Countdown to Christmas

As the last few days to Christmas approach, children no longer have dreams of sugar-plums dancing in their heads. They have dreams of tiny little devices used to play music or communicate with their friends. There's a Wall Street Journal Article, Kiddies' Wired Wish Lists which I unfortunately could not find online which talks about how kids today want, phones, video games, ipods and other very techy Christmas presents left under the tree.

The question I'm sure on many a young mind is, do the elves up in the North Pole have the sophistication to make these wonderful 'toys?'

Have a Happy Holiday Season! This blog will be on vacation until January 2, 2008.

Is Attitude Everything?

Does attitude play a role in their success? What about the attitude of the doctor? Does the doctor have to believe that a treatment will succeed for it to do so? I once watched this special about a medical trial where people with enlarged hearts were being treated by chopping out a piece of their heart to make it smaller. The procedure was developed by a doctor in South America, Dr. Randas Batista. The TV special was about an American doctor who wanted to try the same technique, but he could only get approval to try it on very high risk patients, at a much higher risk of dying than the people who were being treated in South America. So he rounded up the men who qualified for the trial and reduced the size of their hearts and they all died.

In my two previous posts, the patients who take things into their own hands are very young and strong and the most likely to survive from tried and true treatments, so is a doctor really going to advise them to take a very high risk treatment that has not been proved? Does attitude play a huge role such that these patients might benefit from many treatments that others would not such that their results shouldn't even be counted?

What if there were a device that could measure attitude and treatment could be advised based on attitude? What if your doctor came in and put the attitude thermometer in and said,
"Sorry, we are going to have to do something about your attitude before we continue." Or would doctors use this measure to determine who gets the 'soma' like in brave new world and goes out softly and who goes out fighting for every medical trial?

What's it Going to Cost?

Yesterday I referred to a Wall Street Journal article about some people who have managed to successfully fight cancer with a drug cocktail approach. One thing the article did not talk about was how much experimental treatments can cost. A few days ago in the San Francisco Chronicle there was an article that talked about this very subject: Insurer said no, so cancer patient pays for experimental treatment which is about Evanthias Pappas desire to participate in a very experimental study at a cost of $235,000 to fight her very aggressive cancer.

There are so many different experimental treatments out there and they all cost. Is a doctor being unfair in not supporting a patient who wants to go after an unproven treatment at exorbitant costs?

In Brave New World, the dying all hung out strung out on soma, but in our society that approach is pretty frowned upon. What does the future hold? Will health care plans eventually have Plan A. Fight fights that have a 50% survival rate. Plan B. Fight fights that have a 75% survival rate. And the top of the line plan.... Plan C. Fight regardless of survival rates. And what will plan C cost?

Excuse Me Doctor, Let Me Explain What I Need.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago: Lab Rat?
Sam Hutchison has cancer. His father is seeking a cure beyond the edge of medicine. The article talks about people who are doing their own research and finding their own receipes to cure cancer. It begs the question... do you need a medical degree to do research and make treatment decisions? With so much information now widely available and doctors having limited time to spend on each patient, is it possible that people who can devote several hours a day to investigating their own treatments might be able to come up with better solutions even than doctors that specialize? One of the interesting things about this article was the fact that the parent of a patient or a patient can make the decision to use untested drugs in combination whereas would a doctor be capable of taking such a risk?

Will all this new information that's available to patients with the time and the energy to the do the research open up a new type of doctor? Ten years from now will the be facilitator specialists. Will there be doctors who ask you to do research on your own problem and then help you treat yourself based on that research? And what about the people who don't have the time or the knowledge to do their own research? Will there be a new profession outside the medical profession. A personal research assistent? And will medical schools have to add a new class: How do you learn from your patient?

Is Anyone Getting Any Sleep?

