Resister: Space Funding Crisis II
Page 14
THIRTY-THREE: KBZ CHAMBER CONTROL HANDOVER
She came out into a large open space like a white laquer cavern. Dozens of people were scurrying about or sitting clustered around large terminals. Some kind of organizing was going on, but everyone was ignoring her.
THIRTY-TWO
Out of nowhere, she was suddenly grabbed into a tight embrace. The mouthful of hair tasted of Dart. Somewhere near, there was a tap-tap-tapping of a keyboard.
THIRTY-ONE
“Arianne!” wailed Dart.
“Mmhff!” said Arianne.
Holt appeared over Dart’s shoulder.
“Arianne! You’re alright! I thought …”.
THIRTY
The simple hug and the look of genuine concern warmed Arianne’s heart. Even after all the things she’d put them through, they’d still come to give her a sendoff. But they’d carry on with their lives while she was frozen. She would miss them.
Her heart cooled considerably when she looked past Holt and saw Vastion La Quana standing on a raised dais and surrounded by scurrying support staff.
“Ah, Dr. Arianne,” he said, “thank you for completing your test.”
TWENTY-NINE: HUB SEQUENCES INITIATED
Arianne sighed and gently detached herself from Dart. She knew that La Quana would want some kind of gloat before consigning her to the waiting fields, so she took a few steps towards him.
“Oh, no problem,” she said, her nonchalance somewhat dampened by a massive spasm in her left eye. “And thank you for keeping such a close eye on us while we were often nearly killed.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
La Quana was scanning his fingerprint on a tablet offered up to him by a lackey, so didn’t really hear her rebuke.
“And,” he continued, waving a tiny chrome memory card at her, “you picked up some extra credit.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Yeah, well,” said Arianne, shrugging and bowing her head, “bit of an accident. I guess that I’ve failed whatever weird criteria you had?”
TWENTY-SIX
La Quana chuckled.
“Locating the outside agency was not an accident at all, Dr. Arianne, it’s what I sent you out to get. And don’t be so hard on yourself - you’ve done a great deal in a small timespan. In fact, I’ve decided to offer you all a place on my field expedition.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Arianne made a kind of quiet squeaking noise and her shoulders slumped further. So this was her reward? A brief extension of her academic life to go on yet another mysterious errand. Probably six months of live time and another half century of waiting the cold. Was it really worth it? She had dreams of being free to revel in the miraculous inevitabilities of the universe, but maybe it just wasn’t possible. She glanced around the room and saw hundreds of people moving back and forth, all single cogs in CAFCA’s machine. She had been foolish to think that she could succeed as some kind of frontier scientist, living a simple, self-sufficient life dedicated to nurturing her own theories. This wasn’t the wild west anymore. Research wasn’t about striking gold in an undiscovered valley or breaking open a buried tomb or discovering some rare correlation. It was nudging numbers around on a funding spreadsheet, it was learning to worship the immovable authority of the higherarchs and bend to their will.
If she was honest with herself, Arianne always knew that at some point she’d be found out and cast aside. She’d known that she was rebelling against the tried and tested way of doing things, and that it couldn’t last. Her old supervisor had been right: it had been time to grow up, to make serious plans for the future. But she hadn’t. And now it was too late.
TWENTY-FOUR
Well, she thought, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to leave that all behind. And she could, she suddenly realized – she could leave. This life was all that she could remember, but there were other horizons out there. Her head suddenly filled with a hundred things she could do if she didn’t have to battle galactic conspiracies. Or, more accurately, if she didn’t have to spend weeks filling out forms to get a stipend to do a workshop to create a grant application for funding to go battle galactic conspiracies. Jumping into the blue was all she’d ever wanted to do, and what better way than trying something she’d never tried before? It wouldn’t be so bad.
TWENTY-THREE
Arianne met La Quana’s eyes and spoke steadily.
“Thanks, but I’m not interested,” she said. “I’m going to go have … you know, a life or whatever it is people do instead of submitting funding applications and dodging lasers.”
