Rotating Wings

I’ve fallen in love. I went flying in a gyrocopter last Saturday, and now I want one! I’m fond of helicopters, but they are expensive and complicated. Fixed wing pilots call helicopters ‘a cloud of metal fatigue around an oil leak.’ Helicopters  have become an expensive way for millionaire amateur pilots to kill themselves.

Autogyros, or gyrocopters look a bit like helicopters. They usually have one big rotor on top, and an engine at the back with a pusher propeller. But the likeness to the helicopter is superficial. The rotor is not mechanically driven, it spins like a windmill in the airflow. Borrowing an idea from nature and spinning sycamore seeds, falling gets them spinning and the spinning slows the descent by causing a little lift to be generated. In the autogyro the rotor is tilted up at the front. The engine pushes you along and forward motion keeps the rotor spinning.

If the engine should stop the impetus to go forward is reduced and the ‘gyro starts to descend, but the rotor keeps turning, it’s still being pushed around by the wind, so lift is still being generated. Engine failure on an autogyro is no big deal, the pilot still has directional control, and he can concentrate on picking out a clear spot for landing.

In a ‘gyro a near vertical landing can be achieved, unlike a glider which needs to keep moving forward in order for the wing to keep producing lift. The rotor of the gyro keeps producing lift so long as it’s turning.

The idea has been around since 1920 and for a while it seemed as though every home would have one. They fell out of favour when the helicopter proper came in. The pre-war gyro’s were as big as light planes, it was only after the war that technology changed.

Annette wrote a blog on James Bond last week and I dug out the DVD of ‘You Only Live Twice’. That’s the one where Q provides 007 with a miniature flying machine, the gyrocopter, Little Nellie, packed up in four suitcases. The script, BTW, was by Roald Dahl, who got a mention a few blogs back for adding Gremlins to the national consciousness.

The gyrocopter in the film, was flown by its inventor, ex-RAF pilot, Ken Wallis. During the war both the Germans and British had experimented with small Gyrocopters, or rather, rotary winged kites. Both of these design were looked at after the war when gyrocopter were developed for sport aviation.

The Germans had devised a compact observation platform which could be packed up and towed behind a U Boat, and the British design was intended to be towed behind a aircraft and then released. It would be used for dropping agents into enemy territory.

Nowadays both jobs could be tackled using parachute variations. Square, steerable chutes were developed for sport aviation in the 1960’s and adopted sometime afterwards by the military. Now Special Forces personnel train to perform high altitude, covert, free fall drops into enemy territory. The aerodynamic ram air chutes are manoeuvrable and quite different to what was available in the 1940s.

Q has fitted Little Nellie out with various devices, to make it an airborne version of the Aston Martin. On the DVD commentary track Ken Wallis, who had worked on aircraft missile firing trials, grumbles about the way a cluster of miniature missiles are fired simultaneously. He knew that in reality they must be fired in a stream for best accuracy.

That's the movies for you, always taking liberties with the truth, but just to show that larger than life characters are not just found in films, Ken, born in 1916, was still flying his autogyro at the age of 90!

Essential Music

It would be hard to overestimate the importance of music in our lives. Since the earliest times great efforts have gone into making music, and reproducing it. For centuries the leading edge of technology has been used to reproduce music as faithfully as possible. Modern methods record and replay sound but mechanical methods of producing music go back to the 9th century.

The principle of recording the notes to be played, rather than the sound produced, has been applied in various ways. Chiming clocks and musical boxes use mechanical means to record the data. A favoured method, still in use today, utilises a drum which rotates. Pegs stick out of the drum and strike or pluck the notes.

Similar to the pegged drum are perforated metal discs which allow for easier storage of more software. Techniques borrowed from the Jacquard loom, led to the player piano with its paper roll. These were initially produced by manually punching out the notes, the music to be played had to be worked out in advance, then realised in the workshop. Then, around 1900, techniques for recording an actual performance of a keyboard player were devised.

Recording methods were gradually improved. One of these, the Duo-Art, recorded a four bit binary code, representing loudness, on to the paper roll. The Duo-Art ‘expression box’, was a mechanical servo system which decoded the binary data and converted it to 1 of 16 volume levels. A new volume level was set every 1/60th of a second.

