Science or Fiction?

All of us Space nuts know that what you really need to travel in space is a form of space drive that does not involve throwing matter out the back of your ship as rockets do. First, it is limited: once you run out of stuff to throw away, that's it.  Second, it means you need to keep lots of explosive, dangerous stuff in your ship while your drive is operating and as the stuff gets used up it changes the ship's performance.  Oh, and it's very limited.  If only we could just use energy itself to drive our ship through space we could equip it with generators, batteries and solar panels and just Go. No need to stop and refuel anywhere, no huge tanks of dangerous liquids required, just thrust at one gee aslong as you like and you can enjoy earth-normal gravity while getting there much, much faster than any rocket ship. 
Well the idea has been around for a long time, but recently people have claimed success doing just that: making a reactionless, exhaustless thruster.
Have a look here, and here courtesy WIRED.  To date, the total thrust output of the test devices is tiny, but even so, it already beats existing satellite systems and it never needs refuelling.  Then consider  the potential of a more advanced model using superconductors, which would work very well in space since the main requirement of superconductors as they are today is near- zero temperatures, which are already plentiful (as it were) in space.Provided you can take enough electric power with you, you can get anywhere in the solar system fast enough (and with artificial gravity, esssential for healthy humans) to do some proper exploring. Okay, so I am going out on alimb here postulating a reactionless thruster that can push one gee, but even with a lot lessthan that we could at least make a start. 

Then there is the backlash: according to some people this drive cannot work "because it disobeys Newton's laws of motion": Hilarious!  I don't care a damn what critics say: the proof is in the results and so far I can see that  there is a principle here that might work - and there are at least two science labs working on it so I think it will come to pass as real.  Actually, the very fact it does work will once again shake up the world of science and force people to question their blind assumptions.  Great!
Actually the "how" of it does not matter: only that it does. I recently read about big arguments by scieintific types about how ariplanes actually fly: the classical definition of how a wing profile generates lift is  not just open to argument, it cannot work that way: yet every day thousands of aricraft certainly do fly so it really does not matter so much - the truth seems to be a good deal more complex than the simple explanation I grew up with . . . . .

IT'S ROBOT SEASON AGAIN . . . . . .

You have been deceived: machines and robots will not "take your jobs", they are not capable of that.  Humans running Corporations and Governments are doing that. 

Once again, I read the same old fears and expectations about robots:

How they will take our jobs

How they will soon be so smart they will replace people

Where is the sense from these people?

Manufacturing truth and illusion

Myth No.1: Robots are about to take over production and will soon replace everyone in manufacturing.

It seems that some people believe what I call “The George Jetson Idea Of Automation”: in the cartoon, George goes to work every day and presses one button that starts the machinery of his employer. That's it, nothing more to do. I have followed automation for many years and have worked on automated production lines and machinery and none of them were ever like the George Jetson's world – or will be in the forseeable future.

First and most importantly, the machines are just not smart enough to work by themselves and at the rate of computer progress we see today they will not be smart enough to diagnose their own faults and correct them for a very, very long time.

Don't be fooled by application specific devices either: sure, Google can get a car to drive itself but that is after many humans spent millions of manhours developing it, and as of writing this, it is still in development – and this is application specific : you could not take that same computer driver and then throw it in an office chair and expect it to read and write reports. Computers are really, really dumb. They can only deal with things in their area of experience.

Every so-called automated machine needs human oversight. Not “should have”, must have: machinery and robots are not cheap and when they go wrong, they really mess things up.

There are ways to cut the number of human overseers and operators but these result in some very negative outcomes for the factory: first, you can set up your machines to only produce the same product over a long period – but you still need to check the output and make sure the machine is doing what it should, and even then, a company that produces exactly the same product year after year is unlikely to compete against other companies that constantly change theirs even if the changes are only cosmetic because humans like variety.

The very idea of manufactured items all coming off a production line all uniform and perfectly identical is a myth. Complex machines don't ever run smoothly for very long before they need human attention, often because the complexity means there are so many things that can vary but also because things shake, bend and wear and so the first fifty, hundred or thousand items might be fine but gradually the output will get worse and worse with no human overseer to stop the line and fix it.

