belated pictures

I dropped my camera in the stream, and I had to wait for it to dry out, so these are a little late.

This is the garden, revision 0.1 The rosemary was there before, and you can see the basil and tomato I planted, along with the mostly dead herb-collection that I transplanted.
we saw these yucca plants blooming, which I almost never see.
This is a picture from Switzer Falls trail. Dang, but California is beautiful.

more futurism

The other thing I can't wait for is for carbon nanotube construction to hit the big time. This time I'm thinking about a submarine that's strong enough to take several people to several hundred feet of depth, and light enough to be carried by a blimp.

When it's as simple to build with nanotubes as it is to build with, say, fiberglass, all sorts of impossible things will become less impossible. (like the space elevator)

In fact economical nanotube construction methods would make the whole Zeppelin concept MUCH more approachable. Get on it, Science!

grocery store futurism

We are living in the future. A couple years ago I was puzzled and mildly put off when my local grocery store installed a flat panel TV at every checkout stand. Lately I can see why they did it, the advertising is probably a nice secondary revenue stream for them, etc..

Yesterday I was walking around my local supermarket and I noticed how fragmented it is. There are three places to buy mozzarella cheese. One in the 'normal' cheese section, one in the pre-packaged picnic deli aisle, and one in the 'fancy' cheese section. Now that I think of it, I didn't check the deli, so it's possible there are 4 places.

Large stores like Target and Home Depot, and increasingly supermarkets, are attractive because they have amazing selections, but they are hard to navigate. Store designers are stuck laying out their vast catalog of products in 2 dimensions, generally. (some stores are multi-level, which has plusses and minuses, but doesn't approach the benefits of true 3-dimensionality, since access between floors is restricted to certain points.) So, they try to group products in an intelligent manner, so that you can find similar things together. This can lead to unintuitive arrangements when you group products by usage, and this is the case with mozzarella cheese.

I'm not particularly trying to solve the 2D layout problem. It's a hard problem, and well understood, and I respect the people who work on it. But I think that by adding an index layer on top we can alleviate and almost eliminate the frustration of crossing and re-crossing a vast store in search of a product, which, let me tell you, is the main feature of my experience at most large stores. I got to thinking about this index layer yesterday. Since I spend most of my time in front of a monitor, I naturally expect relevant data to be connected to itself via a web of links and cross links. The supermarket should be cross-referenced.

But we can do better than little paper signs that tell you where else an item is. What if we put little touchscreen kiosks around the store, maybe with multi-lingual voice recognition so you don't have to touch a keyboard, and we put inexpensive (low resolution) wide angle LCD projectors on the ceilings (so that they project on most of the walkable floor in the store), and we hook into the existing security camera network, and tie it all together with some fancy software?*

Well, then you could walk up to a kiosk and say "mozzarella cheese", and it would show you pictures of the matching products, with prices and (optionally?) nutrition information, and you use the touchscreen to pick one.

Then a little animation on the screen tells you to look at your feet. When you do, you notice that there is a blue arrow, starting at the kiosk and pointing off to your left about ten feet. It is labeled with the name of the product you selected**, and as you walk it extends in front of you and erases itself behind you, guiding you along the best route to the exact location of your cheese of choice.

In addition, you will be able to enter your shopping list onto the store website***, either from your cell phone or from your computer at home, and when you get to the store you simply activate the list and follow the computed shortest path to complete your shopping. The system, once the kinks are worked out, will entirely replace asking a clerk where something is. Half the time they don't even know, anyway. Getting lost in a store equipped with the system will become a purely voluntary experience.

Stores will install it because it is incredibly sticky****. Once you start to use this system, you will not want to go back. Try to imagine using the internet without Google, or organizing a rendezvous without cell phones. Therefore once customers get a taste of it, all the major chains will be follow suit. On top of this, it opens up a lot of tie-in potential with advertisement (turning the entire floor into a message space), coupons, and other promotions.

