Thursday, July 30, 2009

Do you have yellow mushrooms?

I keep a lot of houseplants. I like to have living things in my space. They also help make things interesting: a little bit of Nature here and there to break up the monotony. Actually, in some rooms they pretty much are taking over. But I feel responsible for them and like them to be doing well. I am not an expert, but know something about how to keep some kinds of plants alive and occasionally thriving.

A few years ago I started to notice a yellow fungus growing in the soil of a few of my potted plants. Assuming it to be not a good thing, I applied fungicide and it dried up and seemed to go away. Problem solved?

Well, eventually I noticed this yellow stuff had a tendency to come back, and if I let it go for very long it quickly grew these bright yellow mushroom heads. Oh! Kind of cool, but still, that can not be a good thing, could it?

Thank you, Internet. I decided to find out whether these mushrooms are a problem and if so how best to deal with them, so I did a search and learned the following:

They are a species of fungus called Leucocoprinus birnbaumii, also known as Lepiota lutea. Common names are "flower pot parasol" and "plant pot dapperling."

The yellow mushrooms are the "fruit" of the fungus that mostly lives as a fibrous colony under the soil. It is not known to damage plants, as it feeds on dead organic matter and apparently does not interfere with the plant itself. It likes warm and moist conditions, and can grow outside in warmer climates. They are rather difficult to remove, as you need to eliminate not only the fungus itself but also its spores, which become airborne and can be carried surreptitiously on clothing, tools, etc. They are not edible and may be toxic or at least cause digestion problems. It is recommended to let them be and enjoy them, but remove the mushrooms if there is a danger a child or pet might eat one.

Here are some links to sites I found that talk about these little fun-guys. They include some photos, but you can probably recognize what I'm talking about and now you know what they're called:


Monday, July 20, 2009

This Empty House

This Empty House

Everywhere, this place is filled
with treasures and opened boxes
of past dreams, benevolent ghosts,
a life's accumulation:
Baby's smiles, ribboned hats,
dry flowers, candles and keepsakes.
Grandmother's watercolor Rose and my
gleeful baby niece's photo album afford
a blanket woven of love
and other people's memories
to wrap me up
on a chilly evening by myself.


(7/20/2009)

Friday, July 10, 2009

Electronic Conscience (1999)

Electronic Conscience

by Chris Kaltwasser

Copyright ©1999-2009 Chris Kaltwasser, do not redistribute without the author's permission.


"The instruments say we've got about six minutes of breathable air left, Max, Peter. What do we do now?" Janice Mers checked readouts and jabbed buttons on the operations panel. She was trying not to panic, but it was clear she wasn't going to succeed for long without a little help.

Three people sat staring at one another in the operations cubicle of a very small mining station. Each waited for a sign of hope from the others. Situated on an asteroid circling the sun at just under three times the distance as the planet Earth, their air supply in the man-made station was slowly leaking away because a small but significant crack had developed somewhere in the wall of its artificial habitat.

"We must have caught the full brunt of a micrometeor." The best Janice could tell, it must have been a fairly large micrometeor--perhaps half the size of a baseball, but smashing into the station at about fifteen thousand times the speed of a pitcher's swiftest fast ball.

Relatively few such rogue space rocks existed in the asteroid belt naturally. Except for the wakes of comets, most of the smallest rocks had long since been swept away or captured by the gravitation of the larger planetoids like Ceres and Vesta. But humanity has a knack for making a mess of his environment even when he thinks he's being careful. Years of deep space mining operations to harvest the bounty of raw materials in the belt had left a fresh supply of pulverized remnants. Most particles were sand-like, racing outward without air to slow them; some were quite a bit larger and made for much more devastating projectiles. Because of the clear risk--and a few deadly mishaps--precautions to protect people and equipment in the region had become severe and costly.

The potential disaster of a high-speed collision with such a projectile had been anticipated in the design of this particular mining station, which was why about 95 percent of it had been dug into the surface of its host planetoid for protection. The rest might have been well secured by sophisticated range detectors and electromagnetic fields, except that these systems were still far from perfect.

