Livescribe pen

So I broke down and bought the Livescribe Echo, which I mentioned on my other blog. I’m really impressed. It does a lot of things, right, particularly its choice of demo apps. It’s the first piece of technology I’ve owned in a long time that I just don’t know how it works.

Well, that’s a little bit of an overstatement. The pen has a camera pointing down the barrel of the ink cartridge, and when you press down, it looks at the pattern of dots and determines from that where, on what page, in what pre-saved notebook it’s looking at. It only records what’s written when it’s on: I tried writing a bit with the pen (with power off) then turning the power on and drawing a line through it, and it only recorded the line. I suspect from that, and looking at how it picks up the lighter strokes in my handwriting, that it’s not actually recording the sight of a line being laid down, but the position of the pen relative to the dots while pressure is on. (Which means that I really need to press down more firmly while writing!) But I don’t know what it is about the dot pattern that makes it recognize where it is so well.

As for usage:

I doubt I’m often going to use the recording feature: lectures and meetings, most often, so maybe once or twice a week, depending on whether my coworkers are leery of it. It would be nice to bring to Viable Paradise in the fall, but I’m not sure whether recording devices are allowed. I’ll ask at some point. (Did I mention I got in? I got in! It gives me hope that I might actually manage to publish something, and thereby become an author instead of merely a liar!)

I’ve also found that the handwriting recognition does a very poor job with my exceedingly poor handwriting. I can’t decide whether editing the results of OCR would be better than simply retyping what I write. So, I probably won’t be jotting down blog posts or anything.

However, even without those features, I really like the pen: I constantly lose notebooks (and pens, actually...) and the idea of having my writing backed up greatly appeals to me. I had been taking photos of my notebook and storing them in Evernote, but it’s a cumbersome process and I have issues with proper rotation.

I’m also intrigued by its SDK, the ability to create my own applications and my own paper. It would be pretty cool to be able to print up maps that it recognizes, and then plot out character movements from room to room, then go back and ask it where certain characters were at particular times.

In Which Our Heft Turns Out To Be Pretty Good Protection

OK, I get it: alien invasion of Earth is a fascinating thought experiment. We’re all familiar with the history of exploration and colonialism, and it’s a useful exercise to imagine all of humanity on the wrong side of it -- preferably in the face of something mean and scaly.

But articles like this one (repeating to some extent Stephen Hawking’s recent musing on the subject) that talk about hordes of aliens skipping from planet to planet stripping them of resources miss one important point: Invading an occupied planet for its resources is stupid, stupid, stupid. Here’s the thing: there’s almost nothing on this planet that cannot be found, in abundance, on the various moons, asteroids, comets, and other small bodies in our solar system. Water? All over the place. Hydrocarbons? Maybe, but there are smaller moons that look pretty good for that, at least for the simple ones [1]. Gold, iron, platinum, uranium, tritium: there for the taking.

What do those sources not have? Angry defenders (to be brushed away like gnats, natch) and a big honking gravity well (Link found quickly and easily via DCKX!). Yup, everything stolen from us pathetic Earthlings has to be hauled uphill at considerable cost. Whereas to drive off aliens stealing our asteroids, we would have to develop ships to go attack them. Even if you were a total badass, if you’re that interested in resources, you’ve probably got accountants who will tell you the right answer.

So, the moral of the story is, if aliens ever rain death upon us, it won’t be so they can steal our gold, it will be because they simply want to kill us. Possibly because they watched Glen Beck.

Now, there do remain potential invasion scenarios which do pop up from time to time. First possibility: capture a whole lot of semi-intelligent hominids to use as slaves, mining marshmallow peeps on Regulus V. (What? Where do YOU think they come from?) [2] Second possibility: Settlement, either permanent or temporary. (Both of those say a lot about the conquering aliens, in a “why do you have this technology, but not this other one?” way that leads to interesting books) Now, Prof. Hawking could argue that these are highly likely to be the case, but I’m not nearly so sure.

