Translations In the Real World (Photo by Tflanagan at KSU, Saudi Arabia, Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)
One of the first things people ask me when they read certain of my stories is “What’s the right way to pronounce all these weird words?” My stock answer is: “However you like! It’s all made up, whatever sounds right inside your head is fine by me.”
Starting the process of doing an audio book for All That Was Asked has forced me to face the fact that, well, really there is a “right” way. For one thing, the story centers on language–in fact, the working title of the book was “Translations by Ansegwe.” In general, for the stories where I have a made-up culture with their own language or an “evolved” culture that’s grown from more-or-less familiar cultures but uses a language other than English as their root language, I do know how those words should be pronounced. I’m that wonky sort that blows off an entire afternoon at Worldcon to attend a linguistics workshop, so, well, that’s where I’m coming from.
In the real world, I know French pretty well, I watch a lot
of foreign-language TV (though of course I’m relying on subtitles), I live in
place where I hear Spanish and Russian regularly, and I have technical-world
acquaintances with a great variety of language “homes” from India to
Europe to Africa to both Chinas. I’ve
struggled to learn a smattering of my culture-base language–Gaelic. And I grew
up being hauled around to various places in the U.S. and England. I even still “hear” (and alas for
spell-checkers, spell) most English as Brit-style. End result:
I love the interplay of languages and the way everyone talks. I
do not claim to be a polyglot, but I’m a diligent researcher and I just love
all those sounds.
In my writing, most of the problematic words are names, because I think of such stories as having been “translated” from the alien/alternate history language set. Names tend to get left over after a translation, because even if I’m translating a story from French to English, I wouldn’t change “Tourenne” to “Terence” or “Gervais” to Gerald, because a) the names aren’t really the same and b) the sounds of names add the flavor of a language without requiring a reader to actually know a foreign tongue directly. Spoiler? My current work-in-progress has characters named Tourenne and Gervais, and they live in a francophone culture that doesn’t exist anywhere in the real world.
In the made-up language base for All That Was Asked, I have lots of names for people, place-names from more than one country in the alternate-universe world, and a few name-based terms. (The academic types in the story have dreams of winning their version of the Nobel prize, so they talk about it a lot. The Nobel prize is named for a person, but . . . it’s a thing.) I wanted the central names to make sense, to have relateable sounds, and to have some commonalities. For instance, in English we have a lot of names that end in ‘-y’. I selected some sound elements that would fit into different names and tried to make them sound like they came from a distinct self-contained culture–except for a few names I made up specifically to sound like another culture, in the same world.
I decided on a family-personal naming order that made sense
for the culture–Family first, Personal second, and most people refer to each
other and address each other by their personal names, because everyone knows
what family everyone else belongs to. And
I made names longer than we’re used to in English. In our culture “power names” tend
to be short, in theirs, most people have multisyllable names, and powerful people
tend to have longer names.
For other sets of words in this story, ones that are “translated” to English, I “hear” the words in British/European English rather than American English, because that fits better with the social style of the people and gives it a little bit of distance for American readers. It may sound really fussy–especially for such a short little book–but I think having a clear auditory sense going into it helped me with building the alien culture. I just have to hope it carries through to readers and listeners–not a burden to cope with but an added feature of the story.
In my next post, I’ll give you a blow-by-blow pronunciation guide for All That Was Asked, with a few background bits to liven it up a bit.
One thing about the global economy…it’s January 31st in some places already. Barnes and Noble has the paper editions as well as the Nook version ready to go.
Meanwhile, Amazon is lagging behind, with just the Kindle version and it still is tagged as “preorder” . . . in the U.S. C’mon Jeff, don’t you want more money for your rocketship project? UPDATE: Amazon is up, in Kindle and Trade Paperback editions.
But you can download it from Amazon’s sites for the UK or India.
And it’s up at Canada’s Biggest Bookstore, !ndigo.
Before launching (pun intended) into this installment, I have to note some disappointing news from the European Space Agencyâs ATV-5 mission. Due to a power issue, they decided not to do the shallow-angle reentry, which would require the vehicle to be in flight for an extra week or more after deploying from the ISS. Instead, it completed its mission in a more typical reentry maneuver, earlier today (Sunday, Feb. 15th ). Oh, well, the astronauts saved the new NASA monitoring instrument aboard the ISS for use in a future mission. But it was not like we had anticipated. To cope with the loss, enjoy some NASA imagery from the reentry of Japanâs Hayabusa spacecraft.
