Some stories are great because of the tremendous imagination of the author. Some are great because of the engaging tone and style in which they are written. This book is great because every word intensifies a single emotion: despair. Not one is wasted or counterproductive.

I like to think of myself, in general, as a happy nihlist. There’s no inherent meaning or purpose in life, but that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying myself in the meantime. This book is the story of a nation forced to the same outlook.

I loved it. You may not have the same reaction, but you will absolutely react to it in some way. It is worth reading for that alone.

Nevil Shute, On the Beach (Amazon)

Thus it is that I only recently joined Google Wave.

My impression before joining, based hazily upon half-remembered opinions I’d seen in the tech news and blogs, was that it was (like the laser) a solution in search of a problem. Nobody seemed to know quite what to do with it, at least at first.

It’s not that hard a problem: as email is optimized for two-party communication, wave is optimized for n-party communication. At its most basic, it falls back to simple email: asynchronous communication between two parties. If both parties happen to be online simultaneously, Wave updates the conversation in realtime. The content is stored online forever on a remote server whose administration and upkeep costs have been abstracted away from the user experience. None of this is beyond the capabilities of modern email.

Wave’s advantages come into play when more than one person is interested in the conversation. Native threading of replies lets sub-discussions happen naturally. Collaborative editing tools allow people to improve working copies of a document without the hassle of mailing the current revision to every person as each edit is made. The internet nature of the thing is exploited to give each message a unique URL, meaning that wikis are an extremely natural application of the technology. At the same time, permissions are all managed by the overall Google structure.

The most common use case for Wave in the general zeitgeist is that it’s useful for online gaming. There’s that, but there are also much simpler, more general cases. For example, my little brother’s birthday is coming up. Everyone in my family is going to get him something, but we’ll want to converse before buying both to share gift ideas and to ensure that we don’t duplicate gifts. Wave is very well suited for that sort of discussion. With email there is a list of recipients that must be managed per reply and a message-centric format which encourages excerpting and replies to all, generating much traffic and taking much inbox space. Wave’s format identifies the conversation itself as central instead, reducing traffic and repetition. In the end, it reduces the process involved in having the discussion, which makes it the superior technology.

Email has one major advantage that Wave currently lacks: interoperability. Email is at heart a message format defined by SMTP and extended with MIME. Any client or server conforming to the format and performing the expected operations will interoperate with any other, which has lead to the ubiquity of the tech. Wave is, for now at least, an application, not a format. To get on Wave, you need a Google account and an invite from a current wave user. Then you use the Google viewer to view the waves on the Google server. It is very much a one-company phenomenon. This, I believe, is to Google’s detriment. If they open the format and ideally the current software implementing it, wave could eventually become as big as email. It would no more be tied to Google than email is to ARPA, but it would be everywhere. Right now, Wave can’t replace email as a primary means of communication: even if I could sell the idea to everyone with whom I wanted to converse, they couldn’t all get accounts. Opening the format might change that.

Wave is still beta tech, and it is very obvious in places. For example, right now, anyone can edit any message in any conversation in which they are a participant. One major requirement for the final version will be the implementation of various levels of access control. Relatedly, there is some version control for the textual content, but rich content and in particular dynamic widgets which are deleted are gone forever.

Still, this is a technology with some real potential, particularly if some means of interoperability is established with classic email. Once it’s cleaned up, polished, and open-sourced, I can see it being big. Until then, it will remain a niche product.

Branch Managers are the people in charge of moving people around within the Army, to meet both the Army’s needs and the needs of the individuals which it is comprised of. The two in charge of all Warrant Officer Black Hawk pilots had come to Korea for the express purpose of educating us as to the exact process by which they decide where we go and which schools we attend.

