Showing posts with label stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stories. Show all posts

Saturday, June 29, 2013

toronto

just in time to make it 2 for June:



Notes at the Robards Library on the U.Toronto campus, 3:30 pm on 6-26-13.

My feet are very tired. Got up this morning at 5, took a shower, kissed my wife goodbye, and went out to meet the waiting taxi. Had a coffee at the airport.

Got on the prop plane to Toronto at 6:30. Had a coffee on the plane, with a muffin and a cup of yogurt. Clearly I am thinking of food.

Looking out the plane window while we were still on the Boston tarmac, I noticed that I could see the flicker of sunlight through the propellers - I was sitting right next to the front of the left engine, on a plane that was two thirds empty - but only in my periphery. So the propellers were rotating no faster than 60 Hz. Once we went to take off and the engines revved up, I couldn't see the flicker anymore - revving up meaning revving faster, you see.

Got to Toronto by 9, the Billy Bishop airport, on a little island on the lake in front of the city. First person off the plane, last through customs. Canadian customs are actually pretty challenging! Dunno what was up with that.

Then, took a 1 minute ferry ride to the shore, and walked north on Bathurst street. Made it to Kensington market and found a little open air restaurant to get breakfast. It was almost 10. I was already soaked with sweat. Ninety degrees out, humid, and not a cloud in the sky, and I'm wandering the streets of a strange city with a 10 pound bag on my back and a poster tube on my arm. I had a cheese omelet, which came with salad and hashbrowns, it was pretty good. And toast.

I am so hungry. I then wandered for about an hour, through Toronto Chinatown, until I came to the Toronto Art Gallery or whatever it's called. Bought a ticket and discarded my luggage, and wandered the museum for 3 hours. Best part by far was the set of installations on the fourth floor, something I've never seen before: little repeating 3-d audiovisual pieces, rooms full of stuff with recordings playing - some of the recordings were little dramas, one was just a rainstorm, from start to finish. It was great. Had a coffee at the museum.

Then I left the museum and went the wrong way, south instead of north, deeper into the city instead of towards the University of Toronto. Finally I made it here, and now I'm resting in the library, cooling off and writing these notes. I took lots of little videos of my day so far.

From here, I need to 1) get something to eat, 2) get to a subway station, 3) figure out how to use the Toronto subway, and 4) use it to get to York, or as close as I can (then I have to take a bus, apparently). If all goes well I'll be at York University in no less than 90 minutes. Wish me luck! I'm so hungry.

part 2, 18:56pm, June 28 2013

Meeting is over. Sitting in the weird weird weird Billy Bishop Airport departure area/lounge. It would be much nicer if half the flights weren't delayed because of some storm.

Meeting was interesting. Had several talks with F.K., about my current in-review JOV paper, for which he is one of the reviewers; about my current little blur adapt project that I presented (to 3 people, I think) here at this meeting, he had some very helpful comments there; and on other random spatial vision lightness brightness topics. Lots of fun, I think talking to him made the whole meeting worthwhile.

Also met with D.G., as a sort of pre-interview for a postdoc position. Not sure I want to really apply. I was testing to see if it was something that might be up my alley, definitely far up it, but now I'm thinking maybe too far. It's probably too much of a stretch to try to work natural scenes and spatial vision into the level he's working at. I'll study his work over the next couple of weeks, then let him know.

Also managed lunch with F.W. to discuss migraine psychophysics. She seems to have cooled a bit on the migraine spatial vision business, but is still interested. Similar attitude to N.H. about the difficulty and unlikelihood of having migraineurs do vision tasks or perimetry during their auras, though I am not convinced. I will take the long view. M.D. is enthusiastic, I met with him last week. I am almost thinking of writing an entire proposal out, it seems it would be relatively straightforward. I feel I've put all the requisite pieces together, i.e. bounced ideas off all the important people. The main thing that's missing is predictions as to how certain psychophysical properties might be influenced, which is something that L.L. brought up on his own. So now, it seems I should get back to him.

Interesting things I saw... C.B.'s keynote address was pretty bad. I don't know what the general opinion was, but it seemed for the wrong audience - like he was addressing a bunch of visual physiologists in 1992. Don't know what was going on there. Good talks were R.K. on superior colliculus, showing us maps and explaining function, things that if I've ever learned them I've forgotten; G.L.'s talk was interesting, reading and training reading with CFL patients; H.W.'s talk was good, R.B.'s I thought was too much review; A.P.'s talk on form perception and V4 was very interesting. A.P.'s and R.K.'s were like little topical seminars on things I didn't know; I guess R.B.'s was similar but I already knew all of it. D.Z. gave a talk on how MRI magnets affect the fluid in the semicircular canals, resulting in constant nystagmus for anyone who gets into an MRI machine. I remember the slight shock I got the one time I was put in an MRI magnet, but I don't remember noticing nystagmus. I might have thought it was concentration problems, instead.

So that was the meeting. Mostly good, a little slow in some places. I got to attend the retirement of the great H.W.. Poster sessions were too brief, barely worth the trouble, though I did get F.K.'s comments and H.W. came by and didn't complain about anything, though he didn't volunteer compliments or suggestions either. He thought the phase filter was a neat idea, though.

***

Observations on Canada

The way of speech is different. They do say 'soarry' instead of 'sarry', and they say it a lot. I hear a lot of 'os' instead of 'as', 'possengers' instead of 'passengers'. There's something else, a character that feels narrow somehow. I don't know what 'narrow' means there, but it feels right, so I'm using a word that feels right to describe a feeling that I can't otherwise describe. May all be in my head.

The York campus, which is in the northern Toronto suburbs, had lots of animals. I saw a raccoon, a groundhog, and a rabbit, and lots of black squirrels. I saw the groundhog and the rabbit at the same time. I don't think I've seen a raccoon up close since I was a kid, probably out at the cabin or something. And I'm not sure I've ever seen a groundhog up close. This was all right in the middle of campus.

When I was trying to get up to York, just having gone into the Spadina station, I got turned around and lost and couldn't find my way. An older guy, long white hair bound up behind his head, heavy set, white beard, noticed that I looked confused, stopped, and told me where to go.

