The key to happy Ness monsters

Muscle wire.”

“What?”

“Muscle wire.  Do you have any muscle wire?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  The man standing beside her looked at her strangely.

Guin sighed.  She had temporarily accepted an assignment to escort a group of tourists off-base.  During their excursion to the nearest overlook, nicknamed the Loch Ness Monster due to the group of humps that seemed to loom out of the landscape as you drove up to it but gave a sweeping view back to their research outpost when you turned around on top, a torsion bar was torqued out of shape.

“Oh, if only…well, never mind.  I don’t think we’d have any in the lab.  Back on Earth, though…”

Every now and then, Guin recalled her younger years.  She smiled and laughed inwardly as a scene from her childhood, when she first had an inkling she wanted to be a mechanical engineer, flashed through her thoughts.

She was in the mountains visiting her grandparents.

Her father, who had grown up there, had warned her about the kind of folks that lived deep in the hills.

“Now, our family is mainly of the preaching kind, as you know.  But the other families don’t take too kindly to strangers, being drug runners, mainly ‘shine, but some of them have been known to grow the wacky weed, especially Pennsylvania Pure, said to be a direct descendant of crops raised by George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.”

Even down in the valley, where Guin’s father had raised her, the drug dealers lived nearby.

Once, when Guin was out mountain biking, she blew a tire and hitched a ride home from a nice boy with a really cool 4×4 Jeep.  The moment the Jeep pulled into the driveway, her father let loose two warning shotgun blasts in the air.

Guin yelled it was her so her father set down the shotgun, telling her to get out and the boy to take off.

“He’s one of those drug dealers I told you to stay away from.  He’s bad!”

Guin shook her head.  “No he’s not, Dad.  He gave me a ride home.”

“Well, don’t go near him again.”

Guin kept this in her thoughts as she pulled up into her grandparents’ driveway, honking her horn long before she got to the house.

Her grandfather met her at the door.  “Praise Jesus.  I was worried about you, child.  Your father said you’ve been hanging out with those bums in the valley.  Don’t you know they’re the devil’s brood?”

“Aw, come on, Granddad.  I just had a flat tire.”

“Well, you shouldn’t’ve.  You need to learn to fix a tire yourself ’cause if you go out riding around here and get a flat, you will not be coming back.”

Guin wondered why her grandparents, who claimed to be good Christians, were so quick to dismiss the very people who they should be preaching to.  Instead of asking, she noticed her grandfather had a can of of spray foam insulation in his hand.

“Whatcha got there, Granddad?”

“Oh, this?  Well, your grandmother noticed bugs getting into the laundry room.  I noticed a gap running along the line between the window and the wall, probably from the house settling all these years.  I’m going to spray some of this and fill the gap, hoping that’s where the bugs are coming in.”

“Granddad, you’ve given me an idea.”

“Yes, dear, what’s that?”

“Well, that spray foam’d make a great inner tube for my mountain bike tires, don’t you think?”

“That is a great idea.  I’ll save you some.”

“Thanks, Granddad.”

While Guin loosened the brake cables on her bike and removed the wheels, she looked at the brake cables and shocks.

Her thoughts wandered.  What if…

She covered the inside of the wheel rims with a thin coat of oil to keep the spray foam from sticking but left a thin line of the rim clean just inside where the tires would touch the rims, allowing the foam and tires to stick together and bond with the rims.  She slowly sprayed the wet foam along the inside of each tire and seated one at a time back on the wheel rim, letting the expanding foam dry out and form a fully-inflated tire tightly wrapped around the wheel.  She didn’t know how long the foam-filled tires would last but surely long enough for her to have fun biking around the old home place in the mountains.

She dug through the mechatronic play set her grandfather had given her for Christmas and pulled out the muscle memory wire kit.

The heat generated by her bike could activate the muscle wire.  With a tip actuator, she could use the heat generated by her brakes to…hmm…well, what exactly?  A recoiling strand of muscle wire, as part of a nitinol heat engine, could turn a pulley.  What would it take for the system to know if she was about to tip over her handlebars because the front brakes were locking up tighter than her back brakes and ease off pressure on the front wheel so she could still slow down controllably?

Guin’s grandparents wished her goodnight but Guin got out of bed after she heard them quietly snoring down the hall.

She snuck outside with her gear and biked down the road to one of the moonshiners’ hangouts, loudly announcing her presence in the middle of the night.

Needless to say, she was met by flashlights and rifles with hidden voices behind the blinding lights demanding to know who she was and what she was doing in the middle of dadgum night.