[1] This leads to the hilarious-to-me situation where “Aliens invade Earth for its oil” is actually the most plausible of the “resource stealing” scenarios... and is the one that nobody will touch because it’s just too corny and heavy-handed. Gotta love that.
[2] My personal theory is that Earth is a secret sweatshop for an alien race that really, really likes second-hand plastic.

Tests and Grandmatronly Mortality

It’s been conclusively proven: sad but true, students’ family members die at much higher rates just prior to exams. It’s even harder on the families of students who aren’t doing well -- perhaps they die of shame?There are graphs and everything, and according to my cargo cult understanding of science, graphs equals truth. Can’t argue with it.
So think about that, teachers and professors, next time you lift your poison pen to scratch out a test paper! J’accuse!
(H/T to Doc Grasshopper)

A Meditation on Two Papers on the Mpemba Effect

I came across two excellent, fascinating, and very different papers this morning, about the Mpemba Effect: the observation that hot liquids often take less time to freeze than cold liquids, an apparent contradiction of Newton’s laws of thermodynamics. I love the story of the Mpemba Effect, it’s exactly the kind of story that scientists love to tell: scrappy upstart notices odd experimental findings, receives just enough scoffing to make for a good story (but not so much that he gives up -- he is made of sterner stuff than that!), then finally proves himself and vindicates his findings. Hooray!

OK, he wasn’t really the first person to notice it. Aristotle (in Meteorology, Book 1, near the end of Part 12) noticed it... but then, Aristotle was not much of an experimentalist: he used to claim that women had fewer teeth than men, for example. Despite having had three wives, it never occurred to him to, y’know, count. (On the other hand, if Aristotle asked to count my teeth, I’d say no.)

I was struck, in reading the two papers I’m about to describe, both by how well-crafted they are and how very different they are from each other. They complement each other in important ways, and I highly recommend reading (or at least skimming) both, as they are both freely available through Cornell’s arXiv, which is generally my go-to place for Interesting Science Crud and an excellent resource for would-be science-fiction writers.

The first paper (actually, the second one I read, but you should read it first) is an excellent historical overview of the problem, by Monwhea Jeng. It does a very able job of answering the question, “What is this effect, why is it interesting, and why should it be studied?” as well as some possibilities that others have raised for explanations. Bottom line: this problem is real, weird, and worth pursuing. (Jeng is a very able writer, too, and paints a much more interesting portrait of Mpemba’s experience than does Wikipedia)

I did take issue with one statement, though:
What is interesting about the Mpemba effect is that unlike the examples commonly given in science text- books, where theory and experiment march hand-in- hand, always leading to further progress, here theory (rightly or wrongly) prevents acceptance of experiment.
Now, this paragraph (which I have admittedly scrubbed of context) is more subtle than it looks: my first reaction was to shake my head and say that Jeng has it exactly backwards, as Gödel, Darwin, or many others would attest. But the bit about the science textbooks gives me pause here. I remember my textbooks as playing up the scientist-as-lone-hero aspect. Has that changed? Am I misremembering?

The second paper I read this morning, by James Brownridge of SUNY Binghamton, is an attempt to bring together all the possible experimental conditions that give rise to this apparent effect. This one is a very thorough experimental paper that comes to an explanation that I find very convincing. (Hint: the definition of the Mpemba effect is that, under the same experimental conditions, a quantity of hot liquid freezes faster than the same quantity of otherwise identical cold liquid. Ask yourself what it really means to have the same experimental conditions) Brownridge goes to great lengths to examine the problem from many different aspects, but also maintains something of a narrative: this was done this because of this, and then this and that as a result.

The contrast between the two papers is, to me at least, striking. I was tempted at the outset to put more value in the Brownridge paper with its detailed experiments, charts, and explanations. But I was corrected by none other than Brownridge, who holds up Jeng’s paper in the first paragraph as helpful and useful.

So, I backpedaled, and thought about it. There are two important pieces here: the problem and the solution. Often in the papers I read (and write) the two pieces come from the same author, who frames the problem, describes the procedures, and presents the solution all in one paper. It’s difficult under those conditions to avoid warping the definition of the problem to make the solution look better: after all, you’re not just persuading the reader that you’ve done useful science, but the publishers and reviewers of that paper, and to some extent convincing yourself and your teammates. I think that using another person’s paper as a problem definition can help keep you honest -- it helps outline the work a little better, you can’t rephrase it or reframe it in convenient ways.

