“In a full world, making anything at all is a responsibility”

This is an ambivalent post.

This is beautiful:

When I say beauty, I don’t mean aesthetically. It’s a functional beauty, born of lightness and efficiency. The America’s Cup boats are cracking forty knots (or 75 kilometres per hour in sensible units), using nothing more than wind and carbon fibre. As an engineer, I’m proud to point to what we can do.

(Aesthetically, it’s hard to make anything that efficient which isn’t sleekly desirable. For me, that’s a side-effect, but you may disagree.)

At the same time, it’s a pretty hideous thing, an expensive, pointless, rich man’s toy. It’s exploring a parameter space that’s defined by legalese rather than any sane utility. And one just killed a member of its crew.

That dichotomy exemplifies our interactions with material objects, the same thing can be an object of desire and a component of an morally-vacuous consumer lifestyle. So how do we get out of this trap? Continue reading “In a full world, making anything at all is a responsibility”

Our house in the Dominion Post

“Your Weekend” section, this Saturday the eleventh of May:

Cheers to Lou, Cliff, Duncan, and everyone involved.

Car alarms of doom

You know that moment, immediately after an earthquake or explosion, when all the car alarms go off? Hold that thought…

In the UK in 2005, about three hundred tonnes of petrol spilt from an overflowing tank at the Buncefield fuel storage site. Most of that formed a vapour cloud in the still air and a spark eventually caused the whole lot to explode, flattening nearby buildings and leading to three days of fires that burned fifty thousand tonnes of petrol.

Amazingly, no-body died or was seriously injured, mostly because it happened first thing on a Sunday morning. People who like to blow shit up Explosion mechanism experts are still studying this, as it was a strange explosion. It was a complicated mixture of deflagration and detonation. Deflagration means rapid burning, giving you a boom; detonation means a proper explosion, giving you a bang. In a deflagration, the flame front rushes through the vapour cloud, setting it on fire and giving you a lovely fireball climbing into the sky. In a detonation, shock waves expand supersonically, kicking the whole lot off pretty much in one go.

Normally, with a big cloud of gasoline vapour in open space, you get deflagration. You only get detonation if you have the cloud confined so that pressures can build up (some of you can think of an obvious example). Buncefield was a mix of the two. Some of the trees and hedges provided enough confinement to turn deflagrations into detonations. However, the (sadly paywalled) summary report on the disaster also contains this theory:

“[The first] deflagration led to a fireball that … created a pressure wave … that moved across the car parks. This activated the remote keyless entry anti-theft alarms in cars at the western edges. These caused ignition and vented deflagrations from the cars … This suggests that it would be prudent to test the propensity, or otherwise, for activated antitheft alarms to ignite a flammable mixture.”

So yeah, the cars were sitting in the vapour cloud, the initial blast from the first burning set off the car alarms, the alarms triggered the cars to go boom.

I don’t know about you, but I find that hilarious.

We put a slack rope up in the lounge

…as you do, if you’re us.

Pics and all

Airlines don’t make profits

Over the last forty years, airlines have not been profitable. Despite the massive and ongoing growth in air travel, the whole industry has manged to return an average of about 0.1% on revenue, which is as close to zero as makes no difference. So what happened and what’s going to happen when airlines start getting serious about their carbon emissions? Continue reading Airlines don’t make profits

Can you spot the problem?

One of the LED strips in the Mitochondrion is has a problem. Only the first third of the LEDs light up, the rest are dim. Now, finding hardware problems can take bloody forever. Poking, swearing, scratching of head. In this case, however:

Yeah, that’s a crack through the middle of the driver chip. It’s pretty easy to work out why this strip isn’t working.

Short term fix is new LED strip. Longer term, well, the driver chips are slightly wider than the aluminium strip underneath. When I drop the whole thing, the chip bangs up against the curve of the polycarbonate tube, pushing the ends down and the middle up. Thus the crack across the middle. So, some padding required for the Mark 4 to help cushion these chips. For the Mark 5, the drivers are inside the LEDs, so that should be more robust, but again, padding will be required.

Sustainable carrying capacity – or what are limits anyway?

Last week, the Royal Society published two papers on the sustainabile carrying capacity of New Zealand. I’ve been working on these for a while but, as ever, I don’t feel like I authored them. Instead, they’re a consolidation of discussions with experts, reviewed by yet more experts. There’s a huge list of names of the back of them, go see.

