A struggle to launch

Quick trip down to Clarks Village, Street this morning to get Clare some summer cycling pants.

The puma is go ...

A category 4, but almost a 'failure to launch' ...

I went to the gym instead; no-one ever face-planted, took a case of 'road rash' or broke their collar bone on an exercise bike.

Dental machismo

My previous dentist was ethnically East-Asian. He was highly-competent, but visits to his surgery were marred by his addiction to an ambient "Lady in Red". Anyway, he has now moved on, taking his Chris De Burgh fixation in tow.

The proximate cause of this afternoon's trip was the sucking-out of a filling (top left) by a post-dinner piece of Xylitol chewing gum: that stuff which is supposedly so good for your teeth. Tellingly, the effect on fillings has been less mentioned.

My new dentist was a plump, middle-aged woman who by accent was from Poland. She inspected the damage and said, "It's repairable."

Show no pain!

I have to say that up to this point, it had never occurred to me that it would not.

"Unfortunately," she continued, "I'm going to have to do some drilling. No problem; no need for anaesthetic. You OK with that? Let me know if you feel pain."

In front of a woman used to tough, leather-jacketed Polish males, what could I do? I smiled with what I hoped was the right degree of languid indifference and replied casually, "Sure. If it hurts, you'll know."

The drill whined and ground into my enamel. She was right. Didn't feel a thing.

---

Adrian has more extensive dental work scheduled for later this afternoon. I'm thinking of sending him a WhatsApp progress report summing up my afternoon's experience:

"Easy in, easy out."

Do you think he will find that encouraging?

A Relativistic Impact Weapon

A Relativistic Impact

I first wrote about this on sciencefiction.com, but armed with information on highly-relativistic beam effects from the Large Hadron Collider (which I wrote about just a few posts ago)  it's timely to revisit.

"The logistic computer calculates that we have about a 62% chance of success, should we attempt to destroy the enemy base. Unfortunately, we would have only a 30% chance of survival - as some of the scenarios leading to success involve ramming the portal planet with the Anniversary at light speed." 

So speaks the unfortunate starship commander in The Forever War (Haldeman, 1974, p. 110).

An attack by highly relativistic impact weapons is a military planner's nightmare. The first problem is that the incoming weapon is highly superluminal: it appears to be travelling much faster than light. Suppose such a weapon was launched from interstellar space towards the earth at a velocity of 0.99995c (i.e. 99.995% of the speed of light). Its apparent velocity as observed from the earth is 20,000 times the speed of light (the speed-up factor is c/(c-v) which tends to infinity as the object's speed approaches that of light).

Suppose our military first spots this incoming object out at Jupiter's orbit, 35 light minutes away. How long do we have before impact? Less than one tenth of a second: there is simply no time to react.

What would be the effect on the Earth of such an impact? Some people have speculated that a relativistic impactor would simply tunnel all the way through the planet, perhaps not slowing down at all and not causing much damage. After all, light transit time through an Earth diameter of 12,800 km is just over 40 milliseconds. There’s not much time for lateral effects as the object barrels in.

But this conclusion is profoundly wrong.

Assume an adversary fires a one tonne object at the Earth at 0.99995c - the weight of a small car, or a cubic meter of ice. To work out the energy we use the relativistic energy formula E = γmc², where γ = 1/√(1 - v²/c²) - in this case,  γ = 100. Most of that kinetic energy, (γmc² - mc²) is going to get dumped into the Earth to create a stupendous explosion; there will also be colossal lateral radiation from the descending fireball. If we put the numbers in, the energy of the arriving impactor is around 2,000 Gigatons of TNT (compare with the 50 Megatons of the Russian Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever tested). This is broadly equivalent to a mile-wide asteroid hitting the earth at 30,000 mph; not bad for a single one meter cube.

