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Well, there goes NaBloPoMo... Pity really. Oh well, thirteen days of continuous updates isn't so bad, I suppose. A couple of months' radio silence followed by a couple of weeks of daily spam, although at least I managed to avoid memes and other fluff. Now, I suppose I have to try to find the happy medium.
This weekend has been ... less than productive. I managed not to fail at the archery club on saturday, which was a pleasant surprise: four years since I've last drawn a bow, and I can still put three arrows inside the nine-ring at twenty yards. Granted, that only happened twice in two hours, but it sounds better if I say it like that. I slept half the weekend without really trying, and only just managed to get some more coding done on the Winter in the Willows project this evening: the skill framework is nearly finished, but it's proving a bit of a pain in the ass to find all the edges of what should be a comparatively simple design. Guess I'll bang my head on it some more tomorrow.
Hope you had a good weekend. By way of apology for a somewhat downbeat entry, have an entertaining link: http://itmademyday.com/.
(It's the same day if you haven't gone to sleep yet, right? Right? This is totally the 13th's entry.)
So, continuing the tradition of my Writing About Weird Shit for NaBloPoMo (I'm kinda worried about what I'll decide's a good idea to write about for day 30, now...), I've decided to scribble a quick note about LARP before I go to bed. Although that was before I helped my housemate fix his computer, and watched him play Flash games for rather too long... Hmm.
Anyway. Briefly, the point of LARP is that it's role-play: you create a character and then play them. If it's going really well, and you're really into that character, then you can be in their mindset for upwards of twelve hours a day - it's very liberating, and quite interesting, to take on a different perspective, a different setting, hell, just a different job for a while. And then you come back, back to what you've known, back to what you've always been. Most of us roleplayers are more or less happy with who we are, but we relish the opportunity not to be every so often. A bit of escapism's healthy enough.
But now it's the winter season, and apart from a few player events (essentially, parties or gatherings being held at the in-character homes of some characters, rather than the huge festivals of normal events), there won't be any more escapism until April 2010. Sure, I'll be spending a fair bit of time doing in-character stuff like writing letters, building props and so on, but it's not quite the same.
C'est la vie. As in so many things, without the shadow, how can we appreciate the light?
I'm going back to the University archery club for the first time in ages on Saturday. If I shoot another arrow into the wall, I shall not be best pleased. Let's see who's fared worse over these few years, me or my bow and arrows...
From time to time, I am called upon to explain some of the aspects of my research to friends and family. I'm working on drive-by-wire systems, I tell them, where there's no longer a physical connection between the controls of a vehicle and the devices being controlled. Almost always, I get a negative response back. Computers always crash, they tell me, how can you be sure your system won't just freeze and leave me without control of my vehicle at sixty miles an hour? (modern dbw systems are multiply redundant, certified by international safety organisations, provably safe, before they're ever considered for use on a vehicle.) In an emergency, the system won't let me pull the steering wheel as hard as I can and avoid the child/pet/tree that's unaccountably appeared in front of me. (First, good luck hanging on to the steering wheel when you're trying to command that kind of change in direction and speed, and second, most modern dbw systems won't let you get into that situation, never mind getting out of it.) It's pretty reliable. I've not yet had anyone see a drive-by-wire system in a positive light, only ever neutral or negative, despite the fact that we've trusted our passenger aircraft to identical systems for twenty-five-odd years now.
Well, I'm going to take advantage of a recent news article to present one of the positive sides of drive-by-wire technology. The technology is known as "platooning", or the "road train" concept, and it's being pioneered by a group of European engineers including members of a local engineering consultancy my lab works with now and then. Essentially, it involves a group of highly-skilled professionally-trained drivers running around the trunk roads of the country, driving modern drive-by-wire vehicles with a few custom modifications. Another modern drive-by-wire vehicle can then locate said driver and negotiate to couple on to the back of their platoon. The joining car disengages driver input, synchronises its control system with that of the platoon, and then pulls up to within a couple of inches of the rear bumper of the preceding car: from that point on, the entire platoon maneuvers like one long, flexible vehicle under the control of the lead driver. If and when a driver wishes to leave the platoon they can signal the system, which will increase the distance around their car, maneuver out of the platoon, then instruct the cars that were previously either end of them to close up together. At no point is there any physical connection: the entire system is electronic, wireless and RADAR based.
The potential advantages of this system are significant. First, because the cars are so close together, they behave aerodynamically like one vehicle, not several. This results in significantly less drag, and a fuel saving of up to 20% per vehicle (highest for those in neither the front nor back positions). Drivers in the platoon need not concentrate on driving while coupled, they can nap, eat, drink, work, talk to friends or business associates... Previous versions of the platooning concept required sensors and broadcast beacons to be integrated into the roadway, which is pretty unrealistic in the short and medium term, at least. SARTRE, the specific platooning system on which Ricardo are working, requires simply that the vehicles in the platoon have the required modifications, making it a system that could potentially be deployed nationwide in a few months with enough research effort and testing.
The Frankenstein complex will always be a problem for engineers in mine and allied fields, but it's worth bearing in mind that a lot of us drive cars using the technology we build. We're not always perfect, but we're not suicidal: if we trust it, knowing exactly how it works... maybe it's worth something other than a knee-jerk reaction?
This is the day we remember the fallen, those who died in war, fighting for their country, or for what they believed was right. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the first World War ended, and we all hoped never to see its like again.
Anything I write here is unlikely to express my people's thoughts, my thoughts, on the matter. Twenty MILLION dead in the first World War, because of outdated and poorly-conceived tactics, poor equipment, poor communications. We didn't learn much. The losing side was all but destroyed, and what remained was hobbled with crippling sanctions by the winner. Twenty-one years later, the remains of the losing side began it all again, likely at least partially driven by the effects of the sanctions they were under. The second World War killed seventy million people, roughly.
Almost 100 million people*. That's twice the population of the UK. So many fallen. Some, granted, were on the "wrong" side. Few of those killed, I suspect, truly believed the ideologies driving the conflict.
I'm not a student of history, and I don't claim to understand the social, political and economic forces that drive a nation to war. I certainly don't understand the wrongness of mind that causes a man at the head of a nation to decide that certain of his countrymen are somehow inferior, and should be driven out or killed. All I can do is look at the statistics, and the photographs, and the stories and promise that I, like all of us, will do my utmost to make sure this never happens again.
*(I don't mean to belittle later conflicts, or those lost in them, but I think the World Wars are the iconic image, as it was their ending that caused us to begin "celebrating" Armistice Day.)
Iain M Banks defines an Outside Context Problem as the kind of problem "most civilisations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop." This, while a fascinating definition (and a rather good book) is not the kind of OCP I intend to talk about (briefly) tonight.
Mine's more mundane, but similar in the way it causes the brain to briefly stop processing while it figures out what's going on, and why it's wrong. It's meeting a celebrity at the supermarket checkout, it's taking a holiday to LongWayAwayLand and ending up going to the same bar as your neighbour. It's doing something in one place, setting and headspace, and having someone or something from quite another suddenly turn up. In this case, it was getting on the bus while decaffeinated and having a brief, somewhat strange conversation with a perfectly nice young woman you later (quite a lot later) recognise as someone who works in the Engineering cafe, and with whom you're perfectly comfortable chatting when you (a) are in the right place and (b) remember who she is.
I have no idea how universal these experiences are, so I figured I'd write about it and see if anyone has anything to say.