I've decided to do a little series on medical treatments, practices, etc of today. And today's topic is Sleep Apnea or is anyone getting any sleep? I had two friends tell me that they have recently been tested for Sleep Apnea which is a disorder where a person stops breathing for periods of time while they sleep. I heard the story of how they had to go to a sleep clinic and go through a sleep test for a diagnosis. Then on the TV show 'Little People Big World' the dad goes in for the same test and for the first time I started to get an idea of what the treatment is. It's a mask that the person wears when they are asleep - a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure machine. It certainly doesn't look like something that would help you get a better nights sleep.

The only statistic I could find was that 12 million Americans have from this problem, but I wonder how accurate this data can be given that most people who have it are unaware that they have it.

As a species are we on the path to becoming more Borg-like? Instead of jumping into bed and getting a good snooze will there be a point where we have to 'regenerate' and plug ourselves into machines?

I'll Take a Side of Quality With That

I just bought myself a Christmas present at Brookstone, an ipod speaker so that I can listen to my tunes without having to close out the rest of the world. As I was checking out the cashier asked me if I wanted to get a 2 year guarantee with that so that if anything happens to the speaker they will fix or replace it.

Remember the days when there were actually guarantees that came 'free' with products? I remember my high school backpack. I sent it back to the manufacturer twice. Once they fixed it and once they just sent me a new one because it had a lifetime guarantee.

As technology improves, how come the quality behind products isn't improving as well? Are people happier to be getting a better price with less quality? Will almost every product become disposable? Or will we see a reversal where people only buy products that come with guarantees? Or will sales shops say the guarantee is 'included' as a new sales point?

That Looks Kind of Familiar

I think most sci-fi fans enjoy Escher pictures. There's a interesting Japanese artist making Escher-like pictures: http://www.pallalink.net/. Some of the pictures are made up of images of Tokyo and because I lived there, I recognize the scenes. Like vending machine in front of a brick building is such a classic Japanese scene.

Quality of the News

Before the internet age, big stories were a big deal. Reporters would work all the angles to cover the story and before you knew it, you knew details that you never would have even associated with that particular story. With the internet news items have to be cast or published immediately with little research or insite added if a news system wants to remain competative. A reporter can't even spend valuable minutes thinking up new angles. And now with the world of bloggers taking off, you have people blogging eye witness accounts instead of being interviewed.

We know more about what's happening in the world, but has the quality of the news suffered? The Daily Show is a favorite of mine because they are always spinning the news in amusing ways such as pulling clips of politians completely contradicting themselves. But why don't we see this type of detail in the 'real' news?

Where will the news be twenty years from now? Who will make the call as to what is important enough to be called news. Will there ever come a time where the journalists go back to asking hard hitting questions of our polititians? Will anything short of a disaster hold the news for more than a day so we can find out about the news 'behind' the news?

DNA Evidence

What DNA Evidence would you want to leave behind? According to a San Francisco Chronicle article Shrink-wrapped genes: DNA Direct of S.F. offers consumer service DNA Direct offers a service to freeze dry your DNA so that you could keep it in a sock drawer if you wanted and reconstitute it with water should the desire ever present itself. The question is, what would you really want to leave behind?

Some of the more normal things that people do with genetic material is check for predispositions for certain ailments. I could see where maybe people who die of unknown causes might want to leave their DNA behind so that it could be studied in the future. But there's also people who are taking DNA from their dead dads to check for paternity.

My grandmother left her body to science, but after watching one to many medical programs I don't think that's for me... too humiliating even if I am dead, but I could see the possibility of leaving my DNA to science (note to you vultures out there, this is no way represents consent.) I can just imagine, 100 years from now someone reconstituting my DNA and saying wow... can you imagine how blissfully ignorant this person must have been in life not realizing how many potential problems there were?

Thanks Bruce

I watched the movie Die Hard or Live Free yesterday. I'm a big fan of the Die Hard series. Lots of action. Never a dull moment and very memorable. I was thinking how the Mission Impossible series has a lot of the same sorts of action in them, but they never quite captured me.

