robots – Dan Q

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers

As soon as I finished reading its prequel, I started reading Becky Chambers’ A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (and then, for various work/life reasons, only got around to publishing my micro-review just now).

The book carries on directly from where A Psalm for the Wild-Built left off, to such a degree that at first I wondered whether the pair might have been better published as a single volume. But in hindsight, I appreciate the separation: there’s a thematic shift between the two that benefits from a little (literal) bookending.

Both Wild-Built and Crown-Shy look at the idea of individual purpose and identity, primarily through the vehicle of relatable protagonist Sibling Dex as they very-openly seek their place in the world, and to a lesser extent through the curiosity and inquisitiveness of the robot Mosscap.

But the biggest difference in my mind between the ways in which the two do so is the source of the locus of evaluation: the vast majority of Wild-Built is experienced only by Dex and Mosscap, alone together in the wilderness at the frontier between their disparate worlds. It maintains an internal locus of evaluation, with Dex asking questions of themselves about why they feel unfulfilled and Mosscap acting as a questioning foil and supportive friend. Crown-Shy, by contrast, pivots to a perceived external locus of evaluation: Dex and Mosscap return from the wilderness to civilisation, and both need to adapt to the experience of celebrity, questioning, and – in Mosscap’s case – a world completely-unfamiliar to it.

By looking more-carefully at Dex’s society, the book helps to remind us about the diverse nature of humankind. For example: we’re shown that even in a utopia, individual people will disagree on issues and have different philosophical outlooks… but the underlying message is that we can still be respectful and kind to one another, despite our disagreement. In the fourth chapter, the duo visit a coastland settlement whose residents choose to live a life, for the most part, without the convenience of electricity. By way of deference to their traditions, Dex (with their electric bike) and Mosscap (being an electronic entity) wait outside the village until invited in by one of the residents, and the trio enjoy a considerate discussion about the different value systems of people around the continent while casting fishing lines off a jetty. There’s no blame; no coercion; and while it’s implied that other residents of the village are staying well clear of the visitors, nothing more than this exclusion and being-separate is apparent. There’s sort-of a mutual assumption that people will agree-to-disagree and get along within the scope of their shared vision.

Which leads to the nub of the matter: while it appears that we’re seeing how Dex is viewed by others – by those they disagree with, by those who hold them with some kind of celebrity status, by their family with whom they – like many folks do – share a loving but not uncomplicated relationship – we’re actually still experiencing this internally. The questions on Dex’s mind remain “who am I?”, “what is my purpose?”, and “what do I want?”… questions only they can answer… but now they’re considering them from the context of their relationship with everybody else in their world, instead of their relationship with themself.

Everything I just wrote reads as very-pretentious, for which I apologise. The book’s much better-written than my review! Let me share a favourite passage, from a part of the book where Dex is introducing Mosscap to ‘pebs’, a sort-of currency used by their people, by way of explanation as to why people whom Mosscap had helped had given it pieces of paper with numbers written on (Mosscap not yet owning a computer capable of tracking its balance). I particularly love Mosscap’s excitement at the possibility that it might own things, an experience it previous had no need for:

…

Mosscap smoothed the crease in the paper, as though it were touching something rare and precious. “I know I’m going to get a computer, but can I keep this as well?”

“Yeah,” Dex said with a smile. “Of course you can.”

“A map, a note, and a pocket computer,” Mosscap said reverently. “That’s three belongings.” It laughed. “I’ll need my own wagon, at this rate.”

“Okay, please don’t get that much stuff,” Dex said. “But we can get you a satchel or something, if you want, so you don’t have things rattling around inside you.”

Mosscap stopped laughing, and looked at Dex with the utmost seriousness. “Could I really?” it said quietly. “Could I have a satchel?”

…

That’s just a heartwarming and childlike response to being told that you’re allowed to own property of your very own. And that’s the kind of comforting joy that, like its prequel, the entire book exudes.