Terry Fong with NASA Social Team:Â Blue Skies Over the Roverscape
Once weâre done with the agency-wide event of the morning, we find our way to the dazzling outdoors and distribute ourselves between a shuttle van and a minivan with our NASA team and a service-dog-in-training, and weâre off to the Roverscape.
Welcome to the Roverscape
Iâm figuring weâll get a few canned presentations about the rovers that roam that dirt lot, climbing its artificial hills and avoiding its alignements of obstacle-rocks. And Iâm psyched for that. At Amesâ 75th-anniversary Open House, it was a crowd-fighting challenge to catch a glimpse of the rover patrolling on the other side of the barbed-wire-topped fence, subject to remote-control by a NASA roboteer hiding in plain sight under a pop-up tent in the parking lot.
But no. Itâs not a presentation in the parking lot.
On arrival, our NASA Social Team quickly demonstrates thinking, writing, photographing, and connecting.
Now, presentations are nice. But the thing is, if youâre at a NASA Social, you feel like you have to be tweeting and posting the whole time and itâs been pretty thoroughly proven that there is no such thing as multi-tasking. Which means while youâre tweeting and posting youâre missing stuff. Some folks handle that by simply recording presentationsâyou know, like the Real Media do. My strategy is to free-type notes, but thatâs pretty dependent on having mad touch-typing skills. In any case, you donât actually get much chance to interact with the people youâre there to learn from. Plus, for the presenters, gawd, there is nothing more tedious than being dragged away from your work to give a presentation to a bunch of people who seem to be playing video games and are not prepared to ask you questions.
So today the Ames Media Relations Gang are trying out a new idea.
The Elevator Pitch for The Elevator Pitch System, Featuring Today’s Reverse Photo Op
They have rounded up a bevy of NASA engineers & scientists associated with seven different project groups. Each group has chosen a representative to give a three-minute âelevator pitchâ. That would be either a) the one person who wasnât there when the rep was chosen or b) a team leader who actually likes talking to groups. Then the social-media herd will be set free to scatter among the projects that have sparked their interest.
This is an experiment that works well on several levels. First, the quick-posting tweeters get snippets of video of the pitch presentations & those are up on YouTube in nanosecs. Second, at first, the attendees naturally focus on projects that interest them the most. Third, because everyoneâs free to wander, attendees also wander over to chat with folks whose topics werenât as appealing at first. That means people discover new things. And theyâre more likely to get excited about new discoveries. Fourth, because it becomes nearly a one-to-one discussion format, questions are livelier, connections are made, and, fundamentally, everyone has a better time.
The sole downside is, for an old-school note-taker like me, itâs tough to shoot photos & video, listen, ask sensible questions, and get notes written down. Gives you some respect for the professional media, eh, what? I’m envying that old-style team of reporter + photographer.
I tried to chat with every group. Very nearly made it, too. So, with rough notes supported by follow-up research, my photos, and the power of memoryâŚ
Target #1: Big Giant Roverbots!
First off, I headed right for Terry Fong and the K-REX robot that was actively surveying the Roverscape. Strangely, no one else was chatting with him yet. Maybe they were scared off by his position as Director of the Intelligent Robotics Group, aka King of the Roverscape. But, seriously, Terry Fong is one the most personable robotics experts you can talk to, and others quickly joined me. It was quickly evident that what people wanted were photos of the rover, so he suggested good shooting angles, led small groups close enough for the rover to demonstrate its detection-and-avoidance behavior, and (near the end of the event) asked his crew to go to RC mode for a bit so the rover wouldnât trundle away so determinedly.
Howdy, Prospector Bot K-REX
Where Be the Water?
The current design mission for the K-REX (which is the upsized younger sibling of the workhorse K-10 robot platform) is developing prospecting tools and algorithms. For survey missions, the rover can use a variety of tools from ground-penetrating radar to its 3-D GigaPan camera. But the hot topic of the moment is seeking water ice under the surface, for Lunar and Mars missions. But how do you âseeâ underground water? Robots, not being prone to faith-based data acquisition (or confidence tricks), arenât good at dowsing. But water contains hydrogen, and each hydrogen nucleus (i.e., a single proton) is just the right size for interacting with a neutron in a measurable way. If you fire neutrons into the ground, theyâll penetrate about a meter, while bouncing around among the component atoms. Eventually, some will bounce back out of the surface. Ones that have only hit large, heavy atoms will be flying at close to their original velocity. But the neutrons that have struck hydrogen atoms will be slowed down significantly. The HYDRA neutron spectroscope detects the relative fraction of slowed-down neutrons and reports high hydrogen concentrations. Lots of hydrogen almost certainly means H2O. The team recently took their rover on a practice mission to search for water in the Mohave desert.