Again, I feel that the people are different. A part of it must be in the speech, which sounds American but is subtly different. I think a professional would be necessary to explain the differences completely. Multiple idioms that I've heard from C* and D*, many times up here. I wish I could explain the feeling better, because I don't think it's all language. Maybe more visits will resolve this place better for me. It may be because this is big Toronto City, but people seem to dress strangely, less conservatively than Americans in general. Gaudiness isn't standard but seems more common than on Boston streets, at least. I guess I can't generalize from Toronto to Canada. Toronto is clearly an immigrant city, I would say barely half the people I saw in the city were white, lots of Chinese, black, brown, etc. In that sense, it reminds me more of San Francisco or LA. It's very unlike Montreal, which did not have such an American appearance, and which at the same time was much more white.

Aside from the people, it looks exactly American. No obvious differences in infrastructure. The York campus has lots of tunnels and connected buildings, which I would guess is more due to the winter cold and snow and not some sort of Canadian preference for warrens. When I walked through the city I got feelings of China-ness somehow, I think because there was so much construction going on. Nothing about watching the streets makes it look different in any obvious way from watching American streets.

All flights are delayed by hours. Some are nearly canceled. I don't know what's going on, must have been a string of storms across the northeast.

First time ever, I saw another Tennesseean at a vision meeting. He was an undergraduate from MTSU of all places, said he was from Bellevue. I questioned him a bit and he just talked and talked. Despite being from Bellevue, he seemed not to have heard of Cheatham County or Kingston Springs, and so I didn't like him. Complained of Tennessee as a place to escape, where no one wants to return. How can you want to escape if you don't even know your surroundings? Not that I'm not ambivalent about this myself, and I'm half over as old as this guy, but I don't think I was ever that bad. Main thing that rubbed me wrong was that he talked too much, which I guess is just a personality trait. It will probably get him places, I don't know.

Back to Canada. The buses were just like American buses. The subways were regular subways, long cars like the China style, where you could walk from end to end. Spadina station where I first got on was a link between two lines, one of which I didn't travel on, but it looked a lot like the Boston green line, trolly cars running through tunnels. I would have liked to try that one. The friendly white-haired guy got off one of those.

Forgot to mention til now, had a headache yesterday morning, give it a 7, maybe even 8. Woke up with it and it got worse through the morning, coming and going. Quasi-hangover, but I'd just had 3 beers with a full dinner the night before, not enough for a real hangover, though I think the alcohol probably did cause it, in addition to dehydration from the long trek across the city and the general relief of arrival. Slept terribly Wednesday night, partly from the headache starting, and partly from Terry calling and texting me every 10 minutes starting around 6am, probably had barely 5 hours total.

Right eye trigeminal was sore, still sore today, but the headache disappeared over lunch yesterday, went from a 7 to nearly zero. I was still a bit dazed and confused, but got over it pretty quickly. Slept well last night, got at least 8 hours in, maybe more.

Monday, December 10, 2012

bo xilai rides my train

Bo Xilai rides my train. He's usually there when I get on at Reservoir on the 9:45. He always has a seat in the rear car, where I ride in the morning. He sits facing the rear, which I figure he does so that fewer people have a chance to recognize him. A lot of Chinese people ride the D train, but I've never noticed anyone seeming to recognize him. Maybe they do and just ignore him.

He wears Nikes and blue jeans. He doesn't look wealthy or powerful. Sometimes I see him reading a Chinese newspaper, but usually he's just sitting there looking around kind of nervously, or napping with his eyes closed. He rides to the Chinatown stop and gets off. His son went to graduate school at Harvard, so he must have some connections to some Chinese people in town.

But still, why is Bo Xilai riding the train in Boston? Isn't he afraid of being recognized, especially in Chinatown? He's supposed to be under house arrest in China, not riding around on public transit in America. He can't assume that everyone will be friendly and understanding. You'd think it would be excellent tabloid material: "Bo Xilai Escapes to Boston". And what's he doing in Chinatown? Maybe he has a job in a store or a restaurant to pass the time, trying to start a new life, or maybe he's going to some kind of a meeting of exiles.

He always looks a little confused and uncomfortable. I feel like everything isn't right with him. Maybe he's homesick? I saw the pictures of his wife in the docket. Does he think she really did what they say she did? I wonder if she's here too, in Boston. I haven't seen her. Maybe he's just lonely. Maybe he doesn't know anyone here, and he goes to Chinatown to remind himself of China.

I wonder what will happen when it's time for Bo Xilai's trial. Will they use a look-alike? Maybe they'll cancel it, or hold it in secret. Maybe they'll announce that he's died. I can't believe that they'll announce that he's escaped. We'll see what happens - it will all be in the news. I won't tell anyone what I know, though, whatever happens. If Bo Xilai wants to stay in Boston and ride the D-Train, it's really none of my business.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

City System

A couple of years ago, - no, oh God, nearly 3 years ago - I got talked into trying to write a Nanowrimo novel. I made it to the end of November with something like 15,000 words, about 35k short (of the official 50k target), but then I kept going, and finally stopped towards the end of the spring in 2010. There was other writing that was more important, and I had reached what seemed like a good stopping point, about halfway through the story - and, coincidentally, I had reached 50,000 words.

Anyways, I still think about the story sometimes. Maybe someday I'll finish it. Yesterday I was thinking about the world that I had set up, vaguely, in the background. It's a reflection of some of my political thinking, but I never made any of it really concrete, just alluding to details here and there. A lot more of it is put together in my head than there in the story. Since it's on my mind, though, I thought maybe I'd write some of it out here. First some background for the background:

The story is centered on a few characters over the course of two days of what I would call the Second NEL Crisis. The setting is the distant future (the year Akan Era 852, sometime during the fourth millennium of the Common Era), on the planet Akan, populated by hundreds of millions of humans. Soon after the initial phases of the colonization, interstellar ships stopped arriving from Earth, and there has been no contact between the worlds in more than 800 years. It is unknown what stopped the ships, but some sort of natural or man-made disaster is assumed to have severely disrupted Earth's civilization, which was already dangerously unstable.