In the picture, the musician, at the keyboard of a recording piano, is working with a recording producer who is adjusting the levels. There was an extensive post recording process where the producer could rework, and tidy up the recordings. Eventually an edited master would be signed off by the musician and the producer and mass production would begin.

With lots of 'software' available ‘Player Pianos’ became very popular. The family would congregate around the piano and someone would work the foot pedals. These drew the paper roll through its reader, and provided the energy to strike the notes. Sometimes the paper roll would have song lyrics written on it as well, and these would come into view as the roll was drawn through the machine, much like a karaoke machine.

A device known as a 'Piano Player' was made, these could turn a normal piano into a recording player. Concerts were sometimes staged where an orchestra played along with a virtual pianist recorded on paper. In 1985 Rudolph Granz made a posthumous performance using this method, playing along with the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra. This puts a different spin on 'live performance'.

While few self respecting middle class homes lacked a piano, automated or otherwise, the super rich needed something better. For the very wealthy, with lots of room, orchestrions was produced. Often centered around an automated pipe organ, orchestrions added automated drums, automatically fingered violins and often animated figures. This detail show part of an orchestrion for playing a violin.



Smaller orchestrions were installed in pubs and café’s These machines were very robust and could play a variety of music with the ‘software’ often on books of fan fold card pages.

With such sophistication, small wonder that recorded music, rather than recorded sound, held sway for so long. Before the invention of electronic amplification mechanically recorded sound was scratchy, tinny and low in volume. Devices such as the orchestrion could reproduce very high levels of sound. Moreover, some music prepared for these mechanical musicians was so involved that it is too difficult for a human to play.

The precision technology of the mechanical servos was robust and versatile. Engineers found alternate applications for it. One American company, The Link Piano and Organ Factory of Binghamton, NY started out manufacturing player pianos and organs. Ed Link, son of the man who founded the piano company, adapted player piano pneumatic servo systems and used them in the Link pilot trainer. Thousands of these were built for pilot training and, in somewhat modified form, as fairground rides.

The Link trainer with its vestigial wings.

The Binghampton company, now CAE Link, is still making simulators. In the movie Apollo 13, the Link logo appears on the side of the Lunar Lander simulator. Though by the 1960's Link had abandoned pneumatics and taken to using digital computers with electronic servo systems.

By the 1950's sound recording with electronic amplification had finally started to catch up. Scratchy 78s gave way to 45s and magnetic tape. These in turn gave way to digital recording. But the old player piano technology has a modern counterpart. MIDI is a digital protocol that allows computers to exchange control information with electronic instruments and mixing equipment. MIDI can also be used to cue stage lighting, effects and animation. An entire performance, of electronic instruments, can be recorded as MIDI cues and reproduced note for note. As such it makes a good modern analogy to a player piano roll.

Music, as close to the cutting edge of technology as anything humans do. How did it ever become so important? Sounds like a topic for a future blog.

Link trainer
Player Pianos

Hunting in the dark

These two hunters use echo location to find their quarry. But the bat is more sophisticated in extracting information from the returned echoes than the equipment in the aeroplane. This implies no disrespect to the engineers who designed the radar in the Junkers. In an intense, darwinian struggle of barely 5 years, through move and countermove, German, British and American engineers devised most of the techniques of what is now called Electronic Warfare, EW.

The equipment in the aircraft could determine the distance to a target with some accuracy, but the direction could only be discriminated with an accuracy of about 5 degrees. Bats, on the other hand, (and here I’ll speak of the characteristics of various species, not just the Horseshoe bat in the picture) can also extract Doppler information. Doppler is used to determine the speed of a target, by measuring how much its motion has changed the frequency of the returned echo. In 1940 the Doppler effect had been known of for a 100 years but it took the Hamburg campaign, Operation Gomorrah, before radar engineers exploited it. The raids, in July 1943, a week of intense air attacks, night and day, was the most effective strategic bombing effort that the RAF were ever to carry out.

The effectiveness of the attacks was largely due to the deployment of a new EW measure, chaff. Both Germany and Britain had known that by dropping bundles of metal foil, of the correct size, they’d be able to create havoc on radar. Both sides resisted using it, in case their opponents hadn’t already thought of it. But in 1943, Harris, commander of the RAF bomber force, was given permission to use chaff in the Hamburg attacks. Huge amounts were dropped making the actual aircraft indistinguishable to the radars of the day.