One of the things that an action movie has over science fiction these days is that the special effects are there to make the impossible seem possible. Okay there were a few stunts that weren't completely believable in this latest movie, but for the most part, there's that surge of adrenaline as you think... wow, what if this happened. In science fiction, many times you have to put your disbelief so far out there that it's impossible to really put yourself in the action.

On the other hand, how many car chase scenes can we see and still be enthralled. I thought the movie could have had about 20% cut without losing a think. I watched it on DVD and I probably never would have made it through it in the theater... it was too long.

Where will special effects go in the future? Will a car chase never cease to be a staple in an action movie? I thought it was interesting that the movie had technology at it core, but having some kid hacking isn't a very visual image.

Sorry No Sniffles Allowed

Almost anyone who has ever had to work in an office environment can relate to the article on CNN: My coworkers are making me sick. Everyone I know seems to go into work sick, myself included. The problem is that you can never tell how sick you are going to get. Are you just coming down with a cold? What if it is going to be a seven day cold and you are going to be really sick on day four and five? Will taking days two and three off help or will they just drain your sick days which we all know have been merged with vacation days which means you are using potential days off where you could have been on a beach somewhere.

I wonder, did we all used to exchange our germs so readily or are we all stressed out and more at risk of catching every little thing? Or are the viruses so much stronger these days that we are helpless in their precense.

There are two things I see for the future. One, telecommuting when sick to avoid spreading germs will become mandatory. For a lot of office jobs, why not just work at home? Two, sickness sensors. I can see having to go through a security checkpoint that inhales your breath and if the machine sneezes, you are on mandatory sickleave. Or maybe someday we'll all have a completely opposite feeling towards being sick. Maybe a discovery will be made that it's very important to get all those little colds when you are young to avoid getting sick when you are old and people will exchange their germs happily.

It's All About the Money

One of the big discussions my family had this Thanksgiving was about the nearly invisible line of really tiny text on the new ten dollar bills. Some of my family could see it, others couldn't. It's that tiny. Even with a magnifying glass it was still really, really tiny.

According to Wikipedia the average ten dollar bill only lasts 18 months and then is taken out of circulation due to wear.

I wonder how much the country spends making money. Will all these new technological advances of using ATM cards instead money to buy everything from Starbucks coffee to McDonald's be a cost saver for the government?

In the future could it be possible that we'd have to buy the right to use cash?

Childcare Specialists Requires Medical Degree

You may have read my previous post that talked about some of the severe allergies that are becoming more prevalent among children. A few days ago I was reading a CNN article My son's food allergies: danger every day and what struck me was not what the parents had to go through, but what daycare providers would have to cope with to deal with a child with severe allergies. Where young folks with little training would have at one time been fully prepared to care for a 3 year old with just a little babysitting background, now they have to be able to deliver a shot of epinephrine. How do child care providers cope with the rule rather than the exception that they will one day have to rush a child in their care to the hospital.

Will day care providers of the future have some sort of medical training? Will there be computer programs that help coach these specialists to diagnose when to take their young charges into the hospital.

Identity Theft vs Marriage

I saw an ad the other day on TV about how some children are going to have their identities stolen and their credit ruined before they are even old enough to think about credit. There's another ad about a young man who is living in his wife's parent's basement because he didn't check his wife's credit score before marrying her.

It's horrible how many lives can be ruined by identify theft. Will it eventually lead to changes in culture? Will marriage become a huge financial risk (well more of one than it is today?) Will people end up living together instead of getting married because they to have a fall back back in the event of identity theft? Or will the laws change making it harder for companies to give out credit without really verifying a person's identity.

What will be our forms of identification in the future?