What has really happened in manufacturing is that corporations that have no moral or national limitation have moved their production to wherever is cheapest for them, using the cheapest human labour possible to get the highest profit margin possible. 

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Myth No.2: Robots will soon be smart enough to replace humans in technical and engineering jobs.

Let's take a serious look at this: the claim is that computers will be “smart” enough to engineer products and processes and develop new products, their manufacturing lines and logistic and supply systems that will get those products to the end users.

Who writes this stuff? No computer has the capacity to do any of these things now and I don't see any in the near future either. Consider the matter of “artificial intelligence”. We don't know what intelligence is, so lets ignore that for now: consider the processing capacity of the human brain.

One estimate of note is that in 2002, if every computer in the world were connected together running the same master program, they would equal the processing power of one human brain. One. We don't know what that program would be, but we can be certain that even if we had a computer on our desk that had the processing power of a human brain (and the estimates of that vary too) it would be no use without the “program” that would make it “intelligent".

The companies making computer chips are not making endless progress toward faster and more complex computer chips because the nature of matter and energy create limits that are not easily avoided. Already they are looking to change the whole architecture of computer chips to get around the limitations of existing chip production. 

There is no “Moore's Law”: it is all marketing.

What we are is the result years of learning in a mobile body with sensory information coming in continuously and being handled in ways we don't understand which we then use to generate new actions and reactions. There may well be information and/or processing methods that are built in from conception but the nature of them is open to debate.

A second, and perhaps more important problem for robot makers of the future is memory capacity:

human memory is nothing like computer memory – the memory system of a human brain is mixed in with the thinking system, there is no discernible division of function unlike a computer. In computers, we have storage areas that are completely discrete from the processing area. Then there is memory reliability. In current computer systems, up to a quarter of the whole storage capacity of your computer is used to correct errant data and fix errors when they occur when copying or transferring data from one place to another. Human memory is far from perfect as any court case will remind you, but the method of storage is different.

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You have been deceived: machines and robots will not "take your jobs", they are not capable of that.  Humans running Corporations and governments do that. 

The real issue is what we humans will be doing in future for jobs and money.

Machines are very good at doing boring, repetitious and dangerous jobs for long hours - but they still need human oversight. . . . The REAL issue here is how we, the common and not-so-rich people, can survive in the future if sociopathic people and corporations have swallowed up our sources of income, work and contribution in their insane machinery of acquisition.

People need jobs. I know you might say “We don't need jobs, we just need money” - but in my experience, people need to contribute to society in some meaningful way, and recieve from it return. Those of us who have a sense of fairness and morality know that: even if it is trivial, actions that affirm our membership and right to contribute to, and receive goods and services from society keep us connected and sane.

Prevent people from participation in society and there won't be any society - or they will make their own new one.

Big business does not have the right to drain our society of income just so that we can all (well, those who still have money) buy cheaper appliances or furnishings.

Already small people have begun to create their own self-support groups, bypassing the Big Business funding and operation models that have cut them out of the services. I expect this to continue and expand - the test case is currency. If new electronic currency develops like it should, the Megabanks will be cut out of all the billions of small trades going on since they demand a fee for each trade – and by using blockchain currency e.g. bitcoin, they are not needed or wanted.

This could result in a two-level economic system where only the biggest trades will involve the old money while most of us use purely electronic currency for day-to-day trading. This creates a lot of questions, but for now I will only say that something must change, the only question is wether the change will be peaceful or bloody.

When an update isn't better

Well, I am pretty sure no-one Really Important reads this, but I just can't be bothered signing up for yet another site and seeing my post at no. 220 in a long list so here it is.
Call it a modern problem.

What I am referring to in the title is the new version of Mac OSX, "Yosemite". I always look at the websites that talk about this stuff,  partly for the improvements, but mostly for self-defence.
"Updates" are not always improvements, you see.

