- Bova, Ben.
Mercury.
New York: Tor, 2005.
ISBN 0-7653-4314-2.
-
I hadn't read anything by
Ben Bova in years—certainly
not since 1990. I always used to think of him as a journeyman
science fiction writer, cranking out enjoyable stories mostly
toward the hard end of the science fiction spectrum, but not
a grand master of the calibre of, say, Heinlein, Clarke, and Niven.
His stint as editor of
Analog
was admirable, proving himself a worthy successor to John W. Campbell, who
developed the authors of the golden age of science
fiction. Bova is also a prolific essayist on science, writing, and
other topics, and his January 1965 Analog article
“It's Done with Mirrors” with William F. Dawson may have
been one of the earliest proposals of a multiply-connected
small universe cosmological model.
I don't read a lot of fiction these days, and tend to lose
track of authors, so when I came across this book in an
airport departure lounge and noticed it was published in
2005, my first reaction was, “Gosh, is he still writing?”
(Bova was born in 1932, and his first novel was published in
1959.) The
U.K. paperback edition was featured
in a “buy one, get one free” bin, so how could I
resist?
I ought to strengthen my resistance. This novel is so execrably bad
that several times in the process of reading it I was tempted to rip
it to bits and burn them to ensure nobody else would have to
suffer the experience. There is nothing whatsoever redeeming
about this book. The plot is a conventional love triangle/revenge
tale. The only thing that makes it science fiction at all is
that it's set in the future and involves bases on Mercury, space
elevators, and asteroid mining, but these are just backdrops for a
story which could take place anywhere. Notwithstanding the
title, which places it within the author's “Grand Tour”
series, only about half of the story takes place on Mercury,
whose particulars play only a small part.
Did I mention the writing? No, I guess I was trying to forget it.
Each character, even throw-away figures who appear only in a
single chapter, is introduced by a little sketch which reads
like something produced by filling out a form. For example,
Jacqueline Wexler was such an administrator. Gracious
and charming in public, accommodating and willing to
compromise at meetings, she nevertheless had the steel-hard
will and sharp intellect to drive the ICU's ramshackle
collection of egos toward goals that she herself selected.
Widely known as ‘Attila the Honey,’ Wexler
was all sweetness and smiles on the outside, and ruthless
determination within.
After spending a third of page 70 on this paragraph, which makes my
teeth ache just to re-read, the formidable Ms. Wexler walks off stage
before the end of p. 71, never to re-appear. But fear not (or
fear), there are many, many more such paragraphs in
subsequent pages.
An Earth-based space elevator, a science fiction staple, is central
to the plot, and here Bova bungles the elementary science of
such a structure in a laugh-out-loud chapter in which the
three principal characters ride the elevator to a platform
located at the low Earth orbit altitude of 500 kilometres.
Upon arrival there, they find themselves weightless,
while in reality the force of gravity would be imperceptibly
less than on the surface of the Earth! Objects in orbit are
weightless because their horizontal velocity cancels Earth's
gravity, but a station at 500 kilometres is travelling only
at the speed of the Earth's rotation, which is less than
1/16 of orbital velocity. The only place on a space elevator
where weightlessness would be experienced is the portion
where orbital velocity equals Earth's rotation rate, and that
is at the anchor point at geosynchronous altitude. This is not
a small detail; it is central to the physics, engineering, and
economics of space elevators, and it figured prominently
in Arthur C. Clarke's 1979 novel
The Fountains of Paradise
which is alluded to here on p. 140.
Nor does Bova restrain himself from what is becoming a
science fiction cliché of the first magnitude:
“nano-magic”. This is my term for using the
“nano” prefix the way bad fantasy authors
use “magic”. For example, Lord Hacksalot
draws his sword and cuts down a mighty oak tree with a
single blow, smashing the wall of the evil prince's castle. The
editor says, “Look, you can't cut down an oak
tree with a single swing of a sword.” Author:
“But it's a magic sword.”
On p. 258 the principal character is traversing a
tether between two parts of a ship in the asteroid
belt which, for some reason, the author believes is
filled with deadly radiation. “With nothing
protecting him except the flimsy…suit, Bracknell felt like
a turkey wrapped in a plastic bag inside a microwave oven.
He knew that high-energy radiation was sleeting down on
him from the pale, distant Sun and still-more-distant stars.
