Buckle Up, This Is Going To Be Bumpy
First of all, let it be known that my finger is poised - POISED! - over the Remote Nuclear Detonator, and I have already vapourised three people who pointed out the "Spelling mistake". Yes, there is a saying "Mighty oaks from little acorns grow", which is what I was riffing on. For your information, 'Boak' is Scottish and Irish slang for vomit - NO picture needed, Art - and A.C.O.R.N.S (Yes yes yes I cheated with no full stops in the title, sue me and see if I care) stands for "Autonomous Constructor Omnivorous Replicating NanobotS", because today we are going to be waffling on about nanotechnology. Art!
HIGHLY speculative
We have touched on nanotechnology before, and Your Humble Scribe has even coined his own name for the entities involved:'Microbots'. Modern science fiction is full of stories about this area of the future and how it will affect every nuance of our lives, from medicine to making cars to mangosteen harvesting. And, of course - obviously! - with every scientific advance there are always risks and potential problems.
Enter Grey Goo. Art!
<heavy sigh and sounds of an industrial-size elephant tazer being charged>
Try again, Art, and ignore the convulsions.
Bear in mind that this is explicitly to do with assemblers; the dissembler is a different saucepan of fish completely. So, Conrad's febrile mind came up with an analogy: grey goo as a viral analogue. You should be familiar with the Covid-19 "R" value, which stands for "Reproduction", and the same factor can be applied to ACORNS. If it stands at exactly 1.00000 then you are only ever going to have a single assembler working, because by the time it's created another, the original has expired. If the R factor is below 1.00000 then the assemblers will die out.
On the other hand -
- if the R value goes over 1.00000 then your microbots are going to increase, and the larger the R factor the greater the rate of increase. If it's pitched at R5, for example, each assembler is going to create 5 more, each of which will create 5 more, etcetera, etcetera. After 15 generations there would be over thirty billion of these things. You can see where the 'Boak' comes from now, can't you? Eventually, since these things are completely beyond human control - the 'Autonomous' bit - and can use anything and everything to create new assemblers - the 'Omnivorous' bit - they would consume the entire earthly biosphere.
Ooo-er Matron!
SSSKKKRRRRCCCCHHHHHH*
Except not quite. It's a great scenario for horror stories, admittedly, yet real life is considerably more nuanced than that. For one thing, these microbots are supposed to be about the size of a bacterium. Bacteria have been around for billions of year and yet here we still are, not miles deep in bacteria.
ANYWAY that's the set-up. In tomorrow's blog we'll have a closer look at how possible or plausible a Grey Goo scenario is, probably whilst knocking back a vodka or two.
Ha! Another 'Forbidden Planet' reference!
Wordle
This was discussed on the office floor yesteryon, with James being entirely ignorant of the game, much as Your Humble Scribe was a few weeks ago. Donna and Lisa were explaining how it functions, with Conrad chiming in to inform that you get a stats dialogue box appearing to show your performance to date. Art!
There you go, Conrad solved today's purely in order to get that stats box up as an illustration. Clever old Conrad.
Of course - obviously! - Conrad, being a nit-picking pedantic hair-splitter of the very best kind, simply couldn't leave it at that. O no.
Thus, if you so cared that you hired a computer hacker to give you endless goes at Wordle, and an army of slaves to feed you, clothe you, carry out ablutions and stop you from ever sleeping, it would potentially take you 137 days of non-stop input to crack the word combination. The odds are that you'd crack it long before then, which is a good thing, as sleep deprivation will send you round the bend long before Wordle will.
Let's Indulge In A Little Torment
Another in our series of extracts from an old long-form fiction I wrote for NANWRIMO a long time ago. CAUTION! Not full of rainbows and happy bunnies. More like thunderstorms and jugged hare.
‘
“Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord”,’ quoted the priest. ‘Not yours or mine, Louis. The temporal authorities deliver justice in
the present, the Lord delivers judgement for eternity. Do you really think that Eric Miller would
have been unpunished in the hereafter for his ghastly crimes?’
‘It’s hard, giving up a few
decades of religious dismissal overnight,’ replied Louis, combining disgruntled
guilt and apology.
The priest coughed, trying not to
choke on his tea whilst laughing. Louis
shook his head.
‘Oh – you might care to know that
another spirit came to visit yesterday. Calls
himself “Professor”. Bit of a
schoolteacher, he said I need to watch out for another spirit, an unpleasant
specimen they call Morgan.’
He anticipated a response from
the priest, who nevertheless did nothing.
Except sip his tea.
‘I got a sort of condensed
lecture about what evil spirits do.
Possession, mind control, attacking people with second sight.’
Having finished his tea, the
priest’s tobacco-less pipe came out again.
‘Don’t mock, Louis. Possession causes terrible suffering to the
victim.’
‘Sorry. Yes, I can understand that. You get another consciousness imposing itself
on you. And from what I’ve been told,
any spirit that can stoop to that kind of activity is the essence of evil.’
The priest put his pipe away and
rooted in his pockets, eventually coming up with a set of rosary beads, a small
crucifix and a phial.
‘Here, take these. No, no, I insist. You need protecting, Louis, because you are a
rare and precious commodity. The last genuine seer was - ’
‘Anton Verbius,’ broke in Louis,
to the priest’s utter amazement.
‘Professor told me.’
‘Lord above!’ exclaimed the other
man, his huge eyebrows practically quivering.
‘So few people know that – Louis, I am persuaded once again of your
uniqueness. Yes, yes, entirely
true. Anton Verbius. From
You won't find many supernatural stories that involve Lithuanians. We like to mix it up a bit here, as you may have noticed.
Appropriately Wet
Good lord aloft, the weather! Yesteryon, up on the 18th Floor of the Dark Tower, one had a view across half of Greater Manchester, where to the south all might be fluffy white clouds and blue skies, whilst in the hills over Ur-On-The Roch - well, you couldn't see the hills thanks to low-lying cloud that blotted out the view with torrential rain.
ANYWAY back to the Underwater Photographer of the Year. Art!
Courtesy Enrico Somoyogi
Here you see a toad either being rude or - no, we'll give him the benefit of the doubt, it's a peace sign. He is actually climbing up the transparent dome Ol' Enri was using to protect his camera, enabling this gift of a shot.
Finally -
We've hit the Compositional Ton (upped to 1,200 words whilst we have "Tormentor" extracts present) so all I need to say is that, yes, I am having a day off, and no, you do not get two new posts today. I have World Domination to plot, for crying out loud!
* This, children, is the noise an old vinyl record made when the stylus scraped over the tracks instead of in them
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