A.C. Flory's Blog, page 107

Prodigal Son – by Laurie Boris

You’re welcome.

Smithing in Vokhtah – how to forge the links of a chain

The creatures of Vokhtah possess many ‘skills’ that owe more to fantasy than sci-fi, but their world is as real as I can make it, so here is some real blacksmithing that I had to research today:

Those who’ve read the first book about Vokhtah will know that the technology of the iVokh is somewhere between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age of Earth. They have Smiths who work starrock – i.e. rock that falls from the stars – in firepits. Of all the items crafted by the Smiths, two play a vital role in Vokhtan culture – timepieces and shackles.

I introduced the concept of a water-driven timepiece in book 1, and the following is a concept drawing of what such a timepiece [with extra ‘alarm bell’] might look like:

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In book 2, however, I’ll be introducing the idea of the shackles. Think old convict shackles like these:

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If you go searching for images of shackles, please be careful how you word your Google search. I learned some eye-opening things about bondage before I found the above image on Ebay. Apparently you can ‘Buy Now’ for $25.97 USD…

But after all that research, how much actually ended up in the story?

Not much. The one thing that truly hit me from the video was that without that shaped anvil, the calipers and the hammer, the blacksmith would have been struggling to make anything resembling a chain link. So how about my Smiths. Would they have possessed such specialised tools? Probably not, at least to start with. So my research boils down to half a sentence, shown in bold below:

The silence of the small chamber was broken by the clank of starrock as Tatah strained against the shackles that bound her to the cot. Held aloft by her huge, red wings, she thrashed from side to side in a vain attempt to break free, but neither the shackles nor the cot showed any signs of weakening.

Exhausted by her efforts and still not completely recovered from the Cut, she slumped back onto her belly and lay there gasping as her wings slowly deflated.

She was bitterly disappointed at not being able to free herself but was not surprised. She had commissioned the shackles at a time when she thought she could conquer the world, so her Smiths had been ordered to produce nothing but the best. They had taken her at her word, spending a year just to craft the tools they would need to forge the shackles. Then they had spent another year refining the starrock and forging it into a set of bindings strong enough to hold even the strongest Vokh.

Tatah had been delighted. But, of course, she had never dreamt that the shackles would be used against her…

Happy weekend all.

Neural lace – Innerscape comes one step closer!

Apologies but I’m high fiving myself like an idiot because of an article I just read in futurism.com:

https://futurism.com/within-the-next-decade-you-could-be-living-in-a-post-smartphone-world/

The whole article is interesting as it attempts to predict the near, medium and long term future of communications technology, but it was this paragraph that made me so happy:

This week, we got our first look at Neuralink, a new company cofounded by Musk with a goal of building computers into our brains by way of “neural lace,” a very early-stage technology that lays on your brain and bridges it to a computer. It’s the next step beyond even that blending of the digital and physical worlds, as human and machine become one.

The only thing I’m sceptical about is the time-frame. Tech that you carry and tech that you ‘wear’ is one thing, but tech that invades your brain is something else entirely. I’m sure there will be some maverick individuals who will ignore the risk and give the neural lace a try, but most of us will not jump in quite so quickly. Think desktop computers and the general public. The vast majority of people who use smartphones now either never learned to use computers properly or never felt comfortable with them – i.e. the gain did not negate the pain.

I think the concept of an in-built, brain-machine interface will be around for quite a while before some tech comes along that will make the interface, safe, painless and most of all, easy.

To me, easy is the operative word because, as a species, we always look for the line of least resistance. I just hope I’m still around when it happens as the next few decades are going to be very interesting indeed.

Ballet as you’ve never seen it before. :D

via Men in Tights — My OBT

Seriously, I’ve just spent two hours at My OBT, and I laughed and applauded the whole time. Simply brilliant. I’ve run out of superlatives.

Pesticides in the US and Australia

Chlorpyrifos is one of the most widely used pesticides on American farms, sprayed on everything from strawberries to soybeans. It’s cheap, and it works well; chlorpyrifos is derived from the same chemical family as sarin nerve gas, and kills insects by attacking their nervous system. But exposure to chlorpyrifos is also linked to brain damage…

via The US government is ignoring its own scientists’ warning that a Dow pesticide causes brain damage in children — Quartz

This article talks about a pesticide called chlorpyrifos, and the harm it can cause. Something that jumped out at me was this:

Pregnant women who lived near agricultural fields where chlorpyrifos was sprayed during their second trimester were three times more likely to give birth to a child who would develop autism, according to a study out of the University of California, Davis.

If there really has been a rise in autism, then perhaps chlorpyrifos is at least part of the problem because the residues on common food can do damage as well. A search for what kinds of foods are sprayed with chlorpyrifos in Australia led me to:

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These are the worst offenders when it comes to pesticides, including chlorpyrifos. These are commercially grown foods that we all eat. I almost cried when I saw strawberries, grapes and sweet bell peppers [capsicum] in that list. And potatoes?