Will K-REX find water under the pebble patch?
One factor they are teaching the robots to work around is the varied character of the surface of the ground, so at the Roverscape, there are test patches of gravel, smooth pebbles, sand, and even shale rocks with smooth surfaces and jagged edges.
Couldn’t resist snagging some video of the rover at work:
Target #2: Makers of the Three (or More) Rules of Flying Robots
At the far end of the row of tents were a couple of guys with, sadly, no active robots to play with. And no one hanging around asking them questions. So, ever happy to avoid a crowd, I left Terry and made a bee line for their display. And discovered the team working to protect us all from wild mobs of flying robots clogging our skies. No, seriously, have you not worried whatâs up with drones these days? Anyone can pick one up on Amazon and start zooming about. There have already been legal cases with âpeeping tomâ drones. And towns arguing about whether or not to legalize shooting down drones above, say, your ranch property. More prosaically, but even more seriously, a drone wandering into airspace populated with passenger airplanes poses serious safety issues. Back in the early days of airplanes, there were similar issues of privacy, rights of transit, and safety.
In his State of NASA address, Charles Bolden trotted out the NASA aero mantra, âNASA is with you when you flyâ. Did you know that on top of cool aero hardware, NASA has been involved in air traffic control & collision avoidance? Now itâs time for UAV traffic controls. In big words, weâre talking: Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM). This mission involves devising both regulations and technology, because UAVâs need to be smart enough to “know” the rules and to recognize and avoid âforbiddenâ space.
The timeline is short, as the drones are already out thereâwith lots of useful and fun applications but just as many problematic situationsâso the plan is to have essential systems for safe airspace in place within five years. The proposed solution space incorporates static elements (âgeofencingâ to tag keep-out zones) and drone smarts (to detect geofences and manage routing) to build, by stages, a comprehensive system allowing for autonomous operations which maintain secure areas and safe travel.
I only wish theyâd been able to have a live drone to play with and illustrate their points. Because, you know, objects in flight.
Target #3:Â The One I Missed, But Oh, Well, Didya Know…?
The guys next door had a huge UAV on their table, but, well, it was popular. I never did get to talk to them about it. Luckily Tokiwa Smith (@Tokiwana–follow her on Twitter, ok?) tweeted a good photo, so I was able to ID that fierce flyer as FrankenEye, a hybrid creation built largely by a group of student interns using parts from the NASA Dragon Eye UAVâs and their own 3-D printed parts.
It’s FrankenEye: A project student interns got to work on! (Courtesy of NASA)
So, this is a good place to mention that NASA has a tremendous internship program. The robotics programs alone at Ames pull in a dozen or more interns every summer. There are openings for liberal-arts students as well as engineers & scientists. And there are year-round internships as well. The best place to get connected with NASA internships all around the country is a single website, OSSI. There are spots for high-schoolers, undergraduates, grad students, and postdocs, all with one application. However, if you (or a student you know) are in commute distance of any NASA site, check their website for a local internship. For example, at Ames there is the Education Associates Program (supported by funding from USRA)
Target #4:Â Innovative Bots Based On Baby Toys. Seriously.
Next up: the tensegrity bots, a NASA research project which has involved university students and professors from Ghent University to UC-Berkeley to Case Western Reserve. We got our introduction from Vitas SunSpiral, a Stanford-trained innovator whose company is a contractor for the IRG. Yes–one way to work “for NASA” is to work for a company that works with NASA.
Meet the Tensegrity Team
These folks are thinking so far outside the box that there isnât any box left. Theyâre most fascinated by designing structures with great flexibility, analogous to our own flexible spines and spring-loaded tendons and joints. For their inspiration, theyâve turned to the toy universe: remember those springy rattles or balls made of sticks and elastics? At the Open House, Iâd seen the large prototype that theyâre sharing at this event as well as a prototype Berkeley students had built using LEGO Mindstorms. (SunSpiral told me that excited kids at the Open House partly disassembled the LEGO version.) Theyâve even dubbed this design a âSuper Ball Botâ, reflecting the nature of the device is to be âbouncyâ in a flexibility sense (and it also works as a pun on the robotics event âBot Ballâ, though I’m not sure that’s intentional). The Ball Bot moves by adjusting tension in cables connecting the rods in response to dynamic pressure signals transmitted through this physical network. The result is a slow rolling peregrination. Theoretically, this device is its own safety net: it could roll to the edge of a cliff, drop down, and land safely. Eventually, a payload can be added, suspended in the middle of the âballâ and protected by the springy structure of its un-legs.