The technology is possible now; all we're waiting for is for prices to drop and for someone to do it and sell it. If I had the money on hand, and if I knew a little bit more about supermarket information systems, I would start a little company to build it and market it to supermarkets and giant chain stores. Probably someone is working on it already. One day you will see this technology, and you will know that you are living in the future.


*I'm sorry, I get excited and my sentences get too long.
**or not, if you don't want everyone to see what medications you're using.
*** and it will automatically suggest and provide (print?) relevant coupons. This is a great way to retain customers (if you go to the trouble of entering your list on ralphs.com, you are not going to shop at Albertsons).
**** in the sense of customer retention.

garden

I got the urge to plant a garden.

On thursday I dug up the planter area in our backyard where a garden had been before. I went out and bought a crapload of seeds and a couple of sprouted guys, and I brought them back.

Today I planted it.

Basil
Dill
Thyme
Sage
Oregano
Broccoli
Cucumber
3 varieties of tomato
2 varieties of bell pepper
Corn
Cilantro
Watermelon
Summer Squash
Corsican Squash

(I really did mean a crapload.)

So we'll see how it all comes out, but I'm excited. The economics of gardening always appealed to me, and so this is kind of an experiment to see how that bears out in real life. I think I already made a mistake, in that I should have bought about half as many seeds, or fewer, but what can you do.

Also, vegetable and herb gardens play a small but important part in my plans for either the Castle or the Zeppelin, so in starting this I feel that I am taking a small step towards those ideas.

Ask me how it's doing in a few weeks!

natebrand game concept

hey guys, quick game concept for the Burrito Game*.

SO you build your cross-generational burrito franchise in this game, starting with What'sHisName and his donkey, somewhere in Mexico, and moving through cities and across time until your burrito is World Famous.

So that's all fine, it's a traditional casual food service game where you slowly add ingredients and increase complexity.

The key idea I just had is that the game is ALSO a family-raising game. When your shop has accumulated enough success, some customers will fall in love with you. You can then marry one of them, which ends the level. Then you pick one of your children to play for the next level, and which city to send your children to. This requires me to build a generic face engine so that I can model young/old people of both sexes and multiple races, and their offspring, but the result will be a huge awesome family tree that you built yourself, with each node a playable character depicted in portrait style in the setting of their city, and shown with the ingredient that they contributed to the Burrito. (Spelled here with a capital 'B' because I'm talking about the Platonic Burrito, not just some tortilla-wrapped meat. Like how in programming, when class names are capitalized but objects are not.)

It will be your mythic family tree of the Burrito, and it will rock.

Also the portraits will go from Olde Tyme to modern, and clothes fashions and cities will change with the times, right?

OK let's get started.

*Background: I decided to make games for all my shirts so that the shirt logo is an appropriate end game/title page for each game, and then use the games to sell the shirts. No games have yet been made, but I do have a sweet particle system!

unsupported assertions on my part

I think it's interesting that if you are a professional policymaker or pundit, you face approximately the same amount of accountability as anyone else or, arguably, less.

In most fields some mistakes are tolerated. You might get fired for making a particularly bad mistake, but chances are you can go out and get another job at another company in the same industry doing mostly the same thing. Some professions are particularly mistake tolerant, (see: publishing, professional psychic, blogger), and some are relatively mistake-intolerant, such as the medical, legal, and civil engineering industries. In mistake-intolerant fields, you usually have a system of accreditation and an organization that's in charge of enforcing industry standards. If you mess up badly, or if you screw with this organization, you will not be able to practice your profession. The AMA, the Bar Association, etc..

The political world has some aspects of tolerance, and some of intolerance. The media and the electorate are the enforcing institutions for elected officials. Get caught having the wrong sex and your career as a politician is over. Note that the political world's sensitivity to personal scandal is practically unique--in most other professions you can move on with only some minor embarrassment. In addition to the tabloid press, elected officials face elections, which ostensibly hold them responsible for decisions made and punish mistakes made. Losing an election is often career-ending for politicians, BUT policymakers and pundits are not all politicians, and retired politicians can move into this other class of non-elected policy professionals.

