KEV67

I was thinking about the supercomputer McGuffin. Unless these computers were a huge leap in technology it hardly seems worth the bother. I seem to remember a time when people talked about these amazingly powerful computers, but a year or two later there would be even more advanced computers. I saw a supercomputer at Reading University. I think it was used for predicting the weather. It was a basement full of racks of PCs all connected up together. There are technologies like quantum computing and parallel processing. I have not been keeping up, but I think the idea of quantum computing is that the bits can have more states than 1 and 0. Not sure about that. Anyway, I would have thought the designs were more important than the actual computers. I would think it was pretty difficult to reverse engineer a supercomputer with a novel architecture. The book talks about trading one or two of the computers for the operating system and source code. There are people around clever enough to write operating systems. Again, I would have thought it would be even more difficult to do without the designs. I used to work at a company where one of the brainier engineers wrote the operating system to a product. How do you even go about doing that? Then the company hired an even brainier engineer to write code for its successor product, including its operating system. I sometimes saw job adverts for bare metal micro-controller coders. Micro-controllers are easier than micro-processors, but still take quite a lot of knowhow. I attended a public lecture by one of the academics from Cambridge University who designed the Raspberry Pi. He intended it as an educational tool. He recounted how he was initially disappointed when one of his students said she could not get on with its operating system, so she coded her own!

Definitely Tom Cruise material. TBF it would make quite an entertaining film.

This is the first Clive Cussler book I have started reading. I thought I would give one a go. Only I noticed it was written by Graham Brown. So how does that work then? Actually it is quite a good story. It is fairly cinematographic. I could imagine Tom Cruise in it. A freighter carrying two supercomputers has been sent to the bottom of the sea. You would think that would be be bad for the computers, but no, because they are liquid cooled anyway. I wondered about that, because water is not very good for integrated circuit boards, especially salt water. You would think it would short circuit the PCBs. I suppose the PCBs were coated with some waterproof covering.

My entire knowledge of this comes from a woman off YouTube. She could have been telling me anything. It reminds of a Hawkwind album I had. It was about these 2 dimensional alien invaders. You could see them on the album sleeve.

I wondered about that too.

Good point. But in a 4D space you could see inside a 3D box without lifting the lid.

Netflix has filmed The Three Body Problem. I think they are streaming it soon. I doubt the Chinese will be happy. The Chinese film/broadcast industry has attempted to film it twice, but they did not have the resource.

There was a fair bit of science in this. Mention of the strong nuclear force reminded me of a booked by Isaac Asimov called 'The Gods Themselves'. The McGuffin in that was the strong nuclear force. That is the force that keeps all the photons and neutrons in the kernel of the atom together. There is also the weak nuclear force. I am a bit vague about that. It has something to do with beta radiation. A level physics was not entirely wasted.

When I was a teenager in Hove, we had a physics student from the University of Sussex as a lodger. He talked a bit about multi-dimensional space. He said there were ten or eleven of them, but most of them were curled up on themselves. I don't know what he is talking about. There are some mind-bending videos on YouTube about 4 dimensional space (not including time). You can make representations of four dimensional objects in three dimensions, just like you can represent a cube on paper. IIRC you can even represent a four dimensional cube on paper. As the book says, an interesting thing is that if you lived in four-dimensional space you would be able to see inside three-dimensional objects.

I am interested in this self-interpreting code used to transmit interstellar messages. Are these a thing? Self-correcting protocols are used in telecommunications. If a bit within a byte gets flipped then at the end of the message there is a code which will not add up properly. In a lot of cases the erroneous bit can be identified and flipped back. Self-interpreting, though? Would that not imply some universal language? The only universal language I can think of is mathematics, but how would you translate any mathematical symbol or equation to any everyday word? Interesting idea, however. Maybe I was not paying enough attention in the chapter in which two protons were sent across interstellar space. How were these protons detected and identified.

This book reminds me a little of a book by Michael Crichton called Climate of Fear. They both have environmental terrorist groups. Michael Crichton was not a great believer in climate change.

I am progressing with this. It is written in Old English on one side of the page, modern English on the other. It was translated by John Porter and it is a fairly literal translation. My step-mother gave me a translation by Seamus Heaney once, but I never read it. I suppose the translation was a little more free. I think the story is jolly good. There is quite a lot of preamble. Beowulf does not just turn up and start fighting monsters. There are lots of pleasantries and formalities. You can't just turn up and fight monsters without a by-your-leave, particularly if you turn up in a boat full of armed men.

I rejoined Facebook, but only to get some information on someone. I am very curmudgeonly these days and don't like people. I like the suggestions for friends Facebook keeps sending me. I cannot remember meeting them, but they very good looking.

I learnt something I did not know. Alpha Centauri is a three body system, although, if I understood right, one of the stars is not visible. Edit: Alpha Centauri is not a three body system like in the book. It is a binary star system with a red dwarf somewhere in the vicinity, but still a pretty long way away from the other two, which orbit around each other quite closely. It is not a chaotic system.

I wonder if what Cixin Liu wrote about the sun potentially being able to amplify signals is true. It sounds plausible, but maybe it is the science fiction equivalent of poetic licence.

I quite liked the chapter in which the game players made a computer processor out of soldiers holding white and black flags. I once read a non-fiction book called Alone in the Universe. The writer said the earth was very unusual in that our solar system is stable. There are not many asteroids thrown hither and thither and making nuisances of themselves. The relative stability of the solar system allowed complex life to evolve, along with some other happy happenstances. So I doubt pretty much intelligent life could evolve in a solar system with three stars.

I suppose The Hobbit for me.

The science and technology is coming a bit more to the fore. I am still in the first half. I have studied some of the technical stuff in the past, computers, radio signals, etc. However, whether I will keep up with the science in the second half, I don't know.

Surprises me this ain't been made into a film yet, but maybe it will be.

Ian Lavender, Private Pike from Dad's Army. Most unwelcome news.

I started reading this. I was a bit surprised. It starts off during the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 60s and 70s. Intellectuals were being horribly repressed. I am a bit surprised a Chinese author felt he could set a book at this point of Chinese history. The other thing that surprises me is that I thought it would be hard science. Maybe it will be but part 1 was mostly Chinese modern history. A three body problem is a sci-fi pun. It is mathematically very difficult to predict how three bodies in space will interact and revolve around each other. I suspect three bodies are approximately similar masses.

I think Great Expectations is still the most moving book I have read as an adult.

Poor old Barry. An amusing aspect is that although these are supposed to be Barry Lyndon's memoirs, they are edited by a certain G. S. Fitz-Boodle. Every now and again there is a footnote by Fitz-Boodle to imply doubt on the veracity of Barry Lyndon's accounts. Then there are other footnotes saying 'omitted in later editions '. I am not sure whether these were put in by the fictional editor, Fitz-Boodle, or the actual editors, or whether they are intentionally humorous or not.

Was that Laurie Lee?

I tried to find the Anglican congregation again on Sunday. Again I failed. I visited a Georgian Orthodox cathedral today. It was a very imposing building. There were no stain glass windows, but there were many religious paintings. They use metal a lot in their pictures. It looks like they use a lot of gold leaf. Must be worth a bob or two.