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.)

The Hard Part IV - Strike One

Well, F&SF doesn't want it. Fast turnaround, I'll give them that.

I'm not sure where to go from here. I've shown it to about a dozen or so of my friends so far, of whom two have read it, and the only editor to touch it rejected it without useful comment. This is not exactly a stellar record for something that I'm hoping that thousands of people will read and enjoy. All the advice at this stage is to put it back in an envelope and send it on to the next market, but that's under the assumption that there are plenty of markets for the work, and there aren't.

I think the plan will be to do another round of revisions, and maybe look into an online workshop like Critters. I think that it needs to be shorter before I attempt to send it to Analog, which I think is the next stop for this beast.

Edit: One point that needs clarification: First, I am NOT, NOT, NOT unhappy with any of the people who got copies and didn't read it or didn't comment: the whole point of the exercise was to see whether people would pick it up, read it, and like it. 2/10 is a datapoint, not a disappointment. (Well, it's a disappointment, but in the story, not in the readers)

Columbo meets The Prisoner?

I'm a big fan of the show Columbo -- Peter Falk was just brilliant in that show. I just watched an extraordinary episode, though, Last Salute to the Commodore, directed by Patrick McGoohan, a repeat guest star on that show. This was a distinctly bizarre episode in a lot of ways, a lot of odd motifs going on, particularly related to volume: a great scene with Columbo shouting over machinery, and a lot of singing/whistling, over-loud laughter. Columbo also had great fun invading personal space: particularly in the scenes with the over-stuffed car and the telephone call. On top of all that, he had not one but two sidekicks! (There's another, more significant, unorthodoxy about the episode, but it comes later on and I'd hate to spoil it) Other than the departures from the usual formula, though, it was a decent Columbo mystery: he pulled a lot of the same tricks, including experiments to figure out how things were done, trying to get the murderer to explain at length how it "must have been done", etc. It's just... I had the distinct impression that the cast was somewhat tipsy through the whole thing, which is what prompted me to look up who the director was, at which point it all become clear.

If the name McGoohan rings a bell, by the way, then you've probably seen his short series The Prisoner, with which this episode has a lot in common. The Columbo episode wasn't quite as surreal as The Prisoner, but a lot of the same elements were there, especially the laughter motif. If you haven't seen The Prisoner, I'm not sure I can recommend it without reservations, not least because I just can't recommend watching the last episode, which I think was horribly botched. But it might be worth seeing before the miniseries remake that's slated to come out this November.

And if you do watch The Prisoner, go back and watch Columbo Season 5.

Props where they are due

By the way, as several who know me also know Shweta Narayan, you should also know that she's a very good writer, and has had the good taste to submit to Strange Horizons. Last week they published her story Charms, and earlier this year Nira and I. Both are fantastic pieces and should be read.

Abandoned Japanese Sites

One of the links I posted yesterday was chosen because it linked to a fascinating series of photos of an abandoned amusement park. I looked around a bit more, however, and found that it's part of a much larger site full of photo essays of abandoned sites. Some of them are quite striking, such as the collection of pink chairs in this abandoned hotel lounge. Not all of them are rural and remote: this one looks like an old multi-level restaurant in the middle of a city, with living space above. The unfinished apartment building has some very nice shots. (One word use a few times transliterates to "mansion", which in Japan is a single-room apartment. I've never been able to figure out if that's a joke)

Some quick notes for browsing using the buttons at the bottom:
目次 will bring you back to the main page
次へ will bring you to the next page of photos
戻る will bring you to the previous page of photos

A Big Step

I am deeply impressed by the Japanese election -- they've thrown out the LDP[1], which has been in power almost continuously since 1955, the end of the American occupation. It's funny -- I started studying Japanese in 1997, a mere three years since the "interregnum" (1993-1994) so to me it has always vaguely seemed plausible, and yet, having just screwed up their first chance at power, the DPJ has always seemed vaguely comical to me: they're the ultimate "those other guys," who it seems to me served as the stick half of the LDP's carrot-and-stick approach to the voters.