There seems to be no broad mechanism in place for holding policymakers or pundits responsible for errors in judgment. There is no professional association to ensure high standards. The press do not make a habit of checking and revealing track records, and there are no elections for these positions. Therefore, without a quality enforcement mechanism, the field of policy making and punditry are mistake tolerant. And that is why the people who made all the mistakes five years ago are still respected, professional pontificators. Wacky, eh?

heck yes.

I had a leaky tire on Saturday (deflated, but not down to the rim.) I took it to the little tire shop down the street from the office. The guy told me it would be ten bucks to fix it.

$10.00

HECK YES. +1 each for Specialization, Free Markets, Competition, Commodification of Service, and Division of Labor. If I had to patch my own tire, I could have done it, but it would have taken me several hours, some tool and supply purchases, and maybe two attempts. There's just no way I WOULDN'T pay ten dollars for someone else to take care of all of this for me. Maybe if my hobby was repairing tires. But it isn't.

gz dave

get a load of this guy.

aw, thanks zombie feynman!

Adorable.


Made some ostrich egg omelets over the weekend. They were quite good, and as an added benefit, this picture is now topical.

I really really hope Zombie Feynman becomes a recurring character on XKCD, although I think it's not terribly likely to happen. Still, the idea is so poignant, or maybe pungent, and I think that Ralph is the right guy to pull it off. Please?

I've been working on our new game at work, and it seems to me that I've become strangely aware of my own cognition as I program. I get to thinking about the limits of consciousness and the finite cranial resources that we apply to large problems, as I am working on the problems themselves, which, let me tell you, is a little like trying to run a debugger on your operating system when it's low on RAM, which, let me tell you*, slows things down considerably.

Still, it's interesting stuff, and I've also noticed that my programming style seems to be attempting to make a phase transition. I think I'm moving from writing applications to writing systems. So, from writing game logic to writing game system logic. It's a slow and incomplete transition, and right now I'm in the uncomfortable middle section, but it's interesting. I wonder if, when I grow up (as a systems programmer) I will read specifications instead of guides, and participate in newsgroups and IRC channels. That's what serious programmers do, right?

Truth to tell, I've never been terribly serious about programming. If you knew me in college, I was just not a CS major, and I'm really still not, so I'm developing this whole 'I are serious programmer' thing pretty late for my age. I've always been more of an engineer than a scientist, in that I am much more interested in what I can do than in what one can do. I like makin' stuff. But I find that the more I make stuff, I also like makin' stuff right.

That is another interesting set of concepts, the 'right' way to do things. If we get rid of the moral baggage attached to the word 'right,' we can gin up some metrics like efficiency, maintainability, accuracy, transparency, expressive bandwidth, uniqueness, and scalability. Then, depending on what you want to make, different metrics are important. For instance, when making a product for the commercial market, you want efficiency, expressive bandwidth, and scalability. For the industrial market you want efficiency, maintainability, accuracy, and scalability. Here is a table!

	commercial	industry	government	art
efficiency	very	yes	meh	no
maintainability	meh	yes	yes	somewhat
accuracy	meh	yes	yes	meh
transparency	no	somewhat	yes	no
expressive bandwidth	yes	no	no	very
uniqueness	meh	no	no	very
scalability	very	yes	yes	no

My point is, doing something the right way depends very much on context, but there are definitely right and wrong ways within a given context. Figuring out what the metrics are for your context can often get you half way to a solution, and as an added bonus you'll be doing it right. lol. But in all seriousness, I find this stuff fascinating.


* you called my bluff, I've never tried it. but I can imagine.

guys guys checkitout

So, inaccuratelynamed.com is available. I am seriously considering snatching it up and using it to document my lifelong rant against poor branding and public signage.

Is this a good idea?

more like In-n-accurately named, amirite?

Man, I love In-N-Out but I just spent over sixteen minutes in their drive through line, at 8:00 on a Thursday. sixteen minutes does not qualify as "in and out."

