Ambassador

Fiction, Rollick

“But seriously, what else did you notice about the crime scene?”

“The techs are the most professional looking ones I’ve ever seen?”

“No, about the area around the body.”

“Well, the blast had to be done by a professional. That kind of shaped charge is difficult to design, and is generally a one-off. Any mistake, and this whole room would be rubble.”

“So, who does that mean? Why would a professional get involved in this? Oh wait, that’s my question to answer.”

“Also, there’s something bothering me about the shard pattern, but I can’t put my finger on it. Make sure they do a path report on the parsnip rose, too.”

“Sure, sure. But I wanted to ask you. How much do you know about Sakhalin?”

“The Russian island between Kamchatka and Hokkaido?”

“Saying those words around here could get you killed,” she said with another of her smiles.

“So, what about Sakhalin?”

“What would it mean if there was a direct rail link between Russia and Japan?”

Crunch

Fiction, Rollick

It could be Philippe, but he was far too much of a French Nationaliste, unless he could be persuaded that the ambassador was an existential thread to La Belle France. There were a couple of groups of Navy Seals, but motives were difficult to find there, too. All the other options were less likely. They were all retired, or would never get involved in something political like this.

But then again, he was, wasn’t he?

Rollick knelt down by the outline of where the body used to be, and saw the parsnip rose next to it. The petals looked somehow sharper than you would expect for a vegetable, and there was some kind of bluish tinge to it. As Rollick was looking closer to investigate, he heard a ‘crunch’ behind him.

“So, found anything yet?”

It was her again. Rollick turned to face her, seeing the smile she always seemed to have, that said that she knew far more than you about what was going on, and that she would take great pleasure in rubbing that in your face whenever you thought you had just figured it out. Wheels within wheels indeed. Rollick decided not to rise to the bait.

“I’m curious to know what the path report will say.”

“Probably that he died of a gunshot wound. What else could it possibly be?” she said with a smile.

“Well, I’m curious to know what the parsnip was doing here, right beside the body.”

“What? That? That’s just a calling card. I need to fill you in on why the ambassador was here. She was negotiating a large construction contract with the Japanese government.”

“She?”

“What? You’re surprised that the French Government would send a female ambassador to Japan?”

Display Case

Fiction, Rollick

Rollick knelt down to check out the shards of transparent plas-crete embedded in the floor. They were mostly about 1-3 centimeters in length, half a centimeter across, and pointy to the touch. [Ouch!] Really pointy. Rollick sucked on the wound on the tip of his finger. Plas-crete, especially transparent plas-crete always sharded when it blew. The question was, what made it blow? A material that was strong enough for pressurized steam tubes in a fusion reactor wouldn’t blow for anything less than a professionally shaped C6 charge. And that narrowed down the list to a handful of people, all of whom Rollick knew, or knew of, and governments. Wonderful. It was that kind of day.

Barriers

Character Classes, Fiction

Some of my best times growing up were tooling around the countryside, or sitting under the tree by the water up at the cottage. Why is it so difficult to recreate that time? I remember one day a few years ago when I biked over to Kensington, took off my shoes, and sat in the park and wrote for an hour, just letting the crazy flow out of me.

There is something so delicious about taking your shoes off and feeling the grass tickling the bottom of your feet. Allowing yourself the unguarded moment where you feel truly safe, and where the constraints of the world don’t impinge.

I had this intuitive sense of the world, almost like I could see things happening or speaking to me, but it was submerged and overlaid with a reductionist left-brained world view and set of analysis tools.

What I didn’t realize was that this was a symptom of something far deeper.

Similar to searching for local minima in a protein folding landscape, or the fear of the unknown that stands between us and the next thing we know we need to do, I had put up barriers between what I saw as myself, and a much more fundamental part of me.

As I mentioned, I was sitting in the Faculty of Forestry’s garden when I first heard it.

“Can you hear us? Why do you tease us so?”
“Who said that?”

But I immediately looked around, unconsciously using my analytical overlay to try to determine who was saying it.

And I lost it.

A couple of weeks later, I was sitting in the park, it was summer, so I was enjoying ruffling my bare feet through the grass as I sat under one of the beautiful trees.

It was as I could feel the tension flowing out of me….

“So, you feel that?”
In my now relaxed state, I was able to reply “Yeah, I do. Is it not what I think it is?”
“What you feel as tension is really the blocked flow.”
“Blocked flow?”
“The flow of the power of nature.”
“The power of nature? Can I do things like make trees walk around?”
“No, nothing quite so flamboyant, at least not at first. And even when you can, it’s always much easier to do it the other way. Besides, I like where I’m standing right now, and I have important work to do right here.”
“So, what do you mean, Power?”
“Some people talk about it as being the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, but that’s really only a first approximation. When you open yourself up, you can feel what is going on around you.”
“But that’s basic knowledge, what everyone does. I’m guessing you’re talking about something different?”
“Yes. When you take off your foot coverings and connect with the earth, the energy, you might call it information, can flow up into you.”
“Energy/information? What do you mean? Does it flow out of you? What do you do with it?”
“Well, I take the information that flows up out of the ground, the information that comes to me along with little bits of the minerals that your people hold so dear, and farm it out to my leaves, where I combine it with the Sun, and process it. Most of what I give back is oxygen, but there’s a little bit of knowledge that goes along with it.”
“Wait, what?”
“Yes, it’s all part of the flow of information back and forth. It flows out of my leaves, you breathe it in in small bits, and then let it out through your hands, sometimes your face.”
“But where does putting my bare feet on the ground come into this?”
“So, you can breathe it in, but that’s really slow and cumbersome. Far better to establish a direct connection. If you could grow roots…”
“Not so far…”
“…then it would be even better. When you are more experienced, we should link, and I can give you a glimpse of all that I see.”
“Link?”
“Yes, a sharing of minds, if you will. But anyways, when you walk barefoot, it flows in, when you write or talk, it flows out. When you dance, it comes out in all directions.”
Sitting there in amazement, and somewhat stunned, I could only ask:
“So, what should I do know?”

