Going with Grace

Day 64 of Writing

It is just a coincidence that our friend’s recent feature film had a main character named Grace, as does my story. It was the first feature film that he wrote, starred in, and produced. His character’s name was set early, and is part of the title, Getting Grace. Belle writes about this on her blog.

My character’s name was also set early. She is named after and inspired by Admiral Grace Hopper. My Grace meets and gets a chance to talk with Admiral Hopper when she is a teenager. Hopper was a cheerleader for women getting into computers, and she mentored a lot of women.

My Grace uses many different names as aliases. She was born Amy Brennan, but hasn’t used that name in many years, since Amy Brennan is officially dead. Grace is the name she uses most often, and she does it in honor of Grace Hopper.

Admiral Hopper had a remarkable career. She had a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University and was a professor of mathematics at  Vassar College. When World War II started, she tried to enlist in the Navy but was considered too old at 34. She joined the Navy Reserves and focused on computers.

She was part of the team that developed the UNIVAC I, the first general purpose electronic digital computer. It was the first American computer to be marketed for business and administrative use. In a publicity coup, it famously predicted the result of the 1952 Presidential election.

Perhaps her greatest contribution was her push for and development of compiled languages. She is credited with writing the first compiler, which was a huge step forward in computing.

Programming done in machine language is difficult to do and difficult to debug. Science professor Douglas Hofstadter (who wrote one of the most brilliant books I have ever read in his Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid) stated: “Looking at a program written in machine language is vaguely comparable to looking at a DNA molecule atom by atom.”

Hopper believed that computer programming languages that used closer to English syntax would make it much easier to develop complex programs, and she was correct. Computer languages like BASIC, C, and the one Grace is associated with, COBOL (She was nicknamed Grandma COBOL), can be read and debugged with relative ease. COBOL is still widely used on government computers, but since it is not multi-threaded, it should have been abandoned long ago. Still, this 1950s relic of a language endures.

Speaking of debugging, while Grace did not come up with the term, she is associated with it. While she was working on the Mark II Computer at Harvard University in 1947, a moth was discovered trapped in a relay, causing it to fail. This is considered the very first debugging. That moth is preserved in the Smithsonian.

Another huge benefit of compiled languages is that you can write the code and then compile it for a specific computer, rather than having to rewrite it from scratch for each different piece of computer hardware. This made the market for commercial software practical.

Admiral Hopper was incredibly modest. She did not consider herself a genius (I personally disagree with her on that point), but rather that she just applied common sense and looked for practical solutions. She was also doggedly determined. Her accomplishments and accolades are many, as a quick perusal of her Wikipedia entry will demonstrate.

Grace had an amazing ability to persuade people, which is part of what made her such an effective teacher and lecturer. It also made her a great leader. She was generous with praise and with giving and sharing credit. She mentored many, taught many others, and had the respect and love of those who knew her.

She believed that women made terrific programmers. She offered women from the secretarial pool free classes in programing, which is why a number of accomplished programmers started out as secretaries.

While sexism was and still is a huge problem in tech, women have made countless significant contributions to computers and programming. Long ignored, women’s contribution to programming was most recently celebrated in the 2016 film Hidden Figures, which recounts their incredible contribution to the NASA space program

Grace frequently pointed out the unsung contributions of Betty Holberton, one of the six original ENIAC programmers. Most notably, she wrote the very first computer program that could create a computer program. This was an important part of the inspiration for Grace in her creating a compiler.

In 1842, Ada Lovelace is credited as the very first computer programmer. The piece of code she wrote was important, as it showed that computers could go beyond mere number crunching. It was written for the mechanical Charles Babbage designed Analytical Engine (which was never built).

Ada was the daughter of poet Lord Byron, so it is no surprise that she was a brilliant writer, and able to clearly explain complex topics. Her insights on what computers might be able to do in the future were 100 years ahead of her time.

All of these women are fascinating and I have linked their names to Wikipedia articles on them.