In the Event of an Emergency Stock Up on Poptarts

The first time Moffet Air Field opened to the public, I planned to meet my parents there. I didn't know what the food situation was going to be since although there were likely to be thousands of people, there weren't necessarily going to be concession stands. So I went to the little market near my apartment and bought a box of poptarts and a bottle of water. The interesting thing is that I NEVER buy poptarts, but in this situation it seemed like a perfect food. They taste good. They keep forever. And I knew that if my mom or dad got hungry they wouldn't mind a poptart.

I was watching TV the other night and there was a special about how Wal-Mart has tracked the fact that people buy strawberry poptarts in the event of an emergency. If there's a hurricane coming, Wal-Mart will order extra strawberry poptarts. This is all due to more sophisticated tracking of products with relation to external events like hurricanes.

Wouldn't it be interesting if in the future instead of having the survival goods arrive after the hurricane, if they arrived before? If the bottles of water, poptarts, canned goods, and other necessities to make it through an event like Katrina arrived before the hurricane did. Logistically speaking would it be more difficult or less difficult? More expensive or less expensive?

The Evolution of Television

Did you ever think about the goal of TV programming 20 or 30 years ago? Back in those days many homes only had one TV so the 'best' programs where shows that appealed to everyone in the family. Today, a family of four might have four TVs. (This is not to mention additional Tivo devices and such.) Programmers have to capture a demographic vs having widespread appeal. Has this changed how families interact? Do families argue less? Do children no longer have constant opportunities to develop abilities to negotiate and compromise?

Entertainment certainly is bound to continue to evolve. What are we likely to see in the next twenty years? Could they start to make realistic cartoon shows that are programmed in a way to be entertaining in some custom fashion to one person? Will we each be in our own little worlds? If that happened would we lose something in the process?

Man Jewelery

I have this theory that men like to wear their jewelery in the form of technology. Sure some men are bold enough to wear necklaces and earrings, but for a man of means, it seems as if there's nothing more pleasurable then the latest bluetooth ear piece or a nice ipod wrapped around their arm.

Now that the techy companies have tapped into a man's need for wearing technology, where will it lead? Will the once crazy multi-functional baseball hat that you could drink out of somehow evolve? Can you imagine the $10 mainstay turning into the $10,000 must have technology toy?

How Come American's Don't Have Toilet Technology?

One of the most amazingly complicated device in the Japanese bathroom is the toilet seat. Until you've used a nicely warmed toilet seat on a cold day, it probably just sounds like a crazy idea, but in Japan the toilet seats are chock full of gizmos and gadgets:

• Warmers
• Washers
• Dryers
• Noise Makers (so no one can hear the sounds of nature)
• Flush settings (Do you want a little flush or a big flush?)

I think the evolution of toilets in the United States will probably catch up in the future to Japan, but can you imagine what the Japanese toilets might be able to do in the future?

What Happened to the Fast in Fast Food?

If you told someone 25 or 30 years ago that when they went into a McDonald's in the future, they would have to wait around while their food was prepared, I'm sure they would just laugh at you. I remember the days when you'd go into a McDonald's and there near the frying stations would be the little packets of french fries, all lined up. And behind the counter there would be stacks of burgers packed and ready to go.


I went into a McDonald's today and had to wait while they shuffled the fries into the little paper envelop and assembled the burger. What happened? This is not a McDonald's with no traffic so that's not it. I'm assuming that maybe the elimination of the Styrofoam containers which kept things warm might be a factor... or maybe it's just that people want freshly assembled food (let's face, it's not being freshly cooked back there.

So what will we expect 30 years from now? Are there designers out there coming up with new technologies that make it possible to once again have the food all assembled and ready to go or will there new directions that we can't even possibly imagine?

This Lot is Full

There's a San Francisco company Streetline that wants to change how the world (or at least a few cities) views parking. Install smart meters that have sensors detecting when the space is occupied or empty and respond accordingly.

On the negative side, how would you feel if you parked at a metered space and the minute the meter ran out, it called the meter maid to come and give you a ticket or worse just took your license plate information with a camera and mailed you a ticket based on how long you overstayed your welcome.