Guin explained who she was and the guns lowered.

She further explained why she was there and the lights motioned her on into the barn and down into the hidden chamber where the moonshine was being cooked.

One good thing about being herself, Guin knew how and when to hide her geekiness just long enough for guys to warm up to her good looks.  Most guys got a kick out of a preacher’s granddaughter saying that she liked a strong sip of good moonshine.

She passed on the bong of Pennsylvania Pure getting handed around.

After 15 minutes of shooting the bull, trading stories about high school and cruel principals who didn’t take a liking to mountain folk, Guin sauntered over to the moonshine still.  She paid close attention to the welding, how neat everything was put together.

“You fellows sure know how to assemble piping.  Any chance you have any soldering equipment I can use?”

One boy’s face lit up.  “Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

“Nathaniel.”

“Well, Nathaniel, is this your handiwork?”  She pointed at the temperature control gauge and electronic control board that was hooked up to the still.

“Yes’m.  My daddy taught me.  He went to trade school and all that.  Was working at the steel mill over in Pittsburgh back before all that was shut down or automated.”

“Can you show me how to operate your equipment?”

“What fer?”

“I broke my bicycle and need to fix it but I want to make it better than before.  Any assistance you could give me would be greatly appreciated.”

“You aren’t trying to steal my ‘shine recipe, are you?  A purty girl like you?”

“No, Nathaniel, I’m not.  I just want to get to know you and your kin better.”  She looked around the group of guys, a couple of them in their teens, three or four in their 30s and two of them in their 50s or 60s.  “Right now, I don’t see much difference between you guys and my brothers or my father and grandfathers.”  She shrugged her shoulders.  “They preach fire and brimstone.  You make white lightning from fire and piping.  Both of you want to make the world a better place from your point of view.”

The guys nodded in general agreement.

Nathaniel pointed toward the back of the room.  “Over here, then.”

“Okay, I’ll get the rest of my gear.”  Guin climbed the ladder and walked over to where she had been made to set her stuff down in the barn.

The memory seemed like yesterday.  Had it been decades?

Guin looked at her reflection on the side of the all-terrain vehicle filled with antsy tourists, some who’d paid a life’s savings for this trip to Mars.  She had paid dearly for a treatment of Syndrome X, “freezing” her body at the age of 40, more than a life’s savings, sacrificing some of her memory and all of her wealth on Earth in order for the biological parts of her body not to die of natural causes for many more decades, what her friends called the ultimate energy exchange.

She opened her thoughts to Lee and Shadowgrass who were leading a tourist group out to an old historic landing site.

Between the three of them, they mentally created a reconfiguration of the ATV to operate without the need for one torsion bar, recording a note to themselves to request an expedited repair bot not only for their domicile but one each of the latest generation bots for the tourist ATVs.  Guin applied their fix and drove on, wishing for a new repair but wishing more that she’d had time to design one herself.

The new bots contained their own smelters which could forge hybrid parts from just about any chemical found in Martian soil, allowing Guin, Lee and Shadowgrass to expand their exploration and free up time for research after the tourista bots were allowed to go back into operation once the latest supply ship had landed with much-needed irreplaceable parts.

At the top of the ridge, the tourists oohed and aahed, recording themselves together in small groups, drinking water replacement fluids and eating spicy snack treats exclusive to this tour.

Guin virtually handed out commemorative electronic stamps that were actually coded algorithms once called apps that could only be sent and activated from the geolocation of the Loch Ness Monster Overlook, the tourists choosing the colour schemes, soil/clothing smells, wind/walking sounds, and 3D background scenes to include with their immersive experience video that was included as part of their tour package.

Guin sent a silent smile and hug to her two “guys,” which they returned within microseconds.

To get this far with their development of the Martian colonies had cost them many close friends on Mars and lost time with family members back on Earth.

But it was worth every sol (Martian day) and marsec (Martian second).

Whatever it took, even a week of giving tours instead of time devoted to pure research.

They always had each other.

But how many women fully support the idea of a patriarchal system and want their men to rule the universe?

To get hit with the blinding headaches of a major sinus infection in the middle of summer (but during the coldest days in decades), hands shaking and body not able to sleep due to intake of suphedrine, Mucinex D and the usual cholesterol/blood pressure control medication is the least of my worries.

To be able to write stories, I must have a polyamorous and polysexuality thought set.

Being in love with the characterised versions of people I know whom I use as models is driving me mad at this point.

[Pardon me while I honk my nose.]