The Admiral and my Grace share a number of traits. There are also traits that I incorporated from my wife, including her negotiating skills and ability to talk to anyone.

There is a third person she is based on. She was high up in the Navy, worked on top secret projects, and I got to interview her. It turns out that she had a lot in common with how I envisioned Grace. More on her and her fascinating life in an upcoming entry.

What’s Up with Us

We are both still battling a creative lull, getting much less done than normal. It is getting a little better, but still somewhat dispiriting.

We are also battling the heat. It went from a chilly by California standards winter right into summer. It is sort of like living in the reverse of the Twilight Zone episode The Midnight Sun.

Turns out it is not just our central heater that went out, but also the air conditioner. I have always said that I prefer cold to heat as with cold, you can keep putting on layers, but with heat, there is a limit to the number of layers you can remove.

While we delayed having someone come in for repairs to the heater, and used a lot of blankets and layers of clothing, it is just too hot to try and tough it out. Thankfully, we had friends who knew someone who made time for us. They got our air conditioning fixed last night and just in time. Today it hit 101 degrees.

Yesterday was very upsetting. I absolutely hate to eat in the car and have always avoided it whenever possible. I am not even that into picnics as I don’t like eating with the dirt. However, just for a change of scenery, we drove over to Balboa Lake to eat safely in the car with a lovely view of the lake.

The park had a lot of people in it. Most did not have masks. Some were ignoring social distancing. Even worse, a vendor with a cart but no mask or gloves was selling candy. Very young unaccompanied children crowded around him to buy their potentially covid laced candy treat. The children had no masks. Another unmasked adult woman approached him to buy candy. They stood close to each other as they chatted.

The park is a clear vector for disease. Sadly, people just don’t seem to be smart enough to do what they need to do.  They are either going to have to close the parks or put some supervision there. I saw none.

When I called the park, they said they lacked the manpower to do anything about it. I called the mayor’s office but they seemed uninterested.  Someone will file a report to someone.  In the meantime, if we ever get around to doing widespread testing and then tracking, I am pretty sure they will track cases back to this park. I am guessing it won’t be the only park.

Using My Brain

Day 55 of Writing

I wrote earlier about the challenges of creating dramatic tension with characters that technically can’t be killed. One of the elements that I had thought of early on was making their brains very fragile, prone to many types of failure. My main characters are, essentially, technological constructs, and things can always go wrong.

It is very personal, in my case. Write what you know, they say, and one thing I do know is brains not doing what they are supposed to. I have briefly mentioned my neurological condition and how it effects me, but those were only hints. In fact, it causes a wide array of neurological dysfunctions that come and go. I have experienced things I have only read about and things I never even heard of. It is often strange, annoying, uncomfortable and not infrequently disabling. Before one of the drugs I am on now was finally approved by the FDA, I could barely function.

My symptoms can come and go without warning. I wanted to afflict my characters with that same challenge. I based their problems not just on my own experiences, though. I am a huge fan of highly esteemed neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks, and have read almost everything he has written, most especially his works on neurology. His The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is still my favorite. He describes various neurological conditions in a way that makes them very personal and understandable. He focuses on the people that have to deal with them as much as on the problems themselves. In case he is still unfamiliar, his book Awakenings was the inspiration for the Robin Williams film of the same name. Sadly, we have since lost both of them.

The things my characters are subjected to, as strange as they might seem, are all based on actual neurological conditions. Did you see the terrifying episode of Dr. Who where the statues only move while you blink? There is a real condition that creates that type of experience. It is called cerebral akinetopsia. It is an inability to perceive motion.  I incorporate that and a lot of other real and bizarre conditions, a few that I have experienced myself. There is a very fun sequence where a character can only move when they sing, and yes, that is a real thing. When the brain goes haywire, things can get very strange.

I have experienced auditory hallucinations. They are very strange, and science still does not completely understand them. In my case, certain sounds trigger voices all talking at the same time, and I can’t make out what the people are saying. It sounds very real, even though I know at the time it is not. There are lots of different types of auditory hallucinations, from hearing music to hearing voices telling you to kill yourself or kill someone else. Fortunately, I don’t experience the later.