"We need to find and patch the leak. Are the integrity sensors showing the location of the breech?" asked the station supervisor, a solid man in his mid-forties, just starting to gray at the temples.

"I'm not sure. They're not all on-line. I'm trying to reset the detection grid, but I think there's been physical damage to some of the nodes," Janice replied. She paused, turning back from the console. "Shouldn't we be able to hear the leak?"

"Not necessarily. The walls are well insulated. Any vibration is probably muffled by all the layers of thermal and radiation shielding. It would be far easier to detect from outside of the dome. But there's hardly time now to get into an pressure suit, let alone get out there and look."

"OK, so how about our backup systems? Don't we have reserve air tanks? Shouldn't we seal off the different compartments of the station and take refuge in the unaffected areas?" As she saw more options, Janice was mastering her panic, but like her two companions, nonetheless agitated.

Jenkins thought a second and said, "I don't know that we have time for that. And, the leak is probably on this upper level somewhere, but this is where all the major operations and communications equipment is. If we abandon this level we'll be cut off down there and we aren't even sure yet what is causing the decompression. We could end up trapped and at the mercy of a more serious systems failure."

The other man present on the station had yet to say anything. He sat quietly, reviewing their options in his mind. Trapped indeed, he thought, but what else could they do? He thought back to when he'd arrived at the station, barely three hours earlier.



Maxwell Hume had walked into the operations room and found the station supervisor frowning hard at the operations panel. It was a smallish room, really just an office with desk, a small table, and the major communications and computer consoles needed for running the station. The supervisor didn't look up as Max came in; he just sat there in deep concentration, hunched over his consoles with a data tablet in one hand. Max caught himself wondering if the man was trying to levitate the panel with the power of his mind.

Maxwell was here on business. He tried to be cheerful, but feared the mood would turn sour all too quickly. "Hello, Pete. It's been a while since I've seen you. How can I help? What's the matter?"

With a disgusted frown, Station Supervisor Peter Jenkins slapped down his reading tablet, but he didn't turn to face the entering engineer. He kept looking at the displays with a grimace that indicated he expected they were about to tell him something else he didn't want to know.

"I don't understand this new technology, Max. I'm just at my wit's end! I can't find anything wrong! I've gone over this worthless manual twice waiting for you to get here!"

"Well, I'm here to help. The message I got sounded pretty urgent." Maxwell was a contract engineer and happened to be at a facility on a nearby planetoid when he received a call from a representative of the asteroid mining company asking him to come to their station to help deal with serious technical issues with some of their robotic equipment. They hadn't been very specific about the problem, but they were clear that it was serious enough that he should come quickly.

Jenkins did look up then, and finally made an obvious effort to be civil.

"Sorry. I don't mean to snap at you at all. It's our AR-XII unit. It's about 4,000 kilometers out in the field right now and it's stopped responding to my command inputs. The diagnostics are giving me conflicting reports, and I can't spare anyone to go out there to check on it. You do have some special tests or something you can run on it from here, don't you?" Jenkins asked.

Maxwell breathed a quiet sigh to himself. He was always called on to be the repairman, he thought. People hardly ever came to him unless something was broken or wasn't doing what they wanted. At each job complaints and impatience greeted him. Nothing could exasperate him quicker than an impatient, critical client. He asked himself: Why was he still doing this after nearly seven years?

Jenkins continued, "We've no time for having the rig idle as it is. Procedures would have me reel the blasted thing in if somebody sneezes, but with all the quotas and deadlines and no end of reports telling me we're not working fast enough, I hope you can get this thing working before I get too much more behind."

"All right," Maxwell said calmly. He straightened his back and put on his most professional attitude. "I'm familiar with the unit. Do you have data from before the trouble? You're using the monitoring protocols, right? What sort of work did you have the unit on?"