I'm just sayin.

on optimism

(note: I am a Democrat, and I support Obama.)

Is the Obama optimism justified?
In a word, yes.

http://www.intrade.com/ does basically legalized betting on the outcomes of political processes. The idea is that the market as a whole is more accurate than any individual person, (and more accurate than polling as well,) because money is on the line. So this is a pretty good place to see the consensus view of the race.

I was looking at the numbers and here's where it stands now:

Democratic Nomination:
Obama 72
Clinton 28

General Election:
Obama 48
McCain 38
Clinton 18

(Note, the numbers don't have to add to 100, since these are share prices, but they should be close. (inaccuracies mean inefficiencies))

So, the market seems to see a greater than 60% chance of a Democrat taking the white House, and a roughly 70% chance of Obama taking the Democratic nomination. For comparison, during the 2004 race, Kerry was never trading above Bush for any significant amount of time.

Now, the futures markets are not perfect predictors, but they are a good guide to what the informed conventional wisdom is. For someone like me who gets a lot of his information from secondary or tertiary sources (on purpose! it's filtered!), having a tap on this kind of brutally non-partisan information is pretty valuable. It helps keep me grounded.

Specifically, for this election, there are a lot of factors out there that make me optimistic, but as a scientist (more on this subject later) it's important to me that I have some kind of numerical evidence to back up my anecdote-derived hypotheses. These markets are providing that evidence.

So yes, despite having been burned in the past, I am optimistic this year.

that's what I'm saying.

interesting overview article on memetics.

it is also what Charles Stross is saying, although the book that talks about it, Accelerando, is not his best work. Atrocity Archives is better, imo.

that is all.

abstraction layers

briefly.

choosing abstraction layers is at the heart of programming, science, systems engineering, and design.

Call a concept a box. Take a few related boxes (concepts), put them in a bigger box. Give that box a name. (Grouping two boxes together means you think of them at the same time.) Repeat until you have a few boxes. Now you can put those boxes in bigger boxes, and so on. You can group the boxes however you like. You can fit any number of boxes into a bigger box, as long as you can think of a name for the bigger box.

Some groupings will make it easier to think about some problems, and harder to think about others. Large systems will have hundreds or thousands of small boxes, or more.* Choosing how to group the boxes, and how to name them, is a skill that can be improved.

(In programming terms, it's a system of pointers used to increase efficiency when working with large objects, and also to work around the limited registers in the human brain.)


*My favorite example of a large system with a ridiculous number of basic concepts is U.S. Law. It's also organized pretty poorly, which is why we need to pay bright, highly trained people lots of money just to understand it and report back. They are called lawyers.

web graffiti

Here's an application I want. It's possible today, and it could be a browser plugin, or a web service. (It probably would need to be both to get popular.) I guess it's a lot like del.icio.us and other aggregators, but the idea is to get rid of the concept of the aggregator as a separate site, and instead make it a view on the existing content of the internet.

So, you can make notes on any page, have a friend network, select network depth, and see notes on any page left by others, it's all persistent online, you can switch between public and private notes, and there's auto/community moderation. In effect, a wiki/tagging/social-networking view on the web (which is currently being done), viewable as a HUD on the web itself (which I have not yet seen).

Let me example you. This is what your browser would look like:



So you'd go to some restaurant's site, and there'd be notes left there by ppls. The restaurant did not have to do anything to subscribe, and in fact has no control over the notes, (other than through the community moderation features) If your friends left notes, you'll see those highlighted. You can turn off all notes with a click, if they're obscuring content, or you can turn individual notes on/off, and move them around.

Key features:

• Make notes on any page
• notes are stored per user and per url
• view notes that have been left on the page, by you
• view notes that have been left on the page by others
• subscribe to other ppls notes
• block other ppls notes
• make notes private
• have a friends list
• make notes viewable by friends only
  
• follow graffiti links
• automatically create and strengthen graffiti links
• when viewing, grow or shrink the network depth automatically so that you have interesting content but no information overload
• easily turn on/off all graffiti content
• all graffiti content stored on a graffiti server
• graffiti is accessible from any modern browser, with plugin support for popular browsers.