Imagine watching the weapon as it hits the atmosphere with time slowed down a million times. In one microsecond light (and the weapon) travels only 300 metres. If the atmosphere is taken to be ~50 km deep, transit time to ground impact is just 170 microseconds (almost three minutes in our slow-motion view). But this is nuclear physics: microseconds are an eternity and the paradigm is particle accelerator.

Physicist Lawrence B, Crowell takes up the story in his analysis of the scenario:

"I think there would not be a hard collision of the object with the ground. It would pass through a column of air of comparable mass, so I suspect the energy of the object would be consumed before it hits the ground. This would be a sort of massive cosmic ray event. The interaction energy of atoms would be comparable to Tevatron energy (1/10 of that or so) and what would reach the ground would be a huge pulse of secondary particles that generate an enormous thermal-mechanical shock wave."

The LHC beam-dump engineering team modeled the LHC's proton beam hitting a solid copper tube. Half a microsecond after impact it had already penetrated 2 meters (around 7 feet)  into the copper tube with a core overpressure of 30 GigaPascals (300,000 atmospheres). The LHC protons are faster than our assumed impactor, but it seems clear that the atmosphere - hitting the impactor at 99.995% of the speed of light - would have completely penetrated the weapon in the first 1% of its atmospheric transit. After ten microseconds and three kilometers, the ice-block would be plasma. You may object that the top of the atmosphere is pretty sparse .. but then, so is the LHC proton beam.

Its very arrival would be spectacular enough - to conclude, here's an account from "The Killing Star" (Pellegrino and Zebrowski, 1995, pp. 23-24) of the arrival of a similarly-sized object arriving at just 92% of the speed of light.

"Then, looking east, she saw it coming - at least her eyes began to register it - but her optic nerves did not last long enough to transmit what the eyes had seen ... a flaming spear with every square foot of its surface radiating a trillion watts ... Virginia was more than three hundred kilometers away when the light burst towards her. Every nerve ending on her body began to record a strange pricking sensation - the sheer pressure of photons trying to push her backwards ..."

So there you have it. A weapon system very difficult to detect, arriving before defense systems could engage, and causing an extinction-level event. I present to you the Relativistic Kill Weapon (Wikipedia). Read more at Orion's Arm.

Miami, November 2002; New York, July 2002

Andy Murray has now left America after his nightmare third set in the Miami Masters final. No doubt he has other things on his mind right now, but hey, we were in Miami too!

Once upon a time.

Clare on South Beach, Miami

The author: fatter, more pensive and with less shades of grey

Our Everglades hotel room

I was working for Cable & Wireless in Reston, Virginia at the time. We took the opportunity of that 18 month assignment to check out Florida, San Francisco and Yosemite, New York (below) and  a trip down Route 66 to Skyline Drive in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Clare on Wall Street with 'the Bull'

The Statue of Liberty

"I'll take Manhattan"

We also took in Times Square and the Broadway Theater production of "Proof".

The Collider is back

It could be a real bad day to be a hadron if you hang out near Geneva today.

Q. What's a hadron, anyway?

A. It's any particle made up of quarks (e.g. three-quark baryons such as as protons and neutrons, or two-quark mesons).

Q. What would happen if you stuck your head in the LHC beam?

A. I discussed this obliquely in an article for sciencefiction.com back in 2011.

---

The LHC as a weapon system (abridged)

The Large Hadron Collider is not at first sight an ideal weapon system. First of all it’s physically a 17 mile (27 km) long circular tunnel, buried beneath the French-Swiss border at a depth in some place of over 570 feet (175 m). Not much use against most military targets. However, the concept of a beam weapon was explored in the SDI (‘star wars’) programme for ICBM defense, and a weaponised LHC would be a formidable anti-spacecraft system.

The LHC is a proton accelerator. It gets its protons from a tank of hydrogen gas and then cranks them up to near the speed of light. How fast are the protons finally going? Their velocity is only 3 metres per second slower than light but in relativity the factor which measures relativistic effects is the gamma factor (γ) which tends to infinity as v → c. At the LHC the proton γ is 7,460. At that speed a starship journey from earth to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri (4.2 light years away) would be just a five hour jaunt for the crew!

