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WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS Earthdate November 2001 |
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WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS Earthdate November 2001 |
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OFFICIAL
NEWS |
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It was the end of an era... Uniquette, who had edited the weekly Fed news since we were back on AOL, stepped down. Real Life took her away from us. We sent her a huge, Galactic thank-you for her hard work. And her table-dancing. See also Horatio's article in the Inside Scoop section of this yearbook. As of the November 4 issue, the Federation Chronicle was edited by my good self - the demi-goddess Hazed. My bad self, meanwhile, looked on and made sarcastic comments. Capture the Flag returned to the event calendar. Alan Lenton was interviewed by one of the players of the online game Iron Wolves, the submarine simulation that ibgames had a hand in developing. You can read the article at http://www.tbar.com/tow/iwolves/011101/on_board.shtml. And if that domain name looks familiar, yes it is the ex-Fedder Tbar's web site! He's a keen Iron Wolves player. The interview is conducted by Buxton, who also plays Age of Adventure. It's a small world! In Real Life, the Mars Odyssey spacecraft arrived at its destination after a journey of six months, having travelled 285 million miles. It settled into a stable orbit around Mars, and sent a postcard home. "Wish you were here," it said, "having a lovely time, although the atmosphere leaves a lot to be desired". Well no, actually, what it really did was transmit its first image back home, to prove that it was working OK. Take a look at that pic at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/mars/odyssey_103101.html.
When the clocks changed last month, several players asked questions about Fed time. Is the time shown by the "Time" command accurate, and if so what is it based on? Or does Bella just set it from her wristwatch whenever the Fed clock needs winding? I have to say, the idea of a giant mechanical clock that needs to be wound up periodically is a lovely idea. Somewhere in the centre of the Galaxy it sits, on a purpose-built asteroid, with a team of chronic technicians attending to the timepiece's needs. When you type "Time", your comm unit connects with the Galactic clock to find out the time. The asteroid would be airless, so the cacophonous sound of the huge clock ticking would not carry. However, any technician whose ears accidentally come into contact with the clock's casing would risk terrible damage. As I say, it's a lovely idea. But the truth is somewhat more mundane. Fed gets its time from the clock in the operating system of the computer on which the game runs. The computer sets that time by, every now and again, checking with the US Naval Observatory, who are the official time-keepers of the US, to get the up to date time. The USNO, in turn, gets the time from its master clock. This has to be accurate because it's used by such critical things as global positioning satellites. This master clock is based on a system of dozens of independently operating cesium atomic clocks and a dozen hydrogen maser clocks. For details about how they work, see http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/mc_to.html. For more information on various aspects of Fed time, you can read articles in previous news bulletins, found in the archives. For info on the stardate and how it is calculated, see http://www.ibgames.net/archives/fed/webyearbooks/2000/wyb0007a.html#4. For more general information about time used by space missions, see http://www.ibgames.net/archives/fed/webyearbooks/2000/wyb0009a.html#6. As a postscript... when I was poking around on the USNO's web site looking for info on the master clock, I found a real audio broadcast of the USNO master clock voice announcer. What a cool idea, I thought, and I was about to click the link to start the download, when I noticed this qualification:
Fat lot of use that is, then!
We here at the Federation Chronicle are often called upon to answer questions sent in by concerned readers. The questions are handed out to us junior newsdroids in rotation, so exactly what question each of us will get to answer is a matter of chance. Some questions are easier to answer than others. Sometimes the questions are important, covering huge, planet-shattering matters. "What is the meaning of life?" or "Why are we here?" or "How many Sirians can tango on the head of a pin?". We hate getting that kind of question. Because, let's face it, we don't know this stuff, and doing the research is a lot of work. No, we prefer the simpler questions, the trivial stuff. If the questions are about personal matters, problems with Fedders' love lives, social worries about how to behave or what to wear, then we can just make the answers up and people will accept whatever we say as if we were some kind of oracle. Easy work. We love that kind of question. Then there's the trivial questions about stuff in the Fed universe that can be answered by delving into the vast store of knowledge and lore that resides in Hazed's brain. Then, it's pot luck. If we're lucky, she'll have the answer on the tip of her tongue and she will spit it right out at us, so we can write our article with no trouble. But when the knowledge we seek is buried, that's when it gets messy. Exploring the murkier reaches of Hazed's mind is no picnic, let me tell you. You'd be amazed at the centuries of accumulated garbage she remembers, not to mention shocked at the weirdness of some of it. Or perhaps, if you have ever talked to Hazed, you wouldn't be amazed at all.