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is not quite so wondrous as A Psalm for the Wild-Built. How could it be, when we’re no longer quite so-surprised by the enthralling world in which it’s set. But it’s still absolutely magnificent, and I can wholeheartedly recommend the pair.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

Duration 5:42

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I’d already read every prior book published by the excellent Becky Chambers, but this (and its sequel) had been sitting on my to-read list for some time, and so while I’ve been ill and off work these last few days, I felt it would be a perfect opportunity to pick it up. I’ve spent most of this week so far in bed, often drifting in and out of sleep, and a lightweight novella that I coud dip in and out of over the course of a day felt like the ideal comfort.

I couldn’t have been more right, as the very first page gave away. My friend Ash described the experience of reading it (and its sequel) as being “like sitting in a warm bath”, and I see where they’re coming from. True to form, Chambers does a magnificent job of spinning a believable utopia: a world that acts like an idealised future while still being familiar enough for the reader to easily engage with it. The world of Wild-Built is inhabited by humans whose past saw them come together to prevent catastrophic climate change and peacefully move beyond their creation of general-purpose AI, eventually building for themselves a post-scarcity economy based on caring communities living in harmony with their ecosystem.

Writing a story in a utopia has sometimes been seen as challenging, because without anything to strive for, what is there for a protagonist to strive against? But Wild-Built has no such problem. Written throughout with a close personal focus on Sibling Dex, a city monk who decides to uproot their life to travel around the various agrarian lands of their world, a growing philosophical theme emerges: once ones needs have been met, how does one identify with ones purpose? Deprived of the struggle to climb some Maslowian pyramid, how does a person freed of their immediate needs (unless they choose to take unnecessary risks: we hear of hikers who die exploring the uncultivated wilderness Dex’s people leave to nature, for example) define their place in the world?

Aside from Dex, the other major character in the book is Mosscap, a robot whom they meet by a chance encounter on the very edge of human civilisation. Nobody has seen a robot for centuries, since such machines became self-aware and, rather than consign them to slavery, the humans set them free (at which point they vanished to go do their own thing).

To take a diversion from the plot, can I just share for a moment a few lines from an early conversation between Dex and Mosscap, in which I think the level of mutual interpersonal respect shown by the characters mirrors the utopia of the author’s construction:

…

“What—what are you? What is this? Why are you here?”

The robot, again, looked confused. “Do you not know? Do you no longer speak of us?”

“We—I mean, we tell stories about—is robots the right word? Do you call yourself robots or something else?”

“Robot is correct.”

…

“Okay. Mosscap. I’m Dex. Do you have a gender?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

These two strangers take the time in their initial introduction to ensure they’re using the right terms for one another: starting with those relating to their… let’s say species… and then working towards pronouns (Dex uses they/them, which seems to be widespread and commonplace but far from universal in their society; Mosscap uses it/its, which provides for an entire discussion on the nature of objectship and objectification in self-identity). It’s queer as anything, and a delightful touch.

In any case: the outward presence of the plot revolves around a question that the robot has been charged to find an answer to: “What do humans need?” The narrative theme of self-defined purpose and desires is both a presenting and a subtextual issue, and it carries through every chapter. The entire book is as much a thought experiment as it is a novel, but it doesn’t diminish in the slightest from the delightful adventure that carries it.

Dex and Mosscap go on to explore the world, to learn more about it and about one another, and crucially about themselves and their place in it. It’s charming and wonderful and uplifting and, I suppose, like a warm bath: comfortable and calming and centering. And it does an excellent job of setting the stage for the second book in the series, which we’ll get to presently…

Hero of Alexandria

A little under two millennia ago¹ there lived in the Egyptian city of Alexandria a Greek mathematician and inventor named Hero², and he was a total badass who invented things that you probably thought came way later, and come up with mathematical tricks that we still use to this day³.

Inventions

Illustration of an aeolipile, showing a heated sphere or cylinder of water spraying steam in two different directions, causing it to rotate. — If you know of Hero’s inventions because of his aeolipile⁴,known as “Hero’s engine”, I’ve got bad news: it was probably actually invented by his predecessor Vitruvius. But Hero *did* come up with a way to use the technique to make a pneumatic temple door that automatically opened when you lit the fires alongside it.