Oh, and here’s another way to improve the discussion of science.

Zombie Researchers

How many zombies do you know? Good question! Andrew Gelman, zombie researcher and statistician, explains while possibly saying something about social network analysis. (H/T to Marginal Revolution, who totally missed the point)

See also Lakeland’s analysis of the effect of education on mortality rates to zombie invasion. Basically, it doesn’t help. And really, that should have been predicted, because the last thing you need in a zombie attack is MORE BRAINS! No, the math plainly shows that we can be saved only by scantily-clad teenage zombie killers. You can’t argue with math, people. For Christ’s sake, there are graphs! GRAPHS!

Edit: Speaking of zombies, check out this abomination against nature. The dead walk again!

My Demands

It has undoubtedly come to your attention that an hour of your life has been stolen from you while you slept. I assure you, it is nothing personal, only my greatest heist ever! I have accumulated over 250 million stolen hours from the United States alone, and I have no intention of returning them... unless my demands are met. I want one billion dollars is deposited in my Swiss bank account. I want a helicopter for my getaway. I want a small island in the Pacific (Not a leper island. And not too big, seriously, they're such a pain to clean) I also want a Swiss bank account.

If my demands are not met, your hours will not be returned to you. Nor will the time it took you to read this post.

Hah! Hahahah! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAaaaa...

Your Chef for the Evening Is Rebooting

I was just reading a NY Times article about robot cooks. With Japan, food, and robots, this is an article written just for me. And hey: a pan-handling robot that drinks beer! What’s not to like?

They’re all very cool, representing remarkable technical skill, and probably many long nights in the lab. But I think the reporter is missing the point of those humanoid chef-robots, judging by the juxtaposition of those with the work of the CMU Human-Robot Interaction team.

Allow me to explain in a roundabout way: There are already machines that make ramen (maybe not ones that also have knife-fights, but bear with me here) and otherwise perform many of the other tasks here. For many individual tasks, the use of a humanoid robot or arm robot represents a lack of imagination: the mental agility to imagine how a task would be performed with an unrestricted body type often comes up with far more ingenious and efficient ways of doing it.

In fact, I’d say that very few tasks really require humanoid robots. I can’t think of any off-hand. For any individual task, there will almost always be a better form. But this is not to say that it is a bad idea to develop humanoid robots, far from it. The promise of a humanoid robot, and ultimately the (proper?) motivating factor behind many of these prototypes is the same as the promise of an iPhone or something of that ilk: A flexible device that seamlessly becomes one of any number of other single-purpose devices. This is distinct from a personal computer in some important ways, but right now the primary importance is of *doing* one thing at a time (whatever else it may be *thinking*, if you want to put it that way). By adding more cooking jobs to the general robotic repertoire, they’re converging on a suite of tasks for which the humanoid form probably is better-suited.

Microsoft Robotics also kind of gets this, I think. They ought to, anyway, as it is an analogue to Microsoft’s original strategy and success: of standardizing the slow part (the hardware) to focus on doing as much as possible with the fast part (the software). A humanoid robot (or more simply a single arm) can mechanically do just about any task they might desire (if inefficiently), so if we standardize on that ideal, the software and the logic can take a more central place. It represents a sort of design convergence: when you try to combine tasks into the simplest possible hardware, the more human tasks you add, the more human the hardware is going to look.

