Science Fiction Comes to Life

One of my favorite authors is Vernor Vinge, who explores how the evolution of technology impacts future societies.  Vernor is a former professor of computer science, so it is perhaps no surprise that his tech focus appeals to me.  The novel The Peace War imagines a post-apocalyptic society that is recovering from a world war that was prompted, in part, by a new force field generating device (called the Bobbler).

There are all kinds of futuristic technologies described in this book, which is typical for Vinge's literature.  In one scene, the protagonist is about to be ambushed by a group of bad guys. He hands a gun to his teenage companion, who takes out the bad guys without hardly aiming the gun.  The trick is that the gun has computer-guided bullets, which the protagonist directed using his laptop.

This sounded like standard sci-fi tech fantasy until I heard about the self-guided bullet that has been developed by Sandia National Laboratories.  Mashable has a fun video describing the work (see Yahoo News).  Although I work at Sandia, the team working on this didn't invite me to the test range.  Perhaps I'll get to help test out the Bobbler.  ;)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Python Plugin Frameworks

Updated to include pointers to the PyUtilib Component Architecture and PnP. Various Python projects I am working on could benefit from the use of a Plug-in framework.  However, there does not appear to be a standard Python plug-in framework, though there are some mature packages that support plug-ins. Here's a summary of my recent web research: yapsy - This is a simple plug-in framework that was designed specifically to support plug-ins with no external dependencies. Mary Alchin describes a simple plugin framework , with a similar goal.  His classes provide an API for the plugins, with few supporting features (e.g. searching for plugins). André Roberge has a series of posts that describe the application of plugins to refactor a simple calculator application.  The goal of this is to illustrate the requirements for plugin frameworks, with the goal of identifying best practices for plugins. There are some interesting replies to this post, which consider implementati...
Read more

SBOMs for Scientific Software: C++

This is the second of a series of posts exploring the feasibility of generating Software Bills of Materials ( SBOMs ) for complex scientific software. SBOMs provide a list of the components, libraries, and modules that are required to build a piece of software. The United States 2021 Executive Order on Cybersecurity highlights the role of SBOMs to support risk assessments for newly discovered vulnerabilities.  Further, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released its Secure Software Development Framework , which requires SBOM information to be available for software. My previous post  explored the generation of SBOMs for both simple and complex python software packages.  A variety of tools have recently been developed that can create SBOMs for python software, which are relatively easy to install and apply. Standard python installation tools like pip and poetry capture much of the information needed to formulate SBOMs, so developers may not nee...
Read more

Using AsciiDoc for Mathematical Publications

Technical writing is an integral part of my research in computer science and operations research. I have a long history using LaTeX, which is very well suited for writing technical articles that contain mathematical equations as well as code snippets. Although LaTeX can readily generate postscript and PDF output files, I have been unimpressed with tools that generate HTML from LaTeX source. Thus, I was intrigued by AsciiDoc , which promises to generate PDF, HTML and eBook formats. AsciiDoc is used to provide online documentation for software projects, and authors can publish book through O'Rielly using this tool. Thus, this is a well-developed document generation tool. I have successfully prototyped a draft book, Getting Started with Coopr , and you can browse the subversion repository for this document here . Note that the Makefile file specifies build targets for PDF, HTML and eBook files. The advantage of AsciiDoc is that you can use a simple markup language to generate...
Read more