For once the bombers were able to deliver a crushing blow. Largely unhindered by radar controlled flak guns and night fighters the bomber force was able to bomb with uncommon accuracy. Very large fires were started and losses on the ground were huge. Hamburg was considered by both the allies and Germany to be a major event. But the bombers were never able to be as effective again, just 4 months after Hamburg Germany had come up with a countermeasure.

The countermeasure was doppler discrimination. Doppler is used by bats to distinguish between moving prey and stationary trees. They detect the small changes in frequency of the received echoes. The bigger the frequency change, the greater the speed of the target. The same phenomena effects radio frequency echoes. Dropped chaff falls straight down, unlike the bomber stream which had a cruising speed of around 200 mph.  In response to Hamburg, German radars were modified to distinguish moving targets by detecting the doppler shift. They were able to sort out the targets, from the chaff.

But bats can do even better, the Doppler effect of the particular motion of the wings of a prey can characterise the returned echo. Some bats use this to distinguish between different species of insects. By the end of the war electronics had caught up with bats and was able to do this too, and use the modulation effect of spinning propellers to help identify types of potential target.

Biologists talk of co-evolution, where the development of a new trait in one species influences the evolution of another. Some species of moths have evolved a sensitivity to the calls of a particular bat’s echolocation. They use it to take evasive action. This too has it’s airborne counterpart with aircraft using directional receivers that ‘listen out’ on the known frequencies of enemy radars. Physics restricts what frequencies can be used and the trick is for the hunter to keep changing frequencies. It turns out that bats too, in their need to keep one step ahead of the moths have learned to frequency hop, in order to pre-empt the moths sensitivity to the usual sound.

Bats exploit frequency sweeping, changing the note of the burst of sound they emit in order to more accurately determine the range to the prey, accuracies of under a millimetre are possible. Electronic implementations of these techniques, using modern systems are very software intensive. They require a wealth of intensive, maths heavy, code. Yet the bat has evolved a nervous system that is quite capable of cracking the same problem.

Is there anything humans have come up with that hasn’t already been achieved by bats?  Bats seem to be lone hunters while radar equipped nightfighters receive guidance from the ground. Nowadays we have airborne networks with fighters, dedicated radar warning aircraft and ground stations all exchanging data continuously and automatically. I’d be surprised  if it turns out that bats ever figured out how to hunt in cooperation, analysing echoes when the position of the transmitter is unknown could be just too difficult for nature.

But evolution has come up with some pretty amazing things. Watch out, if it turns out that a study on bats, or any of the other creatures that use echolocation suddenly disappears from view. Maybe the men in black have confiscated all the copies! It could just be that nature came up with something that man as only just go around to understanding, and now engineers somewhere are keen to copy it and work it into a new weapon system, before the other guys do.

WW2 German airborne radar
Dyson, Disturbing the Universe
Bat echolocation

Conscious, but only of the past.

Yesterday Colum took me to task, for him a bandwidth of 20 bits per second seems too slow for consciousness. These numbers are quoted in The User Illusion by Tor Norretranders, and were established nearly 60 years ago. In fact, several different figures are quoted, and for some tasks the consciousness did even worse. The task of proof reading, for example, is performed at 18 BPS (bits per second), while piano playing is done at 23 BPS. It seems possible that some jobs lend themselves to being ‘automated’, as it were, and are speeded by well practiced, unconscious skills. On the basis that a picture is worth a thousand words there are some more diagrams, and further notes here.

It is important to consider only tasks that MUST be performed consciously. Many activities, like driving and changing gear, become so practiced that the consciousness does not need to participate. Driving is quite different in the early stages, those first attempts at clutch and brake control were much harder, took longer and took up all of the resources of the conscious. Once the skill is learned most of the donkey work is delegated to the unconscious. Once you’ve learned to drive you can drive AND listen to the radio. The conscious has been freed up for other things.

It’s also worth remembering that in the case of emergency those practiced unconscious reflexes are in charge. They must be, not only is the conscious limited in capacity, or bandwidth, it’s also lagging behind the unconscious in time, and way behind reality.

