aka "We're doomed, doomed." c.f. "Kids these days..."
In my previous essay I emphasized how real-world physical acoustics leaves fingerprints in recorded sound. For instance; record in your living room, and unless you smother it with excessive post-processing, anyone listening will know it was recorded in a living room. Which is fine, unless you meant for it to sound like it was recorded on a wind-swept moor.
The corollary is that acoustic physics can be the easiest way to load desired information into a recorded sound. Want a cue to sound like it is coming from an iPod speaker? Play it back on an iPod speaker. Or play it back on that speaker, record the result, and play that back! (Leaving aside whether placement in space is also desired for that particular effect).
However.
Your audience is increasingly not getting that necessary reference to the real acoustic world. They are increasingly surrounded by processed sound. By amplified sound, by reinforced sound, by manipulated sound, and more than anything else by recorded sound.
This is the latest serve in the volley between audience and sound designer. First one could be said to start back in the Mystery Plays. By the time of Opera and Vaudeville, a whole symbolic language had been built of artificial sounds, standing in for elements of the desired environment; mechanical effects from the slapstick to the thunder run and the wind machine.
This is a trend developed through the golden age of the radio play and the early sound films, advanced by creative directors like Hitchcock and Wells, and reaching fruition sometime in the 70's when film sound became a fully designed element; no longer thought of in terms of mere reproduction, but a canvas of substitution. Film sound has become akin to film editing in being a language the must be learned by the audience, until they accept without thinking that the cry of a red-tailed hawk means the mountain on screen (whether it is meant to be in Peru or on Barsoom) is tall and majestic.
A Hollywood gunshot or fist no longer sounds much like any "real" gun or fist, to the point at which the sound designer takes a risk in putting out a sound that goes against that programmed expectation. The otherwise unmemorable action film Blown Away went through expensive effort to record the actual sounds of explosives before test screenings forced them back into the stock, expected, "blowing on a microphone" effect that was itself a relic of earlier and more primitive microphone techniques.
The next volley is amplified music on stage and ADR dialog on film; an audience raised to expect the kind of pristine vocals and instrument reproduction possible in a studio (or with studio techniques laboriously introduced into every available cranny of production audio and married as seamlessly as possible with studio re-takes). The audience of 1940 heard mostly unreinforced voices on stage, even on the musical or in opera, from the pulpit and even from the podium and bandwagon. Now, reinforcement is omnipresent. And the vast majority of story and song that is delivered to the theater audience is outside of that still-acoustic space.
In short, the audience is used to hearing every syllable clearly, every finger pluck clearly. They don't have to pay attention, much less strain, when listening at home to radio or television or recording, and they aren't listening to unassisted voices in an acoustical environment in the movie house or concert stage. With rare exceptions.
And they have brought those expectations to live theater. They expect to hear dialog as crisply, and with as little effort on their own part, in that still-acoustic space. So the poor theatrical -- and even operatic -- sound designer is forced into ever more technologically sophisticated (and expensive) systems to reinforce and amplify and (usually less successfully) clarify.
So now we come to the last salvo. And that is an audience who spends a significant part of their waking life with earbuds in. They no longer have any first-hand experience with a physical acoustic environment. To them, the sonic cues that tell how far away a sound is, or how big a room is, are those created by designers -- by film and television sound designers, but even more frequently by game programmers.
Just as we can no longer trust our audience to understand an actual recorded gunshot -- how we need to present them with the fake, wrong, ersatz gunshot they expect -- we can no longer trust them to pick up environmental or physical acoustic clues that mimic or are taken from the real world. To them, increasingly, distance is reverb and a shout is merely volume.
We may, as designers, have to learn this new and artificial language instead if we wish to communicate with our younger audience.
But then, the way some trends are going, we might just put aside the microphones entirely and put the whole thing in the form of tweets.
Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humor. Show all posts
Monday, August 15, 2016
Saturday, December 5, 2015
Apollo, the last "good" hoax
Some of us enter the great Argument Room of the internet looking for something that fits in with our interest in science. The vast majority of professionals stay away from such arguments; they aren't career advancing, there's plenty of conflict closer to hand with people within their own field (few fields are free of ongoing controversy), and the argument itself is perpetual, more a Monty Python sketch then a purposeful debate that will end in a conclusion.
But sometimes the professionals do speak out, and that is to all our benefit, as that means describing their work and its philosophies and some of its challenges in a way people like me can understand.
Most of what little I know about engineering and a number of hard sciences comes courtesy of people -- engineers, aerospace professionals, also professionals in broadcast engineering, photography, photogrammatry, astronomy -- who saw the misinterpretations, mind-boggling stupidity, and outright lights being promulgated among the host of Apollo Hoax believers and chose to comment.
Again, correction is never going to happen. Or, rather; the people who write books, sell patent medicines or electrum bracelets, create videos for the "History" Channel, or push YouTube videos are never going to be convinced. Nor are many of their followers; the only thing more suspicious than a lack of response, in their eyes, is any response. Nor does any of this speak to the bulk of the crowd, who aren't aware that they actually have a dog in the race and thus take one view or another (more often than not, the conspiratorial view, as that is considered the least conformist) without any particular passion or even any particular attention.
I do believe, however, that the bad ideas are already out there, and they will taint everyone, the reasonable included, if there aren't counters floating around out there as well. And someone has to make those reasoned rebuttals. So I salute the Phil Plaits and the James Randis even as I (and they) understand how akin their books and blogs and other writings are oddly similar to tilting at windmills.
The hoax promulgators also have it easier in that it takes less words, less time, and a lot less math to express a bad idea than it does a good idea. When you get down to it, a lot of pseudo science (conspiracy beliefs included) replace a complex, difficult to understand, difficult to boil down concept with one that is simpler. (They also replace the random with the anthrogenic, the impersonal with the personal, and of course they prefer emotional statements over mathematical arguments!)
Unfortunately, the Apollo Hoax is dead. Really, the nerds won; unlike conspiracy beliefs involving Bigfoot or Mu, the Apollo Hoax was proximate to subjects the Nerd Horde was already primed to pontificate on; hard sciences, in particular, but also the space program.
But, really, the Apollo Hoax did itself in. It came out swinging with Bill Kaysing's book and from those first moments it had apparently decided its weapons of choice were, well, science. It came to the duel and when given weapons of choice chose the one it's opponent was already master of.
Every die-hard Apollo Hoaxie will eventually retreat to the ramparts of emotional argument and grand conspiracy and "were you there" ism. Discussions with them inevitably descend to attempts to game the discussion, then disruptive behavior, and finally angry exits. But their first entrance and their early work is framed in the form of testable scientific hypothesis.
Which is wonderful. Which is why I miss the Apollo Hoax.
Because not only are these testable hypothesis -- say, "Why weren't stars visible in photographs taken on the lunar surface?" -- they are also, to use the physics joke, questions posed in a frictionless vacuum.
Quite literally, in many cases! The nature of the project -- the alien setting, the specific physics of the situations, and the extreme mis-match between the naive expectations of the questioner and what actually arises in that setting -- conspire to create questions with very clear conditions and very clear answers.
You can argue endless whether someone "looked guilty and uncomfortable" in a press conference, but when you phrase something like "The Saturn V could not contain enough fuel to get to the Moon" you have created a simple and testable case. You've removed the engineering and all the second order factors and made what in reality is, well, rocket science into a first-order approximation. Into something as simple as plugging the weights of the system into the Ideal Rocket Equation and looking up the transfer delta-vee for the Earth-Moon journey.
And the questions weren't always physics. The peculiar conditions of the Moon, the alien look to those scenes, the emotional impact of photographs of men on the Moon, and the consistent impetus among all pseudo-science conspiracy believers to place images, and simplistic interpretation of images, foremost (since everything else takes more work and even -- shudder -- professional-level skills) means there are thousands of wonderful Apollo Hoax hypothesis that can be tested with simple geometry.
Can a flag lack a shadow? Can shadows converge? All of these are presented in specific cases which can be put to geometric analysis. (My favorite one was a Jack White, and a little hard to explain. LM, US flag, and high gain antenna photographed from some distance away, with the LM appearing in the center of the group from one photograph, and to the left of the other two in another photograph. Jack White believed this to be impossible. A quick sketch shows how it can be done -- and I leave that exercise to the reader).
The Apollo Hoax stood alone in having interesting problems you could work out yourself and learn a little science from, and putting this foremost in the argument (sure, you can calculate how large the Ark must have been, but that sort of work is ignored as pointless distraction by the people arguing various flavors of Biblical literalism.) And it offered a chance to think about space, to learn more about this fascinating project and the very real challenges they faced (and very clever solutions they came up with).
9-11 Truthers verge into science with their "melting steel" claims but they are incredibly angry people and no fun to talk to. Holohoaxers are just disgusting and don't deserve time wasted on them (sure, one could imagine a reasoned approach to holocaust denial, but scratch a hundred of them and somehow you come up with a hundred antisemitic white supremacists with fascist leanings). Anti-vaxxers are as angry as Truthers but a lot sadder about it (which I would be too, if I bought into it.) And so on and so forth.
If you wanted an argument, then the Argument Clinic is right next door to Getting Hit on the Head Lessons. But Apollo Hoax was something else, a weird mashup between a debating club and word problems in a maths text, like an impromptu orals for a graduate degree in some oddly interdisciplinary science, and that room is rarely open these days.
But sometimes the professionals do speak out, and that is to all our benefit, as that means describing their work and its philosophies and some of its challenges in a way people like me can understand.
Most of what little I know about engineering and a number of hard sciences comes courtesy of people -- engineers, aerospace professionals, also professionals in broadcast engineering, photography, photogrammatry, astronomy -- who saw the misinterpretations, mind-boggling stupidity, and outright lights being promulgated among the host of Apollo Hoax believers and chose to comment.
Again, correction is never going to happen. Or, rather; the people who write books, sell patent medicines or electrum bracelets, create videos for the "History" Channel, or push YouTube videos are never going to be convinced. Nor are many of their followers; the only thing more suspicious than a lack of response, in their eyes, is any response. Nor does any of this speak to the bulk of the crowd, who aren't aware that they actually have a dog in the race and thus take one view or another (more often than not, the conspiratorial view, as that is considered the least conformist) without any particular passion or even any particular attention.
I do believe, however, that the bad ideas are already out there, and they will taint everyone, the reasonable included, if there aren't counters floating around out there as well. And someone has to make those reasoned rebuttals. So I salute the Phil Plaits and the James Randis even as I (and they) understand how akin their books and blogs and other writings are oddly similar to tilting at windmills.