The papers are asking the question of how many people can New Zealand support and copiously failing to give a simple answer, but that’s ok, coz this stuff is hard. For instance, here’s some of the press about the papers:
Kiwis take more than a fair share – NZ Herald
Less television, more gardening suggested – Otago Daily Times

Both those articles miss the point, or rather they are casting about for a simple message – that we’re overshooting the planet’s capability to support us. There’s a bunch of issues with that simple message, which I’ll get around to describing another time, but the primary one is that we know we’re in overshoot, we’ve known that for really quite some time, and saying it again isn’t going to change that.
We know that, so let’s think a bit harder

It’s time to stop writing webpages in notepad

After being with the same host (cheers, Paul) since 1997, I’ve moved to WordPress and a commercial host. Hence here’s the new happyinmotion.com. Pics moved from the broken Gallery 1.whatever install to Picasa web albums, blog posts & comments back to 2004 imported from LiveJournal, and everything seems fine so far. Anything you find broken, please let me know. Format and presentation likely to change as I get settled in.

Content posted here will be cross-posted to LJ, coz it’s a Wellington thing and LJ still does a better job than any other social network of managing the complexities of human community, security, and identity. THere may be more private content posted to LJ, but not often, coz I like to talk with people in person. Old-fashioned, I know, but what do you expect from someone who only just stopped using Notepad?

Laptop broken, how do I diagnose what is wrong?

So, one fucked laptop here. Machine is a Toshiba Satellite A300, four-five years old, all drivers up to date, no software or hardware changes between Sunday and today. Updated to Win 8 six months ago, has run passably until today, with occasional crashes on hibernation.

Rather odd symptoms: it will boot fine and let me sign in, all the way to the Win8 Start screen, clicking on the Desktop gets me the desktop, but then no further responsiveness. No response to mouse clicks, key presses, CTRL-ALT-DEL. So then:

  • Boot into safe mode, works fine.
  • Try refresh, can’t make a refresh disk in safe mode, can’t do anything in unsafe mode. No refresh possible.
  • Try reinstalling Win 8. No reinstall disk, running the Win8 setup utility from safe mode fails with no error message.
  • Umm… fucked if I know…

So, lazyweb, what should I do to try to diagnose what the problem is? Or should I just take it to the Toshiba service place in town who, truth be told, have been great at fixing hardware problems on several Toshiba laptops. Or should I just stump up an irritatingly large chunk of cash to replace a laptop that’s only four years old?

Before anyone says “don’t use Windows”, I’ll just point out that I’ve been using Linux since Redhat 5.2 and the current set of mechanical or electrical design software for Linux is a heap of shite. And I trust you all know me well enough not to suggest I use a Mac.

Mitochondrion glow staff progress – where I’m at, where I want to go

Back from Rainbow Serpent now and mostly recovered from having too much fun. So much fun that I haven’t any pics or vids. The Mitochondrion mark 4.2.3 got a great reception, someone described it as brain-melting, which is one of the feelings that I’m trying to create, and I got to meet lots of other good people and see lots of other LED gear.

I’ve mostly been developing this glow staff for my own pleasure* but with an eventual goal of making these available to other people. “Eventual” can be a long time in the future, but Reese from Soul-fire had a spin (and looked downright wonderfull with it) and then bounced up to me and said “you should be making these so other people can have this experience”. That’s the best reason for hurrying this process along.

This year's plan

Mark 4.2.3 – More grunt needed. As always.

While everyone’s off to Kiwiburn, we’re off to Rainbow Serpent in Oz. It just worked out that way. Anyway, for the Mark 4.2.3 I’ve fixed lots of bugs, mended a couple of screws, implemented a couple of more structured modes, 24 modes in total, and doubled the speed – 10 ms per refresh.

I’ve also nearly run out of program memory (28 kB out of 30 kB) and RAM, so fitting in the code for the audio, BlueTooth, and motion-responsive patterns is going to be tricky.

More grunt needed. As always.

I must go now, to rejoin my people:

Further Adventures in Time-Consuming Shelves

One of the great joys of owning our own place is that if we what some shelves bolted to the walls, we can just bolt some shelves to the walls. One of the drawbacks of living in a beautiful house built by a master is that you really can’t be half-arsed. Just getting some plywood and angle-brackets is right out. With that in mind, I decided to make three more shelves.

