MEET ALAN
MOLE
I am an aerospace stress
analyst, an engineer who determines whether rockets will
break. (Not hearts, that's a
different kind of stress analysis ...) I work as a Contract Engineer, temp who comes in when there's a panic and goes away when it is over.
This pays very well, about three times what a direct engineer gets, so now,
at sixty, I am semi-retired. But not retired in the idle sense. I
have wide interests. In space -- I've written about how to terraform
Mars, one idea good enough to be quoted by Buzz Aldrin in Encounter
with Tiber (page 539.) I ponder how to get to the stars, and believe there
are four critical technologies: First we should build super telescopes to
find earthlike planets at nearby stars (NASA has come to the same conclusion
and is working on one.) Next we'll send small colony ships with frozen
embryos, with artificial wombs to hatch them (a Japanese scientist, Dr.
Kowabara, is actually working on this with some success), plus robots to
build settlements and frozen adults to raise the children (hence my original
interest in cryonics.) The hardest technology is the propulsion, which will
probably involve antimatter, though the Casimir drive just might be
possible.
My other great interest
is in linguistics, and I wrote a translator program for notebook computers, to
allow you to converse with people if you go, say, to Hungary but don't speak
Hungarian. It works without
grammar, because we understand perfectly well "Three man rob bank yesterday."
But because ambiguous words de-stroy understanding if they are translated wrong,
the program asks you for the meaning every time you use one. ("Charge" as
in which meaning? 1. Charge my card. 2. Charge the battery 3.
Charge him with murder.)
You know what you mean so
you type in the correct number and the translation comes out right. This
means you have to be there to answer such questions, so it can't translate Web
pages or letters where the authors are not present. The program works
well, but, alas, people want to translate Web pages and don't want to converse,
and it doesn't sell. So I became involved with the other
means of world communications, the international language. English makes a
great one except that its irrational spelling must be memorized, so I wrote a
program to translate between regular spelling and reformed spelling.
It worked and I ended up
president of a small society for spelling reform, the American Literacy
Council. To gain publicity I sug-gested we picket the National Spelling
Bee. We did, and this year ended up in almost 20 newspapers. Great
progress, but will it lead to spelling reform? Stay tuned...