Filed under: Alzheimer's, Amazon, Artificial Intelligence, Brave New World, Connections, Feedback, Genetic Testing, Health, Hospice, Humor, Kindle, Marketing, movies, Promotion, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, tech, Writing stuff, YouTube | Tags: Aliens, Alzheimer's, Amazon, artificial intelligence, blogging, direct publishing, DNA, feedback, free, health, Her Final Year, hospice, humor, jim downey, John Bourke, Kindle, movies, promotion, science, Science Fiction, Scrivener, St. Cybi's Well, synthetic biology, technology, writing, www youtube
Catch this news this week?
Synthetic biology: New letters for life’s alphabet
The five bases found in nucleic acids define the ‘alphabet’ used to encode life on Earth. The construction of an organism that stably propagates an unnatural DNA base pair redefines this fundamental feature of life.
* * *
Sorry about the sparseness of posting lately. I’ve been … busy. Have had a couple of interesting things happen which could play out in some very good ways. One is still enough in an embryonic stage that I won’t mention anything about it yet, but the other is far enough along that I’ll share: there’s a literary agent who is potentially interested in representing me, something which I have been thinking about for a while.
And it seems like a good enough fit that I took all of last weekend to put together a submission package for formal consideration. That meant going through and doing fairly thorough revisions to the first few chapters of St Cybi’s Well, using the feedback I have gotten from half a dozen ‘beta readers’, as well as composing a formal synopsis of the book. Frankly, both were a lot of work, and somewhat skewed my normal work schedule such that it is just now getting back to what passes for normal in my life.
But it was also helpful, and forced me to clarify some things which I had left unfocused for the rest of the book. Because of the way I am writing this (using Scrivener), it has been fairly easy for me to block out both the overall arc of the book as well as character developments. But doing so has been based on chapter notes more than anything, meaning that it was still somewhat in flux. Creating a full synopsis meant that I had to put the whole thing into one coherent document. And even though it was something of a pain in the butt, the result is helpful.
I’ll keep you posted as to any concrete developments.
* * *
Remember this scene from Aliens?
Considered a classic, and rightly so. But I’ve always thought that a big part of the brilliance of it is how it sets up what happens immediately after:
Back at the groups’ table, Bishop holds up his hand and examines a tiny cut closely.
BURKE: I thought you never missed, Bishop?
To Ripley’s horror, a trickle of white synthetic blood runs down his finger. Ripley spins on Burke, her tone accusing.
RIPLEY: You never said anything about an android being on board! Why not?!
BURKE: It never occurred to me. It’s common practice. We always have a synthetic on board.
BISHOP: I prefer the term ‘artificial person’ myself.
BURKE: Right.
* * *
Oh, one more thing: in observation of Mother’s Day, the Kindle edition of Her Final Year is available for free download through Sunday, May 11th. If you’re new here, just a quick note: this is our care-giving memoir about the challenges and rewards of caring for someone with dementia, as well as the long recovery/reflection period which comes after. It seems to have helped a lot of people. Perhaps it can help you or someone you know.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Emergency, Flu, Health, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Writing stuff | Tags: antibiotics, blogging, Communion of Dreams, fire-flu, flu, health, influenza, jim downey, Keiji Fukuda, plague, predictions, science, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, WHO, writing
30 April 2014 | Geneva – A new report by WHO–its first to look at antimicrobial resistance, including antibiotic resistance, globally–reveals that this serious threat is no longer a prediction for the future, it is happening right now in every region of the world and has the potential to affect anyone, of any age, in any country. Antibiotic resistance–when bacteria change so antibiotics no longer work in people who need them to treat infections–is now a major threat to public health.
“Without urgent, coordinated action by many stakeholders, the world is headed for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill,” says Dr Keiji Fukuda, WHO’s Assistant Director-General for Health Security. “Effective antibiotics have been one of the pillars allowing us to live longer, live healthier, and benefit from modern medicine. Unless we take significant actions to improve efforts to prevent infections and also change how we produce, prescribe and use antibiotics, the world will lose more and more of these global public health goods and the implications will be devastating.”
I thought I had mentioned it here previously, but a quick search didn’t turn up anything: I had originally considered the world-wide pandemic which sets the ‘history’ of Communion of Dreams as being entirely due to an antibiotic-resistant bug (probably the plague). But as I was going through and doing work on the early draft of the book, I decided to change that, since an informal survey among people indicated that it was too “far fetched.” I didn’t think so — as far back as 15 – 20 years ago there were already indications that this was a real threat. But you can’t get too far out ahead of what people think is possible, even when writing Science Fiction, so I went with an influenza virus instead.
