Filed under: Arthur C. Clarke, Artificial Intelligence, Carl Sagan, Expert systems, Fermi's Paradox, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Space, tech
‘Babelfish’ to translate alien tongues could be built If we ever make contact with intelligent aliens, we should be able to build a universal translator to communicate with them, according to a linguist and anthropologist in the US.
Such a “babelfish”, which gets its name from the translating fish in Douglas Adams‘s book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, would require a much more advanced understanding of language than we currently have. But a first step would be recognising that all languages must have a universal structure, according to Terrence Deacon of the University of California, Berkeley, US.
Color me dubious. Deacon’s notion, as presented at AbSciCon 2008, is basically that any language will be tied to descriptions of the physical universe in some way. As reported in the NewScientist article above, this would allow for some distant computer/software to do a machine translation.
Well, sure – keep it open-ended enough, and just about anything is possible if you go far enough in the future. Clarke’s maxim about technology and magic comes to mind.
But we have a lot of ground to cover, first. Are there technologically advanced civilizations beyond Earth? If so, where are they? Do they even perceive the universe the same way we do? If so, do they have something resembling language, whether it be spoken, written, farted, or spit? Or do they communicate by telepathy, electrical discharge, or some other means outside of our normal sensory perception? Do they experience time the same way we do?
We can’t even build a good algorithm for doing human language translations, with languages well understood and cultures which are compatible, among members of our own species. Anyone who has tried to use one will know what I am talking about. Let’s use the current real-world version of Babel Fish to translate that last sentence, into German, and then back into English. We start with:
Anyone who has tried to use one will know what I am talking about.
Which becomes:
Jedermann, das versucht hat, ein zu verwenden, weiß, über was ich spreche.
Which is pretty good, to my rusty memory of idiomatic German. Now, back into English:
Everyone, which tried to use knows, about which I speak.
You see the problem? And that’s using a standard translation software – which has undoubtedly been tweaked and adjusted time and time again. A commercial software program may give you a better result, but the fact remains that any business will not rely on said software – they’ll go to a human who is fluent in each language for a good translation. And that is with all the commercial forces at work to create a dependable, value-added translation software program. How the hell are we supposed to come up with something which will work with an alien ‘language’ with which we have no prior experience?
Sagan and all the other SF authors who have tackled this had it right: we’ll have to start with mathematics.
Jim Downey
You may have heard of the 5.2 quake we had in this area this morning (epicenter about 150 miles from here, I’d guess). I missed that, what with being sound asleep and all. Got people rattled, you might say.
Well, we just had an aftershock here about 45 minutes ago. I was writing an email to a friend at the time, said this:
I think we just had another post-quake shock. Whole house vibrated, and my monitor did a little dance.
Hmm. Should check the USGS and see if they have anything posted yet.
Nope. But I filed a report.
Well, the report is now up: a 4.5 event, according to IRIS. Interesting. That may be the most powerful one I’ve felt.
Lots of people don’t think of the Midwest as being particularly active, seismically (and otherwise). But we’re probably sitting on top of one of the biggest potential disasters when it comes to likely earthquakes: the New Madrid Fault. Hereabouts, people actually worry about this from time to time, though not nearly enough in terms of applying architectural and engineering knowledge to minimize risk. Because that would cost money.
Shocking, I know.
Jim Downey
One of the major things we still need to do for our ballistics project is to come up with a name for the website/url where all the information and data will be hosted. It is something we (me, Jim K and Steve) really should have discussed over the course of the long weekend just past, but honestly we were always just too worn out at the end of a long day of testing to be very creative. And trying to think about it myself right now is problematic, because I am trying to fight a migraine at the same time and only have enough focus for one thing or the other (and sorry, but getting rid of the migraine takes precedence).
So I thought I would throw out the idea here, see if any of my occasional readers would have any thoughts to contribute. Ideally, the site name/url will be short, easy to remember/type, convey exactly what the project is all about, and available to reserve as a domain.
Here is a list of some of the names we have kicked around previously, to give you some idea where we’re going with this:
- ammobytheinch.com (et cetera = .etc)
- ballisticsbytheinch.etc
- handgunballistics.etc
- pistolballistics.etc
- handgunammovsbarreldata.etc
- pistolammovsbarreldata.etc
- pistoldata-barrelandammoeffects.etc
- pistol-barrelvsammodata.etc
- muzzlemeasure.etc
- muzzlevelocity.etc
- muzzledata.etc
- barrelvelocity.etc
We’d probably prefer to do a .org for the primary domain, if one is available in the name we want, but also buy up the .com and other common variants and have them redirect. So, that is a consideration. Of the ones listed above, I like the simpler and shorter ones.
Thoughts?