The hoax promulgators also have it easier in that it takes less words, less time, and a lot less math to express a bad idea than it does a good idea. When you get down to it, a lot of pseudo science (conspiracy beliefs included) replace a complex, difficult to understand, difficult to boil down concept with one that is simpler. (They also replace the random with the anthrogenic, the impersonal with the personal, and of course they prefer emotional statements over mathematical arguments!)
Unfortunately, the Apollo Hoax is dead. Really, the nerds won; unlike conspiracy beliefs involving Bigfoot or Mu, the Apollo Hoax was proximate to subjects the Nerd Horde was already primed to pontificate on; hard sciences, in particular, but also the space program.
But, really, the Apollo Hoax did itself in. It came out swinging with Bill Kaysing's book and from those first moments it had apparently decided its weapons of choice were, well, science. It came to the duel and when given weapons of choice chose the one it's opponent was already master of.
Every die-hard Apollo Hoaxie will eventually retreat to the ramparts of emotional argument and grand conspiracy and "were you there" ism. Discussions with them inevitably descend to attempts to game the discussion, then disruptive behavior, and finally angry exits. But their first entrance and their early work is framed in the form of testable scientific hypothesis.
Which is wonderful. Which is why I miss the Apollo Hoax.
Because not only are these testable hypothesis -- say, "Why weren't stars visible in photographs taken on the lunar surface?" -- they are also, to use the physics joke, questions posed in a frictionless vacuum.
Quite literally, in many cases! The nature of the project -- the alien setting, the specific physics of the situations, and the extreme mis-match between the naive expectations of the questioner and what actually arises in that setting -- conspire to create questions with very clear conditions and very clear answers.
You can argue endless whether someone "looked guilty and uncomfortable" in a press conference, but when you phrase something like "The Saturn V could not contain enough fuel to get to the Moon" you have created a simple and testable case. You've removed the engineering and all the second order factors and made what in reality is, well, rocket science into a first-order approximation. Into something as simple as plugging the weights of the system into the Ideal Rocket Equation and looking up the transfer delta-vee for the Earth-Moon journey.
And the questions weren't always physics. The peculiar conditions of the Moon, the alien look to those scenes, the emotional impact of photographs of men on the Moon, and the consistent impetus among all pseudo-science conspiracy believers to place images, and simplistic interpretation of images, foremost (since everything else takes more work and even -- shudder -- professional-level skills) means there are thousands of wonderful Apollo Hoax hypothesis that can be tested with simple geometry.
Can a flag lack a shadow? Can shadows converge? All of these are presented in specific cases which can be put to geometric analysis. (My favorite one was a Jack White, and a little hard to explain. LM, US flag, and high gain antenna photographed from some distance away, with the LM appearing in the center of the group from one photograph, and to the left of the other two in another photograph. Jack White believed this to be impossible. A quick sketch shows how it can be done -- and I leave that exercise to the reader).
The Apollo Hoax stood alone in having interesting problems you could work out yourself and learn a little science from, and putting this foremost in the argument (sure, you can calculate how large the Ark must have been, but that sort of work is ignored as pointless distraction by the people arguing various flavors of Biblical literalism.) And it offered a chance to think about space, to learn more about this fascinating project and the very real challenges they faced (and very clever solutions they came up with).
9-11 Truthers verge into science with their "melting steel" claims but they are incredibly angry people and no fun to talk to. Holohoaxers are just disgusting and don't deserve time wasted on them (sure, one could imagine a reasoned approach to holocaust denial, but scratch a hundred of them and somehow you come up with a hundred antisemitic white supremacists with fascist leanings). Anti-vaxxers are as angry as Truthers but a lot sadder about it (which I would be too, if I bought into it.) And so on and so forth.
If you wanted an argument, then the Argument Clinic is right next door to Getting Hit on the Head Lessons. But Apollo Hoax was something else, a weird mashup between a debating club and word problems in a maths text, like an impromptu orals for a graduate degree in some oddly interdisciplinary science, and that room is rarely open these days.
Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Laralex, Polygons, and Post-Post-Processualism
I was quite under the weather for a few days there. Each time I'd sort of recover, I'd do another early-morning show and between the missed hours of sleep and the tension of the show I'd slip back again.
The CAD is coming along slowly. This is the hard part now. This week is also load-in of my next lighting design. And Maker Faire is not all that far down the road.
But I was sick and my concentration shot so I basically slumped on the couch with lots of hot tea watching Cynthia Rothrock movies and reading Tomb Raider fan fiction.
Oh, yeah. Discovered another odd relic from the late 90's. Apparently when the King Tut exhibit was on tour, the Times (yes, the Times of London) wanted to remind everyone that they had helped bankroll Howard Carter. So they contacted Eidos/Core Design and had them re-use the engine and assets from TR4 (Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation) to make a short game homaging the Times' involvement in the opening of the Boy King's tomb.
In the game, Lara is hired by the Times (as if!) to explore a newly discovered annex to KV62. Complete with rampaging mummies and all the usual Tomb Raider action, of course. The game is a full stand-alone and a free download and as a Win98 game runs near flawlessly on Wine. It is also the original "tank controls" Lara, who really does handle (as The Escapist puts it), like a cow in a trolly. But it was worth it just to experience 200-polygon Lara first-hand.
It's been a long strange journey. I was never attracted by the character or the games until one bored evening I stumbled on Tomb Raider: Underworld on a $1.99 sale at Steam. And that game was a lot more fun than I expected. My only real interest in the older games, though -- even the Crystal Dynamics remakes of them -- was from that same sort of completisim that drives one to read all the books in a series even when the first one wasn't that great.
Actually, this is more of a problem when you started with one of the later editions. I didn't want to play "Legends" so much as I wanted to find out what was the deal with Amanda and Natla and all the hints about Lara's previous history with them.
Anyhow, the fanfic.
Fanfic in bulk follows trends. The stories people were writing after AOD (Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness) were largely about continuing adventures of Lara and Kurtis and more appearances by the Monstrum (or whatever...I never played that game, although perhaps I should, given the Prague setting of part of the action).
Following the 2013 game, the main meat for most fanfic is what might have been called in the old days of Star Trek fanfic "slash" stories -- Kirk/Spock then, Lara/Sam now. Like several recent writers in popular markets, Rhianna Pratchett included a subtext (in this case, in the relationship between Lara and her best friend Samantha "Sam" Nishimura) that is so barely under the radar it practically counts as canonical.
But another major trend to fanfic based on the 2013 reboot is, basically, fix fics. Specifically, versions in which Alex doesn't die. Which is kind of odd. The shape and flavor of the game is pretty much a grimdark in which Lara loses most of her friends and is pushed slightly beyond the bounds of sanity, coming back someone who will willingly put a flaming arrow through a stranger's neck in order to survive.
Alex is one of the disposable NPCs. More specifically, he is a nerdy guy over his head, led by Lara's example to an unwise attempt at heroism himself. His entire reason to exist in the narrative is as a combination object lesson and one additional sorrow for Lara. Maybe it is the way that he is so utterly eclipsed by Lara that draws so many fanfic writers to him, and towards his attempts to win (and grow enough to earn) an actual relationship with her. And it isn't nerdy young boys who are vicariously living this dream, either, but young women.
There's some fun stuff out in the fanfiction world. I've been reading one story that sends her to the Plain of Jars. I wish I'd thought of that one -- mysterious neolithic cultures and thousands of tons of unexploded wartime munitions makes a perfect playground for the Tomb Raider. Another I'm subscribed to is a hurt/comfort fic (Lara/Sam, of course) that beats the poor kid up worse than the 2013 game. But does some cool stuff both with Greek mythology and with pulling in some of the characters and situations from the previous games.
My own fanfic is basically Crystal Dynamics canon, but taken before the events of Underworld (mostly because Underworld concerns Thor's Hammer and the Stargate SG-1 side of my plot involves, among other things, the Asgard).
I did scribble one quick Tomb Raider 2013 sketch, though. Which was entirely a take-that at one of many bits of ludonarrative dissonance in the game. Might be a little hard to explain. You see, the game makes it possible to go back through all the previous levels after defeating Mathias and freeing Himiko (aka, after winning the game). And this makes no sense within the presented narrative (any more than the reluctant hero of the narrative meshes with game mechanics that encourage you to do especially brutal kills in order to earn more points).
Come to think, my previous one-shot was also a take-that -- this time at the railroad nature of the plot. Which is why I had Lara set fire to Himiko's body the first time she saw it. Not like she doesn't spend half the game setting fire to everything in sight (mummified bodies included) anyway!
What attracts me most in fanfics is alternate histories. Especially stories in which one thing is changed, and the changes propagate until the entire original narrative unravels. And, yeah, in my opinion Tomb Raider 2013 could really do with some of these. Pity that none of the Laralex fics I've seen so far do much but re-tell the exact same game only with Alex following along like a strangely-shaped shadow.
But all these Heroic Alex fics made me tempted to send Jonah down to the beach to look for survivors instead. Which would mean Lara would never go through the opening sequence with the mummy bag. And might even end up with Stephanie being rescued. And between Jonah's sturdy, unflappable nature ("I'm not going to die with an empty stomach") and Stephanie's irrepressible good spirits, the story would evolve in very much not the grimdark way it does in the game.
Instead of course I'm doing an SG1 cross-over. Which started as a one-note joke; a desire to observe the clash between Daniel Jackson and Lara Croft, despite both practicing essentially the same Indiana Jones school of archaeology. But what has become the alternate universe aspect, really, is my attempts to rationalize both the Forbidden Archaeology of the Tomb Raider world, and the Ancient Astronauts of the SG1 world, with something resembling the real world we live in -- one in which archaeologists carry soft-bristle brushes, not whips.
One of these conflicts is going to become important in my next few chapters and I'm still trying to figure out how to approach it. Tomb Raider, like much fictionalized depictions of archaeology, is artifact-centric. Which is not incorrect for an earlier era, the time of cabinets of curiosities, of Carter, of Schliemann (who, it is quoted, did to Troy what the Greek army could not). But really, this depiction comes straight out of much older story-telling traditions; fables and fairy-tales, stories of magic swords and geese that lay golden eggs.