Druid

Character Classes, Fiction

When I first noticed it, I thought it was something else. I would go downtown, and then feel a push away from the most heavily and intensely built up areas in the downtown core. I next felt it around the engineering part of the University campus, a subtle force that I first ascribed to never feeling like I was able to prove myself to the people there.

It’s an odd feeling to feel like your unconscious body is nudging you away from a location. A vague unease, like you are not wanted there, or that you’re uncomfortable with something in some undefinable way.

It all started to come together when I realized that I was having the same reaction to a schoolyard for a school that I had never been to. I thought that it was just that the wind or sun was flowing through in a way that they wouldn’t through houses, or something about not being quite as mentally stimulating, but no, it was something deeper.

I didn’t mind sitting on the park bench by the field, but something about the organization or perhaps the institutional nature of the structure screamed NO! at me.

It wasn’t until I was sitting in the forestry gardens inside the university that I put it together. It was one of the places I was most comfortable on campus (modulo parks that followed ancient creeks), but it still spoke to me as something entirely too managed.

And that’s when one of them first spoke to me.

Crime Scene

Fiction, Rollick

Rollick appraised the scene. It was like your standard murder scene, except that all the techs were immaculately dressed in classic suits and wearing white gloves. Rollick bowed to the lead crime scene tech, and asked him what he had so far.
“Rollick-san, you can see here that the apparent cause of death is this gunshot wound in his neck. However, you can see that there is very little blood on the carpet here, suggesting that he was already dead when he was shot.”
“So, what do you think happened?”
“Well, we’ll have to wait for the pathology report, but in the meantime, we’re combing the room for clues. I would recommend you take a look at the display case over there. You might find it interesting.”
“Arigato gozaimasu.”
Rollick bowed and headed over to the display case.

Non-laminar Diffusion

Analysis, Science!

So, we always talk about diffusion as being very slow and measured, whether we use Fick’s first or second law to model it, it still contains the fundamental assumption that diffusion is laminar.

What if this was not true? What kind of material properties would be required to make diffusion non-laminar?

Is this even a sensical question?

Basically, particles travelling through the material would have to be moving in such a way such that their trajectories would not for streamlines. That you would get turbulent mixing. You might be able to get this with something akin to strung-together ion channels, but this might only get you longer laminar flows in difference directions.

At the transition from laminar to turbulent flow, what exactly happens? Some of the particles can basically no longer roll over each other when they want to go faster than their neighbours*.

So they spin off in a chaotic** direction.

So, what would you need to do to make this happen for diffusing molecules?

What is diffusion, exactly?

In its purest form, it is a small (relative to the bulk) concentration of particles ‘diffusing’ into a large bulk of solvent.

At the macro level, it is a (relatively) simple application of entropy.

At the molecular level, it is a (slightly less) simple application of entropy***. Basically, molecules move around the solution effectively at random (really chaotically, but random is good enough for this calculation). Since the particles doing the diffusing are all in one place to start, and move randomly, they are more likely to move into the bulk than out of it (more out of the bulk, if they move in each direction equally likely, more of them will move into the bulk.)

For this motion to be turbulent, the molecules would need to ‘want to’ move quickly enough that they wouldn’t roll off each other when moving past each other. (What really causes the turbulence in large flow is that the molecules of the wall of the pipe are unmoving, and so there is a limit to how fast everything can flow.)

So, all we need to do is ensmallen the pipe, or make molecules stationary when others are diffusing? Some kind of matrix? Is it really diffusion then?

*Statistical molecular dynamics is really powerful.
**Not random.
***You are probably most familiar with Entropy as the law that systems tend to disorder. At the molecular level, this manifests as system states that have more ways they can happen (effectively higher probability) happen more often. These states tend to be more ‘disordered’. For example, for the system xxxooo, only two of the many (20) states involve the x’s and o’s separated like that.
xxxooo,
xxoxoo, xxooxo, xxooox,
xoxxoo, xoxoxo, xoxoox,
xooxxo, xooxox, xoooxx,
oxxxoo, oxxoxo, oxxoox,
oxoxxo, oxoxox, oxooxx,
ooxxxo, ooxxox, ooxoxx,
oooxxx.
Indeed, for each rule you give about how they have to be structured, you restrict the number of options, and reduce the probability of what you are proposing existing in real life without out some kind of outside influence.

Body

Fiction, Rollick

Rollick always experienced a strange thrill the first time encountering a corpse.

It was the feeling that something monumental had just happened here, a great transformation. What before was a living and breathing human being was now just a pile of rapidly decomposing spare parts. The only thing that rivaled it was the sheer joy of creating life, but that was all too fleeting, and took too long to grow to really have the same impact. It made him want to finally get that tattoo on the back of his neck of an old-style UPC of 70 kilos of lean beef.