Hereâs a fun video the team posted a while back of their Super Ball Bot in development, concluding with a demo run right here at the Roverscape:
Target #5:Â Making Robots Take Charge of Their Own Health
OK, there were people nearby showing off tiny satellites, but I needed a big-robot fix again. The guys from the âHealth and Prognosticsâ group were displaying an older-style roverbot with a laptop perched on top of it.
“Health and Prognostics for Optimal Mission Success”  What? Huh?
Whatâs this all about? Health? Is this a bot that helps keep people healthy? I can tell from some of my fellow NASA Socialistas that this is the first-line guess, because that’s how they tag the first photos they tweet.
But, well, no. The âHealthâ under consideration here is the deviceâs own health. For this prototype, the robot assesses the status of its battery packs and then has to decide if itâs up to completing the mission itâs been assigned: driving an assigned path and returning to base. It may need to eliminate some waypoints to safely complete at least the most critical stops on its route and skip the lower-priority stops. Consider that an autonomous survey rover on the Moon or Mars must be able to get itself back to its charging station and still make the cost of its construction and deployment worth the investment.  The laptop on this robot is displaying its “thoughts” as it assesses its assigned route and redesigns that route in response to having one of its battery units disconnected in a recent experimental expedition around the streets right near the Roverscape.
But, wait, thereâs more! To do this job well takes more than an instantaneous measure of how the batteries are doing. This crew has tested batteries to build a system which predicts battery status in the course of the missionâthatâs the âPrognosticsâ in the heading. And that’s also information that is already set to be applied in batteries for electric cars–because this robot uses the same batteries.
It’s unfortunate that the nomenclature leads to a natural confusion here. This is a new field in systems engineering, one that truly sounds like something to do with medicine: Integrated Systems Health Management, or ISHM. I’d’ve picked a different word than “health”, but systems engineers have used that term for so long, it would have been hard to change. In any case, what’s important (and, analogous to biological health) is that it’s all about maintaining systems, and in this context a âdiagnosisâ isnât determining the cause of a rash but more like asking a smart device, like, say, the starship Enterprise, to give itself a check-up, that is: ârun diagnostics.â This has applications in any area with multiple components with failure potential. Here, weâre seeing it applied to an exploration rover system.
Target #6: Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites
OK, as I plunge over the 2,000-word line, check out those little cubes that Astronaut Scott Kelly is playing with here. I only got to look around the shoulders of others talking to the SPHERES crew, but I got the gist just fine.
Astronaut Kelly juggles SPHERES (Courtesy of NASA)
First of all, theyâre not cubes, theyâre SPHERES. Yes, clearly the acronym was assembled to be cute. But the job of these babies is cool: they are flying ISS helper bots designed to be used as test beds for small satellite designs which include satellites which can work together to perform tasks in space. Theyâve been under constant development since their first flight in 2006. The original-style SPHERES in this photo aren’t really being juggled, they’re navigating within the ISS using echolocation, using fixed-position ultrasound transmitters in the ISS to establish their location and relative positions. The most recent versions are âSmartSPHERESâ equipped with smartphones to communicate rapidly and enable image-taking and provide potential for vision-based navigation.
The resemblance of the SPHERES bots to the âremoteâ droids in the Start Wars franchise is no accident: the original SPHERES were designed by MIT students in response to a challenge from their professor to build him one of those droids. Since then, the SPHERES have continued to be influenced by students, as students have been able to âflyâ by writing programs for SPHERES to execute.
An interesting recent series of experiments involved using a pair of SPHERES to cooperatively rotate a canister of fluid to study the way fluids slosh in microgravity. This is not just an academic exercise. Sloshing behavior affects the way fuel behaves during spacecraft maneuvers. Hereâs a little NASA video of one sloshing experiment (And YouTube will happily point you to more like this.):Â Â
Target #7: Teeny-Tiny Satellites
I could see others moving towards the exit (and some groups packing up their displays), but I squeezed in a quick conversation with one of the CubeSat team members. What the heckâs a CubeSat, did I hear you say? Well, CubeSat is a modular design for a nanosatellite (i.e., a really small satellite). Each CubeSat is composed of a specific number of same-sized cubical “units”. Oh, and though the SPHERES bots look like cubes, a CubeSat âunitâ is actually meant to be cubical: nominally 10x10x10 cm (though if you nit-pick, the specs come out closer to 10x10x11cm).  A CubeSat is assembled as 1 or 2 or 3 such âunitsâ, with 6-unit and 12-unit cubesats in the works. Look at it this way: a 3U CubeSat is a bit smaller than a 12-pack of soda…roughly the size of a standard roll of paper towels. The beauty of the small and modular design is that it opens up satellite-building to students, small businesses, and even hobbyists(though not everyone will score a launch ride with NASA).