"Yes, yes." Jenkins shifted the pad across his desk with a sigh of resignation. "It's here. I had the diagnostic software following it the whole time. This is the first time we've used the AR-XII since we got it. It had been out for a little over 900 hours when it started reporting weird anomalies in the diagnostics. Different systems would shut down with reported failures but I couldn't tell what was going wrong. Whenever I tried restarting the driver software it would work again as if there was no problem, but after a while another system would break. I had figured this was the new version of the AR, so I'd better keep a close watch on it, go by the book, and all that. I admit I don't ever really trust the newest version to be right all the way. I haven't had any rest for 20 hours because I've been working on this thing, so I'm sorry if I'm a bit irritable right now. I'm under a lot of pressure. Sometimes I don't understand all this stuff."

"OK, don't worry about it. Let me take a look at this." Maxwell grabbed the tablet. He pulled out his own and started checking off his troubleshooting grid.

In five minutes he was scratching his head. In eight he was biting a nail and staring at the pad and the operations displays. Jenkins paced the nearby corridor, deep in thought.

Ares Mining Station One was an asteroid mining operation under contract to several major corporations back on Earth. The company that owned the station didn't really specialize in deep space operations, but had purchased it during a push to diversify its assets. Jenkins had worked on the station for three years. He'd worked on lunar excavations for eleven years before that. He had felt he was diversifying, too, but maybe he just hadn't wanted to admit he'd felt stuck at his previous job.

"Ahem--hey." Jenkins cleared his throat. He raised his voice a bit from the doorway: "Making any progress? Can you see what's gone wrong with it?"

"Ah, well." Max didn't like to look foolish in front of a client. "Well, I believe this is not a simple problem. I suggest we bring it into the service bay. I'm afraid it's that serious."

Jenkins muttered and swung a fist at the air in front of him. "Just like a new machine! Just like it to go and blow a fuse on the first run out! This is going to put me way behind. Can you bring it in under power, or do we need an EVA pod to go fetch it in?"

Maxwell stared out into the darkness of the office portal as if he would be able to see the robot from this distance. "I think I can get it running enough for a powered flight back, but we'll have to tether it for the final approach. I can't guarantee that in this state it wouldn't smash into something if we try to bring it inside with its own maneuvering thrusters."

"Well, I guess we've got a mess to deal with, then. Makes me wish I'd stayed in bed or something."

Forty minutes later station mechanic Janice Mers massaged the service bay controls, maneuvering the AR-XII unit inside the hanger and closing the airlock doors. The silvery sinews of the traction net brought the large robot to rest in the middle of the service bay and retreated back into their niches in the ceiling.

The machine's great drum-like body nearly reached the top of the control booth, five meters above the hanger floor. It had no proper head, only a set of sensors and communications equipment. Its many articulated "arms" rested some at its side, others in a jumble near the base. Shielded against micrometeors and cosmic rays by a thick gold- colored synthetic fur, the larger arms resembled those of some kind of wild beast. The smaller, thinner arms seemed more like hairy snakes with complex instruments and tools for heads.

Mers jumped down from the control booth and tethered the machine's base with a large set of mooring clamps. It wouldn't do to risk having the big machine tip over or jostle about in the low-gravity hangar.

"There you go, Archie: all safe and snug. You just rest now, and we'll take care of whatever's been bothering you."

Jenkins walked down the steps from the operations level. "You shouldn't bother chatting it up like that, Janice. It's nothing more than a machine."

Mers ignored the man and patted the robot's hairy arm. "Don't let these guys get you down, OK Arch?" With that she stood up and walked out of the hanger through the lower set of doors.

Jenkins clicked his tongue and he and Maxwell moved into the hanger bay to take a look at the machine.

"OK, well, no obvious damage from this angle. How long do you think it'll take to get inside this thing and figure out what's gone wrong with it, Max?"

"Well, the first step is to check the automatic diagnostics. I can hook it into the station computer to run a more thorough check of the software and hardware. All in all, it should take no more than a couple of hours, tops."

"Then I should leave you to it while I go see what work isn't getting done right now," Jenkins grumbled and left.

