Category Archives: Science

Left behind by events, part 2

October 17, 2017 RichardAbbott 1 Comment

So, picking up the story where l left off two weeks ago, it’s time today to look at science fiction set in the near future from its author. Last time the focus was mainly on stories set hundreds of years in the future, where the problem is often that the technology seems pitched at too low a level. But there are different pitfalls with telling a tale in the next couple of generations. Here, an author may well assume that all kinds of things will happen quickly, when in fact they take much longer.

Flying cars are a stock image for a lot of stories, including Back to the Future and Bladerunner. Now, cars have changed in lots of ways over the span of my lifetime, but they don’t fly (and we still don’t have hoverboards). Yes, periodically there are optimistic announcements that they’re in development, but they certainly aren’t normal consumer items. The future bits of Back to the Future are set in 2015, and the original Bladerunner in 2019, so both are very contemporary.

Interceptors from moonbase in TV series UFO (PInterest)

Likewise, lots of science fiction authors assumed that we would have a moon base well before now, and that manned space missions would have visited other places in the solar system. One of my favourite books, Encounter with Tiber, written in 1996, thought it credible we would have a lunar base by around 2020. Space 1999 and the TV series UFO were even more optimistic. The prominence of the ISS, orbiting a mere two or three hundred miles from the Earth, was not often imagined, nor the enormous success of unmanned exploratory probes. Missions like Dawn, to the asteroid belt, or New Horizons, to Pluto and beyond, don’t feature. Still less the Hubble space telescope, or the LIDO gravity wave detector, which spectacularly hit the news this week.

Social change seems profoundly hard to predict. Orwell’s 1984 still has the capacity to grip us with its stark picture of state control, but actually its vision of the future is wrong in all kinds of ways. A great many authors assumed – with good reason – that a third world war would take place in the 20th century. EE (Doc) Smith’s Triplanetary simply had “19–?” as the setting for an atomic missile war, following after “1918” and “1941”. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (the short story behind Bladerunner) presupposes a war and heavy resulting pollution behind the drive to spread to other planets, and the construction of android replicants as labourers.

But all of these stories remain worth reading. We often judge the value of a story more for its human drama, and its ability to convincingly present a human response to crisis, than for the accuracy of its timeline. That is as it should be, I think.

I sometimes read criticisms of fiction which focus on the correctness or otherwise of minute details in the text, and sometimes they miss the point. Most of us don’t know the exact terminology of the parts of modern American handguns, and most of us wouldn’t know if the wrong word was used – yes, I read a scathing comment from one reviewer on just this subject a while back. But if the story holds up, most of us don’t mind. Then there’s my own area of expertise – programming. I find it hilarious when expert coders are depicted in films as hammering out on a keyboard at lightning rate without looking at either their hands or the screen. We just don’t work like that. A great deal of time is actually spent in copy-and-paste from geeky sites like StackOverflow (followed by a fair amount of careful reconfiguration). But if the story’s good, I’ll happily overlook that.

There’s certainly a place for research, and good research, in any area of fiction, but not pursued, surely, at the cost of the story and all of its other dimensions alongside the factual ones. So yes – science fiction stories set in the near future often do get things wrong, but often that doesn’t really matter.

Far from the Spaceports, Science, Science fiction, Timing

Left behind by events, part 1

October 4, 2017 RichardAbbott 1 Comment

This is the first part of two, in which I look at the ways in which books show their age.

I read a lot of science fiction, and I watch a fair number of science fiction films and TV series. The latest addition is Star Trek Discovery, the latest offering in that very-long-running universe. For those who don’t know, it’s set in a time frame a few years before the original series (the one with Captain Kirk), and well after the series just called Enterprise.

Inevitably the new series has had a mixed reception, but I have enjoyed the first couple of episodes. But the thing I wanted to write about today was not the storyline, or the characters, but the presentation of technology. The bridge of the starship Shenzhou looked just like you’d imagine – lots of touch screen consoles, big displays showing not just some sensor data but also some interpretive stuff so you could make sense of it. And so on. It looked great – recognisable to us 21st century folk used to our own touch screen phones and the like, but futuristic enough that you knew you couldn’t just buy it all from Maplin.