I'm sure someone is working on this right now.

dwarf fortress

I am addicted to this game. I cannot recommend this game.

It has a terrible user interface, cryptic graphics, a vertical learning curve, an extremely unfriendly user interface, a niche theme, and most of all, obsessive, overbearing, OVERWHELMING COMPLEXITY.

And yet, this game tells very compelling stories. It tells stories of simple, ambitious, emotional, hardworking dwarves, out to build themselves a new life. It reminds me most of The Oregon Trail, which I loved on the Apple IIe in elementary school. You gather your dwarves together, pick your starting skills and equipment, pick your destination on the world map, and strike out.

You then arrive, and dig your way into the mountain. Traders and more immigrants arrive as your fortress grows in size. All your dwarves have emotions and you need to keep them happy while they work. Eventually the goblins attack too. You can draft a military, or build siege weapons, or moats, or magma moats. You can build traps. You can build waterwheels and windmills to power complicated pumps and machinery. You can (and should) make individual bedrooms and tombs for your dwarves, in addition to meeting rooms, statue gardens, and dining halls. You can build a dwarven civilization from the ground up, in excruciatingly believable detail.

As a small example, in order to forge a sword, you need to do these things:
-have a dwarf with a pick mine some stone and haul it back.
-build a woodburning furnace (this uses some stone)
-have a dwarf with an axe chop down some trees and haul the logs back.
-use the furnace to turn logs into coal (this uses the logs you got)
-locate a source of ore, like copper ore, somewhere on the map.
-mine the ore and haul it back.
-build a smelter (this uses some stone)
-use the smelter to smelt the ore into metal bars (this uses up some coal)
-have an anvil (you can't build one without a forge, so bring it with you)
-build a metalsmith's forge (this uses the anvil, and some more stone)
-use the forge to forge the sword (uses up the metal bar and more coal)
In addition, for every step that requires a dwarf to do something, there is an associated skill, and the higher that skill is, the faster/better the job gets done. Dwarfs can train up their skills by doing the associated tasks. This is what I mean when I say "excruciatingly believable detail" and "obsessive, overbearing, overwhelming complexity."

So, my question is, why do I care? Why do I put myself through this?

I don't have a great answer, except that this game pushes a lot of specific buttons for me.

NATE'S BUTTONS:

-It's a massive society simulator, and it takes its subject seriously. Growing up, I always wanted to make such a game, with a fully simulated ecosystem and emotional and interacting citizens. Dwarf Fortress does a pretty good job with this.

-It tells funny stories. The dwarves do a lot of wacky stuff, but they're generally easy for me to empathize with. They need alcohol to get through the working day. Sometimes they're struck by moods and go into fits where they take over a workshop and work like mad to produce some crazy artifact, or go insane if they can't find the materials they need. The dwarves remember the events that occur and record them in engravings all over your fortress, which you can look at.

-I like building things.

-I've always enjoyed thinking about starting up society from scratch, it's one of my favorite thought experiments. It's all in here, from farming to mining to leatherworking to weaving to engineering to leisure.

-I really empathize with the dwarves, and I try hard to keep them alive, well fed, and happy.

I don't know, what can I say. It's a game that I should have no interest in. It totally fails to meet my user interface standards, it's from a genre (Dungeon Siege) and medium (ASCII art games) that I routinely ignore, and I can't even mention it in polite company, because it's too goddamn nerdy, and I CAN'T PUT IT DOWN. Go figure.

Reflecting some more, this game reminds me a lot of X-COM, which I also absolutely loved, and Civilization, which I played quite a bit. It also has hints of Might and Magic, The Incredible Machine, Lemmings, and, as noted, Oregon Trail.