Experiments described here seem to show that the conscious lags behind perception by around half a second. We might expect some delays while objects in the field of view are evaluated and decisions are made, but consciousness, whatever it is, even lags behind when everything that is going on is internal, in our heads.

What this means is that any decision we might make is not revealed to the consciousness until around half a second after we’ve decided to do it. The decision takes place, and conscious recognition of the decision takes place around 500mS later.

This doesn’t mean that we are not creatures of free will, just that our recognition of it lags behind by around half a second. But we’ve grown accustomed to it, our unconscious mind works much faster, so it’s the unconscious that drives the car, thank goodness, the conscious just can’t keep up.

What we call consciousness, just seems to be a recognition of what we have decided, it doesn’t seem to be an essential part of the process.

In my rather facetious attack on HDTV, I intentionally left out a key point. The actual experience of reality, even the reality of watching a movie, is very different to our memories. Memories, no matter how cherished, can’t equal the richness of the actual experience. The conscious, when editing and storing our memories must leave out much of the experience. What is felt during the actual deed, as it’s happening, will be more intense than anything we can possibly recall.

The richness of the actual experience are what those 20 million bits per second of HDTV are trying to reproduce.

So is the conscious involved in editing and laying down memories? I think it must be, massive amounts of information, events that happen to us are edited out and lost. Why should they be remembered? All the automatic learned skills that we use, day to day, serve no useful purpose by being recalled. What took place on the journey, road conditions, stops for petrol, etc are rarely worth memory space once you've claimed your expenses. If, on the other hand, you stop for petrol and in doing so meet the love of your life, you’ll remember it for ever. But, it is only in retrospect that the true importance of an event can be recognised. If that love turns out only to be a passing fancy, over a longer time that recollection too may fade.

This is what Daniel Dennett describes as the Orwellian model, described here, where history, in our memories, is re-written in the light of current events and priorities.

Intentionally editing memories, BTW, which can mean just removing painful ones, as in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, seems to be getting a little closer, as related here.

The Bandwidth of Conciousness

Anyone contemplating buying a high definition TV might like to consider the following, one crucial part of the system will always operate at a much lower data rate than whatever device you select and carry home from the store. - The human consciousness, that part of the chain which actually experiences and recalls those movies has a data rate much, much lower than the TV. Tests have shown that the conscious experience runs at little better than 20 bits per second. Compared to HDTV which brags about data rates of 10 million bits per second.

Of course, the manufacturers of modern audio visual systems claim to deliver an experience much closer to reality than earlier models. What we call experience includes a welter of unconscious sensation. All this enriches things but what we remember of the event is what has fallen into the domain of the conscious mind. The conscious seems to be responsible for evaluating what we see and hear and what we remember.

The unconscious mind IS engaged, turning what is imaged on the back of the retina into objects and the sounds heard into speech. The conscious, takes all that, edits our experience and saves the highlights. In which case, why not cut to the chase and just live the highlights. Is there a way?

Ace SF writer Philip K Dick conceived the idea of missing out the expensive, and often largely boring parts of experience. In, We can remember it for you, wholesale. a travel agency supplied only the memories, and a few souvenirs, of pricey tourist jaunts to Mars.

Now back in the early days of TV, the supporters of radio liked to say that the pictures, on radio, were better. Listening or reading a well written narrative invokes pictures in the head. And I'm remind that those first, text only, computer games were pretty engaging.

The data rate of reading is very close to the measured data rate of consciousness. But during reading the experience is subtly different. Watching a movie, or in real life, the unconscious mind reduces a wealth of audio visual events to a narrative that the conscious can follow. When reading the conscious induces mental images which illustrate the narrative internally.

In reading too, part of the unconscious IS engaged, first taking the printed word and converting it to an internal voice. This seems much like the voice of conscious, that internal narrative that produces a commentary on all the richest parts of actual experience.

So the message is, don’t waste your money on HDTV. A writer sat down, and dreamed up a story, it’s been filmed, distributed and shown on your TV. Then, assuming it turns out to be memorable, your brain converts it back to a narrative, and finally to a set of memories,

Now let’s face it, you could have got there sooner and cheaper by buying the book, and the book would last longer.