Rarely do the people match the characters I’ve created.

Rarely still do the people feel the way I do toward them as characters.

But sometimes it takes experimenting with the people and their emotions to give me better understanding of where I want to take the storyline.

Meanwhile, keeping two mapsets — one of reality and one of the science fiction fantasy mapped onto the reality — takes its toll on my sanity.

Throw in an attack on my body’s balanced health and the imbalance throws me off-kilter.

I am a rudderless boat caught in a horrendous storm.

Then, while drifting in and out of daydreams while my wife snores and the cats lickclean themselves while resting on my chest, a story emerges…

[NOTE: Amateurs plagiarise, professionals steal.]

My successful Kickstarter campaign for a 3D printer that’s connected to a computer program that creates a 3D-layered robot complete with 100-DOF motion and 3D built-in electronics which can repair/replicate itself using the 3D printer and eventually creates its own successful Kickstarter competitor for robots that create their own successful businesses, giving me residual revenue for copyright/trademark/patent purposes.

In my dreams, I find ways to build layers to protect me from my klutzy personality and its intersection with other sets of states of energy.

I admit that my polyamorous side is in love with many people right now and the only way to keep myself straight is to write myself a controlled situation in which we are all relatively happy in our cocooned thought sets as we encounter each other in fictional life.

Fortunately or unfortunately, writing these fictional tales here adds to the confusion when the plots seem to align with storylines taking place in what, for lack of a better phrase, I’ll call “real life.”

Sometimes, I hypnotise myself into believing that I can imagine a future which has almost completely aligned with real events and think I have made a prediction.

That is why I keep a calendar countdown which tells me sometime 13,410 days or revolutions of our mother planet from now, we will experience something that is related to our species establishing permanent colonies off-Earth.  It can be the Moon or Mars, preferably the latter, which followed in our species’ timeline of sending one of our electromechanical wonders outside of the solar system; I’d be happy with a human-populated space probe, too.

As they say, if you work hard enough on a goal, it becomes reality.

At the beginning of the year, when I weighed 244 pounds, I told myself that I wanted to weigh 225 pounds by the fall quarter.  Yesterday morning, on the 17th of August, I weighed 225 pounds.  Goal became reality because I believed I could reasonably reach the goal and worked diligently, slowly, with setbacks, frustrations and elations, to get there.

Which reminds me, why aren’t we working more diligently and telling our species about the ways we plan to capture/collect water on the Moon and Mars?

There aren’t enough water molecules in near-Earth orbit for us to capture but there are certainly places on the Moon and Mars for us to dig in the ground and/or “net” water from the air, if not generate water (or its equivalent (hint, hint)) using other processes.

Instead, using my “robotic” money-generating algorithms on the stock market, I am putting myself out of business by skipping Kickstarter altogether and going straight to the 3D-printer self-repair/replicate robot realised dream.

If only there was some way I could automate my polyamorous/polysexual storylines and get me out of the thought-mapping business!

But then, what would I do about my thoughts that pop up when I’m engaged in normal small-talk conversations with people whom I fear would not understand my verbalised thought maps in realtime, as they have in the past?

At 2:30 a.m. in the morning, I don’t have an answer to that question.  Best keep my tangentially-weird thoughts and ideas to myself and my closest friends, whom I fear more than most because their weird thoughts and ideas are even more amazingly complicated than mine!

Companionship and hugs

What if we offered hugs instead of bullets to resolve conflicts between the brothers and sisters of our species?

I stand here at the top of our driveway listening to a lawnmower, a clothes dryer, a chirping alarmist wren, and a cardinal but no insects or tree frogs and I wonder, thinking back…

I have worked on the logic decision trees of the U.S. Space Shuttle main engine controller, the U.S. Navy CASS, an infrared missile system for a Navy fighter jet, a sewer flow monitoring system, PC DSL home router/gateway system, digital KVM equipment, Zigbee-style wireless control systems and yet…

Here I am.

Am I better or worse, having left the world behind me in better or worse condition than I found it?

Have I been nicer or meaner than I could have to the people I’ve encountered in person and/or online?

The cardinals chasing each other in the woods can’t tell me.

The person mowing grass over in the next neighbourhood probably can’t say.

Dead people aren’t talking to me.

The bioluminescent fireflies aren’t signaling me any indication of the results of my behaviour that I can recognise – are there more or less of them because I don’t mow grass or don’t chemically treat the plants that grow in the front yard?

This weekend I spend time mentally reassessing who I was and who I want to be qualitatively, not just by the job assignments I completed for pay and medical coverage.