In conclusion, I wish I knew why I find this game so compelling that I am willing, even forced, to put up with it's bullshit. Because if I knew, I would bottle it, put it in a mass-market game, and sell it for a ton of money, and then use the money to build my castle. :-D

public motivations

So, the US Military wants to shoot down a spy satellite as it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere. They will use a component of the Missile Defense system to do it. Their public rationale is that the satellite might be dangerous when it lands, as it contains a tank of toxic hydrazine gas, and shooting it down first will seriously diminish the (already tiny) risk posed by this gas.

Now, this rationale is pretty flimsy.

The Satellite is not that big, the amount of gas is very small, the odds of it hitting anyone are minuscule, etc., etc.. read the article if you don't believe me.

The real rationale is almost certainly something like, "Hey guys, let's see if our expensive new Missile Defense System can hit a live target!"

I don't really have a problem with this. I mean, it would be nice to know if it works, right? But what sortof chews me is that they come up with this bogus line to feed the public. And it bothers me for two reasons.

Reason 1. Have a little respect for us, guys. This public reason was obviously a load of hooey, to me, before I read this article. I am not being a conspiracy theorist here, the "conspiracy" is in plain sight: some people want to (publicly) test their missile so they can get more funding for it. Fine. Just say so, don't trot out this line about protecting life and dangerous hydrazine.

Reason 2. The execution of this line of propaganda is pretty half-hearted, but this is exactly the same way that the US was bamboozled into war with Iraq. (See: conflation of Iraq and Al Queda, Saddam WMD, etc etc etc. ) So, there's a broad pattern of the government, and especially the military, hiding its real motivations, and getting into the propaganda game.

Obscuring the motivations for shooting down this satellite just seems petty, a knee-jerk, automatic propaganda response. No-one really cares, in the grand scheme, why you want to shoot it down, no-one's going to protest much, or stop you, but you lie about your motives anyway, out of habit. Which implies that, when we consider your motivations on more weighty matters, you are demonstrably untrustable.

Weak Sauce, is what I am saying.

on atheism--also, we are still monkeys

Last night I saw a dude down on 3rd Street with a slide projector and a microphone. He was arguing that atheism is philosophically absurd, and morally untenable, and that macro-evolution is unproven, and such. It made my blood boil a bit, but I didn't go over to yell at him, because I didn't want to validate him, and I also didn't want to waste my time.

But I think an interesting point is raised, which is a little bit orthogonal to our specific cultural differences. I know from personal experience that many atheists are perfectly ordinary and ethical (I would also say moral) people. They function well in society, they don't go around murdering people or stealing, even when they can get away with it. So my anecdotal personal experience seems to refute the claim that atheism leads to anarchy. Maybe I've constructed a straw man here, but indulge me. The point is this: I think that moral behavior is more a function of human nature than it is of the presence of a ideological moral framework.

So, when someone has to make a moral decision, say, whether or not to steal something, I don't believe they generally consult their ideology*, I believe they consult their animal emotions. I think that's the main reason that most atheists don't end up in jail. Importantly, I think that's the same reason that most Christians don't end up in jail. People are social animals, we have an innate emotional need to be loved, and when our loved-ones feel good, we feel good too. For ordinary decisions we don't ask "what would Jesus do?" or "What will make the best society?" Mostly we act out of habit, or on our social and emotional intuition.

So while I think it's possible, and maybe even important, to derive a moral framework without relying on religion (see first post), I think an equally important realization is that our moral ideologies interact with our day to day lives only rarely**. Still, it's nice to have one when some street preacher is metaphorically calling you a piece of dysfunctional shit.


* Here I use ideology to mean their logical construction of morality founded on some fundamental faith.
** Similarly, algebra is a very basic mathematical tool, but I almost never use it, and I wrangle logic for a living. Forget about calculus. What is with that?

buyer's, or blogger's, remorse

After I wrote my first post here, I immediately regretted the title of this blog. It's too big. However, I'm not changing it. It's too late now, and I will just have to learn to live with it.

this room has only ever seen the light of the pickle

[I just gotta write this down while it's fresh. So to speak.]


"Empty your pockets please. Cellphone, matches, PDA, camera, keys, everything."

