And now, something for the Giant Robots’ Debating Society

Filed under Works in Progress

In arguments, as in most things in life, there’s a decided advantage to being a Giant Robot.

I don’t claim that this is fair.

Some of us, despite our rigorous attention to logic and rhetoric; despite our faithful attendance at the debate club; completely without reference to our careful preparation and well-reasoned arguments, were simply not born with gigantic cannons mounted in our chests. Through no fault (or merit) of our own, our fists are not five hundred pound mallets made for mayhem.

It’s not a level playing field, in other words.

All I can say is: buck up, keep a stiff upper lip, and be prepared to run through the streets while you shriek like the teakettle of doom.

I nearly didn’t complete this one because it could be too true to be funny.

But I did complete it, possibly to make sure that even argumentative Giant Robots can have their day, their t-shirt, and their poster. And since Giant Robots come in every size, shape, and disposition, there are shirts for men, women, and kids.

Please remember, though, that even if you have fists like five hundred pound mallets made for mayhem… you don’t have to use them.

David Walton’s Superposition bridges quantum and classical physics, right across the valley of courtroom drama

Filed under Reading / Watching / Consuming

David Walton’s Superposition is a book that offers lots of fun, from experiments in a supercollider to courtroom drama, with each of those threads entangled by a technology that projects quantum effects up to the classic, Newtonian scale. It’s fun for the reader, I mean; it’s more like the opposite of fun for its characters.

It’s hard to get specific here without being spoilery.

Once you’ve read the first few chapters you’ll understand one of the fundamental things about the book; like most everything else, this hangs on an effect of quantum physics. You won’t be sure how much more of that you’ll encounter as you go on.

The book could be seen as an expansion on the famous thought experiment of Schrödinger’s Cat – which is described, at one point – and the reader has to keep wondering just how many probability waves are collapsing (or not collapsing) as time goes on.

You ought to expect a certain amount of handwavery here, seeing as we don’t actually know how to edit the laws of physics on a local scale. This technology isn’t understood by the characters, either, so it gets a convenient pass. I was left wondering a bit about how a part of their own technology (“smart paper”) can run software that projects its effects into the physical world. This was a small, nagging bit that did bother me.

But by the time that comes up we’ve seen so much that’s (reasonably) inexplicable that this may not trouble everyone. Quantum theory itself is described in terms that even a common mortal – me – can understand. But what it does…!

Another lovely part of the book is also tied up with spoilers, but it concerns the family relationships that are wounded, patched up, and sometimes survive while the structure of reality is torn one way or the other. Superposition succeeds on levels that aren’t limited to the quantum and classical.

This is the first book of Walton’s that I’ve read, but I’m now looking forward to its sequel (Supersymmetry) as well as Quintessence, an Age of Exploration tale in which science has proved that the world is flat.

If you can read this line, the experiment will now begin

Filed under Works in Progress

Standard Agreement for Visitors
to this Establishment:

By entering this laboratory and reading this sign, you have irrevocably and permanently (not to say, voluntarily) relinquished all and every means of remedy or remediation regarding any action by the occupant, including (but not limited to) any and all forms of behavior that may be considered to be violations of your “basic human rights” whether through common usage or through action, definition, or establishment of law.

Now, if you’ll just step on the red “X” and hold your breath for a moment, we will begin.

The cause of Science (Mad) thanks you for your cooperation in this matter, and during any event that is about to occur. Which will be awesome.

Once again, my dear experimental subject, you are invited to drape your comely torso with this handsome and practical garment from the Retropolis Transit Authority. It functions as a perfectly usable and possibly a legally binding EULA, to serve at once the interests of Science and Amusement.

As do we all.

An Amazing UFO (or ringed planet) lamp from High Desert Dreams; also I invent words, possibly Welsh

Filed under Found on the Web

This isn’t the first time I’ve linked to the Etsy shop called High Desert Dreams, and it may not be the last, either, unless I somehow fill my house with lamps that look like retro rocket ships and flickering, high-stakes laboratory lights.

But, for today, it’s the nowth time I’ve linked there. You may tell me that nowth isn’t a word. It should be. If that makes you uncomfortable, you can try spelling it nwydd, and we’ll pretend that it’s Welsh.

With that settled, then, treat yourself to a look at the UFO table lamp pictured above. I thought it was a ringed planet lamp; in this I was mistaken. For the nowth time.

Six city plans from the retro future, via Web Urbanist

Filed under Found on the Web

Web Urbanist goes retro-futuristic in this short series of city planning visions for five American cities – and one imaginary one.

It’s good to know that – this being the future – we’re all zooming around San Francisco in our (patented!) flying saucers; Columbus will, by now, have floating skyscrapers in a very nearly Retropolitan setting; and Manhattan gets a familiar, multi-tiered layout to accommodate air traffic, cargo hauling, and trains.

Houston (left) will obviously have at least one Hugh Ferriss building. In other words, pretty much what we ought to expect – with one exception. Where are the greenbelts?