TWENTY-TWO: DETACH MOORINGS
Arianne turned away.
“Oh, I’m afraid I took the liberty of choosing for you. There’s no leaving now,” said La Quana, darkly.
TWENTY-ONE
Arianne froze.
“Where are we going?” asked Dart, sounding uncharacteristically worried.
TWENTY
“To meet them, of course – the outside agency,” said La Quana with a sly hint of humor.
NINETEEN
“Though I’m afraid the journey will take a while ...” he said, nodding gravely.
EIGHTEEN
“How long?” asked Kotlin.
SEVENTEEN
“Oh,” said La Quana shrugging, “nearly three thousand years.”
SIXTEEN
Three thousand years? The amount of time was ludicrous. It nearly welded Arianne’s resolve, and she tilted forwards to start walking away. But then some pieces locked together in Arianne’s brain. An old idea, almost childish. She could hardly believe it. Just half a moment ago she was sure of wanting no leave. Now she felt the giddy rush of oncoming destiny.
FIFTEEN
“We’re on a ship, aren’t we?” she asked nobody in particular.
Holt came to stand at Arianne’s shoulder, she turned to him and he nodded.
FOURTEEN
“Yeah, a mill class 9 superlifter.” Holt sounded both impressed and worried.
THIRTEEN
“How far can a class 9 superlifter go in three thousand years?” she asked.
TWELVE
Holt gulped. “A long way.”
ELEVEN
“I’ve been beamed the flight plan,” said Kotlin, coming to stand on her other side.
TEN: REMOVE SAFETY INHIBITS
“Are we going hubward or spinward?” asked Arianne.
NINE
Dart pushed her nose over Kotlin’s shoulder.
“Um, what’s the word for ‘away from everything’?”
EIGHT
Arianne turned back to La Quana who was smiling broadly.
SEVEN
“I told you that you’d want to know,” he said, and winked.
SIX: KBZ ENGINE START
“What’s. Going. On?” demanded Dart, shaking Kotlin’s shoulders in frustration with each word.
FIVE
A smile also emerged on Arianne’s face.
FOUR
“Aliens!” said Arianne, breathlessly.
THREE: KBZ FIRING ALIGNMENT IS A GO
“They’re found fucking aliens and they need a team to do first contact.”
TWO
“We’re going to become the most famous linguists ever!”
ONE
“Or at least the first useful ones.”
ZERO
And they blasted into space.
Epilogue
“It was very hexpedient to ‘ave us stowhaway like this.”
“Yes, though not hexactly a first-class ‘otel. But where are we going?”
“I’m glad you asked!”
Karen Govinam L. Arianne will return in Transister
Appendix
1. “The world’s strongest MRI will be able to pick up a tank”
http://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-strongest-mri-will-be-able-to-pick-up-a-tank-1598149430
2. Links between electric stimulation, the dopamine system and learning
Knecht, S., Breitenstein, C., Bushuven, S., Wailke,
S., Kamping, S., Flöel, A., Ringelstein, E. B. (2004). Levodopa: faster and better word learning in normal humans. Annals of neurology, 56(1), 20-26.
Enard, W. (2011). FOXP2 and the role of cortico-basal ganglia circuits in speech and language evolution. Current opinion in neurobiology, 21(3), 415-424.
Bao, S., Chan, V. T., & Merzenich, M. M. (2001). Cortical remodelling induced by activity of ventral tegmental dopamine neurons. Nature, 412(6842), 79-83.
Murrin, L.C. & Roth, R.H. (1976). Dopaminergic neurons: effects of electrical stimulation on dopamine biosynthesis. Molecular pharmacology, 12(3), 463-475.
3. Using electric resonance to hack computers
Kim, Y., Daly, R., Kim, J., Fallin, C., Lee, J. H., Lee, D., ... & Mutlu, O. (2014). Flipping bits in memory without accessing them: An experimental study of DRAM disturbance errors. In ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News (Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 361-372). IEEE Press.