I tried to convey my skepticism with a raised eyebrow. This was clearly some sort of a scam, or at the very least a prank, but the old man steadfastly refused to recognize my appeal. He simply held out a gray plastic basket for my things. After a few seconds of silence I started to get uncomfortable, so with an inward sigh I started going through my pockets. Camera, cellphone, wallet, keyring, coins.

"Do you need my belt buckle too?"

"No, I trust you. But we have to do this, you know."

I did not. He slid the basket into a cubbyhole in the wall next to the vault-like door. Then he patted himself down, and put his cell-phone in another basket, in another cubbyhole. He picked a strange device off of a hook on the other side of the door. It had a bulky handle like a flashlight, but instead of a bulb and lens it had this funny hook and clamp, with a screw at the top. An unpleasant looking device, but this time I fought down the eyebrow. It wasn't going to get me anywhere, anyway. One thing I had picked up for certain in my visit to the castle at the end of Mount Shadow Manor Lane*, and that was that the people here didn't much care what you thought of their ways. They were blissfully indifferent to both your cynicism and your common sense.

He levered open the lid of a large mason jar that stood to the left of the door. It opened with a slow, wet, "thwup." It was dark down here, and we had come down fifty steps on a spiral staircase to reach this level. (I had counted the steps. I had also noticed that the staircase wound clockwise as we were headed down, so that we were always turning right.) The mason jar was crusted over on the inside with salt, but I was unsurprised when he picked up a pair of tongs and pulled out a large pickle. That was, after all, why we were here.

The old man shook the pickle off, and then inserted one end of it into the device he held. He used the screw on the hook to press down and hold the pickle firmly in place, pierced at each end. It was a very fast motion, and the pickle-torch was ready to go in a matter of seconds. He flipped a switch on the handle and the pickle glowed with a faint greenish yellow light**. He nodded and handed it me carefully, so that it didn't drip on my sleeve.

He briskly pulled a second torch from the wall and inserted a second pickle, then he closed the mason jar. Now that we each held a pickle torch, he started to turn the large wheel on the steel door that I had been staring at since we had arrived at the bottom of the stairs.

"Point of interest. This next room is a working airlock that we salvaged from a decommissioned missile silo in Kansas, and installed here. One door cannot open while the other is open. The doors are airtight, and so of course they block all light as well. There are no windows or lights inside the airlock, other than these." The door creaked open with a nearly imperceptible hiss of equalizing air pressure, and swung open. It was indeed dark inside.

The airlock was a small metal room. We stepped inside, and my guide closed the door behind us. As the light from outside was sealed off we were bathed in the dim green glow of our pickle torches. If I had been a claustrophobic person, this would have been the time. He turned the inner wheel on the door until there was a click, and then he moved across the room to the other door to start opening it.

"We installed the airlock and the electrical circuit facing a bear rock wall. Since the installation of the airlock, only this form of illumination has been permitted inside. So the entire chamber you are about to see was excavated under this light, and has never been exposed to any other illumination."

"Never." I didn't even bother with the question mark at the end of that one.

"Never."

What do you keep in a room that has only ever seen the electric light of the pickle? You keep an immense golden chandelier, with three tiers of gloriously glowing pickled cucumbers, obviously. You keep a small crop of sickly-looking genetically modified low-light cucumbers, apparently. You keep a family of mice in a large cage. They haven't seen the sun for six generations, but they seem very happy otherwise. There's a tank of seamonkeys next to them. You keep a giant glass tank of brine, too, and you keep a book with drawings and plans. Construction isn't complete here. There's an unfinished mosaic on the floor, and work on another tunnel is in progress. The plantation, the mice, and the tank of brine all have an unsettled look to them, under the shimmery yellow-green glow, as if they're not quite in their final places, as if this particular arrangement is only temporary.

"The work continues, as you can see."

* It's important that you understand that this is not a made-up street. It is real and deadly serious.
**It's important that you understand that this is not a made-up source of illumination. It is real and deadly serious.