« October 2018 | Main | December 2018 »
Monday, November 12, 2018
Reading List: People's Republic
- Schlichter, Kurt. People's Republic. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2016. ISBN 978-1-5390-1895-7.
- As the third decade of the twenty-first century progressed, the Cold Civil War which had been escalating in the United States since before the turn of the century turned hot when a Democrat administration decided to impose their full agenda—gun confiscation, amnesty for all illegal aliens, restrictions on fossil fuels—all at once by executive order. The heartland defied the power grab and militias of the left and right began to clash openly. Although the senior officer corps were largely converged to the leftist agenda, the military rank and file which hailed largely from the heartland defied them, and could not be trusted to act against their fellow citizens. Much the same was the case with police in the big cities: they began to ignore the orders of their political bosses and migrate to jobs in more congenial jurisdictions. With a low-level shooting war breaking out, the opposing sides decided that the only way to avert general conflict was, if not the “amicable divorce” advocated by Jesse Kelly, then a more bitter and contentious end to a union which was not working. The Treaty of Saint Louis split the country in two, with the east and west coasts and upper midwest calling itself the “People's Republic of North America” (PRNA) and the remaining territory (including portions of some states like Washington, Oregon, and Indiana with a strong regional divide) continuing to call itself the United States, but with some changes: the capital was now Dallas, and the constitution had been amended to require any person not resident on its territory at the time of the Split (including children born thereafter) who wished full citizenship and voting rights to serve two years in the military with no “alternative service” for the privileged or connected. The PRNA quickly implemented the complete progressive agenda wherever its rainbow flag (frequently revised as different victim groups clawed their way to the top of the grievance pyramid) flew. As police forces collapsed with good cops quitting and moving out, they were replaced by a national police force initially called the “People's Internal Security Squads” (later the “People's Security Force” when the acronym for the original name was deemed infelicitous), staffed with thugs and diversity hires attracted by the shakedown potential of carrying weapons among a disarmed population. Life in the PRNA was pretty good for the coastal élites in their walled communities, but as with collectivism whenever and wherever it is tried, for most of the population life was a grey existence of collapsing services, food shortages, ration cards, abuse by the powerful, and constant fear of being denounced for violating the latest intellectual fad or using an incorrect pronoun. And, inevitably, it wasn't long before the PRNA slammed the door shut to keep the remaining competent people from fleeing to where they were free to use their skills and keep what they'd earned. Mexico built a “big, beautiful wall” to keep hordes of PRNA subjects from fleeing to freedom and opportunity south of the border. Several years after the Split, Kelly Turnbull, retired military and veteran of the border conflicts around the Split paid the upkeep of his 500 acre non-working ranch by spiriting people out of the PRNA to liberty in the middle of the continent. After completing a harrowing mission which almost ended in disaster, he is approached by a wealthy and politically-connected Dallas businessman who offers him enough money to retire if he'll rescue his daughter who, indoctrinated by the leftist infestation still remaining at the university in Austin, defected to the PRNA and is being used in propaganda campaigns there at the behest of the regional boss of the secret police. In addition, a spymaster tasks him with bringing out evidence which will allow rolling up the PRNAs informer and spy networks. Against his self-preservation instinct which counsels laying low until the dust settles from the last mission, he opts for the money and prospect of early retirement and undertakes the mission. As Turnbull covertly enters the People's Republic, makes his way to Los Angeles, and seeks his target, there is a superbly-sketched view of an America in which the progressive agenda has come to fruition, and one which people there may well be living at the end of the next two Democrat-dominated administrations. It is often funny, as the author skewers the hypocrisy of the slavers mouthing platitudes they don't believe for a femtosecond. (If you think it improper to make fun of human misery, recall the mordant humour in the Soviet Union as workers mocked the reality of the “workers' paradise”.) There's plenty of tension and action, and sometimes following Turnbull on his mission seems like looking over the shoulder of a first-person-shooter. He's big on countdowns and tends to view “blues” obstructing him as NPCs to be dealt with quickly and permanently: “I don't much like blues. You kill them or they kill you.” This is a satisfying thriller which is probably a more realistic view of the situation in a former United States than an amicable divorce with both sides going their separate ways. The blue model is doomed to collapse, as it already has begun to in the big cites and states where it is in power, and with that inevitable collapse will come chaos and desperation which spreads beyond its borders. With Democrat politicians such as Occasional-Cortex who, a few years ago, hid behind such soothing labels as “liberal” or “progressive” now openly calling themselves “democratic socialists”, this is not just a page-turning adventure but a cautionary tale of the future should they win (or steal) power. A prequel, Indian Country, which chronicles insurgency on the border immediately after the Split as guerrilla bands of the sane rise to resist the slavers, is now available.