Original series Enterprise bridge (PInterest)

But herein lies the problem. Look back at an old episode of the original series, and the Enterprise bridge looks really naff! I dare say that back in the 1960s it also gave the impression of “this is cool future stuff”, but it certainly doesn’t look as though it’s another decade or so on from the technological world of Discovery.

Space 1999 paper output (http://catacombs.space1999.net)

Basically, our ability to build cool gadgets has vastly outstripped the imagination of authors and film makers. Just about any old science fiction book suffers from this. You find computers on board spaceships which can think, carry out prodigiously complex calculations, and so on, but output their results on reams of printed paper. Once you start looking, you can find all manner of things like this.

Forbidden Planet - The Tempest in space (DenOfGeek) — Forbidden Planet – The Tempest in space (DenOfGeek)

Now, on one level this doesn’t matter at all. The story is the main thing, and most of us can put up with little failures of imagination about just how quickly actual invention and design would displace what seemed to be far-fetched ideas. On the whole we can forgive individual stories for their foibles. If it’s a good story, we don’t mind the punched-card inputs, paper-tape outputs, and so on. We accept that in the spirit that the author intended. Also, many authors are not so very interested in the mechanics of the story, or how feasible the science is, but in different dimensions. How might people react in particular circumstances? What are the moral dimensions involved? What aspects of the story resonate most strongly with present-day issues?

The particular problem that Discovery has is simply that it is part of a wider set of series, and we already thought we knew what the future looked like! A particular peril for any of us writing a series of books.

Now it’s not just science fiction that can be left behind by the march of events. Our view of history can, and has, changed as new evidence comes to light. Casual assumptions that one generation makes about past societies, interactions, and chronology may be turned over a few years down the line. Sometimes we look at the ways in which older authors presented things and cringe. Historical fiction books might easily be overtaken by research and deeper understanding, just as much as science fiction. It’s a risk we all face.

Next time – some thoughts about my own science fiction series, Far from the Spaceports, and the particular things in that story that might get left behind. And also, the particular problems of writing about the near-future.

History, Science, Software, Writing

Can handwriting survive?

September 19, 2017 RichardAbbott 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking for a little while now about reading and writing, and decided to convert those thoughts into a blog post. I used to reckon that reading and writing were two sides of the same coin. We teach them at broadly the same time, and it seems natural with a child to talk through the physical process of making a letter shape at the same time as learning to recognise it on a page.

But lately, I’ve been reconsidering this. My thinking actually goes back several years to when I was studying ancient Egyptian. It is generally understood that alongside the scribes of Egypt – who had a good command of hieroglyphic and hieratic writing, plus Akkadian cuneiform and a few other written scripts and a whole lot of technical knowledge besides – there was a much ĺarger group of people who could read reasonably well, but not write with fluency or competence. A few particularly common signs, like the cartouche of the current pharaoh, or the major deity names, would be very widely recognised even by people who were generally illiterate. You see this same process happening with tourists today, who start to spot common groups of Egyptian signs long before they could dream of constructing a sentence.

The ability to write is far more than just knowing letter shapes. You need a wide enough vocabulary to select the right word among several choices, to know how to change each word with past or future tense, or number of people, or gender. You need background knowledge of the subject. You need to understand the conventions of the intended audience so as to convey the right meaning. In short, learning to write is more demanding than learning to read (and I’m talking about the production of writing here, not the quality of the finished product).

Roll forward to the modern day, and we are facing a slightly different kind of question. The ability to read is essential to get and thrive in most jobs. Or to access information, buy various goods, or just navigate from place to place. I’m sure it is possible to live in today’s England without being able to read, but it will be difficult, and all sorts of avenues are closed to that person.

But the ability to write – by which I mean to make handwriting – is, I think, much more in doubt. Right now I’m constructing this blog post in my lunch hour on a mobile phone, tapping little illuminated areas of the screen to generate the letters. In a little while I’ll go back to my desk, and enter characters by pressing down little bits of plastic on a keyboard. Chances are I’ll be writing some computer code (in the C# or NodeJS computer languages, if you’re curious) but if I have to send a message to a colleague I’ll use the same mechanical process.

