http://qntm.org/ the personal website of Sam Hughes http://qntm.org/nas http://qntm.org/nas Blog » I don't usually admit defeat in a technological showdown but this one may have killed me. I have a Windows 7 computer and a wireless router provided by my ISP. Attached to the router (via a wire) is a piece of NAS, a 1TB Maxtor Central Axis external ethernet-connected hard drive. This drive is mounted as Windows network share on my computer. The hard drive is called ntgl. On this hard drive is a file. This file cannot be deleted. List of measures I've attempted and how they failed: Hitting "delete" Windows reports "The action can't be completed because the file is open in another program. Close the file and try again." "Shift+delete" Same again. Moving the file This works fine as long as the file remains on ntgl. Modifying the file Can't be done, file is read-only. Renaming the file Perfectly allowable. Editing the file's properties to remove the "read-only" flag Windows reports "Access is denied". Trying to find any process which may have locked the file Turned up no s...]]> Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:11:04 +0000 http://qntm.org/pegg http://qntm.org/pegg Ideas Man » Bring back Spaced. As a comic book. Let me elaborate. Spaced always was heavily rooted in pop culture. The comic book character caricatures already exist: see the covers of any of the DVD collections. Spaced was also an extremely dense, rich, vibrant, colourful universe. It was time-consuming and exhausting to film. Comic books do not have these issues. They can much more easily be expressive, and larger than life. And finally, the main reason why no further Spaced has been made: all the actors are too old. They are no longer contemporary twenty-somethings. Comics do not have this issue. Tim and Daisy can stick around for decades. Get the rights out there! People would kill for Spaced: The Graphic Novel! I am totally serious....]]> Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:37:54 +0000 http://qntm.org/driving http://qntm.org/driving Blog » Learning to drive was pretty good fun, and I had a great teacher, but it was stingingly expensive, and I was constantly stressed by the idea that the slower I learned, the more it was going to cost me to learn. Taking the driving test is pretty horrific as stress goes. It's probably the greatest single monetary gamble I've ever made. "Hey, Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency! I bet £140 [or whatever it was] that I can pass your fancy test." The events surrounding the gamble weren't great either. Long story short, if I failed there and then, I was going to have to learn all over again in an entirely different city. Buying a car is like travelling into another universe. I have no experience. I don't know what to look for. I have driven exactly two cars in my whole life. You want me to risk four figures on this? Is it made from platinum? I consider myself a smart reader and a quick study, but car insurance is truly mindblowing in its complexity, and paying for it - if you happen to fal...]]> Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:58:08 +0000 http://qntm.org/joke http://qntm.org/joke Blog »                                                                                 . ...]]> Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:59:33 +0000 http://qntm.org/snakecube http://qntm.org/snakecube Programming stuff » For Christmas one of my friends presented me with a block puzzle. This puzzle was basically a Rubik's Cube, but the difference was, instead of having colours on each side, all the sides were coloured yellow. Instead, a snake, with two heads, starts at the centre of one of the faces of the cubies and snakes around the other cubies to its endpoint. Once scrambled, the idea is to unscramble the cube so that the snake forms one continuous curve. Attempt 1: solving legitimately This proved to be extremely difficult. To begin with, I am very bad at the Rubik's Cube puzzle, so simply rearranging the cubies using ordinary legal turns is not something I can do. I was restricted to trial and error. Attempt 2: take the cube apart and solve by eye The next problem was that even having taken the cube apart - and unfortunately I broke one of the pieces in order to do this, but the puzzle itself was still intact enough to be entirely solvable, so no worries - you still don't know what the solutio...]]> Fri, 19 Feb 2010 21:45:47 +0000 http://qntm.org/language http://qntm.org/language Mathematics » For a formal grammar G = { N, Σ, P, S }, where... N is a finite set of nonterminal symbols Σ is a finite set of terminal symbols, disjoint from N P is a finite set of production rules, each consisting of A finite string of symbols on the left (with at least one of them being nonterminal in N) A finite string of symbols on the right A special starting symbol S which is nonterminal in N ...the formal language L(G) is the set of all finite strings of symbols which can be produced by... Starting with a string consisting of just an S Applying a production rule to the current string, to turn it into a new string Repeating step 2 until there are no nonterminal symbols left in the string. At this point, all the symbols in the string are terminal in Σ, which means no more production rules can be applied. So, the sentence itself is terminal. While G is finite, L may be finite, countably infinite, or empty. L is distinct from the set o...]]> Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:24:49 +0000 http://qntm.org/lent http://qntm.org/lent Miscellaneous, Etc. » Yay! I'm sure you're all as excited as I am about Lent! You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be! I've got all my Lent decorations up, the snow is falling, traditional Lent songs are playing on the radio, everybody I know is filled with Lent spirit... this is going to be the best Lent ever. Anyway, I'm so excited about Lent 2010 that I made this: The Official Lent 2010 Countdown! var months = [ "January", "February", "March", "April", "May", "June", "July", "August", "September", "October", "November", "December" ]; var days = [ "Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday" ]; var suffixes = [ "th", "st", "nd", "rd", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "st", "nd", "rd", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "th", "st" ]; function getString(date) { return( days[date.getDay()] + " " + date.getDate() + suffixes[date.getD...]]> Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:22:18 +0000 http://qntm.org/parser http://qntm.org/parser News » I have made some minor site tweaks today. There are now some social bookmarking links at the bottom of each page. RSS feeds only appear on pages where they're likely to be of any use to anybody, namely the front page, blog, fiction and Fine Structure. RSS feeds can still be theoretically generated for any page, though, if you manually alter the URL, and are dumb. Empty discussion threads do not appear on pages where discussion is turned off. Closed discussion threads are marked as such instead of just mysteriously lacking an "add comment" button. Comments have a swanky new HTML parser. The last point was the one which required the most work. I realise that there are parsers out there which do the job, but I wanted something that was restrictive to the point of being puritanical so that my precious valid XHTML can't be disrupted by commenters who don't know how to mark stuff up. The new parser can handle any legitimate combination of the <p>, <em> and <strong>...]]> Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:55:12 +0000 http://qntm.org/making http://qntm.org/making Extras, appendices, feedback » So let me tell you what I was trying to achieve with Fine Structure. This is going to be a little difficult for me to write because one of the first and most important things I was aiming for here was to write as original a piece of science fiction as I could manage. I deliberately tried to avoid invoking as many science fiction (and general fiction) tropes as I could. Irony? I wanted to create something which was pretty new. The central concepts of Fine Structure - most notably, the concept of information as a substance with an equivalence with energy and mass - was, as far as I know, pretty much entirely original, as well as naturally (through a little creative application) giving rise to a surprising number of wonderful new technologies and powers, such as teleportation, telepathy, mind control, memes, antimemes and other things which are generally impossible. Memes and antimemes in particular, as powerful tangible objects with offensive capabilities, are pretty new in modern ficti...]]> Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:08:31 +0000 http://qntm.org/mashups http://qntm.org/mashups Movies » Without A Head On Your Shoulder The Ocean Job 13 Going On 300 Citizen Rambo Honey, I Shrunk The Terminator The Princess And The Cobbler Bill And Ted's Excellent Space Odyssey Meet The Sith An American Rugrat In Paris The Italian Titanic The Imaginarium Of Doctor Strangelove Scooby Doo And The Nightmare On Elm Street The Usual Squarepants Movie The Fantastic Mr Todd No Country For Old School The Lion, The Witch And Zombieland Free Willy Or Die Hard Harry Potter And The Big Lebowski Get Potter Harry Potter And The Road Lock, Stock, And The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants The Wizard Of Thunderdome Passion Of The Hancock Bridges Of Mad Max County Pink Floyd's The Wall•E A Clockwork Orange County A Boy And His Toy Story The Brockovich Identity Snow White And Se7en Michael Jackson's This Is Spinal Tap Ocean's Chamber Of Secrets Cinderella And Cash Fear And Loathing In Casablanca Cinderella Scissorhands A Nightmare On 34th Street The Nightmare Befor...]]> Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:21:50 +0000 http://qntm.org/defect http://qntm.org/defect Blog » I'm now on my second of what will probably be three roles (rotations) during my first two years here at Intercontinental. Previously I had been doing performance analysis for a piece of messaging middleware. The idea of middleware is to recognise that, in business, a lot of people spend a lot of time building processes and applications to do very similar things-- that is, reinventing the wheel. Middleware is a single, extremely powerful, well-built wheel which we can go up to people and say "Hey, don't build your own wheel! There are all kinds of pitfalls in that kind of thing, and besides, it's got nothing to do with your core business of selling theatre tickets or soil or whatever, and you don't want to waste time on it. Just buy our excellent wheels instead!" In this case the wheel was "reliably sending a message from point A to point B without losing it". The idea would be that you write your application to transform and route messages and deal with them appropriately, but you use ...]]> Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:45:19 +0000 http://qntm.org/spirit http://qntm.org/spirit Blog » Debatable sentiment, at best mediocrely conveyed. You guys should wait until we lose contact with Voyager 1. I have always found that thinking about the Voyager 1 and 2 and Pioneer 10 and 11 probes triggers powerful emotions in me and I've never been able to fully explain them or properly pin them down in text. The closest I've come is Lonely Photographer which I'll concede is almost as sophomoric as Munroe's effort. Let's cover Voyager 1 in particular. Voyager 1 has been travelling away from the Earth for longer than most of the people reading this have been alive. It is expected to continue operating until the mid-to-late 2020s. It is the most distant man-made object from Earth. It takes our radio signals more than 15 hours to reach it, and it takes another 15 hours for Voyager's pathetically weak responses to return to us. That number is constantly increasing. But we will listen to those signals, for as long as there is still enough power to send them. This is because Voyag...]]> Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:25:56 +0000 http://qntm.org/klick http://qntm.org/klick Extras, appendices, feedback » This short piece was originally intended to shed some light on the precise events which followed Andreas Kosogorin's suicidal attack in this is not over and I am not dead. I never found a good place to put it in the story. Last Updated: Tuesday, 9 June 2009, 19:58 GMT 20:58 UK E-mail this to a friend         Printable version Second Klick box "could have killed millions" The Klick device which was found in the possession of physicist Andreas Kosogorin this morning could have killed everybody in the city of New York, say scientists. The box, which was found in a Starbucks coffee shop in Manhattan, is an empty platinum cube, just 2.1cm (0.8 inches) on a side, and now being held as evidence in a police investigation into the attempted attack. Unlike Paul Klick's original device, Kosogorin's would have had devastating physical consequences, effectively destroying all of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens as well as much of Jersey City ...]]> Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:20:44 +0000 http://qntm.org/faq http://qntm.org/faq Extras, appendices, feedback » When did you decide to really commit to Mitch not being the aggressor? I was thinking about this all the way through the first half of Fine Structure (because it seemed like a pretty obvious twist) and then someone actually suggested the possibility in the comments some time after Sundown, which was when I dropped the idea entirely. Maybe I just have to read it again a bit more carefully, but what, exactly was Mitch? Was he Xio, but just not as... benevolent as Ching and co. first believed? Mitch Calrus, originally a mathematics teacher, becomes Xio's host body in Sundown, in the same way that Mikhail Zykov became Oul's host body in the events described in The Chaotician. The concept that information and thought are separate from matter means that the mind is distinct from the body. Note that the original Mitch Calrus dies, presumably of old age, some time in the 21st Century, while backed-up copies of his mind (well, Xio's mind) are resurrected in clone bodies or donor bodies man...]]> Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:57:37 +0000 http://qntm.org/marooned http://qntm.org/marooned Extras, appendices, feedback » This scene was originally the second sub-chapter of the final episode, Science Fiction Future. Its inclusion was controversial. In this scene several fairly major facts are revealed. First, that like Oul, Xio has an "egg". Xio's egg is buried under an archaeological excavation in equatorial Somalia, at the point on Earth where humans first rose to sentience, thereby creating a large enough concentration of intelligence to cause Xio to "condense out" from what, up until then, was something like a thin vapour of consciousness spread over the whole universe. Like Oul's egg, Xio's egg requires a freshly-deceased human body to escape, and it is an unlucky mathematics teacher called Mitchell James Calrus who fatally trips and falls and provides that outlet. Calrus is in Somalia on expedition with a few other teachers and a group of pupils from his school, establishing educational links with a Somalian school which, for no reason other than to convolute matters, also happens to include Anoo N...]]> Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:22:13 +0000 http://qntm.org/concepts http://qntm.org/concepts Extras, appendices, feedback » The first central concept of Fine Structure is that the real universe in which we exist, "Alef", is one of a near-infinite array of ever-larger universes. This "Fine Structure" displays size, coherence, intelligent life and all kinds of wonders on every scale and in every conceivable cross-section. Being only 3+1-dimensional, we exist right at the very bottom of this scale. The second major concept is that intelligence, thought, ideas and coherent information are all aspects of a superdimensional force, existing alongside gravity and electricity. Information is substance, and can be manipulated. Information is a much more powerful force in the higher dimensions, which is why they are filled with intelligent life. In a three-dimensional universe, however, information is a very weak force, so intelligent life is rare. Humans are the only intelligent life anywhere in Alef. We are extremophiles, existing far below the point where most higher-dimensional individuals believe that intel...]]> Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:13:57 +0000 http://qntm.org/stars http://qntm.org/stars Extras, appendices, feedback » This short story from January 2007 is what eventually became The Astronomer’s Loss. I was never really happy with this story. Gary’s emotional outburst towards the end never felt like it was timed or paced properly. The fact that he explicitly figures out exactly what is happening to the stars is implausible, as is the notion of the quintillions of microscopic singularities in the first place, and the odd saboteur at GILO obviously doesn’t fit in the story as it eventually turned out. Also, apologies to the real people whose names and identities I borrowed for some of the party attendees. "What time is it?" Gary is the kind of geek who's geeky enough to own a binary wristwatch but not geeky enough to be able to decode the digits instantly. The alcohol doesn't help. It's been a good party so far. Though he is still vertical. "Eleven fifteen," he says after doing the numbers in his head. "Cheers," says the girl-- Yin? He has a bad head for names. He smiles broadly. Drains ...]]> Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:34:33 +0000 http://qntm.org/squared http://qntm.org/squared Extras, appendices, feedback » This passage was written very early in the development of Fine Structure (circa December 2006) and, like Forgotten Things In Space, never really properly fit into the storyline. Unlike "Forgotten" I never released it as a standalone story either because it doesn't work in isolation. The unnamed man in the story is obviously Mitch, and he and Anne are evidently working together to "earth" the bulk of Mitch's remaining power in Mitch. Instead, they tap into another, much angrier, source of power by mistake - and realise that Mitch's adversary Oul has also survived the Fall seen in Unbelievable Scenes. Mitch's comment about "flattened information" is also a first stab at what later became the Crashes. Running all the way down the centre of the Atlantic Ocean is a tectonic fault. Two plates, one containing both Americas and the other containing Europe and Africa, are pulling apart from each other at a rate of millimetres per year. The surface of Earth is mostly dead rock but betwee...]]> Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:25:01 +0000 http://qntm.org/negative http://qntm.org/negative Extras, appendices, feedback » Obviously Fine Structure is not the last thing I will ever write. If for any reason you did not enjoy the story, please take the time to share your feelings here below - in particular, what aspects of the story are weak, what aspects of my writing are weak, and what things you would like to see me pay more attention to in future stories. Thanks in advance for all your comments....]]> Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:45:01 +0000 http://qntm.org/positive http://qntm.org/positive Extras, appendices, feedback » Obviously Fine Structure is not the last thing I will ever write. If you enjoyed the story, please take the time to share below what you enjoyed about the story here - in particular, what things you would like to see again in future stories of mine. Thanks in advance for all your comments....]]> Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:42:44 +0000