Posted at
23:54
Tuesday, November 6, 2018
Reading List: Blue Collar Space
- Shoemaker, Martin L. Blue Collar Space. Seattle: CreateSpace [Old Town Press], 2018. ISBN 978-1-7170-5188-2.
- This book is a collection of short stories, set in three different locales. The first part, “Old Town Tales”, are set on the Moon and revolve around yarns told at the best bar on Luna. The second part, “The Planet Next Door”, are stories set on Mars, while the third, “The Pournelle Settlements”, take place in mining settlements in the Jupiter system. Most of the stories take place in established settlements; they are not tales of square-jawed pioneers opening up the frontier, but rather ordinary people doing the work that needs to be done in environments alien to humanity's home. On the Moon, we go on a mission with a rescue worker responding to a crash; hear a sanitation (“Eco Services”) technician regale a rookie with the story of “The Night We Flushed the Old Town”; accompany a father and daughter on a work day Outside that turns into a crisis; learn why breathing vacuum may not be the only thing that can go wrong on the Moon; and see how even for those in the most mundane of jobs, on the Moon wonders may await just over the nearby horizon. At Mars, the greatest problem facing an ambitious international crewed landing mission may be…ambition, a doctor on a Mars-bound mission must deal with the technophobe boss's son while keeping him alive, and a schoolteacher taking her Mars survival class on a field trip finds that doing things by the book may pay off in discovering something which isn't in the book. The Jupiter system is home to the Pournelle Settlements, a loosely affiliated group of settlers, many of whom came to escape the “government squeeze” and “corporate squeeze” that held the Inner System in their grip. And like the Wild West, it can be a bit wild. When sabotage disables the refinery that processes ore for the Settlements, its new boss must find a way to use the unique properties of the environment to keep his people fed and avoid the most hostile of takeovers. Where there are vast distances, long travel times, and cargoes with great value, there will be pirates, and the long journey from Jupiter to the Inner System is no exception. An investigator seeking evidence in a murder case must learn the ways of the Trust Economy in the Settlements and follow the trail far into the void. These stories bring back the spirit of science fiction magazine stories in the decades before the dawn of the Big Government space age when we just assumed that before long space would be filled with people like ourselves living their lives and pursuing their careers where freedom was just a few steps away from any settlement and individual merit was rewarded. They are an excellent example of “hard” science fiction, not in being difficult but that the author makes a serious effort to get the facts right and make the plots plausible. (I am, however, dubious that the trick used in “Unrefined” would work.) All of the stories stand by themselves and can be read in any order. This is another example of how independent authors and publishing are making this a new golden age of science fiction. The Kindle edition is free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
Posted at
22:34
Saturday, November 3, 2018
Reading List: The Forgotten Genius of Oliver Heaviside
- Mahon, Basil. The Forgotten Genius of Oliver Heaviside. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2017. ISBN 978-1-63388-331-4.
