I finally finished the rewrite of my most recent mystery story, The Body and the Bomb. It bloated a bit: up to almost 8,500 words, which makes me a little unhappy, but it’s better.
This was a bit of an experiment. I printed out the last draft, went through it with a pen -- then instead of opening up the original file, I typed it all back in. The theory here is that this is what writers used to have to do in the bad old days of typewriters and hand writing and clay tablets and oral tradition (that last one probably got ugly when you were really embarrassed about a draft). The results were mixed.
On the plus side, I had to give everything at least some attention. Having just finished a read-through, I had the whole thing in my head and I knew exactly where it was going. This was a great help in terms of deciding what clues had to go where, and which bits weren’t pointing in the right direction. I think that the result is a smoother piece of work. Also on the plus side was that I was more willing to junk large sections of text that I hadn't recopied yet. Heck, the laziness factor probably saved me a few hundred needless words. This was particularly true at the end: I had never been happy with the last two sections, and on retyping I just balked at doing all that work on something I thought was sub-par. This prompted me to produce what I consider a much better ending.
On the minus side, it was not nearly as helpful as I thought it would be in terms of making structural changes. Part of this was my failure to think ahead and put page breaks between sections, to see how things read in a different order. As a result, I focused far more on tactics rather than strategy, and had to go back through later to make the more sweeping high-level changes that the story needed. Also on the minus side was the fact that retyping was an opportunity to introduce new and interesting typos.
Bottom line for this experiment: It's a worthwhile thing to try, but only when I'm alread very happy with a draft, but when I expect to have the time and energy to go back through it again. I am not sure that this would work well for a much longer work, but I may try it.
Friday, March 19, 2010
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!
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!
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
24-Hour News, Summarized Neatly
Yeah, this is pretty much what all television news looks like to me.
Open Tabs 3
Hello again, just a quick summary of some of my more interesting open tabs:
A blog post on the economics of Star Trek. There are a lot of interesting questions, there. What is the effect on society of a near total lack of scarcity? You want something, you replicate it. In the Star Trek universe the writers had good incentives to try to find ways in which this breaks down: the need for exotic materials, large sized objects, energy budgets, etc. One of the commenters points out that Charlie Stross has not only looked into the subject as well, but came up with a very clever way of showing how different societies might treat the issue differently.
Michael Weingrad asks why there isn't a Jewish Narnia (and why there is otherwise a relative dearth of Jewish fantasy writers), and why that might be changing.
Looks like I might get to fiddle with a Pixel Qi display this fall, that's exciting. I suspect that swapping it into my Mac would be a pain, but I have a netbook with about the right size screen that I might be willing to sacrifice.
Wil Shipley's recollections from this year's TED conference. Still open because I haven't quite finished reading it, but the bit about Stephen Wolfram is what makes it stick in my head: I had occasion briefly to meet Wolfram when he gave a talk here some years back on cellular automata shortly after A New Kind of Science came out. The talk itself I remember as being somewhat... meh... but I was deeply impressed that he stayed for a good hour afterward to answer questions.
The latest entry in Steven Strogatz's New York Time math blogging series, this one on geometry.
A discussion of the Information Commons that I'm still trying to wrap my head around
... and finally, my sentence of the day, courtesy of the always-interesting Chuck Wendig:
Sunday, March 14, 2010
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...
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...
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Crazy Busy, With Crash Blossoms
Hey, I’ve been pretty absent lately: after being stuck in Texas for most of a week, I came down with the cold of doom (which I naturally passed on to everyone around me...sorry) and then spent a great deal of time finishing up a paper that I’m going to be presenting this April. I haven’t had a lot of spare time. (Not that blogging should be only or predominantly a spare-time activity!)
Anyway, I’m still catching up on work and other things, and getting ready to post the next few entries on Christie’s Labors of Hercules (as augmented by a book I just finished containing copies of some of her notes for those stories! Excitingly intrusive!), but in the meantime, go read about crash blossoms: newspaper headlines just ambiguous enough to bring our reading comprehension to a screeching halt. (The term originates here)
Anyway, I’m still catching up on work and other things, and getting ready to post the next few entries on Christie’s Labors of Hercules (as augmented by a book I just finished containing copies of some of her notes for those stories! Excitingly intrusive!), but in the meantime, go read about crash blossoms: newspaper headlines just ambiguous enough to bring our reading comprehension to a screeching halt. (The term originates here)
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Second Draft
I’ve finished the second draft of The Body and the Bomb -- up to almost 7,000 words now. I strengthened the co-investigator character, making her a bit less of a Watson, and added a couple interviews to fill in some gaps. It’s got a nuclear weapon, and black market human organs, and a pyramid scheme. Fun, fun fun.
If anyone wants to give it a read and offer feedback, let me know. I think I’ve plugged all the logical leaks -- and yes that’s a challenge!
If anyone wants to give it a read and offer feedback, let me know. I think I’ve plugged all the logical leaks -- and yes that’s a challenge!
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
MacHeist
Mac user? The MacHeist NanoBundle2 is up. As usual, the more people get it, the more things go into the bundle for everyone. As UNusual, one of those items (unlocked at 50,000 bundles) is the full Tales of Monkey Island series! Y'know, the games otherwise known round these parts as "Those games he won't shut up about".
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.
Out the door!
I bet you thought I forgot about Viable Paradise! Not so, I sent off my application this morning. I admit though, that I did dither a bit: I just finished a draft of a story that I like better, another mystery entitled "The Body and the Bomb". But when push came to shove, that one was just not polished enough and could take months to bring up to the level where it would be a good representative piece.
Unfortunately, all I have of "Death in a Tin Can" (my submission piece) is the PDF, thanks to a rather nasty bug in either the software I use or the MobileMe service which wrecked the RTF bundle I'd originally written in, so I need to hurry and reconstruct the RTF for the electronic part of the submission, which should be in their hands before the physical copy arrives. Fortunately I'm working from an RTF only a week older than the PDF, but it's aggravating nonetheless...
Wish me luck!
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