Maxwell walked around the AR unit and looked up and down the thing. He couldn't see any signs of physical damage to the exterior of the self-driven vehicle. All of the arms seemed to be in place and functional, too. He tapped one with his knuckles and the hairy thing retracted slightly, a bit like a startled animal. He noted the normal reaction.

The AR-XII was the twelfth in a series of autonomous robotic deep space vehicles designed for various unmanned investigations and hazardous operations. The robust cylinder that served as its "body" housed the computers, sensors, and optional equipment bays that allowed the machine to be adapted to whatever challenges were required of it. Being the twelfth of its kind, years of research and experience with previous models were built into its advanced hardware and heuristic AI software.

Maxwell pushed open a recessed panel on the side of the robot, revealing a readout display and touch interface. He pressed a few icons and stood back.

"Archie: acknowledge command interface codes."

The display rearranged itself with new sets of figures, while a seemingly disembodied voice replied: "Command interface codes accepted. Hello, Maxwell Hume. How are you doing?"

Maxwell chuckled to himself slightly at the expense of whatever eccentric programmer had given this machine its "charm." He pulled out his work tablet and noted a few of the robot's codes.

"Archie, run software checksum and report base level one diagnostics."

The screen became an amber blur as new sets of figures began to stream by. After a few seconds the voice returned: "Checksum completed. No discrepancies detected. Level one diagnostics completed. No errors in hardware blocks. No errors in file system blocks. No errors in driver software blocks. No errors in heuristic blocks. No errors in neural network blocks. Total errors reported: zero."

The last word rang out in the cool, airtight space of the hangar with a harshness that almost sounded like pride. I guess the XII has a bit of an attitude built in, Max thought to himself.

"Archie, establish communications protocols for interlink with station computer, channel zero-one-four."

"Channel zero-one-four initialized and prepared for interlink." Pause. "Test data confirms no interlink problems, Max. I am ready for further tests."

"Good. Good, Archie." Maxwell wondered a bit to himself that the computer sounded so confident in its assessment of the situation. He had begun to marvel at the engineering that went into this machine. "Prepare to download additional diagnostic routines, Archie."

About an hour later, Maxwell wandered into the operations room.

"You look like a beat man, Max," Jenkins told him. "I guess you aren't making a lot of progress, then?"

Maxwell sat down in an empty chair across from Jenkins' desk. He spread his empty hands out in front of him.

"Actually," he said, "I've made quite a bit of progress. I've run a huge test regimen. I've thoroughly scanned the logs and analyzed the various automatic system reports. I have successfully ruled out a huge number of possible problems, from physical damage to data corruption. I think I see some odd patterns in the malfunctions, but I've no clue what's been causing them."

"Now you know how I feel sometimes," said Jenkins with a bit of a smirk. "It's enough to make me want to become a Luddite some days. Keeping all the technology on this station running well is no fun or easy task."

"Oh, I doubt you'd really want to be a Luddite out here, Pete. We'd all die pretty quick and horribly if this bubble of technology should break suddenly."

All the more reason why I shouldn't be out here at all, Peter Jenkins thought to himself. He got up to get coffee from the dispenser. He needed some caffeine to get his head to stop aching from all this annoyance.

At that moment a loud klaxon rang out, and Jenkins spilled half his fresh coffee on the floor.

"Drat! What the--!"

Janice Mers appeared from the corridor and rushed past him to investigate the operations console.

"Pete," she said, catching her breath. "You're not going to like this. The computer says we've sprung a leak!"

After a minute or so of near-panicked brainstorming with Jenkins, Mers offered another thought: "OK, here's an idea," she said, much more in-control than she had been a few moments earlier. If she had actual wheels in her head they would be spinning at full speed now. "We need to get outside to find and patch the leak, but we don't have time to get suited. How about putting out an instrument pallet using the docking tethers from the hangar. They should be long enough, and then the sensors on the pallet can find the hole and we can try to patch it from in here."

Jenkins was silent, considering, but Maxwell became animated. His eyes flashed as though a light bulb had just lit up his brain.