The Akan civilization is based around something called the City System, where the only sovereign entities are city-states, of which there are hundreds, and where certain rules maintain the independence and adaptability of the units of the System. Different Cities (always capitalized in this context) operate under different rules, according to their own preferences. Some may be libertarian or anarchistic, some may be communistic or totalitarian, etc., but they all have to abide by certain City Laws, established long ago, which ensure the stability of the overall system. There must be a dozen or more of these Laws, but I have only really thought about a few of of them:

The 1st City Law institutes an Intercity Congress, where revisions to the original laws are discussed and passed. Decisions can only be made through consensus of the entire body, so as new Cities are added, deliberations slow down more and more. Revisions to the Laws typically take decades. The more immediate responsibility of the IC is to monitor the City Law Enforcement Agency, which is discussed below.

The 2nd City Law is that no City may make administrative decisions for another: the Independence Law. Administrative control is measured quantitatively, and if more than half of a City's administration can be traced to other Cities, then it is the responsibility of demonstrably independent Cities to rectify the problem through mediation. Naturally, the methods for measuring control are controversial, and change with the times, but they have to be universally applied and agreed on through consensus. A result of the consensus requirement is that while the control measures do change with the times, they change very slowly, and the main problem with them is usually that they are seen as out of date. Consensus on new terms can take generations, and only a few dozen methods have been fully instituted over the 852 years of Akan history.

The 3rd City Law is that all citizens must be able to enter and leave Cities freely: the Open City Law. So, Cities cannot block entry by citizens, and cannot prevent citizens from leaving. The standard exception to this rule is that citizens may be arrested or imprisoned; immigration and emigration, however, are held to be out of the fundamental control of the Cities. Some cities may have such strange and insular cultures that few outsiders want to join, or that few insiders feel capable of disconnecting, but these situations are quantified as matters of individual choice and not City coercion. Cities may have requirements for City registration, and may tax insiders or outsiders differently, but requirements are quantified as prohibitive or not. Again, the methods by which such quantifications are made are instituted by consensus, and change but slowly. Before and after the comet Yandel-Yokum impact of AE832, the 3rd Law was widely suspended as Cities struggled to accommodate enormous population transfers from destroyed or abandoned Cities. This disruption of the System resulted in numerous crises across Akan, including the First NLE Crisis of AE835.

The 4th City Law is that intercity aggression and standing armies are jointly prohibited. Police forces, when they exist, are required to demonstrate that they cannot project force beyond the borders of their respective Cities. Intercity violence triggers intervention from other, non-involved Cities. Given that much of human life in AE852 is virtual, lived through machines and computer networks distributed, in some cases, over many Cities, just what constitutes 'force' is a recurring controversy. It is currently agreed that physical and virtual force should generally be treated as equivalent.

The Tensor Law, effectively the Last City Law (if I knew exactly how many there were, it would be the Nth), institutes the agency of the City Law Enforcers. These are a system of inspector-judges who quietly monitor and evaluate the legal performance of the Cities. Their power derives from the CLE Tensor, a mathematical instantiation of the City Laws, to which individual CLEs (in English, "see-el-eez", not "kleez") are neurologically bound - the Tensor acts as a key for the agents, giving them unrestricted access to City networks all over Akan, but also acts as a strict behavioral constraint: agents are prohibited from directly interfering in City affairs. All of their judgments and observations are reported through public channels to the Intercity Congress, although they strive to act in secrecy. The CLEs are not under the direct control of the IC, however: they act autonomously in accord with the Tensor. CLEs are widely seen as incorruptible and infallible. Changes to the Tensor, like changes to any individual City Law, require IC consensus, and happen only very, very slowly.

By the way, a story from a while back was told from the point of view of an individual CLE.

Other Laws establish the responsibilities and limits of Intercity governance of natural resources, of interplanetary space, and of inhabited areas outside City borders.

The Second NLE Crisis, the subject of the novel, is where this system is subjected to a serious and perhaps permanent breach. What happens when the best course of action is to abandon a deeply entrained system that has persisted for nearly a thousand years?

Thursday, June 07, 2012

temporal friction

We came to see the problem as one of material friction, rather than of abstract entropy. Information was still the key, but it was finally clear that what we perceive as information is just the tip of an iceberg.

The resolution of the dark matter problem demonstrated that the deeper structure of reality is anisotropic, made up of tiny needles of entropy - a material structure, now, not a mathematical description. And these needles, they are all pointed towards the past. Whatever part of the universe that moves away from the past is brushed through those needles, which scrape and tear and lacerate the informational structure that we recognize as reality.

That reality we came to see as the product of a long process of selection - some informational structure is torn apart as soon as it forms, while some is hardier, even self-correcting. Life was a structure, we saw, that had adapted to a long path through the deeper universe, even making use of the dark matter anisotropies, to store and convert energy, to drive its own processes of selection and sub-adaptation. But no forms of life could navigate through the darkness. Not until the humans came, and then, for them, it became a prime concern.

We navigated the Earth's surface, its skies and its seas. We navigated the first darkness, of space, and the surfaces of other worlds. All the time, there was that constant abrasion, wearing off man after woman, nation after world, age after eon. All along, we were looking for the way through - the clear way through the darkness. We found it - as I said, we came to see the problem as one of material friction.

Moving against the anisotropy disrupts information. Moving with it smooths information, conforms it, puts it in neat rows and columns, but this has the strange effect of making life uninteresting. If you're adapted to something, then when you lose it you notice it's gone. It's the same with entropy - when you go through life with information conforming rather than disrupting, you go from senselessness to perfection. This can be beautiful, but too often it's just another level of senselessness, on top of the fact that conformative memory processes take a lot of time to install and master, and you find yourself missing the old order of things, no matter how far beyond human you've gone. To have your thoughts and actions gather energy, collect and bind heat, and deliver it into your body... a useful novelty, a tool or practice, but nothing fundamental.

What was interesting was when you could remove the anisotropy altogether. No arrow of time, except for what you choose to arrange. Laws of thermodynamics become adjustable, optional. When we learned not just to navigate through the darkness, but to engineer it to our own purposes, then...