Hero is variably credited with inventing, in some cases way earlier than you’re expecting:

automatic doors (powered either by pressure plates or by lit fires),
vending machines, which used the weight of a dispensed coin to open a valve and dispense holy water,
windmills (by which I mean wind-powered stationary machines capable of performing useful work),
the force pump – this is the kind of mechanism found in traditional freestanding village water pumps – for use in a fire engine,
float-valve and water-pressure based equilibrium pumps, like those found in many toilet cisterns, and
a programmable robot: this one’s a personal favourite of mine because it’s particularly unexpected – Hero’s cart was a three-wheeled contraption whose wheels were turned by a falling weight pulling on a rope, but the rope could be knotted and looped back over itself (here’s a modern reimplementation using Lego) to form a programmed path for the cart

Illustration showing mechanism of action of a fire-powered automatic door: heated air expands to displace water into a vessel whose now-increased weight pulls ropes wrapped around two wheels which pull open a pair of temple doors. — It’s just headcanon, but I choose to believe that the reason Hero *needed* to invent the fire extinguisher might have involved the number of “attempting to make fire do work” inventions that he came up with.

Mathematics

If you know of Hero because of his mathematical work, it’s probably thanks to his pre-trigonometric work on calculating the area of a triangle based only on the lengths of its sides.

But I’ve always been more-impressed by the iterative⁵ mechanism he come up with by which to derive square roots. Here’s how it works:

Let n be the number for which you want to determine the square root.
Let g₁ be a guess as to the square root. You can pick any number; it can be 1.
Derive a better guess g₂ using g₂ = ( g₁ + n / g₁ ) / 2.
Repeat until g_N ≈ g_N-1, for a level of precision acceptable to you. The algorithm will be accurate to within S significant figures if the derivation of each guess is rounded to S + 1 significant figures.

That’s a bit of a dry way to tell you about it, though. Wouldn’t it be better if I showed you?

Put any number from 1 to 999 into the box below and see a series of gradually-improving guesses as to its square root⁶.

Interactive Widget

(There should be an interactive widget here. Maybe you’ve got Javascript disabled, or maybe you’re reading this post in your RSS reader?)

Maths is just one of the reasons Hero is my hero. And now perhaps he can be your hero too.

Footnotes

¹ We’re not certain when he was born or died, but he wrote about witnessing a solar eclipse that we know to have occurred in 62 CE, which narrows it down a lot.

² Or Heron. It’s not entirely certain how his name was pronounced, but I think “Hero” sounds cooler so I’m going with that.

³ Why am I blogging about this? Well: it turns out that every time I speak on some eccentric subject, like my favourite magic trick, I come off stage with like three other ideas for presentations, which leads to an exponential growth about “things I’d like to talk about”. Indeed, my OGN talk on the history of Oxford’s telephone area code was one of three options I offered to the crowd to vote on at the end of my previous OGN talk! In any case, I’ve decided that the only way I can get all of this superfluity of ideas out of my head might be to blog about them, instead; so here’s such a post!

⁴ If the diagram’s not clear, here’s the essence of the aeolipile: it’s a basic steam reaction-engine, in which steam forces its way out of a container in two different directions, causing the container to spin on its axis like a catherine wheel.

⁵ You can also conceive of it as a recursive algorithm if that’s your poison, for example if you’re one of those functional purists who always seem somehow happier about their lives than I am with mine. What’s that about, anyway? I tried to teach myself functional programming in the hope of reaching their Zen-like level of peace and contentment, but while I got reasonably good at the paradigm, I didn’t find enlightenment. Nowadays I’m of the opinion that it’s not that functional programming leads to self-actualisation so much as people capable of finding a level of joy in simplicity are drawn to functional programming. Or something. Anyway: what was I talking about? Oh, yeah: Hero of Alexandria’s derivation of square roots.

⁶ Why yes, of course I open-sourced this code.

