Regularly Expressing

I’ve started to listening to books on CD in an effort to ease the monotony of driving to and from work. My present choice is “Wyrms” by Orson Scott Card. So far I like the book quite a bit, but this one quote is priceless:

Here’s the Google book search result.

Wouldn’t this be an interesting opening hook for a story? I have some questions about how this *could* happen, but it helps that it did.

If you do any programming, you may have heard of a strange language called Haskell. It’s gaining rapidly in popularity, and has many cool features.

1. Implicit Strong Typing - It provides the compile time error checking that one gets with C++ or Java generics, but it deduces types on its own without explicit programmer input (of course, the programmer can over-ride this if needed).
2. Functional - This is a limitation that results in a strength. Functional programming means once you assign a variable you can never change it. This restriction on the programmer frees the compiler to perform many optimizations.
3. Shared Transactional Memory - Sometimes it is too inconvenient to program without mutable state, so Haskell provides you with an escape hatch from functional programming. With Shared Transactional Memory you can write sections of code that modify memory arbitrarily without fear of deadlocks or race conditions.

Check out the tutorial: Learn Haskell now!.

Many regular expression engines, my own package pat included, suffer from a tendency to produce stack overflows in some circumstances. This seems to be a widespread problem, common to many java regular expression engines. To overcome this limitation I recently wrote a new regular expression library, completely from scratch, designed to avoid this problem. It conforms (mostly) to the java.util.regex interface, so changing your code to use my package is as simple as changing your import statement.

Please try it out and let me know what you think. See the main site: http://stevenrbrandt.com.

Picture from the Advocate

Me, Sir Noah, and Darth

Babelcon is Baton Rouge’s science fiction and fantasy con. It is small, but has been rapidly growing. This year was a major leap forward for the Con in many ways. Excellent care was provided for the halfings (kids) on the Con’s “Shire Track.” My son greatly enjoyed the treasure hunt, collecting more glass beads from hidden places around the con than anyone else.

Babelcon goers are above average costumers. You’ll find Darth, Klingons, blue skinned elves, blue-black skinned dark elves, pirates, storm troopers, etc. and to cap it off there is always an “Orion Slave Girl Dance” by one of the local belly dance troops. (This is always a family friendly show)

This year we had three distinguished visitors:

1. John Hertzler a.k.a. General Martok. When I first saw his picture I thought, “That doesn’t look like Martok, he looks like a nice grandpa.” But after hearing him talk (he actually shed his own blood during his audition for Star Trek) and seeing some of his antics at the Con I thought, “This guy is part Klingon!”
   

   My wife and John Hertzler
2. Richard Hatch a. k. a. Zarek was also present. I asked him if he thought he might be a Cylon — naturally he refused to comment. I don’t know, i think if I were him I would have just raised my eyebrows suggestively and said, “By your command.” Anyway, he also got into the spirit. He participated in a knighting ceremony (the Queen of Babelcon was performing them regularly throughout the Con). He even taped the queen’s mouth shut!
   

   My wife and Richard Hatch
3. Suzie Plackson, a. k. a. K’Ehleyr (Alexander’s mom, Worf’s girlfriend). She’s a beautiful woman and has recently been branching out into other endeavors (art, music, etc.).
   

   Suzie Plakson

Looking forward to seeing how things progress in 2009!

Previously I’ve written about solar sails in a globular cluster. There I used a speculation that we would eventually be able to make solar sails with a density of 1 g/m^2 (one gram per meter squared).

With all the buzz about graphene lately, I thought I’d take a look at how a one molecule thick material would work in this setting. I don’t know the optical properties, but the surface density is 6.5 * 10^(-4) g/m^2 (see this article) — pretty close to zero. On the assumption that it is not stiff enough to do the job you could probably drape it over a skeletal structure (essentially the rigging of the sail) similar to the solar electric wind sail. The rigging could be made at present with a density of 1.1 g/m^2. This is already within 10% the theoretical limiting value I assumed before.

I’m guessing we can make stronger lighter rigging in time, so the solar sails in my hypothetical globular cluster story just got faster. Sounds promising.