And speaking of which, time to get back to writing St Cybi’s Well …
Jim Downey
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Science, Science Fiction, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: augmented reality, blogging, jim downey, science, Science Fiction, smartphone, St. Cybi's Well, technology, writing
Sorry for a bit of absence – I came down with an annoying cold over the weekend, and needed to devote my energy to getting past that.
Anyway, remember last time I mentioned a technology change I introduced into the Prelude of St Cybi’s Well? Well, now I have worked through the rest of the book, applying that change where appropriate, until I got back to where I am currently writing. And I thought I would share the following passage, so you can get a sense of how the tech works:
“See it?” asked Eleazar.
Darnell shook his head, but peered closer where Eleazar pointed. He could see something faint on the rock, but couldn’t make the image resolve. So he took out his hand-held, removed the stylus. Pointing the stylus camera and the flash on the phone at the image, he tapped an icon on the screen. There were a series of quick flashes, and the screen filled with a close-up of the stone face. Eleazar looked on with some amusement as Darnell used a slider at the bottom of the screen to go up and down the spectrum, changing the image and bringing out details otherwise hidden in it. Darnell glanced up at Eleazar, saw his amusement, and explained “Multispectral imaging. Not nearly the resolution or range of real remote sensing equipment, but handy for some things.”
“Particularly when you’re going blind, eh?”
“Yeah. And until I can find my miracle, this helps.” Darnell smiled slightly, a wry, almost sad smile. “But the range of the image is well beyond what even good human sight can see – what even you can see.”
“I already know what is there,” said Eleazar.
“Well, now so do I,” said Darnell, pausing in his manipulation of the image and holding up the screen. On it was a cup. An old cup, like an ancient chalice, clearly visible on the menhir face.
Back to it.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, General Musings, NPR, Science, Science Fiction, Star Trek, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: augmented reality, blogging, Diane Rehm, jim downey, Morning Edition, NPR, predictions, Samsung, science, Science Fiction, smartphone, St. Cybi's Well, Star Trek, technology, tricorder, writing
Seriously. It’s a common thing for me. Usually I shower while listening to Morning Edition or The Diane Rehm show, picking up on the news or some interesting topic of conversation. The combination of engaging my brain while relaxing my body seems to prompt intuitive leaps and interesting insights. And I had an excellent one this morning.
From back in December:
He turned the hand-held on, did a quick check to make sure it had the software and apps he’d asked for. Everything was there. He’d pick up a burner phone later, and swap the SIMM card into the hand-held.
Compare it to this passage:
He turned the hand-held on, did a quick check to make sure it had the software and apps he’d asked for. Everything was there. It was a model with a ‘super stylus’ – one end for working on the screen like any stylus, the other which had an integrated camera and microphone system wirelessly tethered to the phone. With the range of applications available, this damned near made the thing a proto-tricorder. He’d pick up a burner phone later, and swap the SIMM card into the hand-held.
No big deal, right? Just two additional sentences. What constitutes a minor tweak, right?
Actually, it’s the first major revision of St Cybi’s Well. Granted, I’m only about halfway done with the first draft, so calling it a revision might seem to be a bit much. But it’s not.
Consider what you could do with such a change to our current technology. My present smartphone is a Samsung Galaxy Note II. It’s a great phone, with an amazing range of applications available for it. If you added a resident decent camera and mic to the end of the stylus, combined with the right software, this thing really would be almost like a tricorder. Particularly if the quality of the camera were such that it could pick up a wider range of EMR than just normal visible light, and the mic(s) were sensitive to a wider range of sounds. You might need to add in something like an IR or UV “flash/laser” on the phone body, but doing so would allow you to do a wide range of diagnostics well outside the usual range of human vision and hearing. Just off the top of my head it would be capable of:
- Checking surface temperatures.
- Night vision.
- Rangefinder.
- Motion detection.
- Blood oxygenation & glucose monitoring.
- Pulse/heart monitor.
- Echolocation.
- The ability to look around corners or over walls, into small crevices/holes …
- The ability to listen to distant sounds and to estimate location of same.
You get the idea. And pretty much all that should be possible with our present level of technology (both hardware & software), just brought together in some slightly different ways.
So yeah, just two sentences dropped into the “Prelude” to the actual novel, but which sets the stage for me to allow my characters to know and do more throughout the whole book.
