I_Voyager
User is Invalid
I'm working on a two-novel story. I have been working on thesis arguments, synopsis' and character development up 'til now while reading broadly. It's a coalescence of wide-viewed education and reflection over many years on many social-political topics. Although it is a science fiction taking place between 2015 and 2080, I think of it less from a "sci-fi" perspective as from a broadly academic perspective. The main areas of my learning have been: philosophy, neuroscience/psychology, history, physical science and modern political/economic theory. This work seems to be a 'coming together' of long divided thoughts in my subconscious.
The main theme is entropy, moving into order, moving into entropy. Everything begins in a state of entropy. Matter seems to aggregate into order. Its ordered form is more powerfully impulsive and by interacting in greater degrees with its environment generates more entropy. This increase of entropy always leads to greater order and greater entropy. This is true for atoms in a closed space, biological evolution, the evolution of society by spreading technology, the evolution of political systems by spreading ideologies, the evolution of combat by improving military tactics, the flow of conversations by making incomplete but ever advancing arguments and the neural interplay of chemicals, electrons, synapses and neurons in a human mind.
Anyways, here's the beginning. I try to make unbaised, incomplete, imperfect arguments. But at the end, the last paragraph is an attempt to depict the whole theme perfectly in a descriptive paragraph. The few paragraphs before that but after the videos end are less complete. Finally, I have the setting in San Fransisco and later mention snow. I intend to fix that eventally!
Sorry for the long pre-description... This is the first time in my life I've been able to focus on a single project long enough and with enough clarity to do this much work (on top of the 17'000 words in synopsis' and such).
Ten minutes and forty-three seconds into the live video stream four guest speakers are seated in elaborate chairs around a machine. A wide-angle lens captures all four of them and the machine that has been the videos focus up to this point. It is a 3D printer and it stands five feet tall from the ground up, an elegant box of carbon-plastic rods vertically supporting a system of other horizontal rods. Those rods ferry self-propelled step-motors which shudder smoothly, if not soundlessly for as little as a half-millimetre in one direction or another. The motors work together to move the three most important parts of the machine: two plastic extruders – six year old technology - and something new. It was referred to by its inventor as a low-cost carbon nano-compressor and extruder, written down in shorthand as an LCC-NCE and it allowed the printer to use a powerful alternative to plastic: open sourced carbon nano-tubes.
Open Sourced, guest speaker Tiedemann Murray explained, only meant that the design had been constructed by peers who met through the internet while agreeing to, after the point design, release the plans and work material onto his Port Share network to be reproduced digitally and freely as opposed to patenting the designs as proprietary intellectual property.
The printer is busily laying down the final carbon-plastic layers on an object, the making of which has been this printer’s life’s purpose for the last six hours. The three piece symbol stands tall and bold: the figures ‘3’, ‘X’ and ‘I’ as very real black capital letters six inch tall, two inch thick and shimmering with white light. The stylized font is familiar to millions across the world. 3xI is an abbreviation for the name of a popular technology conference called “Invention, Innovation and Information.”
For the first ten minutes of this particular presentation Tiedemann Murray had explained in quick terms the technical detail of the printer he had named the Opensync. The horizontal rods, upon which the printer’s super-heated extruders glided, separated and pivoted from their base into new horizontal connection points. This allowed for a great depth of movement synchronizing all three printer heads in one printing effort. Custom software made use of this depth by co-ordinating three different print-order scripts from the installed template files which he and online peers had designed code-up. The whole thing was built and programmed on ten thousand dollars paid to them from seventy four backers off a website called openfunding.com. After the point of design they received another hundred thousand in enthusiastic donations from another two hundred and fifty individuals. Everything was synchronized by open source software, hence the name.
His invention was laying down thin layers of carbon nano-tubes at defined places in the larger structure of the 3xI. The nanotubes were being made into supports spiking into the glow-white, negative-black, glow-white and again negative-black plastic base. The supports were “T” shaped pillars two centimetres in diameter rising from the bottom to the top. They were compressed tightly against other wider simpler plastic structures, and finally the complex structures were sealed, hidden behind the guise of flat glowing black letters and numbers. The compressed black-on-white was finely dispersed and barely visible, each layer only a millimetre thin on the exterior. The black-light glow met traditional white light in competing wave-fronts vibrating against each other on the visual spectrum and the human eye had sensitivity enough only to process the black data. The white data was pushed aside and appeared not to exist despite itself - but the glow effect remained. Visually there was a black acronym which glowed white, and at other angles would appear to be white glowing black for a moment before flashing back to black again.