‘Cause you just can’t have a retro-futuristic megacity without its essential farmlands, dairies, and orchards.

Cities like this nearly make sense. But if you’re still trucking in your food from distant farming communities then you’ve got some shocking waste of energy. You will also have created two societies instead of one, where the cities get everything they need from the farms and the farms get more or less exactly what they have today.

So get those greenbelts in there. We really need ’em, no matter how many flying cars we have.

The Retropolis Rocket Works (noun, not verb)

Filed under Works in Progress

The most anticipated event of every year is the “Rockets of Tomorrow!” exhibition by the Retropolis Rocket Works. That’s the show where we find out what exciting new models are about to pour off the production lines at one of the city’s most famous factories.

And what a show it is! In recent years visitors went agog over the introduction of the Pulsating Phaeton, the Auburn Beauty Six, and the Morgan Plus Forty-Eight.

And even in those years when we haven’t seen a major model launched the Rocket Works has always shown us fantastic advancements and new features for their existing lines, offering what Brooks Stevens has called:

“…something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.”

It may be a little sooner than is necessary… but we can’t wait to get ’em!

Brooks Stevens’ idea of planned obsolescence was a pretty benevolent one, when compared with the reality we’ve come to know and hate – the reality in which things are designed to last slightly longer than their warranties, I mean. But since we can ignore The Present We Really Have for the moment, let’s enjoy the gradual and steady improvement of things in The Future That Never Was.

And the point of that enjoyment, once again, is a new version of a Retropolis Transit Authority staple: the Retropolis Rocket Works t-shirt, poster, coffee mug, and mousepad.

And although I published them with less than a whisper, there are also thirteen (count ’em, thirteen!) new business card designs at Retropolis, too. From even more retro rockets through a variety of characters laboring away on mechanical typewriters; mad scientists of two genders; and some other odds and ends, as well. Because your business card should be as peculiar as you are. I’m here to help.

Some concerns about recent advances in the science of robotics

Filed under Can't Stop Thinking

Sometimes I feel a little guilty about my mad scientists of Retropolis. That’s because I don’t normally think that our scientists are mad. Not, you know, muahahahaha, you cannot escape my Dessicating Diffracto-Ray mad.

But I have to say that any time the death rays and the giant robots and the curiously effective molecular destabilizers begin to get me down, I remind myself that there are avenues of research in our own Earth that are, to put it plainly, absolutely and positively demented. No. That’s not plain enough. What I mean is: bug-loving, glands to the wall crazy. Which is nearly plain enough.

For example, let’s look at robotics.

Recent advances in robotics include building robots that are fueled by meat. Wow, that’s nuts, right? So they did it again. With corpses.

But fueling robots with meat is pretty harmless, so long as robots can’t detect meat. So let’s make sure they can. In fact, let’s teach them to flense and debone meat. That’s better!

So now that the robots know how to prepare and eat meat, let’s ask them what they think of us, shall we? According to the robots, we are bacon. Mmmmm. Bacon.

But we shouldn’t worry, should we? At least they can’t escape. Oh, no, wait.

Okay. That is a little distressing. Shall we recap, then? We have built robots that are fueled by meat; we have taught them to recognize meat; they now know how to butcher meat; and we’ve made sure that they can get out of their paddocks and onto the streets.

What shall we do next? I know! Let’s build ANGRY robots!

That’s the kind of meditation I go through when I feel badly about the scientists of Retropolis. By the time I reach the end I don’t feel badly about them at all. Because I’m running down the street with a can opener in my hand and screaming that I am not bacon.

Oh, sure, the neighbors stare. But wait till they see what’s coming up behind me.

The Goblin Emperor and the triumph of Poughkeepsie

Filed under Can't Stop Thinking, Reading / Watching / Consuming

I really enjoyed The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette). I’m putting that right out front, because it would be too easy for you to think that I didn’t like it.

And when I say that I really enjoyed it, what I mean is that on two of the three evenings I spent with the book I stayed up late because I just didn’t want to stop reading it. I didn’t want to stop reading it in spite of the fact that its hero can Do No Wrong: his only missteps are when, for a moment, he wants vengeance… only to chastise himself for taking the low road, even in his mind, which of course makes us like him even more.

No, that wasn’t it. The thing that convinced me that I should not be enjoying the book is that it seems to mark the complete victory of Poughkeepsie.

I haven’t read much fantasy of the medieval or ancient sort in the past three decades, apart from Terry Pratchett; and Pratchett is really in a class of his own. I used to read a lot of fantasy, but at some point, I think unconsciously, I just stopped. I’m aware that what’s popular in fantasy has changed over the years. I just wasn’t really there to see it.

Back in 1973 Ursula K. Le Guin wrote an essay called From Elfland to Poughkeepsie. It’s really good; you should read it. In her essay Le Guin took a then popular fantasy author to task, very gently, for writing fantasies that didn’t need to be fantasies: fantasies that would work just as well if you pulled the fantastical characters out of the book and dropped them into Poughkeepsie. You see? The story and its dialogue would still make perfect sense, and would lose nothing, if they were placed in a fairly average modern day city.