-
At age eleven, in 1861, young Oliver Heaviside's family,
supported by his father's irregular income as an engraver of
woodblock illustrations for publications (an art beginning to be
threatened by the advent of photography) and a day school for
girls operated by his mother in the family's house, received a
small legacy which allowed them to move to a better part of
London and enroll Oliver in the prestigious Camden House School,
where he ranked among the top of his class, taking thirteen
subjects including Latin, English, mathematics, French, physics,
and chemistry. His independent nature and iconoclastic views
had already begun to manifest themselves: despite being an
excellent student he dismissed the teaching of Euclid's geometry
in mathematics and English rules of grammar as worthless. He
believed that both mathematics and language were best learned,
as he wrote decades later, “observationally,
descriptively, and experimentally.” These principles
would guide his career throughout his life.
At age fifteen he took the College of Perceptors examination,
the equivalent of today's A Levels. He was the
youngest of the 538 candidates to take the examination and
scored fifth overall and first in the natural sciences. This
would easily have qualified him for admission to university,
but family finances ruled that out. He decided to
study on his own at home for two years and then seek a job,
perhaps in the burgeoning telegraph industry. He would receive
no further formal education after the age of fifteen.
His mother's elder sister had married
Charles
Wheatstone, a successful and wealthy scientist, inventor,
and entrepreneur whose inventions include the concertina,
the stereoscope, and the Playfair encryption cipher, and who
made major contributions to the development of telegraphy.
Wheatstone took an interest in his bright nephew, and guided
his self-studies after leaving school, encouraging him
to master the Morse code and the German and Danish languages.
Oliver's favourite destination was the library, which he later
described as “a journey into strange lands to go a
book-tasting”. He read the original works of
Newton, Laplace, and other “stupendous names”
and discovered that with sufficient diligence he could
figure them out on his own.
At age eighteen, he took a job as an assistant to his older
brother Arthur, well-established as a telegraph engineer in
Newcastle. Shortly thereafter, probably on the recommendation
of Wheatstone, he was hired by the just-formed
Danish-Norwegian-English Telegraph Company as a telegraph
operator at a salary of £150 per year (around £12000
in today's money). The company was about to inaugurate a cable
under the North Sea between England and Denmark, and Oliver set
off to Jutland to take up his new post. Long distance telegraphy
via undersea cables was the technological frontier at the time—the
first successful transatlantic cable had only gone into
service two years earlier, and connecting the continents into
a world-wide web of rapid information transfer was the
booming high-technology industry of the age. While the job
of telegraph operator might seem a routine clerical task,
the élite who operated the undersea cables worked in
an environment akin to an electrical research laboratory,
trying to wring the best performance (words per minute) from
the finicky and unreliable technology.
Heaviside prospered in the new job, and after a merger
was promoted to chief operator at a salary of £175
per year and transferred back to England, at Newcastle.
At the time, undersea cables were unreliable. It was not
uncommon for the signal on a cable to fade and then die
completely, most often due to a short circuit caused by failure
of the
gutta-percha
insulation between the copper conductor and the iron sheath
surrounding it. When a cable failed, there was no alternative
but to send out a ship which would find the cable with a
grappling hook, haul it up to the surface, cut it, and test
whether the short was to the east or west of the ship's
position (the cable would work in the good direction but
fail in that containing the short. Then the cable would be
re-spliced, dropped back to the bottom, and the ship would
set off in the direction of the short to repeat the exercise
over and over until, by a process similar to
binary
search, the location of the fault was narrowed down and
that section of the cable replaced. This was time consuming
and potentially hazardous given the North Sea's propensity
for storms, and while the cable remained out of service it
made no money for the telegraph company.
Heaviside, who continued his self-study and frequented the
library when not at work, realised that knowing the resistance
and length of the functioning cable, which could be easily
measured, it would be possible to estimate the location of
the short simply by measuring the resistance of the cable
from each end after the short appeared. He was able to
cancel out the resistance of the fault, creating a quadratic
equation which could be solved for its location. The first
time he applied this technique his bosses were sceptical,
but when the ship was sent out to the location he
predicted, 114 miles from the English coast, they quickly
found the short circuit.
