Welcome to Eldacur
Eldacur.com is the on-line home of Jim Burrows, his family and colleagues. We operate under two brands: Eldacur Press for publishing books and Eldacur Technologies for high-tech consulting and contracting.
Eldacur Press
So far, two books have been published under the Eldacur Press imprint: Jim Burrows’s The Demon Priest and Aunt Jenny and the Delayed Quest. More are planned, including Jim’s latest work in progress, La Maupin, Mistress of the Sword, and a series of three books by Earl Wajenberg.
Eldacur Technologies
Over the years, Eldacur has undertaken many technology projects. Since Jim retired about a decade ago, two remain especially significant today: the early project StarGen, and the more recent Personified Systems.
Personified Systems
When Jim left his last paying gig, Vice President of Advanced Development at Silent Circle, he wanted to be able to do what that company did a few years earlier—launch a vital technology just as the world discovered how badly it was needed. The only way to do that was to predict about 5 years in advance what the next big problem was. After a week or two of sitting and thinking, he decided that the big technical problem that would be bursting on the scene in 2020 was going to be Machine Ethics.
AI, serious AI, even Artificial General Intelligence, had been promised to be a decade away since Jim was first hacking on the MIT-AI system in the early 1970s. But what was changing now was that computers, using both AI and good old-fashioned human coding, were starting to act more like people. We talked to them and they talked back. They were beginning to recognize us by our voices and faces. While they couldn’t drive our cars, they could help. They were giving us advice, both professional and personal. With our without AI, they were interacting more and more like people than mere tools.
Well, if they are going to act like people, the next obvious thing is that they’d better act like good people. The world doesn’t need armies of artificial sociopaths. Jim’s degree is in philosophy, and his career in computers. Defining the ethics of computers acting like people—Personified Systems—seemed like a perfect match. And so was born PersonifiedSystems.com. Jim went on sabbatical, built a team that could edit and critique his writings on the subject, opened a blog and started researching and writing about Machine Ethics.
StarGen
Run StarGen on Fast-Times
StarGen is one of the oldest Eldacur Technologies projects—a program for creating moderately believable planetary systems around stars other than our own. Its origins go back more than half a century to a seminal work in theoretical planetology: a Rand Corporation report published in 1964 by Stephen R. Dole, "Habitable Planets for Man" (available from Rand, here).
StarGen is the latest version of a series of programs I’ve worked on off and on over the last thirty years, though none of my code in the current incarnation is more than half that age. It owes a lot to many different precursors written by several authors over the years, starting with Dole's work and a program called ACRETE, coded in FORTRAN. Martyn Fogg created a microcomputer version of Accrete, still in Fortran, and published a paper in 1985. In 1988, Matthew Burdick, who turned the Accrete model as described by Fogg into a program called “starform”. StarGen evolved from there.
Although I’ve not updated StarGen recently, it’s still available on our Fast‑Times server, here, or by clicking the image to the right.
The Origin of Our Logos
As mentioned above, the word “eldacur” is based upon the Elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin, created by J.R.R. Tolkien as a part of the world-building that led to his fantasy novels. It was specifically coined to describe the peculiar abilities of elves in a role-playing game campaign that we ran back in the 1990s. It is derived from two roots “eldar”, the elves, and “curu”, skill. The elvish would be “eldacuru”, properly, but it gets Anglicized as “eldacur”. In our game it was used to explain why elves could do remarkable things even without invoking magic. Eldacur technology would thus be tech made with subtle and preternatural skill.
Using J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Tengwar” writing system for representing elvish, one might write the derived English word “Eldacur” as or or even . The first uses the convention of placing the vowel over the following consonant, which works well for English. The second uses the more common elvish convention of placing the vowel over the preceding consonant, necessitating a place-holder under the “E”. It also replaces the “” with the single glyph “” which is often used to represent “LD”. The third reverts to the vowel over the following consonant, but uses “” for the “LD”. I prefer the first simply because a “” looks like an uncial letter “T”—“T”—which works so well in our logo.
The original Eldacur Technologies logo marries the tengwar “El” of Eldacur (“”) with an uncial T (“T”). Naturally enough, 30 years or so ago, Jon Callas and I created Eldacur Technologies’ very own tengwar font, and the logo started with the el from that font and then added to it the uncial T based upon the one from a public-domain font called “Celtext”, which appears to have been created by someone named Michael Lee.
Old Stuff
This site has existed for more than three decades and gone through a lot of changes. This latest version removes links and content. If something is missing or you're felling nostalgic, the old index page is here.