Drumsticks

Gandalf opened the dusty book, slowly turning to the last written page of the History of the Mines of Moria.

After a surprised expression crossed his brow, he began reading, "Drumsticks, drumsticks in the deep!" After solemnly choosing the great tome, he declared "...there is nothing more."

Turning, he addressed the fellowship of chickens, "Fly, you fools!"

Semantic Jellyfish

There is a thin semantic line separating weird and beautiful.

And that line is covered in jellyfish.

Welcome to Night Vale.

The podcast episode this somehow refers to is here, its Wikia page is here, and the project's home page is here.

I haven't listed to the Night Vale podcast. Perhaps I'll do that while I'm travelling to Washington. Still, my wife found the quote on Pinterest, and it's been eating at me. What does it mean?

And I don't mean, "How does this strange line fit into the Night Vale world?", no, I mean "What does that English construction actually say?" The more superficial question interests me here.

(Two friends of mine inspired this dig.)

Semantics: semaphore antics, when two Army signals specialists get bored.

Thus we see that the military is training jellyfish to assassinate writers in an attempt to control the global supply of--

**cough**

Pardon me. Now where was I? Ah yes...

Semantics: the study of meaning. (Thanks, Mirriam-Webster and Google.)

So what I get out of this quip is that the meanings of "weird" and "beautiful" are actually fairly close. I don't think I understood this until I saw this rendering, which made me realize that jellyfish really do play with that line. They are surreal and beautiful, especially when their colors are brought out like that. They are also utterly alien to me, a dry midwestern boy.

So I think that there is a line. It's thin, if it's not a proper probability field, and many things are in the same in-between-almost-both zone that jellyfish lie in.

There you go. That's what I think it means.

(With modern Art attempting to explore the distinction, I think the tentacles and neurotoxins could be brought in for an extended, painful analogy...)

Steam vs. Fedora 18

(Yes, this is a boring technical post. :)

I recently installed Steam on Fedora 18, as the post title implies.

The instructions from sten's ask.fedora post work magnificently...until it tells me that I'm not online:

Fatal Error: Steam needs to be online to update. Please confirm your network connect.

There are a number of awkward fixes like changing a config file that doesn't exist and simply reloading a dozen times. None worked for me, though, so I kept digging until I found Aleksandar30's post that details a snafu in Steam's server configuration in the 1.0.0.39 package Steam was linking to when I wrote this.

I haven't tried removing the /etc/hosts line since the Steam client updated.

Research and Sequestration

On a political note, I thought I'd ask:

If we're so strapped for cash that we're cutting all sorts of research funding and sending IRS employees home and cutting military spending and clogging up airports, why isn't the NSA et. al feeling the burn? Complete capture intelligence is expensive.

[Tech] Xilinx ISE, Vivado, and Fedora 19

[technical post warning :]

Once upon a time I took a sequence of classes in which I got a taste of what a class of microchips--FPGAs--could do. I have further seen their use in high-performance professional and research work. In simple terms, these chips allow you to try out microchip designs before spending a few million getting them actually made (with a few obligatory gotchas).

So, when the university I was attending decided to upgrade to Digilent Spartan 3E Starter Boards, I made a point of buying one of their old Digilent Spartan 3 Boards, featuring the Xilinx XC3S200-ft256 (Spartan 3) FPGA.

About a year and a half later, I'm just now getting to trying to play with it. As it turns out, older versions of Ubuntu don't play nice with ISE (a previous post described some of my problems), so I upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 to Fedora 19 to start working.

Tip 1: Vivado is distinctly not ISE. Vivado is their high-level SoC design tool, while ISE has less power and more control...and easier licensing. ISE WebPack is what they offer for free. Save yourself a 6GB download and don't download Vivado--download ISE. I got ISE 14.5.

Tip 2: Once I got ISE downloaded and installed, I figured out that the cable driver installation and the "Simulate Behavioral Model" function both rely on having GCC handy. In Fedora, I found a good post here showing this one command:

sudo yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

that is somewhat analogous to Debian and Ubuntu's "build-essential" package. This gets the simulator working.