Far from being artifact-centered, one could argue that a modern dig is site-centered. A site is explored horizon by horizon (essentially, layers of time) instead of the bulk being hurriedly tossed away (as it was by Schliemann) in the search for museum-ready pieces. And all the detritus of the site goes under the microscope, analyzed by every method from botanical to statistical to build up a picture of the culture under consideration.
And even this conceit -- the idea of archaeology as a neutral observer which could use tools of economic analysis and time-motion studies to reconstruct a society's needs and goals, started to be questioned as far back as the first cultural anthropologist to openly admit that they were incapable of painting a picture of life in a remote village -- they were instead painting a picture of life in a remote village that had an anthropologist visiting it.
Almost every lovely economic theory eventually founders on the harsh reality that people do not make rational purchasing decisions. So, too, did processualism falter on the conceit that a stone age tribe put their physical and emotional needs in the same boxes as a college graduate in the western world of the 20th century. But then, too, did post-processualism fail in throwing these tools (of using our own constructs to analyze the workings of a very different peoples) completely away.
And, of course, amid all these heady and competing theories, and in a world where site access is fought over and observing the legalities is everything to an archaeologist's career, the reality of a Daniel Jackson or Lara Croft is still going to be going after those rare magic swords that, in their version of the world, are still out there.
The CAD is coming along slowly. This is the hard part now. This week is also load-in of my next lighting design. And Maker Faire is not all that far down the road.
But I was sick and my concentration shot so I basically slumped on the couch with lots of hot tea watching Cynthia Rothrock movies and reading Tomb Raider fan fiction.
Oh, yeah. Discovered another odd relic from the late 90's. Apparently when the King Tut exhibit was on tour, the Times (yes, the Times of London) wanted to remind everyone that they had helped bankroll Howard Carter. So they contacted Eidos/Core Design and had them re-use the engine and assets from TR4 (Tomb Raider IV: The Last Revelation) to make a short game homaging the Times' involvement in the opening of the Boy King's tomb.
In the game, Lara is hired by the Times (as if!) to explore a newly discovered annex to KV62. Complete with rampaging mummies and all the usual Tomb Raider action, of course. The game is a full stand-alone and a free download and as a Win98 game runs near flawlessly on Wine. It is also the original "tank controls" Lara, who really does handle (as The Escapist puts it), like a cow in a trolly. But it was worth it just to experience 200-polygon Lara first-hand.
It's been a long strange journey. I was never attracted by the character or the games until one bored evening I stumbled on Tomb Raider: Underworld on a $1.99 sale at Steam. And that game was a lot more fun than I expected. My only real interest in the older games, though -- even the Crystal Dynamics remakes of them -- was from that same sort of completisim that drives one to read all the books in a series even when the first one wasn't that great.
Actually, this is more of a problem when you started with one of the later editions. I didn't want to play "Legends" so much as I wanted to find out what was the deal with Amanda and Natla and all the hints about Lara's previous history with them.
Anyhow, the fanfic.
Fanfic in bulk follows trends. The stories people were writing after AOD (Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness) were largely about continuing adventures of Lara and Kurtis and more appearances by the Monstrum (or whatever...I never played that game, although perhaps I should, given the Prague setting of part of the action).
Following the 2013 game, the main meat for most fanfic is what might have been called in the old days of Star Trek fanfic "slash" stories -- Kirk/Spock then, Lara/Sam now. Like several recent writers in popular markets, Rhianna Pratchett included a subtext (in this case, in the relationship between Lara and her best friend Samantha "Sam" Nishimura) that is so barely under the radar it practically counts as canonical.
But another major trend to fanfic based on the 2013 reboot is, basically, fix fics. Specifically, versions in which Alex doesn't die. Which is kind of odd. The shape and flavor of the game is pretty much a grimdark in which Lara loses most of her friends and is pushed slightly beyond the bounds of sanity, coming back someone who will willingly put a flaming arrow through a stranger's neck in order to survive.
Alex is one of the disposable NPCs. More specifically, he is a nerdy guy over his head, led by Lara's example to an unwise attempt at heroism himself. His entire reason to exist in the narrative is as a combination object lesson and one additional sorrow for Lara. Maybe it is the way that he is so utterly eclipsed by Lara that draws so many fanfic writers to him, and towards his attempts to win (and grow enough to earn) an actual relationship with her. And it isn't nerdy young boys who are vicariously living this dream, either, but young women.
There's some fun stuff out in the fanfiction world. I've been reading one story that sends her to the Plain of Jars. I wish I'd thought of that one -- mysterious neolithic cultures and thousands of tons of unexploded wartime munitions makes a perfect playground for the Tomb Raider. Another I'm subscribed to is a hurt/comfort fic (Lara/Sam, of course) that beats the poor kid up worse than the 2013 game. But does some cool stuff both with Greek mythology and with pulling in some of the characters and situations from the previous games.
My own fanfic is basically Crystal Dynamics canon, but taken before the events of Underworld (mostly because Underworld concerns Thor's Hammer and the Stargate SG-1 side of my plot involves, among other things, the Asgard).
I did scribble one quick Tomb Raider 2013 sketch, though. Which was entirely a take-that at one of many bits of ludonarrative dissonance in the game. Might be a little hard to explain. You see, the game makes it possible to go back through all the previous levels after defeating Mathias and freeing Himiko (aka, after winning the game). And this makes no sense within the presented narrative (any more than the reluctant hero of the narrative meshes with game mechanics that encourage you to do especially brutal kills in order to earn more points).
Come to think, my previous one-shot was also a take-that -- this time at the railroad nature of the plot. Which is why I had Lara set fire to Himiko's body the first time she saw it. Not like she doesn't spend half the game setting fire to everything in sight (mummified bodies included) anyway!
What attracts me most in fanfics is alternate histories. Especially stories in which one thing is changed, and the changes propagate until the entire original narrative unravels. And, yeah, in my opinion Tomb Raider 2013 could really do with some of these. Pity that none of the Laralex fics I've seen so far do much but re-tell the exact same game only with Alex following along like a strangely-shaped shadow.
But all these Heroic Alex fics made me tempted to send Jonah down to the beach to look for survivors instead. Which would mean Lara would never go through the opening sequence with the mummy bag. And might even end up with Stephanie being rescued. And between Jonah's sturdy, unflappable nature ("I'm not going to die with an empty stomach") and Stephanie's irrepressible good spirits, the story would evolve in very much not the grimdark way it does in the game.
Instead of course I'm doing an SG1 cross-over. Which started as a one-note joke; a desire to observe the clash between Daniel Jackson and Lara Croft, despite both practicing essentially the same Indiana Jones school of archaeology. But what has become the alternate universe aspect, really, is my attempts to rationalize both the Forbidden Archaeology of the Tomb Raider world, and the Ancient Astronauts of the SG1 world, with something resembling the real world we live in -- one in which archaeologists carry soft-bristle brushes, not whips.
One of these conflicts is going to become important in my next few chapters and I'm still trying to figure out how to approach it. Tomb Raider, like much fictionalized depictions of archaeology, is artifact-centric. Which is not incorrect for an earlier era, the time of cabinets of curiosities, of Carter, of Schliemann (who, it is quoted, did to Troy what the Greek army could not). But really, this depiction comes straight out of much older story-telling traditions; fables and fairy-tales, stories of magic swords and geese that lay golden eggs.
Far from being artifact-centered, one could argue that a modern dig is site-centered. A site is explored horizon by horizon (essentially, layers of time) instead of the bulk being hurriedly tossed away (as it was by Schliemann) in the search for museum-ready pieces. And all the detritus of the site goes under the microscope, analyzed by every method from botanical to statistical to build up a picture of the culture under consideration.
And even this conceit -- the idea of archaeology as a neutral observer which could use tools of economic analysis and time-motion studies to reconstruct a society's needs and goals, started to be questioned as far back as the first cultural anthropologist to openly admit that they were incapable of painting a picture of life in a remote village -- they were instead painting a picture of life in a remote village that had an anthropologist visiting it.
Almost every lovely economic theory eventually founders on the harsh reality that people do not make rational purchasing decisions. So, too, did processualism falter on the conceit that a stone age tribe put their physical and emotional needs in the same boxes as a college graduate in the western world of the 20th century. But then, too, did post-processualism fail in throwing these tools (of using our own constructs to analyze the workings of a very different peoples) completely away.
And, of course, amid all these heady and competing theories, and in a world where site access is fought over and observing the legalities is everything to an archaeologist's career, the reality of a Daniel Jackson or Lara Croft is still going to be going after those rare magic swords that, in their version of the world, are still out there.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Rambling Rex
Charlie Stross recently posted on his blog one of the ways in which modern technology resembles old-school fantasy magic. In one sense this is a trivial observation. Arthur C. Clarke, Florence Ambrose, and Agatha Hetrodyne have previously spun riffs on this.
But in another sense the insight is fresh. Modern technological artifacts are understandable, but very nearly un-comprehendible. And hand in hand with this is an increasing lack of user serviceability.
This is something the Maker movement has confronted. So much of our daily infrastructure is presented as inherently indecipherable. Consumer electronics -- both by design and as a natural outgrowth of the technologies of production -- are intended to be seen by the end-user as black boxes. The clearest point of this evolution, to me, is when Apple began putting their cases together with an extra-long torx key; a tool most end users would not have in their tool box.
Because of competition and industrial espionage, many pieces of equipment have the labels scraped off the chips, or the chips potted, to make reverse engineering harder. Now, there are people who have gone all the way down to analyzing micrographs to reverse-engineer a chip down to the transistor level. But for many of us, the need for increasingly specialized tools and specialized knowledge means even such hobbies as backyard mechanic are falling by the wayside.
So, practically, a great many things end up being treated as black boxes. Or, as Charlie put it, the kind of easy-to-use, easy-to-understand magic artifacts in a D&D game. Add to this a few layers of marketing-driven obfuscation, and the result is an end-user who expects their smart phone to work, transparently, all the time -- who is not expected to (when not actively prevented from) knowing what the real limitations of the technology and underlying science might be.
The place where it hits people like me, often enough, is when end-users extrapolate unfairly. They don't understand why the sound in an acoustically complex auditorium seating six hundred people can't sound just like the headphones on their iPod. And the reason is that so much is being done behind the curtain; automatic gain control, EQ curves tailored to in-ear transducers, leverage of psychoacoustic effects, etc., etc.
In short, the black box makes it look simpler than it is. And the nature of that black box makes it extremely difficult -- and, in practical terms, usually non-productive -- to try to open the lid.