Amazon Dot - Active — Amazon Dot – Active

Then again, some of my friends use dictation software to “write” emails and letters, and then do a small amount of corrective work at the end. They tell me that dictation technology has advanced to the stage where only minor fix-ups are needed. And, as most blog readers will know, I’m enthusiastic about Alexa for controlling functionality by voice. Although writing text of any great length is not yet feasible on that platform, my guess is that it won’t be long until this becomes real.

All of this means that while the act of reading will most likely remain crucial for a long time to come, maybe this won’t be true of writing in the conventional sense. Speaking personally, hand-writing is already something I do only for hastily scribbled notes or postcards to older relatives. Or occasionally to sign something. The readability of my hand-writing is substantially lower than it used to be, purely because I don’t exercise it much (and by pure chance I heard several of my work colleagues saying the same thing today). Do I need hand-writing in modern life? Not really, not for anything crucial.

I don’t think it’s just me. On my commuting journeys I see people reading all kinds of things – newspapers, books, magazines, Kindles, phones, tablets and so on. I really cannot remember the last time I saw somebody reading a piece of hand-written material on the tube.

Now, to set against that, I have friends and relatives for whom the act of writing is still important. They would say that the nature of the writing surface and the writing implement – pencil, biro, fountain pen – are important ingredients, and that bodily engagement with the process conveys something extra than simply the production of letters. Emphasis and emotion are easier to impart – they say – when you are personally fashioning the outcome. To me, this seems simply a temporary problem of the tools we are using, but we shall see.

Looking ahead, I cannot imagine a time when reading skills won’t be necessary – there are far too many situations where you have to pore over things in detail, review what was written a few chapters back, compare one thing against another, or just enjoy the artistry with which the text had been put together. Just to recognise which letter to tap or click requires that I be able to read. But hand-writing? I’m not at all sure this will survive much longer.

Perhaps a time will come when teaching institutions will not consider it worth while investing long periods of time in getting children’s hand-writing to an acceptable standard – after all, pieces of quality writing can be generated by several other means.

Alexa, Extract, Half Sick of Shadows, Science

Polly and Half Sick of Shadows

September 12, 2017 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Today’s blog is primarily about the latest addition to book readings generated using Amazon’s Polly text-to-speech software, but before getting to that it’s worth saying goodbye to the Cassini space probe. This was launched nearly twenty years ago, has been orbiting Saturn and its moons since 2004, and is now almost out of fuel. By the end of the week, following a deliberate course change to avoid polluting any of the moons, Cassini will impact Saturn and break up in the atmosphere there.

So, Half Sick of Shadows and Polly. Readers of this blog, or the Before the Second Sleep blog (first post and second post) will know that I have been using Amazon’s Polly technology to generate book readings. The previous set were for the science fiction book Timing, Far from the Spaceports 2. Today it is the turn of Half Sick of Shadows.

Without further ado, and before getting to some technical stuff, here is the result. It’s a short extract from late on in the book, and I selected it specifically because there are several speakers.

OK. Polly is a variation of the text-to-speech capability seen in Amazon Alexa, but with a couple of differences. First, it is geared purely to voice output, rather than the mix of input and output needed for Alexa to work.

Kindle Cover - Half Sick of Shadows — Kindle Cover – Half Sick of Shadows

Secondly, Polly allows a range of gender, voice and language, not just the fixed voice of Alexa. The original intention was to provide multi-language support in various computer or mobile apps, but it suits me very well for representing narrative and dialogue. For this particular reading I have used four different voices.

If you want to set up your own experiment, you can go to this link and start to play. You’ll need to set up some login credentials to get there, but you can extend your regular Amazon ones to do this. This demo page allows you to select which voice you want and enter any desired text. You can even download the result if you want.

But the real magic starts when you select the SSML tab, and enter more complex examples. SSML is an industry standard way of describing speech, and covers a whole wealth of variations. You can add what are effectively stage directions with it – pauses of different lengths, directions about parts of speech, emphasis, and (if necessary) a phonetic letter by letter description. You can speed up or slow down the reading, and raise or lower the pitch. Finally, and even more usefully for my purposes, you can select the spoken language as well as the language of the speaker. So you can have an Italian speaker pronouncing an English sentence, or vice versa. Since all my books are written in English, that means I can considerably extend the range of speakers. Some combinations don’t work very well, so you have to test what you have specified, but that’s fair enough.

