Escape Pod Flash: Off Base
By Stevens R. Miller
Read by Steve Anderson
Her boyfriend put a slim hand to his forehead, as though shielding his eyes
from sunlight, even though the sun had set some minutes before. Where the
girl had pointed was a bright star, moving east.
Rated PG for frequent golf horror
Being someone who regularly counts to 31 on one hand (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_binary) probably helped, but I thought this was a really great build-up to the “punchline”.
Yup, you got the right skill set to appreciate the resolution of the piece. Thanks for the kind review.
Nice. Thanks for the notice. I love Escape Pod and I loved your story!
Thanks, Doug! I loved hearing my story read by Steve Anderson.
Some writers are known for being sensitive about departures from their personal visions of their work. I tend to look at anyone else’s contribution as a form of collaboration.
Steve read Murphy and the boyfriend differently than I heard them in my own head. That was cool! He made the audio version of the piece into something I couldn’t do alone. And it worked.
My first published story was illustrated. The artist rendered some supporting characters as non-humans. I had imagined them as humans, but the story certainly doesn’t require that they be humans. Again, it worked.
We’re all in this together. Writers, readers (those who record the podcasts), illustrators, readers (those who read or listen to the story), and everyone else. It’s a grand ball, with all of us dancing.
Thanks for coming to the ball.
I don’t get it.
Steve,
ummm…. did you try to answer your own question? What is 19 in base eight? The answer is “Does not compute”. There is no number nine in base eight.
To go with the story, it would only make sense that the aliens actually used fingers and toes and based everything on base sixteen. With that logic 19 in base sixteen would be 25 in base ten.
My bad … I listened to the story again and it clicked. You got it right.
Oh by the way, great story!
Great recovery, Michael.
I’ll be humble and admit that the draft I first sent to EscapePod did have a base-conversion error in it. I noticed it and sent them a corrected version. Thanks to Rachel for accepting my changed version late in the game, and thanks to you for the kind review!
I listened very nicely to the story. And then it finished. I had an 8 second blank mental phase, and then it hit me and I literally fell onto the ground laughing. One, it was funny. Two, I felt embarrassed that I didn’t get it right from the get-go because I’m a programmer and deal with converting bases all the time. Perfectly worded to get that twist and just the right time!
Definitely a “devil’s in the details” kind of story. It’s a good thing Escape Pod is Creative Commons though. Otherwise all “Off-Base” would belong to us.
DrC: That’s just the kind of, “what the- OH!” reaction I was hoping for from people like us (yup, I’m a programmer too). Thanks!
Sch: Damn, but you answered a geeks-only story with a geeks-only comment! Touche’…
I have only just discovered Escape Pod and I really loved this story. As the human race has already lost several space craft down to problems with Imperial and Metric unit confusion this sort of thing is likely. (As for the Russian and European probes to Mars, presumably all metric, it must be those Martians shooting them down)
That’s an apt comparison, Kevin. Extrapolating from international to interstellar differences in mathematical conventions, one could imagine a variety of sources of confusion. In “Off Base,” I simply rendered a number in a way that was ambiguous between bases. But consider the possibility that a species biases in favor of more granularity for numbers associated with psychologically modest events (like counting sheep or doing a count-down to a lift-off), while feeling the need only for order-of-magnitude granularity for “big” things. This could lead to having a different base for each digit in a number.
For example, if the rightmost digit were in base 16, and the next digit were base 8, and the next were base 4, the base 10 number 35 could be rendered as 123. But it could also be rendered as 43. I can’t see any practical advantage to such a system, but I also can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work at all. Who knows? On some distant planet, maybe they do it this way as a political compromise between nations whose citizens have different numbers of fingers and toes (and who knows what else)?
Anyway, welcome, and I’m glad you like the story!
So, Stevens, want to explain the Mayan numerical system while you are at it? Or why we have 360 degrees in a circle? I remember the first time I learned about “doing” degrees as a ratio of pi in radians and thinking, “Gee, why haven’t we done it this way from the start”. Its funny, mathematicians like ratios, engineers like decimals.
Speaking of ratios (sorry, the coffee just kicked in), I remember reading something about storage media. One guy said that all you needed to store huge amounts of data was a very precise metal rod and a very precise cut. You take the length of the rod to the left of the cut and make that the numerator, then the length to the right of the cut and make that the denominator. The ratio resolves to a non-repeating decimal which, when converted to some code becomes letters and these letters just happen to make up the Encyclopedia Britannica.
You just have to pick the right rod and the right ginsu knive…
I’m writing all that down, DrC. Don’t sue me when you see it in a story, okay?
BTW, the problem with that guy’s storage system is that, to avoid a repeating decimal, you need to be able to measure the two lengths from the cut to the ends to an infinite degree of precision, and they can’t form a ratio between numbers of finite significant figures (or else the decimal equivalent of the ratio wouldn’t be non-repeating), requiring that you be able to write out at least one non-repeating number in the first place. If you could do that, you wouldn’t need the rod…
Dr Crisp:
I remember seeing a similar plan, whereby you render the data you need to store as a fraction, and then cut the rod so that it’s new length is precisely that fraction of its old length.
I worked out that, assuming a 1m rod, you could store less than 100 bits in this fashion before the width of the atoms becomes a limiting factor.
And what if the short length of the rod compared to the long length happened to match radius/diameter….or phi, or , oh i forget. And yeah, the measurment has to be exact too.
Hey, don’t steal my ideas. Just because I don’t get mine published doesn’t mean I don’t write my own…
Wintermute:
Well and at the subatomic level indeterminacies preclude measurement. Since we are way off topic (an incessant problem of mine) DNA is still one of the more space efficient encoding methodologies. Encryption and compression are strange bedfellows…strange in a subatomic sense. Is this getting recursive?
For what it’s worth since no one mentioned it, 19 in base eight is 23. 110+9 = 28+3. Personally, I think that space travel would be like air travel is now, with internationally established conventions such as communication all in English (which it apparently is in this story) and consistent units. Failing to use the same number system would be a fairly obvious thing to correct, for this very reason, so I found the tale quite a bit far fetched.
As for the rod diameter vs. length idea, matter is discreet rather than continuous, so there is a limit on the increments you can divide length or width. You might get through the alphabet once, but certainly not an encyclopedia. Which is not to say that it’s not a clever idea that could be made into something.
Oops. To correct the orthography in my previous post: 1 x 10 + 9 = 2 x 8 + 3. Gotta watch those asterisks.
Horace, you’re right. I understand that the Octavians have since corrected their conventions, as a result of the incident described in the story.