This page, and the two after it, are largely to introduce us to Tam. Tam is all about perception and thinking, so I figured it was better to show some of her thinking. As I have been fleshing her out, so to speak, I have found that she is even more intimidating than I expected.

The thing about encryption may need some clarification. One theory of quantum computing holds that they might be very good at breaking codes. Most modern encryption attacks use one of two broad classes of attacks, either brute force or vulnerability. Vulnerabilities are stuff you hear about in the news, where a hacker uses a technical trick to make a code easier to break than it should be. Brute force is just trying password after password until the hacker gets the right one. Brute force attacks are why you shouldn’t pick simple passwords. With modern encryption it is supposed to take much much … MUCH longer to find the right password by randomly guessing then it does to encrypt data in the first place. However, with quantum computing it may work that multiple passwords are tried simultaneously.

This is what Tam is doing, when ever she is presented with a password barrier she tries ALL of the possible passwords at the same moment, but only the instance where she has randomly picked the right password is the world that ends up actually existing. It is not actually clear if this is something that is possible in the real world, but some current quantum theories seems to indicate it could be possible. If you want to read a really good piece of Science fiction that explores some of that you could check out Anathum by Neil Stephenson. Toward the end of the book a character who is in tune with the quantum copies of himself goes through a password protected door using exactly the method I just described where he selects a code at random, and then works to make the world where he picks the right code the ‘real’ world.

She went ahead and broke into all of the available Wi-Fi networks so that she could access the internet in parallel and get better bandwidth. I am fairly sure she can’t read all the pages simultaneously the way she guesses codes as when she was done she would have only read one, but she does read very very fast.

Ok, the boat is actually mooring, not anchoring, and so the whole book is miss-named. But really, how many people out there know the difference between mooring and anchoring? Well soon a few more, but that won’t mean that any more of them care.

There is actually a lot going on here, and to make it clear I could have taken a bunch of pages and bored everyone but avid sailing geeks out of their minds, and the sailing geeks don’t need the explanation anyway. Given that quandary I feel forced to put the explanation down here where you my dear reader can easily ignore it at no cost to yourself at all.

The last time Kay anchored out here he set up a mooring. An anchorage hooks your boat to the ocean bottom with an anchor, and anchors have the small problem that they have to be portable. This is a problem because the ideal way to hook yourself to one place is to use something that isn’t going to move – not something portable. Kay wanted security so instead of hooking himself to the bottom with a 20 pound danforth anchor he used an 800 pound hunk of concrete and rebar which he cast in a kiddie pool. That thing isn’t going anywhere. This is great, until you want to leave. The obvious solution is to un-hook yourself (duh) but then you have the problem that the chain that is attached to your moorage is going to sink to the bottom never to be found again. The simple and obvious solution to this is to put a sizable float at the end of your chain.

So, the moorage consists of something un-moveable attached to the bottom, a chain attached to that, and a float at the end of the chain. All great, except that the float could be a hazard to shipping, and by definition the moorage isn’t going anywhere and could be considered a piece of long-term pollution. Bad Kay! So he used the smallest float that the thought he would be able to find again, a tennis ball filled with foam and attached to the end of the chain with some fairly lightweight wire. Tam helped him find this with an optical trick of making the water disappear, and man that was more difficult than I expected to try to illustrate. If you haven’t figured it out yet, Tam can overlay images onto what Kay sees when he is wearing those spiffy glasses. They will be explained in more detail in a later book.

The last little bit I thought I might need to explain is how he attached himself to the mooring. Why not just hook the chain onto the cleat? Well as the boat moves back and forth in the wind and tide a chain attached that way will almost certainly scrape the side of the boat with results distressing to any boat owner. Also attaching a chain that way is very difficult to do securely. Cleats are designed for ropes, not chain. The rope isn’t just tied because in the long-term there isn’t any knot that a sailor would consider reliable either. Ok, there is the sheet bend, but that is only reliable because it’s always under load – don’t use it for long-term anchorage. Instead he is using one of the best tools of the well prepared sailor, the rope with a bight (aka a loop) spliced at either end. He attaches one loop to the chain using the method that you would use to attach rubber bands together, and the other loop can very securely attach to the cleat. Tada, complete security, and no scratches, probably. In practice is never quite works out like the theory, which is what makes sailors somewhat paranoid. Actually, its not paranoia if the Ocean really is out to get you is it?

I did warn you that you could have skipped all that right? Aren’t you glad I didn’t try to illustrate all of it? I  know I am.

I remember the first time I sailed into San Francisco bay.

A little.

Mind you it was a big event. In some ways one of the biggest in my life. To understand why I have to tell you why I was sailing into the bay and how I got there. I was actually sailing my boat up to Seattle and never intended to even stop in San Francisco. I was going to skip along from Monterrey to Mendocino and avoid the high traffic and poor visibility that the entrance to the bay is famous for. However while about 120 miles off shore due west of the foggy city my boat started sinking and I high tailed it into the bay I was planning on avoiding.

Four days later I sailed into the bay and it was the first sunlight I had seen for 3 days. Since I was using celestial navigation  and I had been in fog for three days in a sinking boat I was only kept from panic from sheer exhaustion. So while it was one of the biggest events of my life to sail to safety my reaction was something like “Yay. I’m saved. Now maybe I can sleep!”. While most of you haven’t had such an experience I am sure, just imagine getting to your dream vacation destination – after spending 3 days in a plane in 3rd class.

That’s about the attitude I was thinking Kay might have in this panel. Tam of course would be just as chipper as she always is. I doubt he would have found that very comforting.