I strongly recommend that you read the entire article, including the ‘Clean Fifteen’. These are fruits and vegetables that have the least amount of pesticide residue:

http://www.sgaonline.org.au/pesticides-in-fruit-and-vegetables/

As a final word, the EPA in the US wanted to ban chlorpyrifos, but new Trump appointee, Scott Pruitt, chose to ignore his own agency’s recommendation. Here in Australia we haven’t even gotten to that point yet. Pathetic.

Meeks

 

Filed under: Food glorious food Tagged: Australia, Autism, chlorpyrifos, EPA, neurological, pesticide, potatoes, Scott Pruitt, strawberries, US

The Rise of Vertical Farms (Infographic)

This….imagine if all of our useless skyscrapers could be converted to food production?!? -happy dance-

ALK3R

Vertical farming is letting us grow 100 times more food, in a green revolutionary design.

Here’s what you need to know:

View original post 2 more words

Filed under: Uncategorized

How to uninstall Intel Security Truekey when all else fails

[image error]Before I get to the ‘how-to’, a quick explanation: I downloaded the latest version of Adobe Flash, from the Adobe website. I was not shown an opt-out screen for the two applications bundled with Flash – i.e. McAfee and Intel Security Truekey. All three applications were installed on my pc as I watched in fury, unable to stop it from happening.

As soon as the installation finished, I immediately uninstalled McAfee via the Control Panel, but for some reason, Truekey did not show up at all, not as ‘Truekey’ and not as ‘Intel Security Truekey’. Yet there it was on my desktop, cosily installed on my pc.

I went online and found suggestions that did not work. If you are in the same boat here is what you do:

Go online and search for Intel Security True Key support in your home country. In Australia it’s – 1 800 073 267,
Ring, and when you finally get through to a tech, do not give them your email address – it is not necessary,
Do not agree to remote access support. Remote access means that someone, somewhere is given permission to get into your computer to fix it. Never, ever allow remote access because you have no way of knowing whether that access has been permanently closed or not,
DO ask to speak to a supervisor. It may take a few minutes but this is your right, especially if you did not want the application in the first place.
If the supervisor doesn’t offer it, demand a link to their software removal application. You will have to download it and install it on your pc, but you can check it with your own anti-virus application before you run it. The application I was given is called: MCPR.exe.

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I had to run MCPR.exe twice as the first attempt was not successful:

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After the first, unsuccessful attempt, I was told to restart my pc and then run MCPR.exe again. I did, and finally managed to get rid of Truekey completely, but I wasted a lot of time doing it.

To say that I’m angry is an understatement. Apparently there is an opt-out screen on which you can uncheck both McAfee and Truekey, BUT that opt out screen doesn’t always display. I know, because I found a lot of other angry people who could not opt out either. You’d think a company as large as Adobe could get something like that right, wouldn’t you?

Apparently not. And then, to add insult to injury, my research revealed that I didn’t need Flash in the first place! The only site I use regularly that did use Flash, once upon a time, is Youtube, and it doesn’t use Flash any more. There may be certain games that still require Flash, but the whole industry is moving away from it because of the constant security issues. That in itself should be a red flag.

So, my advice is to stay away from Adobe products like Flash unless you absolutely have to have them. And if you do download one of Adobe’s products, and become the victim of an unwanted application installation, don’t just shrug it away. User apathy is one reason these companies get away with behaviour that is one, small step away from malware.

Right, I feel a bit better now. Time to go make the Offspring’s birthday cake.

cheers,

Meeks

 

Filed under: How-to guides Tagged: Adobe, bundle, Flash, Intel, McAfee, no-opt-out, removal-tool, security, tech-support-number, Truekey

The problem with capitalism…in a ball

Unless you’re a golfer, you probably don’t think about golf balls. But a new US lawsuit about these little dimpled spheres has an economics lesson for all shoppers, showing why consumers have cause for concern when companies use court for sport. Costco, the wholesale membership club, rocked the golf world in 2016 when it started…

via A lawsuit over Costco golf balls shows why we can’t have nice things cheap — Quartz

The practice of Capitalism is more people-friendly than say, Totalitarianism, because it requires people to be consumers, and that is something people are happy to be. But to work properly, Capitalism requires the checks and balances of a healthy, competitive marketplace.

Using the law as a way to get rid of the competition may be ‘legal’ and ‘clever’, but it’s also a bully’s scam. The law is meant to be an equalizer, not a weapon. Frivolous legal action should have punitive consequences. While it does not, the law becomes complicit in the scam.

Perhaps I’m naive. Okay, I know I’m naive, but I did not expect the companies being bullied to accepted the inequity of their situation without protest. Excuse me? You’ve just lost your company for no good reason, and you grudgingly admire the tactic that made you lose?

Is this really the way we want our world to run?

In Australia, we have something called the ‘pub test’. If the common man in the pub thinks something stinks, then the authorities need to take action, even if it isn’t strictly illegal, because there’s the letter of the law, and then there’s the spirit of the law, and we all know the difference.

