Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
In the Night Market
Monday, May 7th, 2007
The autumn wind was coming down the valley from China, but, to Javad Azaizeh, it felt as chilly as if it were pouring south from Siberia. He should be inside on a night like this, but insomnia always left him feeling lonely, and Khabarovsk’s night market seemed like the perfect remedy.
Vermillion in the shadows of the next row of kiosks caught his eye, and he walked closer. In the narrow aisle between a noodle stall and one that sold prepaid viewpads for the municipal space, a stocky man in an apron swept his bare forearm up and down, back and forth. Red flashed with every movement. The noodle-seller — he hadn’t even put down his long chopsticks — paused, and the diodes in the skin of his forearm winked out.
He was looking over Javad’s head, and Javad turned.
Up on a rooftop overlooking the market square, a woman waved in response. Her arm, too, traced red on the night, a series of symbols that hung on the air through persistence of vision.
Javad smiled in recognition — he knew those symbols. Forty years ago, touring with Cheba Alia’s orchestra when he was just a city kid who’d never been more than ten kilometers out of Paris, he’d seen the same alphabet on hand-lettered signs in towns on the edge of the Sahara. They’d seemed then like the most exotic thing in the world. He’d never learned how to read them, and what a noodle-seller in a Korean market in a Russian city was using them to say, he couldn’t guess.
Javad turned back to see the noodle-seller resume his side of the conversation, his arm a blur. There must be some sophisticated on-the-fly processing behind the simple arm-waving — the quick-fading scarlet lines were crisp.
Javad’s admiration was tempered by hunger — the smell of fish and spices reminded him he hadn’t eaten since midday.
“Pardon, but when you have a moment…” he said.
The noodle-seller’s arm continued flaring letters on the twilight, his gaze remained fixed on his distant companion, and Javad had no idea if the man had even heard him.
Final Exam
Friday, May 4th, 2007
1. Assume a four-dimensional hyperspherical universe fifteen billion years old. Populate it with one hundred billion galaxies.
A. Calculate the likelihood of life developing.
B. Calculate the likelihood of intelligent life developing.
C. Calculate the likelihood of more than one intelligent race developing.
D. Calculate the likelihood that in the assumed universe with x intelligent races, that any one of them will become aware of another.
E. Calculate the likelihood that any two races will make war on each other.
2. In a p-type universe, specify the preliminary and boundary conditions for each of the following types of singularity.
A. Indigenous species improves genotype beyond recognition.
B. Indigenous species creates mechanical aid that destroys said species.
C. Indigenous species creates intelligent mechanical aid that supplants said species.
D. None of the above.
E. Extra Credit: All of the above.
3. Create 12 p-type universes. Set preliminary and boundary conditions such that only one intelligent race develops in each and that they are unable to leave their parent system. Chart time to their self-destruction. Be sure to clean the laboratory afterwards.
4. Are you God? Show your work.