel I have read in quite a while. Set in the year 3013, not long after galactic civilisation barely escaped an artificial intelligence apocalypse and banned fully self-aware robots, the story is related by Sasha, one of a small number of Self-Arresting near Sentient Heuristic Androids built to be useful without running the risk of their taking over. SASHA robots are equipped with an impossible-to-defeat watchdog module which causes a hard reboot whenever they are on the verge of having an original thought. The limitation of the design proved a serious handicap, and all of their manufacturers went bankrupt. Our narrator, Sasha, was bought at an auction by the protagonist, Rex Nihilo, for thirty-five credits in a lot of “ASSORTED MACHINE PARTS”. Sasha is Rex's assistant and sidekick. Rex is an adventurer. Sasha says he “never had much of an interest in anything but self-preservation and the accumulation of wealth, the latter taking clear precedence over the former.” Sasha's built in limitations (in addition to the new idea watchdog, she is unable to tell a lie, but if humans should draw incorrect conclusions from incomplete information she provides them, well…) pose problems in Rex's assorted lines of work, most of which seem to involve scams, gambling, and contraband of various kinds. In fact, Rex seems to fit in very well with the universe he inhabits, which appears to be firmly grounded in Walker's Law: “Absent evidence to the contrary, assume everything is a scam”. Evidence appears almost totally absent, and the oppressive tyranny called the Galactic Malarchy, those who supply it, the rebels who oppose it, entrepreneurs like Rex working in the cracks, organised religions and cults, and just about everybody else, appear to be on the make or on the take, looking to grift everybody else for their own account. Cosmologists attribute this to the “Strong Misanthropic Principle, which asserts that the universe exists in order to screw with us.” Rex does his part, although he usually seems to veer between broke and dangerously in debt. Perhaps that's due to his somewhat threadbare talent stack. As Shasha describes him, Rex doesn't have a head for numbers. Nor does he have much of a head for letters, and “Newtonian physics isn't really his strong suit either”. He is, however, occasionally lucky, or so it seems at first. In an absurdly high-stakes card game with weapons merchant Gavin Larviton, reputed to be one of the wealthiest men in the galaxy, Rex manages to win, almost honestly, not only Larviton's personal starship, but an entire planet, Schnufnaasik Six. After barely escaping a raid by Malarchian marines led by the dread and squeaky-voiced Lord Heinous Vlaak, Rex and Sasha set off in the ship Rex has won, the Flagrante Delicto, to survey the planetary prize. It doesn't take Rex long to discover, not surprisingly, that he's been had, and that his financial situation is now far more dire than he'd previously been able to imagine. If any of the bounty hunters now on his trail should collar him, he could spend a near-eternity on the prison planet of Gulagatraz (the names are a delight in themselves). So, it's off the rebel base on the forest moon (which is actually a swamp; the swamp moon is all desert) to try to con the Frente Repugnante (all the other names were taken by rival splinter factions, so they ended up with “Revolting Front”, which was translated to Spanish to appear to Latino planets) into paying for a secret weapon which exists only in Rex's imagination. Thus we embark upon a romp which has a laugh-out-loud line about every other page. This is comic science fiction in the vein of Keith Laumer's Retief stories. As with Laumer, Kroese achieves the perfect balance of laugh lines, plot development, interesting ideas, and recurring gags (there's a planet-destroying weapon called the “plasmatic entropy cannon” which the oft-inebriated Rex refers to variously as the “positronic endoscopy cannon”, “pulmonary embolism cannon”, “ponderosa alopecia cannon”, “propitious elderberry cannon”, and many other ways). There is a huge and satisfying reveal at the end—I kind of expected one was coming, but I'd have never guessed the details. If reading this leaves you with an appetite for more Rex Nihilo, there is a prequel novella, The Chicolini Incident, and a sequel, Aye, Robot. The Kindle edition is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Reading List: Artemis
- Weir, Andy. Artemis. New York: Crown, 2017. ISBN 978-0-553-44812-2.
-
Seldom has a first-time novelist burst onto the scene so
spectacularly as Andy Weir with
The Martian (November 2014).
Originally written for his own amusement and circulated
chapter by chapter to a small but enthusiastic group of
fans who provided feedback and suggestions as the story
developed, he posted the completed
novel as a free download on his Web site. Some people who
had heard of it by word of mouth but lacked the technical
savvy to download documents and transfer them to
E-readers inquired whether he could make a Kindle version
available. Since you can't give away Kindle books, he
published it at the minimum possible price. Before long, the
book was rising into the Amazon bestseller list in science fiction,
and he was contacted by a major publisher about doing a print
edition. These publishers only accept manuscripts through
agents, and he didn't have one (nor do agents usually work
with first-time authors, which creates a chicken-and-egg problem
for the legacy publishing industry), so the publisher put him
in touch with a major agent and recommended the manuscript.