"That's no good," he said. "It would take too long to reprogram the tethers to put out and steer the pallet. They're not really designed for anything but retrieval. But," a note of caution entered his voice: "we do have something else to send out there to find the leak. Archie can go."

Immediately, Jenkins and Mers both protested.

"We can't send that thing out there, Max! It barely made it back in here," argued Jenkins. "It's become totally erratic and unreliable! Earlier you said we couldn't trust it to steer itself without wrecking, and now you want to trust it to go out and find a hole in the wall? It might just as well go haywire on us and blast a whole new one!"

"No, Pete, I think we can trust it for this. I believe I now know why Archie's been acting strangely, and I can get around the problem. I'd call it a mild case of 'robot neurosis.' I think his higher AI programming is what's become erratic and caused all the diagnostic errors. But, I've already got him all interfaced with the station computer, so it would take me no time at all to bypass his higher AI routines and have the station computer guide him out there and find the hole and patch it."

"Well, you seem confident enough, and we can't just sit here and keep shooting down all our ideas," said Jenkins. "By all means give it a try!"

So Maxwell stepped up to the operations panels and started entering new codes. "Archie," he said to himself, "we're going to put you to sleep for a bit. Pleasant dreams, kiddo."

Jenkins rolled his eyes at the display of sentimentality for a machine, but Janice Mers was right by Maxwell's side, looking out at the hanger below as the new instructions took effect and the big robot awakened.

The mooring clamps released. The hangar doors parted with creeping silence. The robot lifted from the repair bay and maneuvered through the opening with nearly angelic grace.

Ninety-two seconds later the three humans were looking at one another, barely daring to breathe as the robot applied a patch to a small crevice it had detected in the station exterior.

Four seconds more and their lungs were aching from their own raucous outbursts at the most exhilarating rush of relief any of them had ever felt.

The three of them crowded around the AR-XII as they welcomed it back into the hangar bay. Even Jenkins caught himself patting the robot's barrel chest in an irrational expression of gratitude to the thing.

"Max, you saved our lives. I can't say how grateful I am that you were here," he said.

"Hey! We have Archie to thank, too, Pete!" interjected Janice Mers, giving one of the machine's big arms an affectionate tug.

"Yeah, well, sure," said Jenkins. "I sure am pleased that Max figured out what was messed up with it, at any rate."

As Janice and Maxwell headed back to the habitation section, Jenkins stayed back for a few moments, drifting in thought after the stressful event. This, he thought to himself, is a sign. Why was he still running away? First the moon and now even farther into deep space, he hadn't been chasing dreams or even following a sensible career path. The truth was that he was running from the things on earth he hadn't wanted to face when he was so many years younger. Maybe it was time to stop running, and go back and see if he could put together the pieces of dreams that he'd been too afraid to let himself dream.

After an impromptu celebration, as Maxwell was putting together his equipment to get ready to leave the station, Janice came over to see him.

"There's one thing I'm not sure I understand still, Max. How did you know it was all a problem of some kind of psychosis in Archie's AI programming?"

"To be honest, Janice, I wasn't ever 100% sure. But now that I've gone back and rechecked Archie's logs and diagnostic reports, I'm pretty certain I was right. You see, while I was going over what had been going wrong with him out in the field, I noticed that the malfunctions always coincided with directives in his instructions to activate his gamma torch, either to excavate or analyze an asteroid fragment. It wasn't until later, when our lives were endangered by that micrometeor impact on the station that something clicked on in my brain.

"You see, back when I was still in school studying computer engineering, I happened to take an introductory class in psychology. It was something that interested me somewhat back then, though it turned out I never had time to really get into it because my major requirements were too demanding as it was.

"Anyway, one of the things we studied in that class was how people can sometimes become physically sick because of something they can't or won't face directly. It's a kind of psychosomatic illness that can be brought on by a fear or mental conflict over a situation or thing or activity.

"All my testing hadn't turned up anything actually wrong with any of Archie's hardware or software. He was apparently working exactly as he was programmed and designed to work. So what was causing the mysterious shutdowns of random systems right before he started cutting into a piece of rock?