The LHC scientists are interested in those few protons from the contra-rotating bunches which hit each other: collisions lead to new physics. But from a weapons point of view we are more interested in the majority which miss. These are completely lethal. In dealing with them, the LHC engineers had to answer the question: what do you do with the fastest human-produced objects ever to travel on the earth?

The engineering team simulated the effects of the proton beam hitting a copper tube 10 centimetres in diameter and five metres long. In the top picture of the diagram below we see the situation half a microsecond after beam impact. The beam has already penetrated 2 metres (around 7 feet)  into the tube with a core overpressure of 30 GigaPascals (300,000 atmospheres). The protons and their collision debris are literally gouging out the centre of the target.

The lower picture shows the situation at 9.5 microseconds where the beam has now penetrated five metres (more than 16 feet) into the copper and has compromised the entire tube. This is a density plot and shows the vaporised core as having less than 1% of the original copper density. Based on this simulation, the entire 89 microsecond beam would penetrate 35 metres (115 feet) of solid copper.

At CERN they take care to defocus the beam first, spreading it over the face of the beam dump. It turns out that carbon is better than copper in stopping the now-defocused beam so the actual LHC beam dump absorber is engineered as a two foot diameter, 23 foot long graphite cylinder contained in an outer steel cylinder. This is water-cooled and surrounded by about 750 tonnes of concrete and iron shielding in a dedicated enclosure. The LHC protons finally come to rest in a cascade of secondary particles, deep inside a blazingly-hot carbon tube.

In a future particle beam weapon system, it could have been a rocket hull or spacecraft: stabbed, incinerated and disabled in 100 microseconds.

---

OK, I'm conscious that I evaded the question. About your head.  No matter, it was answered brilliantly here.

Confessions of an eternalist

Confession: I am an eternalist.

Eternalist Sean Carroll has a post up commenting on recent books by Lee Smolin and philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger who argue to the contrary. Reading the comments there is depressing  - people either don't understand the issue at all, or don't appreciate how to think about the subjective nature of 'now'. Physicists!

One physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder, has written an excellent and definitive analysis: here's an extract.

"The decisive ability that allows us to experience the present moment as being unlike other moments is that we have a memory. We have a memory of events in the past, an imperfect one, and we do not have memory of events in the future. Memory is not in and by itself tied to consciousness, it is tied to the increase of entropy, or the arrow of time if you wish. Many materials show memory; every system with a path dependence like eg hysteresis does. If you get a perm the molecule chains in your hair remember the bonds, not your brain.

"Memory has nothing to do with consciousness in particular which is good because it makes it much easier to find the flaw in the argument leading to the problem of now.

"If we want to describe systems with memory we need at the very least two time parameters: t to parameterize the location of the particle and τ to parameterize the strength of memory of other times depending on its present location. This means there is a function f(t,τ) that encodes how strong is the memory of time τ at moment t. You need, in other words, at the very least a two-point function, a plain particle trajectory will not do.

"That we experience a “now” means that the strength of memory peaks when both time parameters are identical, ie t-τ = 0. That we do not have any memory of the future means that the function vanishes when τ > t. For the past it must decay somehow, but the details don’t matter. This construction is already sufficient to explain why we have the subjective experience of the present moment being special. And it wasn't that difficult, was it?"

I'm not so much into perms as my preferred physical model of subjective temporal experience. If you imagine a robot with an updating model of observed-reality obtained from its internal and external sensors, it's easy to see that examining its own memory store at any instant at all the robot can persuade itself that this instant "now" is special. But all introspective moments are like that. If we saved each database-state where:

"the robot notes that it is aware of itself and its environment now"

to disk, there would be nothing fundamentally distinct about any of them.

That robot is, functionally, me and you and sits easily in the block universe.