If you’re comfortable with the coding effort required, you can call the Polly libraries with all the necessary settings and generate a whole lot of text all at once, rather than piecemeal. Back when I put together the Timing extracts, I wrote a program which was configurable enough that now I just have to specify the text concerned, plus the selection of voices and other sundry details. It still takes a little while to select the right passage and get everything organised, but it’s a lot easier than starting from scratch every time. Before too much longer, there’ll be dialogue extracts from Far from the Spaceports as well!

Science

Voyager at forty…

September 6, 2017 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Voyager 1 takes off, Sept 5th 1977 (NASA)

Forty years ago, the Voyager probes 1 and 2 were launched. I remember it happening, along with the feelings of pride and excitement that mankind had been able to construct and launch such things. It was less than a decade from the first moon landing, and it felt as though space was progressively, and quite rapidly, opening up to us all. Those were optimistic days.

Jupiter as seen from Voyager 1 (NASA/JPL)

The launch time was chosen very carefully, so as to take advantage of a rare planetary line-up to gain acceleration as they passed each of several planets over the years. This manoeuvre has come to be known as slingshot, and is used extensively in films and books as well as for real. Anyway, this series of relatively close passes also meant that we were treated, at increasing intervals, to images of planets with details which at the time had never been seen. These remote places, mere points of light to the naked eye, suddenly became real places, and we saw how familiar things like weather patterns, volcanoes, and water appeared throughout our solar system.

The two probes are still travelling outwards, still gathering new information, and still sending signals back to Earth. These signals now take 16 hours for Voyager 2, and nearly 20 hours for Voyager 1, and are fantastically weak compared to the strength at take-off. One of the many scientific spinoffs has been the development of ever more accurate equipment to listen to these distant voices. But the lifetime of the battery power is finite. From 2020 onwards, the scientific instruments will be turned off one by one to prolong the on-board power, and after 2025 none will be operational. From then on, the spacecraft will simply continue on as complicated pieces of metal. Their current velocity will be broadly the same, as there is hardly any gravitational drag.

Since 2013, Voyager 1 has officially been classed as travelling through interstellar space, as opposed to the volume of space directly linked to our sun. You could liken this to the atmosphere which surrounds a planet, attenuating in stages to interplanetary space – and indeed the region is now called the heliosphere. The very fact that such a boundary region exists was not recognised before Voyager 1’s instrument data was analysed. Our present understanding is that in this zone, the constant stream of particles pouring outwards from our sun – the solar wind – ceases to have a clear direction of flow and becomes turbulent. You could liken it to air flow around the speed of sound, but the density of particles is so thin that there is no hazard to navigation! In this region, Voyager 1 is encountering as many particles from other stars as it does from ours – the boundary zone acts as a buffer shielding our entire solar system from too much stuff passing casually in.

Neptune, as seen by Voyager 2 (NASA/JPL)

Voyager 2, though launched first, has taken a slightly different trajectory, and is now a few years behind Voyager 1. Currently it is still in the heliopause – the boundary zone – and will emerge in a few years. Both craft will – in around 300 years or so – begin to traverse a region called the Oort Cloud. This is a vague and fuzzy shell largely inhabited by comets and similar celestial debris, which occasionally get disturbed enough to drop down to the inner system and make themselves known. It is possible that one of the Voyagers will get close enough to interact with one of these objects, but hugely unlikely given the sheer volume of space concerned.

Other things being equal, they will come out the other side of the Oort cloud in about 30,000 years… and still the nearest star will be our sun. It will take about 40,000 years, give or take, before they will be nearer another star than our own sun. This last figure highlights just how far it is from one star to the next, compared with the distances from a star to the associated planets. Right now, the closest star to us is Alpha Centauri, but by that time another star will be our nearest neighbour, Gliese 445. But even that won’t be very close – the point of nearest approach is about 1.6 light years.