The User Illusion

Friend (verb)

Almost everyday I see FRIEND used as a verb. As in I’ll FRIEND you on facebook. None English speakers may find the English practice of 'verbing' nouns confusing.  This kind of thing happens in English, but is strictly forbidden in German and would swiftly invoke action from the syntactic police who are authorised to use, if necessary, deadly force to ensure the use of the verb BEFRIEND.

BEFRIEND doesn't work for Facebook. BEFRIEND implies a casual encounter at the vending machine, maybe a little assistance freeing a sticking bag of crisps, or an exchange of views on the price of gummy bears. BEFRIEND is not for someone that you actually give a shit about. But FRIEND (verb) doesn’t have a past form that feels right. One might say, I ‘FRIENDED you, but it sounds infantile.

A more radical approach would be to say: I FROUEND you on Facebook. This copies the: I fight, I fought, form but is still longwinded. Another variation, as in I drink, I drank, could give: FRAEND, which looks pleasingly medieval. Better still is FRUEND, which seems rather Freudian, which immediately makes it sexy.

I don’t generally sweat the conjugation of verbs but I do have a song in the Country and Western genre waiting to be written. Some of you may have heard my previous haunting ballad: I’m selling my dentures on EBAY because I don’t need to smile anymore.

The new number, which will doubtless be in the Country charts just as soon as this thorny linguistics matter is clarified will go something on the lines of, I FRIENDED my daddy on facebook, now I chat with him in heaven everyday.

Gremlins

This week Annette has been writing about gremlins. Gremlins found their origins in the wartime RAF. These are discussed in The Gremlin Question, an evocative bit of writing on the subject from the RAF Journal, 1942
Included, in full, is the following song,  no doubt ‘sanitised’ for its appearance in print.
When you're seven miles up in the heavens,
(That's a hell of a lonely spot)
And it's fifty degrees below zero
Which isn't exactly hot.
When you're frozen blue like your Spitfire
And you're scared a Mosquito pink
When you're thousands of miles from nowhere
And there's nothing below but the drink
It's then you will see the Gremlins...

Gremlins were blamed for weird failures that occurred in the air, but were not reproducible on the ground. As aircraft became more complicated these problems became more common, but the squadron that produced this song seems to have been especially bothered by them. There are several clues why. They were a photo reconisance unit, and the pink Mosquitos and blue Spitfires flew as high as the technology of the day permitted. The song says seven miles but the best Mosquitos could make it up to 42000 ft. As mentioned in the song, it gets pretty cold up there.

There we have it, cold soak an aeroplane and parts start to shrink and jam. Back on the ground, at normal temperatures, a sticking part will often free up again.

Weird things can happened on the ground too, when the Supermarine company was ramping up Spitfire production, prior to the Battle of Britain. They installed new tooling. A jig for manufacturing wings was made with the framework bolted firmly to the factory floor. Yet wings made in this rock solid new fixture were found to vary in size. Some would fit snugly into the new fuselages being built alongside them, others would be too big or too small and had to be scrapped. Gremlins? No, the factory was built on the banks of a tidal river, on reclaimed land, and as the tide came and went the wing jig was distorted. High tide wings came out different to low tide wings.

No wonder that the RAF thought the gremlins were working for the opposition.

The writer Roald Dahl served in the wartime RAF. After seeing combat in Greece he was sent, in 1943, to serve with the British Air Attaché in Washington. While there he wrote about gremlins and presented Walt Disney with the idea for a movie about them. After this, gremlins became part of the fantasy vocabulary.

They still retained an attachment for aircraft though. There’s a Twilight Zone episode from 1960, starring William Shatner, who sees a gremlin on the wing of a plane creating mischief around the engine.

So, now that gremlins have been outed, are we safe from them? I doubt it. The folds and wrinkles of software systems offer massive scope for gremlins. In fact, there is probably a whole sub-species of gremlins just there to invoke problems around data arrays. These are probably the count-from-zero, count-from-one gremlins who hang around multi-platform systems just waiting to strike.

The Thames Barrier is a safety critical system which just has to work when called for. The control system, on the insistence of the designers, has been implemented completely without software.

