Author Archives: Sci Fi Engineer

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About Sci Fi Engineer

Husband Father Writer Engineer

Aliens in the Belfry

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In Sci Fi aliens serve a myriad purposes, but most often as humans in bad makeup.  One reason for this is so that the author can tell an allegory without having to worry about being considered racist, or misogynistic, anti immigrant, anti american, etc. Also, if they act/react like humans but are described as ‘Other’ the reader has a much easier time relating, we can understand their motivations and like, or dislike, them.  This makes telling a complex story much easier and makes it more enjoyable to read.  

They also make better class of zombie, vampire, elf (don’t tell me Spock’s not an elf), gods (small g), etc.  In other words they let us retell stories again and again just changing the protagonists and antagonists, the setting and the point of view, creating an endless array of potential stories to tell ourselves. 

As a dilettante in the sciences my current expectation is that life at least at the level of microbes is fairly to extremely common, but life at the level of complexity/sophisticated seen on Earth is rare, possibly to the point of singularity.  My expectation is that if life will probably come in many forms but from a terrestrial world you will get terrestrial looking creatures that, to the citified might just be one other weird ass racoon, or chicken, etc, they are unlikely to look like Predators etc.  Would an intelligent dinosaur or wolf be horrific? Leaving aside the potential they’d consider us good eating or a lower class of pest that is.

And while a Non – Terrestrial world’s environment could easily produce creatures we have a hard time relating to (maybe they’d even be horrific in appearance.) They’re unlikely to want to interact with us except on a purely business matters since its unlikely we’d be of much interest to them.  Though again empire builders might not care about having to live in domed cities while the locals mine the tar pits.

So having wandered all over the topic, what is my point you ask?

I don’t really have one I guess, I was thinking about the Post a Day challenge and then decided to post about what I would write if I take up the NaNoWriMo challenge and wandered off from there.  Am I going to write Sci Fi again, I think so.  Will it have aliens, again I think so, though perhaps not obviously.  Am I going to try to do NaNoWriMo…who knows…if a big job hits at work then certainly not, 1,700 words a day and 80 hour work weeks do not mix. But the aether appears clear at this time. So Maybe.

 

NaNoWrMo…What to write, and how

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My daughter sent me a not regarding the National Novel Writing Month.  Since I’m in the middle of a lot of stuff right now, including trying to get Under Siege cleaned up and into Smashwords I figured that I’d just comment on it and move on.  But there is something about the idea of taking a whack at it, the opportunity it would offer to get a bit more visibility to my writing alone is very attractive.  I’m just not sure I can do 50K words in 30 days. ~1700 words a day? That’s nuts! Except I know I’ve done that and better in the past, when I was just slapping the keys and not thinking too much. 

And I’ve got a couple of stories, more really, flapping around in the belfry. It would be fun to just let rip with new story rather than having to work on edits like I have for the last several months.  I’ve never (purposely) written comedy, I’m not a funny guy, but maybe I could take a crack at it.  What about a historical novel instead of Sci Fi.  A western, a mystery or a romance?  Though I doubt I could keep it on the straight and narrow I’ve never been able to before.

Maybe I’ll post it online, on a subsidiary blog, as someone at blog a day suggested, that might be interesting if possibly embarrassing.

Anyone out there interested in commenting?

Editing Writing with an iPad

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I am here tonight to admit in front of you all that I am an addict. An iPad addict. I to have been assimilated into the great collective.

I read the Economist, Aviation Week and Space Technology, and more on it, follow the news and blogs. I watch shows, read books, play games, stay in (calendar) synch with my wife on it. But it’s not just because it’s the uber net to brain link, though that plays it’s part, that I am so addicted.

Despite what S.Jobs and others have said the iPad is a content creating platform, it’s just not a Mac or PC. For some jobs it is awkward and it does change how I express myself, writing and editing are harder and I tend to be ‘flatter’ less expressive but that’s not always bad I do have a tendency to be too flowery even repetitive if unconstrained (and use too many big words.). For art/picture creation it is a revelation. And it enables creation in places I have not been able to create in before, primarily on travel for my work because carrying 2 laptops is (for me) not an acceptable option.

I have created the covers to both my novels, one published the other upcoming, on my iPad and am happy with both, here’s the upcoming one the other is Moon Dreams shown down a few links.

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While typing on the iPad is not as fluid as it is on my ThinkPad laptop it is possible to do lying in bed one finger hunt and peck.

The iPad has had a profound impact on me and my family, hopefully generally for the better (how else could I listen to Pandora and read Instapundit while on the elliptical machine at the gym?

National Novel Writing Month

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November is National Novel Writing Month.  They are sponsoring an authorship marathon, write a novel in a month, 50,000 words (175ish pages) between November 1st and 30th. That’s a lot of words for a non professional, and they press you not to struggle with editing or any of that other hard stuff, focus on quantity and not quality.

This is (for good reason) in line with advice by novelists of note S.King and J.Pournelle that you simply have to sit down and write if you ever expect to be a writer.  There may be some people who are natural authors but most of us have to write a lot of words (in my case ~ a half million) before it comes reasonably easily most of the time.  Which in the days before the computer and word processor was an even larger investment in time and effort than it is now.

Dawn @ Vesta

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Vest South Polar Region

Vesta South Polar Region Dawn Framing Camera

The Dawn Mission is ultra cool, what’s not to love about orbiting an unexplored world.  Motoring there on ion drive and planning to motor over to a new planet (minor) on your ion jet after you’ve finished with this one.  This is what space exploration was supposed to be like….and it is, we just got too jaded in the mean time to understand what we are seeing.  This image is from the Image of the Day.