Fun stuff.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Religion, Science Fiction, Society, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: blogging, excerpt, jim downey, Pentre Ifan, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, Wales, writing
Excerpt:
Eleazar considered, again reached up and laid a hand on the closest upright. “You said yourself: there are structures like this all around the world, built within the same time period. But they’re in completely different cultures. Cultures which had little or no contact.”
“So?”
“So, how likely is it that the mythology associated with Wales would apply to all those sites?”
Darnell allowed his hands to fall to his side. But he looked up again at the huge stone which almost seemed to float above his head. “Not very, I suppose.”
“Still, you have the gist of it. In some way, they are all connected. It’s just that the way of … understanding …” Eleazar stared at the stone structure, almost as though looking for inspiration “… of interpreting … has to be done within a given culture.”
“Understanding what, exactly?”
Eleazar looked from the stone to Darnell. Looked him right in the eye. “Miracles.”
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Connections, Feedback, Kindle, Marketing, NPR, Predictions, Promotion, Publishing, Quantum mechanics, Religion, Science, Science Fiction, Writing stuff | Tags: Amazon, blogging, Communion of Dreams, direct publishing, free, Her Final Year, jim downey, Kindle, multiverse, NPR, promotion, religion, science, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, writing
This article is … surprisingly relevant to one of the main themes of St Cybi’s Well. Near the end:
Infinity gets us tangled up in knots. How are we to establish what is normal when, in the realm of the infinite, everything is possible? It is a mind-twisting notion that an infinite multiverse would have infinitely many copies of this and every other possible kind of universe.
A quick note on the two-day promo: there were very few additional downloads of Her Final Year yesterday, for a grand total worldwide of 56 copies. A bit surprising, a little disappointing. Communion of Dreams fared much better, with a total of 1092 downloads around the world. Thanks, everyone!
Jim Downey
*Yup.
Filed under: Arthur C. Clarke, Augmented Reality, Brave New World, Connections, Emergency, General Musings, Health, Paleo-Future, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Star Trek, Survival, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: Arthur C. Clarke, augmented reality, blogging, cell phone, energy, fracking, hydraulic fracturing, jim downey, mundane science fiction, oil, predictions, Samuel Tisherman, science, Science Fiction, Star Trek, suspended animation, technology, writing
Suspended animation of one sort or another has been a staple of Science Fiction just about forever. Of course, as such it has often been dismissed as being little more than fantasy — just a magic trick that a lazy author will resort to in order to get around some technological barrier or another. Because, you know, it’s just completely unrealistic …
NEITHER dead or alive, knife-wound or gunshot victims will be cooled down and placed in suspended animation later this month, as a groundbreaking emergency technique is tested out for the first time.
Surgeons are now on call at the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to perform the operation, which will buy doctors time to fix injuries that would otherwise be lethal.
“We are suspending life, but we don’t like to call it suspended animation because it sounds like science fiction,” says Samuel Tisherman, a surgeon at the hospital, who is leading the trial. “So we call it emergency preservation and resuscitation.”
Yeah, you certainly wouldn’t want it to sound like Science Fiction. ‘Cause that stuff’s just nuts.
*sigh*
I’ve written previously about ‘mundane science fiction‘, the idea being that we have to stick with what we know to be technologically realistic. The thing is, what we consider to be technologically “realistic” keeps changing, often in surprising ways. I remember the energy crisis of the mid-’70’s, and when US energy independence was considered to be little more than a fantasy talking-point of presidents. Well, the US currently produces more oil than we consume. Sure, it has come with real costs/problems, but it is nonetheless true. (And actually, I think that sort of trade-off makes for a more interesting Science Fiction story overall, exploring both the benefits and problems of new technologies.)
Clarke had it right: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That doesn’t give a Science Fiction writer complete latitude to just make shit up. But it also cautions against dismissing any technology as “unrealistic” out-of-hand.
Just ask the first person who will be saved due to “emergency preservation and resuscitation.” Chances are, sometime later this year you’ll be able to do so on his/her cell phone.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: blogging, Dinas Maelor, excerpt, jim downey, Pen Dinas, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, Wales, writing
Excerpt:
He hiked over to the highest point, Pen Dinas, where now stood a large 19th century monument to Wellington. It was supposed to represent a cannon turned heavenward, but Darnell wondered whether it wasn’t also meant to suggest the horn of Maelor, the giant of legend who had made the hill fort his home. Darnell stood there, at the base of the huge monument, and enjoyed the views back towards the city, out over the sea, as well as inland. It was easy to see why the early Celts would have decided to settle in this place.