Narrative: From here I went on to writing a small Verilog test that merely wired an input to an output. I also pulled in the UCF for the Spartan 3 Board (that Digilient no longer seems to host), configured it, and got it through the Synthesize - XST, Implement Design, and Generate Programming File phases without a hitch. (Not even a warning...except for an unused signal I forgot to take out.)

The next phase was "Configure Target Device," which pulls up Xilinx' Impact programmer tool...which didn't recognize my cable. Big surprise--it had told me driver installation failed.

Tip 3: use Tip 2 PRIOR to installation. If you didn't (or like micromicromanaging things), simply run (assuming you used the default root installation target):

cd /opt/Xilinx/14.5/ISE_DS/common/bin/lin64/digilent

sudo bash ./install_digilent.sh

answer its questions, and smile. 

Tip 4: I'm not sure what problems it might cause (I was find all the way through launching Impact), but do remember to modify your environment. In my case, I simply added these lines to .bashrc:

# set up environment for Xilinx tools

. /opt/Xilinx/14.5/ISE_DS/settings64.sh

# because I didn't use the default

export DIGILENT_ADEPT_CONF="/usr/local/etc/digilent-adept.conf"

Tip 5: OS Not Supported
Dear Xilinx, >:-P Love, Jon

If you dig around, you will likely find and try

cd /opt/Xilinx/14.5/ISE_DS/common/bin/lin64/install_script/install_drivers
sudo ./install_drivers

which fails miserably because

linux_common.h:29:4: error: #error "This kernel is too recent: not supported by this file"

So, off I traipsed to http://rmdir.de/~michael/xilinx/ where I learned I could run

sudo yum install libusb-devel # or your distro's variant; solves "missing usb.h" problem

git clone git://git.zerfleddert.de/usb-driver

cd usb-driver

make

LD_PRELOAD=/home/username/tmp/usb-driver/usb-driver $STUFF/ise

Now when I launch Impact, I can do a boundary scan and talk to the FPGA.

Next problem was "DONE pin did not go high." 

I tried FPGA Start Clock, High-Z unused devices, power cycling...but the next day it worked. (This was after a full power cycle of my aging P4-era box.) Make sure that Start Clock is set to JTAG, power on the FPGA, THEN connect the programming cable. That fixed it for me, anyways.

Mormons, Evolution, and Science (and perhaps magnets)

"We have the history recorded in the crust of the Earth. We have the history recorded in the scriptures. One day we will have all the facts and the two will blend together." 

--Paraphrase of a paraphrase of a quote whose origin may one day be hunted down

So...if you're wondering what Mormons believe on a given scientific topic, you'll probably find the answer in the best textbooks on the topic.

Winter

Alder looked out the window at the softly falling snow, appreciating the monochromatic scintillation as the blanket grew deeper.

The newcomer was sitting up in her bed, starting at him hard.

"How do you stay sane? Well this blasted winter ever end? It's so...plain!" Her outburst was vehement, but there was a hint of realization in it.

"You don't understand, your highness. I know winter. I hardly know anything else. It's harshness is only broken by its occasional harsh beauty." Noting the princess' distress, he began pacing in front of the wall of windows that overlooked the snow gardens.

"There is one thing we do know, those of us that live here: We know that winter will end.

"This knowledge--not the belief the city folk accuse us of--keeps us alive. Perhaps, during your stay here, you will see spring. You may even bring it to us."

He stopped, intently studying the promise of spring glimmering in her eyes, fighting to the her icy visage.

Perhaps, one day.

A Break in the Case

The search had been quite fruitful; nearly every cubic kilometer of the old Luk'naga golem was accounted for. Varying sizes of chunk drifted in a tesselating grid of parking orbits around the cold, methane-bitten surface of Niffleheim, the most neutral of all the space spanned by the Mul'ulanki federation.