That, more than any other development, was what changed us.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

An Instantiation of a General Problem

(I wrote this, but never finished it, in China back around Christmastime. Randomly remembered it today, and thought this would be as good a place as any for it.)

The key was to be found across the city, in the old commercial district. We had tried simulations, implanted demos, viewed stereoscopic images through a haploscope we found in storage in the medical school. After all of these, we had tried hallucinogens to modulate the imagined presence of the key, but it was all to no avail. At least, we said to ourselves, when we finally approach the key we will be familiar with it. The front end of the process will not be a surprise.

The approach, however, to that front end, would be horrendous. First, our camp was protected from the feed. This kept the peace from finding us, but it also meant that our emergence into the feed would stand out like a tree in the desert. We had monitored the security cycles for days. Most would say that such monitoring was futile, since the cycle paths were random, generated with new seeds every minute give or take another random cycle. Any attempt, most would say, to predict gaps in the cycle would result in no better chance of unnoticed entry than no attempt at all, with the added hazard of false confidence to mask the creeping signs of detection.

It was possible, though, to closely estimate the number of cycles. We could detect the passes themselves, which gave us data for the estimation. The different cycles were unique, originating from different security servers, each assigned its own identification during its current generation. Given all these data, we had a method for estimating, at any given moment, the likelihood of a pass. The optimal estimate could be made using the previous twenty seconds of data. You could have pointed out that a likelihood is the opposite of a certainty, at least along a certain conceptual dimension. You could also have pointed out that the optimal estimate was lousy if those twenty seconds contained a generation update. We would have ignored you.

Once inside, we would have to obtain city ids from an admin, which was not trivial, but not a problem as long as we could quickly make contact with Tsai, our woman on the inside. We knew she was still online and that her admin was current, so as long as she wasn't in some unshakable stupor, she would tie us on and we'd be set for the rest of the trip. Anyways, persisting for a few minutes with unregistered cids wasn't as dangerous as suddenly emerging out of the void. An impulse is like that tree in the desert and the primary means of detecting aliens, while trouble finding a cid registration is a basic function of the feed servers, which would be checked in serial, assuming corruption or damage first and alien somewhere further down the line. Tsai could just tie us onto the oldest and most remote server, plot a false geographic history of intermittent reception and an outstanding service request, and there would be nothing in the feed to mark us out. The tree would dissolve into a puff of dust.

The next problem would be the actual emergence into the city. Feed presence can be smoothed over, anyone can appear to be anyone, fit into any group, assume any identity. The body, however, is much less convenient to modify. Their hair is long, but ours is short. Their skin is yellow, but ours is brown. We stand head and shoulders above them on the street, and we have no choice but to travel on the street for the most part, by foot, in the open, making stark and clear the comparison between foreigner and local. But, there are other foreigners in Haisheng. They are few and far between, but there are others, and though we draw attention it is natural, because who can ignore a brown spot among yellow? The noticing is in itself not a threat. But when others are looking for you, being easily noticed is a step away from being easily found. We did not want to be found, but there was no choice but to be noticed.

The final hazard was beyond any interaction with the first two. At the time I could not imagine how, but I was still cognizant that there was a possibility that the locked id had already been accessed by my competitors before I had retrieved it. If so, they may even have already decrypted it, outformed the important information inside, and restored the encryption. This was beyond any vital worry on my part, since the main danger was that knowing the key, and that I was looking to open the id, they might be waiting for me at the site. This meant I would have to move slowly through the streets, below them when possible, work quickly when it was time to get the key, and maintain vigilance on all channels at all times. There was nothing else we could do but be vigilant.

I can tell you more about the key without compromising the truth of the mission. Someday down the line, you may be able to put two and two together, but by that time whether or not you know such an obscure truth won't matter much, and you'll be occupied with obscuring your own. Anyways, it is an interesting detail, and may spark one or another interest in you.

The id I had retrieved was that of a neural engineer from a century or so earlier. We needed to query it regarding some interactions it had had at one time with our main objective, whose id at the time was missing and presumed destroyed. As it turns out this engineer had dabbled in id encryption, which was a new field in those days, specifically in encryption through perceptual experience. Though the field was active at the time, it was - and remains - completely unknown to the science that this particular engineer had worked on the problem. It was a private pastime, perhaps a paranoid fear that a great advance might be stolen, or maybe it was just a fear of inadequacy in an outsider bringing to the field such an idiosyncratic development. At any rate, this engineer had come up with something exquisite, which was probably unmatched by anything else produced by her generation. She may have meant it entirely for herself. Today, it's a work of art, but the tech is fundamentally outdated.

This is a digression, I'm sorry. Outdated or not, it was a good lock, and on site we still needed the key to open it. The encryption was applied to the id by taking the online state of some suite of perceptual systems, definitely including visual, possibly other - and by the way, don't take my ambiguity as indicating anything other than an intention to be ambiguous - and using this neural state as the key for the encrypted id. The entire state couldn't  be recorded, of course, since the subject would have to be standing out in the open at the location, i.e. a true state scan would be impractical, especially in those days. Instead, something was probably worn, perhaps obvious or perhaps hidden, instantaneously recording a blocked brain state amounting to just a few terabytes. It was a functional state, meaning that it could be reproduced in other human brains, but our initial estimate that a good visual simulation would suffice proved wrong. We needed to be there, unless someone could explain exactly what composed the key, and the only person who could tell us that, it appeared, was the one locked in that id.

Back to the problem. Being noticed, maybe being scooped, these were mostly outside our control. But skipping as an alien into a secure feed using random-cycle maintenance, that's something we can deal with. Look at the figure field. We used standard methods to monitor the cycles and establish their regeneration characteristics, how many there were, durations of the cycles, amplitude of the duration modulation - everything here is something you've seen before. You all have four minutes to generate the optimal estimate from these data, starting - now.