Health Care Costs (3)

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So to continue:  The way I see Health Care has seen a bubble in the US that has grown huge over a very extended period.  Most have called this ‘bubble’ Health Care Cost inflation.  But a bubble over any period between inception and bursting can be seen as (mistaken for) inflation. Is the HCC “Bubble” going to burst or do we have to just accept this as inflation.  I think that too many people want this to be Inflation, not a bubble. And I do not want a ‘bust’ but I do think we need to get on the off ramp, to a price plateau at the very least.

I’ve discussed:

  1. The pernicious effect of opaque pricing
  2. A spike in Cost/Value in capital investment (buildings and equipment.) 
  3. The Gov’t affected floor to pricing
  4. The profit motive effect of increasing costs in the system

Now I’ll add some more:

  • Direct sales…more and more selling of this that or the other service, drug, wonder cure, to the general populace who have no real way of parsing the useful from the useless or even harmful.  And then the sales guys got to congress and punditry and started demonizing those who tried to point out that the common man was not really in a position to make medical decisions. (Not that the god-doctors should be put in charge, much as many of them believe that they should be because they are smarter than anyone else.)
  • Litigation, because medical outcomes are impossible to ensure, and there has been a Lawyer bubble going on for many decades, doctors got sued more and more frequently, malpractice insurance costs went up and so another cost was added into the equation (and for a long time absorbed because the system hid the costs)
  • Specialization, again 9% of 10,000 is a lot more money than 10% of 5,000, but 15% of 10,000 is even more.  Specialist charge at a higher rate because they are specialists and have special skills, that are needed by special cases…..they don’t have to see as many patients, get to go to conferences and consult with other wizards and look down their noses at the rest of the world, even at other doctors.  What’s not to like? Just one more cost adsorbed in the system.
  • Administrative fief building, its a fact of nature, or rather an emergent property of human society:  administrations grows more complex and adsorbs more resources as time moves on, as the top level administrators increase the number of ‘direct reports’ then create hierarchies so they don’t have to talk to as many people so they can be ‘more efficient.’  Administrators (Bureaucrats) are extremely good at capturing the system and turning it to serve them versus the customer the system is supposed to serve.

So what is the solution.  Well I think you can see the one I would focus on first but that will be a discussion for another day.

Alpha Dog…next we have Wardogs…then Wargs

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Alpha Dog shown in this video is really, really neat technology but even in this early stage there is something very creepy about it.    If you connect this with what we have done with the Predator drone and its cousins….one has to wonder if we have opened Pandora’s box.  

I have written about Wardogs in Under Seige, a novel I wrote years ago and I will be publishing soon, and in passing about guard robots in Moon Dreams.  Saberhagen had the Berserkers et.al. for decades. But one does not have to get to AI’s gone berserk for things to get out of control. 

We may have paved the way to H E double toothpicks with Predators.  The Chinese and Russians, as well as others, will sell just about any technology to anyone.  We have the example of what tech did in the Arab Spring….is possibly doing in Syria.  What happens when the bad guys don’t have to risk their lives, or lose a night sleep, when they go after protestors and arrest or erase them?

Health Care Cost (2)

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When I was a kid and even as a younger adult I went to the dentist’s office and other ‘providers’ and the amenities were clean and neat but often I was treated in a ‘ward’ environment.  And this was way after I’d left Jolly Olde England and the NHS (National Health Service.)  Today most providers I go to the office/clinic space is custom designed often with soothing art, music, video etc.  Now don’t get me wrong, Video/Music does help when you’re under the drill (having something probed etc,} and the video screens used for modern digital x-rays or other data reproduction are a boon as well. But why is every ‘provider’ the same.  Why did hospitals move away from wards to private or semi private rooms with the concomitant increase in capital and operating costs.  Why does my local hospital s soaring almost churchlike multi story lobby floored in granite with overlooking balconies and a Yamaha robo grand piano, and this is not the top end hospital in the region. 

It seems to me that what we have seen is a health care bubble, much like the higher eduction bubble (or the overall education system foam,) we’ve seen in the last thirty years….but I digress.

  • As providers realized that they could attract more lucrative patients by setting up nice offices in nice parts of town the general price of HC (excuse the acronym) went up, in general the expectation in all for pay HC went up while the free clinics crashed.
  • It’s mathematically obvious that 10% of 5,000 is a lot less than 9% of 10,000 and the cost of consumables etc are usually fully reimbursed by the payee because their price is a published known. So providers made more and more use of high cost consumables of one sort or another, and were not incentivized to keep the costs down even if their ‘profit’ was squeezed a bit.
  • Medicaid and Medicare have managed to subsidize the lower end of the patient rainbow and pushed up the overall cost by pushing the higher end patients and providers into a different ‘market space.’
  • Because the actual cost of HC is essentially invisible to the patient the steady spiralling cost was not noted by the high-end clients because they perceived (I think rightly) that they were receiving value for money.  BUT as the high-end pulled away the middle dependent ons insurance etc was stretched and the low-end fell away, the old-fashioned cheap equipment / methods / services they had used were rendered obsolete and replaced by the new much higher cost versions.

Add this and other mechanisms together and you have a bubble.  One that grew and grew, while people griped, tried to do something about it but failed.  For some reason we seem unwilling to change the basic underlying dynamics.  Is that because they are so complex and interlaced that people can’t be bothered to go beyond the simplistic.  Or do a lot of the bad things have attractive sides that would be lost if we made major changes? 

In the current system its impossible to figure out the trade-off between a private room and a ward.  Once that wasn’t true or as true.  We have the technology to make this problem go away.  I believe that with transparent pricing and costs wouldn’t we make different decisions.  Maybe not all the time, but maybe enough to break the back of the ridiculous inflation rate we see in health care.