Category: science/fiction

Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind

There’s an earlier, crappier version of this, and a later, better edit, and I don’t know which one this is. But man, this movie’s good, and the comic is even more wonderful in the ways you’d guess.

I think it’s probably still too scary for my niece, who’s excited about Totoro and the nonscary parts of Spirited Away, but I look forward to being able to watch this with her soon.

Pioneer 1

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UCBk6LTmNY&feature=player_embedded

I’m really excited to get to see this. $30000 of funding made this entire series (of which $27k+ has been raised — if you like it, donate!).

This is the future of media, everyone. Artists making money making art. I hope it works. I might just fire up Kickstarter to make sure I can afford to make Human Contact the thing I want it to be.

Edit: Not bad! Now I want to see the rest of the series!

Alien Contact? The Beginning of the Singularity? Financial Terrorism?

My favorite quote from this article, discussing the spontaneous market crash last April:

The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.

These bots are making 56,000 offers a second. It sure looks to me like something not-human is actually happening here, though it could be the result of gross incompetence, I suppose. Or maybe that was a test run.

But it looks to me kinda like an attempt at saying “hello.”

Quantum Computation and the Contactors

I’m just now writing the Quantum Computation section of Human Contact, and lo and behold, there’s a really weird article on io9 today about a novel — and frankly paradigm-reshaking — use of the (still impractical) technology.

Quantum computing is interesting for a number of reasons, but the biggest one is that it can solve mathematically Complex problems in non-eschatonic amounts of time. For instance, let’s say you’re traveling the world. You want to see 50 sights, then come back home, and you want to travel the minimum distance to do it. Solving this problem with a computer like the one you’re reading this on right now would take an impractical amount of time — it would have to try 3*1064 routes. That’s 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. If each simulated route took 1,000th of a second to calculate, it would take 1057 years to have proven that the shortest route is found. (For perspective, that’s well past any prediction of the end of the Universe.) A quantum computer operating at the same computational speed, would take about .061 seconds, or the dark half of a blink.

For problems that involve Complexity like that one — simple systems whose interactions depend on other interactions — quantum computers straight up solve the problem, assuming there’s a single best answer (and greatly reduce the complexity to knowable probabilities otherwise). That means that most forms of encryption are immediately decryptable. It also means that those with quantum computation capabilities have otherwise provably unbreakable encryption. And it also means that, if someone tries to break the code, they leave indelible fingerprints that show that someone tried to tamper with it. With such a thing, you could predict weather with great accuracy, herd behaviors, probably even culture shifts — all assuming you knew what all the parts were in such a system.

In Human Contact, the Contactors (the starship/institutions that meet new civilizations) possess a single, multi-node quantum computer, required for making last-femtosecond calculations when passing through a Bridge to another star system. It’s integrated into the structure of the craft itself to maximize use of the radiation shielding of the vessel (radiation being made of quanta) and reduce error with redundancy. The ubiquitous computation and networking of Academics in the field can access the quantum computer, but their clothing, tools, vehicles, and food lacks the capabilities for that kind of computing by itself.

So, make sure your network connection is up if you want to predict the spread of a meme through the society, huh?

Every Dr. Who Theme, Ever

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J_3rsEwYVE&feature=player_embedded

Since Delia Derbyshire‘s initial treatment of the title theme, each version has gotten slightly worse. It’s what happens when a creative experiment is successful, I suppose: rather than learning from it to do more creative experiments (which are often unsuccessful, after all), subsequent creators often just kind of polish up the remaining artifact to try to retain what success it had.