Both Voyager craft carry “The Golden Record”, looking not unlike an old LP vinyl record, containing a diverse collection of information about us. I remember there being considerable controversy about this as launch time approached back in 1977. There were earnest debates about the content – should Johnny B. Goode be part of our interstellar welcome pack? Was it improper to have pictures of a naked man and woman? But there were also more basic questions. Did we wanted to make our existence known to other possible life forms? Should we include what are effectively navigation instructions telling whoever finds them how to find us? Those who are curious can look up the exact list of what we sent on these golden disks here, and even listen to the audio content here.

For me, the Voyager craft have been a background feature of life from my late teens. For some people, they have been the focus of their entire working lives. And so far, they are the only two objects that we have built which have escaped the gravity well of our sun, and are now at large in the galaxy.

“Pale Blue Dot” – Earth from Voyager 1, 4 billion miles away (NASA/JPL)

Science, Science fiction, The Liminal Zone

A research snippet

August 15, 2017 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

I thought today I’d share some research I have been doing for my WIP science fiction book, The Liminal Zone.

For various plot reasons I needed to know the answer to the following problem. Suppose you were standing on the surface of Pluto’s moon Charon, looking up at Pluto, fully lit by the sun… how bright would that be compared to looking up at the full moon from Earth?

This depends on a few factors:

How bright is Pluto compared to our Moon?
How big are Pluto and Charon compared to Earth and the Moon?
What is the separation between Pluto and Charon compared to that between Earth and Moon?
How much light from the sun falls on Pluto or Charon compared to Earth and Moon?

The relationship between these various factors boil down to a fairly simple equation – comparing everything to the full moon brightness, which is fairly familiar to us, you have to:

Scale up by the ratio of intrinsic reflectivity of the two bodies (called the albedo)
Scale up by the ratio of the apparent area of sky covered by the two bodies
Scale down by the square of the relative distance from the sun.

The apparent area can be calculated relatively easily knowing the radius of the body in question and the distance apart.

At this point you start looking up the raw figures from any of several science sites (a handy list follows below).

Let’s first think about the simpler problem of how bright a “Full Earth” is as seen from the Moon. The Earth is, on average, 2.5 times as reflective as the Moon (that’s averaging over cloudy and clear skies, land and water, etc), and the area of sky it covers is about 14 times that of the Moon. So a Full Earth as seen from the Moon is about 35 times as bright as the Full Moon as seen from Earth. Quite a sight.

Charon from New Horizons spacecraft (NASA/JPL)

Let’s move out to Pluto, and imagine we are standing looking up at a “Full Charon”. Charon is brighter than the Earth, is much smaller, much closer to Pluto than our Moon is to us, and much much further away from the sun (forty times further on average).

When you put all those figures together you find that the apparent diameter of Charon in Pluto’s sky is nearly eight times that of our Moon, so nearly sixty times the apparent area. Scale up for the extra brightness and down for the distance from the sun, and you find that Charon has about 1/6 of the brightness of our full moon. Probably still just enough to cast shadows.

Pluto from New Horizons spacecraft (NASA/JPL)

And finally, looking up at a “Full Pluto” from Charon. Pluto is about twice the size of Charon so about four times the area. By way of comparison, that means Pluto would nicely fit inside either the top or bottom half of the constellation Orion – between belt and shoulders, or belt and feet. Pluto is also brighter than Charon. Put that all together and you find that Pluto’s full light is about two thirds that of a full moon here.

I found this quite a remarkable fact when I crunched the numbers. Go all the way out from our Earth to the furthest of the standard nine planets, and the experience of standing on Charon looking up at Pluto is almost the same – in terms of brightness – as standing here looking up at the Moon. A useful comparison for my character, who is doing just that.

Facts and figures for the curious…
Albedo values (average)

Moon 0.12
Earth 0.3
Charon 0.45
Pluto 0.6

Radius values

Moon 1737 km
Earth 6371 km
Charon 606 km
Pluto 1187 km

Distances from planet to moon

Earth-Moon distance 384,400 km
Pluto-Charon distance 18,384 km

Apparent angular size

Moon from Earth 0.5 degrees
Earth from Moon 1.9 deg
Charon from Pluto 3.8 deg
Pluto from Charon 7.4 deg

Extract, Science, Science fiction, Timing

More about Polly… and Pluto besides

July 18, 2017 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Today’s blog is mainly about the mp3 conversation extracts from Timing, which I talked about last week. And right up front here are links to my favourite two…

On board Rydal’s ship, the Heron… http://datascenesdev.com/Alexa/voicefiles/All_Extract_A.mp3

On board Parvati’s ship, the Parakeet… http://datascenesdev.com/Alexa/voicefiles/All_Extract_C.mp3

While talking about Timing, it seems a good idea to remind everyone about a recent review which captured neatly a great deal of what was trying to convey in the story: “a story that provides questions as well as answers, thrill and satisfaction, and an adventure that can’t be beat“.