Jim Downey
The ballistics testing is finished. Well, sort of. As I mentioned yesterday, the primary goal was to get through the barrel-chopping tests, get all the data from that, and to worry about the ‘real world’ guns sometime later. And we accomplished that. Early on, as we were cruising along, it looked like we might wrap up really early, perhaps mid-day.
Of course, it couldn’t possibly work out that way.
Just as we were down into the 3″ barrel lengths, disaster struck: the mounting rail for the laser busted loose. And not just a little bit – the mounting screws stripped out, and there was no way to fix it short of machining in new threads on the receiver. That’s not the sort of thing you can do out in the field.
Remember I said this, yesterday:
We have four more ‘flights’ of ammo to test today (we did six yesterday), going from barrel lengths of 5″ down to 2″. When we get to the point where the length of the barrel is less the the housing of the receiver (the pistol), things get tricky, but the aiming laser will help a lot.
Um, oops.
And of course, the thing didn’t fail all at once. We got to go through that wonderful process of noticing the impending disaster and trying to cope with it, using this or that strategy, each attempt sorta working for a little while before failing. That took about two hours. And just when we thought we had it secured, a shot with one of the powerful calibers (I think it was a .45 Colt) sent the thing flying in recoil.
Steve, who probably has the most experience as a shooter of any of us, figured that he might as well see if he could shoot the pistol, sans laser. And sans any other sort of sight. Even without the benefit of a barrel, since once we got to that point, the short little bits of barrel were *down inside* the housing of the Thompson/Center Encore pistol (look down to ‘Number 1842’ to get an idea of what just the housing looks like – it’s the part without a barrel or anything attached, off on the left side).
This, needless to say, was going to be a difficult accomplishment, for just a few shots. Doing it for a couple hundred data points (shots were only considered “good” if we got comparable readings from both chronographs), using always-changing types of ammo and different calibers, almost impossible.
But Steve did it. We decided that his secret ‘super power’ is the ability to shoot amazingly well in really dumb situations.
So, we got it done. Got all the data we considered critical for the project. Packed up the stuff we didn’t want stolen, and what needed to go back to Iowa with Jim K, came home. I’ll get the rest of the set up (tent, tables, et cetera) today. And Steve and I will go out sometime in the next week or so and do the ‘real world’ testing, using guns on the market with the same ammo as for the test, which will give us some benchmark comparisons to relate to the ‘ideal’ data.
Big project. The better part of $7,000 worth of ammo, and $5,000 for the custom barrels. Add in another three or four thousand for incidental stuff (lasers, chronographs, generator, chop saw, and so forth). Maybe 250 man-hours of labor for the actual testing component. And we’re still a long ways from being done. We still need to do all the data entry, design a website, write everything up so that all the information – warts, glitches, and errors – is available freely to anyone who is interested in seeing hard data about what the correlation is between barrel length and ammo performance. I’m guessing we still have several weeks before we can say that it is done.
But one hell of a big part of it is accomplished. And that feels really good.
Jim Downey
This is going to be fairly brief – I still have a lot to do this morning and only about an hour to do it.
You know how you feel when you first start a new job, with the uncertainty and intense learning curve? OK, keep that in mind. Now, you know how you feel after a good workout, doing exercise or a bunch of yardwork? Add that in. How about that great feeling of accomplishment, yet exhaustion that comes with finishing a big and difficult project? Add that, too. And lastly, if you are an intensely introverted person, used to being alone about 85% of the time, but switch around to being with people constantly for a week? (Extroverts, I think you’d get a similar feeling by being stranded on a desert island for a week, with no human contact to recharge you.) That’s how I feel. All of it together.
In other words: “Damn, I’m beat.”
The ballistics testing project continues to go very, very well. With a little luck we should wrap it up today. We’ve had a variety of minor glitches, each of which has required some good ol’ Yankee Ingenuity to resolve, but nothing major. The new ‘armour’ protecting the replacement chronographs works – yes, one of us managed to bounce a round right off the top of it (likely would have missed the chronos, but still . . .). The new chronos themselves are a great improvement over what we had been using. The laser has had some problems – good thing we ordered in overnight three additional ones on Thursday, as back-ups. And now that we’ve gotten down to the ‘good parts’ (barrel lengths typical for most defensive handguns), we’re both really excited and really getting pummeled by the effects of the blast of repeated discharges in close quarters.
But we’re coping. Using the box for the portable generator, combined with additional layers of cardboard, we’ve created a ‘blast shield’ to mitigate the worst of the shock wave. All the recording process has gotten smoothed out by experience. The chopping of the barrels continues to be simple. It’s going really, really well. We have four more ‘flights’ of ammo to test today (we did six yesterday), going from barrel lengths of 5″ down to 2″. When we get to the point where the length of the barrel is less the the housing of the receiver (the pistol), things get tricky, but the aiming laser will help a lot. Whether we get to doing tests of ‘real world’ guns with the same ammo today is not too critical, since we can do those on another day with a whole lot less equipment (no need for the chop saw, generator, et cetera). So we should finish the main part of the test today, follow up with the rest later.