At the time, most workers in electricity had little use for
mathematics: their trade journal, The Electrician
(which would later publish much of Heaviside's work) wrote in
1861, “In electricity there is seldom any need of
mathematical or other abstractions; and although the use of
formulæ may in some instances be a convenience, they may
for all practical purpose be dispensed with.” Heaviside
demurred: while sharing disdain for abstraction for its own
sake, he valued mathematics as a powerful tool to understand
the behaviour of electricity and attack problems of
great practical importance, such as the ability to send
multiple messages at once on the same telegraphic line and
increase the transmission speed on long undersea cable links
(while a skilled telegraph operator could send traffic
at thirty words per minute on intercity land lines,
the transatlantic cable could run no faster than eight words
per minute). He plunged into calculus and differential
equations, adding them to his intellectual armamentarium.
He began his own investigations and experiments and began
to publish his results, first in English Mechanic,
and then, in 1873, the prestigious Philosophical
Magazine, where his work drew the attention of two of
the most eminent workers in electricity:
William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and
James Clerk Maxwell. Maxwell would go on
to cite Heaviside's paper on the Wheatstone Bridge in
the second edition of his Treatise on Electricity
and Magnetism, the foundation of the classical
theory of electromagnetism, considered by many the greatest
work of science since Newton's Principia,
and still in print today. Heady stuff, indeed, for a
twenty-two year old telegraph operator who had never set
foot inside an institution of higher education.
Heaviside regarded Maxwell's Treatise as the
path to understanding the mysteries of electricity he
encountered in his practical work and vowed to master it.
It would take him nine years and change his life. He
would become one of the first and foremost of the
“Maxwellians”, a small group including
Heaviside, George FitzGerald, Heinrich Hertz, and Oliver
Lodge, who fully grasped Maxwell's abstract and highly
mathematical theory (which, like many subsequent milestones
in theoretical physics, predicted the results of experiments
without providing a mechanism to explain them, such as
earlier concepts like an “electric fluid” or
William Thomson's intricate mechanical models of the
“luminiferous ether”) and built upon its
foundations to discover and explain phenomena unknown
to Maxwell (who would die in 1879 at the age of just 48).
While pursuing his theoretical explorations and publishing
papers, Heaviside tackled some of the main practical problems
in telegraphy. Foremost among these was “duplex
telegraphy”: sending messages in each direction
simultaneously on a single telegraph wire. He invented a
new technique and was even able to send two
messages at the same time in both directions as fast as
the operators could send them. This had the potential
to boost the revenue from a single installed line by
a factor of four. Oliver published his invention, and in
doing so made an enemy of William Preece, a senior engineer
at the Post Office telegraph department, who had invented
and previously published his own duplex system (which would
not work), that was not acknowledged in Heaviside's paper.
This would start a feud between Heaviside and Preece
which would last the rest of their lives and, on several
occasions, thwart Heaviside's ambition to have his work
accepted by mainstream researchers. When he applied to
join the Society of Telegraph Engineers, he was rejected
on the grounds that membership was not open to “clerks”.
He saw the hand of Preece and his cronies at the Post Office
behind this and eventually turned to William Thomson to
back his membership, which was finally granted.
By 1874, telegraphy had become a big business and the work
was increasingly routine. In 1870, the Post Office had
taken over all domestic telegraph service in Britain and,
as government is wont to do, largely stifled innovation and
experimentation. Even at privately-owned international
carriers like Oliver's employer, operators were no longer
concerned with the technical aspects of the work but rather
tending automated sending and receiving equipment. There
was little interest in the kind of work Oliver wanted to do:
exploring the new horizons opened up by Maxwell's work. He
decided it was time to move on. So, he quit his job, moved
back in with his parents in London, and opted for a life
as an independent, unaffiliated researcher, supporting himself
purely by payments for his publications.
With the duplex problem solved, the largest problem that
remained for telegraphy was the slow transmission speed on long
lines, especially submarine cables. The advent of the telephone
in the 1870s would increase the need to address this problem.