Hacker mentality is about prying open the boxes whenever possible. It is about sufficient comprehension of the magic (and often leads to trickles of leaking Magic Smoke. Part of the Maker movement is a similar unpacking of the physical layer of modern technologies. There is something empowering about making your own injection-molded part or graphite-reinforced frame.
Or machining. I may be reading things that aren't there, but I think there is a healthy self-skepticism in the Maker movement. That Makers are aware that their knowledge is incomplete, even dangerously incomplete.
I am sitting here looking at a chunk of aluminium stock. It has markings on one end left over from the lathing I did to the rest of the piece. But I think if it in terms of one layer of archaeological investigation. One peel of the onion skin. How curves get into a piece of stock are not a mystery to me any more. More than intellectual knowledge, I have direct physical experience in cutting those curves on a lathe.
Into the next layer, I have some sense of the way different alloys are available, what an alloy is, what the properties are. I've direct lathing experience with a couple of different alloys, and that gives me a framework to at least have some sense of understanding what "corrosion resistance" and "machine-ability" mean in practical terms.
But even here -- when I order metal online, I sometimes get copies of the "MTR's and Certs of Conformance." Which I can only barely read, and have almost no understanding of how they are used. I am well aware that there are aspects to cutting a shape out of aluminium that are well and beyond my knowledge base.
And that's just cutting. Someone actually made that alloy. Someone mined that bauxite (or whatever). There are so many steps, so many associated processes, so many different sciences that were involved at some point in the bringing of that chunk of stock to where I can stick it in a lathe, it would be a lifetime of study to properly understand them all.
One word I use for this is footprint. Technologies have a footprint. The more complex a technology, the larger the required ecosystem.
If this is true of a pencil, imagine how much more true it is of an iPad.
Well, that is a bit unfair. We don't have to understand gravity in order to model it. We don't need to track aluminium all the way back to stellar nucleosynthesis in order to be able to lathe it properly. We don't have to be Thomas Thwaites, who decided to make a toaster from scratch. (Maybe he doesn't like Apple Pie?)
But it can be said that no one person can build an iPad. And that no one person designed it. It isn't quite the same as saying no one person could design one, but it is quite unlikely any one person would have the range of specialties necessary. And besides, that's just not how industry works. There are project leaders, there are even visionaries, but no one person is tasked with personally doing all the grunt work. Heck, even composers have been using copyists and arrangers for hundreds of years.
This means the artifacts of our creation are one step divorced from our direct design. They arise in collaboration, by committee, using already-complex existing parts in the growing libraries, and on the back of trends and existing standards and back-compatibility and inherited (yet unexamined) design assumptions.
Fortunately, you don't have to recreate an artifact of the modern world from scratch. You just have to understand the real black box -- the essential behavior, stripped of the masking environment -- in order to re-purpose it.
You don't need to have been the original creator of the spells "Summon Monster" and "Displace Spell" to realize you could combine them and decoy an attacker into a nearby wall. And you don't need to identify all the chips inside a toy in order to circuit-bend it into a musical instrument.
So if we accept what Charlie is saying, the implication is clear. Hackers are munchkins.
But in another sense the insight is fresh. Modern technological artifacts are understandable, but very nearly un-comprehendible. And hand in hand with this is an increasing lack of user serviceability.
This is something the Maker movement has confronted. So much of our daily infrastructure is presented as inherently indecipherable. Consumer electronics -- both by design and as a natural outgrowth of the technologies of production -- are intended to be seen by the end-user as black boxes. The clearest point of this evolution, to me, is when Apple began putting their cases together with an extra-long torx key; a tool most end users would not have in their tool box.
Because of competition and industrial espionage, many pieces of equipment have the labels scraped off the chips, or the chips potted, to make reverse engineering harder. Now, there are people who have gone all the way down to analyzing micrographs to reverse-engineer a chip down to the transistor level. But for many of us, the need for increasingly specialized tools and specialized knowledge means even such hobbies as backyard mechanic are falling by the wayside.
So, practically, a great many things end up being treated as black boxes. Or, as Charlie put it, the kind of easy-to-use, easy-to-understand magic artifacts in a D&D game. Add to this a few layers of marketing-driven obfuscation, and the result is an end-user who expects their smart phone to work, transparently, all the time -- who is not expected to (when not actively prevented from) knowing what the real limitations of the technology and underlying science might be.
The place where it hits people like me, often enough, is when end-users extrapolate unfairly. They don't understand why the sound in an acoustically complex auditorium seating six hundred people can't sound just like the headphones on their iPod. And the reason is that so much is being done behind the curtain; automatic gain control, EQ curves tailored to in-ear transducers, leverage of psychoacoustic effects, etc., etc.
In short, the black box makes it look simpler than it is. And the nature of that black box makes it extremely difficult -- and, in practical terms, usually non-productive -- to try to open the lid.
Hacker mentality is about prying open the boxes whenever possible. It is about sufficient comprehension of the magic (and often leads to trickles of leaking Magic Smoke. Part of the Maker movement is a similar unpacking of the physical layer of modern technologies. There is something empowering about making your own injection-molded part or graphite-reinforced frame.
Or machining. I may be reading things that aren't there, but I think there is a healthy self-skepticism in the Maker movement. That Makers are aware that their knowledge is incomplete, even dangerously incomplete.
I am sitting here looking at a chunk of aluminium stock. It has markings on one end left over from the lathing I did to the rest of the piece. But I think if it in terms of one layer of archaeological investigation. One peel of the onion skin. How curves get into a piece of stock are not a mystery to me any more. More than intellectual knowledge, I have direct physical experience in cutting those curves on a lathe.
Into the next layer, I have some sense of the way different alloys are available, what an alloy is, what the properties are. I've direct lathing experience with a couple of different alloys, and that gives me a framework to at least have some sense of understanding what "corrosion resistance" and "machine-ability" mean in practical terms.
But even here -- when I order metal online, I sometimes get copies of the "MTR's and Certs of Conformance." Which I can only barely read, and have almost no understanding of how they are used. I am well aware that there are aspects to cutting a shape out of aluminium that are well and beyond my knowledge base.
And that's just cutting. Someone actually made that alloy. Someone mined that bauxite (or whatever). There are so many steps, so many associated processes, so many different sciences that were involved at some point in the bringing of that chunk of stock to where I can stick it in a lathe, it would be a lifetime of study to properly understand them all.
One word I use for this is footprint. Technologies have a footprint. The more complex a technology, the larger the required ecosystem.
If this is true of a pencil, imagine how much more true it is of an iPad.
Well, that is a bit unfair. We don't have to understand gravity in order to model it. We don't need to track aluminium all the way back to stellar nucleosynthesis in order to be able to lathe it properly. We don't have to be Thomas Thwaites, who decided to make a toaster from scratch. (Maybe he doesn't like Apple Pie?)
But it can be said that no one person can build an iPad. And that no one person designed it. It isn't quite the same as saying no one person could design one, but it is quite unlikely any one person would have the range of specialties necessary. And besides, that's just not how industry works. There are project leaders, there are even visionaries, but no one person is tasked with personally doing all the grunt work. Heck, even composers have been using copyists and arrangers for hundreds of years.
This means the artifacts of our creation are one step divorced from our direct design. They arise in collaboration, by committee, using already-complex existing parts in the growing libraries, and on the back of trends and existing standards and back-compatibility and inherited (yet unexamined) design assumptions.
Fortunately, you don't have to recreate an artifact of the modern world from scratch. You just have to understand the real black box -- the essential behavior, stripped of the masking environment -- in order to re-purpose it.
You don't need to have been the original creator of the spells "Summon Monster" and "Displace Spell" to realize you could combine them and decoy an attacker into a nearby wall. And you don't need to identify all the chips inside a toy in order to circuit-bend it into a musical instrument.
So if we accept what Charlie is saying, the implication is clear. Hackers are munchkins.
Monday, April 14, 2014
Rotating Perspective
The Holocon software is finally running. Since I had four individually-controllable RGB pixels, it just seemed too much of a shame not to animate them. So I wanted to write a routine that "spun" (that is, a chase circuit) with a pulse superimposed on that, with a color shift superimposed on that.
Took forever to work it out. Yesterday, I managed to board BART out towards TechShop without my grenade plans (or a book to read) or even a pen. And worked out the software routine I needed in my head.
(This being the internet age, once I arrived at TechShop I logged in to one of the freely available workstations, navigated to Instructables and after searching out my own Instructable on the grenade, scribbled down the measurements I needed on a scrap of paper.)
The big thing that made the routine finally simple enough to write was realizing the LEDs were changing too quickly for me to bother with actually fading the chase part up and down. Between the hysteresis of the light, and the persistence of vision of the eye, just blinking them in a 25%, 50%, 75%, full-on pattern would be sufficient.
Now I just need to solder up a "naked" ATtiny circuit and hook it back to the rest of the Holocron. The last part will be figuring out how to close the lid properly. And once that is done, I can finish the Instructable and earn another class.
Another bit of perspective. I had to use a different lathe than the one I normally reserve, and I found to my dismay it was a bit out of alignment. I was pretty much ranting about how bad it was; over five thous off of plumb (measured over three inches from the face of the chuck out along the workpiece). Using the three-jaw chuck, I had a wobble at the end of my billet that was on the order of twenty thou.
Yeah. About that. A thou is a thousandth of an inch. The worst error the lathe was throwing at me was maybe 1/32nd of an inch. Put another way, the lead on my mechanical pencil is bigger. Even using the edge of the lead, I could not draw a line with the accuracy I'm usually shooting for with the lathe (2-3 thousandths of an inch).
Took forever to work it out. Yesterday, I managed to board BART out towards TechShop without my grenade plans (or a book to read) or even a pen. And worked out the software routine I needed in my head.
(This being the internet age, once I arrived at TechShop I logged in to one of the freely available workstations, navigated to Instructables and after searching out my own Instructable on the grenade, scribbled down the measurements I needed on a scrap of paper.)
The big thing that made the routine finally simple enough to write was realizing the LEDs were changing too quickly for me to bother with actually fading the chase part up and down. Between the hysteresis of the light, and the persistence of vision of the eye, just blinking them in a 25%, 50%, 75%, full-on pattern would be sufficient.
Now I just need to solder up a "naked" ATtiny circuit and hook it back to the rest of the Holocron. The last part will be figuring out how to close the lid properly. And once that is done, I can finish the Instructable and earn another class.