My hallucinatory experiences have all been mild and benign. The olfactory hallucinations are always of a very strong unpleasant odor that follows me wherever I go. The visual hallucinations are infrequent and quite interesting. It is possible that they are hypnagogic hallucinations, those that occur in the conscious state between waking and sleeping. They only occur at night when I am in bed. It feels like I am awake.

This was the only symptom that I sort of liked. They were actually quite beautiful. The patterns of light and shadow on the wall at night were made by the street lights filtered through the leaves. They transformed into complex and detailed scenes on the wall of paper cutouts of people. They looked just like the art of silhouettes, where profiles and even complex scenes like mine were cut out of paper. It is a skill still associated with magicians, and famed close-up artist Dai Vernon made much of his early living at it. There was an amazing permanence to these silhouette scenes, as I could look away for a few minutes and look back and still see the same scenes. As real as they looked, I never for a second thought that they were real. I sometimes spent several minutes marveling at them. The next night would present a series of brand new scenes. I always knew they were a hallucination, and in a way they were lovely and comforting.

They went away for months, and then came back, but now they were more menacing. This was after Halloween, so that may be why the silhouettes were replaced with detailed skulls. The skull was the first hallucination that moved, and it moved towards me. I was very startled. After that, I stopped looking at the patterns on the walls or out the window at night, where the leaf patterns could resolve themselves into faces.

If you are curious about my condition, it is covered in more detail in my book The Greatest Adventure, which focuses on our early years in show business.

What’s Up with Us

Happy Birthday to me. That is about as much celebrating as I am going to do today. We are putting any birthday celebration off until things are back to a little more normal. It will be a new normal, though. Sadly, I am beginning to fear that just might be by my birthday next year.

I love my home State of California, and have never been happier to be a resident here. We have the largest economy in the U.S. If California were a country, we would have the fifth largest economy in the world. Governor Newsom is using our economic power to work directly with industry to secure 200 million medical-grade masks per month. We will even have enough to share with States having high need. Newsom stated he has basically given up on Federal assistance. The States are on their own as the Federal government continues to flail impotently.

I had my first covid dream. Belle and I always gear up before we go anywhere, with a kit with all our protective gear and another that has everything we need if we decide to take a drive somewhere and eat in the car. It might have once been called a picnic basket but it is now just part of our covid battling supplies. Sometimes you just need a change of scenery.

In the dream I went out in the world without our kit or even a mask and acted as I used to before all of this. I shook people’s hands, and then realized that was a mistake and slapped my hand to my forehead when I realized it. Then I realized I’d need to rub sanitizer on my face and hands, but we were out. [We actually are running low.] There was no place to wash up, as all the restrooms were locked. [That is a real thing here as they don’t want non-employees contaminating their rest room or people just coming in to use it.]  It was a nightmare. I much prefer my more usual adventure and science fiction based dreams.

Belle still has her job. Being able to work, contribute to something important at Cedars Sinai, and get a regular paycheck helps a lot. She has started rehearsing again, and is gearing up for doing a number of videos. I am also starting to get more creative work done after nearly two weeks of just feeling completely drained.

Spinning Tails

Day 46 of Writing

It is important for me to have the story be scientifically grounded. No magical technologies that come from nowhere and defy known physics. I have been looking at emerging technologies for ideas that I could use while expanding their capabilities a little beyond what can be done today.

One of the most important emerging technologies revolves around carbon nanotubes. What we are able to do with them seems like magic. Making them at commercial levels is still difficult, but the potential is mind boggling and revolutionary.

Ordinary carbon turns out to be pretty amazing. We ourselves are carbon-based life forms. Carbon can be in several forms, including charcoal, diamond and graphene.

Graphene is made from graphite, the same stuff in a pencil. Graphene is a single layer of it just one molecule thick, with the carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal, honeycomb lattice. It has unique electrical, mechanical and other physical properties.