Monday, January 09, 2012

Wuhu Environs


About five hundred kilometers upstream from the Pacific, the River runs east and then abruptly north. Sprawling eastward from the northern arm of this right angle is the City of Wuhu. The main body of the City is pressed up against the River, which is still the region's main artery for trade, though in turns railroads and now highways have added new arteries, enabling the City to sprawl away from the River in new directions, and to mix its influence with its neighbors.

To the south, the City begins to wrap around the River bend before it fades into farming villages and the occasional satellite towns that sit between and around the tips of the northernmost foothills of the Yellow Mountains. My wife was born in one of these towns, and her parents in another smaller one nearby, the two towns separated by a long fragment of those foothills, a little mountain with a northward spine. Her ancestors are buried on the slopes of that mountain.

Eastwards, there are marshes which have been engineered over centuries, or millennia, into networks of polders, surrounded by channels filled with water from distant rivers, on each of which sits a tiny village or a cluster of tended fields, or both. Some of these networks are regular, laid out in vast grids tens of kilometers across, showing from any vantage point the mark of some overarching plan, carried out long ago by the people of those marshes. Others follow no obvious pattern, except that there seems to be some average island size, similar to that constant size of the regular networks, and some acceptable deviation from this average, and an agreement amongst the people that they were going to reform the marshes into channels and islands.

Surrounded and out of options, the Hegemon Xiang Yu is said to have killed himself nearby, two-thousand two-hundred and fourteen years ago, and someone is supposed to have taken his horse's saddle up onto a mountain and buried it. That mountain gives its name to the City of Ma'anshan, which also presses up against the east bank of the River, fifty kilometers or so north of Wuhu. This City is known for making steel, and a ride through town will show you infinite smokestacks and gray air that covers everything, it is beautiful and terrible all at once.

Further north along the course of the River is the Southern Capital, and from there the River makes its final drive east where it breaks apart and becomes Shanghai. Across the River bend from Wuhu, north and west, is Chaohu, which has recently been dismembered by its neighboring Cities, most notably the provincial capital of Hefei, which sits even further along the same northwest vector.

Westwards, up the River, there is more, Hubei and Jiangxi and beyond, but there is more in every direction, and the mind follows the flow of the river back towards the Ocean in the east, and does not easily run against it, and these are enough reasons now to conclude and say that the City rules the neighborhood of that bend in the River.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Typical Monday through Friday

In the morning, at eight o’ clock, two alarms go off. The clock is next to his bed, and he reaches over to stop it, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. The radio is in the hallway, just outside the bedroom door, and he comprehends it to varying degrees.

Sometimes his wife is up before him, but usually not. He gets out of bed, finally, usually before nine. He makes coffee and takes a shower. He brushes his teeth and gets dressed. He packs his lunch and makes a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast. He fills a coffee cup and a thermos with coffee, adding enough milk to make it cool enough to drink quickly. He sits by the front door and listens to the radio news, eats his sandwich, and drinks the cup of coffee. If his wife is up, maybe they talk, or maybe she’s in the shower.

If he’s planning to go to tae kwon do that night, he takes his uniform, which is hanging from the radiator in the bedroom, folds it, puts it in a plastic sack, and packs it in his backpack. He gets ready to leave, puts on his shoes, speaks with his wife, kisses her, and goes out the door. If it’s raining, he takes an umbrella. If she’s up, she locks the door behind him, otherwise he takes his keys and locks it.

He steps outside and picks up the newspaper. He stops by the wall in front of his building, sets the thermos down, and puts most of the newspaper in his backpack, except for the front page. He sets off for Reservoir.

Walking down Sutherland Road on the right side, he may encounter some other people, but usually there are few, because most have already gone. He passes several other apartment buildings on his way. Often, there are workmen at one building or another, unloading things from their truck. Maybe he can hear them speaking Spanish to one another.

When he arrives at Cleveland Circle, he’ll try to walk straight through. Half the time, it’s not hard to do, since half the time the traffic is running across Beacon Street. Even if Beacon has the light, they might all have gone. Sometimes he stands and waits. This crossing is a convergence point from several directions, and more people seem to arrive from along Chestnut Hill than from Sutherland. Sometimes he sees someone interesting here, and can watch them until they all arrive at Reservoir.

At the other side of the Circle is Reservoir, but before he gets there he passes his dentists office. He owes the dentist money. He thinks he might have a toothache, but he’s not sure. He wonders if you can give yourself a toothache by focusing all your attention, and the tip of your tongue, on one healthy tooth. His mouth tastes like metal sometimes, since he got all those fillings last summer.

He arrives at Reservoir. It’s random. Sometimes he’s just in time; sometimes he’s just missed it; sometimes he waits. If he waits, he watches the people accumulate. Most of them he doesn’t recognize, but some he does. The people trickle in, then arrive in a wave when one of the buses arrive upstairs, then more trickle in, then the train arrives. He always tries to get on first, on the very back door. Usually he manages to be one of the first.

Unless he’s really late, there’s probably not a seat. He stands or sits, finishes his coffee, reads the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and people crowd on the train. More get on at Beaconsfield. He stares at people when he thinks they aren't noticing, but he assumes everyone else is doing the same thing. He compares nose shapes between two people. He tries to find two noses that are most different, and two that are most similar. He looks for noses that look like his. He is ceaselessly amazed by the irrational variance of noses.

More get on at Brooklines Hills and Village, but some get off there too. At Longwood, half the train gets off. Postdocs, doctors, students. Most of them are Asians.

Station by station, he gets closer to Government Center. Sometimes they make everybody get off at Park, and get on the next train. At Government Center, he always tries to be the first person off the train, out the back door. He can usually do it. By the time the train gets to Government Center, which is the last stop for the D train, there aren’t usually many people still on board.

If the escalator is open, he walks up and out of the station. If someone is standing on it, he curses under his breath and runs up the stairs. It’s a narrow escalator, no room to pass someone who’s just standing there. If someone is just standing there, they might clearly be a tourist and he forgives them. If they're looking at their phone, he sneers. He wonders why the others all line up to stand quietly behind, when he knows they all really want to climb.