Another bit of perspective. I had to use a different lathe than the one I normally reserve, and I found to my dismay it was a bit out of alignment. I was pretty much ranting about how bad it was; over five thous off of plumb (measured over three inches from the face of the chuck out along the workpiece). Using the three-jaw chuck, I had a wobble at the end of my billet that was on the order of twenty thou.
Yeah. About that. A thou is a thousandth of an inch. The worst error the lathe was throwing at me was maybe 1/32nd of an inch. Put another way, the lead on my mechanical pencil is bigger. Even using the edge of the lead, I could not draw a line with the accuracy I'm usually shooting for with the lathe (2-3 thousandths of an inch).
Friday, April 11, 2014
Grenades and Tanks
I just sold and shipped one Pulse Rifle grenade and I have a happy customer.
I'm still enjoying myself doing the machining. I've always liked working with metal, and having access to the tools that can really carve into the stuff is something I've wanted for a long time. I've also been checked out on the milling machine, which will eventually open up even more fabrication options for me.
On the other hand, dimensioning has been an ongoing struggle. I've finally settled on a tenth of an inch smaller in diameter and that chambered in an Airsoft shotgun replica. But length is still an issue (and was for the movie; despite the official claims, only three rounds would actually fit in the real prop.)
I've been reflecting just how many things I had to learn to get where I currently am on the lathe. I was also reminded recently just how much there is yet to learn. But that will be another post. I want to mention an odd yet very watchable 2012 anime I saw recently.
"Girls and Panzer" is about one year of a sports club at an all-girls high school. The name of the sport is given in the anime as "Sensha-do" and is variously translated by various media; I like the cleverness of "Tankwando" myself but the official translation uses "Tankery." Yes; it is about mock battles using lovingly restored W.W.II era tanks.
It doesn't sound like it could possibly work. It sounds really silly. It is silly. But it does work. Somehow, it is a really fun show to watch.
Yes, a lot of it is the usual meat and potatoes of anime set at a Japanese high school; friendships, friction with families, trouble fitting in, etc. And it does follow much of the familiar sports club script of the underdogs going into the nationals with the very survival of their school at stake (apparently the national schools administration was browbeaten into agreeing that if Oarai High School makes a strong enough showing in that particular extra-curricular activity, they will continue to be funded.)
But it also breaks with one of the traditions of much Japanese manga about certain sports (particularly martial arts) and most traditional activities, as well as with a cross-cultural tradition common to way too many shows in general. In the first, there is no stern instructor, none of the self-abasement, none of the rote learning. Although the students of Sensha-do very much respect the traditions of their sport, it is never presented that there is only one correct way of doing it, and it is certainly not presented as the protagonists having to move beyond their pride and learn the correct ways.
This is almost lampshaded. When their instructor shows up for the first day of practice, she gives the teams a map and says, "Get in, drive to these spots, then start shooting." They have to figure out how to start the tanks on their own -- one team by riffling through a manual, another by frantically Googling it, and at least one by having handy a tank fan who has really, really studied the subject previous to this.
In the second, the "gambatte" routine is downplayed. Too often, in Western works just as often as in Japanese (and I'm looking at you, Disney), the key to victory is having enough "heart." Of wanting enough, of trying anyhow, etc., etc. In "Girls and Panzer" the key to victory is often as not reading the damn manual.
Sure, they also come up with the usual maniac plans of such things, and there are also several key moments where the most important thing is to rebuild their trust in the team, and have hope they can continue on. But for all of that, it is shown over and over that merely wanting it a lot doesn't magically make things go right. You need to put in the work -- of practice, and of study.
This is a very strange universe. The entire idea of tank combat as a high school sport is ludicrous, and the anime doesn't help any with the Academy Ships (entire towns with their central high school built on top of massive aircraft carriers). Whatever is the educational equivalent of OSHA fled the scene gibbering long, long ago.
The show also passes the Bechdel test. Laps it, even. Only one named male character ever shows up, and the conversation about him is very short. Really, very few men, and very few adults, show up at all, and those that do don't do much. It is as I said a strange universe.
In any case, language is another part of the fun. For no particular reason, one of the amateur sub groups chose to throw in a bunch of gratuitous German. Now, of course "Panzer" is used as the common term for "armored vehicle," and the phrase "Panzer vor!" appears frequently, and one character says "Nein" once. And the ampersand in the official titles is transliterated on those same titles as "und." But the subtitlers just went ahead and replaced many of the occurrences of common, idiomatic Japanese with equivalents in German.
I thought my German was better than my Japanese (I don't know either language, not particularly) but I still usually caught the Japanese first. Japanese being such a contextual language anyhow, it makes a certain sense that "Hai!" can be translated as "Ja!" or "Jawohl!" or "Gute!" (and several other variations as well. But the translation is really reaching when a character comments on an explanation just given -- simultaneously with taking out her contacts and putting on glasses -- and the translation of the Japanese all-purpose syllable "Ja" is translated in the subtitles as "Alles klar."
Oddly enough, a quote from Guderian himself is spoken in the anime in what sounds to my ears as ordinary Japanese, but is properly given by the subtitlers as "Nicht Kleckern sondern Klotzen!" Yet, they completely miff the famous McAuliffe retort to a request for surrender (during the Battle of the Bulge), rendering it as, "They sure are nuts."
The translators leave alone a nice translation of Caesar's,"veni vidi vici" into idiomatic Japanese (at least I think it is; I only understand the "mitte" that begins it), but the same character's other foray into the classics, "Festina lente," is transcribed exactly.
This language fun is shared by the characters; the first time "Panzer vor!" is uttered by one, another swivels around with a shocked "Pants are for what?" At least, that's the subtitling; my Japanese is not up to understanding the rapid-fire idiomatic reply of the original anime. But the "subtler" joke is that the Japanese use British, not American garment terminology here. Which possibly makes later scenes with their cries of "What would panzer be doing in a parking lot?" and "Where are the damn panzers?" even funnier.
The cast really gets into it with the "Russian" school, though (all the various schools that field Tankwando teams are Japanese, but they chose to put on a show of various national stereotypes. The "American" school sets up camp -- in a blink-and-you'll miss it bit -- with folding tables, boxes of K-rats, a jeep, and Coke in the old-style glass bottles.)
One of the voice actresses is a Russian Language student, and during the big tank advance they SING "Katyusha." And then to add frosting to the moment of awesome, the same character reprises part of the song as a lullaby to her sleeping commander. My musical day was made even before the "German" school advances to the music of the Wehrmacht marching song "Erika." A song I partially learned myself during work on "The Sound of Music."
And I've made a botch of describing this thing. As I said above, it doesn't seem like it could possibly work, or be anything else other than silly, but it was very much worth watching.
And was perhaps one of the things that helped me recover from the slump of this past week. I'm still not back up to full strength, but at least I'm back to lathing, and I've got Holocron code spinning around in my head, too.
I'm still enjoying myself doing the machining. I've always liked working with metal, and having access to the tools that can really carve into the stuff is something I've wanted for a long time. I've also been checked out on the milling machine, which will eventually open up even more fabrication options for me.
On the other hand, dimensioning has been an ongoing struggle. I've finally settled on a tenth of an inch smaller in diameter and that chambered in an Airsoft shotgun replica. But length is still an issue (and was for the movie; despite the official claims, only three rounds would actually fit in the real prop.)
I've been reflecting just how many things I had to learn to get where I currently am on the lathe. I was also reminded recently just how much there is yet to learn. But that will be another post. I want to mention an odd yet very watchable 2012 anime I saw recently.
"Girls and Panzer" is about one year of a sports club at an all-girls high school. The name of the sport is given in the anime as "Sensha-do" and is variously translated by various media; I like the cleverness of "Tankwando" myself but the official translation uses "Tankery." Yes; it is about mock battles using lovingly restored W.W.II era tanks.
It doesn't sound like it could possibly work. It sounds really silly. It is silly. But it does work. Somehow, it is a really fun show to watch.
Yes, a lot of it is the usual meat and potatoes of anime set at a Japanese high school; friendships, friction with families, trouble fitting in, etc. And it does follow much of the familiar sports club script of the underdogs going into the nationals with the very survival of their school at stake (apparently the national schools administration was browbeaten into agreeing that if Oarai High School makes a strong enough showing in that particular extra-curricular activity, they will continue to be funded.)
But it also breaks with one of the traditions of much Japanese manga about certain sports (particularly martial arts) and most traditional activities, as well as with a cross-cultural tradition common to way too many shows in general. In the first, there is no stern instructor, none of the self-abasement, none of the rote learning. Although the students of Sensha-do very much respect the traditions of their sport, it is never presented that there is only one correct way of doing it, and it is certainly not presented as the protagonists having to move beyond their pride and learn the correct ways.
This is almost lampshaded. When their instructor shows up for the first day of practice, she gives the teams a map and says, "Get in, drive to these spots, then start shooting." They have to figure out how to start the tanks on their own -- one team by riffling through a manual, another by frantically Googling it, and at least one by having handy a tank fan who has really, really studied the subject previous to this.
In the second, the "gambatte" routine is downplayed. Too often, in Western works just as often as in Japanese (and I'm looking at you, Disney), the key to victory is having enough "heart." Of wanting enough, of trying anyhow, etc., etc. In "Girls and Panzer" the key to victory is often as not reading the damn manual.
Sure, they also come up with the usual maniac plans of such things, and there are also several key moments where the most important thing is to rebuild their trust in the team, and have hope they can continue on. But for all of that, it is shown over and over that merely wanting it a lot doesn't magically make things go right. You need to put in the work -- of practice, and of study.
This is a very strange universe. The entire idea of tank combat as a high school sport is ludicrous, and the anime doesn't help any with the Academy Ships (entire towns with their central high school built on top of massive aircraft carriers). Whatever is the educational equivalent of OSHA fled the scene gibbering long, long ago.
The show also passes the Bechdel test. Laps it, even. Only one named male character ever shows up, and the conversation about him is very short. Really, very few men, and very few adults, show up at all, and those that do don't do much. It is as I said a strange universe.
In any case, language is another part of the fun. For no particular reason, one of the amateur sub groups chose to throw in a bunch of gratuitous German. Now, of course "Panzer" is used as the common term for "armored vehicle," and the phrase "Panzer vor!" appears frequently, and one character says "Nein" once. And the ampersand in the official titles is transliterated on those same titles as "und." But the subtitlers just went ahead and replaced many of the occurrences of common, idiomatic Japanese with equivalents in German.
