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.