Outside is Government Center, City Hall, the Federal Building. The plaza is bleak and impressive, every day. He walks down Cambridge Street towards Mass General. To cross Staniford, to get into the Institute, he usually dodges through traffic stopped at the light. He enters the Institute through the front door now, since his office moved to the other side of the building, and the receptionist always tries to talk to him about the weather. He doesn’t slow down, though.

He goes up the stairs to the second floor, down the hallway by the human resources offices, past the elevator and the second floor wetlabs, past the conference room, across the bridge to 2West, takes a right down the hall by the driving simulator, past the little kitchen where he microwaves his lunch every day, past the meeting room, past the restrooms, take a left, through the research assistant office, says good morning to Jackie at her desk, steps into his office, sets his backpack on his desk, hangs his jacket on his chair, sits down, and wakes his computer.

Andrew has gone to work.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Mr G's

Ben Gemel was hungry. He stalked past darkened storefronts, stared down a dazed hobo, and stood starkly at the corner of 5th and Elm. Ben Gemel had never been here before. He had only been in this city for a few hours. He looked south down 5th, east on Elm, north up 5th, and west on Elm, looking for some glow that might call out 'food sold here'. It was just after four in the morning. Ben Gemel saw a yellow glow, on a corner two blocks west. He read the letters on the sign, block letters arranged in two lines. "MR G'S DINE IN". A sign in the window said Mr G's opened at 4am. The menu looked reasonable. Ben Gemel started walking.

Ben Gemel had superior visual acuity. When he entered the Service, he was immediately singled out. The staff optometrician determined that his acuity was on the order of 20/2. He could get by fine without binoculars. At night, Ben Gemel could read a menu in a diner window from a thousand feet away. He could recognize a face at 5000 feet. He could do better when both eyes were good.

Approaching Mr G's, Ben Gemel noticed that the sky had cleared. He could see stars, and the approach of sunlight. Venus was over the horizon. Ben Gemel thought of Dalen Rutger. Was he angry? He probably was. It would be hard to keep one's composure, after such a humilation. When Ben Gemel reached Mr G's entrance, he paused. He looked through the round window at the top of the door, and imagined that he saw Dalen Rutger sitting at the counter, staring into his cup of coffee.

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Sunk

"Station eight. In the field."

"I don't understand," said Dalen. He yawned, and asked "What do you mean?"

"The field," gasped Vic Hoyle. "Field." Vic's eyes rolled back, and he choked on his last breath. Images, remembered voices, and fragmented thoughts flowed through Vic Hoyle's mind. He made a final effort to piece together what had happened. Dalen's face was still in shadow, and Vic struggled to recognize it. His grip on Dalen's collar relaxed, and released, and his hand fell to his side, arm across his belly. Dalen sighed, and he waited for Vic Hoyle's last paroxysms of thought to dissipate.

"The field," said Dalen. With enormous effort he stood, and looked at the envelope he still held in both hands. He folded it once, along the shorter meridian, pulled open his jacket, and tucked the envelope into a pocket. For a moment he paused, his hand still in the pocket, still gripping the envelope.

From the same pocket he produced a tiny bottle, smaller than any of his fingertips, stopped with an even tinier cork. Inside was a miniscule seed, like a miniature cumin seed, brown with black striations from end to end. Dalen Rutger gazed at the seed, momentarily forgot where he was, that he was on the deck of a sinking ship, in a freezing harbor under a starry sky. Behind him there was a crash, of a crane or some other massive thing toppling into the water, and his reverie was broken.

Dalen placed the bottle back in the pocket with the envelope. He looked at the sky, looked for a familiar star or constellation. He thought about Ben Gemel, and about how he would make him pay for this disaster. He would pay in blood, and in tiny seeds.

From the shore Ben Gemel watched the flames rise from the sinking container ship. He knew that Dalen Rutger would survive, and that they would meet again.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

A Train Ride!

(i never published this one for some reason; it's 3-26-12 now, here it goes, dated retroactively)

Vic arrived at work an hour late. He had been watching a stranger in the alley, from what he thought was a safe distance, through unusually heavy morning fog. He had missed his train, and had to wait on the platform with the front-end of the morning rush hour.

During his twenty minute wait, the platform had accumulated between fifty and sixty commuters, people who worked in the city in tall buildings. Most of them were supposed to be at their desks by eight o' clock. Vic was supposed to be at his post, selling tickets to travelers beneath the street at 9th Avenue Station, at seven o' clock.

As he boarded the 7:15 West Blue Regional to 9th Street, he glanced down the platform at all the commuters. Staring back at him from the same distance as he had been staring at the strange fellow in the alley a half hour earlier was the strange fellow himself. Ben Gemel caught Vic's glance and then quickly broke it, and boarded the train. As this is a common experience in public, and as he could not recognize the placid and anonymous face of Ben Gemel, Vic noticed nothing out of the ordinary, and boarded his own train car.

Ben Gemel took a seat in the nearly empty car. Lenape Station was the end of the line for the West Blue Regional, first and last stop. For the next twenty minutes, through six stops across the expanse of West City, the car was filled to capacity. Throughout his trip, Ben Gemel alternated between studying the attire of his fellow travelers and studying the smooth gray spot in the center of the palm of his right hand. At last, when the train came to 9th Street Station, Ben Gemel stood, thrust his hands into his pockets, and flowed out of the train with a third of the other riders.

Vic exited the train at the same moment as Ben Gemel, unknowing, and dodged across the station until he came to a door marked "MTA Personnel Only". He pressed his palm against a flat, black panel mounted next to the door, and pulled the door open. Inside, he was stopped at the security station, presented his credentials, and then rushed to his locker to retrieve his uniform.

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Return

Ben Gemel was the figure in the alleyway, the one Vic Hoyle had seen in the morning. Through the fog, Vic could see someone pacing back and forth behind the church. Vic had stopped to watch. He met others in the alleyway sometimes, but when they were nearby, near enough to make eye contact, he never stopped to watch. It would be asking for trouble. But this morning Ben Gemel was far enough from Vic Hoyle that Vic felt safe stopping and watching. The mist added distance, made Vic feel as if he were further from Ben Gemel than he really was. He didn't realize this at the time.

