Leo D.M.J. Aurini - June 05, 2016


The Technology of Broken Roads Pt 1

Hosted by
Leo D.M.J. Aurini
The Necessity of Righteous Anger ＂Free Speech Isn't Free＂ by Roosh V

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

125.45

Word count

773

Sentence count

54


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I answer a question I received about the economics of my novel, "As I Walk Broken Roads" and how technology works in the world of the novel, and why it's not as simple as it appears in the novel.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Music
00:00:16.580 Music
00:00:19.200 Now, if there's one thing you should never do, it's ask an author about his writing,
00:00:35.580 because he will go on and on and on. So that said, I am going to try and keep this video brief.
00:00:44.520 So it's a question I received about how do the economics of my novel, As I Walk Broken Roads,
00:00:52.840 how does the technology operate? How does it work? Specifically, the challenge I received was,
00:00:59.820 how is it that you can have a place that knows how to brew, you know, a fine ale, which requires
00:01:06.120 some fairly advanced modern technology, and yet they have no idea how to fix an internal combustion engine?
00:01:15.480 Well, in a way, that's kind of the whole point of the novel. Now, with the science in general,
00:01:23.120 I did take some liberties. For one thing, a car like this, she, during a nuclear war,
00:01:29.980 would be completely fried. The computer would be nothing but ruin, and she wouldn't move.
00:01:37.100 Now, there's a very slim possibility I might be able to figure out how to rebuild that. Very slim.
00:01:45.520 But for the people in Broken Roads, which was happening about 100 years after the nuclear war,
00:01:51.820 not a chance in hell. Okay? Everything would have been completely fried.
00:01:56.300 So what I wind up doing, I'm kind of cheating by going with mainly 1970s tech, before we were so
00:02:05.480 thoroughly reliant upon microprocessors in absolutely everything. And this is also part of
00:02:13.720 just my preferred design philosophy. I do not like microprocessors. I prefer analog systems,
00:02:21.180 because half the time they never break, and when they do break, you can usually figure out how.
00:02:27.740 You get computer chips involved, and you're dealing with a whole new layer of problems.
00:02:32.840 So for argument's sake, all the vehicles in the novel were built in the 1970s.
00:02:43.020 That's why they can still run. And most of the technology that's still around is 1970s tech.
00:02:49.860 But how is it that they can do, you know, an advanced brewing process using pressurized containers?
00:02:56.560 How is it that racks can get a hold of an acetylene torch, which requires, again,
00:03:02.320 very advanced machining techniques to maintain the pressure inside of it?
00:03:07.680 And yet they're so primitive that they're dragging plows with oxen.
00:03:14.060 Again, that's kind of the point of the book.
00:03:16.600 I reference in the novel, I reference Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
00:03:24.720 which is an absolutely wonderful book that I strongly recommend.
00:03:29.900 And the author, whose name I can't remember offhand,
00:03:34.820 he talks about how people want things done right.
00:03:40.360 They want it done officially.
00:03:42.060 And so he talks about his friend, who had a problem with his motorcycle,
00:03:46.820 where one of the handlebars, it was jiggering a little bit.
00:03:51.220 And so he took the side of a beer can, you know,
00:03:54.920 snipped the little triangle out of it, and put it in as a shim.
00:04:01.280 And the aluminium of a beer can is an absolute perfect material to use for that,
00:04:07.620 because, well, what happens with aluminium is that it rusts immediately when it's exposed to oxygen,
00:04:14.520 but then that protective layer of aluminium oxide,
00:04:17.600 and I know that's annoying you Americans when I say that,
00:04:20.220 that protective layer stops any more rusting.
00:04:25.260 So yeah, absolutely wonderful material, perfect.
00:04:27.580 But his friend was offended that he'd put a vulgar piece of beer can in his $20,000 motorcycle.
00:04:41.740 Which is absolutely absurd.
00:04:44.260 You know, I once had a mechanic friend of mine, I was having some battery issues,
00:04:48.160 and this was, I should have thought of this.
00:04:50.380 This was brilliant.
00:04:51.060 He looked at the loose connection, you know,
00:04:52.960 and the clamp was tightened down as much as it could be.
00:04:55.660 So he grabbed a spare screw, put it into the divot, the gap,
00:05:02.600 screwed it in, half a centimetre.
00:05:05.940 No more electrical problems.
00:05:08.860 Because, you know what, the battery, the battery is replaceable.
00:05:13.360 It only lasts for a few years.
00:05:15.140 And the nodes, I think they're lead, I'm not quite certain what they're made of,
00:05:19.680 but it's a very soft metal.
00:05:21.660 So by putting that screw in there, he didn't damage the clamps,
00:05:24.320 he just damaged the node on a replaceable item.
00:05:28.780 Might not look pretty, but you don't see that part.
00:05:31.700 There was absolutely nothing wrong with that repair.
00:05:34.000 Took 10 seconds, and no more electrical problems.
00:05:39.340 But it's not official.
00:05:41.520 You know, some people would want to spend $500 on a new battery.
00:05:44.060 Which is just absolutely, absolutely absurd.
00:05:50.280 Now some of you are wondering, what does this have to do with the novel?
00:05:52.220 Here we go.
00:06:01.460 Oh
00:06:04.680 Yeah.
00:06:06.620 Oh