I want to finish the foundation of the legacy, the direction that my parents honestly intended for me as they struggled against my personality to raise me, and build with more loving companionship from my friends, family and acquaintances.

The time for the end of my midlife retirement, my six-year long meditative retreat, has arrived.

High school notes simmering on the back burner of life

I was bothered last evening by the lingering memory of intercepting a note passed between high school classmates 35 years ago.

Then it dawned on me that I used to work in the sewer rehabilitation industry where we were Number 1 and Number 2 in our business.

You needn’t understand what I’m joking about here — it’s just a personal thought recorded for posterity, remembering all the brown trouts I used to love to study to know the pipe shape/profile and speed of sewage in order to calculate the volume of material flowing through a sewer system, estimating any I&I and other aspects of what a municipality must anticipate when planning and maintaining a sewer treatment plant.

Being in love and sexual tension will keep you awake at night, too.

It’s not just the bills you have to pay because you’re un/underemployed that cause sleeplessness.

There’s the age-old argument of structural-vs-cyclical unemployment that can dog your thoughts at all hours of the day and night.

There’s also the ache and pain of separation anxiety.

That, my friends, is my problem right now.

At least here in this fictional universe, it is.

Maybe in reality, too.

I’ll keep you posted.

Time for a nap!

Don’t Fear the Robot

Boy, oh boy, was last night’s presentation a doozy?!

Dr. Goldfarb, a thin fellow, prone to blinking a lot, told us about his biomechanical engineering/science work at Vanderbilt University.

[Disclosure: I had the choice of Georgia Tech or Vanderbilt for my four-year U.S. Navy ROTC scholarship in 1980, which means I should be biased toward Vanderbilt, but I’m also a football season ticket holder for the University of Tennessee, an in-state sports rival to Vanderbilt, so it probably balances out.]

I took notes during the presentation, recording some of the technical details of the work performed at the Center for Intelligent Mechatronics by Goldfarb and dozen or so assistants (which he showed in a slide at the end of his presentation — looked like 11 males and 1 female, assuming their faces reflected stereotypical gender roles and none of them are cross-gender dressers like Bradley Manning).

After I returned home and ate my wife’s peach-glazed pork roast with sweet potatoes, I took a short jog around the neighbourhood, processing what Goldfarb’s research meant for me, a person who could, at any time, suffer a debilitating injury should a drunk/texting driver jump the curb and hit me before I have time to react.

What’s it like to lose a fully-functioning limb?

What’s it worth to put in the time to learn to use an artificial limb, one assisted by microprocessor-centred circuitry?

Goldfarb’s approach to prosthetic devices is the least-invasive — no tapping into the brain or surgically implanting electrodes in nerve/muscle tissue.

There’s a whole industry devoted to this type of technology and history has shown us that prosthetics are valuable.

We can take the humorous approach and think of Captain Hook or a pegleg pirate.

Humour is a valuable asset when coming to grips with the change in one’s physical capabilities while adjusting to becoming a more apparent cybernetic organism, cyborg or borg.

Goldfarb’s three main approaches to solving the problems of limb/nervous system functionality include prosthetic hand (Vanderbilt multigrasp hand), prosthetic leg (transfemoral prosthesis) and powered lower limb exoskeleton.

The state-of-the-art is always years behind science fiction fantasies.

I would wish our artificial limbs of today could operate mechanically as well as give complete skin/nerve cell feedback — hot, cold, soft, hard, calloused, sweating, etc.

But even more, I wish our artificial limbs could give us functions that are greater than the capabilities of our human counterparts, not just the boy-toy dreams of Iron Man or Avatar but something entirely outside of our current range of thoughts/emotions.

In the meantime, I encourage university researchers like Goldfarb to give people what they once had, including the young father who would like to walk to a bench seat and watch his son’s baseball team from the stands rather than from the wheelchair section; one who wants to walk down the aisle to marry his bride next August, perfectly happy with Goldfarb’s exoskeleton as it is today, but probably after bugs have been worked out and the design refined a little better for commercial use.

Speaking of which, Goldfarb said that the cost-benefit analysis of his designs show that the improved quality of life, active/reactive prosthetics reducing hospital visits because of falling down with the use of passive prosthetics, for instance, clearly offsets the initial cost of the prosthetic devices over time.

Do insurance companies agree?  Would the ACA condemn a person to a wheelchair his whole life or offer the chance of walking via exoskeleton?

Goldfarb thanked the NIH for funding some of the research at CIM.

