Fantasist's Scroll

“To the stars through hardship.”

That’s roughly what Ad Astra Per Aspera means. I think the effort is worth it, though. There’s been a lot of talk lately about President Bush’s new space plan. Basically, his plan has two branches. First, establish a moon base. Second, send a manned mission to Mars.
This Wired News article talks about the first step, building a permanent moon base. This, of course, has been the dream of many of us since the very early days of space travel. I know that I’ve been waiting for it since I was a little kid. I even remember getting a book from a school book fair that had cardboard cut-out toys that which was all about a moon base. But, something happened. We lost our way and this dream got shelved. Now, President Bush has revived it. Let’s hope it stays alive.
The second part of the space plan is to send a manned mission to Mars. Again, a dream of many of us for many years. I started to think about this after I started listening to the environmentalists yapping about the state of the Earth’s ecology. In fact, I’ve said for years that if it’s so bad, we need to invest in getting off the planet! Now, it seems, we may.

Of course, there’s a lot of talk about how much this will all cost. Honestly, I’m not sure why it matters. It sure didn’t matter when we went to the moon. All that mattered was that we got there and beat everyone else. I’d say the same thing applies here, too. Now we have to compete with the Chinese and the Indians, who both have viable space programs. Sure, the front-runners are the Chinese who have only recently put an astronaut in space, but still, they’re gaining. We need to beat them to the Red Planet. I mean, c’mon. “The Red Planet”? How can we pass up the chance to make headlines about beating the Red Chinese to the Red Planet?
Seriously, maybe some good, old-fashioned competition can restore our country to the greatness we once enjoyed. I sure hope so. And, I’d love to get a call from a grandkid on Mars.

Er, a mechanical dog for the military?

Okay, I’m not sure why they don’t use the real thing, but according to this story on WiredNews, the US military is working on building, essentially a robotic dog. The idea is to have a robot that can carry more of the soldier’s gear and still be able to keep up with them over rough terrain. Interesting, but the robot looks like a clunky, mechanical dog. The article even makes the comparison. Seems to me, with all the problems that they seem to be having creating this robotic helper, it would be better to stick with the K-9 units. But, then, I’m an old-fashioned guy.
In any case, it’s an interesting story.

Oy! I finally get it!

This morning, while thinking like Martin Luther, it occurred to me why I have trouble with some of my fellow conlangers. It’s a simple difference of philosophy. They are opposed to my automated tools on the basis that they somehow degrade the “art” of conlanging. I think, to them, that the process of conlanging is the whole point.
To me, though, a constructed language isn’t relavent without a constructed culture to go with it. That is the fun of conlanging for me. Seeing the interplay of culture and language in a new way, or even an old way that I’m controlling, is the fun thing. The language creation itself is just a means to an end, so it only makes sense to me to crank it out as quickly as possible.

It’s interesting that this never occured to me before. Of course, I may have been so busy being defensive that I didn’t take the time to figure out what was going on. And, I have to admit, I let my temper get the best of me. I got irritated with the snobbery I percieved in the arguments I heard against using automation. I guess technology has become such a part of my life that I take for granted what it can do for me and that not everyone else exploits it the way I do. Go figure.
Anyway, I thought it was an interesting observation….

“Now, Jim will wrestle the wild book, while I stand here sipping tea in safety.”

Remember Wild Kingdom? Where poor Jim had to wrestle the deadly anaconda, while Marlon Perkins stayed all nice and safe with the camera crew? Remember Jacques Cousteau chasing the “wiley and elusive” sea creature of the moment? Well, now you can watch books in the wild, too. Okay, that was a goofy lead-in to this, but bear with me.
While I was looking for something else on the Internet the other day, I came accross something called BookCrossing. It’s a simple concept, really. Just mark a book with information about the service, register it on their website, then, set the book loose “in the wild”. Now, as people read the book, they sign into the website and journal about it. They might review it or just talk about where they found it or whatever. Then, they pass it on to another person or location. Rinse, repeat. So it goes, ad infinitum, supposedly. I have to admit, it might be an interesting experiment to try. I wonder where the book might travel and who might read it. Following a book like that might make for some interesting fiction, too. The Life and Travels of a Book

Well, whatever, I thought it was cool, so I decided to share. Enjoy!

It’s here!