As for the people focused on human-robot interaction, there are interesting research questions there, and good science being done. But that research, to my mind, is not so much robotics research as it is human research with some very difficult test equipment: kind of like when zoologists design puppets that baby animals will feed from. (I really wish I could find a copy of a particular Calvin and Hobbes to link to here. It’s in “There’s Treasure Everywhere”, page 148)

Anyway, that’s my two cents on the subject. (And keep in mind that I’ve never actually done humanoid-robotic research, having focused entirely on rover-types, so I could be totally off-base)

Oh! If after reading that article you’re wondering what okonomiyaki is, by the way, it’s often referred to as a cabbage pancake or pizza. It’s... neither, really, or maybe both. I’m familiar with Osaka-style okonomiyaki, but as anyone will tell you, it can vary wildly, especially by region. For me, the little okonomiyaki-ya outside my dorm at Gaidai is the only true form: You take a batter of flour, potato starch, egg, and shredded cabbage, and spread it out on a hibachi table for some high heat, usually spread on top of some kind of meat filling like bacon or shrimp. Flip it once (so the ‘filling’ is now on top), finish cooking, then top it. The traditional toppings, to my mind, are a thick sugary sauce (like yakisoba sauce or BBQ sauce), Japanese mayonnaise, bonito flakes, and powdered seaweed. It’s... tastier than it sounds? I like it, anyway.

One final thing: I’m trying out new blog software -- MacJournal 5 from the most recent MacHeist. The interface isn’t too bad, and I do like the ability to keep separate journals in the same interface, plus locally-organized stuff: one of my big complaints for my current writing software is that it’s difficult to manage multiple projects.

Tagging seems to be more difficult compared to the web form, which autocompletes and shows me a list of tags I’ve already used.

Don't Shock a Flatline

... or this person will come to your home and beat you with a wet chicken. But only after a fascinating discussion of cardiac behavior!

That's got to be my new favorite blog.

Why Didn't I Think of That?

It's not often that I see something in the news or online that I want to smack my forehead and regret not thinking of it. This is one of those cases: moon exploration via telepresence. The basic idea is to send a slew of humanoid robots to the moon, each equipped with a variety of sensors and actuators to roughly correspond to human operators down on Earth.

The trouble is, the article doesn't give due weight to the three-second delay. Three seconds is huge, as anyone who played first-person shooters online in the 90s knows. Lag is a major factor in error, and three seconds takes a human operator well out of the range of reacting naturally to events. In the paper linked, they only go as far as 225 ms lag time, an order of magnitude faster than is being talked about here. I have no doubt that some operators will become very skilled at this delay (though I really wouldn't want to share a road with them driving home after a long session!) but the learning curve will be awfully steep, and potentially expensive.

Part of the solution to that problem will be extensive simulation. Simulators can be built right now that would get the broad strokes right in terms of gravity. The lunar regolith composition will be tough to get the feel right, but hey, they have access to people who've been there and can offer pointers.

To me, though, the answer is to scratch the humanoid part of the telepresence plan. The more the operator expects the robot to act like a human, the more frustrating the experience will be. Locomotion would be the first target -- even in the low gravity, it would be far too easy to trip and fall. Walking would quickly become a chore anyway. A wheeled or treaded robot would be my first choice, but would not be terribly mobile, and those mountains would be awful temptations. I would go for a centaur-like robot, maybe built on a Big Dog chassis: an internal controller would take care of staying upright. The feet would have to be modified, but that's do-able.

The user-controlled manipulators could sit on top of that, taking care to keep the center of gravity low. I would personally prefer (at least for the first few attempts) a modal system where the operator can either move the robot or move the manipulators, not both at once. Part of this is so that the operator's time isn't divided, but also to allow centering and balancing routines to ensure that the robot doesn't fall over.

As for getting a bunch of robots to the moon in the first place? If only there were a commercial competition devoted to getting robots onto the surface of the moon cheaply...

No, Bill. No. Just step away.

I deeply respect Bill Gates's commitment to philanthropy. He is obviously trying very hard to make the world a better place to live. But the man who gave us Microsoft Windows is the last person on Earth who should be developing a nuclear reactor. Just saying. I know you're jealous of that kid who built a nuclear reactor in his backyard (and that Microsoft is known for me-too products), but this takes it too far. And you don't want to end up like him anyway.

That said, his actual proposal (run by an actual nuclear physicist) makes a great deal of sense. I'm a little surprised that they're not going for thorium reactors, but hey. And yes, competition in this space among qualified participants could well be terribly useful to helping ease the country's energy problems. I'll post a link to the talk as soon as it's up... well, as soon as I notice, remember, and get around to it.