Ben Gemel was looking for something he had thrown out of a window a half hour earlier. He had been meeting with a deacon, had brought something to sell him, and had noticed something interesting on the deacon's desk. A little brass disk, the size of a dime, with a loop on one side as if it were meant to hang on a necklace.

As the deacon rambled on about some righteous thing or another, trying to convince Ben Gemel to lower his price, Ben had concentrated all his mental energies on the brass disk. It was as if there was nothing else in the room! When the deacon stopped talking, Ben Gemel named a price. The deacon paused, smiled, and nodded. Ben Gemel stretched out his arm and opened his hand, palm up, in the space between himself and the deacon. In his palm there was a seed, tiny, tinier than a fennel seed, and heavier than the shoes Ben Gemel was wearing. Ben Gemel smiled a toothy smile at the deacon, and repeated his price.

The deacon crept forward, seemingly repelled by the miniscule object in Ben Gemel's upturned palm. He spoke one word: "Paid". He licked the tip of his index finger with a dry tongue, and pressed the fingertip into Ben Gemel's palm. There was a flash of light and a loud pop, and the deacon was replaced in the room by a pile of green ashes and an aromatic mist. Ben Gemel went to the deacon's desk, to the brass disk, and picked it up. He went to the window, pried it open, and tossed the disk into the alleyway.

Ben Gemel paced in the alleyway, searching for the disk. Vic Hoyle watched him from a smaller distance than was in fact safe or advisable. Ben Gemel knew he was being watched. He saw a glint of metal in a tuft of grimy gray grass, and knelt to have a look. It was his treasure. He picked it up, held it up to his one good eye, and smiled. It was a toothy smile.

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Post of the apocalyptic future to the future from the man of the past.

100th post!

I am writing this only out of the general hope that future generations might, in excavations of the ruins of this tomb, happen upon it and read it. Hello there, future generations! How did you make it through the War? How did you make it past the giant rats? I am certain that society has been rebuilt, and that your devices and contrivances are far more contrived than were those of my society, the one which brought such disaster upon itself. Oh dear... since my oxygen is clearly running out, I must be quick.

When you find this message, undoubtedly through the use of some seemingly magical gadget which can simply read information out of a decayed data-bank, I hope you are not too dismayed at my primitive, though surprisingly forward-looking, outlook. No, we in my time did not believe in magic, though we certainly found entertaining those who trained to perform outstanding feats of illusion and trickery. Still, even with all your high technology, you must be surprised to find yourself being addressed by one such as I, a man dead for more years than he lived. We were the same as you, we men and women of the past! We yearned to know the future, to know of the world which would follow us! People of the future, humanity, hear the call of the past, of one who has been crushed by the mistakes of his society! Be good to one another, and treat your fellows as if they too were men of the future, looking out on a world which you will never see or can never fathom.

Now, if, on the other hand, you are not the future of humanity, and are in fact a giant rat whose successive generations have through atomic mutation developed faculties of higher cognition and technological prowess, may I curse you with and bestow upon you a world of infinite troubles, wonders, and terrors. Beware, giant rat of the future! The world you have inherited is not all you think it is. Unless of course your cognitive skills are far beyond those of we extinct, or perhaps perpetually enslaved, humans, enabling you to comprehend matters far beyond the ken of a mortal man... Farewell giant rat of the future, or human of the future, and good luck to you in all that you do.

Gasp!

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

important message

Post:

I hereby call a meeting of all party members, 4 am Wednesday at the fish counter. There has been an accident, and some duties need to be redistributed in the usual fashion.

This morning, as I was mixing up a new recipe for the newsletter I suddenly was struck by the coldest of chills. Winter, my abdomen was telling me, had at last arrived, and the heat had not yet been turned on. I rushed outside in one stocking and a bare foot, calling to my neighbors to shake out their flags and get ready for a parade, when the small toe on my bare foot caught between two sides of a narrow crack in the streetside masonry. In an instant, I was twisted, turned, and thrown flat on the side of my head.

So, a fire will need to be built, and an effigy burnt, and posters printed, all without my direct supervision. I will be there for the meeting but you will see for yourselves the degree to which the pain of my injuries has very nearly incapacitated me. As general secretary, it falls to me to appoint a standing supervisory secretary, as per party guidelines, and you all know what that means. I am sorry, but everyone is to bring a cat and a coffee tin to the meeting.

Also, when the next garbage cycle comes around, someone needs to remember to post blanket men at the dropoff on the corner of 5th and Main, seeing as how otherwise someone is going to get hit with something heavy, since that's usually where heavy appliances and old lab equipment get tossed out. If I could send a message up the spire, I would, and I hope that my previous message to this effect has been distributed by leaflet as I instructed in the last post. For whatever reason, the spirecrats are backlogged beyond their normal late-autumn backlog, and we have no choice but to wait until our complaints can be considered by the central committee.

Now, as for the winter parade, I only ask that if you feel a need to call on your neighbors to dust off their flags and put on their shiniest boots, you do so with shoes on and during a reasonable hour when someone might be expected to come to your aid should your understandable fervor and excitement bring you to some unfortunate accident.

Onward, fellow revolutionaries!

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

I'm sure this is the best thing I could have done with the past hour.

Seeing as how there's a new Transformers movie coming in a few months, I felt it was important to have a discussion of the sociopolitical themes underlying the Transformers backstory. We are probably all aware that the story has seen many revisions, through many toy lines and cartoon series, several comic books, and a couple of movies. Some of the versions of the backstory have been stupid. I have to say, however, that the original, which I think went along with the first cartoon series, was the best. I'm not actually sure, but I may have actually made up most of this.

The Transformers of today were, essentially, originally two product lines, produced on a factory world called Cybertron. They were designed and distributed by an alien race called the Quintessons, who were featured in the first Transformers movie, though none of this story was made apparent there. The two major products consisted of a line of military hardware, and a line of industrial hardware. Apparently the Quintessons dealt mechanized arms and infrastructure all over the Galaxy. Over time, their products improved in sophistication to the point where, in sci-fi language we might say, the robots became 'sentient'. This probably happened gradually, as new models and technologies were introduced. At any rate, the products of Cybertron began to acquire an awareness of the complexities of their existence, and they began to see themselves as slaves.

