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    Yesterday's Thief, Tomorrow's Science: A Look at the Real-life Technology Behind Eric Beckman's World
    Yesterday's Thief, Tomorrow's Science: A Look at the Real-life Technology Behind Eric Beckman's World
    Yesterday's Thief, Tomorrow's Science: A Look at the Real-life Technology Behind Eric Beckman's World
    Ebook38 pages20 minutes

    Yesterday's Thief, Tomorrow's Science: A Look at the Real-life Technology Behind Eric Beckman's World

    By Al Macy

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    About this ebook

    This short nonfiction book takes a look at some of the science and technology described in the popular science fiction novel, Yesterday’s Thief.
    Here are some of the questions it answers:
    • Can earthquakes be predicted?
    • Is mind reading possible?
    • What are space-time crystals?
    • Do people really try to steal power?
    • What kind of time travel is possible (and happens every day)?
    • Is it really possible to artificially inseminate three thousand cows in one year?
    • Can oil wells be infected?
    • Do jewel thieves make stupid mistakes?
    • Does cold fusion deserve a second look?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAl Macy
    Release dateMay 5, 2019
    ISBN9781370560134
    Yesterday's Thief, Tomorrow's Science: A Look at the Real-life Technology Behind Eric Beckman's World
    Author

    Al Macy

    Al Macy's story begins millions of years ago in a cave in Eastern Siberia. Wait. What? I don't have space for that much detail? Now you tell me! So much for the story about the saber-toothed tiger that was a little too friendly.When Macy was a kid, he could never decide what he wanted to be when he grew up. OK, let me interrupt a second. I'll let you in on a secret about author biographies: Most of them are written by the authors themselves. They just use the third person to make it sound like they have some kind of highfalutin public relations team. Unless they are, like, Stephen King or Ernest Hemingway, in which case they actually do have a public relations team. That's especially true for Hemingway, since he's dead.So, just to let you know, while reading this bio, that when it reads "Al Macy did this" and "Macy did that," [whispering...] it's really just me saying that I did this or that. OK?Where was I? Oh, yeah, Al Macy (wink, wink) couldn't decide what to do with his life. He was pretty good at music, but he was better at science and math, so he started studying engineering at Cornell. But then he changed his mind, and finished his degree in physiological psychology. After a PhD in neuroscience at University of Michigan, and a post-doc at UC Berkeley, he changed his mind again, and started writing educational computer games for a living.OK, this is getting boring for me now -- I mean for Al Macy now. I'll skip ahead, and tell you that Macy retired in his early fifties, and switched back to having music as his main hobby. He played jazz trombone and jazz piano in local venues, and, as he puts it, "Worked hard to get bettter before anyone noticed how bad I was."Recently, he started writing books. His goal is to write many books in totally incompatible genres to insure there will never be any carryover success from one of his bestsellers to another. Thus, his first book helps people play the piano, the second book is a story about a bicycle trip, his third book will help people format books, and his fourth will be a science fiction thriller. Get the idea?And that's all you need know all about Al Macy! Isn't he a great guy? Now, about that saber-toothed tiger...

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      Book preview

      Yesterday's Thief, Tomorrow's Science - Al Macy

      ShakeAlert

      In Chapter 8 of Yesterday’s Thief, Eric experiences an earthquake in his San Francisco condo. This is what happens: I was slumped over my home-office desk, dreaming that Viviana was poking me in the stomach, when ShakeAlert, San Francisco’s Early Earthquake Warning System [EEWS], blasted me with its Klaxon.

      Many of my beta readers suggested that was too advanced for the year 2020, but it turns out this technology may be closer than most people realize. Scientists have not found a way to predict earthquakes reliably, but when one happens, they can predict how it will propagate and when the waves will reach a particular location.

      I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area when the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake struck. In its aftermath, emergency workers struggled to free survivors from a collapsed section of highway in the East Bay. Those workers were at great risk of being crushed if an aftershock caused a further collapse. So scientists got their collective butts in gear and put together a primitive earthquake early warning system. Three temporary sensors recorded aftershocks near the epicenter of the original quake. If two of the three sensors detected a magnitude 3.7 or larger aftershock, an alert was transmitted by radio to receivers at the work

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