Well, gotta run.
Jim Downey
Filed under: 2nd Amendment, Ballistics, Guns, Humor, movies, RKBA, Science, tech, Weather
Ever see what happens to modern electronics when you shoot them with large caliber handguns?
Wait . . . I’m getting ahead of myself.
* * * * * * *
As noted previously, I’ve been busy the last few days getting things ready to start the next round of ballistics testing. Round one was about three weeks ago, and in addition to getting a lot of good data about three of the 13 calibers we’re doing the research on, we also learned a great deal about the testing platform and procedures. Because of that amount of learning, when the three of us got together this week before setting everything up on Wednesday, we decided that we would go ahead and push this weekend to do all the remaining testing.
As a friend said in an email Wednesday night: “Whoa.”
Yeah, because that is 10 more calibers (eight barrels, since the .38 special and .357 magnum bullets use one barrel, and so does the .44 special and .44 magnum). And over 5,000 rounds of ammo.
We’re fortunate in that all three of us (me, Jim K and Steve) are all in situations where we can set aside our work demands for a time and devote our attention to doing this. And in looking at the remaining barrel/ammo combinations, it was clear that there would be some efficiency in doing things all at once – a number of the somewhat more unusual calibers have only two or three types of ammo, meaning that we’d be spending more time swapping out the barrels and chopping them than actually shooting and recording data. So there would be a benefit in getting all those calibers done, then move on to the several calibers where we had a lot of different ammo to test while the other barrels were chopped and prepped (de-burring and modest recrowning to get good consistent results).
And that’s what we did yesterday – dove in head first, in spite of very uncooperative weather (lots of rain and temps in the 40s). Our set-up keeps us out of the wet (we’re using a fair-sized cabin tent for our work area, with the chronographs outside under a protective tarp) but the damp chill still takes a lot of energy out of you. The changes we made to the shooting platform – the addition of an inexpensive target laser – meant that you essentially didn’t need to take the time to aim the thing (once we had it zeroed in), all you had to do was control it with the more powerful calibers.
And before we stopped early in the day, we had gotten to the same point with these remaining 10 calibers as we got on the first day of the previous round of testing with just three calibers.
Now, why did we stop early, if things were going so well?
Wasn’t due to the weather. Not unless you consider a .45 caliber bullet as rain.
What happened was this: one of us (who shall for now remain nameless, until I can spend more time to write up the saga appropriately) was in the middle of shooting the second most powerful of the calibers we’re testing, and didn’t manage to control the gun completely when he fired the round. And it went right through both chronographs. Perfectly.
We use two chronographs, lined up one in front of the other, to be sure we’re getting good data. He hit the first one right dead center, a little high from the middle. Like a perfect shot in a movie, hitting the bad guy right between the eyes. The large bullet punched through the display, destroyed the electronics, and shattered the back of the chrono – then entered the front sensor of the second chrono, exiting out the bottom rear sensor as well.
It was spectacular. A perfect shot. I have pix I’ll be posting later.
But it meant we were done for the day. No chronographs, no way to measure the velocity of the bullets.
But such things are available here, and we’ll pick up a couple more units this morning. And we’ll be getting the kind which have a remote readout – meaning that it’s just the sensors in the line of fire, the electronics on our shooting bench. Meaning that we can place some protective armor plates in front of the sensors to prevent this from happening again.
Meaning that we’ll just have to find a new and improved way of screwing up. 🙂
More when I get the chance.
Jim Downey
. . . cross-posting this item from UTI, even though I put it up there this morning and the thing is all over the web now. It’s just too damned funny. The version below is low-res; be sure to go to YouTube and click on the “view this in higher resolution” tab, then expand it to fill your monitor.
Jim D.
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OK, just in case you haven’t seen this over at PZ’s or elsewhere, here’s a hilarious and brilliantly done satire:
It takes some deconstructing, but the consensus is that it is indeed pro-science/skepticism.
UPDATE: Here are the lyrics, and here is a brief bit on the ‘cast’ – kudos to both authors!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Carl Sagan, Fermi's Paradox, movies, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Society, Space, tech, Titan, Travel, UFO, Writing stuff
There’s a good piece by Seth Shostak over at Space.com about the possible motivations an extra-terrestrial race might have for visiting our pale blue dot. (Shostak is one of the principals of the SETI Institute, and knows whereof he speaks when he addresses these kinds of issues.) First, he dismisses the usual SF plot devices of an alien race wanting our turf, our resources, or even our bodies:
Taking our cue from Tinseltown, I note that most cineplex sentients come to Earth either to solve some sort of ugly reproductive crisis or simply to take over the planet. The former doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. You can’t breed with creatures at the zoo, despite the fact that most of the base pairs in the inmates’ DNA are identical to yours (note that this is a biological incompatibility, and not just zoo regulations). The aliens, needless to say, will have a different biochemistry, and probably no DNA at all. Forget, if you can, the breeding experiments.