Good or bad, biometrics has hit the retail markets. I’m not talking about those keyboards that have a thumbprint reader to unlock your PC either. I mean that there are retail establishments that are testing pay-by-thumbprint, right now! There’s an entry on Slashdot that has links to both the good, and the bad, side to this technology. Frankly, it’s the dark side that I find the most interesting.
Ever seen Minority Report? If not, you need to see it for just this. Picture being tracked through a shopping mall via biometrics, with advertising targeted to you and calling you by name. To borrow an overused marketing phrase, it’ll take spamming to a “whole new level”. Ubiquitous computing? Forget that. Ubiquitous advertsing. That’s a more likely scenario by far. I shudder at what this will do to our world. And, I can already see a steep rise in amputation related crimes. You thought identity theft was bad in our time? Wait until people are stealling thumbs!

(And, yes, I posted this on my other blog first.)

I see a disturbing trend…

I spent a little too much quality time on a conlang BBS this week. Well, it’s not a real BBS, but it’s one of those new-fangled, PHP-based web-BBS things. I hate them. I much, much prefer the old-fashioned e-mail list or newsgroup.
Anyway, I got all wrapped up in a discussion about the virtues, or lack thereof, in automated word generators. It started with someone reccomending my old generator, which is really based on code from Chris Pound. Well, someone complained that it would be nice to be able to specify the phonology of the words to be generated. So I worked for several months at PERL and finally coded up my Conlang Wordmaker, which will look really familiar to people who have used Langmaker. Well, when I posted that, it sparked a number of things, but one person made the comment that they “damn well would never use a word generator” to make their conlang. Well, that sort of irritated me. And, when I get irritated before my morning coffee, I tend to type rather sharp replies.

But, sharp replies aside, what’s wrong with using a word generator? I mean, a piece of beautiful furnature that was assembled with power tools isn’t any less beautiful, is it? Is something done by hand, in the slowest, hardest way possible, inherently more worthy of praise? I don’t think so, but apparently quite a few conlangers do seem to think so. And, as I’ve poked around the web, it seems to be a sentiment that conlang people in general have taken to be a Universal Truth. But, why?

I think it’s because so many of them are, or were, linguists or linguistics students. Academia is anchored to a rigid system of learning that tends to insist people follow certain patterns. I have a college degree, but most of what I know that I truly prize, I learned on my own far, far away from a classroom. I think far outside the box that academia tends to force scholarship into. For instance, in learning things like PERL, I learned that whichever way works, is a good enough way. Sure, there may be other ways, but if it works, it’s good enough way. So, too, in my “day job”. I manage servers in a corporate envrionment, so I often don’t have time to find the “best” way. I have to make it work, usually on a budget, quickly. I apply that maxim everywhere in my life.
So, how does that relate to conlanging? Well, I’m not really too hung up on phonology or morphology. I don’t care to spend hours upon hours making a rigid, highly technical scheme of phonology and morphology. It matters more to me how the language sounds. If I’m looking for something that sounds a little bit like Cantonese as spoken by a Polyneasean, what difference does it make how the words are formed? All that matters is that I get my end result, a conlang that sounds right.

I’m not in favor of form over function. I never have been. For most things, I’d rather it get done quick and dirty than never get done at all. So, I’m in favor of using whatever tools get the job done for a conlang. I don’t care if you steal words from a natural language and “mutate” them into a new conlang. Do whatever it takes to make a language that adds that realism to your fiction! What matters isn’t the process, but the art that you create!

No, not a computer virus.

That’s right a real, live virus that was created in a lab. According to this article on USA Today, such a thing now exists. Once confined to the slum of science-fiction, completely artificial virii now exist. Thursday, November 13, a team lead by Craig Venter announced that they had created an artificial virus based on a real one in just two weeks’ time.
Now, at this point all they did was make a virus that infected bacteria, but how long before they’re moving on? Where will it end? With a “flu” like Stephen King imagined in The Stand? Or will it be more subtle than that? Or less?
Will we eventually feel that it’s okay to “manufacture” animals through the same process? Will we make unicorns and minotaurs? Where do you draw the line?
I sure don’t know, but it’s a little more confusing now that the line has been redrawn for us. The only good thing about all this is that it gives science-fiction writers a whole lot more to write about!

Okay, this rocks!

According to this article on IGN.com, Farscape is making a comeback. There’ve been rumors, but now the production office “down under” has actually opened up again and work has started. Now, rumor has it that the new project is a mini-series, not a full-blown series, but still, it’s something! I mean I really hated how the series just ended without resolving anything.
Another interesting tidbit is that this will be a project totally independant of the SciFi Channel, who broadcast the original series. That, of course, begs the question: Where will the series run? If it runs on the SciFi Channel, I hope they get gouged on the price. It would be poetic justice if they spent more on the mini-series than it would have cost to finish the last season. In any case, it’ll be cool to see the show again.