All is geometry

Here's a little puzzle. Suppose you pick a number randomly between 0 and 1: call it x. Now pick a second one, also between 0 and 1: call it y. What's the average distance between x and y?

Hands up those who called out zero! Well, you clever, but you bad! I mean the distance you could measure with a ruler, no negative distances.

Not so trivial now, is it.

So here's a picture of us choosing x and y (figure 1). Let's agree that the order makes no difference to the gap between them, so we'll just arrange things so that x is the bigger one (don't care, if x = y).

Figure 1

We'll let z be the distance measured by our mathematical ruler between the two numbers - we want to know the average value of z over many trials. We can plot x and y as separate choices in the X-Y plane (figure 2).

Figure 2

The space of possible choices for x and y is the shaded triangle above. The area of the triangle is one half - we'll need this later.

Now, we add the Z-axis where we can plot the distance between them, z = x-y.

Figure 3

The volume z = x-y is a right-angled triangular pyramid. As you can see, when y is zero, z is just equal to x so z slopes upwards on the X-axis. When y = x, z is zero - that's where the pyramid meets the X-Y plane. The volume of the pyramid is a third the base-area times the height so that's (1/3) * (1/2) * 1 = 1/6; we'll need that in a moment.

I hope you'll agree that this three-dimensional volume showing the variation in distance between two randomly chosen points in the [0, 1] interval is not exactly obvious. To work out the average value of the distance z, we consider a shape which "sits" on the shaded area of figure 2 above, which has the same volume as figure 3 but is of uniform z-height.

Here's the picture (figure 4).

Figure 4

As you can see, z here is a constant 1/3, because (1/3) * (1/2) = (1/6), the same volume as before.

So that's the answer: the average distance between two randomly-chosen points is one third. Did you guess that correctly?

[Note: you might be surprised by how hard this problem is in general].

---

Here's another puzzle. You throw an ordinary six-faced die twice (example: getting 5 and 2). Call the difference between the two scores z (example: z = 5-2 = 3).

What's the average value of z? Fancy a guess?

Suppose the faces of the die were labelled (1/6), (2/6), ..., (6/6). Then these six points are uniformly distributed along the interval [0, 1] so we could use the result we already showed above and estimate that the average distance between them should be one third.

Of course the actual values on the die are six times bigger, so we would expect the value of z here also to be six times bigger, so 6 * (1/3) = 2.

Rough, obviously. We're talking a continuous approximation to a discrete distribution. We can get the right answer by simply listing cases.

6-1 = 5, 6-2 = 4, 6-3 = 3, 6-4 = 2, 6-5=1, 6-6 = 0
5-1 = 4, 5-2 = 3, 5-3 = 2, 5-4 = 1, 5-5 = 0
4-1 = 3, 4-2 = 2, 4-3 = 1, 4-4 = 0
3-1 = 2, 3-2 = 1, 3-3 = 0
2-1 = 1, 2-2 = 0
1-1 = 0

Total of differences = 35; total number of cases = 21 so average difference = 35/21 = 5/3 = 1.67 .. or, as we say, two to the nearest whole number :-).

(Do you see how you could draw pictures of these cases paralleling figures 2-4 above? You'd get a lumpy three-dimensional histogram rather than the smooth pyramid.)

---

There is a point to this amateur theorising. Mathematics sometimes seems very abstract and textual: axioms and long strings of deduction. This is to take a very lexical-syntactic view; to reduce ourselves to automated theorem-provers. The language of mathematics is about something, and that something is structure, geometry. The entities of mathematics are structural objects, often of high-complexity, of infinite size and inhabiting many dimensions. Our axioms and theorems describe properties of these structures; our proofs are like a blind man feeling his way around an elephant, encountering its aspects deduction by deduction.

When you truly understand a mathematical object in its full "shape", its nature is obvious. But it's hard for mortals to encompass the infinite - mere glimpses are sometimes as good as it gets.