Some chunks had been easily repurposed and were now fully functional members of the warship-cum-planetoid. Most, however, still maintained a defensive, preservationist stance, punishing salvage and recovery attempts while refusing to be reprogrammed. This tenacity was most curious to the commander, but the techies insisted that this stubborn nature was in keeping with the original design and would be a great asset were it properly turned to the federation's purposes.

Except that we can't even melt it down without losing men left and right... The commander shifted the can of pencils from one place on his desk to another, and started reading the reports, hoping for some clue that would let them reuse the recovered components.

He didn't notice the pencils start to rattle, but he did notice when the deck lurched about a foot to his right. That felt like a hyperjump, but the magnitude could only imply a full attack fleet or--that--

He stared out his office's full-wall porthole, barely comprehending. A small planetoid was hovering at the lunar L1 point. The markings were right, and the geometry fit what intel the federation had bothered to collect: this was the Nar'ara golem. Something was missing though...no support vessels? Not even a squadron of fighters on patrol? What was going on?

He absently fingered his watch to answer the chirping that had started just as the lurch had. "Sir, you've probably seen it, but we need you down in Control pronto. The golem is hailing us, and I think this one's above our combined pay grades..."

---

The Interfederation Astrophysical Year was conceived as a method for fostering goodwill among the polities of Cluster 6. It involved a wide range of scientific explorations and experiments that would not only push the limits of current physics, but would provide vast quantities of data that would illuminate ill-explored facets of everyday navigation. Probes into Oort cloud ionization, Phil's Phenomenon (a queer error in hyperjump projections), and numerous other oddities were scheduled, with each federation vowing to share any and all data acquired for the benefit of all. It ended up occupying the better part of a decade.

For reasons yet to be understood, the Nar'ara had only deigned to volunteer their golem to the effort.

It was on an assignment from the Secretary General of the IAY that the golem had shown up to recruit the Luk'naga to perform some experiments regarding the effects of light on gravity. (The effects of gravity on light were already understood, you see.)

Nobody tells us anything, the commander thought crossly. He had just gotten off the comm with the President herself, who authorized the release, complete with nuclear arming codes. Wow. I guess we'll just babysit this wreckage until it gets back...

---

Now, this is curious. My administrators have not bothered to gather intel about the foreign federation, yet here I am cooperating with its golem. I have a question or two that ought to be cleared up...

---

The commander stood behind the lead engineer's chair, leaving over to make out the figures on the display.

"It just stopped snapping back, like that?"

"Yes sir. We were only testing reprogramming channel one, which is what this screen shows." The civilian pressed a few keys and the patterns on the screen shifted subtly. "Shown here is channel two," again, another yet less subtle change, "and here is channel one on the first find. Since it hasn't snapped we've successfully repurposed all sixteen channels of the prime evaluator drive. We don't know the status of the Deep Sigma Phi, but at least one channel has not snapped in three other wreckage fragments. We're working as fast as we can to try other modules, and I think we'll be ready when it returns." The techneer was clearly proud of his team's achievements in the past twenty-four hours.

"You've done good work here. Get some rest; I'll be by at 1000 tomorrow to follow up." The commander was pleased as well; his long-sought dream of full recovery of the golem's might and glory for the Mul'ulanki federation was in reach...assuming nothing else went wrong.

Salvage

When the first piece of wreckage had been brought in, the scientists had started their work immediately.

Visual inspection showed that it contained a large fragment of the AI's core as well as a swath of the surrounding support equipment, probably from the emotive and generative subsystems.

Luckily, the salvage crews had learned from the original recovery: they all wore radiation instrumentation and shielding when they began exploring the new fragment's maintenance shafts. It had saved most of them from the sudden appearance of heavy gamma emitters in one of them. I'm not looking forward to writing the letters to the casualties' families...

After that, the comp techneers had decided to try to use the built-in failsafes to flush the contaminants out. This involved sending one man in, connecting up a few hundred tiny wires with a nanoscope, and then interfacing with the systems from a remote, safe location.

Sadly, the tech didn't quite make it out before another random surge rendered his escape moot, but the job had been done, the uplink installed, and remote exploration begun. Another letter, and another expert lost...

