OK, I admit it: I was a fan of the 70s sci-fi series Space 1999. And I always thought that the their spaceships, the Eagle class, really looked the part – much more so than Gerry Anderson’s earlier designs, such as Fireball XL5 and the Thunderbirds. I even preferred the Eagle to Matt Jefferies’ original Enterprise. (Heresy!)
The Eagle looked as if it had been designed by a mechanical engineer rather than an artist. No swooping curves, bold colours, or mysteriously pulsing “warp coils”: the Eagle was a grey, utilitarian, tubular framework with a series of uncompromisingly functional modular assemblies bolted on. This utilitarian style soon appeared in other 1970s sci-fi films and series, exemplified by the U.S.S. Cygnus in Disney’s disastrous Black Hole, the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica. It’s probably no coincidence that this was the period when the Pompidou Centre was being constructed in Paris, with all of the plumbing, pipework, cables and service ducts on the outside of the building. Be that as it may, I thought that the Eagle looked just right, as did the Hawk variant that appeared in one episode.
Over the years fans all over the world (but especially in Japan) have kept the Space 1999 series in syndication, and I see that it’s now out on DVD at (ouch) $199. I know, I know, it’s 48 episodes on 16 discs, but even so…. Anyway, an unexpected package arrived today from the BBC America shop: a detailed, foot long, diecast Eagle. Cool! And thanks….
(Yes, the transporter pod does snap out. And I see that a Rescue Eagle version is now available. Hmmmm…)
(Update: It seems that medical and freighter Eagles are on the way too…..)
Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance: A feeling of tension experienced when certain cognitions are contradictory or inconsistent with each other
For example, in this morning’s news:
“I think the bitter differences over the war are over,” said Mr Bush. [iC SouthLondon]
While at the same time, the level of peaceful demonstrations – and threats of violence – is such that:
About 4,000 police and 2,000 soldiers more than a third of Ireland’s security forces are being deployed… In addition, 700 US security personnel and four naval ships are being called in…. In Istanbul… Turkish police are expected to deploy more than 23,000 officers for the Nato leaders’ summit. [Belfast Telegraph]
I’m definitely experiencing “a feeling of tension” about contradictory cognitions. How about you?
"Our preposterous use of books"
Back on June 4th, I posted a piece about Arianna Huffington’s article comparing George W. Bush and England’s King Henry V (as depicted by Shakespeare). Of course politicians, advertisers, journalists and others have always mined the English literary canon for stirring sound-bites. (In Blood, Class and Empire, the alternately brilliant and insufferable Christopher Hitchens notes that William Safire went through a purple patch in which a third of his NYT op-ed pieces included Churchillian references.) And today Scott Newstrom, an assistant professor at Amherst College, sent me a pointer to a fascinating essay in which he looks in some detail at the various (and varied) ways in which Americans have exploited the “Prince Hal” character, particularly with respect to George W. Bush. Recommended.
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The title of this entry is from Emerson. Read Scott Newstrom’s piece for the connection.
Disused London underground stations
Speaking of visualizing complex systems (as I was), here’s a delightful site about disused London tube stations. A recent addition shows a map of the system in 1929 – you can see why Harry Beck’s classic map caught on when it came out four years later.
Mornington Crescent, anybody?
Fond memories
Back on May 4th I posted a piece about colleagues who had been caught up in the most recent round of layoffs here at Sun. What some people didn’t realize is that the process was not completed back in May. For reasons associated with the reorganization of the systems business, some of the layoff decisions were deferred… until today.
I want to mention two people who were RIFfed today who had been at Sun almost as long as I have. Since I haven’t cleared this with them, I’ll just call them Dave and Don.
I worked with Dave on the 386i (“Roadrunner”) workstation in the 1986-1988 period. I did software, he did mechanicals. Where we came together was designing the keyboard. For those of you who have not experienced it, working on a keyboard design team is the most miserable job on the planet. Everybody, and I mean everybody, knows how to do your job better than you do. Nobody, and I mean nobody, will be satisfied with what you decide. Too soft, too hard, too clicky, not enough feedback, “you moron, how could you put key X in position Y”…. Dave was unfailingly patient in the face of all the brickbats (and the occasional compliment). In the end, I think we did a bloody good job, even if everyone hated us for it.