Sometime in the next couple of weeks they’ll be uploaded to YouTube, but for now they are just audio links included below and on the appropriate blog page. You’ll find more about this below. In passing, there’s a small prize available for the first person who correctly spots what’s wrong with the voice selection for Chandrika! Also, and unrelated to that, you’ll hear that not all of the voices are equally successful. I shall continue to tweak them, so hopefully the quality will steadily improve.

But before that, NASA just released two YouTube videos to celebrate the two year anniversary of when the New Horizons probe was at nearest approach to Pluto and Charon. They have turned the collection of images and other telemetry into flyby simulations of the dwarf planet and its moon, as though you were manoeuvring over them. Both the colours and the vertical heights of surface features have been exaggerated so you can get a better sense of what you are seeing, but that aside, it’s as close as most of us will get to personally experiencing these places.

Pluto: https://youtu.be/g1fPhhTT2Oo

Charon: https://youtu.be/f0Q7O7TZ7Ks

OK, back to Polly. As well as specifying which of several different voices you want, you can give Polly some metadata about the sentence to help generate correct pronunciation. Last week I talked about getting proper nouns correct, like Mitnash. But in English you also get lots of words which are spelled the same but pronounced differently – homonyms. The one which I ran into was “minute”, which can either be a unit of time (min-nit) or something very small (my-newt). Another problem case I found was “produce” – was I expecting the noun form (prod-yuce) or the verb (pro-deuce)?

In all such cases, Polly tries to guess from context which you mean, but sometimes guesses wrong. Happily you can simply add some metadata to say which you want. Sometimes this is simply a matter of adding in a tag saying “I want the noun”. Other times you can say which of several alternate senses of the word you want, and simply check the underlying list until you find the right one. And if all else fails, there’s always the option of spelling it out phonetically…

Alexa, Far from the Spaceports, Science, Science fiction, Timing

More about AI and voice technology

July 11, 2017 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

A couple of weeks ago I went to a day event put on by Amazon showcasing their web technologies. My own main interests were – naturally – in the areas of AI and voice, but there was plenty there if instead you were into security, or databases, or the so-called “internet of things”.

Readers of this blog will know of my enthusiasm for Alexa, and perhaps will also know about the range of Alexa skills I have been developing (if you’re interested, go to the UK or the US sites). So I thought I’d go a little bit more into both Alexa and the two building blocks which support Alexa – Lex for language comprehension, and Polly for text-to-speech generation.

Alexa does not in any substantial sense live inside your Amazon Echo or Dot – that simply provides the equivalent of your ears and mouth. Insofar as the phrase is appropriate, Alexa lives in the cloud, interacting with you by means of specific convenient devices. Indeed, Amazon are already moving the focus away from particular pieces of hardware, towards being able to access the technology from a very wide range of devices including web pages, phones, cars, your Kindle, and so on. When you interact with Alexa, the flow of information looks a bit like this (ignoring extra bits and pieces to do with security and such like).

And if you tease that apart a little bit then this is roughly how Lex and Polly fit in.

Lex and Polly information flows (simplified)

So for today I want to look a bit more at the two “gateway” parts of the jigsaw – Lex and Polly. Lex is there to sort out what it is you want to happen – your intent – given what it is you said. Of course, given the newness of the system, every so often Lex gets it wrong. What entertains me is not so much those occasions when you get misunderstood, but the extremity of some people’s reaction to this. Human listeners make mistakes just like software ones do, but in some circles each and every failure case of Lex is paraded as showing that the technology is inherently flawed. In reality, it is simply under development. It will improve, but I don’t expect that it will ever get to 100% perfection, any more than people will.