I thought my German was better than my Japanese (I don't know either language, not particularly) but I still usually caught the Japanese first. Japanese being such a contextual language anyhow, it makes a certain sense that "Hai!" can be translated as "Ja!" or "Jawohl!" or "Gute!" (and several other variations as well. But the translation is really reaching when a character comments on an explanation just given -- simultaneously with taking out her contacts and putting on glasses -- and the translation of the Japanese all-purpose syllable "Ja" is translated in the subtitles as "Alles klar."
Oddly enough, a quote from Guderian himself is spoken in the anime in what sounds to my ears as ordinary Japanese, but is properly given by the subtitlers as "Nicht Kleckern sondern Klotzen!" Yet, they completely miff the famous McAuliffe retort to a request for surrender (during the Battle of the Bulge), rendering it as, "They sure are nuts."
The translators leave alone a nice translation of Caesar's,"veni vidi vici" into idiomatic Japanese (at least I think it is; I only understand the "mitte" that begins it), but the same character's other foray into the classics, "Festina lente," is transcribed exactly.
This language fun is shared by the characters; the first time "Panzer vor!" is uttered by one, another swivels around with a shocked "Pants are for what?" At least, that's the subtitling; my Japanese is not up to understanding the rapid-fire idiomatic reply of the original anime. But the "subtler" joke is that the Japanese use British, not American garment terminology here. Which possibly makes later scenes with their cries of "What would panzer be doing in a parking lot?" and "Where are the damn panzers?" even funnier.
The cast really gets into it with the "Russian" school, though (all the various schools that field Tankwando teams are Japanese, but they chose to put on a show of various national stereotypes. The "American" school sets up camp -- in a blink-and-you'll miss it bit -- with folding tables, boxes of K-rats, a jeep, and Coke in the old-style glass bottles.)
One of the voice actresses is a Russian Language student, and during the big tank advance they SING "Katyusha." And then to add frosting to the moment of awesome, the same character reprises part of the song as a lullaby to her sleeping commander. My musical day was made even before the "German" school advances to the music of the Wehrmacht marching song "Erika." A song I partially learned myself during work on "The Sound of Music."
And I've made a botch of describing this thing. As I said above, it doesn't seem like it could possibly work, or be anything else other than silly, but it was very much worth watching.
And was perhaps one of the things that helped me recover from the slump of this past week. I'm still not back up to full strength, but at least I'm back to lathing, and I've got Holocron code spinning around in my head, too.
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Zombie Ghoasts Leave This Place!
The LED sensor on the Holocron isn't working, and I just don't have the patience to problem-solve it within the context of this project. Somewhere down the road, I'll get an LED-as-sensor working on a breadboard, and then I'll be able to integrate it into new projects.
So that simplifies the programming. The Holocron will have three modes. First is off; when it is turned upside down, the power is cut off to the Trinket. Second mode is Ghost Light; this is some sort of gentle color-shift and perhaps a position-shift as well. I'll have to see if I can re-purpose some of my Blink code to do this. I'm using neo-pixels for this, so no PWM needed, but I still need to cross-fade from one color set to another.
Third mode would be "Jedi Detected." In the current code, the capacitance sensor object "yoda" stores a "midiclorian" value; when this passes threshold, the Holocron will do a brief fancier, brighter display. Maybe some swirling (I have four neo-pixels arranged in a square).
If I could have gotten the LED sensor to work, it would have triggered some sort of display change when the flash drive was in read/written.
Meanwhile, I'm stumbling around like a zombie myself, feeling probably the worst I have since December. But not as bad as in years past, still. Even if I did spend a couple days sitting on the couch seeing if the airboat from Half-Life 2 would drive down the corridors of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center.
Apropos of that, the gaming community has been reduced to noticing script pointers in the latest Steam SDK that appear to refer to maps that don't exist yet...but could possibly be part of Half-Life 3.
Given the insanely long delay, and the lack of any word from Valve, I'd say this particular piece of vapor-ware may be the real "zombie ghoast" in the room...
So that simplifies the programming. The Holocron will have three modes. First is off; when it is turned upside down, the power is cut off to the Trinket. Second mode is Ghost Light; this is some sort of gentle color-shift and perhaps a position-shift as well. I'll have to see if I can re-purpose some of my Blink code to do this. I'm using neo-pixels for this, so no PWM needed, but I still need to cross-fade from one color set to another.
Third mode would be "Jedi Detected." In the current code, the capacitance sensor object "yoda" stores a "midiclorian" value; when this passes threshold, the Holocron will do a brief fancier, brighter display. Maybe some swirling (I have four neo-pixels arranged in a square).
If I could have gotten the LED sensor to work, it would have triggered some sort of display change when the flash drive was in read/written.
Meanwhile, I'm stumbling around like a zombie myself, feeling probably the worst I have since December. But not as bad as in years past, still. Even if I did spend a couple days sitting on the couch seeing if the airboat from Half-Life 2 would drive down the corridors of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center.
Apropos of that, the gaming community has been reduced to noticing script pointers in the latest Steam SDK that appear to refer to maps that don't exist yet...but could possibly be part of Half-Life 3.
Given the insanely long delay, and the lack of any word from Valve, I'd say this particular piece of vapor-ware may be the real "zombie ghoast" in the room...
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Working with Failure
The monitors I "repaired" broke again last night, as did the music light I'd "improved." In the morning, I bricked a $60 flash drive. And I also failed to repair my old coffee grinder.
But I'm not depressed or upset. Failure is part of the build cycle. It is why we work incrementally, why we test. And it is one of the basic elements of the Maker mentality; permission to fail.
Today I revised the music light circuit and it is working fine. Fixed the monitors after the show, and after bricking the flash drive made use of the broken parts to test a different way to connect into one; a solution I am confident enough with to use for the next flash drive. And I bought a new coffee grinder -- but my repairs lasted long enough to get me a couple much-needed cups of coffee.
A concept I've been thinking about lately is that problems occur both singly, and in plurals both series and parallel. The series ones are often the worst ones; hardest to track down, and most dangerous when they happen. That's when two totally different things have to go wrong to create a massive failure that is more than the sum of the parts.
I just went through two cases of parallel problems, though. The monitor system was wired wrong and the amp was going into thermal shutdown. And, as it turns out, the wiring to one of the individual speakers was bad (this bleeds into the serial class of problem since the bad wiring was not a serious problem until all the speaker wiring passed through the bad connection). In the other case, I had bad ground on a cable, and a noisy amp; two more-or-less independent speaker system problems each of which produced a frustratingly intermittent hum.
One of the basic tools of the engineer is to divide and conquer. Make a system into smaller systems and test each smaller system. Isolate the place where the problem is, instead of trying to deal with a complex system all in one shot. But, unfortunately, an entire class of problems only arises in the interactions between parts. This is why, among other things, systems integration tests are so important!
(Which is why the most recent test on the Holocron was if having the charger in circuit and the Trinket and Neopixels operating would interfere with normal file access on the thumb drive. They did not.)
Embracing failure is central to Maker philosophy. If there was a standard it was reacting against, it would be the idea that you have to be perfect in order to do anything. That you have to practice and practice, and get proper instruction, so when you finally sit down to repair an engine or paint a painting you do it "correctly" the first time.
The entire Maker outlook is of knowing you don't know what you are doing, going into it in an experimental attitude, and being prepared for a lot of things not to work the first time. Or maybe even the fiftieth time. Because, among other things, a Maker is not learning to do a craft exactly to the standards of the masters (with the only outcomes then being either you did it right, or you did it wrong), but doing things that have never been done before. (Or that have only been done by a small number of experimentalists).
The tricky thing, of course, is knowing enough not to injure or kill yourself. Going forward with a project with nothing but a basic familiarity with concepts and crowd-sourced intelligence is a way to discover tricky principles of science that can seriously mess up your day. Take TechShop, for instance; the basic classes give you about enough to turn the machine on and not have your hands actually on the spinning blades. Not enough to understand the hidden hazards to you and the equipment.
When you can, of course, fail well. Fail in a way that doesn't get you hurt. Fail when there is still time or money to recover (try to fail on practice pieces and trial runs rather than on your only piece of material). And learn from the failure. Unfortunately there isn't always time for forensic engineering. Often you have a Cosplay convention or a show opening or some other deadline and it is more important to get it working than find out exactly what it didn't.
Trouble is, of course, if you don't know how it failed, you don't know if you actually fixed it. That, if nothing else, can be the most satisfying aspect of a good failure. Sure, you failed. But you know why. And the next one will be better.
But I'm not depressed or upset. Failure is part of the build cycle. It is why we work incrementally, why we test. And it is one of the basic elements of the Maker mentality; permission to fail.
Today I revised the music light circuit and it is working fine. Fixed the monitors after the show, and after bricking the flash drive made use of the broken parts to test a different way to connect into one; a solution I am confident enough with to use for the next flash drive. And I bought a new coffee grinder -- but my repairs lasted long enough to get me a couple much-needed cups of coffee.
A concept I've been thinking about lately is that problems occur both singly, and in plurals both series and parallel. The series ones are often the worst ones; hardest to track down, and most dangerous when they happen. That's when two totally different things have to go wrong to create a massive failure that is more than the sum of the parts.
I just went through two cases of parallel problems, though. The monitor system was wired wrong and the amp was going into thermal shutdown. And, as it turns out, the wiring to one of the individual speakers was bad (this bleeds into the serial class of problem since the bad wiring was not a serious problem until all the speaker wiring passed through the bad connection). In the other case, I had bad ground on a cable, and a noisy amp; two more-or-less independent speaker system problems each of which produced a frustratingly intermittent hum.
One of the basic tools of the engineer is to divide and conquer. Make a system into smaller systems and test each smaller system. Isolate the place where the problem is, instead of trying to deal with a complex system all in one shot. But, unfortunately, an entire class of problems only arises in the interactions between parts. This is why, among other things, systems integration tests are so important!
(Which is why the most recent test on the Holocron was if having the charger in circuit and the Trinket and Neopixels operating would interfere with normal file access on the thumb drive. They did not.)
Embracing failure is central to Maker philosophy. If there was a standard it was reacting against, it would be the idea that you have to be perfect in order to do anything. That you have to practice and practice, and get proper instruction, so when you finally sit down to repair an engine or paint a painting you do it "correctly" the first time.
The entire Maker outlook is of knowing you don't know what you are doing, going into it in an experimental attitude, and being prepared for a lot of things not to work the first time. Or maybe even the fiftieth time. Because, among other things, a Maker is not learning to do a craft exactly to the standards of the masters (with the only outcomes then being either you did it right, or you did it wrong), but doing things that have never been done before. (Or that have only been done by a small number of experimentalists).