A Quick Tour

For those of you who are fans of the space program, I thought you'd appreciate this tour of the space station (h/t Gizmodo)

My God, It's Full of ... Puns

Just when I thought that there was no hope for artificial intelligence, my mind is blown by this. (h/t to PhysOrg) That's right: a computer that formulates and tells jokes, all based on that apex of humor, the pun. It is a little scattershot in its basic approach based on using Princeton's WordNet as a relational database / expert system (using the phonetic form to roughly judge whether two words sound similar. It seems to come up with some interesting results -- they remind me in some ways of the kinds of jokes five-year-olds tell. Some samples:

What do you call a cross between an emporium and a success?
A department score

What do you get when you cross a choice with a meal?
A pick-nic

And (possibly the best of the bunch)
Why is a bronzed handle different from a fringe benefit that is lordly ?
One is a tanned grip, the other is a grand tip

Oh my sides, they split.
(More here)

So, now we know how the inevitable robot armies intend to kill us all. I didn't think they'd be this cruel or ruthless, but I must now stop to wipe away a tear of pride. *wipe*

The software will eventually be available for download. I think that (with permission) this would actually be worth learning how to write iPhone apps.

Screw Celsius

I am in general in favor of the metric system. It makes sense, it's easy to use. But the Celsius scale (while fine for many scientific endeavors) is not appropriate for day-to-day human life.

Think of it this way: for most of us, the range of human temperature experience just fits the Fahrenheit scale better. 0F - 100F is a good range, matching quite well what many of us experience. One degree is large enough to be reasonably meaningful (with useful decades), but is fine-grained enough to not need decimals. Going outside the 0-100 range is really something: a particularly cold or blistering day.

When it comes down to it, the water cycle just isn't that relevant to day-to-day life. Water doesn't magically freeze completely when the weather hits 32F/0C, there's a considerable hysteresis going on there. Besides, you don't want your freezer right at freezing, you want it more like 20F, and your fridge below 40F. There's a distinct difference in the clothing you wear at 50F, 60F, 70F, 80F.

That's not to say that the Celsius decades are useless. They're not bad for broad generalities: -10 is quite cold, 0 is cold, 10 is chilly, 20 is warm, 30 is hot. But there's a big difference within those decades in terms of what you wear, what activities you plan, etc. When you're sitting at a desk for a long time, your preferred temperature may well be a fraction of a degree Celsius.

So, make a stand for Fahrenheit! For a more understandable people-friendly tomorrow!

Tanatalizing!

I just came across a reference to Kanazawa and Perina's recent paper, "Why night owls are more intelligent". Unfortunately I am off-campus until I get back from Thanksgiving break -- so I can only imagine what gratifying secrets lie await in its pages! (OK, it's probably bullshit, but it's the kind of bullshit that justifies all my pre-conceived notions about me being better than everyone else, and isn't that just a synonym for "truth", really?)

What an awesome web we weave

The last thing that you want your robot army to do, when asked "Are you exterminating the human race?" is answer "Yes." Public relations fiasco right there. You can't possibly go on Oprah often enough to make up for that one.

The solution? Make sure your robots know how to lie. Fortunately, there have been great strides in this very field recently. Some folks in Lausanne, Switzerland have been working in evolutionary robotics: they developed a pretty nice platform (the S-bots, shown in that link towing a terrifically tolerant tot) that have a number of general-use actuators and sensors. At the same time, they developed a decent computer simulation of those robots so that they could try out control schemes -- including multiple iterations of an evolved controller.

Note that they have both light rings (three colors of LEDs) and light sensors. The robots are each controlled by a neural network, the inputs for which include input from those sensors, and the outputs drive motors and other actuators. The weights of each node are determined by elements on a single long string, which is treated as genetic material for a genetic algorithm. They run the robots with a randomized genome, and those robots that "survive" (get to a power source) have their "genes" passed on to the next generation (that is, the next iteration of the experiment) Neural networks are a nice handy way to bridge the gap between genetic algorithms and programmed behavior, actually. Anyone who's interested in playing around with these techniques would not do badly to start off with something like this.