Tiedemann began his informal lecture with: “I’ll avoid plucking at the ******** psychological heartstrings as the co-ordinators suggested. I’ll leave time for questions at the end instead.” His curse word was censored by a gap in the audio; his voice was thick with Swedish accent. There were screens behind him three times as big as he and they displayed his mathematical notes and blueprints. There were no other visual aids. He made good on his promise though and after ten minutes concluded despite having sixteen minute of allotted presentation time. Immediately after concluding he moved to sit down in the furthest seat to the right with other three esteemed guests who all seemed very much less important than he.
A camera is now close focused on the left of Tiedemann’s narrow bearded face as he sits down. He is thanked by the nameless voice of the hall PA speakers. His face is dead-pan granite and silhouetted by dirty-brown hair hanging in a pony-tail over his back. His lips are obscured by overgrowth but his goatee is short and wispy off the chin. He sits, drinks out of the glass of water on a table next to him, puts the cup down and folds his arms. The view shifts to a camera zoomed close and fixed parallel to a woman sitting next to him. She is introduced as Senator Audrey Ross. She is plump with the straight back of practiced military posture. She looks intently at Tiedemann with round blue eyes embedded proportionately in her round Caucasian face. Next to her is Doctor Mei-Lien Mingzhu. Her black skirt is to her knees and her short-sleeved overcoat is to her torso, partially covering her dress shirt. She is squirming in her seat trying to find a relaxed spot and failing. A few feet over on the other side of the printer Cameron Rutherford is introduced, his hair well styled, clothes fine, collar out and smiling. He plays the camera angles intelligently and absent minded, angling his face in case this or that shot may be on him at this or that time. His good side is mostly always covered.
Doctor Mingzhu is the first to speak following the introductions. “I think this is just amazing,” she gestures at the machine, Cameron nodding thoughtfully full-body in the picture next to her, “I mean it’s not easy getting the funding we need to get right equipment to conduct our research. Some very important devices can be scaled down into simple three-material tools thanks to this printer. With the carbon compressor I can produce a whole variety of high-resistance, high-sensitivity, conductive devices on a lower budget. It’ll save us time, it’ll save us money. It’ll let us think outside the box in terms of, well, just what we have access to for future projects.”
“I like it, I like it” chimes Rutherford, speaking quickly, “It’s functional and it’s the right price. I’m thinking a few of my factories need to be outfitted with the upscaled industrial models, when you come out with them in a few years.”
Murray shrugs. “I’m not, I’m done with it.”
“You’re done building printers?” Rutherford asks incredulously.
“I’m done with the Opensync,” Tiedemann makes a mocking gesture with his eyebrows as he shifts forward, leaning his left elbow into the dome chairs arm rest “I’m not scaling it up. I’m done with it. It’s good enough. I’m moving onto better things.”
“You’re crazy.” Rutherford states flatly, hands rising in frustration, visibly dumbstruck despite his well-practiced high-brow gaze, “You’ve got a million dollar idea with infinite market potential. You’re going to give it up.”
“Cameron,” Senator Ross interrupts gracefully, her hand raised to claim a chance to speak, “This is the land of the free and the home of the brave. Doesn’t our friend have the right to conduct business with his product in the free global market however he’d like to?”
“Thanks to Creative-Commons rights I suppose so,” Rutherford replies quickly, “You’re right, you’re right, I get it, this is 3xI. I’ll leave politics for the after-party debate.”
“Then I agree, Mr. Rutherford,” follows Ross, turning her gaze back to Tiedemann “It really is a wonderful machine. I’d like to have had a thing like this when I had come out of the army. My productive potential would have been much higher. As it was, just by using the earlier model of 3D plastic printers I was able to provide some of the basic asset needs of many of the impoverished neighbourhoods in my home riding. With this I could have done some real good, built some real lasting infrastructure for those people. If you are done with the Opensync then, Mr. Murray, what are your next plans?”