The tricky thing, of course, is knowing enough not to injure or kill yourself. Going forward with a project with nothing but a basic familiarity with concepts and crowd-sourced intelligence is a way to discover tricky principles of science that can seriously mess up your day. Take TechShop, for instance; the basic classes give you about enough to turn the machine on and not have your hands actually on the spinning blades. Not enough to understand the hidden hazards to you and the equipment.
When you can, of course, fail well. Fail in a way that doesn't get you hurt. Fail when there is still time or money to recover (try to fail on practice pieces and trial runs rather than on your only piece of material). And learn from the failure. Unfortunately there isn't always time for forensic engineering. Often you have a Cosplay convention or a show opening or some other deadline and it is more important to get it working than find out exactly what it didn't.
Trouble is, of course, if you don't know how it failed, you don't know if you actually fixed it. That, if nothing else, can be the most satisfying aspect of a good failure. Sure, you failed. But you know why. And the next one will be better.
Friday, September 6, 2013
You'll never have lunch in this country again
First an aphorism;
"If you are a little behind on a project, skip lunch. If you are a lot behind on a project, have a good lunch."
It's one way to work smarter, not harder. The instinct is to push yourself. So you push even though you are physically slowing down, and you are getting stupid. When you are really far behind, tunnel vision sets in. It is too easy to fall into this behavior pattern of just working, working, through the night, maybe somehow it will okay.
Eat. Rest. Take breaks as necessary. Get enough sleep. All of that time will return to you twice-fold as it is only when you are rested and fed that you can reach and sustain peak efficiency.
And if the project is in dire trouble? This is the best time to stop cold. Don't grudgingly stop to eat, race through a meal, throw yourself back into it. Go away. Get out of the shop, put some kind of mental barrier out there (like clearing the work table and setting out a proper meal). Because the thing to do it not just keep plugging and somehow it will all work out (even though sometimes it does -- generally to the detriment of everyone else on the project as well).
The thing to do is stop and figure out what you can change. Where you can cut corners or compromise, or how you can add more labor, or if there is something that can be moved from the Friday deliverable to delivery closer to opening. Find a better way to solve the project.
At the very least, work out priorities and target dates and figure out where you actually have to be.
But don't just blindly keep pushing until you collapse. I've seen it. I've done it. It isn't pretty.
Second, an observation.
Stage Managers are the Sound Effects Man during rehearsals. Sometimes this can be a problem, as they are leading the cast to expect something quite different than what you were going to design. It is the same effect as temp tracks in Hollywood.
But I've noticed lately -- and the is multiple stage managers, in different theaters and different towns;
Sirens go "Wee woo wee woo." And telephones go "Ring ring. Ring ring. Ring ring."
Thing is, I'm not in Europe. The standard telephone ring in the US (when we still had dial phones) is a single ring (2-second ring, 4-second pause). Not the double-ring of England. And the siren (before electronic sirens) was a long wail, not the European two-tone.
Why are those the standards? Is it because they are easier to pronounce? Is is because no-one remembers any more what a Bell telephone sounded like?
Incidentally, my upcoming show I'm intending to ring an old dial phone. I have a couple of ring signal generators (90v AC at 20 Hz.) My intention is to switch it via MIDI, however, so QLab can run the phone just like any other sound cue.
"If you are a little behind on a project, skip lunch. If you are a lot behind on a project, have a good lunch."
It's one way to work smarter, not harder. The instinct is to push yourself. So you push even though you are physically slowing down, and you are getting stupid. When you are really far behind, tunnel vision sets in. It is too easy to fall into this behavior pattern of just working, working, through the night, maybe somehow it will okay.
Eat. Rest. Take breaks as necessary. Get enough sleep. All of that time will return to you twice-fold as it is only when you are rested and fed that you can reach and sustain peak efficiency.
And if the project is in dire trouble? This is the best time to stop cold. Don't grudgingly stop to eat, race through a meal, throw yourself back into it. Go away. Get out of the shop, put some kind of mental barrier out there (like clearing the work table and setting out a proper meal). Because the thing to do it not just keep plugging and somehow it will all work out (even though sometimes it does -- generally to the detriment of everyone else on the project as well).
The thing to do is stop and figure out what you can change. Where you can cut corners or compromise, or how you can add more labor, or if there is something that can be moved from the Friday deliverable to delivery closer to opening. Find a better way to solve the project.
At the very least, work out priorities and target dates and figure out where you actually have to be.
But don't just blindly keep pushing until you collapse. I've seen it. I've done it. It isn't pretty.
Second, an observation.
Stage Managers are the Sound Effects Man during rehearsals. Sometimes this can be a problem, as they are leading the cast to expect something quite different than what you were going to design. It is the same effect as temp tracks in Hollywood.
But I've noticed lately -- and the is multiple stage managers, in different theaters and different towns;
Sirens go "Wee woo wee woo." And telephones go "Ring ring. Ring ring. Ring ring."
Thing is, I'm not in Europe. The standard telephone ring in the US (when we still had dial phones) is a single ring (2-second ring, 4-second pause). Not the double-ring of England. And the siren (before electronic sirens) was a long wail, not the European two-tone.
Why are those the standards? Is it because they are easier to pronounce? Is is because no-one remembers any more what a Bell telephone sounded like?
Incidentally, my upcoming show I'm intending to ring an old dial phone. I have a couple of ring signal generators (90v AC at 20 Hz.) My intention is to switch it via MIDI, however, so QLab can run the phone just like any other sound cue.
Friday, August 30, 2013
Not-Working at the Computer
It has become the pervasive image of "working," now -- someone sitting at a computer.
It is so straight-forward and seemingly sensible. You make some coffee, sit down at the desk, boot up the computer...and do work stuff.
And, yes, I have a lot of work that is done on the computer. Mic breakdowns. Programming. Writing sound effects. Organizing calendars and communicating with email. So this isn't an entirely wrong assumption.
I have right now a bunch of things that are coming up on deadline. Some are shows or rentals, some more personal projects. And as a result I have a quick breakfast, make a big mug of coffee, sit down, boot up.....and accomplish absolutely nothing.
Because even though a computer is part of what I need to do, the computer is not all of it. I program on embedded hardware and without the hardware I can make little progress. I'm working out mic plots and sound plots and effects for upcoming shows and these have to relate to the script, and to rehearsals -- neither of which is on the computer per se.
Sure, I could bring out the script, the hardware, the other tools I need. The problem is one of focus...the instinct was to sit down and WORK, and going through drawers sorting hardware, or marking up script pages, isn't as straightforward as, well, booting the computer.
And the trouble is, by the time I've done the emails I have to, and checked the calendar, it seems sensible to update the blog and see what is up in forums. And then I'm a little bored and the coffee is half-gone and I take a break by looking at some web comics. And before you know it, half the day is gone and I've made no progress on the pressing work.
Of course by the time I've made that realization, I've been sitting at the computer all morning, and I need a break. And some lunch.
And thus the day passes.
It is so straight-forward and seemingly sensible. You make some coffee, sit down at the desk, boot up the computer...and do work stuff.
And, yes, I have a lot of work that is done on the computer. Mic breakdowns. Programming. Writing sound effects. Organizing calendars and communicating with email. So this isn't an entirely wrong assumption.
I have right now a bunch of things that are coming up on deadline. Some are shows or rentals, some more personal projects. And as a result I have a quick breakfast, make a big mug of coffee, sit down, boot up.....and accomplish absolutely nothing.
Because even though a computer is part of what I need to do, the computer is not all of it. I program on embedded hardware and without the hardware I can make little progress. I'm working out mic plots and sound plots and effects for upcoming shows and these have to relate to the script, and to rehearsals -- neither of which is on the computer per se.
Sure, I could bring out the script, the hardware, the other tools I need. The problem is one of focus...the instinct was to sit down and WORK, and going through drawers sorting hardware, or marking up script pages, isn't as straightforward as, well, booting the computer.
And the trouble is, by the time I've done the emails I have to, and checked the calendar, it seems sensible to update the blog and see what is up in forums. And then I'm a little bored and the coffee is half-gone and I take a break by looking at some web comics. And before you know it, half the day is gone and I've made no progress on the pressing work.
Of course by the time I've made that realization, I've been sitting at the computer all morning, and I need a break. And some lunch.
And thus the day passes.
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Dunning those Krugers
Rule of thumb for the day:
If you are in a situation where the problem seems simple, the answer clear, and everyone else around you is acting like an idiot; if you are in a situation where it seems obvious that you are the smartest person in the room; in that situation, as soon as you recognize you are thinking this -- STOP.
Step back, turn off the machine, take a long careful look around. Because the odds are against you.
Writers over the ages have pointed out that only two kinds of people are completely confident; those who are experts in their field, and those who are vastly ignorant of what is involved.
There's even a name for it, now; the Dunning-Kruger effect (which, according to the original paper, is that confidence maps inversely to skill.)
One of the hardest things to know is when you don't know that you don't know. As Feynman put it in his famous address, "You are the easiest one to fool." We fool ourselves all the time. We want to believe in our skill and the implied status it gives.
So use this. Use that same psychological crutch as a litmus test instead.
If you think everyone else in the room is an idiot.......then, in reality, it's probably you.
If you are in a situation where the problem seems simple, the answer clear, and everyone else around you is acting like an idiot; if you are in a situation where it seems obvious that you are the smartest person in the room; in that situation, as soon as you recognize you are thinking this -- STOP.
Step back, turn off the machine, take a long careful look around. Because the odds are against you.
Writers over the ages have pointed out that only two kinds of people are completely confident; those who are experts in their field, and those who are vastly ignorant of what is involved.
There's even a name for it, now; the Dunning-Kruger effect (which, according to the original paper, is that confidence maps inversely to skill.)
One of the hardest things to know is when you don't know that you don't know. As Feynman put it in his famous address, "You are the easiest one to fool." We fool ourselves all the time. We want to believe in our skill and the implied status it gives.
So use this. Use that same psychological crutch as a litmus test instead.
If you think everyone else in the room is an idiot.......then, in reality, it's probably you.
Saturday, December 29, 2012
Answering Questions
Sometimes I look at my blog sites and I see interesting search terms that led someone to here. Sometimes I wish they'd stay and write me a note; because it is something I actually know the answer to.