Carbon nanotubes are sheets of graphene rolled into a tube. What can be done with them? The possibilities seem almost endless. Increased energy density for capacitors. Better batteries. Electrodes with very high surface area and very low electrical resistance. Dental implants with improved bone adhesion and a built-in anti-inflammatory. They can be used to repair the electrical conductivity of damaged heart tissue. You can make artificial muscles with 200 times the lifting power of organic muscle tissue. They can be used as the pores in membranes to run reverse osmosis desalination plants. You can make amazingly small sensors that could fit in clothing or even plastic wrap (imagine your food wrapping being able to tell you when the wrapped food has spoiled). How about a very inexpensive test strip for bacteria in water? They can be used to create stronger lighter materials. I could do a blog just about all of the current and future possible uses for carbon nanotubes, and I would never run out of material. Check out this Wikipedia article if you want your mind blown.

Still a bit exotic and unfamiliar to most, carbon nanotubes will be in an endless array of future consumer products. They will also be inside of us. They will be everywhere, but for now, they offer great possibilities for science fiction, if only you can keep ahead of their rapid development.

I like to do homages to different genres, and I wanted a tip of the hat to Indiana Jones. I decided on an electro-whip, not a new idea, but my addition was disguising it as a pony tail and made from single strands of spun electrically conductive carbon nanotubes. I had read awhile ago that it was theoretically possible to do this, so I did a little research to see what the state of the art was. I found a video of a lab actually spinning a vat of carbon nanotubes into what looked like a strand of hair.

I also adapted some other cutting edge but real technologies to make an extensible electrified whip that would be the envy of Ivan Vanko. I have some fun ideas for how to incorporate it into the story.

What’s Up with Us

California is in better shape than just about any State, thanks to strong leadership at the State and local level. Being ahead of the curve on so many things has helped us flatten the curve.

After being sent 170 ventilators from the Federal government that did not work and getting nothing from the national stockpile, Governor Newsom went out on his own. We have tremendous technological expertise in this State, and he went put to find every broken ventilator in the State he could and got them repaired. That upped our ventilator supply from 7,587 to 11,036. That gave us enough wiggle room to loan out 500 ventilators to be used where they are most needed.

I don’t know what happened, but it happened to both my wife and I. Suddenly, our creative juices just dried up. She stopped working on developing new magic ideas and I pretty much came to a halt on the novel and a few other creative projects.

Work continues on reorganizing the garage. It was really needed, as more and more things (including more magic equipment) keep coming into the house with no place to live. The garage lacks a car but has everything else in it. We added three more large shelving units, and now it is a matter of getting things better organized. Just the stuff for Halloween fills 15 large tubs.

We also made progress on converting the library to a video studio. Belle will use it for some magic educational videos and for doing interviews with women magicians about their craft. They will no longer be in person, but done using Zoom during the crisis. We have a number of backdrops and a green screen.

Working on video is the only way she can perform now. She lives for performing. Nothing makes her happier than being in front of a live audience. Hopefully performing on video will give her a little bit of a fix. It will also give me more to do, as I will be doing all the video editing.

I first learned how to edit video when non-linear editors were just becoming a thing. I wrote for Digital Video magazine and was a columnist for Video Toaster magazine, so I have been doing it since the beginning. By the beginning, I mean the transition from analog to digital editing. I did have to do a little editing using the mechanical process of using multiple tape-based playback machines, but I never found that to be anything but slow, hard work.

Digital completely transformed video, a transformation just as dramatic as the transition from manual typewriters to word processors. We also had the much too long delayed transition away from the old and terrible NTSC video standard, which finally took video out of the dark ages of television. I may be a little rusty, and I still have new things to learn in my video editing software. Editing text has been more my focus lately.

The daily stress is starting to take its toll. I am noticing that I am becoming increasingly short tempered. It is triggering my symptoms so I am in more pain and suffer greater mental difficulties. Each day continues to flow into the next in a dismal sameness.