On the positive side, how wonderful would it be if you could flick open your cell phone or PDA in a congested area and get directions to an empty space.

What will be the unintended consequences of this new technology? Do people often plan on overstaying their limit in parking meters? Will garages suddenly develop a booming business?

In the small town of Utsunomiya Japan where I used to live, there were no street parking spaces. If you had a car, you had to rent or own a corresponding space. If you went to a friend's house there was never a parking space. This city was modern enough that they could have planned for more parking, but it wasn't in the culture. There were very expensive Ferris wheel like parking lots where you could put your car. Is this the future of American cities as well?

Happy Thanksgiving!

This blog will be on vacation for the Thanksgiving Holidays and will return next week.

Thought for the day, how many technical devices make it possible for Rachel Ray to cook an entire Thanksgiving meal in 60 minutes?

The Government Discourages Saving

I just got a letter from E-trade that says if I don't have some activity on my account soon that they will have to give the money up to the state. I had heard about this before because I read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Anguished tales of property taken by state. But in all honesty I wasn't worried, after all, I always have activity in my accounts. But I was wrong. I have this little modest account that I have that I decided to just leave in place and make a little interest on. A little rainy day account so to speak. Well needless to say, I'm just going to that account before the money gets confiscated by California. I wonder if they contact the beneficiaries on the account before they take it.


Did you ever think about how much you depend on technology for your banking these days? More online banking. ATMs are an amazing invention, but now we are moving further and further away from ever using cash. Will there come a time when some places will not accept cash? Is money real if we never see it? If we save our money, are we just setting ourselves up for someday having someone take it away in the middle of the night in an automatic transaction never to be seen again?

Lung Cancer or Diabetes

I assume that San Francisco is like many other big cities across the country in that there are messages everywhere. Around here there are a lot of messages on the buses about the dangers of diabetes and then of course there is the constant news about how the American population is growing and they don't mean in numbers. One thing that fascinates me about so many health studies today is that they seem so isolated from everything else that is going on in the world. When will the cross-referencing of data become powerful enough that root causes can really be tracked down?

One thing I was thinking is how a few generations ago most or at least a large percentage of people smoked. From what I've heard smoking is a really great way to stay slim and quitting smoking is a really great way to gain weight. Is it possible that having a generation of ex-smokers may have impacted the health of the next generation through sweets instead of second hand smoke?

And how will the children of the 'diabetes' generation be impacted as their parents panic over the evils of sugar? What could possible replace sugar?

What Would Darwin Think?

Did you know that bulldogs mommies usually have cesarean sections to deliver their pups? (Reference) Snuppy, the Afghan, was the first dog to be cloned. And check out this article on CNN about designer kiddy-cats - How much is the kitty in the window? $22,000. People are breeding different members of the feline family to create a designer product. The thing that I find interesting is that the kitten's come with a certificate of authenticity and a DNA "fingerprint."

I wonder is all this use of technology just to get us use to the idea of what we could do with people? Or is the future of the pet much more technical than that of the human?

It's So Hard To Stay Ahead of The Game

I turned on the TV this morning. Helicopters were flying overhead and I wanted to know what it was all about. Instead I saw a clip about the fact that Barack Obama is going to be visiting Google today and it's expected for him to discuss his plans to name a Chief Technology Officer (See here on VentureBeat.)

I signed a deep sigh. Is nothing sacred? See, I'm writing a book in which I refer to the Secretary for the Department of Technology. It sounds so much more authoritative don't you think?

Anyway, my point is that it's very difficult to stay ahead of the game in science fiction particularly when it comes to technology. We are at a tipping point where things are moving so fast that it's hard to predict the future. One piece of evidence of this is that the announcment is connected to his visit to Google, a company that has been around for less than 10 years rather than at Microsoft or Apple which were once considered the hip and happening software companies. And let's face it, at one time great-grand-daddy IBM would have been the place to make this kind of announcement.