He closed his eyes, and for a moment tried to place himself back in that time. Relaxing, opening up his awareness, for a brief moment he thought he heard a voice, then others joining it, in chant. In that same brief moment, the darkness of his closed eyes was touched by a vision of fire, quiet low flames, which spun as though a wheel.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Babylon 5, Brave New World, Carl Zimmer, Connections, National Geographic, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, tech, Titan, Writing stuff | Tags: augmented reality, Babylon 5, blogging, Carl Zimmer, Glass Brain, jim downey, mind-machine interface, National Geographic, Neuroscape lab, neuroscience, predictions, science, Science Fiction, Tholin, Titan
Carl Zimmer has put up a really interesting piece about recent developments which allow for visualization of brain structures which I would recommend:
It’s hard to truly see the brain. I don’t mean to simply see a three-pound hunk of tissue. I mean to see it in a way that offers a deep feel for how it works. That’s not surprising, given that the human brain is made up of over 80 billion neurons, each branching out to form thousands of connections to other neurons. A drawing of those connections may just look like a tangle of yarn.
As I wrote in the February issue of National Geographic, a number of neuroscientists are charting the brain now in ways that were impossible just a few years ago. And out of these surveys, an interesting new way to look at the brain is emerging. Call it the brain fly-through. The brain fly-through only became feasible once scientists started making large-scale maps of actual neurons in actual brains. Once they had those co-ordinates in three-dimensional space, they could program a computer to glide through it. The results are strangely hypnotic.
Yeah, they are, and also very cool. One of the most interesting developments is a new program called the Glass Brain which is powerful enough to allow you to see how the brain is working in real time. From the article:
Imagine, if you will, putting on an EEG cap and looking at a screen showing you what’s happening in your brain at the moment you’re looking at it. That’s what this system promises.
The diagnostic and training potential is obvious. And if you consider the implications a bit, this could be a big step towards a true mind/machine interface. And then all bets are off for what could happen next.
Jim Downey
*Referencing Dust to Dust.
And a side-note. While I don’t make a big deal of it in Communion of Dreams, if you stop and think of the descriptions I use for the super-conducting ‘gel’ found on Titan, and what is revealed about it, you might notice that it would seem very similar to how neurons in the brain are structured and behave, though on a vastly different scale … 😉
Filed under: Augmented Reality, Brave New World, Connections, General Musings, Health, NPR, Preparedness, Science, Science Fiction, Scott Simon, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: apps, augmented reality, blogging, health, ideas, jim downey, NPR, Rupal Patel, science, Science Fiction, Scott Simon, speech, St. Cybi's Well, technology, VocalID, writing
A somewhat related item on NPR this morning reminded me of an idea I had a while back. The gist of it:
Come up with a simple computer/smartphone app which would contain a few hundred basic words which you just read aloud and record. Save the file, and later it could be used for basic communication should you not have direct use of your voice for whatever reason.
Speech scientists/therapists could compile the standard list of words (for whatever language), perhaps with “expansion packs” of additional words some people might want to also record. When you have a few free minutes, you just run down the list, say a few words and save it. Then later you could use something like a standard text-message app to compose the words into sentences for ease of communication, and the app would just plug your recorded words into place.
It wouldn’t have the normal sort of nuance of inflection that comes with natural speech (though there may be a simple way around that — I’m not knowledgeable enough to know), but at least it would be in your own voice.
Who would use such a thing? Well, all of us face temporary or permanent loss of our voice throughout our lives, for all kinds of reasons. So there’s that. But I could also see uses where the app could be mated with any email or texting use, so that the recipient could directly hear you “talking” to them with it. I would think that it would have all kinds of uses beyond that, as well.
Just a thought. If someone wants to come up with such a thing, cut me in for a percentage, will you?
Jim Downey
PS: Hmm, I may have to incorporate this kind of tech into St Cybi’s Well. I can think of a few ways it could be useful …
PPS: Following posting this, I contacted one of the speech scientists mentioned in the NPR program this morning, Dr. Rupal Patel. And while it isn’t exactly the same sort of thing I envision, she did share with me the effort she is involved with, which has an app currently in beta testing: http://vocalid.org/ Looks like a very worthwhile endeavor, check it out and ‘donate’ your voice.
Communion Of Dreams 