Further discoveries awaited the technologists. The AI core was still looping in a pre-Collapse state, and all of the adaptable logic was configured to use Nar'ara protocols -- hence the defensive radiation floods. Still, section appeared to house some extremely important functions, so the crew started trying to repurpose it -- after cracking the security and reprogramming a few small modules, the whole system would reset to its old config, snap the connection, and then start trying to convert the remote console into a Nar'ara control system.

After avoiding a few catastrophes from internal system reversion, the wreckage was catalogued, tidied up a bit, and moved into a parking orbit near the reassembly site.

After hearing about this, the admiralty quietly sent two more salvage ships with better-trained crews, fresh supplies, and a hand-written note:

"Keep looking."

SciShow!

I would like to call your attention to one of the most fascinating, well-made, and generally awesome YouTube series I know: SciShow.

These short videos are packed with an extremely wide variety of excellent information, and the personality delivering them paces himself well and enjoys his work. Deadly poisons, lethal diseases, Martian habitability, and many other topics have all made it into his broadcasts. Occasionally his topics might make some blush, but his frank delivery in these cases is refreshing. 

Needless to say, I enjoy his show. 

Sure he's not exactly precisely perfectly right sometimes (according to my microbiologist wife, who loves the show); however, to (rather terribly) paraphrase Zombie Feynman, "[By teaching people to value basic scientific knowledge and application, SciShow] is doing more to drag humanity out of the unscientific darkness than a thousand lessons in rigor."

I am also quite proud of the currency of his videos. He generally comments on research that is very recent while also going back in time to research the history of his topics quite well.

If you haven't watched any, go watch one now. 

No, really. I'm about to make a whiny little point, and the awesomeness of his work ought to be appreciated before reading my comment on one of his videos (NASA Needs You).

Back? Well, here goes:

-- begin misanthropy --

If you are going to venture into the political realm, please do so completely responsibly. Government economics is a fascinating field, with opinions all over the board. I would be happy, I think, to see a shift in our budgetary priorities towards science and away from pork. I am also of the opinion that we can't spend more than we have, so if everything gets cut then science probably should too, though perhaps by a smaller proportion. (According to our dear President, this was actually the case when budgets actually decreased.) "OMG, the NIH will be cut by $1 billion!!!1!" is entirely insufficient in this case, when what appears to be the 2013 budget is $30 billion. One Billion is a scary number, as my wife, several students, and an experienced professor would be going to China to do oncology work this summer on a measly $100,000 (that's its own story), but the sheer scale of the NIH's work shouldn't be so blithely understated.

Oh, and "These budget cuts cannot be reversed"? Really? Sure these budget cuts won't as per their designs, but do you really think the NIH, NIST, NSF, or DoE budget is a monotonic sequence?

-- end misanthropy --

That said, I'm happy to hear that NASA got $200 million more than they asked for this coming year. I would love to hear about the NIH's budget increasing too; PubMed is an awesome resource whose growth I am proud to say my tax dollars support.

The Collector's Box

Reconstruction after the war had been difficult, but it had been approached with a renewed rigor among the lassaiz faire policies following the outbreak of peace.

Reconstruction of the ISL's Golem, on the other hand, was not.

Calvin had been working on the project for quite some time, and figured he had seen it all: The Alliance's indifference to the project had left it massively underfunded and, consequently, understaffed. The Golem's AI core was unresponsive to even the most skilled psychotronic engineers. Only about a fifth of the original superstructure of the Golem had been recovered, and they only had enough resources to run one dilapidated salvage ship on shot-in-the-dark missions into the Void, where the war-ending cataclysm had occurred. The nature of the recovery missions meant that extensive shoreside leave on Terra was required for each crew sent out, and this did not please the bean counters.

