How To Test a Time Machine — A Review of Sorts
So, like most of you out there, from time to time I get totally screwed over by marketing. The latest was when I was browsing in my local Mr. Occulam’s Shop for Diverse and Interesting Artifacts.
I know what you’re thinking — I thought you were a fan of Amberton’s Ethereal Emporium Agent 99, why are you slumming at Occulam’s?
Hey — it’s nice to have favorites, but if there is one thing that the Multiverse teaches us is that there is no permanence or all-compassing solution. We should periodically assess the competition.
I had passed the long table of shrunken heads on the second floor where the brass bound windows all look out on the aetherial chasm, the nice little granny lady who drags her chain across the dusty floor and asks you if you need any help from time to time was coming to bother me, but I sidestepped and pretended I had found a particularly useful dagger for lycanthrope killing.
Having evaded her assistance I made my way down the curving infundibular stairwell, swearing up a storm against the dipshits Occulam hired to do the design of his premises, I was of course heading for the checkout when out the corner of my eye I spotted the book cover shown above, a book with the wonderful title “How To Test A Time Machine”, I didn’t really need it, the Protervus is a marvel of engineering — I built it myself!
But I was of course interested, and snatched it up for later review.
And then, Some Hours Later
Well, That Was A Colossal Waste Of Time
OK, maybe I am being a bit dramatic here, there are some parts to this that are useful, but first things first I should stress — this book is not about time travel at all, it is actually about “End-to-end solutions and options for test architecture and methodologies”
From the Foreword
Noemí Ferrera’s How to Test a Time Machine is a comprehensive guide to testing in the software development industry. This book is an excellent resource for anyone interested in software testing, whether you’re an experienced professional or a beginner. (I mean, the book title alone should make you want to read it!)
Damn! Was this maybe written by a member of Illuminati Ganga?!? I’m traveling right now so I can’t check (well actually sitting on the Pleistocene Veldt with a picnic basket prepared by Mrs. Rouncewell, the housekeeper at Chesney Wold, but you know what I mean), at any rate the foreword to this book starts off by stating how great the book is for its intended purpose. He may not be a member, but that right there shows membership potential (oops, mistake, it’s written by a lady — I am unable to backspace and correct my writing [due to space-time issues and some problems with honey mustard and this keyboard] so I shall just continue as I have started by typing onwards). Of course I know the purpose of a foreword is to tell why you should buy a book, but this foreword lays it on a bit thick.
So this is about testing software, well there is some software involved in the Protervus, but it is written by me, and probably does not follow any sorts of standards of normal corporate software development, not that I know what those would be having spent my life focused on real engineering.
It is written in special home-brewed version of J (with a bridge to run speedy integration with R as I needed to use qsimulatR for some things) and also while J does a lot of matrix manipulations super fast and much easier to reason about, which is obviously a must for any sort of time travel, R just has so many more specialized libraries for graphing and plotting — good Data visualization is insanely useful for — and can be essential to realizing that - if you don’t do something soon you’re going to die. That’s the kind of realization you don’t want to have, unless you need to, and then you want it as quickly and clearly as possible.
Just a suggestion on finding some great stuff about R and graphics and visualizing data — try this book (affiliate link)
Anyhow I can see I’m getting off the track here.
Aside from the book title itself being enough to make you want to buy it from wherever in the space-time continuum you acquire your hard to acquire items, it does have some things that are worth considering — whether you are testing software or otherwise.
For example the title of the first chapter of the book…
Part 1 Getting Started — Understanding Where You Are and Where You Want to Go
This is of course absolutely essential for any sort of time travel. I know you’re thinking it’s essential for just about any sort of travel but it isn’t; I can know that I am in the Pleistocene Veldt during a relative interpluvial phase of the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, which knowledge is going to be necessary for me to calculate the distance in space time from my current location to Salzburg 1783 as well as to set radiation dissipation and energy usage. If I don’t have this information I would die or probably cease to exist in any meaningful way via some means much less pleasant than “death”.
But once I am in Salzburg I can not know exactly what position I am in the city and anything about the city really, although in this case I do, but I can still set off in a leisurely stroll and not have any particular difficult in finding my way to the Augustiner Brewery by the general stench of drunkenness pervading its closest environs.
But another thing you need to know in time travel — is why is this trip actually necessary.
As it happens I’ve got some things I am working towards. Some people would say they were bad things, wicked things, they think I must be stopped.
But really what I am is just a nice guy who is bringing this picnic basket full of butterfly eggs I have gathered here in the African Veldt of the Pleistocene to Salzburg 1783 which I will leave in gardens of one Leopold Ernst von Firmian, who will die of unrelated causes soon after these butterfly eggs hatch. No really.
Ray Bradbury had a story called the Butterfly Effect which was absolute bullshit, but this is very serious shit. And I’m about to test just how serious.
IG Agent 99 signing off for now.
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This article was of course submitted via regular channels by IG Agent 99.
Aside from the previous affiliate link to 99’s recommended book on R and Graphics and Visualization
We can also recommend the following books — also purchasable via affiliate links.
Fractals, Visualization and J — I’ve heard 99 swear by this book, (but then again I’ve heard him swear by just about everything)
The book that 99 bought at Occulam’s turns out to actually exist in the reality, and is easily purchasable
Finally if you find the articles of 99 to be rewarding reading you might like to get The Vaults of Fug, by Agent 6, which has some things in it that might apply