Translated from the original Klingon, of course.

To the tune of: On Top of Spaghetti On top of a blood pie, All covered with rokeg, I lost my poor targball, When somebody snorted. It rolled off the table, And on to the floor, And then my poor targball, Rolled to Stovokor. It landed on Kahless, on top of his head, and so he condemned it, to the Barge of the Dead. So if you are in Gre'thor, and on food you are short, and you find a targball, make sure you don't snort.		To the tune of: Nobody Likes me Everybody Hates me, I think I’ll go eat Worms. Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I think I'll go eat qagh! Big fat nasty ones, Half dead sleepy ones, Oh how they wriggle and squirm! Down goes the first one, down goes the second one, Oh how they spasm in death! Up comes the first one, up comes the second one, Oh how they spasm in death! Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I think I'll go eat qagh! Big fat nasty ones, Half dead sleepy ones, 51 varieties of qagh!
To the tune of: Old MacDonald had a Farm Old MacMartok had a farm, e-i-e-i-ooh! And on that farm he had a targ, e-i-e-i-ooh! With a grunt, grunt here and a grunt, grunt there, Here a grunt, there a grunt, everywhere a grunt, grunt, Old MacMartok had a farm, e-i-e-i-ooh! Old MacMartok had a farm, e-i-e-i-ooh! And on that farm he had a tribble, e-i-e-i-ooh! With a purr, purr here and a purr, purr there, Here a purr, there a purr, everywhere a purr, purr, grunt, grunt here and a grunt, grunt there, Here a grunt, there a grunt, everywhere a grunt, grunt, Old MacMartok had a farm, e-i-e-i-ooh!		To the tune of: Let me Call you Sweetheart Let me call you par'mach I'm in love with you Let me hear you loudly roar you love me too Growl, kick, claw and bite me with a passion so true Let me call you par'mach I'm in love with you

1. McNugget’s will some day be all-natural health food, relatively speaking (Caves of Steel, Asimov). Apparently our diet will consist largely of yeast grown in vats.
2. My cockroach problems really aren’t so bad (Starship Troopers, Heinlein). Mr. Rico has to face giant bugs carrying death rays. Don’t watch the movie, by the way, it does not do the story justice.
3. Don’t trust your computer (2001, Clarke). One of the early stories about a computer that goes nuts and kills everyone. If you use Windows, you know what I’m talking about.
4. Don’t drink while sitting on an 8th floor window ledge (Inferno, Niven & Pournelle). The protagonist did this and woke up in Dante’s version of Hell.
5. You can’t get away from bugs by moving to the desert (Dune, Herbert). Giant sandworms are everywhere. Fortunately, you can ride them.
6. Asteroids and burritos are a bad combination (The Dragon’s Nine Sons, Roberson). This really cool alternate future history has the Mexic Dominion (a cult nation that worships Mexico’s ancient bloodthirsty gods) on a secret asteroid base.
7. It’s a bad idea to make Libertarians angry (Freehold, Williamson). This piece of Libertarian science fiction is sort of a Klingon’s version of utopia — justice served by dueling, armed citizens, and a highly efficient military.
8. It’s a bad idea to set your alarm clock for too early a time (Coyote, Steele). One character wakes up early from cryosleep and has to spend the rest of his life alone on a starship.
9. Never take your wedding ring off (Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Donaldson). In this story about a modern day leper, we find that a white gold wedding ring has enough power to stop all the forces of evil.
10. Cats are telepathic (On Basilisk Station, Weber). Specifically, the book is referring to a race of six limbed tree cats. But you know the regular ones are telepathic also.
11. Puns are magic (A Spell for Chameleon, Anthony). I probably read 10 books from this pun-based fantasy series.
12. Those secret Vatican organizations? They’re here to help (Carpe Demon, Kenner). These books are about what Buffy the Vampire Slayer would be like if she grew up, had kids, and lived in the burbs. The heroine works with a secret demon-fighting organization in the Vatican called Forza Scura.
13. Make sure you have good health insurance (War of the Worlds, Wells). The big powerful aliens with their war machines all died from the common cold. Apparently, they didn’t even have an HMO.