The "carrot" of course is the large-scale spending programs, particularly road construction. Japan has a lot of concrete. There are a lot of "bridges to nowhere" -- and even entire new towns on the other ends of those bridges. (Ghost towns are also not uncommon.) People who are better economists than I am have alternately railed against the construction regime as a drag, and hailed it as keeping the Japanese economy afloat, though I gather that the former opinion has more currency. Either way, the DPJ is surely going to put a halt to it, as they have said they intend to focus on the social safety net, and find ways to encourage Japanese people to have more children.

I'll be watching with a lot of curiosity. I still have a soft spot for Japan after my semester there, and I do hope the country does well. I suspect that the DPJ will have an easier time organizing itself this time around (it basically fell apart in 1994, like a dog that never expected to catch its car) but it's not clear that they actually have a mandate. They have an outright majority in the legislature, which is nothing to sneeze at, but they're going to face an entrenched bureaucracy that the LDP will surely try to make use of: after all, it's going to look to them that the shortest path back to power will be to make the DPJ look just as incompetent as they are. (And hey: Better the fool you know, right?)

[1] Note, by the way, that I don't bother to spell out the party names, as I consider them meaningless. They seem to be not so much descriptive as the result of that particular East Asian combination of eagerness and earnestness that can sometimes be very hard to describe. If you've ever met a South Korean Evangelical Christian, or seen a Japanese rapper, you probably know what I mean.

The Hard Part III: Out the door

Well, my manuscript is out the door and on its way to Mr. Van Gelder at F&SF (Well, probably to Mr. Adams, who I gather reads the slush pile) I picked S&SF for a couple reasons: they explicitly take long stories, and in fact earlier this year had an issue that I think was nothing but novelettes. They've published sci-fi/mystery type stories recently (I think this is a plus, hopefully they're not sick of them). And, I've run across GVG and JJA online a few times, and both gentlemen seem to be pretty classy -- in other words, the thought of them reading it doesn't fill me with visions of my bescissored manuscript being set on fire to the sound of gleeful laughter.

I'm still not sure about my cover letter. I've read a lot of conflicting advice online, so I would up briefly describing the piece ("murder mystery set on a space station where certain implications of faster-than-light travel represent a critical plot point"), mentioned that this is my first fictional work but that I've had scholarly work published in a scientific field. Etc, etc. This leads me to the last reason I sent to S&SF first: GVG has said that he reads the cover letters last. :)

Having spent the last few days psyching myself up to firmly believing that it will be accepted, I'm now trying to convince myself that it is certain to be rejected, and indeed added a folder to my filing cabinet for "Rejection Slips". Seemed like the prudent thing to do.

The Hard Part, II - where do you sell the survivors?

In the bright light of morning, I'm still determined to sell this beast. According to Robert Heinlein, I've followed three of his rules already! (Actually, I've already started following Mr. Sawyer's sixth rule. "Midnight Train" is well underway, with two thousand words already written and copious notes about tidally locked planets, coffee ceremonies, and Paul Krugman's paper on calculating interest rates when traveling at near-luminal speeds)

In a way, I'm lucky: the length of the piece severely limits its market, but leaves open a couple options that I'm happy with. I'm adding a further constraint: I would like to be eligible for SWFA membership. Of the Big Three SF magazines, Analog and Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine look like my best bets. (Asimov's, whose submissions guidelines apparently are not linked to from the site itself and must be Googled, discourages works over 15k words, but does not refuse them) F&SF explicitly takes works up to 25k words, so mine fits nicely, and they're specifically asking for more science fiction.
There are relatively few other choices. Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show is one possibility. I'd kind of like to avoid web-only publications, for the simple reason that I rarely read them myself (with one exception). However, OSCIMS *is* one that I've read in the past, and it looks like a decent place to publish. (No, I'm really not interested in discussing OSC's politics in the comments to this post)
And... that's pretty much it. That's a distressingly short list. But given the wait times involved, it could well take a year to work through it, so I'm not going to worry about it right now.

Sadly, I do not qualify for Sheep! Magazine, published out of Trout, WV. Maybe Inspector Crandall's next case will be more appropriate.