The letter read:
Oh no. It's one of those factual ones. I'm going to need to get off my metallic butt and do some research to find out the answer. I can't just make this up. Frankly, I haven't the faintest idea what a quix is, but I guess I'll have to try to find out. I also don't have the faintest idea where to start. When in doubt, wander around aimlessly and hope that inspiration strikes you. If I had had a mother, instead of being manufactured on a production line, she would probably have told me something like that. It's worked for me in the past. So I borrowed a teleporter and started hopping randomly around the Solar System. Fortunately, newsdroids can't be killed easily. Floating in space doesn't send us to the hospital like it does beings made out of flesh and other gooey stuff. Neither does accidentally teleporting into the sun - although that did melt some of my internal wiring, leaving me with the robotic equivalent of a limp and a stutter. I'll get that fixed next pay day. I must have caused a bit of a stir when I ported into the ladies loo, and when I popped into the cafe, Godot thought I was the person he was waiting for, before realising it was just a case of mistaken identity. Finally, my random jumps took me to Castillo, and that's where I came across a quix. Well, not a real quix. Not an actual, physical thing that I could examine and then report back on. No, that would have made my life too easy. But I did find a mention of a quix:
Aha! Well, that's a start. I decided to wait around for this nonentity to come home, so I could question him about this quix thing. Unfortunately, he was such a nonentity that it appeared he didn't exist. At least, he never showed up all week. So I decided to use logic. In what context was the quix mentioned? "Not even room to swing a quix" it said. So, a quix is something that you swing. Clearly, I needed to make a list of swinging things. I tuned to 9 and asked for suggestions from the Fedders. Here's a selection of the replies I got - the printable ones:
Somehow I felt that I might have asked the wrong question, or perhaps asked the wrong people, or maybe both... Rather than swinging things, what I was looking for was things that could be swung. I reworded my question, and asked again. And got:
No, no, no! In the end I thought, to hell with logic, to hell with research, to hell with journalism. I'm making this answer up and I don't care if it's wrong.
I just hope Hazed doesn't read this reply!
Newsdroid #47 ended his article in last week's Fed Chronicle with the hope that Hazed would not read the shoddy piece of work he had submitted. He was out of luck. She read it, she was angry, she turned him into a trashcan. Thus it falls to me, Newdroid #32, who drew the short straw, to actually tell you what a quix really is. After I file my copy I intend to disappear for a few weeks so that if Hazed is displeased by my work, too, I won't suffer the same fate as my predecessor. I decided to actually do some research, so I turned to my usual source: the Galactic Encyclopedia. This publication purports to contain the sum of all knowledge, human and alien, and is contained in a set of vast memory banks buried deep within an asteroid in a secret location somewhere in the Galaxy. To query this fount of wisdom, one has to tune to the correct comm channel. The channel used by those who tend the encyclopedia changes every day, to prevent them from being flooded with trivial requests. It's a matter of chance whether you actually stumble across the right channel at the time you have a query: some beings have never found the channel, been forever unable to ask their question and have gone to their graves without getting their problems solved. Fortunately, as a droid, I have a few special features. I'm not talking about the ones that make me very popular with other droids - I mean, the feature that lets me whizz through all the comm channels at high speed, checking if there's any encyclopedia staff logged on. Using the modification does tend to burn out my wiring, though, so it's something to be saved for extremely important question. Given Hazed's threats to me if I wasn't able to come up with a proper answer to the question about what a quix is, I considered this enough of an emergency to risk burn-out. I was in luck. It only took me a few hours to find the right channel, and only unimportant (and easily replaceable) wiring was charred by that time. I quickly composed my message and sent it off:
I sat back and waited, trying to ignore the smell of singed wiring which was drifting into my olfactory sensors. A few minutes later, the answer came back:
So there you have it. Obviously, the person who occupied those cramped quarters on Castillo had visited Zagoben VI and observed their rituals involving deceased quixes!