(On a separate topic, I just noticed on Microsoft's website that the company is turning 30 this year. Remember the phrase: "You can't trust anyone over 30." Well I guess it still holds true, unless that particular company makes products that start with an 'i.')

So 20 years from now, what role will the government be playing in technology?

What Are They Saying in Italy?

I have been doing some searches lately for an Italian painting. I topped out what I could find on the English sites so I started to search the non-English sites. First I had to look up the name of the painting in the other languages for the most efficient search. There are a lot of wonderful tools out there on the web that do free translations. I used the free Babel Fish Translation tool. (If you haven't heard of Babel Fish, it was a little fish that the characters in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy put in their ears so they could understand other species in space.)

Although many people in the world study and speak English, this world is far from having one common language. Europe has always fascinated me because the countries are so small, but the differences in language are so great. What does the future hold? Will we ever speak one language? Will we have cool tools that allow us to communicate seamlessly with people who speak other languages? What features would a tool have to be to be successful.

The Reality of Reality TV

Remember the movie The Truman Show. It seemed like such an interesting concept... something that could certainly never happen in real life. Well now reality shows are a dime a dozen and today's reality stars act as if they aren't even on TV. I find it fascinating how polished reality shows appear. Take a look at a segment of MTV's The Hills. I'd love to know the infrastructure behind what we see on the TV. And what is going on in the heads of these people who are living their lives under scrutiny?

• MTV


• Music Videos


• MTV Shows


• Entertainment News

Is this just some camera men sneaking around or is the technology becoming more sophisticated so that they can be more invisible? Have you ever noticed that the reality shows are so much more polished then say, the segments we watch on the President? Why is that?

In The Pursuit of SPAM

Isn't weird that there are all these people out their trying to ruin your email experience? People who do everything in their power to send very, very unwanted emails about things that you'd just as well not know about? They do everything in their power to subvert the fortresses you or your email or Internet provider put in place to stop them.

Who are these people and why do they do it? It has to be all about the money right? Wouldn't it be funny if one conglomeration owned the companies that created the SPAM and the ones that try and stop the SPAM... just kidding, that wouldn't be very funny at all.

There is a new breed of person out there. One who creates unwanted emails. What will our email systems be like in the future? What will a future SPAM email look like? Will prisons be filled with SPAMMERS?

(And just for fun, what does SPAM stand for as it pertains to email?.... nothing it's slang for Unsolicited Commercial Email.)

Dreams of The Future

There's a guy named Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, who is gave his 'last lecture' because he is dying of pancreatic cancer. The lecture has caught a lot of attention. He's been on Oprah, etc. The lecture if you are interested is available on the Carnegie Mellon site: Video site.

One of the topics that Randy talks about in his lecture are his childhood dreams. Being that he's kind of a geeky guy some of his dreams involved being in zero gravity, being Captain Kirk and being a Disney Imagineer. Well thought out, but not surprising dreams for someone of his age. In his lecture he encourages having these dream/goals and he goes over how he achieved his dreams.

With all the changes in the world, can you even imagine what geeky kids will be dreaming about 40 years from now? What will kids want to be? What will they want to achieve?

A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings Part 2

Yesterday's post was about how pollution in Los Angeles is being traced to Asia. Well it turns out that not only is the pollution coming out of Asia being felt in other parts of the world, but the pollution is also impacting the weather: BBC article - Global impact of Asia's pollution.

It's an interesting article because one naturally has to draw the conclusion that if the pollution coming out of Asia is causing world-wide problems as China gets bigger, than it stands to reason that pollution coming out of the United States and other developed countries for the last 100 years has already done significant damage and has impacted the air quality of what should have been the pristine air quality of third world nations in the past.