He hoped that suit's radiation protection was as good as
the manufacturer claimed.” Imaginary editor (who
clearly never read this manuscript): “But the only
thing which can shield you from heavy primary cosmic rays
is mass, and lots of it. No ‘flimsy suit’
however it's made, can protect you against iron nuclei incoming
near the speed of light.” Author: “But it's a nano
suit!”
Not only is the science wrong, the fiction is equally lame. Characters
simply don't behave as people do in the real world, nor are events and
their consequences plausible. We are expected to believe that the
causes of and blame for a technological catastrophe which killed millions
would be left to be decided by a criminal trial of a single individual
in Ecuador without any independent investigation. Or that a conspiracy
to cause said disaster involving a Japanese mega-corporation, two
mass religious movements, rogue nanotechnologists, and numerous
others could be organised, executed, and subsequently kept secret
for a decade. The dénouement
hinges on a coincidence so fantastically improbable that the
plausibility of the plot would be improved were the direct intervention
of God Almighty posited instead.
Whatever became of Ben Bova, whose science was scientific and whose
fiction was fun to read? It would be uncharitable to attribute this
waste of ink and paper to age, as many science fictioneers with far
more years on the clock have penned genuine classics. But
look at this! Researching the author's biography, I
discovered that in 1996, at the age of 64, he received a doctorate in
education from
California Coast University,
a “distance learning” institution. Now, remember back
when you were in engineering school struggling with thermogoddamics
and fluid mechanics how you regarded the student body of the Ed
school? Well, I always assumed it was a selection effect—those
who can do, and those who can't…anyway, it never occurred to me that
somewhere in that dark, lowering building they had a nano
brain mushifier which turned the earnest students who wished to
dedicate their careers to educating the next generation into the
cognitively challenged classes they graduated. I used to look forward
to reading anything by Ben Bova; I shall, however, forgo
further works by the present Doctor of Education.
- Gershenfeld, Neil.
Fab.
New York: Basic Books, 2005.
ISBN 0-465-02745-8.
-
Once, every decade or so, you encounter a book which empowers
you in ways you never imagined before you opened it, and
ultimately changes your life. This is one of those books.
I am who I am (not to sound too much like Popeye) largely
because in the fall of 1967 I happened to read Daniel McCracken's
FORTRAN book and realised that there was
nothing complicated at all about programming computers—it was a
vocational skill that anybody could learn, much like
operating a machine tool. (Of course, as you get deeper into the
craft, you discover there is a great body of theory to master, but
there's much you can accomplish if you're willing to work hard and
learn on the job before you tackle the more abstract aspects of the
art.) But this was not only something that I could do but,
more importantly, I could learn by doing—and that's how I decided
to spend the rest of my professional life and I've never regretted having
done so. I've never met a genuinely creative person who wished to
spend a nanosecond in a classroom downloading received wisdom at
dial-up modem bandwidth. In fact, I suspect the absence of such
people in the general population is due to the pernicious effects
of the Bismarck worker-bee indoctrination to which the youth of most
“developed” societies are subjected today.
We all know that, some day, society will pass through the nanotechnological
singularity, after which we'll be
eternally free,
eternally young,
immortal, and incalculably rich: hey—works for me! But few
people realise that if
the age of globalised mass production is analogous to that of
mainframe computers
and if the
desktop
nano-fabricator is
equivalent to today's personal supercomputer, we're already
in the equivalent of the minicomputer age of personal fabrication.
Remember minicomputers? Not too large, not too small, and hence difficult
to classify: too expensive for most people to buy, but within the
budget of groups far smaller than the governments and large
businesses who could afford mainframes.
The minicomputer age of personal fabrication is as messy as the
architecture of minicomputers of four decades before: there are lots
of different approaches, standards, interfaces, all mutually
incompatible: isn't innovation wonderful? Well, in this sense
no!
But it's here, now. For a sum in the tens of
thousands of U.S. dollars, it is now possible to equip a
“Fab Lab” which can make “almost anything”.
Such a lab can fit into a modestly sized room, and, provided with
electrical power and an Internet connection, can empower whoever
crosses its threshold to create whatever their imagination can
conceive. In just a few minutes, their dream can become
tangible hardware in the real world.
