Sand and Heaven

Musings on writing, reading, technology and eternity

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Hot off the Griddle

April 11th, 2009 by Doug Barton
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I needed to create a world, fast.  Jill didn’t strike me as a patient person.

I was a technological kind of guy, so a little technology was in order—something creative, like the matrix.

Oh, no!   Not the matrix!  It was just so last week.  Unfortunately, it wouldn’t let me go.

The internet existed. It was constantly evolving, driving change in commerce, social relationships, education, geopolitics, warfare, even spirituality. It was altering the balance of power, advantaging individuals and virtual communities, disadvantaging monolithic organizations of all stripes.

So I wanted something like the matrix, but a little less woo-woo, a little more pragmatic.

I called it the Grid.

The Grid was the future of the internet converged with a future disaggregated and distributed power generation infrastructure.

Everything will be connected, every element self-sufficient, elements locally (in time and/or space) self-synchronized, the whole self-healing, self-organized, extravagantly various, constantly varying.

Given enough independent elements—a few trillion perhaps—order not entropy will emerge.  Some might even say that consciousness will emerge (phooey to that).

So I had the Grid.  How to talk to it?   Should Jill “jack in?”  No pun intended.

Nah, I had something more creative in mind.

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What’s the feminine of Virgil? Virgilla?

April 5th, 2009 by Doug Barton
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Jack, tall, broad-shouldered and clueless, needed a faithful guide. You know, a sidekick, or at least someone to give him a swift kick.

Who goes with Jack like bread goes with butter, like tea and crumpets, like wine and women? (song is optional)

Arlene? Priscilla? Tiffany? Edna? Muffy?

In stepped Jill.

Actually, she kicked the door down, interviewed me briefly, “I guess you’ll have to do”, and gave Jack the once over with a little sigh.

“Ok, let’s get this show on the road. We’ll need gunfire. You,” she said, glancing coolly in my direction, “make sure there’s gunfire. And we’ll need a set. You do have a set don’t you?” Her eyes narrowed.

Oops.  I’d better get to work.  Fast.

I had a world to create.

It took more than six days.

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Characters (not gorillas) in the mist

April 2nd, 2009 by Doug Barton
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Adopting Steinian sage wisdom, I resolved to write what I like to read and write about what I know with the objective of making my readers snort and chortle: a sort of comic techno-thriller like perhaps, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or maybe Neuromancer meets Skin Tight.

A tall order. I would need tall characters with broad shoulders to carry the load.

I thought about this for a month or so.

Characters lined up for a job interview. Unfortunately, the door seemed to be locked and all I could see was noses pressed up against foggy glass. Seeing through a glass darkly was not my strong suit.

What I needed was a name. Maybe a name would open the doors of imagination. Think of a name.

Jack.

Jack stepped through the door, tall, broad-shouldered and clueless. He was perfect.

However, every Dante needs his Virgil. Who would lead Jack through the seven circle of my imaginary world?

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There’s more than fish in the sea

April 2nd, 2009 by Doug Barton
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One of my fondest memories as a boy was fishing on the Chesapeake Bay with my Dad. We’d drive to Kent Island before sunrise, have a greasy breakfast at a local diner, and head out on a flat bottomed boat to catch the blue fish running. Even a three pounder could jerk the rod out of your hands and chew up steel leaders with barracuda teeth. My Dad wouldn’t let me pry their thrashing bodies off the hook—you could lose a finger. In three or four riotous hours, we’d fill a forty gallon trashcan up with fish.  There was energy for a growing boy in those slabs of oily protein and although I got tired of fish, it beat the heck out of pan-fried liver.

Today, we’re fishing the sea for a different king of energy: electricity, power to the grid, channeled lightening.  A gift of the moon and sun, wrapped in tides and waves, we’re slowly learning to untie the bow and claim the prize.

There’s extraordinary power in the tides—waters rise and fall, the life blood of bays and estuaries, whatever the weather, whatever the season, night and day. Constant and inexorable, the tides are not fickle like the wind, or on-again, off-again like the sun, gloriously present than gone.

It’s simple really, when waters rise, waters run, and running waters turn turbines. A turning turbine generates electricity, food for the engines of the modern age.

So how to go about it?

There are two ways: barrage systems and tidal stream systems.

Barrage system are not cannonade, massed rifle fire or rockets, but rather dams, sluices, ship locks, and caissons.

A barrage (a huge dam) is built across an estuary. Water flows through tunnels in the barrage. The barrage contains sluice gates that let water in with the coming of the tide, capturing it at high tide. As the tide ebbs, the water is held until the difference in height of the water is sufficient (creating a ‘hydrostatic head’). Then the sluice gates are opened and the out flowing water turns turbines generating electricity.

While it sounds simple, it’s not without challenges.

  • Tidal power projects are very expensive to build. Massive dams must be built in difficult environments (salt water estuaries).
  • Salt water is corrosive. Barrage systems are expensive to maintain.
  • For a barrage to be economical, the tidal range (the difference between low and high tide) must be greater than 5 meters for the barrage to work efficiently.There are relatively few locations in the world where this is true. Also, a large bay is required behind the barrage to store water at high tide.
  • The environmental effect of a barrage system on plants and animals in the estuary can be substantial.

The largest tidal power station in the world is in the Rance estuary in northern France. It was built in 1966. You can read more about it here.

You can read more about tidal power generally here.

Next time: wave power.

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Managing password sprawl

March 31st, 2009 by Doug Barton
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Somehow in the process of creating this blog, I added another ten passwords to my already voluminous collection. Fortunately, I use Password Safe. 

This neat little utility was designed by noted security expert, Bruce Schneier, author of Applied Cryptography (a terrific book, my primary reference on cryptography) and creator of the Twofish algorithm.

It’s free, absolutely free, no strings attached.

From the SourceForge website:

“Password Safe allows you to manage your old passwords and to easily and quickly generate, store, organize, retrieve, and use complex new passwords, using password policies that you control. Once stored, your user names and passwords are just a few clicks away.”

“Using Password Safe you can organize your passwords using your own customizable references—for example, by user ID, category, web site, or location. You can choose to store all your passwords in a single encrypted master password list (an encrypted password database), or use multiple databases to further organize your passwords (work and home, for example). And with its intuitive interface you will be up and running in minutes.”

I highly recommend this utility and use it every day. 

Try it, you’ll like it.

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What possessed me to write a book?

March 28th, 2009 by Doug Barton
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Possessed is the word–or perhaps a moment of madness. I’m sure I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

These characters were clamoring in my head, struggling to get out, banging pots and pans together and generally making a racket. I understand there’s medication for this.

I did what any self-respecting engineer would do (after the hangover wore off), I read a book. Several books actually. By great good fortune, I started with Stein On Writing. One of Sol Stein’s first morsels of wisdom was to be very clear on why you’re writing: fame and fortune, catharsis, self-discovery, revenge, therapy, lunch with Brad and Angie.

I didn’t have to think for very long. I wanted to entertain, to make people smile, perhaps to belly laugh. When a loyal reader got to the end of my book, I wanted them to kick back, sigh happily and start over. At the very least, I wanted my readers to feel they got fair value for their hard earned money.

Two other bits of sage guidance: write what you like to read and write about what you know.

When I was not reading for work, I read for diversion: thrillers, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, humor. The last thing I needed after a day at work was more of the real world.

I was an engineer working in the defense industry so I knew a little about technology, warfighting and geopolitics.

But how to put this all together?

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