While telegraphic transmission on a long line slowed down the
speed at which a message could be sent, with the telephone voice
became increasingly distorted the longer the line, to the point
where, after around 100 miles, it was incomprehensible. Until
this was understood and a solution found, telephone service
would be restricted to local areas.
Many of the early workers in electricity thought of it as
something like a fluid, where current flowed through a wire like
water through a pipe. This approximation is more or less
correct when current flow is constant, as in a direct current
generator powering electric lights, but when current is varying
a much more complex set of phenomena become manifest which
require Maxwell's theory to fully describe. Pioneers of
telegraphy thought of their wires as sending direct
current which was simply switched off and on by the sender's
key, but of course the transmission as a whole was a varying
current, jumping back and forth between zero and full current at
each make or break of the key contacts. When these transitions
are modelled in Maxwell's theory, one finds that, depending upon
the physical properties of the transmission line (its
resistance, inductance, capacitance, and leakage between the
conductors) different frequencies propagate
along the line at different speeds. The sharp on/off
transitions in telegraphy can be thought of,
by Fourier
transform, as the sum of a wide band of frequencies,
with the result that, when each propagates at a different
speed, a short, sharp pulse sent by the key will, at
the other end of the long line, be “smeared out”
into an extended bump with a slow rise to a peak and then
decay back to zero. Above a certain speed, adjacent dots and dashes
will run into one another and the message will be undecipherable
at the receiving end. This is why operators on the transatlantic
cables had to send at the painfully slow speed of eight words
per minute.
In telephony, it's much worse because human speech is composed
of a broad band of frequencies, and the frequencies involved
(typically up to around 3400 cycles per second) are much
higher than the off/on speeds in telegraphy. The smearing
out or dispersion as frequencies are transmitted at
different speeds results in distortion which renders the voice
signal incomprehensible beyond a certain distance.
In the mid-1850s, during development of the first transatlantic
cable, William Thomson had developed a theory called the
“KR law” which predicted the transmission speed
along a cable based upon its resistance and capacitance.
Thomson was aware that other effects existed, but without
Maxwell's theory (which would not be published in its
final form until 1873), he lacked the mathematical tools
to analyse them. The KR theory, which produced results
that predicted the behaviour of the transatlantic cable
reasonably well, held out little hope for improvement:
decreasing the resistance and capacitance of the cable would
dramatically increase its cost per unit length.
Heaviside undertook to analyse what is now called the
transmission line
problem using the full Maxwell theory and, in 1878, published
the general theory of propagation of alternating current through
transmission lines, what are now called the
telegrapher's
equations. Because he took resistance, capacitance,
inductance, and leakage all into account and thus modelled both
the electric and magnetic field created around the wire by the
changing current, he showed that by balancing these four
properties it was possible to design a transmission
line which would transmit all frequencies at the same speed. In
other words, this balanced transmission line would behave for
alternating current (including the range of frequencies in a
voice signal) just like a simple wire did for direct current:
the signal would be attenuated (reduced in amplitude) with
distance but not distorted.
In an 1887 paper, he further showed that existing telegraph
and telephone lines could be made nearly distortionless by
adding
loading coils
to increase the inductance at points along the line (as long as
the distance between adjacent coils is small compared to the
wavelength of the highest frequency carried by the line). This
got him into another battle with William Preece, whose incorrect
theory attributed distortion to inductance and advocated
minimising self-inductance in long lines. Preece moved to block
publication of Heaviside's work, with the result that the paper
on distortionless telephony, published in The
Electrician, was largely ignored. It was not until 1897
that AT&T in the United States commissioned a study of
Heaviside's work, leading to patents eventually worth millions.
The credit, and financial reward, went to Professor Michael
Pupin of Columbia University, who became another of Heaviside's
life-long enemies.