“I’ll show you in twenty-two minutes,” Tiedemann replies, “my new tablet’s installing the custom operating system script my team and I wrote.”
The main theme is entropy, moving into order, moving into entropy. Everything begins in a state of entropy. Matter seems to aggregate into order. Its ordered form is more powerfully impulsive and by interacting in greater degrees with its environment generates more entropy. This increase of entropy always leads to greater order and greater entropy. This is true for atoms in a closed space, biological evolution, the evolution of society by spreading technology, the evolution of political systems by spreading ideologies, the evolution of combat by improving military tactics, the flow of conversations by making incomplete but ever advancing arguments and the neural interplay of chemicals, electrons, synapses and neurons in a human mind.
Anyways, here's the beginning. I try to make unbaised, incomplete, imperfect arguments. But at the end, the last paragraph is an attempt to depict the whole theme perfectly in a descriptive paragraph. The few paragraphs before that but after the videos end are less complete. Finally, I have the setting in San Fransisco and later mention snow. I intend to fix that eventally!
Sorry for the long pre-description... This is the first time in my life I've been able to focus on a single project long enough and with enough clarity to do this much work (on top of the 17'000 words in synopsis' and such).
Ten minutes and forty-three seconds into the live video stream four guest speakers are seated in elaborate chairs around a machine. A wide-angle lens captures all four of them and the machine that has been the videos focus up to this point. It is a 3D printer and it stands five feet tall from the ground up, an elegant box of carbon-plastic rods vertically supporting a system of other horizontal rods. Those rods ferry self-propelled step-motors which shudder smoothly, if not soundlessly for as little as a half-millimetre in one direction or another. The motors work together to move the three most important parts of the machine: two plastic extruders – six year old technology - and something new. It was referred to by its inventor as a low-cost carbon nano-compressor and extruder, written down in shorthand as an LCC-NCE and it allowed the printer to use a powerful alternative to plastic: open sourced carbon nano-tubes.
Open Sourced, guest speaker Tiedemann Murray explained, only meant that the design had been constructed by peers who met through the internet while agreeing to, after the point design, release the plans and work material onto his Port Share network to be reproduced digitally and freely as opposed to patenting the designs as proprietary intellectual property.
The printer is busily laying down the final carbon-plastic layers on an object, the making of which has been this printer’s life’s purpose for the last six hours. The three piece symbol stands tall and bold: the figures ‘3’, ‘X’ and ‘I’ as very real black capital letters six inch tall, two inch thick and shimmering with white light. The stylized font is familiar to millions across the world. 3xI is an abbreviation for the name of a popular technology conference called “Invention, Innovation and Information.”
For the first ten minutes of this particular presentation Tiedemann Murray had explained in quick terms the technical detail of the printer he had named the Opensync. The horizontal rods, upon which the printer’s super-heated extruders glided, separated and pivoted from their base into new horizontal connection points. This allowed for a great depth of movement synchronizing all three printer heads in one printing effort. Custom software made use of this depth by co-ordinating three different print-order scripts from the installed template files which he and online peers had designed code-up. The whole thing was built and programmed on ten thousand dollars paid to them from seventy four backers off a website called openfunding.com. After the point of design they received another hundred thousand in enthusiastic donations from another two hundred and fifty individuals. Everything was synchronized by open source software, hence the name.
His invention was laying down thin layers of carbon nano-tubes at defined places in the larger structure of the 3xI. The nanotubes were being made into supports spiking into the glow-white, negative-black, glow-white and again negative-black plastic base. The supports were “T” shaped pillars two centimetres in diameter rising from the bottom to the top. They were compressed tightly against other wider simpler plastic structures, and finally the complex structures were sealed, hidden behind the guise of flat glowing black letters and numbers. The compressed black-on-white was finely dispersed and barely visible, each layer only a millimetre thin on the exterior. The black-light glow met traditional white light in competing wave-fronts vibrating against each other on the visual spectrum and the human eye had sensitivity enough only to process the black data. The white data was pushed aside and appeared not to exist despite itself - but the glow effect remained. Visually there was a black acronym which glowed white, and at other angles would appear to be white glowing black for a moment before flashing back to black again.