"Well, all of this clicked in my mind when I remembered that one major component of Archie's programming is to anticipate and try to avoid possible problems, such as damage to himself or people. It's a fairly new sort of AI that's been used in a lot of automated systems like transit cars and construction equipment, but nothing as complex as the AR-XII.

"As you know, one of the more serious hazards of mining operations out here is that the methods used to find and excavate useful ores happen to have the nasty side- effect of blasting a lot of potentially deadly micrometeoric material in all directions. Even the smaller bits of debris can cause dangerous electrostatic discharges. The result is that we've actually made things a lot more dangerous out here by increasing the concentration and number of these dangerous bits of flying junk.

"So I reasoned, maybe Archie's learning heuristics had put two and two together, leading to a conflict between his direct orders and his risk avoidance programming. Because he couldn't directly avoid a direct instruction, he somehow triggered the diagnostic glitches that kept him from performing the action that he saw was potentially very dangerous to himself and others."

Janice was shaking her head in amazement. "Pretty smart robot! In a sense, you're saying Archie's so advanced that he's got a kind of a conscience. He felt bad about what he was doing, and made himself sick over it."

"I think that's a fair way to put it. And it really came down to the fact that he has started to see the world as more than black and white. His state-of-the-art heuristics and neural networks tested out fine in the controlled environment of a research lab, but his programming is not quite advanced enough to figure out how to cope with the sometimes contradictory facts of the real world."

Maxwell finished packing up his diagnostic computers and tools. It was a quiet moment as he and Mers looked out the broad overhead hangar window into the deep black expanse beyond. It was a daunting world out there indeed; a very big place for a little human--or robot--to get itself lost in.

"You never know," said Max. "Maybe I've just pioneered a brand new field of robot psychology!"

Copyright ©1999-2009 Chris Kaltwasser, do not redistribute without the author's permission.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

boxes of blank paper (2005)

boxes of blank paper


(he checks the skirts like)
most,boys do

i feel kinda sorry for him
he wears the required:shirt
it's black,polo
and carries a box to punch things into
as he works.on unloading

boxes of blank paper
unlike the coral white neck-lace
and skateshoes that say
life is for-fun
or at least beer and balls


(8/18/2005)

I wrote this one a few years ago while sitting at my desk at work, looking outside my window. I had a lovely view of the nearby city park through the alley access to the building where I was working at the time. Generally I wished I was down there doing something more fun and interesting and alive, instead of sitting in front of a computer contemplating how I was going to keep doing a good job as the odds seemed to get stacked more and more against me and my ability to stay interested in my projects waned. In reaction to the moribund company spirit and my own boredom and feeling of not wanting to be there, I was writing more poems just as a way to help keep myself sane.

I have a "wandering eye" for all sorts of beautiful things. I think this poem is a reflection on identity and a feeling that your life is divided up in ways that maybe you wish could be more unified.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

You Know

You Know

You know how to get through a cold really fast?
You know what you do to get better?
Drink fruit juice with vinegar, that will clean you right out,
Flush the toxins you've stored up away.

Vitamin pills in a massive dose
Put you back on your feet in a beat.
Your head will be clear as a bell on the wind.
That's what to do if you want to get well.

Rest up and fluids and hot chicken soup.
If you want to get better, you're needing that broth.
Well maybe, I think, I'm impatient as any
to get well and keep running my marathon pace.

But maybe, oh gosh, I don't mind feeling ill.
And maybe I'll stop for a change and consider,
This wake-up call to slow things and just be,
A patience pill may be all that is what I now need.


(7/5/09)

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Listen and Hum (2006)

Hydrangeas in bloom
Listen and Hum


What would I miss
(if I could)
after
I'm gone from this place?
Perhaps (others will
miss them in my place)
to listen and
hum along
with my favorite tunes
and my lover's presence
with me
drinking tea and
eating whatever is
for breakfast on the weekend.


(9/2006)