Anyway, I haven't read the paper too carefully, but it sounds like the deception involves the fact that the power source (the "food") has one colored light, and the robots can change color to that same color when they are there (thus helping the other robots with different genes) or they can turn off their lights or turn a different color to give themselves a larger relative advantage! Of course, robots that are attracted to both color lights would gain a further advantage, thus increasing the dominance of that particular strain: a bunch of them with the same set of mutations could effectively hide the power source from other robots.

There's more coverage, with more videos at Singularity Hub. If you're interested in the bots themselves, the older swarm-bots have a page here, and the newer version is over here. The papers there are pretty approachable for technically-minded folks not in robotics, I think, but are not quite to the level of general consumption. Good stuff.

I guess the only remaining question, then, is that, having now learned to lie, will robots ever learn ... to love?

The answer is no.

Fair Play

I've spent a lot of time thinking about detective fiction lately. I'm an unabashed fan of Golden Era detective stories: you know, the ones with the brilliant detective who goes to an English country house and discovers that the doctor killed the matron of the family even though everyone says it's either the butler or some mysterious outsider. Agatha Christie is widely regarded as the queen of the format, and remains one of the best-selling English-language authors ever. If you're going to strike up a literary conversation with a stranger, you're statistically better off bringing up Hercule Poirot than Harry Potter.

But there are Commandments to be obeyed when writing GE-style fiction! Knox's list, as posted in Wikipedia, is pretty useful. Reasonably applicable to sci-fi mysteries, too. I'll annotate with my thoughts.

1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know. Agatha Christie famously broke this one in a book that a lot of people think was a total cheat. What Knox is getting at, I think, is that the reader shouldn't be coerced into identifying with the criminal. For a sci-fi story this has a different reading: it is traditional in these works to have a character stand in for the reader. Knox would say that this character should not be the killer.
   
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course. This holds true, of course, for science fiction, but I'd go further: any science related to the murder itself ought to be impeccable or the story will feel like a double cheat. I've never seen this broken in a way that was done well: this may very well be the one truly unbreakable rule on this list. A number of excellent stories have had the appearance of breaking this rule, right up until the last page, but these days you'll just invite unflattering comparisons to Scooby Doo.
   
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable. My take on this is that the reader deserves to know the lay of the land as soon as possible. One twist on this, says Mr. Knox, is acceptable in the name of an interesting plot, but more than one wears thin. I'd go so far as to say that any such cartographical twist ought not be introduced after the first two-thirds of the story. As far as science fiction goes, I think this can be extended to the laws of physics and the rules of the milieu as well: all of a sudden faster-than-light travel turns out to actually be possible? OK, there's your one allowed "secret passage," good luck with it. But there's a caveat...
   
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end. This one's a lot more important in sci-fi, I think. Part of fairness is understanding what's possible. But also, these things let the readers off the hook, lets them say, "Oh, I had a good excuse not to get that." Rubbish! This gets back to #3, in terms of knowing what's possible. One twist is fine, but it had better not be the key to the whole mystery!
   
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story. Like the man says, no Chinaman. Er, wait. How about, no inscrutable foreigner who the audience simply can't relate to, and automatically suspects? (Aliens might well apply, depending on milieu) Even then, this is kind of a lame rule. I'd rephrase it, "No Chi -- er, no inscrutable foreigner should be the killer" Otherwise the author is pretty much let off the hook for a believable motive, and the reader's only clue will be simple xenophobia. Then again, the presence of the Chinaman can't be an excuse not to cast doubt on some other character.
   
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right. This one holds up pretty well, but is damned hard to pull off. This commandment is most often partly broken in the "Dimwitted assistant accidentally says something that puts the detective on the right track" trope. Watson did this, Captain Hastings did this, Magersfontein Lugg did this, countless one-appearance befuddled Scotland Yard detectives did this -- and then were obliged to feel good about having contributed! This trope can be done well, especially if it is a way of giving an extra clue to the reader, but often is not, and just seems like an unfair insult to the poor benighted Dr. Watson.
   