You might wonder why what seems such a simple result (which can
be written in modern notation as the equation
L/R = C/G)
which had such immediate technological utlilty eluded
so many people for so long (recall that the problem with
slow transmission on the transatlantic cable had been observed
since the 1850s). The reason is the complexity of Maxwell's
theory and the formidably difficult notation in which it
was expressed. Oliver Heaviside spent nine years
fully internalising the theory and its implications, and
he was one of only a handful of people who had done so and,
perhaps, the only one grounded in practical applications such
as telegraphy and telephony. Concurrent with his work on
transmission line theory, he invented the mathematical
field of
vector
calculus and, in 1884, reformulated Maxwell's original
theory which, written in modern notation less
cumbersome than that employed by Maxwell, looks like:
Posted at
23:21
Friday, November 2, 2018
ISBNiser 1.5 Update Released
I have just posted version 1.5 of ISBNiser, a utility for validating ISBN publication numbers in the ISBN-13 and ISBN-10 formats, converting between the formats, and generating Amazon associate links to purchase items with credit to a specified account. Version 1.5 includes a feature added to support the new ISBNquest Web application. A new −d option selects “database” format output in which the result for every ISBN on the command line is a single-line comma-separated value record containing fields as follows. Fields which may contain non-alphanumeric characters are always enclosed in double quotes.- Status: numeric status
- 200 Normal, ISBN-13 and ISBN-10 returned
- 201 Normal, ISBN-13 returned, 979- unmappable to ISBN-10
- 300 Invalid registration group, unhyphenated ISBN-13 and ISBN-10 returned
- 301 Invalid registration group, unhyphenated 979- ISBN-13 returned
- 401 Incorrect length (not 10 or 13 characters)
- 402 Illegal character
- 403 “X” as other than last character of ISBN-10
- 404 Checksum incorrect
- 405 ISBN-13 prefix is not Bookland (978 or 979)
- ISBN-13, no delimiters
- ISBN-13, with delimiters (quoted)
- ISBN-10, no delimiters (“Unmappable” if 979- prefix)
- ISBN-10, with delimiters (“Unmappable” if 979- prefix) (quoted)
- Registration group name (quoted)
- Amazon associates URL (quoted)
- ISBN Registration group database date (quoted)
Posted at
13:51
Thursday, November 1, 2018
New: ISBNquest
If you work with books, you'll frequently need to deal with International Standard Book Numbers (ISBNs), those 13 digit (or 10 character for older publications) codes which uniquely identify the precise edition of a work. (For example, a hardcover, paperback, and each electronic format of the same book will have its own ISBN.) ISBNs are central to the publishing industry and booksellers, both on-line and brick and mortar. As I read and review lots of books, I find myself frequently dealing with ISBNs, needing to interconvert the 13 and 10 digit forms, correct punctuation of the parts of ISBNs (some publishers are sloppy about this, while others have completely abandoned punctuation of ISBNs on the copyright page of their books), look up information about the work on Amazon.com, and compose a link so readers can buy the book with credit to Fourmilab's Amazon Associates account. In 2008, I wrote a command-line utility in Perl, ISBNiser, which automates some of these tasks and, over the years, I have extended it, adding features such as automatic punctuation of ISBNs based upon the official ISBN Range database. Still, many people aren't comfortable with downloading, installing, and running a Perl program from the command line, so I thought I'd make its facilities available in a Web page accessible from any browser and add capabilities a Web-based application enable. The result is ISBNquest, which provides the following utilities for ISBNs.- Validate ISBNs for correct format and checksum.
- Interconvert ISBN-13 and ISBN-10 formats (except for rare ISBN-13s which have no ISBN-10 equivalent).
- Insert punctuation between the components of an ISBN.
- Show an analysis of the ISBN component fields, including the name of the Registration Group.
- Generate a bar code for an ISBN.
- Retrieve information on the publication from Amazon.com (where available) and show information such as title, author, publisher, publication date, page count, language, binding, cover image, and a link to credit purchases of the book to a user's Amazon Associates account.
Direct link to ISBNquest query
Posted at
16:26