Anyway, let’s suppose that Lex has correctly interpreted your intent. Then all kinds of things may happen behind the scenes, from simple list lookups through to complex analysis and decision-making. The details of that are up to the particular skill, and I’m not going to talk about that.

Instead, let’s see what happens on the way back to the user. The skill as a whole has decided on some spoken response. At the current state of the art, that response is almost certainly defined by the coder as a block of text, though one can imagine that in the future, a more intelligent and autonomous Alexa might decide for herself how to frame a reply. But however generated, that body of text has to be transformed into a stream of spoken words – and that is Polly’s job.

A standard Echo or Dot is set up to produce just one voice. There is a certain amount of configurability – pitch can be raised or lowered, the speed of speech altered, or the pronunciation of unusual words defined. But basically Alexa has a single voice when you use one of the dedicated gadgets to access her. But Polly has a lot more – currently 48 voices (18 male and 30 female), in 23 languages. Moreover, you can require that the speaker language and the written language differ, and so mimic a French person speaking English. Which is great if what you want to do is read out a section of a book, using different voices for the dialogue.

That’s just what I have been doing over the last couple of days, using Timing (Far from the Spaceports Book 2) as a test-bed. The results aren’t quite ready for this week, but hopefully by next week you can enjoy some snippets. Of course, I rapidly found that even 48 voices are not enough to do what you want. There is a shortage of some languages – in particular Middle Eastern and Asian voices are largely absent – but more will be added in time. One of the great things about Polly (speaking as a coder) is that switching between different voices is very easy, and adding in customised pronunciation is a breeze using a phonetic alphabet. Which is just as well. Polly does pretty well on “normal” words, but celestial bodies such as Phobos and Ceres are not, it seems, considered part of a normal vocabulary! Even the name Mitnash needed some coaxing to get it sounding how I wanted.

The world of Far from the Spaceports and Timing (and the in preparation Authentication Key) is one where the production of high quality and emotionally sensitive speech by artificial intelligences (personas in the books) taken for granted. At present we are a very long way from that – Alexa is a very remote ancestor of Slate, if you like – but it’s nice to see the start of something emerging around us.

Alexa, Far from the Spaceports, Half Sick of Shadows, Science, Science fiction, Timing

Friday June 30th was International Asteroid Day!

July 1, 2017 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Artist's impression of asteroid (NASA/JPL) — Artist’s impression of asteroid (NASA/JPL)

And no, I hadn’t realised this myself until a couple of days before… but NASA and others around the world had a day’s focus on asteroids. Now, to be sure most of that focus was looking at the thorny question of Near Earth Objects, both asteroids and comets, and what we might be able to do if one was on a collision course.

But it seemed to me that this was as good a time as any to celebrate my fictional Scilly Isle asteroids, as described in Far from the Spaceports and Timing (and the work in progress provisionally called The Authentication Key). In those stories, human colonies have been established on some of the asteroids, and indeed on sundry planets and moons. These settlements have gone a little beyond mining stations and are now places that people call home. A scenario well worth remembering on International Asteroid Day!

While on the subject of books, some lovely reviews for Half Sick of Shadows have been coming in.

Hoover Reviews said:
“The inner turmoil of The Lady, as she struggles with the Mirror to gain access to the people she comes in contact with, drives the tale as the Mirror cautions her time and again about the dangers involved. The conclusion of the tale, though a heart rending scene, is also one of hope as The Lady finally finds out who she is.”

The Review said:
“Half Sick of Shadows is in a genre all its own, a historical fantasy with some science fiction elements and healthy dose of mystery, it is absolutely unique and a literary sensation. Beautifully written, with an interesting storyline and wonderful imagery, it is in a realm of its own – just like the Lady of Shalott… It truly is mesmerising.”

Find out for yourself at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.

Or chat about the book with Alexa by enabling the skill at the UK or US stores.

Far from the Spaceports, Science, Science fiction, Timing

Colonising Mars?