7. The detective himself must not commit the crime. This is related to the first commandment, as the detective is also often a focus for audience sympathy. This is not to say, however, that the detective must not commit a crime, just not the crime being solved. Otherwise you're just toying with your readers, making them play catch-up.
   
8. The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover. This is an important one, and so often broken. The clues don't have to be declared in a way that highlights them ([BLINK]CLUE HERE!!![/BLINK]), but the reader should have access to all the information the detective does, at about the same time (if not more and earlier!) Context is key during an investigation: you'll read an interrogation differently if you already know that the suspect's alibi has been blown. If the detective merely suspects something, however, that information can be safely kept. As far as science fiction goes, that means that relevant science and facts about the milieu have to be trotted out as early as possible. It's not fair for a detective to sit and interrogate someone who obviously doesn't know how anti-gravity works and not clue in the reader.
   
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader. If you're going to have such a character, he needs to be a comfort to the reader, as a companion and guide through the universe being inhabited. Any story with a Watson tends to result in a dozen put-downs: if Watson's ahead of the reader, those are going to sting. This is not to say that Watson should not have information in his own right! Just that any information he has (such as resulting from his medical training) should be provided quickly and clearly to the reader. Having a Watson who knows the milieu well can be a real benefit in a science fiction story, but I would say that there's a serious risk of being ham-handed here, overwhelming the reader with exposition. Tread lightly!
   
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them. Ditto clones, holograms, and someone time-traveling from the future back to his own timeframe.
    

If you read through that list thinking, "Argh! I can think of a dozen potential stories that break this rule to result in a good mystery!" then rant about it here, then go write that story! The rules aren't hard and fast, and I believe that Agatha Christie went out of her way to break every single one. Like many rules related to writing, the key is not to avoid breaking the rules, but to only do so explicitly and with understanding of why they are there.

I'm a bit too tired to go into Van Dine's 20 commandments in this much detail, not least because there's so much overlap. A few do stick out, though:

• There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much bother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader's trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded. This one makes me laugh, and yet it does give me pause. Grand larceny plots (jewels, natch) are a favored exception to this rule, and yet it's hard to imagine this translating well in a future society. The scarcity and value of physical belongings may seem odd, even tawdry, in many possible settings. If the victim's response to the loss of a diamond the size of a bowling ball ought to be, "Damn, I'll have to grow another one. At least my poor aching back will get a week's rest." then grand larceny may not work. Grand larceny has to be really ludicrously grand for this to work in many milieus. And of course, "Recover the secret files!" plots (except maybe blackmail) are in many ways already outdated: cats leap out of their bags and simultaneously pop out a million kittens these days. Also: be careful in choosing your metaphors. Moving on.
  
• A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person — one that wouldn't ordinarily come under suspicion. No robot killers, unless you're Asimov. And, as I recall, not even then.
• Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story. A fascinating and truly beautiful murder is irremediably spoiled by any such wholesale culpability. To be sure, the murderer in a detective novel should be given a sporting chance; but it is going too far to grant him a secret society to fall back on. No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want such odds. Agatha Christie famously broke this one in The Big Four, and it was pretty much her worst book ever, by an enormous margin. This notion that the murderer ought to be individually culpable can be broadened in a science-fiction to include, for example, the Borg. The military and government tend to be far more sinister in the sci-fi tradition than in Golden Era detective fiction, or Van Dine would probably have included them as well.
• A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no "atmospheric" preoccupations. such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude. This one is a challenge to the science fiction author, who must carefully weigh the needs of the milieu. If the setting is so cliched that the reader won't need much introduction, then you may lose that reader for whom the science is first and the mystery second. On the other hand, if the setting is so outlandish that explaining it takes forever, your story might only progress at a snail's pace.
  

Of course, in all of these rules, there is one unspoken: The story must make sense. The murder method may need to be novel and clever indeed to fool the forensics tools available to a 2Nth-Century detective! John W. Campbell thought it impossible, only to be proved wrong by Isaac Asimov. But that's another post.