After some time in this state, that lone salvage crew had crawled back into the Niffleheim system, barely towing a sizeable chunk of the Golem back. While the loadmasters were identifying and inspecting the prize, Calvin asked the lucky vessel's captain what had happened:

"Well, as per standard operating procedure," the captain grimaced, since such words were only used as a nod to the Senate, "we used the ship's reactor's radioactivity to generate a set of random jump coordinates constrained by the expected target space and known stellar obstructions. When our Drive popped us through, we found ourselves heading into orbit around one of the Darkened Suns." The captain paused, waiting for Calvin to urge him on. Those suns had been extinguished in the Golem's contrapuntal feedback event, and physics didn't quite work right around them.

Acknowledging the captain's obvious dismay at this detail, he urged him on. "We were sixteen AUs or so out, so we started the regular ten-light-minute scans, and stepped them up to full system scans. Something in the far hemisphere interfered with the Oort cloud's return of the FTL probe, so we cautiously microhopped over to see what it was..." The captain droned on about the routine details of crossing the star system. Heh. Microhopping was basically the least cautious approach that could have been used...it set off tachyon flares visible for about a lightyear. "...and when the Golem architecturalist on the crew identified it as a fragment, we started dragging it in. It's about four times a massive as it should be, but, with some ingenuity on our engine man's part, we got it here."

"Did you run much more than the simple architecture analytics on it?" Calvin probed.

The captain narrowed his eyes. "Are you not telling me something about my cargo? After fifteen of these missions, jumping blindly into who knows where, we find something, and all you can ask is whether I ran a few extra ********* scans?! Of course we didn't, sir, we were worried enough about getting it back here without a catastrophic drive failure of our own!"

That...was not what he had expected. He guessed that more unexpected things would follow quickly enough... "Captain Morris, you know everything I know. I just had a hunch and wanted to know if you had any small details that might be useful later. We both know it was a drive-related explosion, so I was just worried about contamination from that. The repair crews aren't daft; they know too and they'll be careful."

After a few more questions about the return trip, the captain left, still somewhat frazzled, and Calvin began pacing his office.

Why do Feminist Rants (usually) Bug Me?

(Savannah and Brett, I look forward to your feedback. Feminist Frequency, please read all of it and consider it carefully before dissecting me before the world.)

Let's be honest:

I'm not sure.

This post is both a fairly early attempt to understand my position AND a reaction to recent inputs from the vast ocean of YouTube.

Feminism is an interesting, complex idea. What I understand of it seeks to address deep-rooted and rather disturbing trends in society, and I'd like to think I agree with a large subset of feminist goals. Here I must plead ignorance (and risk accidentally addressing a Straw Feminist).

The video essay I just overheard (#3 The Smurfette Principle (Tropes vs. Women) by Feminist Frequency) was interestingly shallow. It was, as I experienced it, simply a long list bemoaning the fact that there are dozens of instances of Smurfette Principle trope. (I use 'principle' and 'trope' in deliberate redundancy.) The next (#4 The Evil Demon Seductress (Tropes vs. Women)) is similarly a list of complaints against films in which female sexuality is portrayed...far less than correctly.

I believe her complaints are legitimate, if poorly delivered. The Bechdel Test is a cool acid test for complex plots to strive to pass, and it is sad that we need to name the test because it is not already passed by most plots. In the same way, I believe that my view of women growing up would have been positively affected by #3 and #4 being less prevalent while I was growing up.

That which bothers me may be the fact that both of these essays end with a negative: "Sure females can be ___ in well-written plots, but 'you' should stop writing them as ___." It's "stop it, stop it, stoppit, stoppit!!!1! But FYI you can do certain stuff sometimes" rather than a wider and more careful understanding of the problem. Transformers 2 is used in both essays and disturbed me with its portrayal of its one significant female character, yet it grossed $200 million in its first five days. The problem is not just in script writing, and treating those responsible with active contempt is not likely to change much. It certainly won't endear you to me, even if I agree with you.

So, in a vain attempt to not suffer from the same problem:

If:
* you are going to write a feminist rant,
* you want to include a long list of data points, and
* you don't want me mad at _you_ afterwards,
then please:
* avoid ad hominem and straw man attacks, (yes, it's a negative...)
* present a clear argument, and
* state where you notice your own biases.