Don joined the PC-NFS team back in… oh, hell! I can’t remember: it’s like he was always there. He was the guy who made the mysterious stuff happen: that ineffable transition from the first alpha build all the way to getting it into customers’ hands. You know what I mean: the product stuff; training the network ambassadors; preparing the support organization; getting the part numbers; the alpha and beta and omega of making a software product happen. These days it all happens according to a tightly-scripted process; back in the 80s we were making it up as we went along. (A PC software product?! From Sun!?!@!? Hah!) Eventually Don even wrote a book about how to turn our product into a real customer solution. He had [HAS! What the hell, he’s not dead!] a sense of proportion, and of the absurd, which kept him (and us) sane through many releases, and millions of copies sold. Thanks, Don – for everything.
Just two names. Many other colleagues, friends, and acquaintances of mine left Sun today, some gladly, but most before they were ready. Thanks, everyone, and the very best of luck. You deserve it.
Blogspam redux
OK, the blogspamming on this blog is now reaching ~10 per day, which is enough to be seriously annoying. So I’m going to be spending the next few days installing and testing countermeasures. If this causes problems, please be patient…..
Visualizing systems
I’ve always been interested in ways of visualizing complex systems. Simply displaying a fairly literal graphical representation of a bunch of state variables seems unsatisfactory. The correlations and causal relationships are rarely apparent; on the other hand our pattern-seeking brains are all too likely to see relationships where none exist. I remember attending a conference on agent technology (specifically “social” software agents) in which a speaker said that her team was looking for ways to “construct a narrative” that corresponded to what was going on in the system. That feels about right.
But anyway… when I want to visualize a really complex system, I head over to Passur’s site for BOS, pick a good time of day (18:00 works well), and click Start Replay. (The reason to watch a replay is because then you can click on individual aircraft to display their information. That feature is disabled for the live feed, ostensibly for reasons of security. There’s also a random delay on the live feed.)
At the 10 mile setting you can watch the way the air traffic controllers set up the streams of aircraft for arrivals. (At that setting my house is in the lower left corner, below the “J” of Jamaica Pond.) Zooming out to 90 miles you get a nice sense of how the large-scale airways system feeds into the arrival streams. And each one of those icons represents an autonomous agent, with one or two independent planning subsystems, and less than perfect communications, interpreting the wishes of a bunch of ground-based planning systems….
(Passur’s Airport Monitor is available for a number of airports. You don’t have to watch BOS. But if you too have a soft spot for Logan, check out this article from Salon.)
[By the way, the applet doesn’t work quite right on the Mac. Not sure why….]
Wonderful web site on evolution
A casual question from a colleague about spam prompted me to search the web for a quotation from Richard Dawkins on co-evolutionary “arms races”. What I found was this wonderful site associated with Mark Ridley’s magnum opus Evolution. The site includes a video gallery with clips featuring Dawkins, Dennett, Maynard Smith, and others. Highly recommended.
And yes, the “arms race” quote (and QuickTime video clip) is here.
Self-referential blogging
Last month I wrote about why I blogged, and what I hoped that readers would get out of it. Today my colleague Richard Giles posted a reference to John Hiler’s piece from March, 2002 [and doesn’t that seem a long time ago?] on The Tipping Blog: How Weblogs Can Turn an Idea into an Epidemic. As the title implies, Hiler applies the ideas of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point to blogging, pointing out how different kinds of bloggers play the key roles of what Gladwell calls Connectors and Mavens. (Tim Bray seems to be the quintessential Connector – eh, Tim?)
And of course this blog entry simply contributes to what Douglas Hofstadter called a “tangled hierarchy” of self-reference! In fact, I wonder how many blog entries are actually ABOUT blogging – all the way from the simple Getting started, to comments about PG-13 content, to angst-filled discussions about blogs in politics. The title that my colleague Josh Simons chose for his blog seems particularly apt…..
Mary, Mary
Mary Smaragdis has the distinction of running the most frequently visited blog at blogs.sun.com, due mostly to the irrepressible energy she puts into it. (That’s her with John Gage at the Sun Network event.) Anyway, she ran a little competition to win a Sun Shanghai T-shirt, and when she announced the results my entry was the second runner up… except that the first runner-up was anonymous, and I wasn’t eligible to win anyway. But I was glad to be able to work in a reference to Al Stewart’s music.