Also, the Writer's Market website is freaking useless. I have NEVER seen a search utility so horribly broken in my life. I type in "science fiction novella", terms that I have seen for myself in their listings, and it comes up with exactly one: a listing specifically saying "no science fiction". (It also says "no detective fiction" -- it read my mind!)

The Hard Part

Well, it's done -- my first completed novella, a science-fiction mystery. At 22,000 words (a little more than a quarter the length of my PhD thesis) it's going to be a tough sell. (Double-spaced at a 12-point font with a 1" margin it's about a hundred pages!) I've only come up with one professional market so far for which the length is within their published guidelines. But I'm optimistic: I've read it and re-read it, and it's good, I'm proud of it.

The title, if you're curious, is "Where Do They Bury The Survivors?" I'll post updates as they happen. (I'm not going to post it publicly online for a number of reasons.)

Exhibit A

I remain firmly convinced that Tarn Adams, in Dwarf Fortress, is really creating a Lord of the Flies simulator. In support of this hypothesis, I submit the last week's development log.

Also, I resent Blogger's morality-based poll editing constraints. I can change the end date of the poll at will, but I can't change the options because "someone already voted"? It is not for you to prevent me from mucking with my readers, Blogger! If I want to change the poll option from "I heart kittens" to "I heart Pol Pot" and then rant about how my readers have poor taste in overlooking henry Kissinger, that's my business! Fooey.

Fun with Transliteration

One of the things I like most about studying Japanese is that there is a significant role being played by transliterated words from other languages, particularly English. And because there is a whole alphabet devoted to these words (katakana, the more stark and angular of the three character sets) it's easy to pick these words out. However, there can be subtle distinctions between words, particularly when vowels are lengthened. For example, when reviewing a little bit this morning, I came upon, ハロウィーン [+ party]: ha-ro-wi-i-n. I'm pretty sure, in retrospect, that it's "Halloween", but I can't swear it's not "heroin".

The Examined Life

I have two jobs, as I've mentioned before. The common thread in the two of them is to use software to hold up a mirror to one's life in some aspect or other, and learn what it really looks like. "What is normal?" is the big question I find myself attempting to answer.

Now, like most people, I can answer specific questions to describe myself: I am 5'10" tall, weigh *cough* pounds, have black hair (mostly black, anyway), brown eyes, and a goatee. I wear glasses to correct for nearsightedness and astigmatism. These are all physical properties. Let's call it a 0th-order description of myself.

These things change over time, in ways that can be measured. My hair is getting progressively whiter as time goes on. My height is more or less constant, my weight is, er, not. Let's call this a 1st-order description of myself. This is harder to measure, but can be done with some simple note-taking.

I could go further. My hair gets longer and shorter in cycles, according to my visits to the barber shop, for example. These cycles in turn may be lengthening as time goes on. This sort of thing is harder still to measure.

What about my behavior? Assume for the moment that the word "behavior" is well-defined, although it is not. I am sitting and using a web browser right now. Specifically, I am updating my blog, a 0th-order behavior. One could get a 1st-order behavior out of this by looking at my blog history, but this would at best be an approximation, under the assumption that all of my posts spring fully-formed out of my head and take only as long to write as they take to type, and that I do not throw away any half-written posts. (If only I threw away more, some of you complain...)

There are ways to capture this behavior a bit more exactly, and related behaviors besides. I could run network monitoring software of the type I write, which records open sessions between my laptop and the blogger.com server and plots them according to time. I could do this for Kingdom of Loathing, the New York Times, and other sites that I like. (In fact, I have, and if anyone's interested I could post graphs) People trying to make changes in their lives frequently look at this sort of 1st-order behavior as an impetus for change: "I drink how much?", &c. Similarly, it's hard to indicate progress in a running or diet regimen without this sort of measurement.

So, why not a more holistic way of measuring oneself? I'm constantly amazed by how many people think the idea is somehow creepy. We all own mirrors, despite what we look like at 6am. But then, maybe we'd shy away from it if we had to use photographs instead of mirrors. (We'd probably also shy away from shaving) Me, I'm curious.

Other people and groups have been thinking along these lines too, by the way. There was an excellent interactive graphic in the NY Times recently, the result of minute-by-minute surveys of people. Fun to poke around with, I wish I had a graph like that for myself.