Since physics is finding mathematical structures which can be brought into correspondence with measured reality, it is equally true - in some sense - that physics is geometry. There is a programme in physics, Geometrodynamics, which takes this rather literally.

You might also like to take a look at the hottest of new physics ideas: ER = EPR (wormholes in general relativity = quantum entanglement).

"I’ve mentioned before that John Wheeler was one of my heros during my formative years. Back in the 1950s, Wheeler held a passionate belief that “everything is geometry,” and one particularly intriguing idea he called “charge without charge.” There are no pointlike electric charges, Wheeler proclaimed; rather, electric field lines can thread the mouth of a wormhole. What looks to you like an electron is actually a tiny wormhole mouth. If you were small enough, you could dive inside the electron and emerge from a positron far away."

---

"Where did all this come from?" you ask wonderingly. Amazingly, I was working this out in bed this morning at 6.30 am. I have no idea why.

Comments on for story feedback

Bombarded with comment spam, I long ago turned off comments for this blog. However, inspired by Andy Weir (below) I have now turned comments back on again - specifically to solicit feedback on stories I post here. Please feel free etc - they will be moderated and there's some kind of anti-spam word verification. Sorry about that.

"Andy Weir's road to publishing The Martian is a road many new writers would love to take. After writing as a hobby for many years and penning multiple short stories, which he published for free on his website, Weir set about writing a novel, The Martian. Originally releasing the book a chapter at a time on his website, again for free, he used reader feedback to fine-tune the work as he went along—and he only released it as an e-book because those same loyal readers wanted to download it to their e-readers.

The Martian went on to sell 35,000 copies in three months, so unsurprisingly it wasn't long before he'd signed with an agent and inked a print deal."

Excerpted from this review at Strange Horizons which seems to go out of its way to gratuitously find fault. I don't feel my destiny is to retrace Mr Weir's route to fame and fortune, but the approach seems to hold promise. So thanks in advance.

Phytocide

I still remember the excitement of my early teens when we established the first colony at Epsilon Indi A, a sun-like star about 12 light-years from Earth. They called the planet Hope: perhaps they thought we wouldn’t repeat the blood-sodden mistakes of old Earth.

Even then, I was intensely interested in the mechanics of the process. How could they get material and people across such immense distances? Naturally such an achievement ranked as the greatest engineering feat the human race had ever accomplished. The key was bootstrapping. Very powerful lasers delivered the first level nanoconstructor. It was a small device, and complex, but it only had to happen once.

The nanoconstructor was a basic fabricator, and the only thing it could do was create a better one. Soon we had devices which were remotely-programmable, and which could build macroscopic machines of general utility. You get the point: once started, there was no limit. Eventually we could send DNA codes and get adult clone bodies grown in a tank. You just had to know how to do it.

So here’s the macabre bit. We didn't grow brains in those copy-bodies. We didn't want new blank-slate individuals. Instead, we used a programmable neural substrate hosting a transmitted brain-state. (The opportunities for error were the subject of half-a-dozen plays and films). And so, with zero subjective time delay, Captain Vine, his assistant Commander Jung and I ended up in orbit around Hope, in a locally fabricated dreadnought with the encouraging name of Threat.

"Threat" in orbit around Hope

---

Bill Night met us in Threat’s conference room as we sat in a stationary orbit over New City, the first settlement on the new planet (when will people stop calling new things ‘new’?). Bill was the colony leader, and in theory responsible for all the hundreds of thousands of colonists who currently occupied the planet. There wasn't a single adult human brain in 12 light years and that wouldn’t change until the new kids grew up.

“Initially”, Night began, “things went well.”

“They always do,” Jung observed with a smile, “Simulation and reality always start in sync. But it’s like the weather; reality never stays properly on track.”

“We soon had a second group,” Night continued, “established on the next continent about a quarter way round the equator: security in diversity. We called it Fort 2. You understand that everything here is technology-driven. We need agriculture to kick-start the food chain; heavy equipment for construction. We have a lot of dual military-civilian stuff.”