The personal computer revolution empowered almost anybody (at least
in the developed world) to create whatever information processing
technology their minds could imagine, on their own, or in collaboration
with others. The Internet expanded the scope of this collaboration
and connectivity around the globe: people who have never met one another
are now working together to create software which will be used by
people who have never met the authors to everybody's mutual benefit. Well,
software is cool, but imagine if this extended to stuff. That's
what Fab is about. SourceForge
currently hosts more than 135,500 software development projects—imagine
what will happen when StuffForge.net (the name is still available, as I
type this sentence!) hosts millions of OpenStuff things you can
download to your local Fab Lab, make, and incorporate
into inventions of your own imagination. This is the grand roll-back of
the industrial revolution, the negation of globalisation: individuals,
all around the world, creating for themselves products tailored to their
own personal needs and those of their communities, drawing upon the freely
shared wisdom and experience of their peers around the globe. What a beautiful
world it will be!
Cynics will say, “Sure, it can work at MIT—you have one of the most
talented student bodies on the planet, supported by a faculty which excels in
almost every discipline, and an industrial plant with bleeding edge fabrication
technologies of all kinds.” Well, yes, it works there. But the most inspirational
thing about this book is that it seems to work everywhere: not just at MIT
but also in South Boston, rural India, Norway far north of the Arctic Circle,
Ghana, and Costa Rica—build it and they will make. At times the
author seems unduly amazed that folks without formal education and the advantages
of a student at MIT can imagine, design, fabricate, and apply a solution to
a problem in their own lives. But we're human beings—tool-making
primates who've prospered by figuring things out and finding ways to make
our lives easier by building tools. Is it so surprising that putting the
most modern tools into the hands of people who daily confront the most
fundamental problems of existence (access to clean water, food, energy, and
information) will yield innovations which surprise even professors at
MIT?
This book is so great, and so inspiring, that I will give the author a
pass on his clueless attack on AutoCAD's (never attributed) DXF file
format on pp. 46–47, noting simply that the answer to why
it's called “DXF” is that Lotus had already used
“DIF” for their spreadsheet interchange files and
we didn't want to create confusion with their file format, and that
the reason there's more than one code for an X co-ordinate is that
many geometrical objects require more than one X co-ordinate to define them
(well, duh).
The author also totally gets what I've been talking about
since Unicard and
even before that as “Gizmos”, that
every single device in the world, and every button on every
device will eventually have its own (IPv6) Internet address and be
able to interact with every other such object in every way that makes
sense. I envisioned MIDI networks as the cheapest way to implement
this bottom-feeder light-switch to light-bulb network; the author,
a decade later, opts for a PCM “Internet 0”—works for
me. The medium doesn't matter; it's that the message makes it end
to end so cheaply that you can ignore the cost of the interconnection
that ultimately matters.
The author closes the book with the invitation:
Finally, demand for fab labs as a research project, as a collection
of capabilities, as a network of facilities, and even as a technological
empowerment movement is growing beyond what can be handled by
the initial collection of people and institutional partners that were
involved in launching them. I/we welcome your thoughts on, and
participation in, shaping their future operational, organizational, and
technological form.
Well, I am but a
humble
programmer, but here's how I'd go about it. First of all, I'd create a
“Fabrication Trailer“ which could visit every community in the
United States, Canada, and Mexico; I'd send it out on the road in every
MIT vacation season to preach the evangel of “make” to every
community it visited. In, say, one of eighty of such communities, one would find
a person who dreamed of this happening in his or her lifetime who was empowered by
seeing it happen; provide them a template which, by writing a cheque, can
replicate the fab and watch it spread. And as it spreads, and creates
wealth, it will spawn other Fab Labs.
Then, after it's perfected in a couple of hundred North American
copies, design a Fab Lab that fits into an ocean cargo container and
can be shipped anywhere. If there isn't electricity and Internet
connectivity, also deliver the diesel generator or solar panels and
satellite dish. Drop these into places where they're most needed,
along with a wonk who can bootstrap the locals into doing things with
these tools which astound even those who created them. Humans are
clever, tool-making primates; give us the tools to realise what we
imagine and then stand back and watch what happens!
The legacy media bombard us with conflict, murder, and mayhem. But the
future is about creation and construction. What does
An Army of
Davids do when they turn their creativity and ingenuity toward
creating solutions to problems perceived and addressed by individuals?
Why, they'll call it a renaissance! And that's exactly what it will be.
For more information, visit the Web site of
The Center for Bits and Atoms
at MIT, which the author directs. Fab
Central provides links to Fab Labs around the world, the
machines they use, and the
open source software
tools you can download and start using today.