The amp and sub sit in the corner of the snug, occasionally with an ipod on top, occasionally with a laptop for watching of movies. Clearly, this is half-arsed, but a perfect spot for two shelves, mounted to both walls, wide enough for the amp, deep enough for a laptop and, for bonus points, with great big holes for power cables, speaker cables, interconnects, and cooling. How long could that take?

Ha ha oh god no

Follow-ups and references

After my waffling on how we create meaningful stories, or rather on why we prioritise such a small and boring selection from the vast range of possible stories, I’ve enjoyed reading:

Porpentine‘s Creation Under Capitalism essay (and pretty much everything on Nightmare Mode, for some actual thinking about games and gaming.
Starship Reckless for biological realism in hard SF and a host more
Requires Hate for having no patience with idiocy
And from Leninology on Skyfall – “Britain today is a powerhouse of ideas, experiments, imagination”… oh no, wait… no it isn’t. All that remains in postcolonial melancolia is class privilege and misogyny.

And more tedious hang-wringing about the exhaustion of SF and the blurring of boundaries between SF & fantasy.

On the exhaustion of science fiction, or why it’s all just capitalist realism…

Today’s meaty read is Cowardice, Laziness and Irony: How Science Fiction Lost the Future by Jonathan McCalmont.

He’s bitching. Ooo, he’s bitching, that science fiction has decided the future will be infinitely complex and therefore no-one can tell stories about it without dirtying their hands with the fantastic, that capitalism has decided that nothing is sacred and therefore no-one can tell stories about the sacred, and that postmodern culture is just imperialistic cultural theft made acceptable by irony and therefore every story is a western story, no matter what cultural clothing it happens to have pulled off the Ikea customisable module storage unit this morning.

I disagree. Or rather, these features are symptoms of a larger problem, which currently has no solution and we’re mostly arguing about whether there is, or could be, a solution.

(Although to be fair to McCalmont, I wish I could write a put-down like: “genre writers spend their days like performing dolphins… occasionally, a particularly well-trained dolphin receives a celebratory bucket of fish heads in the ballroom of a beige mid-Western hotel.”)

This comes down to rates of change, both now and accelerating into the future. The rates of change we face are unprecedented. I’ve described this before as “post-normal everything” – for a new normality to be created takes time. For a particular set of cultural, economic, social or climatic values to bed themselves down, become a new background and be implicitly and unconsciously accepted as normal requires those values to persist and there simply isn’t time. By the point that a decent fraction of the population accepts a particular set of changed social values as normal, we’re on to another set.

Currently, it seems that capitalism is the only ideology that functions under such rates of change. The particularly US form of capitalism seems to be ahead of the pack when it comes to self-justification, self-strengthening and creating conditions of positive feedback for itself that lead to expansive mode-locking. Equally, the harsh and accelerating rate of change of everything is doing strange things to science fiction – the cultural tool that we have for understanding the change of everything.

When rates of change head towards infinity, then it makes sense for humans to treat the results as fantastic, simply because religion, fantasy, and irrationality are the mental tools that we have for dealing with beings and events far beyond our everyday reality. Sci-fi’s uglier step-sister fantasy gets stick for copping-out and abrogating sci-fi’s responsibility to explore only the possibilities that are grounded in evolutions of this world, but I think that stick is a mistake. Fantastic elements already exist in this world – from the point of view of your stereotyped goat-herder, there’s no functional difference between lightning from Heaven or a drone strike. Equally, the strategic response of said goat-herder to either situation has similarities – engagement with a complex system that has to be engaged with on its own terms and not that of the goat-herder. Hence fantasy works as a tool for exploring the impacts of such rates of change.

At this point I could just go “blah blah Latour blah blah” and take it as read that there are a plurality of different ontological communities, orders, sets of knowledge practices, and institutions. Sadly, that just leads to the singular position that there is no meaning, or rather that that there are a multiplicity of equally-valid stories to be told about the world. That multiplicity leads to a particularly Western ambiguity of choice, an ambiguity that’s perpetual and all-encompassing. It’s an Imperialist stance that denies any meaning by resisting disambiguation down to a singular meaning. Or I could ask: is that ambiguity simply a direct result of commercial pressure to maximise the size of the potential audience by refusing to rule out any ontological position and thus any audience segment?