Here's a random selection from this past week:
qlab how many tracks: As many tracks as your computer can handle. Actually, I've had more trouble over running several long tracks (ten minutes each) at the same time, as at some point QLab runs out of RAM and has to stream more data from the hard disk. A friend of mine has had some breakup when running 10+ stereo sound files simultaneously on an old Mac Powerbook.
nanokey broken: The thing that keeps happening to mine is the keys getting pulled off. They can be put back, if you are nimble (and don't loose the little contacter boot/cup thing). But it is enough trouble so lately I've just done without a few keys.
shield arduino ULN2803: I've not seen this specifically. I made one myself, of course. Plus I made a one-board minimal Arduino + ULN2803 using one of Adafruit's darling perma-proto boards. There are quite a few driver shields out there, tho. Enough so you can almost certainly get the equivalent performance. If not better (as in, many driver shields are arranged around latching registers so they give you more controlled outputs on fewer I/O pins).
oaklahoma little wonder: I built this prop long ago. The description in the play is straight-forward; it is a frontier Viewmaster with a hidden switchblade. Basically, a portable version of the peepshow machines popular at the time; you pointed it towards a light and looked into one end, and saw either a slide, or through various cunning mirrors and similar, more than one slide, of a pretty girl in various stages of undress. In the specific device used in the play, if you know which catch to press, a knife comes out -- according to the script, the knife pops out the bottom and you then grab the tube from the rube and stab him with it. The version I made was slightly more efficient; a spring-loaded rubber dagger came out the viewing end!
attiny button led pwm: Um, sure. All of the above. Trick to note; the tinys have only one or two internal clocks that can be used for hardware PWM. These don't line up well with the expectations of the Arduino software so you are better off writing in C -- and be prepared to read up on register flags! You can also do software PWM on any pin; I reprogrammed a Blink-M this way, and it fades okay without too bad a flicker even though I didn't use very efficient code.
Atompunk USB: now THAT is a nice idea! I've got a couple of flash drives sitting around -- maybe my next prop should be a nice atompunk mod for one of them. Dare I find a really small gear motor and put a fan on it?
Here's a random selection from this past week:
qlab how many tracks: As many tracks as your computer can handle. Actually, I've had more trouble over running several long tracks (ten minutes each) at the same time, as at some point QLab runs out of RAM and has to stream more data from the hard disk. A friend of mine has had some breakup when running 10+ stereo sound files simultaneously on an old Mac Powerbook.
nanokey broken: The thing that keeps happening to mine is the keys getting pulled off. They can be put back, if you are nimble (and don't loose the little contacter boot/cup thing). But it is enough trouble so lately I've just done without a few keys.
shield arduino ULN2803: I've not seen this specifically. I made one myself, of course. Plus I made a one-board minimal Arduino + ULN2803 using one of Adafruit's darling perma-proto boards. There are quite a few driver shields out there, tho. Enough so you can almost certainly get the equivalent performance. If not better (as in, many driver shields are arranged around latching registers so they give you more controlled outputs on fewer I/O pins).
oaklahoma little wonder: I built this prop long ago. The description in the play is straight-forward; it is a frontier Viewmaster with a hidden switchblade. Basically, a portable version of the peepshow machines popular at the time; you pointed it towards a light and looked into one end, and saw either a slide, or through various cunning mirrors and similar, more than one slide, of a pretty girl in various stages of undress. In the specific device used in the play, if you know which catch to press, a knife comes out -- according to the script, the knife pops out the bottom and you then grab the tube from the rube and stab him with it. The version I made was slightly more efficient; a spring-loaded rubber dagger came out the viewing end!
attiny button led pwm: Um, sure. All of the above. Trick to note; the tinys have only one or two internal clocks that can be used for hardware PWM. These don't line up well with the expectations of the Arduino software so you are better off writing in C -- and be prepared to read up on register flags! You can also do software PWM on any pin; I reprogrammed a Blink-M this way, and it fades okay without too bad a flicker even though I didn't use very efficient code.
Atompunk USB: now THAT is a nice idea! I've got a couple of flash drives sitting around -- maybe my next prop should be a nice atompunk mod for one of them. Dare I find a really small gear motor and put a fan on it?
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Testing, Testing
I enjoy language. So here are a few more bits and phrases I've found useful -- these ones on the subject of testing.
Smoke Test: This is when you turn on the power and see if it smokes and catches fire. If you are really unsure if you configured things right (such as, perhaps you reversed the polarity on the power leads) the more refined trick is to turn it on for just a moment, turn it off before the magic smoke can leak out, then gingerly touch the most sensitive components with a bare finger to see if they are heating up.
A smoke test won't tell if you if the circuit works. But it will tell you if the circuit is broken. But please remember to always mount a scratch monkey!
Sanity Test: more commonly in the form of a sanity check (and I'm sorry to say, but there ain't no sanity clause), this is any sort of trivial throughput check or checksum or order of magnitude calculation; instead of the painstaking check of every line of code or engineering calculation, this is taking the simplest and most obvious check that will reveal that all your elegant math foundered when you multiplied instead of dividing in step 2.
This is why smart DIYers don't spare the blinkenlights. A few LEDs (or a few serial.print comments in a code) can tell you that what you intended certain parts of the circuit to do, they are actually doing.
In sound, a sanity test is done by ignoring all the nice microphones and nifty speaker processors and all of that, and just seeing if you can get a simple CD to play through the house speakers. If you can't, you shouldn't be wasting time setting up delay chains just yet!
Plugs-Out Test: I first ran into this phrase in regards to a terrible accident in space history. But let that not stop us from the idea of removing the umbilicals, and seeing if the device will still run on its own internal battery, without the connection to the ISP, and with the cover of the enclosure screwed down.
Proof-of-Concept: Not usually called a "test," this is similar often misunderstood by those who observe them. The proof-of-concept is done entirely to prove the plausibility of the idea -- it is in no way a test of the actual hardware. Indeed, you substitute, you breadboard, you mock up; whatever you have to do to get the thing to work, even for just a second or two before the tape falls apart.
Solderless breadboards, alligator clips, double-stick tape are your friends here. Simulated signals, simulated outputs. It doesn't matter what it looks like; it matters that it works, even if it only works once.
Coffee Test: This is the test of whether you are awake enough to write code or operate machinery; can you make coffee without doing something mind-bogglingly stupid? I grind the beans, brew hot water in a teapot, and pour it through a gold filter to the mug or flask for the day. This provides plenty of chances to prove I'm not awake yet. Today, I put on the water, cleaned the filter, and ground the beans. I finished just as the water began to boil so I quickly rinsed out the travel mug...then proceeded to carefully fill it with boiling water.
Other times, I've skipped the filter or the coffee entirely. The best day of all, though, was when I was still living in the Haight-Ashbury. I carefully filled a clean mug with milk, then proceeded to add coffee grounds to it. I remember watching the black flecks slowly sink in the full mug of milk and wondering what exactly was wrong with that picture.
On a more serious note, there are a couple more test concepts that are worth adding.
Test-in-Place: Especially with RF gear, funny things happen in the actual location where you mean to use the thing. So it isn't properly tested until it is in the room it will be used in. Better yet, it should be in rehearsal, or in as close to performance conditions as you can manage.
Acid Test: This is when you create a worst-case scenario and see if the thing survives it.
Test to Destruction: Unlike the above, this is when you intentionally fail the unit to find out just what it takes to break it.
Smoke Test: This is when you turn on the power and see if it smokes and catches fire. If you are really unsure if you configured things right (such as, perhaps you reversed the polarity on the power leads) the more refined trick is to turn it on for just a moment, turn it off before the magic smoke can leak out, then gingerly touch the most sensitive components with a bare finger to see if they are heating up.
A smoke test won't tell if you if the circuit works. But it will tell you if the circuit is broken. But please remember to always mount a scratch monkey!
Sanity Test: more commonly in the form of a sanity check (and I'm sorry to say, but there ain't no sanity clause), this is any sort of trivial throughput check or checksum or order of magnitude calculation; instead of the painstaking check of every line of code or engineering calculation, this is taking the simplest and most obvious check that will reveal that all your elegant math foundered when you multiplied instead of dividing in step 2.
This is why smart DIYers don't spare the blinkenlights. A few LEDs (or a few serial.print comments in a code) can tell you that what you intended certain parts of the circuit to do, they are actually doing.
In sound, a sanity test is done by ignoring all the nice microphones and nifty speaker processors and all of that, and just seeing if you can get a simple CD to play through the house speakers. If you can't, you shouldn't be wasting time setting up delay chains just yet!
Plugs-Out Test: I first ran into this phrase in regards to a terrible accident in space history. But let that not stop us from the idea of removing the umbilicals, and seeing if the device will still run on its own internal battery, without the connection to the ISP, and with the cover of the enclosure screwed down.
Proof-of-Concept: Not usually called a "test," this is similar often misunderstood by those who observe them. The proof-of-concept is done entirely to prove the plausibility of the idea -- it is in no way a test of the actual hardware. Indeed, you substitute, you breadboard, you mock up; whatever you have to do to get the thing to work, even for just a second or two before the tape falls apart.
Solderless breadboards, alligator clips, double-stick tape are your friends here. Simulated signals, simulated outputs. It doesn't matter what it looks like; it matters that it works, even if it only works once.
Coffee Test: This is the test of whether you are awake enough to write code or operate machinery; can you make coffee without doing something mind-bogglingly stupid? I grind the beans, brew hot water in a teapot, and pour it through a gold filter to the mug or flask for the day. This provides plenty of chances to prove I'm not awake yet. Today, I put on the water, cleaned the filter, and ground the beans. I finished just as the water began to boil so I quickly rinsed out the travel mug...then proceeded to carefully fill it with boiling water.
Other times, I've skipped the filter or the coffee entirely. The best day of all, though, was when I was still living in the Haight-Ashbury. I carefully filled a clean mug with milk, then proceeded to add coffee grounds to it. I remember watching the black flecks slowly sink in the full mug of milk and wondering what exactly was wrong with that picture.
On a more serious note, there are a couple more test concepts that are worth adding.
Test-in-Place: Especially with RF gear, funny things happen in the actual location where you mean to use the thing. So it isn't properly tested until it is in the room it will be used in. Better yet, it should be in rehearsal, or in as close to performance conditions as you can manage.
Acid Test: This is when you create a worst-case scenario and see if the thing survives it.
Test to Destruction: Unlike the above, this is when you intentionally fail the unit to find out just what it takes to break it.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)