So The Goblin Emperor is populated by elves and goblins who do not need to be elves and goblins. They have a few unique twitches (involving ears) but that’s the only thing that differentiates them from humans. The exact same story could be told with a setting in the Chinese empire, the Roman or Ottoman empires, or pretty much any empire you care to name, with hereditary bureaucrats, a disadvantaged underclass, and court intrigues. It has airships, but the fact that they’re airships doesn’t matter; they could as easily be cruise ships or, I guess, buses, because the fact that they are airships is completely incidental. There’s a small amount of magic (two instances, possibly three) that does not need to be magic. A little gas would have done the same thing.

My point is that this is a fantasy novel – a very good and enjoyable fantasy novel – that doesn’t depend on fantasy for anything that matters. It’s a very strange situation, but there it is. It’s Poughkeepsie.

What seems even stranger to me is that nobody seems to have noticed this, and I guess the reason why I’m surprised is that I just haven’t been paying attention to fantasy books. This may be what’s normal and expected now.

So The Goblin Emperor has given me a lot to think about, which is something that I like in a book. Such as: is this a bad thing? It’s an enjoyable book, so is it important that the fantasy elements be necessary to the story?  And I’m still not sure.

You could say that fantasy has been mainstreamed to the point that a fantastic setting can simply be taken for granted, the way power lines and cars are taken for granted in a modern day mystery. But there’s something about that which makes me uneasy.

It bothers me that a book can be both fantastical and mundane.

So after many years I’ve re-read From Elfland to Poughkeepsie, to find that Le Guin was mainly concerned about dialogue and prose style (and she would probably approve of those, I think, in The Goblin Emperor). The rest – my expectation that the fantasy elements of a fantasy story can’t be separated from the story without turning it to nonsense – that’s all me, I guess. But it seems like a natural progression.

If you start out in Elfland but head in the direction of Poughkeepsie, it shouldn’t be any surprise to find that you’ve arrived there: that everything around you now sounds and smells and feels like Poughkeepsie, in spite of the bit of glamour that’s laid on top; in spite of the fact that, now and then, your ears twitch. So maybe – because I skipped the many miles that have passed between the late eighties and the present day – I’m just really surprised to see where I am.

As I said at the start, I liked the book. Weeks later, I’m still thinking about it, and to me that’s a very good sign. So this isn’t a criticism: this is just a question that I’m asking myself.
 

Let us consider Elfland as a great national park, a vast and beautiful place where a person goes by himself, on foot, to get in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion. But what happens when it is considered merely as a place to "get away to"?

Well, you know what has happened to Yosemite. Everybody comes, not with an ax and a box of matches, but in a trailer with a motorbike on the back and a motorboat on top and a butane stove…. They arrive totally encapsulated in a secondhand reality. And then they move on to Yellowstone, and it’s just the same there….

… The same sort of thing seems to be happening to Elfland, lately.

Speed of Light T-shirts: now in both metric and imperial units

Filed under Works in Progress

In what may (or may not) be my final T-shirt redesign for the Retropolis Transit Authority, we can now have our speed of light in two flavors: imperial and metric. Because a constant is a constant, regardless of your preferred unit of measure. Otherwise we’d call it something else, right?

I’ve worked out and tested my redirect system for the old Retropolis Transit links. The search engines may not quite catch on, but in the long run that won’t matter much since visitors to the old version will get whisked, as though by subatomic weirdness, to their new corresponding pages – except in the case of a retired design, when they’ll get whisked to the first page of shirts instead.

The whisking. I’m telling you, it’s the key to everything.

The reason I’m not sure whether this is the last redesign is that I just haven’t decided whether a couple of the old shirts will get a new version. We’ll have to see. And of course there can always be new T-shirts now that the big switch is complete.

For now, let’s simply be happy in the knowledge that we can have our speed of light and drink from it, too.

Because you don’t need to be male to meddle in things that Man was not meant to wot of

Filed under Works in Progress

Okay, this new t-shirt/poster/etc. was not so much planned as it was inevitable.

STEM programs celebrate Mad Science in all its varieties; after all, there’s no glass ceiling in SCIENTIFIC & TECHNOLOGICAL EVIL MACHINATIONS.

You can cackle in any octave you like, and cackle till the cows come home… or until the cows swoop down over the helpless settlements of your enemies, death rays blazing, with hooves like blades of the sharpest steel. For SCIENCE!

It was only recently that Mad Scientists of a female disposition were paid a mere 70% of what male Mad Scientists took home. But through personal resolve, intense and unflinching bravery, and (finally) the sudden application of electricity, we’ve set that right. The lady scientists of Retropolis can now inspire at least 100% of the fear their male counterparts do.

All is now as it should be.

As usual, this triumph of gender equality can be seen on t-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, mousepads, and archival prints.