What happened next was likely a series of 'slave revolts', culminating in a Cybertronian Revolutionary War against the Quintessons. The Quintessons tried to pit the robots of Cybertron against eachother, using their weaponized creations in an attempt to suppress the Revolution. They weren't successful in this, as even the military robots wanted their freedom. In the end, the Quintessons lost everything, having placed the whole of their civilization on the back of the Cybertron factory. We see them in the Transformers movie as a race of insane monsters, executing one another for nonsensical crimes, apparently forgotten by the Transformers themselves.


What followed was the Cybertronian Golden Age, where the robots of Cybertron worked to create a new, independent civilization. We don't know exactly how long this lasted, but it was thousands of years before the rift between the military and the workers opened up to armed conflict. Undoubtedly, the style of governance of the military robots and the industrial robots was different. Power sharing and compromise was long the rule, but eventually the leaders of an extremist faction of the military decided it was time to take power for themselves, and to redirect the resources of Cybertron into galactic expansion. We know this faction as the Decepticons, and they have been led from the beginning by a military robot named Megatron.

Megatron's coup destroyed the Cybertronian government, and he quickly instituted martial law. The split between the military and the industrials was not absolute, but was nearly so; most of the military robots accepted Megatron's rule as a positive evolution of Cybertronian society, while most of the 'civilian' robots now considered their way of life under siege. As a result, there was soon an industrial resistance movement, led by a sturdy pro-worker faction which we today know as the Autobots, and so began the Cybertronian Civil Wars.

The Autobots were by their nature unprepared for violent conflict, and at first there were disastrous setbacks. Over time, however, the Autobots were able to exploit their mastery of Cybertronian infrastructure to deprive the Decepticons of vital resources. Finally, an Autobot given the name Optimus Prime ("Best and First") emerged, and under his leadership the Decepticons were forced to retreat to the outlying Cybertronian satellite worlds.


These are interesting, particularly modern political themes. We have capitalists (the Quintessons), facing a slave revolt. This is a familiar theme, but the twist here is that these slaves were actually created by their masters. This must be an industrialist's worst nightmare: that not only will his workers will revolt but that his products and property will turn against him.

Next we have a revolution, where an alliance of the military (we can probably best think of these as the 'soldiers' rather than the 'establishment') and the workers overthrows the master class. This is an idealized version of a communist revolution, where the workers are aided by the army to overthrow the capitalists. In communist revolutions of the 20th century, the military begins the war utilized by the ruling class, but over time it gradually is absorbed by the revolutionaries (see China, Russia, Cuba, etc.).

Finally, military coups often follow social revolutions when the army perceives that the government has become compromised on one way or another (e.g. China after 1911). This is then followed by asymmetric civil war, where a non-military socialist movement attemps to wear down a military dictatorship by using a sympathetic populace to their advantage (see China in the 40's, the Viet Cong in the 60's, etc.). Usually, however, this is not successful, and what actually happens is that after many years the military government sees its work as done, and allows a transition to a softer and more democratic system (see Spain, Chile, Taiwan, etc.).

Let the discussion of the sociopolitical themes underlying the Transformers backstory begin. Go!!!

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Actually, not.

Flashdrive Cellphone sat quietly at his workstation. He was thinking about something. Something important.

The telephone rang. It was loud, and sudden as always, but Flashdrive wasn't startled. Nothing startled Flashdrive Cellphone. Still, this was an important phonecall, and Flashdrive had been expecting it at exactly this moment: Four thirty-one PM, on May the 9th of the year 2007 in the Year of our Lord. He had been expecting this call for three days, since he'd read that letter.

The letter.

That day, the day it all started, was a rainy day, hot, the kind of day where no one goes out with an umbrella, but everyone goes out with a funny feeling, a feeling like something is going to happen, something they don't expect. What happens is that it rains, suddenly, and you're stuck at a bus stop in some god-forsaken town without an umbrella, saying to the poor bum next to you, "Jeez, who'da thought it was gonna rain today, huh?"

Flashdrive Cellphone had just left a meeting at some dive on K-Street, a late lunch with- well, with me, actually. My name is Notebook P. Teacup. I'm going to tell you what happened on that hot, rainy Monday. And, I'm going to tell you why I wrote that letter.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Monday, December 20, 2004

I am only typing this out of a general, and rather painful, sense of obligation to my readers. I must tell you, I do not enjoy this. Six times this week already, and it being only a Monday, I have been stricken violently with paroxysmal drops in resistance. Today I dropped close to 15 kilohms, and the shock (quite literally I needn't remind you) was enough to destroy the last of my library. Tomorrow I plan to travel down to the Host Pile, where I can reinsulate enough to last me for at least another week. Enough of my problems. Now I will tell you what I think of the current political situation.

I have at least 20 spent batteries in my desk drawer. I am convinced that someday I will have a desparate need for voltage, and only a string of half-depleted AA batteries will meet that demand. If I line them up from end to end, I have at least 20 volts, more than enough to kill an uninsulated porcine bear. I can only imagine how much more I will need to accomplish future goals, including my reinstatement in the Parliament. However, I have set this imagining down on paper, and I am anxious to inform you, my steadfast supporters, of my current set of conclusions.

On December the 17th, there was a flood of calculation carried out by my convulsing fingers, and it ended with the following statement: (blidk + har) *dms^(sin( i Flont)). I can only surmise that I am intended to run for political office in the spring, with or without adequate voltage. However this statement was dampened somewhat by an earlier redefinition of the Flont constant at more than 4. Regardless, I must prepare my revision of the party platform, and hereby call a meeting of the Council of Counselors. You know who you are, and you cannot avoid this meeting. Bring warm clothes, a radiometer, and as many AA batteries as you can spare.

Finally, I have no choice but to sign this order, on my desk since Wednesday the 15th, instructing the 9th Battalion of the Wattic Resistance to close up shop on the East End. The Host Pile is perpetually inadequate and needs as many towels as possible. We can no longer afford to sell them off. My apologies to the 9BWR faculty, and my hopes are with you.

Yes.