This one is definitely not: Apple has gone further in removing all aesthetic pleasure from their OS imagery and that alone is just plain stupid . . . if you look at your computer screen all day you want it to look at least pleasant - but Apple seems to be going backwards toward Windows 3 ugliness.
Of course, if there were features in the new version that made it essential or even desirable to get despite the ugliness I would reconsider but there aren't any, or at best none that I need.
Here I partly refer to iCloud. I have tried to find a way to take my iPhone's music off iCloud but it isn't there.  So far OSX does not force you to use iCloud for all your files but it may be coming.

Apple does not want anyone to make interface "improvements" or "skins' for their OSes so you can forget about "personalising" your OSX either.
At one time I had such and it was excellent, but that was back in the OS9 days, long, long ago - so we will once again get a new version with uglier interface and more features we didn't want (I mean iCloud. I don't care if other folks like it, I just want the choice to NOT use it.  I don't do anything criminal, but I like looking after my own stuff rather than hoping that the net and Apple will always be there.)

Don't get the idea that I will be sailing off to another OS any time soon though: you think they are better? Take a look at Windows 8: they had to bring out 8.1 because so many users had trouble using 8 because it didn't have a Start  Menu.  I won't go into any more now, just remember that everything is imperfect and sometimes making thengs better isn't the only element of the story.

All Trekked Out

Once upon a time there was a teevee show that appeared courtesy of Desilu and some guy name Rodenberry: it was originally supposed to be "covered wagons in outer space" - or so the rumour goes, that was how it was sold to the TV Execs . . . . . . but it was a whole lot more than that.
Okay, it was good:  In the world of crappy sixties television, it was freakin' amazing.

Around that time when I was about seven, BEFORE Star Wars existed, I tried to make my own spacesuit out of cardboard.  I stopped when I realised what people would say when they saw me walking around in it . . and because it was really, really hard to do too for a seven year old from a poor family. . but it was not a copy from some teevee show or movie, I just did it from my own imagination. There was a whole lot of boyhood in there too but that is beside the point here.  . . .

Now . . . . . . in the last few months I have seen not one but two fan-made remakes of the original Star Trek series appear. First, there was Star Trek Continues, and now there is another, Star Trek Phase 2.

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Am I the only one who thinks all this is way, waaay over the top?  Guys, WHY CAN'T YOU COME UP WITH SOMETHING ORIGINAL? Sure, it was good in a cheesy-effects-cardboard-sets-sixties kind of way but hey, that was fifty years ago ! How the frack did so-called sci-fi get so CONSERVATIVE?

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I don't pretend being original is easy, heck it takes more work, but shit, if you are doing Sci Fi stuff the essence of Sci Fi is to go outside the borders of boring old Earth life and explore NEW ideas !
Present things in a different setting or way to get people thinking in ways they wouldn't otherwise!

Oh, riiight, and I guess maybe I don't get the idea of fandom either: it's really about Big Commercial Operations that are only too happy for kids to dress up and promote their products at their own cost. 

Sigh.  Well, I've got to get back to work making my own little ORIGINAL comic/graphic novel.




 

Science is now magic

Back in the eighties I bought a mailorder book of "free energy" patents and other inventions from the US and included was the Howard Johnson patent for a purely magnetic motor. I didn't have the time or money to attempt a replication of it but the idea has always been there.  I have messed with my own relatively primitive ideas of magnetic devices but had no success since I didn't even have the equipment to make proper machines let alone the right principle unlike Howard.
I have never seen a video of it working before though and that always created a sense of doubt . . . . .

Here it is, from Mike at Quanta Magnetics. His more recent efforts are very, very interesting too.  If I had the money and time I would have built one of his Resonance Generators already.

How do I know this stuff works?
First, lots of background experience: as a child, mucking around with electric motors, batteries, magnets, etc. etc. It seems that nowadays there are too many children who don't get to experiment with real stuff and so don't have a real grasp of physics  - so they equate it with magic.
They might get a computer program that simulates electronics instead and think that will tell them what it is really about . . . . scary.

