Category: Ramblings

An allegory about third-party suppliers

Once upon a time, there was a very rich King. The King had many palaces throughout his country, but some were old and crumbling. “Build me a new palace!” he told his advisers. “Make it impressive, and make it big, for my family has grown large, and they expect greatness of me.”

The King’s advisers started on this task immediately. For months, they searched the land to find the perfect location for the new palace. Eventually they found a tall mountain, surrounded by forests, rivers, and splendid views of the countryside.

The advisers could not build the palace on their own, of course. But a tribe of cavemen lived nearby, and the cavemen were known for their construction skills and beautiful craftsmanship. “We want you to build a palace for our King,” said the chief adviser. “It must be impressive, and it must be big, for the King intends to entertain his whole family there.”

Continue reading “The King and the Cavemen”

Are people with photographic memory violating copyright when they watch a movie?

“Check and sign, please.” Thus goes the debit card mantra. I pass the shop assistant a copy of Bill Brysons’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. He scans the barcodes, and tippety-taps something on the cash register.

“That’ll be twelve pounds, please,” he says. I hand over my Switch card. He swipes it, and twirls it idly in his fingers while he waits for the network authorisation. The cash register spews out an itemised receipt, and a voucher for me to…

“Check and sign, please.”

Where’s the dotted line? There it is. I scrawl and scribble something that looks like india ink seeping into a cracked windscreen. I hand him back the pen and the signed slip. He compares it with the stylised and miniaturised version on the back of my card, and decides not to call his supervisor for a second opinion.

He pulls a plastic back from a pile under the counter, flaps it open, and slides the book inside. “Shall I just put the receipt in the bag?.”

“Nah,” I say, “I’ll get it in my wallet.” Along with dozens of other pink, green, blue and white slips recording my spending habits over the last couple of weeks.

“Cheers,” I say. “Thanks very much.” And the transaction is complete.

…or is it?

A couple of days later I was emptying out my wallet and bringing our accounts spreadsheet up to date. £31.45 at Safeway, £12.71 at ScotMid, £33 to renew my bus pass, and… hang on…. £120 for the Bill Bryson book?

When they say “Check and sign, please,” they mean that you should check the amount, and then sign the slip. Not just check to see where you have to put your autograph. I thought that barcode scanning took care of all these pricing issues, but apparently there’s still plenty of scope for human error.

The folk at Waterstones were very good about giving me a refund for the excess £108, and they all had a good giggle about it. So did I, once I had the money back.

Much though I hate gardening, it does get me out into the sunlight and the fresh air, and it gets me working with my hands rather than with my head. What happens then is that my minds starts wandering. It came up with a couple of interesting bits and pieces today:

Country names

Isn’t it funny how countries with adjectives in their names never seem to live up to those adjectives for any length of time? For example, the People’s Republic of China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Okay, so Northern Ireland remains a pretty accurate description. But I reckon that generally, countries should stick to old-fashioned, purely locale-based nation names. To do anything else is clearly tempting fate.

Cyberspace

William Gibson and other cyberpunk authors envisioned “cyberspace” as a separate environment, where people would exist as avatars of their real-world selves, wandering around in a 3D environment. But that’s not the way it’s turning out. It looks to me like cyberspace is just going to be an extension of the real world. Web sites, weblogs, chat rooms, instant messaging, texting on mobile phones…we don’t need a separate avatar to navigate these information spaces.

Cyberspace right now is made up of a series of windows on the real world, that allow us to see views, or facets, or aspects of people elsewhere. We don’t see the whole person, just the side of themselves they choose to expose to that particular window. Cyberspace is thus more like science-fictional hyperspace (or wormholes), existing purely to enable very fast point-to-point links, rather than being a habitable space in its own right.

Fiction

While uprooting a particularly vicious thistle larger than myself, a few disparate ideas that had been floating around in my head for a couple of years synthesized themselves into something that could make an interesting short story. This is the first time I’ve felt inclined to write any fiction in quite some time.

Maybe I should spend more time gardening. No, scratch that. Silly idea. I don’t think it’s the garden that makes the difference, I think it’s being away from the computer. Now that I’ve spent some time getting our garage tidied up, What I really ought to do is get my drums set up again. I’m feeling the need to hit some skins.

I suspect that many of you readers (yes, all three of you) will go “well, duh!” about this, but it was only last week that I figured out the significance of nuclear submarines. It’s the oxygen.

Diesel-powered submarines use combustion engines to provide power and charge the sub’s batteries. And just like every other combustion engine, they use a mixture of fuel and oxygen to run. Diesel fuel is stored on board, as is a certain amount of oxygen. But the crew on board use oxygen, too, and the engines use it up quickly. As a result, diesel subs have to surface regularly to refresh their air–both for the crew and for the engines.

Nuclear subs run on nuclear-powered engines. These engines use the heat of nuclear fission to drive steam turbines, which in turn charge the batteries. But this process doesn’t “burn” any fuel, and so doesn’t consume any (or much) oxygen. Which means that the oxygen stores on board can be used purely for for the crew. So a nuclear sub can stay underwater much longer than a conventional sub with the same amount of oxygen on board.

There’s also a matter of nuclear fuel being more compact than diesel, and nuclear engines being more efficient in their power output than diesel engines, but the real key is their ability to go stay under for longer. This provides a real strategic and tactical operational advantage. In the amazing book Body of Secrets, James Bamford describes how the USS Halfbeak, while on a spying mission off the northern coast of Russia, was forced to stay under water for just a matter of days:

“Eventually the oily air began turning thin and rancid. The captain passed the word to break out the carbon dioxide absorbent–cans of powder would be spread on bunks to help draw the deadly gas from the air. Nevertheless, the sub’s doctor warned that the oxygen levels were becoming dangerously low. Sailors, including Cassidy, passed out and had to be revived. Two large oxygen cannisters were placed in the central part of the sub, and it was suggested that those who felt faint should take a few deep breaths from the masks attached.”

Nuclear submarines can stay submerged for weeks rather than days.

Bamford’s book is a eye-popping must-read, and I’m only half-way through. I’ll write more about it once I’ve finished it.