There are hundreds of thousands of Americans — military amputees, car smashup victims, and stroke recovery patients — who can benefit from CIM’s research.  Imagine those in the rest of world who could also gain mobility?

I never hope to have to use prosthetics but look forward to the day I might, given what I saw and heard from Dr. Goldfarb last night.

Don’t Fear The Reaper

Walking through the ditch at the front of our yard, stepping up and over vinca (what my in-laws called graveyard vine), bending over to cut unwanted tree/bush/vine seedlings — varieties of privet, hickory, cedar, sumac, ash, elm, oak, trumpet creeper, honeysuckle — a song popped into thoughts already dominated by a different song and different thoughts detailed later:

Goodbye, no use leading with our chins
This is where our story ends
Never lovers, ever friends
Goodbye, let our hearts call it a day
But before you walk away
I sincerely want to say
I wish you bluebirds in the spring
To give your heart a song to sing
And then a kiss, but more than this
I wish you love
And in July a lemonade
To cool you in some leafy glade
I wish you health
But more than wealth
I wish you love

My breaking heart and I agree
That you and I could never be
So with my best
My very best
I set you free

I wish you shelter from the storm
A cozy fire to keep you warm
But most of all when snowflakes fall
I wish you love
But most of all when snowflakes fall
I wish you love

Those lyrics played over the previous song in my thoughts, “Everything is beautiful“:

Jesus loves the little children,
All the little children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
They are precious in his sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

Everything is beautiful in it’s own way.
Like the starry summer night, or a snow-covered winter’s day.
And everybody’s beautiful in their own way.
Under God’s heaven, the world’s gonna find the way.

There is none so blind as he who will not see.
We must not close our minds; we must let our thoughts be free.
For every hour that passes by, we know the world gets a little bit older.
It’s time to realize that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.

And everything is beautiful in it’s own way.
Like the starry summer night, or a snow-covered winter’s day.
Oh, sing it children!
Everybody’s beautiful in their own way.
Under God’s heaven, the world’s gonna find the way.

We shouldn’t care about the length of his hair, or the color of his skin.
Don’t worry about what shows from without, but the love that lives within.
And we’re gonna get it all together now; everything gonna work out fine.
Just take a little time to look on the good side my friend,
And straighten it out in your mind.

And everything is beautiful in it’s own way.
Like the starry summer night, or a snow-covered winter’s day.
Ah, sing it children!
Everybody’s beautiful in their own way,
Under God’s heaven the world’s gonna find a way.
One more time!
Everything is beautiful in it’s own way.
Like the starry summer night, or a snow-covered winter’s day…

While I bent over and stood up, bent over and stood up, weeding the ditch step-by-step so that the major/minor/variegated vinca would be the plant(s) of choice, I remembered a story Mom told me.

My mother’s parents kept a large garden in the back part of their small farm.

As any gardener knows, weeding a garden is a regular part of growing your own food — you can see it as a chore or as a delight.

One summer, my grandparents took Mom out west in the late 1940s, traveling parts of Highway 66 and getting all the way to California from Tennessee.  The trip took a month to complete.

Well, as much fun as they had in a car before air conditioning was an affordable option, four weeks away from the farm meant one thing — LOTS of weeding and farm work when they got back.

Mom and her father spent long hours weeding out the beds of potatoes, corn, strawberries, grapes and other crops, a “deal” my grandfather cut with my mother for letting her have fun with them on their special, dream vacation to see this great country of ours.

Because I haven’t been able to sleep for a long time, I tried a product called Zzzquil last night.  I still didn’t fall asleep until after midnight (it couldn’t be the five cups of coffee earlier in the afternoon, could it?) but I had five hours of uninterrupted sleep afterward, not even noticing our cats curling up with my on the sofa in the sunroom.

I don’t even recall my dreams.

Except for one small thought that lingered as I dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved blue shirt to work in the yard this morning, imagining myself in my grandfather’s place, actually older now than he was then working with my mother on the farm, looking forward to getting to know the soil, insects, seedlings and personal meditative thought patterns as I worked.

Do I, do you, respond more to the words of a message or its emotional context/content? [What exactly do I mean by “emotional”?]

And, by extension, when we lay dying, do we quietly look for a signal that says when it’s all right to die?  How possible is it for us to work our friends/acquaintances/workmates network to find the signal we’re looking for?  How possible is it for us to feel/sense/hear the signal-seekers in our regular pattern-matching daily lives?

In other words, are we pattern-matching from womb to tomb?