Category: Articles

Free-electron Laser.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Thanks Brent for directing me towards this article. Now, I’ve blogged about the US Navy’s Mach 8 railgun and that is inked to in this article. That would be this weapon:

 DAHLGREN, Virginia — There wasn’t much left of the 23-pound bullet, just a scalded piece of squat metal. That’s what happens when an enormous electromagnetic gun sends its ammo rocketing 5,500 feet in a single second.

The gun that fired the bullet is the Navy’s experimental railgun. The gun has no moving parts or propellants — just a king-sized burst of energy that sends a projectile flying. And today its parents at the Office of Naval Research sent 33 megajoules through it, setting a new world record and making it the most powerful railgun ever developed.

I’ve also blogged before about this free-electron laser, but there’s much more about it in this article. What I didn’t realize is that it can operate at multiple wavelengths (the white lasers in Line War anyone?).

And I also didn’t realize this, which almost reads like fantasy:

Currently, the free-electron laser project produces the most-powerful beam in the world, able to cut through 20 feet of steel per second. If it gets up to its ultimate goal, of generating a megawatt’s worth of laser power, it’ll be able to burn through 2,000 feet of steel per second. Just add electrons.

You have to wonder if, maybe in ten or so years time, naval power will rise to displace air power until such a time as such power and accuracy becomes  lighter. Beyond that there is only one suitable rational response to this. Fucking hell!

500 Million Planets.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Considering this we see that things are slowly firming up for some actual figures, rather than vague speculations, to go into the Drake Equation:

At least 500 million of those planets are in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold zone where life could exist. The numbers were extrapolated from the early results of NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler telescope.

Kepler science chief William Borucki says scientists took the number of planets they found in the first year of searching a small part of the night sky and then made an estimate on how likely stars are to have planets. Kepler spots planets as they pass between Earth and the star it orbits.

BBC Bias.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Good post here over at Autonomous Mind. So when can we get rid of the licence fee? Or rather, as it should be correctly titled: the propaganda tax for the Labour Party.

When you look at these figures it is easy to see why the BBC should account for the disproportionate number of television and radio appearances by journalists from the Guardian. When given a choice of a national newspaper we can see that out of an average 10,197,331 copies sold each day during January 2011 (including bulk buys) less than 280,000 copies in the UK were the Guardian. That represents just under 2.74% of national circulation.

Additionally:
By far the most popular and widely read newspapers at the BBC are The Guardian and The Independent. ­Producers refer to them routinely for the line to take on ­running stories, and for inspiration on which items to cover. In the later stages of my career, I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of The Guardian and told ‘it’s all in there’.
Peter Sissons.

And more here over at Biased BBC:

“The idea of a tax on the ownership of a television belongs in the 1950s. Why not tax people for owning a washing machine to fund the manufacture of Persil?” — Jeremy Paxman

“People who know a lot more than I do may be right when they claim that [global warming] is the consequence of our own behaviour. I assume that this is why the BBC’s coverage of the issue abandoned the pretence of impartiality long ago” — Jeremy Paxman

“I do remember… the corridors of Broadcasting House were strewn with empty champagne bottles. I’ll always remember that” — Jane Garvey, BBC Five Live, May 10th, 2007, recalling May 2nd, 1997.

Note: The date at the end here is when New Labour won the election.

On Writing: The Short Sentence.

Posted on by Neal Asher

The short sentence (or just one word with a full stop) is a useful tool that can be effective during action sequences or can drive a point home. One of my favourite examples of its power was in one of the Stephen Donaldson books of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. In the particular section I’m talking about he describes the opening of a door into the land of the dead. He describes the surroundings, the reactions of those present, the intense, powerful, terrifying atmosphere of it all, and how this character stepping out is recognized:

Kevin.

Those of you that haven’t read the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, or read the books and didn’t enjoy them, will probably emit a small titter at this point. However, when I was reading them I was utterly absorbed and so I knew that Kevin wasn’t a spotty geek with a bad dress sense and a problem with BO. He was Kevin Landwaster who performed the Ritual of Desecration to annihilate an entire land.

Effective.

Short sentences can be the choice of those who haven’t quite got to grips with double, multiple and complex sentences, or learned how to use co-ordinating conjunctions. They can be the choice of those aping Hemmingway or Chandler and failing to get what those writers were about. And they can be heavily over-used.

I’ve read published books where this over use is prevalent. The writer is driving his words into your head like nails into a block of wood: bammity bammity bam, de bam de bam de bam. After a while you get a headache. Yeah, I get it, stop with the hammering already. I’m got a brain here between my ears that can turn your words into images; that can model your story in my head. Your story doesn’t change just because you’re putting the words there with a literary machine gun.

To sum up, the short sentence is similar to the word ‘fuck’. If you use it occasionally it has an effect; use it a lot and you just become irritating. Light and shade, people. Light and shade.   

Use short sentences sparingly.

Anti-laser

Posted on by Neal Asher

And of course I’m thinking about Polity dreadnought defensive systems…

New Haven, Conn. — More than 50 years after the invention of the laser, scientists at Yale University have built the world’s first anti-laser, in which incoming beams of light interfere with one another in such a way as to perfectly cancel each other out. The discovery could pave the way for a number of novel technologies with applications in everything from optical computing to radiology.

Conventional lasers, which were first invented in 1960, use a so-called “gain medium,” usually a semiconductor like gallium arsenide, to produce a focused beam of coherent light-light waves with the same frequency and amplitude that are in step with one another.

Last summer, Yale physicist A. Douglas Stone and his team published a study explaining the theory behind an anti-laser, demonstrating that such a device could be built using silicon, the most common semiconductor material. But it wasn’t until now, after joining forces with the experimental group of his colleague Hui Cao, that the team actually built a functioning anti-laser, which they call a coherent perfect absorber (CPA).

Oops, get back to those copy-edits Neal!

Those Wicked Tory Cuts.

Posted on by Neal Asher

I’d quite forgotten how much I enjoy reading Richard Littlejohn. Here’s a sample or two from his recent article:

“For the past 20-odd years, this column has made a decent living documenting the insanity and waste in Britain’s Town Halls.

If all else failed, there was always the Guardian jobs pages on a Wednesday to dig me out of a hole.
The recruitment of five-a-day enforcers, lesbian bereavement counsellors and assorted real nappy outreach co-ordinators was guaranteed to raise a giggle.”
…
“So they cynically close libraries, day centres and swimming pools and give P45s to school dinner ladies and lollipop men. When it comes to the pain, it’s women and children first.

Meanwhile their lavishly-remunerated public relations departments synchronise the campaign against the ‘Tory cuts’ — aided and abetted by the Labour Party and the BBC, which pumps out a relentless bombardment of anti-Government doomsday propaganda.
This was, of course, exactly what Gordon Brown intended when he beggared the British economy to create a giant client state.
He set a bear trap for any incoming Conservative government, just as he did with the 50p top tax rate. Brown knew he could rely on the BBC to blame the ‘cuts’ on his successors. And he gambled that most people are so stupid they would fall for it. The indications are that he was right, up to a point.”

Header Picture

Posted on by Neal Asher

You’ll see the header picture has changed (as has the link which will now take you through to my virgin website). However, the row of books there are my old covers. Does anyone fancies creating another header picture using my new covers? The advantage for me in someone doing it is that I don’t have to spend time playing about in paintbrush to do it. The advantage for any reader that does it is that I’ll spend more time writing the next book or post about writing…