Then there is the understanding of science, what it is, and just as important what it is not: much of science research is done in the pay of corporate or industrial concerns to improve their devices or at least improve their bottom line, NOT for the benefit of people in general and not for the discovery of new or different ways of doing things.

 Finally, there is a clear understanding of reality: science can only discover what is real, and the real universe does not change simply because someone wants it to.

There are an endless series of fake or fail "free energy" vids on YouTube, but this one is not. It is easy for people who have not spent the time and energy to claim things are fake because they could not make it work in their garage - but that does not make it a fake. How many people could make a working electric motor in their garage from raw metal and wire? It really is not as easy as you might think to make devices that work, let alone work long term.
I would point people here to the Mythbusters TV show and specifically the "Gorn Cannon" episode: modern people attempted to make a gunpowder cannon from raw materials, and these were not stupid people either - and they could not even get gunpowder that exploded. It really is not easy unless you have the knowledge, experience and the right resources.

It is painful for me to point this out but I am spelling it out because I am fed up with people who have so little idea of science that they equate it with magic.

The main problem as I see it is that too many humans get all caught up in how great they are rather than giving due credit to the long, hard work of others who have come before.  It has been known since at least as early as the fifties that the oil WILL run out, that the environment is getting damaged by all our pollution and that we need to do something about all this or we will end up like Venus - and solutions have been found, but where are they? The only ones that have been put into practice so far  have either been half-done or have made little difference because huge powerful interests don't want to change things. Batteries that don't run out don't make profit for that manufacturers so if they were invented they would swiftly disappear.

Have a go: build yourself an electric motor that actually works, just a couple of AA batteries will be enough power - get some real world experience of physics and you might just be able to find something other have missed in their rush to make a fast buck while ignoring the future consequences of a half-arsed invention.  But don't expect millions of dollars or public acclaim.

More fun stuff

As stated in my previous post I have been watching a lot of Anime vids lately, mostly from YouTube: I got a treadmill and it is almost essential to me to find something to watch lasting twenty to twentyfive minutes while I stomp and sweat: it is so much easier to make it to the twenty plus minutes when you have something to distract you.  

And now for something completely different:

Mel Brooks

I stumbled on to this vid recently that does not appear in his movie "The Producers" (although it looks like it could) but it is so fabulously awful I just can't resist linking it here. Disco and rap as you have never seen it before . . . . . .

Mel also made Blazing Saddles, Young Frankestein and of course the Get Smart series with Buck Henry.
Mel has always been at his best taking the mickey out of racists and bigots, while making us laugh about it: we need more poeple like Mel around.

Anime Top List No.1

I have spent some time looking at Anime recently and there are a lot of bad ones so I thought I might offer a few that are really good (as in more than just machines blowing each other up or superteens with giant eyes and 5 yeear old personalities).
Of course this list has a general sci-fi flavour to it but that's just my preference. 

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***** Mobile Suit Gundam - The 08th MS Team (Series) : This is excellent. It has gundam battles, sure, but it also has a well written story and some really good scenes. Unlike any of the other Gundam videos I have seen. I wish there were more like this.

***** Un-Go (Series) Actually not scifi, more spook-fi or something like that but it didn't matter: it is so well made that it kept me watching until the last episode, and after I was still hoping that more would turn up. Make sure you watch episode 0 (zero) first.
*** Galaxy Express 999 : An older movie,  a boy's adventure during which he attains wisdom.

** Space Battleship Yamato : okay, this one is just plain weird in places, you wonder if it will make sense but in the end it does.  Why Yamato?  I guess it is something very Japanese . . . . it does look great flying thourough space though.  My only question is what the extra bridge underneath the ship was for. (You need to see the movie to get the reference I guess)
 
**** No. 6 (Series) Post- apocalypse story set in and around an artfifcially perfect city called No.6.
Due to copyright restrictions I could not see the last four minutes of the final episode but that's okay I guess - if you really want the whole thing, buy it.

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All of these were what I could find for free on YouTube. I have no intention of supporting piracy or copyright violations  - I am just saying these are great.  More when I find them.

Mobile Suit Gundam - The 08th Team