In a news article this week it was reported that the US Army is working on a new truck loaded to the max with new hardware, electronic gadgets and weapons. It's designed to protect high-ranking military and political officers, and it comes with a remote-control laser-sighted machine gun and a grenade launcher. It has electrified door handles, blinding lights and pepper-spray dispensers. In true James Bond fashion, it can deal with pursuers by releasing a slippery oil slick onto the road, or sharp, tire-shredding tacks, and it can throw up a thick smokescreen. And for extra security, all the controls are fingerprint-activated. Wow. Sounds like something every techno-freak boy racer would want for Christmas. It would certainly stop you being bothered by squeegee people at stop lights: a quick squirt from the pepper spray would deter them from smearing their dirty rags on the windscreen. But there are rather a lot of things that could go wrong... those electrified door handles, for example. I assume you turn them off when the high-ranking military or political officer wants to get into the car, otherwise you'd no longer have any need to protect said high-ranking personage, who would be writhing on the sidewalk covered in third degree burns. But suppose the high-ranker gets in the car, the defences are armed, the electric current is sent to the door-handles, then the high-rankers secretary comes scurrying up of the office saying, "Oh, you forgot these important papers," and tries to open the door to hand the papers to the boss... you get the idea. And anyway, electrified door handles isn't going to stop wannabe kidnappers for long. They just have to wear rubber-soled boots! Now what about those great anti-pursuit measures: dripping oil out the back (I've had cars that do that anyway...) or dropping tacks to shred tires. Fine, until the driver realises he's taken a wrong turn, and wants to back up. To deploy the weapons - the grenade launcher and a laser-sighted gun - the rear seats of the truck slide apart to reveal the weapons control panel. I wonder what happens to the people sitting in those seats? They are probably catapulted out of the back of the truck, where they would land on those tacks. Ouch! Targets are spotted by four cameras, and the gun is remote controlled using a joystick with a one-button firing mechanism. So applicants for the job of driving this thing will need to be experienced at shoot-em-up games. The vehicle is called the SmarTruck and although it was designed for military or government use, a version for corporate big shots is being considered. "You'd have to have the grenade launcher removed, of course, but the tacks, electric shocks and blinding lights could all be used." That's a genuine quote from the vice president of one of the companies collaborating on the SmarTruck. Not fair! Why shouldn't corporate clients get to play with the grenade launcher too?
REAL LIFE NEWS: COMPUTERS GET ALTERNATIVE THERAPY Using computers can be frustrating and stressful. Aromatherapy is supposed to make you feel better. So an enterprising Japanese chap has combined the two - he's produced a ceramic aromatherapy pot that you plug into your PC's USB port. As the pot warms, it releases vapours, such as lavender. Whether the therapy will make computers behave a bit better and not crash so often, hasn't been said!
Just because something sounds wacky, doesn't mean you can't get a patent on it. Which is why two Romanians have patented a "universal transport system" which consists of a flying saucer, built from two wheels that spin on opposite directions to "annul gravity". Damn, if that's all that's needed, why didn't we think of that!
REAL LIFE NEWS: EXERCISE WITHOUT EFFORT Now this is the kind of news story that really cheers me. Apparently, you don't have to get all hot and sweaty to tone up your muscles. Just imagine yourself flexing the muscles, and the effect is almost as good as actually using them. It works because muscles move in response to impulses from nearby motor neurons. The firing of those in turn depends on the strength of the electrical impulses sent by the brain. So you should be able to increase muscle strength solely by sending a large signal to motor neurons from the brain. The scientists who came up with this theory put it to the text. They asked 10 volunteers aged between 20 to 35 to imagine flexing one of their biceps as hard as possible in training sessions five times a week. The researchers recorded the electrical brain activity during the sessions, and also checked that the volunteers weren't unintentionally tensing their arm muscles. Every two weeks they measured the strength of the volunteer's muscles, and the ones who had thought about exercise showed a 13.5 per cent increase in strength after a few weeks, and maintained that gain for three months after the training stopped. Controls who had not done the mental workout showed no improvement in strength. This sounds like the lazy slob solution to keep fit, but it actually has application to elderly people or invalids who are unable to exercise in the traditional, sweaty, way.
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