Taking over the planet would only make sense if there were something really special about our world. The best guess of the exoplanet specialists is that the number of Earth-size planets in our galaxy exceeds tens of billions. That doesn’t sound like our hunk of real estate is terribly privileged.
They won’t come here to mine our minerals, either. The entire universe is built of the same stuff, and while the solar system has a higher percentage of heavy elements than found in many stellar realms, it turns out that this is precisely the condition that seems to foster planet formation. In other words, ET’s own solar system will be similarly blessed with these useful materials. So why would they come here and incur multi-light-year transport charges?
Why, indeed? These various issues are ones which are discussed in the course of speculation about the alien artifact discovered in Communion of Dreams. And while I never actually reveal the motivations that aliens might have for having left the artifact on Titan in my novel, I do have thoughts on the subject (which might come out in a future sequel to Communion.)
Be that as it may, Shostak does go on to make a pretty good argument that if indeed there are a large number of technological civilizations out there, that they may just not consider us worth the trouble of contacting/visiting. Again, from the article:
Then again, there’s that last point: they just want to learn more about us. Well, perhaps so. Maybe that’s really what’s interesting about Homo sapiens. Not grabbing our habitat, saving our souls (or our environment), or subverting our industrial output — but assaying our culture. I’m willing to consider that even very advanced beings might find our culture mildly worthy of study.
Keep in mind that if they’re near enough to find us, that implies that there are many, many galactic societies (otherwise the distances between any two of them will be enormous). If there are lots of them, then we’re just another entry in a big book. Once again, not all that special. Kind of like another weird fish found in the Atlantic. I don’t expect mammoth expeditions to be sent our way.
It is a good point. I would counter, however, that we have seen plenty of evidence in our own history of people going to enormous trouble to bother to learn about seemingly trivial things. One only has to look at the difficulties encountered in sea-faring during the time of the great naturalists – people were willing to go to great expense, to risk great hardship and a fair chance of death just to add another entry into the botanical texts or to discover a new species. Even today we mount insanely expensive expeditions into the deep ocean just to expand our knowledge.
We have no evidence of extra-terrestrial life, let alone advance civilizations. Yet I think that you can make a fair case that any space-faring race which may exist must have some degree of curiosity – and that curiosity may alone be reason enough to come check out the new kids on the block, whatever the hurdles or cost.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Cassini, Enceladus, Health, NASA, Phil Plait, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Saturn, Science, Science Fiction, Space, Titan
Gah. I am either having a relapse of the very stubborn flu that had me laid low last month, or am fighting some new bug with similar (yet still considerably less severe) symptoms. This is highly annoying.
So, I’m about to go take a nap. But first a couple of quick notes, and then a bit from Phil Plait’s blog about a recent discovery that is very exciting.
Note one: downloads of the .pdf of Communion of Dreams have crossed 8,200 and downloads of the audio version continue to climb as well. That’s exciting.
Note two: heard nothing yet from the agent I mentioned contacting the other day. No surprise – I expect that it will take a month or so to hear from them. But I needed something else to note.
Now, about the news from space . . .
I have written previously about the Cassini probe’s 10 year mission to Saturn, and how there have been a lot of great images and information coming back to scientists about that planet and its moons. Information that helps to confirm what we knew when I was first writing Communion (since most of the action of the book takes place on and around Titan.) But there is news which would potentially require me to revise the novel slightly – not about Titan, but about its sibling Enceladus. You may have heard something about this, but I’ll go to the Bad Astro Boy himself for the news:
Life’s cauldron may be bubbling underneath Enceladus
A few days ago I wrote about how the Cassini Saturn probe dove through water ice plumes erupting from the surface of the icy moon Enceladus. The pictures were incredible, but it may very well be that the other detectors got the big payoff.
They detected organic compounds in the plumes.
Now remember, organic molecules don’t necessarily mean life. What Cassini detected were heavy carbon-based molecules, including many that are the building blocks for making things like amino acids and other compounds necessary for life as we know it.
Edited to add: Carolyn Porco, imaging team leader for Cassini, says:
[…] it is now unambiguous that the jets emerging from the south polar fractures contain organic materials heavier than simple methane — acetylene, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, propane, etc. — making the sub-surface sources of Enceladus’ dramatic geological activity beyond doubt rich in astrobiologically interesting materials.
Whoa. I mean, *whoa* . Seriously. It ain’t life, nor even proof of life – but it is *damned exciting*.
Now, a nap. All this excitement makes me tired.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 