- Milosz, Czeslaw.
The Captive Mind.
New York: Vintage, [1951, 1953, 1981] 1990.
ISBN 0-679-72856-2.
-
This book is an illuminating exploration of life in a
totalitarian society, written by a poet and acute
observer of humanity who lived under two
of the tyrannies of the twentieth century and briefly
served one of them. The author was born in Lithuania
in 1911 and studied at the university in Vilnius, a
city he describes (p. 135) as “ruled in turn
by the Russians, Germans, Lithuanians, Poles, again the
Lithuanians, again the Germans, and again the
Russians”—and now again the Lithuanians.
An ethnic Pole, he settled in Warsaw after graduation,
and witnessed the partition of Poland between Nazi
Germany and the Soviet Union at the outbreak of World War II,
conquest and occupation by Germany, “liberation”
by the Red Army, and the imposition of Stalinist rule
under the tutelage of Moscow. After working with the
underground press during the war, the author initially
supported the “people's government”, even
serving as a cultural attaché at the Polish embassies
in Washington and Paris. As Stalinist terror descended upon
Poland and the rigid dialectical “Method” was
imposed upon intellectual life, he saw tyranny ascendant once
again and chose exile in the West, initially in Paris
and finally the U.S., where he became a professor at
the University of California at Berkeley in 1961—imagine,
an anti-communist at Berkeley!
In this book, he explores the various ways in which the human soul
comes to terms with a regime which denies its very existence. Four
long chapters explore the careers of four Polish writers he denotes as
“Alpha” through “Delta” and the choices they
made when faced with a system which offered them substantial material
rewards in return for conformity with a rigid system which put them at
the service of the State, working toward ends prescribed by the
“Center” (Moscow). He likens acceptance of this bargain
to swallowing a mythical happiness pill, which, by eliminating the
irritations of creativity, scepticism, and morality, guarantees those
who take it a tranquil place in a well-ordered society. In a
powerful chapter titled “Ketman”—a Persian word
denoting fervent protestations of faith by nonbelievers, not only in
the interest of self-preservation, but of feeling superior to those
they so easily deceive—Milosz describes how an entire population can
become actors who feign belief in an ideology and pretend to believe
the earnest affirmations of orthodoxy on the part of others while
sharing scorn for the few true believers.
The author received the 1980
Nobel
Prize in Literature.
- Hawkins, Jeff with Sandra Blakeslee.
On Intelligence.
New York: Times Books, 2004.
ISBN 0-8050-7456-2.
-
Ever since the early days of research into the sub-topic
of computer science which styles itself “artificial
intelligence”, such work has been criticised by philosophers,
biologists, and neuroscientists who argue that while
symbolic manipulation, database retrieval, and logical
computation may be able to mimic, to some limited extent,
the behaviour of an intelligent being, in no case does
the computer understand the problem it is solving
in the sense a human does. John R. Searle's
“Chinese
Room” thought experiment is one of the best known
and extensively debated of these criticisms, but there are many
others just as cogent and difficult to refute.
These days, criticising artificial intelligence verges on
hunting cows with a bazooka—unlike the early days
in the 1950s when everybody expected the world chess championship
to be held by a computer within five or ten years and mathematicians
were fretting over what they'd do with their lives once computers
learnt to discover and prove theorems thousands of times faster
than they, decades of hype, fads, disappointment, and broken promises
have instilled some sense of reality into the expectations
most technical people have for “AI”, if not into those
working in the field and those they bamboozle with the sixth
(or is it the sixteenth) generation of AI bafflegab.
AI researchers sometimes defend their field by saying “If it
works, it isn't AI”, by which they mean that as soon as a
difficult problem once considered within the domain of
artificial intelligence—optical character recognition,
playing chess at the grandmaster level, recognising faces in
a crowd—is solved, it's no longer considered AI but simply
another computer application, leaving AI with the remaining
unsolved problems. There is certainly some truth in this, but
a closer look gives lie to the claim that these problems, solved
with enormous effort on the part of numerous researchers, and
with the application, in most cases, of computing power undreamed
of in the early days of AI, actually represents “intelligence”,
or at least what one regards as intelligent behaviour on the part of
a living brain.