The Northern War

Encyclopaedia Fritz, Edition CLVII (2672 Atomic Era)

The Northern War

Border dispute between to adjacent star federations in the Northern Quadrant. Crimes of war led to rapid escalation with eventual depopulation of the sector. See also Blight, Hur'rikku, Tar-Aiym.

Historical Perspective

The Golden Boom was a period of extreme prosperity during the second half of the second millenium of the Atomic Era. This time saw advances in culture such as the cooperative multi-star-system development of the Golems, with massive conquest and unification achieved through the use of such massive war machines. During the peace between the Golden Boom and the White Era, ownership of one Golem came under dispute: the Mul'ulanki federation had originally built the Luk'naga Golem and, after unifying their federation, had set to work on preempting a number of internal issues with the goal of long-term nonviolent federation stability. The Luk'naga was left in orbit around Niffleheim, a cold, methane-ensconced world that was widely viewed as being neutral space in the region.

Capture of the Luk'naga

It was during this time that the artificial intelligence responsible for the Luk'naga's operation locked on to a set of stray Quantum Resonance Discharge transmissions from the Nar'ara federation. (Various theories explain why; until it is fully rebuilt, no one will know why exactly this happened.) When the small supporting fleet discovered that the Luk'naga was no longer responding to their control signals, they sent a scout to the capital world in order to figure out what to do, and started to attempt to reestablish communications with the AI; in the meantime, the Luk'naga had responded to the Nar'ara signals and had started establishing tactical feeds from their command center. According to what few records are available, the Nar'ara response was cautiously optimistic with some trepidation regarding the Mul'ulankis' response to the theft of their Golem.

The conflict began when the Luk'naga decided to jump into hyperspace.

Military Mobilization

[...]

Battle of the Diaspora

[...]

While the two battle fleets kept missing each other in hyperspace along the frontier between the federations, the Luk'naga's AI had been forced by its circumstances into a hyperaware, decision-making state akin to an electronic adrenaline rush. Deciding to stay with its maker rather than expand its experience coffers, it analyzed its trajectory in hyperspace and decided that the only way to stay out of full Nar'ara control was to self-destruct. According to the telemetry the Mul'ulanki control station received, it locked its engines into phase, coupled their impulsors, and simply went to full power. The resulting energy concentration took approximately one month to reach critical; at some point, the fabric of reality formed a discontinuity and an explosion ensued. This cataclysm enveloped several star systems and left a lifeless scar in the local cluster known today as the Black Void. When both federations' fleets heard the news, they simply returned home to watch and see what the other would do, making the Northern War one of the least bloody conflicts in recent history.

After the War

The loss of the frontier star systems around the explosion dealt a deathblow to the politics of Golem projects. If loss of such an important asset were possible, what else might be lost? Was not the Golem designed to lay waste to far more systems than what had been in the Black Void? What moral right had anyone to build such phenomenal engines of destruction?

Henrich von Kramptdatz had been one of the head engineers and architects of the Mul'ulanki Golem project. He was in the federation's control center when the telemetry stopped, signaling the great ship's demise; however, he stated that his team had built a better ship than would simply self-destruct and leave nothing. His primary claim was that salvaging the wreckage and understanding the AI's decisions was the single most important priority the federation could set. This research would reveal how such tremendously complex systems operated under duress, and might lead to better designs in the future. Sizable debris has been found in several adjacent star systems and towed to Niffleheim for inspection, but after widespread criticism of "thinking of the Nar'ara first," he was forced into obscurity and now leads a droll life at 42 Wallabee Lane, Sydney, Australia.

Few have taken note that several of the frontier worlds burned off in the explosion were not Mul'ulanki, but rather belonged to the Nar'ara. The military standoff between the federations has prevented assessment of and humanitarian assistance with the loss, though it can't be all that bad because the Nar'ara now have another Golem.

Economic recovery among the Mul'ulanki was slow but thorough. Construction began on another Golem, based on the design of the first, and is now an integral part of the federation's Defense Fleet. Certain limits on the AI are in place should a similar set of circumstances arise, and the AI is more self-aware than the first.