Meeks

Filed under: My soap box, Uncategorized Tagged: Capitalism, competition, corporate-bullying, justice, Law, litigation, patents, pub-test

Another post about a perplexing WordPress.com ‘feature’

I’ve had issues with the WordPress Reader in the past, but this latest one has me scratching my head. Have a look at how many screens I have to go through to comment on a post from the Reader:

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This is a screenshot of the Reader. Notice the function circled in red? Comments are definitely available.

So I click on the heading of the article to read what it’s actually about and get this:

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‘Share’, ‘Comments’ and ‘Like’ are still available, as you can see, but if you click on the ‘Comment’ function, WordPress just refreshes the page you’re on without allowing you to:

leave a comment or
see what other comments there might be.

You can, however, click the ‘Like’ function.

Something not shown in the screenshot [because it wouldn’t fit] is a very small link in the top right corner of the screen that says ‘Visit page’. I didn’t notice that link at first, and assumed that I was already on the page. But no. To get to the actual page, I need to click again, either on the ‘Visit page’ link or on the heading of the article.

Then and only then do I finally get to the poster’s blog where…glory be…I can leave a comment!

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And, of course, with all these clicks needed to simply leave a comment, you’ll have to click back just as many times.

Sometimes I surprise even myself…

Apologies if I’ve been less visible of late, but I’ve started writing again, and that tends to give me tunnel vision. The story I’m writing is the long delayed, next chapter of the Vokhtah saga.

The story of my psychopathic hermaphrodites languished for four years while I wrote Innerscape, but now they’re back, and I’ve had to re-acquaint myself with their world all over again. Part of that process was to do a backwards outline of the original story, and that’s where this post comes in. I’d actually forgotten that I wrote this preface to the Vokhtan to English dictionary:

Due to the radical differences between Vokh and human physiology, this sound guide is an approximation only. Where humans speak by forcing air past their vocal chords and then shape the resultant sound in the mouth, the Vokh and iVokh use their mouths for eating only. Their lungs are located in their wings, and they inhale and exhale through hundreds of small cilia on the leading edges of their wings, by-passing the mouth entirely. Thus the sounds they produce are akin to the multiple sounds produced by a pipe organ. Even pure sounds have a resonance human speakers cannot match.

Adding to the difficulty of accurately representing the Vokhtan language is the native speakers’ habit of deliberately distorting their speech with ‘chords’, in order to convey tone and inflection. Harmonious ‘chords’ – like the major 5th in human music – denote agreement, pleasure, delight etc. Discords, on the other hand, can imply a range of emotions from disbelief to contempt. Yet despite the musical quality of Vokhtan, neither the Vokh nor the iVokh have ever developed the concept of music.

Vokhtan for human speakers is further complicated by the fact that the spoken language also includes an array of scent cues produced in glands at the base of each cilia. These scent cues are aspirated with certain audible sounds to form a combined sound/scent amalgam. For example, in the word ‘Vokh’ the ‘h’ at the end represents both the sound of the aspiration, and the scent denoting respect or admiration, something humans are incapable of reproducing.

Please keep these difficulties in mind when attempting to speak Vokhtan.

lol – I really did spend a lot of time thinking about the Vokh and the iVokh. From 2004 to 2012 to be exact. There was so much to discover about them. I mean, they all have sharp claws, right, even the much smaller, less aggressive iVokh. But sharp, pointed claws tend to get in the way when you’re not killing something, so how were the iVokh supposed to craft anything?

The ladies reading this post will immediately recognize the problem of nails that stick out half an inch past the end of your fingers. So how did the iVokh manage? By doing what we do, of course. They squared off the tips of their claws. But wait…how would they have cut their claws? Clearly they would need tools of some kind. Not scissors, no, but something like a small nail file perhaps. Except that nail files don’t grow on bushes. The iVokh would need Smiths to make the nail files, and the Smiths would need metal of some sort…

And so it went. Every idea came with its own baggage of pre-requisites, and each day of writing revealed some new discovery. It was an exciting time, but that was then. Now, I have to relearn all these tiny, yet important details so I don’t make any horrible mistakes, like saying that one iVokh punched another.

The iVokh certainly fight, but not with a clenched fist. Why? Two physiological reasons:

Even with their claws blunted, striking with a clenched fist would drive the claws into their own palms, and
Both iVokh and Vokh hands are quite weak in comparison to the rest of their bodies. They do have opposable thumbs, but they only have two fingers, and those fingers are long and spindly. A punch would probably break the whole hand.

And these are the little things that I have to learn all over again. If anyone’s interested, I’ve been trying to do a graphic of the hand. Still very much a work-in-progress, but here it is:

[image error]

cheers

Meeks

 

Filed under: Vokhtah Tagged: Alien, biology, hermaphrodites, physiology, psychopaths, Research, science-fiction, two-fingers, Vokhtah, world-building, writing