First of all, in no case did a computer “learn” how to
solve these problems in the way a human or other organism does; in
every case experts analysed the specific problem domain in great detail,
developed special-purpose solutions tailored to the problem, and then
implemented them on computing hardware which in no way resembles the
human brain. Further, each of these “successes” of AI
is useless outside its narrow scope of application: a chess-playing computer
cannot read handwriting, a speech recognition program cannot identify
faces, and a natural language query program cannot solve mathematical
“word problems” which pose no difficulty to fourth graders.
And while many of these programs are said to be “trained” by
presenting them with collections of stimuli and desired responses,
no amount of such training will permit, say, an optical character
recognition program to learn to write limericks. Such programs
can certainly be useful, but nothing other than the fact that they
solve problems which were once considered difficult in an age when
computers were much slower and had limited memory resources justifies
calling them “intelligent”, and outside the marketing
department, few people would remotely consider them so.
The subject of this ambitious book is not “artificial intelligence”
but intelligence: the real thing, as manifested in the higher
cognitive processes of the mammalian brain, embodied, by all
the evidence, in the neocortex. One of the most fascinating things
about the neocortex is how much a creature can do without one,
for only mammals have them. Reptiles, birds, amphibians,
fish, and even insects (which barely have a brain at all) exhibit
complex behaviour, perception of and interaction with their
environment, and adaptation to an extent which puts to shame the
much-vaunted products of “artificial intelligence”, and
yet they all do so without a neocortex at all. In this book, the author
hypothesises that the neocortex evolved in mammals as an add-on
to the old brain (essentially, what computer architects would call a
“bag hanging on the side of the old machine”) which
implements a multi-level hierarchical associative memory for patterns
and a complementary decoder from patterns to detailed low-level
behaviour which, wired through the old brain to the sensory inputs and
motor controls, dynamically learns spatial and temporal patterns and
uses them to make predictions which are fed back to the lower levels
of the hierarchy, which in turns signals whether further inputs
confirm or deny them. The ability of the high-level cortex to
correctly predict inputs is what we call “understanding”
and it is something which no computer program is presently capable of
doing in the general case.
Much of the recent and present-day work in neuroscience has been
devoted to imaging where the brain processes various kinds of
information. While fascinating and useful, these investigations may
overlook one of the most striking things about the neocortex: that
almost every part of it, whether devoted to vision, hearing,
touch, speech, or motion appears to have more or less the same
structure. This observation, by Vernon B. Mountcastle in 1978,
suggests there may be a common cortical algorithm by
which all of these seemingly disparate forms of processing
are done. Consider: by the time sensory inputs reach the brain,
they are all in the form of spikes transmitted by neurons, and all
outputs are sent in the same form, regardless of their ultimate
effect. Further, evidence of plasticity in the cortex is abundant:
in cases of damage, the brain seems to be able to re-wire itself to
transfer a function to a different region of the cortex. In a long
(70 page) chapter, the author presents a sketchy model of what
such a common cortical algorithm might be, and how it may be implemented
within the known physiological structure of the cortex.
The author is a founder of
Palm Computing and
Handspring (which was subsequently acquired by Palm).
He subsequently founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, which
has now become part of the
Helen Wills Neuroscience
Institute at the University of California, Berkeley,
and in March of 2005 founded
Numenta, Inc. with the
goal of developing computer memory systems based on the model
of the neocortex presented in this book.
Some academic scientists may sniff at the pretensions of a (very
successful) entrepreneur diving into their speciality and trying to
figure out how the brain works at a high level. But, hey, nobody
else seems to be doing it—the computer scientists are
hacking away at their monster programs and parallel machines, the
brain community seems stuck on functional imaging (like trying to
reverse-engineer a
microprocessor in the nineteenth century by looking at its gross
chemical and electrical properties), and the neuron experts are off
dissecting squid: none of these seem likely to lead to an
understanding (there's that word again!) of what's actually going on
inside their own tenured, taxpayer-funded skulls. There is
undoubtedly much that is wrong in the author's speculations, but then
he admits that from the outset and, admirably, presents an appendix
containing eleven testable predictions, each of which can falsify all
or part of his theory. I've long suspected that intelligence has
more to do with memory
than computation, so I'll confess to being predisposed toward the
arguments presented here, but I'd be surprised if any reader didn't
find themselves thinking
about their own thought processes in a different way after reading this
book. You won't find the answers to the mysteries of the brain here,
but at least you'll discover many of the questions worth pondering,
and perhaps an idea or two worth exploring with the vast computing
power at the disposal of individuals today and the boundless resources
of data in all forms available on the Internet.