We nodded, this was standard procedure.

“We knew there would be problems of course, we just didn't know where and when. So we weren't too surprised when the local vegetation started playing up.”

This was news to us, but of course we were years behind the game.

“There’s a kind of root system which tunnels quite rapidly underground; it seemed to take against us. Crops were disrupted and buildings began to collapse.”

“So what did you do?” asked Vine with interest. This was the kind of practical military problem which always engaged him.

“Flamethrowers were effective against the surface leaves and stems. Most of the action was below ground though, and here we tried several things. We had a microwave system, like ground-penetrating radar - that was good at frying the tubers. We also dug moats.”

Vine nodded genially, “And it worked?”

“For a while, but the wretched stuff proved astonishingly adaptable. It dug itself deeper and self-modified in its self-defence. It was then that the disagreement started with Fort 2. Don’t forget, everything we had, they had as well: same size population, same resources, same technologies and same skills. They were researching this plant, same as we were, and in their view it was showing some signs of sentience.”

“And your view?” asked Jung with a look hovering between concentration and consternation.

“It’s a plant. It’s a goddamn problem and it’s screwing up our operation. It it’s smart, that just makes it a bigger problem.”

I was watching Vine carefully. He gave little away but I sensed his pleasure.

“Our only concern was to remove the obstacle and our science team thought they had an answer:  a toxin which would basically just turn it off.”

“So what’s your problem?” asked Vine. “Just go with it.”

“The problem,” said Night with a scowl, “is Fort 2. This thing is so adaptive that we need to spray the entire planet to exterminate it. Anything less and we run the risk it will adapt away from the threat. Fort 2 won’t cooperate. Worse, they say it’s genocide, and that if we proceed they’ll actually fight to defend the wretched plant!”

Vine’s lip curled. “No doubt they offered their own solution?”

“Co-existence,” Night replied, “We clear some areas but leave others for the plant to live on. They want time for further research; they claim they may eventually even get some rudimentary communications going.”

“So what do you want us to do?” asked Commander Jung.

“Make them see sense: one way or another.”

---

After the meeting with Night, Vine kept Jung and myself behind to debrief. It was rare to see any sign of conflict between the two officers. I had once, in private, asked Jung whether he would see any problem getting Vine to approve some pet project of his. Jung had snorted in contempt: “Trust me, how hard could it be?”

As we waited on Vine in his executive office, it was obvious that Jung had been affected by the argument relayed so indirectly from Fort 2. The human race wasn't meant to be in the business of going around the Galaxy snuffing out other intelligent beings, no matter what we might have done back on Earth. It appeared that Jung was for caution.

“This is an irritating problem but not a crash priority – we need to be sure about what we’re doing here. My advice is to get some more research done and open up a line of communication with the people at Fort 2.”

Vine turned to me, a rare event in itself as the captain rarely felt need for science officer input. I hated to be put on the spot, particularly when I didn't feel we had enough data.

"Latimer?"

“I understand the mission here, but we still don’t know enough. I think, like Jung, we should restrain Night and learn more.”

“OK, thank you gentlemen. You’re dismissed.”

As we left Vine’s office, I saw that Night had not left, as I had imagined. He was being shown back in for a further meeting with Vine – alone this time.

---

In the Threat’s bar, I asked Jung what he thought Vine would do.

“He’ll talk big with Night, and they’ll agree that lawful authority needs to be maintained. Maybe we can use some of the big weaponry on the ship to cook an area around the two settlements so that the project can continue unhindered - until we can sort the bigger picture out.

“I’ll have a word with him later and straighten him out.”

---

On the ship we have a new and somewhat awesome system. I'm not even sure we would call it a weapon system. It’s a gravitational wave laser – inelegantly a Gaser. One consequence of being able to produce coherent Terawatt gravitational waves is light-year communication through the dustiest of regions. Another is truly astonishing destruction.