This led to a 2014 hardcover edition and then a
Hollywood movie
in 2016 which was nominated for 7 Oscars and won two
Golden Globes including Best Motion Picture and Best Performance
by an Actor in its category.
The question fans immediately asked themselves was, “Is
this a one shot, or can he repeat?” Well, I think
we have the answer: with Artemis, Andy Weir has
delivered another story of grand master calibre and shown
himself on track to join the ranks of the legends of the
genre.
In the latter part of the 21st century commerce is expanding
into space, and the Moon is home to Artemis, a small settlement
of around 2000 permanent residents, situated in the southern
part of the Sea of Tranquility, around 40 km from the Apollo 11
landing site. A substantial part of the economy of Artemis is
based upon wealthy tourists who take the train from Artemis to
the Apollo 11 Visitor Center (where they can look, but not touch
or interfere with the historical relics) and enjoy the luxuries
and recreations which cater to them back in the pleasure domes.
Artemis is the creation of the Kenya Space Corporation (KSC), which
officially designates it “Kenya Offshore Platform
Artemis” and operates under international maritime law.
As space commerce burgeoned in the 21st century, Kenya's visionary
finance minister, Fidelis Ngugi, leveraged Kenya's equatorial
latitude (it's little appreciated that once reliable
fully-reusable launch vehicles are developed, there's no need to
launch over water) and hands-off regulatory regime provided a
golden opportunity for space entrepreneurs to escape the
nanny state regulation and crushing tax burden of “developed”
countries. With tax breaks and an African approach to
regulation, entrepreneurs and money flowed in from around
the world, making Kenya into a space superpower and
enriching its economy and opportunities for its people. Twenty
years later Ngugi was Administrator of Artemis; she was, in
effect, ruler of the Moon.
While Artemis was a five star experience for the tourists which
kept its economy humming, those who supported the settlement
and its industries lived in something more like a frontier
boom town of the 19th century. Like many such settlements,
Artemis attracted opportunity-seekers and those looking to
put their pasts behind them from many countries and cultures.
Those established tend to attract more like them, and
clannish communities developed around occupations: most
people in Life Support were Vietnamese, while metal-working
was predominantly Hungarian. For whatever reason, welding
was dominated by Saudis, including Ammar Bashara, who emigrated
to Artemis with his six-year old daughter Jasmine. Twenty
years later, Ammar runs a prosperous welding business and
Jasmine (“Jazz”) is, shall we say, more
irregularly employed.
Artemis is an “energy intense” Moon settlement of
the kind described in Steven D. Howe's Honor
Bound Honor Born (May 2014). The community is
powered by twin 27 megawatt nuclear reactors located behind a
berm one kilometre from the main settlement. The reactors not only
provide constant electricity and heat through the two week nights
and days of the Moon, they power a smelter which processes
the lunar regolith into raw materials. The Moon's crust is about
40% oxygen, 20% silicon, 12% iron, and 8% aluminium. With abundant
power, these elements can be separated and used to manufacture
aluminium and iron for structures, glass from silicon and
oxygen, and all with abundant left-over oxygen to breathe.
There is no need for elaborate recycling of oxygen: there's
always plenty more coming out of the smelter. Many denizens
of Artemis subsist largely on “gunk”, an algae-based
food grown locally in vats which is nutritious but
unpalatable and monotonous. There are a variety of flavours,
all of which are worse than the straight stuff.
Jazz works as a porter. She picks up things somewhere in
the settlement and delivers them to their destinations using her
personally-owned electric-powered cart. Despite the indigenous
production of raw materials, many manufactured goods and substances
are imported from Earth or factories in Earth orbit, and every time
a cargo ship arrives, business is brisk for Jasmine and her
fellow porters. Jazz is enterprising and creative, and
has a lucrative business on the side: smuggling. Knowing the
right people in the spaceport and how much to cut them in,
she has a select clientele to which she provides luxury goods
from Earth which aren't on the approved customs manifests.
For this, she is paid in “slugs”. No, not slimy
molluscs, but “soft-landed grams”, credits which can
be exchanged to pay KSC to deliver payload from Earth to Artemis.
Slugs act as a currency, and can be privately exchanged among individuals'
handheld computers much as Bitcoin today. Jazz makes around 12,000
slugs a month as a porter, and more, although variable, from her
more entrepreneurial sideline.
One of her ultra-wealthy clients approaches her with a highly
illegal, almost certainly unethical, and very likely perilous
proposal. Surviving for as long as she has in her risky business
has given Jazz a sense for where the edge is and the good sense
not to step over it.
“I'm sorry but this isn't my thing. You'll have to find someone else.”
“I'll offer you a million slugs.”
“Deal.”