The tape library robot that served drinks

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

This is an IBM tape library robot. It’s designed to fetch, load, unload, and return tape media cartridges to the correct bay in large enterprise environments.

One fateful ‘workend’, I made one serve drinks.

It went back into prod on the Monday…

…

@SecurityWriter

In a story reminiscient of those anecdotes about early computer science students competing to “race” hard drives across the lab by writing programs that moved the heads in a way that vibrated/walked the devices, @SecurityWriter shares a wonderful story about repurposing a backup tape management robot to act as a server (pun intended) of drinks.

LABS

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LABS

After three and a half years, webcomic LABS today came to an end. For those among you who like to wait until a webcomic has finished its run before you start to read it (you know who you are), start here.

Baby Burping Robot

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

Useless Duck Company (YouTube)

At the moment at which he described the machine’s success, I completely lost it.

Slaughterbots

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Stop Autonomous Weapons

The Back Button

How did I get here?

While lying in bed, unwell and off work, last month, I found myself surfing (on my new phone) to the Wikipedia page on torsion springs. And that’s when I found myself wondering – how did I get here?

Thankfully, there’s always the back button: famously the second most-used bit of your web browser’s user interface. So… how did I come to be reading about torsion springs?

An anniversary clock, using a torsion pendulum, so-named because it only needs winding once a year.

I got there from reading about torsion pendulum clocks. My grandmother used to have one of these (an “anniversary clock”, like the one above, and I remember that I used to always enjoy watching the balls spin when I was a child).
I’d followed a link from the article about the Atmos clock, a type of torsion pendulum clock that uses minute variations in atmospheric temperature and pressure to power the winder and which, in ideal circumstances, will never need winding.
Before that, I’d been reading about the Beverly Clock, a classic timepiece that’s another example of an atmospheric-pressure-clock. It’s been running for almost 150 years despite having never been wound.
This was an example of another long-running experiment given on the page about the Oxford Electric Bell, which is perhaps the world’s longest-running scientific experiment. Built in 1840, it uses a pair of electrostatic batteries to continuously ring a bell.

The Oxford Electric Bell experiment. It's batteries have lasted for over 160 years, but I have to charge my mobile most nights: what gives, science? — The Oxford Electric Bell experiment. It’s batteries have lasted for over 160 years, but I have to charge my mobile most nights: what gives, science?

I got to the Oxford Electric Bell from another long-running experiment – the one acknowledged as the world’s longest-running by the Guinness Book of Records – the University of Queensland Pitch Drop Experiment. Running since 1927, this experiment demonstrates that pitch is not solid but a high-viscosity fluid. A sample of room-temperature pitch in a funnel forms a droplet about once a decade.
Earlier, I was learning about the difference between the different substances we call tar. Traditionally, tar is derived by baking pine wood and roots into charcoal, and collecting the runoff, but we also use the word “tar” to describe coal tar (a byproduct of coke production) and bitumen (viscous, sticky crude oil).
I took the initiative to learn about those differences after reading about the name “Jack Tar“, an Empire-era slang term for a sailor in the Merchant Navy or Royal Navy…
…which in turn was linked from the similar article about “Tommy Atkins“, a term for a British infantryman (particularly in the First World War), which has an interesting history…
…to which I got from the “Doughboy” article. The Doughboys were members of the American Expeditionary Force during the First World War.

R.U.R. - "Private Robot" - loads an artillery piece. — R.U.R. – “Private Robot” – loads an artillery piece.

Finally, I got to that first Wikipedia article while, when reading an article on The Paleofuture Blog, I wondered about the etymology of the term “doughboy”, and began this whole link-clicking adventure.

It’s fascinating to work out “how you got here” after an extended exploration of a site like Wikipedia (or TV Tropes, or Changing Minds, or Uncyclopedia – and there goes your weekend…). Thank you, Back Button.

I just wish I had a Back Button in my head so that I could “wind back” my wandering thought processes. How did I end up thinking about the salt content of airline food, exactly?