When Vine ordered the Gasar AI to ‘illuminate’ Fort 2, the effect was extraordinary. The beam was around 40 cm wide with a sub-kilohertz pulse rate. A gravitational wave produces a stretch-compress tidal force – in this case millions of Newtons. Anything in its way was literally shredded to fine powder, the absorbed energy ending up as heat.

The Gaser AI was instructed to deploy in fire-hose mode and with programmed obedience it traced a raster over the entire settlement. After ten minutes attention, Fort 2 and its entire population was transformed to thermally-incandescent dust down to the liquefying bedrock.

---

Afterwards, we were able to piece the story together. Vine and Night had called Fort 2 and given them an ultimatum: basically do as you’re told and eradicate the weed globally or face the consequences. The Fort 2 guys had had a bad attack of principles. They flatly refused, as I think Vine knew they would.  As the captain had carefully arranged, he now had no other option, so in the best traditions of empire he had the place slagged.

The Gaser had smashed a cone-shaped volume straight through the planet, but impressive as this was, it would not suffice to defeat the weed. Night and his team went right ahead with the sterilization programme and a few months later, the consensus was that they had succeeded: onwards to the new global colony!

---

Afterwards Vine tried to calm us – especially Jung, who seemed remarkably upset.

“C’mon guys. Earth has invested a major chunk of Gross World Product in getting this colony off the ground. There was never any way we were going to back off making this work for an indigent, highly-invasive plant species.”

Jung was smart enough not to make an issue of it, although you could see that something deep inside of him was burning. I didn't feel that good myself.

It turned out, much later, that the plant had had a kind of distributed intelligence. I don’t know whether we would ever have been able to communicate with it, but it seemed to know it existed, to have had fears and hopes and desires.

But then, you could say the same about cows.

---

When, 12 years later, Earth found out what had happened, Earth-Vine was commended, even though he personally had had nothing whatsoever to do with it.
___

Ⓒ Nigel Seel, March 2015.

I rather like the idea of a “Gravitational Laser”. Gravitational waves couple so weakly to matter that I can’t imagine a technology that would deliver the level of destruction described. Luckily it’s not my problem. You may detect some similarities in theme between this story and the recently-posted “Space Opera”.

---

Back to "Stories".

System Integration

Yesterday I was cast back to a now sadly-familiar role: the family's systems engineer. My mother had reported that her ancient (CRT) TV had now evolved to sound only .. and indeed it was so. I didn't waste too much time with the old (2003) Sky STB, once turning off and restarting everything had failed to turn things around.

My first ploy was to attach her old aerial coax to a spare Freeview digibox I happened to have. This gave perfectly adequate reception for the channels she's interested in, but could I get that Flipper to control it? In despair I called digibox tech support: I paraphrase.

"Yep, the device you're dealing with is a cheap Chinese import we sell. We've never had any luck getting third party remotes to work with it. We don't know the codes and in any case you're wasting your time."

I was perseverant with the Flipper, manual in hand, but success eluded me. It was time to visit Currys/PC World. The tech assistants were entranced by my Flipper booklet.

"Hey," called my guy to his boss, have you ever seen anything like this?

These are folk who don't get out of bed for anything with less than 200 controls; the Flipper - with its minimalist on-off, channel +/- & volume up/down buttons - entranced and mystified them. The Samsung TV seemed most likely to be Flipper-friendly and so - eventually - it proved.

Samsung delivers the goods

I am so bad at manipulating physical reality, and tend to panic and hyperventilate when presented with two pieces of plastic and seven cross-headed screws. I did, however, finally get the stand assembled and connected to the TV.

Ab initio configuration is so much better now - no more diving through five layers of incomprehensible on-screen menus aided by a bulky manual written in microscopic font. So after no more than 90 minutes I was able to call the Sky people and close down her contract.

They were good about it.