June 21, 2017 RichardAbbott Leave a comment

Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, has made no secret of his plans for facilitating a colony on Mars for a long time now. But last September, in a public presentation, he explained it all in considerably more detail. The reasoning, and the raw logistical figures behind it, are still available. His credibility is built around the SpaceX programme. This in turn is based on a concept of reusing equipment rather than throwing it away each launch, and it has had a string of successes lately. The initial booster stage now returns to a landing platform, there to go through a process which recommissions it for another launch.

SpaceX booster stage returning to land (space.com credit SpaceX)

Quite apart from any recycling benefits, this then allows SpaceX to seriously undercut other firms’ prices of putting satellites into orbit. It still couldn’t be called cheap – one set of figures quotes $65 million – but that’s only about one sixth of the regular cost. If you’re happy to know that your equipment is going into orbit on a rocket that is not brand new, it’s a huge saving. Every successful launch, return to base, and relaunch, adds to buyers’ confidence that the procedure can be trusted.

But the big picture goes well beyond Earth orbit. Musk believes that the best way to mitigate the risks of life on Earth – global warming, conflict, extremist views of all kinds, and so on – is to spread out more widely. In a recent lecture, Stephen Hawking has said essentially the same thing. And in Musk’s vision, Mars is a better bet than the moon for this, for a whole cluster of reasons including the presence of an atmosphere (albeit a thin one compared to here) and a greater likeness to Earth in terms of gravity and size.

So reusable rockets into Earth orbit are simply a starting point. Once you have a reasonably-sized fleet of such things, you can build larger objects already in space, and fly them over to Mars when the orbital positions are ideal. The logic of gravitational pull around a planet means that the hardest, and most energy-intensive part is needed to get you from the surface up to a stable orbit. Once there, much gentler and longer-lasting means of propulsion will get you onward bound.

Artist's Impression of Dawn in orbit (NASA/JPL) — Artist’s Impression of Dawn in orbit (NASA/JPL)

To take a contemporary situation, NASA’s Dawn probe is currently orbiting the asteroid Ceres. Its hydrazine fuel, which powers the little manoeuvring and attitude thrusters, is nearly exhausted. The mission control team are trying to decide on the best course of action. In its current high orbit only a few months of fuel remain. A closer orbit, which would give better quality pictures, would use it up in a matter of weeks. But using the main ion drive, a different power source altogether, to go somewhere else would probably give a few years of science. Fairly soon we should hear which option they have chosen, and where they consider the best balance is between risk and reward. The message for here is that staying close to a planet, or taking off from one, is costly in terms of fuel.

So Musk reckons that over the course of a century or so, he can arrange transportation for a million Martian colonists. In terms of grand sweep, it is so far ahead of anyone else’s plans as to seem impossible at first sight. But if all goes according to his admittedly ambitious plan, the first of many journeys could take place ten years from now. He – and I for that matter – might not live to see the Martian population reach a million, but he certainly expects to see it firmly established.

With Far from the Spaceports, its sequel Timing, and the work-in-progress provisionally called The Authentication Key, I deliberately did not fix a future date. It’s far enough ahead of now that artificial intelligence is genuinely personal and relational – sufficiently far ahead that it is entirely normal for a human investigator to be partnered long-term on an equal basis with an AI persona. None of the present clutch of virtual assistants have any chance at all of this, and my guess is that we are talking many generations of software development before this could happen. It’s also far enough ahead that there are colonies in many locations – certainly out as far as the moons of Saturn, and I am thinking about a few “listening post” settlements further out (watch this space – the stories aren’t written yet!). However, I hadn’t really thought in terms of a million colonists on Mars, and it may well be that, as happens so often in science fiction, real events might overtake my scenario a lot quicker than I thought likely.

Back with Musk’s proposal, one obvious consequence of the whole reuse idea is that the cost per person of getting there drops hugely. This buy-in figure is typically quoted as something like $10 billion. But the SpaceX plan drops this down to around $20,000 – cheaper than the average house price in the UK. I wonder how many people, given the chance, would sell up their belongings here in exchange for a fresh start on another planet?

I was wondering what image to finish with, and then came across this NASA/JPL picture of the Mars Curiosity Rover as seen from the Mars Orbiter (the little blue dot roughly in the middle)… a fitting display of the largeness of the planet compared to what we have sent there so far.

Mars Curiosity (blue dot) as seen from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (NASA/JPL)