Fucked if I know.

[TL;DR Summary: SF reviewer thinks that SF is boring because authors are cowardly, lazy, and overly ironic; I think SF is either a confused response to an ever-more rapidly changing world, or ham-strung by Western capitalism's need to justify itself, or both at the same time.]

Xmas, therefore DIY

It’s the holiday season so, in accordance with both tradition and ancient prophecy, I’m making bits of wood into bigger bits of wood.

The joy of shelving

Burn the suburbs – Cars as social delusion

Your average car is pretty unchanged since fifty years. Four wheels, four seats, four or six cylinders, and a body that rusts to limit the lifespan. Over the last few decades, cars have become safer, more reliable, and more comfortable, although fuel efficiency is pretty much unchanged for the last ten years (Figure 1.9, NZ vehicle fleet stats). But basically, cars remain mostly a tedious way from getting from a surburb to work/school/shop and back.

The reality is that the average NZ adult spends nearly five hours a week driving, up an hour from twenty years ago and NZ adults in my age group average over 15,000 kms per year (data). That’s two hundred and fifty hours per year of sitting on your arse, either stuck in traffic or trying not to break the speed limit.

Why do people do this? Plenty of people feel they have no choice and the reasons for that generally come down to infrastructure, to community design, to planning, to how we allocate costs between individuals and governments, to how workplaces are structured, to how work is specialised, and to social norms.

I’ve always been someone who’s willing and able to say “fuck social norms, I can find a better way”. So here’s one of my standards of success in my life – how little I have to drive each year. Now that we’re sharing a car with tatjna and ferrouswheel, we record mileage to share out costs. So since February last year, I can say I’ve driven (or been driven) for a grand total of 1100 kms. That’s hundreds of hours of my life that are now my own.

But seriously, why should it be so hard to people to break out of socially normative practices? Why do so few people think they have options? Why are people willing to cut off their options and then complain about being in a trap?

And rather than admit that we’re forced by circumstances outside of our control into wasting a vast amount of our money and time, why do we retreat into rationalisation, where we say cars are social objects and statements of identity? Someone who thinks about design as a reasonably interesting level described cars as solving an identity problem where sex meets territoriality. To which I say what?

Well, yes, all cars are social objects as are all objects used by humans. Equally, if you’re going to spend five hours a week with an object, then it influences your interactions with other people. However, underlying all that is that cars are metal boxes on wheels and if you live in the suburbs then you have to get in the box every day. How do social practices (and the analysis of those practices) become so disconnected from reality? Or rather, if your reality sucks, then what stops you from identifying as a sucker?

For the first time in history younger people are driving less. Maybe reality gets the last word.

Something about something other than the Mitochondrion, for once…

There has been copious non-Mitochondrion making and fixing, helped by it being all sunny.

Making and fixing and mad science and wandering, as you do…

And a Mitochondrion video from Circillumina

The Mitochondrion M4.2.2, as spun by Ben.

Apparently, ironically hip people have noticed that psytrance* is neither ironic or hip – A Big Night Out at… a Psytrance Rave! It is, however, fun way to have a night out dancing. That article describes it as “total aesthetic non-conformity” but that implies that the psytrance community cares enough about normality to decide to reject it. I don’t think that’s the case at all (or at least, not very often). It’s more that self-expression can explore a range of directions. By the simple law of averages, most of those directions lead in a different direction to conformity. It’s not rejection, it’s just possibility.

My direction just happens to involve excessive use of computer-controlled LEDs. That’s not because I’m rejecting fluorescent lighting, it’s because I personally think excessive LEDs are a fun challenge. Also I eventually want to spin LEDs whilst having to wear a welding mask due to those LEDs kicking out all the photons.

* – Yes, I know it’s all psybreaks/tech-funk around these parts, not psytrance, and that the tune in that vid is old-school rave, but such distinctions don’t matter at the level of the ironically hip.

Emergency eclipse viewing, or how to make a pinhole camera in a hurry

After the Transit of Venus in June, it’s a good year for things getting between NZ and the sun. Today we’ve a partial eclipse, with totality north of Te Ika-a-Māui and three-quarter coverage in Wellington.

If you don’t happen to have eclipse-specific equipment on you, then you can image an eclipse with a pinhole camera. If you don’t have a pinhole camera, you can make one: My business cards finally become useful