Seaborn, M., & Dullien, T. (2015). Exploiting the DRAM rowhammer bug to gain kernel privileges. Black Hat.
4. Insurance bubbles and shadow reinsurers
http://www.businessinsider.com/insurance-companies-creating-next-bubble-2013-11?IR=T
5. Emergent navigation
Braitenberg, V. (1986). Vehicles: Experiments in synthetic psychology. MIT press.
Zeil, J. (2012). Visual homing: an insect perspective. Current opinion in neurobiology, 22(2), 285-293.
Neumann, T. R., Huber, S. A., & Bülthof, H. H. (1997, October). Minimalistic approach to 3D obstacle avoidance behavior from simulated evolution. In International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks (pp. 715-720). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Barrows, G. L., Chahl, J. S., & Srinivasan, M. V. (2003). Biologically inspired visual sensing and flight control. The Aeronautical Journal, 107(1069), 159-168.
Chahl, J., Thakoor, S., Le Bouffant, N., Stange, G., Srinivasan, M. V., Hine, B., & Zornetzer, S. (2003). Bioinspired engineering of exploration systems: a horizon sensor/attitude reference system based on the dragonfly ocelli for mars exploration applications. Journal of Field Robotics, 20(1), 35-42.
6. Language Efficiency: Find target words to shorten
Load Data
Data from the Switchboard corpus of English.
d = read.csv("SwitchboardWordLengths_andRates.csv")
Take out words with laughter.
d = d[!grepl("laughter",d$word.clean),]
Take out hesitations and turn-preserving placeholders, since the whole point of these is to take up time.
ums = c("uh",'yeah','um','umhum', 'uhhuh','so','oh','really','right',
'well','okay','and','that','this',
"that's",'but','just',"it's")
d = d[!d$word.clean %in% ums,]
Calculate heaviness
Calculate frequency and total time spent saying these words.
f = tapply(d$word.clean,d$word.clean,length)
l.t = tapply(d$dur,d$word.clean,sum, na.rm=T) / (1000 * 60)
Make a linear model predicting time spent by frequency.
m0 = lm(l.t~f)
Get residuals of model - the higher the residual of a word, the worse it fits in the frequency/length curve. This is a word's "heaviness".
heaviness = sort(residuals(m0))
Find the heavy, long words as candidates to change:
targetWords = names(tail(heaviness,n=20))
targetWords = targetWords[nchar(targetWords)>4]
Words that are pulling their weight:
goodWords = names(head(heaviness,n=6))
Plot the target words
par(mar=c(1,7,1,1))
plot(heaviness, xlab='',xaxt='n', ylab="", yaxt='n')
axis(2,las=2)
title(ylab="Heavinessn(deviance from frequency-length curve, minutes)",line=4)
tw.x1 = seq(min(heaviness[targetWords]) - (min(heaviness[targetWords])*0.4),
max(heaviness[targetWords]),
length.out=length(heaviness[targetWords]))
gw.x1 = seq(min(heaviness[goodWords]),
max(heaviness[goodWords]),
length.out=length(heaviness[goodWords]))
seq1 = seq(3000,10000, length.out=length(targetWords))
seq2 = seq(1000,9000, length.out=length(goodWords))
arrows(seq1, tw.x1,
tail(1:length(heaviness),n=length(targetWords)),
heaviness[targetWords], length = 0,
col='gray')
text(seq1, tw.x1, targetWords, pos=2, col=2)
arrows(seq2, gw.x1, 100, heaviness[goodWords], length = 0,
col='gray')
text(seq2, gw.x1, goodWords, pos=4, col='green')
Calculate saving
Calculate the total saving, assuming target words can be halved.
totalTime = sum(d$dur)
totalTargetWordTime = sum(d[d$word.clean %in% targetWords,]$dur)
saving = (totalTargetWordTime * 0.5) / totalTime
So, shortening these words:
actually, probably, don't, things, something, about, because, people, think
Will result in a 2.04% efficiency saving.