This held news both good and bad for me. Good news: coming to Korea immediately after flight school was a very good thing career-wise; my peers elsewhere are often not even RL1 at this point, let alone approaching their PC checkride. Bad news: unless I get my PC qualification quickly and spend the rest of my tour here awing people with my prowess, I’m unlikely to get the IP course enroute. Good news: I’ve got an excellent chance of being assigned to Germany immediately after leaving Korea. Bad news: I’m unlikely to ever be stationed in Japan unless I stay in the Army substantially longer than I want to stay. Good news: I’m fairly likely to be sent to WOAC enroute.

The day would have been substantially improved if we could have simply skipped the morning sessions, or at least split the day in two. This morning’s showtime was 0515, and we didn’t get back to K-16 until 1910. Still, I can’t say that it was entirely a waste; the talk by the Branch Managers was well worth attending. As for the morning, if nothing else, I took away a page full of notes about how not to give a speech.

Let’s ignore the whole life-after-death thing, any idea of continuity of existence. Even then, it could be convenient if there was some real but ineffable thing which humans could not produce other than through reproduction.

Why?

If cognition is a physical process occurring entirely in reality, and the brain is through some transformation Turing-complete, humans will eventually develop true general AI. They have to avoid extinction in the meantime, but it is not an area of research that will ever stop being of interest. Given that I assume those two conditions are true, it follows that I assume that eventually AI will be a practical reality.

When that happens, there will be people who recoil from the entire field of programming. Once we’ve written sentient programs or otherwise created sentient machines, the notion of writing any program (even a fully deterministic one) becomes just a little bit icky: it’s like enslaving the idiot-savants. I side with the programmers: it’s not really like that at all. That won’t prevent the arguments from being an enormous headache.

I bet it’ll be such a huge headache, in fact, that it’s almost reasonable to wish that there was such a thing as a soul.

It’s a funny thing, flying a small reciprocating single-engine plane after becoming used to a dual turbine helicopter. On the one hand, I’m infinitely better at flying this Cessna than I was a decade ago when I first took flight lessons. Air sense turns out to be a skill transferable between modes of flight. Landing, which was once a chancy gamble, is now fairly straightforward. I’ll want a bit of practice before I attempt a solo, but so far everything’s been startlingly easy.

On the other hand, a Black Hawk is just a much more powerful high-performance aircraft. It’s not just that the helicopter has enough cargo capacity to slingload a pair of the 172s–we could, though it’d be a bad idea to attempt any speed much faster than a hover–the power difference shows up in the general performance and handling. On the job, a typical cruising speed is between 120 and 145 knots. The hydraulic system ensures the flight controls offer no resistance regardless of conditions, and the enormous control surface area means that tiny movements are translated into near-instantaneous responses. At the flying club, the aircraft might make 120 knots in a dive, but a more typical speed in level flight is around 105. The controls all feel a bit mushy: they require both larger inputs and actual muscle. Of course, the simplicity and low-powered nature of the 172 are what make it cheap enough for me to be able to fly recreationally, so I can’t really complain.

What I really want is to start collecting ratings. To get an FAA rotary to fixed-wing transition, I need few enough hours that I’m certain to have my private pilot’s license before I leave Korea, and probably my instrument license as well. Once I’ve got both of those and the commercial rating, I can start looking into upgrading, getting into higher-performance aircraft. Hopefully by that point my salary will have risen to where I can afford them.

Several hours later as dusk was falling we happened to cross the same corner again. This time the stage gear was all deployed in the middle of the road and there was a crowd of maybe a dozen gathered in front of a small storefront. In the center of the commotion, at the focus of the cameras and the boom mikes, were two extremely stylish and good-looking young people.

There was an open space four or five meters from the actors, out of the way of the lights and cameras, from which we thought to watch the proceedings for a while. One of the crew came over to us and made exaggerated “be quiet” gestures, and we nodded our understanding silently. Unfortunately, even once the director quieted everyone there and started the camera, the female actress said nothing, but instead gave us a dirty look. We left, chatting about how a pair of innocent waygugin could so distract her that she refused to perform.

It’s one reason I love living abroad: the random events are drawn from a completely different pool than when living back home.