You donât launch a CubeSat from Earth. You launch it from space, by hitching a ride up to the ISS (or further) and having it slung from there to its desired orbit. When Orion runs its test flight to the Moon and back in 2017, itâs hoped that a few CubeSats will be able to hitch a ride and be launched from the orbit of the moon, for placement further from Earth. For instance, solar physicists would love to see an array of little satellites spread out around the sun, so they could see the activity over the entire solar surface at one time.
My captive researcher was was happy to talk but eager to get going as well, because she’s involved in an important test scheduled for “very soon”.
TechEdSat-3 (a 3U CubeSat) was the first test of an Exo-Brake.                          TES-4 is coming down in February 2015
Weâd like to be able to send small payloads to Earth. So far, the final parachute drop has been tested. The ability to communicate with the microsat during transit, using the the Iridium satellite network (yep, the smartphone network) for rapid interactive data handling has had testing, and we know how to pop the device out from the ISS. The exo-brake is a parachute designed for use in the low-density upper reaches of the atmosphere to steer the payload on the right course until regular parachutes can be deployed. The upcoming test is the deployment and descent of TES-4, a CubeSat project involving San Jose State University students. They’ll be testing the latest exo-brake and applying the Iridium communications system.
And then, finally, the call came for us all to exit the Roverscape. I walked backward and took the time for one last photo of K-REX before scrambling back aboard our vans for the ride back to the Exploration Center.
Oh, my, letâs unpack this one. First off, this book is a good choice if you’re shopping for a scifi story for someone who maybe isn’t all that into science fiction but loves kids and understands the parenting life, or anyone who’s given any real thought to what artificial intelligence might be like and what it would mean for ordinary people.
Building Baby Brother is a story made for Silicon Valley parentsâwherever they may live. It has such a multi-layered dimensionality, youâll be peering at your neighbors, wondering if thatâs them, if this story isnât fiction, but thinly-veiled fact.
The story begins with a typical divorced father managing a well-ordered shared upbringing relationship for the child he and his ex are raising together…but separately. The ex has her issues, Dad has his failings, but they both care about Josh, a wonderful kid whose one ask is âwhen can I have a baby brother?â
Parents want to provide for their kids. Donât they? And this dad, once he stops to think about it, realizes he has the capability to provide his son with some of what he needs: a companion to play with, a buddy to share secrets with, a fellow child to grow up with. Gavin is just what Josh needs. What Dad needs Josh to experience.
WaitâŚ.back up a minute there. Secrets? Before Dad knows it, Gavin’s doing things he hadn’t designed him for, because Josh taught him new things, ways to access information Dad didn’t think Baby Brother would need. But what were the kids to do when they needed to make just a few improvements to their favorite video game? What would a Silicon Valley kid do? Of course, they get online and add the mods they want. And Gavin’s got the inside track on modifying software, being mostly software himself.
Gavin is an AI. And also a child. And what does a child do best?
Learn. And what do you do for a child that needs to learn, who is a good person, one whoâs your other childâs best friend?
You help. Of course. Because thatâs what a parent does.
What follows shouldnât be a spoiler, unless you failed to read the blurb on the book.
EXTREMELY MILD SPOILER ALERT.
Stop here if need be. Grab tissues if youâre ok with indirect spoilers.
What happens when a child has learned all they can from their parents?
You mean when theyâre all grown up?
<nods>
Oh. Right. That.
<holds out tissue box>
END OF SPOILER-ADJACENT MATERIAL
Building Baby Brother isnât fear-the-AI, instead it drives straight to that point all parents say theyâre working towards, but that tears them apart, all the same, when it finally happens. If youâre a crier, be sure you have tissues handy. If youâre a parent, be glad you have all those years ahead.
Or do you? Itâs you, isnât it, with the workshop and the spare parts and the know-how? Think, first. OK?