Tiedemann began his informal lecture with: “I’ll avoid plucking at the ******** psychological heartstrings as the co-ordinators suggested. I’ll leave time for questions at the end instead.” His curse word was censored by a gap in the audio; his voice was thick with Swedish accent. There were screens behind him three times as big as he and they displayed his mathematical notes and blueprints. There were no other visual aids. He made good on his promise though and after ten minutes concluded despite having sixteen minute of allotted presentation time. Immediately after concluding he moved to sit down in the furthest seat to the right with other three esteemed guests who all seemed very much less important than he.
A camera is now close focused on the left of Tiedemann’s narrow bearded face as he sits down. He is thanked by the nameless voice of the hall PA speakers. His face is dead-pan granite and silhouetted by dirty-brown hair hanging in a pony-tail over his back. His lips are obscured by overgrowth but his goatee is short and wispy off the chin. He sits, drinks out of the glass of water on a table next to him, puts the cup down and folds his arms. The view shifts to a camera zoomed close and fixed parallel to a woman sitting next to him. She is introduced as Senator Audrey Ross. She is plump with the straight back of practiced military posture. She looks intently at Tiedemann with round blue eyes embedded proportionately in her round Caucasian face. Next to her is Doctor Mei-Lien Mingzhu. Her black skirt is to her knees and her short-sleeved overcoat is to her torso, partially covering her dress shirt. She is squirming in her seat trying to find a relaxed spot and failing. A few feet over on the other side of the printer Cameron Rutherford is introduced, his hair well styled, clothes fine, collar out and smiling. He plays the camera angles intelligently and absent minded, angling his face in case this or that shot may be on him at this or that time. His good side is mostly always covered.
Doctor Mingzhu is the first to speak following the introductions. “I think this is just amazing,” she gestures at the machine, Cameron nodding thoughtfully full-body in the picture next to her, “I mean it’s not easy getting the funding we need to get right equipment to conduct our research. Some very important devices can be scaled down into simple three-material tools thanks to this printer. With the carbon compressor I can produce a whole variety of high-resistance, high-sensitivity, conductive devices on a lower budget. It’ll save us time, it’ll save us money. It’ll let us think outside the box in terms of, well, just what we have access to for future projects.”
“I like it, I like it” chimes Rutherford, speaking quickly, “It’s functional and it’s the right price. I’m thinking a few of my factories need to be outfitted with the upscaled industrial models, when you come out with them in a few years.”
Murray shrugs. “I’m not, I’m done with it.”
“You’re done building printers?” Rutherford asks incredulously.
“I’m done with the Opensync,” Tiedemann makes a mocking gesture with his eyebrows as he shifts forward, leaning his left elbow into the dome chairs arm rest “I’m not scaling it up. I’m done with it. It’s good enough. I’m moving onto better things.”
“You’re crazy.” Rutherford states flatly, hands rising in frustration, visibly dumbstruck despite his well-practiced high-brow gaze, “You’ve got a million dollar idea with infinite market potential. You’re going to give it up.”
“Cameron,” Senator Ross interrupts gracefully, her hand raised to claim a chance to speak, “This is the land of the free and the home of the brave. Doesn’t our friend have the right to conduct business with his product in the free global market however he’d like to?”
“Thanks to Creative-Commons rights I suppose so,” Rutherford replies quickly, “You’re right, you’re right, I get it, this is 3xI. I’ll leave politics for the after-party debate.”
“Then I agree, Mr. Rutherford,” follows Ross, turning her gaze back to Tiedemann “It really is a wonderful machine. I’d like to have had a thing like this when I had come out of the army. My productive potential would have been much higher. As it was, just by using the earlier model of 3D plastic printers I was able to provide some of the basic asset needs of many of the impoverished neighbourhoods in my home riding. With this I could have done some real good, built some real lasting infrastructure for those people. If you are done with the Opensync then, Mr. Murray, what are your next plans?”
“I’ll show you in twenty-two minutes,” Tiedemann replies, “my new tablet’s installing the custom operating system script my team and I wrote.”
