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Muniment #006

Votes in Spaaaaaace!

Welcome to the sixth issue of Muniment! In this issue we'll talk about life, liberty, and the pursuit of random thoughts. We'll also cover voting on the Space Shuttle, and explain why there was such a long break between this issue and the last one.

It's Turtles All the Way Down


Imagine a universe. You're seeing it from the outside, but you can zoom in.  Down you go, through galactic superclusters, galaxies, spiral arms, star systems, planets, continents, cities, buildings, rooms, people, right into their thoughts. That's Nested, a 'Simulation of Everything' by Orteil, which I found via this great article at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Nested's pretty fun to play with, you should definitely take a few minutes and see what you can find. By embracing the limitations of the chosen medium (a phrase or line of text), Nested gets to do what games like Spore aspired to (a procedurally generated galaxy), but faster, more accessibly, and more directly. It really feels like something's going on in there, even though it's just a bunch of random text snippets. Our imaginations add the rest.

If you haven't checked out the gorgeous space exploration sim and indie darling No Man's Sky, it exists in a similar vein, though with a big focus on being pretty.

Govern or be Governed?


Last Friday my buddy Jon Lebkowsky put on his first Austin Future Salon, a round-table discussion of the future with a suitably diverse set of Austin folks. After introductions, Institute for the Future affiliate Jake Dunagan talked to us about the IFTF's Governance for the Future toolkit, a CC licensed set of cards designed to guide a group of people through the process of designing a government solution from scratch. The IFTF ran a ReConstitutional Convention with the toolkit, the results of which you can read online.

There are some game-type elements to the IFTF's process, and it got me thinking of a game I bought a while ago but haven't had a chance to play, FreeMarket. FreeMarket's a transhumanist role playing game set on a space station where you have to decide what to do in an environment lacking for want. I haven't played it yet, but from what I've read, it's hard. Not hard because the game is difficult, but hard like designing a new government is hard, because the problem space is so broad, there is no right answer, and progress is difficult to quantify. Fortunately these are game-design problems, so hopefully we can keep getting better at them, and as we do, we can all get smarter about what kinds of government we need for the future.

I'm really looking forward to the next EVE Online style game where in addition to player factions and trade guilds and galaxy-spanning coalitions, you have real game-system support for government and the rule of law. Game companies are already hiring economists, maybe they'll be hiring political scientists and legal scholars next.

Like Minority Report, But In Space


Let's say you have a 2 thousand ton space plane that you're going to launch into orbit with a bunch of brave souls on board, and then bring back to Earth. Needless to say, the whole craft is too complicated and things happen too quickly for a person to manually control it, so you need a computer. But as we can personally attest, computers in space have problems.

How do you create the most dependable control system possible in a hostile environment? In the space shuttle's case, you put in a bunch of computers, and let them act like committee and vote. You can read the fascinating (if technical) story from NASA, but the gist is that the Shuttle carried 5 computers scattered throughout the vehicle (plus an un-powered spare in some early missions).  Four of the computers were running the exact same code and connected to all the control points on the shuttle at all times (the fifth was a backup only loaded with ascent/descent programs).  The computers were synchronized together, received identical inputs from sensors and control systems, and ran identical copies of the flight control software. The actuators, where the flight control systems decisions would result in actions, would poll the inputs and pick whichever input was the most common. Ergo, if one of the computers started to misbehave, the actuators would ignore it, because they would still be getting correct data from three other computers. Since there were four, you could pull one of the computers out of the voting pool, and still have a valid quorum. Powering off a bad computer required human intervention in order to prevent a software cascade fault, but the computers constantly compared notes between themselves, and sounded the alert when they didn't agree. Quadruple computer systems like this were estimated to only have failures resulting in a lost of craft four times in a thousand million flights. That's some system engineering.

After you've read NASA's history page, here's another fascinating site on space flight computers and avionics. In a small-world coincidence, the 16 person team I'm part of at HP has two engineers on it who worked on Shuttle and Station.

Wrap Up & Shout Outs


It's been a few months since the last issue of Muniment. Here's a short list of reasons (but not excuses):
- Jeff Kramer
Copyright © 2014 Jeff Kramer, All rights reserved.


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