Google Scholar

... is an absolute goldmine for anyone interested in writing science fiction. The story I'm working on takes place on a tidally-locked planet: that is, where the planet's rotation has slowed/advanced due to gravitation so that one side of the planet always faces its sun. (Like the moon with respect to Earth, except that the planet's "dark side" really is dark)

A quick Google Scholar search turns up a ton of information; I need to look up this fellow Manoj Joshi and see if I can pick his brain. In one of his papers there's an interesting discussion of likely weather patterns. Giant permanent hurricane on the sunward side? Awesome. And convenient.

EDIT: I notice that this entry gets a lot of hits courtesy of google.co.kr -- Welcome to my friends in Korea! I'm curious what it is that you're looking for that brings you here, and whether I can help out somehow. (Or does Google simply place this post on the first page of results when you're looking for information on Google Scholar?)

Real Robot Facts (also fun)

Something like 50% of the people who come to this blog are searching for "robot facts" and getting a joke post from earlier. That's... kind of embarrassing, actually. Here's some more useful stuff if you want to learn about the state of robotics:

Fact #1: Japan has the coolest robots in the world. Dr. Hirose is the guy to look at, his lab produces robot snakes that are just awesome. I first came upon his work at a symposium for search and rescue robotics at NIST, where his students had a 3m-long remote-controlled robot snake for use in searching deep rubble piles. You could spend all day looking at the videos on his page and still not see it all -- if your time is a little more limited, at least watch the swimming snake bot video.

Fact #2: One of the smallest robots in the world was built by a classmate of mine at Dartmouth. They rely on having a specially-designed platform that delivers voltage levels that not only power but steer them using alternating strips of conductive material. By raising and lowering the relative voltages they can not only power one tiny little robot, they can cause its arm to stick to the surface, making it pivot (A high voltage causes it to snap downward, making use of physical forces normally too small to notice, then another reversed voltage snaps the arm back so that the robot can continue on)

Fact #3: People have more senses than they think. Proprioception in particular is interesting: it is basically the sense of where your body is with respect to yourself, and lets you do things like touch your nose with your eyes closed. Like your other senses, it can be dulled by alcohol, hence that legendary road-size sobriety test. This can be devilishly difficult for a robot -- the more limbs, the harder. Trying to calculate where the head of that snake robot is from the tail would be a formidable task if you're relying on its internal sensors alone! Sensors, like human senses, have errors that accumulate.
Related to that is the concept of dead reckoning. Try this experiment: stand with your toes to a wall, and shut your eyes. Take two steps backward, then two steps forward. You can probably manage to hot give yourself a bloody nose with two steps. Now try it with five steps (you might want a pillow in front of your face or a friend you can trust) This is a good example of the accumulation of error, and is why your Roomba vacuum cleaner can't just retrace its steps to get back to its base.

Fact #4: Because robots are being proposed for wide use in search & rescue, extraplanetary exploration, and simple patrols, there's a great deal of interest in a subject called SLAM: Simultaneous Localization and Mapping. Basically, this is the art of turning a robot into a cartographer. SLAM requires using all of a robot's sensors to figure out its pose as precisely as possible, "pose" meaning the location, orientation, and position of every part of a robot with respect to itself, to its surroundings, and (in a very interesting case) other robots on its "team". Sebastian Thrun wrote a lengthy survey paper on the subject that I still refer to from time to time.

I'd be happy to expand on these if there's interest.
(Edit: A recent post on the development of deceit in swarm robotics might be of interest.)

Strange Horizons

For all you science fiction/fantasy fans in the audience, here's a reminder that Strange Horizons exists -- it's a free weekly online magazine, funded by reader donations. They just blew through their yearly fund drive goal halfway through the drive month, which should tell you something about how well-regarded it is. If you don't believe me, here's a gem from their archives.

It's a unique magazine, one I keep forgetting about for long periods of time, then kicking myself for forgetting. It publishes a lot of poetry (a lot of it bad, to be honest), a lot of fiction (much of it good), and reviews and other articles, the entire body of which can best be described as eclectic.

From the business side of things, I gather that they are well-regarded, paying what's considered professional rates. The 9,000 word limit is a result of that -- I think they just can't pay for longer works, running as they do on donations rather than subscriptions.

Is Pluto a planet?

No, because Pluto is a [expletive].