On safety critical systems, when software MUST be used, it is tested extensively then changed as little as possible. What is arguably the greatest engineering achievement of our civilisation, the moon landings of forty years ago, were carried out with the minimum of flight rated software. What software was used, not much, was stored in such a way as to be almost impossible to change.

Even so, the gremlins still managed to strike. Defeated on the software front they went back to tampering with hardware. The famous Apollo 13 problem, caused in part by up rating the heater coil in a liquid oxygen tank from 28 volts to 110 volts, and not changing out a switching relay, could have been fatal. As we all know, some very smart guys saved the day. On that occasion the gremlins were trounced, but you can be sure they are still out there. Lurking, inside any machine more complicated than a bottle opener.

Oh no, it's not SF

I was listening to Margaret Atwood discussing her new book, Year of the Flood. She is insistent that it is NOT science fiction. I was reminded of Salman Rushdie who almost broke out as an SF writer, his first published novel, Grimus, is regarded as fantasy SF. Apparently, efforts were made to stop it being nominated for an SF prize, lest Rushdie be stigmatised, poor thing, as an SF writer!

So how did SF find itself in the ghetto? Or rather, back in the ghetto. For a while SF was pretty respectable. Following it's beginnings in the pulp arena, alongside westerns, detective fiction and war stories it gradually became respectable. For a while though, literary critics took to referring to SF has the 'literature of ideas', a polite way of excusing the apparent lack of the traditional literary preoccupations with dialogue and character. Indeed, many SF classics survive quite well on a bloody good idea, not much else, and still manage to be engaging enough to keep you reading to the end.

Later, of course, the likes Ballard, Bradbury and, indeed Margaret Atwood herself brought respectability and even the praise of literary critics to SF.

But these days SF is, again, 'beyond the pale' and anything whole heartedly regarded as being SF is not going to be considered serious writing.

Why is this? And does it matter?

First things first. The SF 'genre' is now shaped by movies and TV. The growth of the SF, massive budget movie/TV market has meant that SF and fantasy movies are a huge industrial investment. And when the money comes in so does marketing, branding and risk management. These kind of corporate buzzwords don’t invoke thoughts that what is being produced in any way resembles art. It’s a business, requiring risk mitigation. It may still be entertaining, and for sure, that guarantees it’s not literature.

No matter that producing a movie is a long way from the lone author crafting his unique and solitary vision. Hollywood has hijacked the SF brand. So now Ms Atwood must talk of writing Speculative Fiction, not Science Fiction, less she ends up in the bookstore alongside all those Dr Who spin-offs.

Now in some ways it doesn’t really matter how stories are categorised. That’s a problem for bookstore inventory management. But it does matter if people forget what SF does best. Anybody who has tried writing soon discovers that the SF writer has a big challenge that the mainstream writer doesn’t, he has to portray the unique world that his story occupies, and quickly. It’s a lot of effort, so why bother?

Here’s why. SF and only SF has the licence to put you in a situation where, for example, you’ll follow a human with his IQ is doubled. What might that be like? Who else can go there but the SF writer? Not Alan Bennett, not F Scott Fitzgerald, not, well name your literary giant of choice.

Is it important? Yes, it is. It took Daniel Keynes great skill and quite a lot of tenacity to write Flowers for Algernon and maintain his vision despite the editors who wanted to Hollywoodise it, and give it a happy ending. And by golly, it is SF and only SF. That’s nothing to be ashamed of, dear Ms Atwood, and Mr Rushdie.

The real culprits are probably the teams marketing them, no matter, I can't address them, it's Atwood and Rushdie on the book cover!

Empires of the mind

The full quote is from Churchill. 'The empires of the future are empires of the mind.'

To an aspiring fantasy writer creating empires of the mind is the goal. After all, isn't writing a matter of stringing words together in such a way that images, worlds even, are created in the mind of the reader?

Of course, it's one thing to aspire quite another to succeed. Building the skills to achieve that goal takes time and practice.

Steven King, of whom I am not a fan, does say one thing that resonates. 'It's necessary to write a million words of b****x first before you can get to write the good stuff.' One reason to write a blog. Somehow or other you've got to write that one million words first, (some people say two million).

With that in mind, be advised, not all the following will be of quality.