Rainbow Cicada FAQ
Dec. 7th, 2006 03:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackQ. Shouldn't you incorporate these things into the story, instead of blogging about them?
A. Yes. But I don't know if I'll ever have a chance, so I'll record thoughts in one place where I can refer to them later, and maybe inform future writing. And then I might as well let other people see it.
Q. I don't understand the "RBOWCICADA" thing.
A. He displayed a clock showing elapsed time (in ticks, the smallest possible unit -- think instruction cycles or picoseconds, but left deliberately vague). He changed the display from base ten digits to wingding digits to base 26 ascii.
Q. And he'd arranged this channel of information beforehand?
A. No. He'd seen a similar trick somewhere else, and because the bomb was so accurate realised it could work here.
Q. Why Rainbow?
A. Because the picture had different coloured bands in, and because it sounded cool.
Q. Why Cicada?
A. Insects always sound cool. Also because Cicadas hibernate underground and then come up on schedule[1].
Q. What's with the image?
A. From Magic the Gathering, images unused on any cards as yet. Several of them just seemed nice, and crying out for a story. Restrictions breed creativity, so writing about something, however remotely, is good. I could have just left out the reference, but thought people might be interested.
Q. How much of the ideas are standard scifi and how much is yours?
A. A virtual world is a standard theme. Nothing that goes that far quite comes to mind, though. Egan plays with consciousness is probably what set me off.
A. Actually, can anyone think? Are there stories where the people are entirely virtual, instead of being brains in vats or copies of organic brains? Stories where a virtual world is the premise instead of the big reveal, and spend time examining what it would be like? Or, for that matter, any stories about aliens without humans?
Q. What *would* it be like?
A. Obviously many jobs would disappear. Entertainment would be big. Many hackers would be resolving problems and writing updated software. You are free to play with your own consciousness -- back yourself up, copy yourself, run several avatars at once, run at varying speeds. A basic trick is to have a pared down version vetting mail, lasting for a few seconds at a time, highlighting mail according to what the main personality wants to see. The main personality has legal protection. Sub-personalities achieving autonomy may petition for recognition.
Q. Is this set in the future? How did we become programs?
A. Not really. People being programs in a virtual world is just the way it is. Addressing that issue raises a whole host of questions like "would we?" so I decide to just concentrate on where we are.
Q. I liked this story, but wish it wasn't scifi. What else have you written?
A. Maurice Saldini, Gothique Investigature. Comic vampire detective story, Fairly long. One of my earliest and one of my best. http://semichrome.net/~jack/fic/saldini-24.html
A. How Fire Became. Very short. Pseudo-children's-story, similar to Ted Hughes and Rudyard Kipling's creation stories. A little funny. http://community.livejournal.com/camwriters/4563.html#cutid1
A. Graveyard Shift. Pratchett fanfic. Completely comic fantasy. Obviously best if you've read Pratchett, but some people said it was still understandable anyway. http://semichrome.net/~jack/fic/graveyardshift_3wm_a.html
[1] Rich: Factoid: Some Cicadas have long periods of hibernation -- prime numbers of years. Reputedly because any predator with a smaller cycle will rarely intersect.
A. Yes. But I don't know if I'll ever have a chance, so I'll record thoughts in one place where I can refer to them later, and maybe inform future writing. And then I might as well let other people see it.
Q. I don't understand the "RBOWCICADA" thing.
A. He displayed a clock showing elapsed time (in ticks, the smallest possible unit -- think instruction cycles or picoseconds, but left deliberately vague). He changed the display from base ten digits to wingding digits to base 26 ascii.
Q. And he'd arranged this channel of information beforehand?
A. No. He'd seen a similar trick somewhere else, and because the bomb was so accurate realised it could work here.
Q. Why Rainbow?
A. Because the picture had different coloured bands in, and because it sounded cool.
Q. Why Cicada?
A. Insects always sound cool. Also because Cicadas hibernate underground and then come up on schedule[1].
Q. What's with the image?
A. From Magic the Gathering, images unused on any cards as yet. Several of them just seemed nice, and crying out for a story. Restrictions breed creativity, so writing about something, however remotely, is good. I could have just left out the reference, but thought people might be interested.
Q. How much of the ideas are standard scifi and how much is yours?
A. A virtual world is a standard theme. Nothing that goes that far quite comes to mind, though. Egan plays with consciousness is probably what set me off.
A. Actually, can anyone think? Are there stories where the people are entirely virtual, instead of being brains in vats or copies of organic brains? Stories where a virtual world is the premise instead of the big reveal, and spend time examining what it would be like? Or, for that matter, any stories about aliens without humans?
Q. What *would* it be like?
A. Obviously many jobs would disappear. Entertainment would be big. Many hackers would be resolving problems and writing updated software. You are free to play with your own consciousness -- back yourself up, copy yourself, run several avatars at once, run at varying speeds. A basic trick is to have a pared down version vetting mail, lasting for a few seconds at a time, highlighting mail according to what the main personality wants to see. The main personality has legal protection. Sub-personalities achieving autonomy may petition for recognition.
Q. Is this set in the future? How did we become programs?
A. Not really. People being programs in a virtual world is just the way it is. Addressing that issue raises a whole host of questions like "would we?" so I decide to just concentrate on where we are.
Q. I liked this story, but wish it wasn't scifi. What else have you written?
A. Maurice Saldini, Gothique Investigature. Comic vampire detective story, Fairly long. One of my earliest and one of my best. http://semichrome.net/~jack/fic/saldini-24.html
A. How Fire Became. Very short. Pseudo-children's-story, similar to Ted Hughes and Rudyard Kipling's creation stories. A little funny. http://community.livejournal.com/camwriters/4563.html#cutid1
A. Graveyard Shift. Pratchett fanfic. Completely comic fantasy. Obviously best if you've read Pratchett, but some people said it was still understandable anyway. http://semichrome.net/~jack/fic/graveyardshift_3wm_a.html
[1] Rich: Factoid: Some Cicadas have long periods of hibernation -- prime numbers of years. Reputedly because any predator with a smaller cycle will rarely intersect.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-07 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-07 04:17 pm (UTC)tune2fscould be used to set the mount count directly.The trouble is that that doesn't set them permanently out of sync: it only sets them out of sync for as long as all reboots are clean. The moment there's a non-clean reboot, all the filesystems get checked at the same time, and all the mount counts synchronise.
If there were a single flag which distinguished a non-clean reboot from a clean one, it would be a simple matter to re-establish the skew after restoring from a non-clean reboot. But instead, there's a separate flag on each filesystem, so you also have to cope with strange cases in which subsets of the filesystems have been uncleanly unmounted.
Probably the best option would be to have the startup scripts check the mount counts of all the filesystems after the initial
fsck, and if any two are in sync, perturb them in whatever seems like the most appropriate way. But I didn't think of that at the time, and in any case it's a lot of personalised effort to have to go to for what ought to be a fairly normal thing to want to do. Setting the max mount counts to be coprime gave me 99% of the effect for 1% of the effort and had bonus mathmo value :-)