Hum... let's look at some UN stats. CO2 emissions 2004:

United States: 5987.98 mio.tonnes 621.86 per km2

China: 5010.17 mio.tonnes 522.06 per km2


One of my favorite books is Ecotopia where part of the Western United States secedes from the Union to do their own thing in a more eco-friendly manner. But it's clear that no nation is an island when it comes to pollution.

As technology gets better and the satellite network improves and more and more data about who is responsible for what is available, could the fight to breath/exist/live actually lead to cleaner air standards by which the entire earth's population? How will countries be held accountable? If another planet like earth was ever found and people colonized it, would standards of pollution be one of the first things addressed?

A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings

There's the whole chaos theory that talks about how when a butterfly flaps it's wings half way around the world, that all kinds of crazy things happen.

There was a decent movie A Sound of Thunder where this guy steps on a butterfly back in the days of the dinosaurs (time travel was involved) and as a result, evolution completely changes. It's one of those movies where you think, but what about.... that doesn't make sense.... over and over, but it was decent.

In the New York Times article: As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes it talks about how not only is China polluting China, but a lot of the pollution there ends up in other parts of the world. Apparently there are studies that say that 25% of the air pollution in Los Angeles can be traced to Asia (reference.)

Is it possible that one day we will be fighting wars because of fear of the air pollution coming from other countries? Will one day there be daily statistics about where the pollution in the air came from published in the newspapers?

Secrets at the Bottom of the Ocean

Unlike the Titanic where there are lots of witnesses to what happened there are many planes and ships that disappeared at the bottom of the ocean in pure mystery. There's an article in the San Francisco Chronicle: Romance of the Skies plane crash haunts pair 50 years later about a plane that crashed and no one has any answers as to what happened except for a few bodies that were found with their watches stopped a certain hour. There's a possibility that someone might have bombed the plane to cash in on insurance money.

With all the new technology it seems very plausible that finding some of these wrecks at the bottom of the sea should be achievable either now or in the near future. Is history going to change as evidence of the past is discovered? Will some day the remains of Amelia Earhart be found?

What new technologies for finding missing people will be discovered? Wouldn't it be cool if you could take a DNA sample from someone and use it as a search device?

Are There Any Noahs Out There?

In Superman when Jor-El (Superman's dad) realizes that Krypton is doomed, he builds the little spaceship to send his son to earth otherwise little Kal-El would have perished with the other folks on the planet.

There's a lot of media attention on Global Warming these days. Almost everyday, there is a story about a glacier melting, the seas rising and other ways in which this planet is doomed. Are there any Noahs out there building boats for that day? Any Ka-El's building spaceships to save their children? Or more likely, is there anyone out there trying to cash in on the the future of Global Warming? Are there Lex Luthors buying real estate based on what the future map of the world might look like? Are there people moving away from the low lying areas.... say New York City so that X number of years from now they won't have to worry about their houses being under water?

And if it's not happening now, and Global Warming continues, what will be the tipping point? When will the profiteers start to look for ways to cash in? Should we be investigating who is invested in the sunscreen companies?

A Trip to Walgeen's

I find one of the most incredible technological experiences is making a trip to Walgreen's. My mom had a neck-ache not to long ago and she asked me to get her some aspirin. So I headed over the pain medication section and looked for aspirin. There was no aspirin. There were about 500 different possible medications. gelcaps, tablets, caplets, liquids... is it a back-ache? There's special pain relievers just for back aches. Are there any other symptoms... maybe cough, cold, fever... allergies? Are there allergies? No just a neck-ache. Okay, so I found the closet thing to pain old aspirin which was buffered version of aspirin.

Then I thought, gizmos and gadgets. I love gizmos and gadgets. What gizmos and gadgets could I get to address this neck ache? So I could have got her a heating pad, but that wouldn't have been interesting. I went to the gizmo and gadget area of Walgreen's because now every drug store has them everywhere. I narrowed down my choices. I could get a disposable heating pad where you rip off a backing and then stick it in place and it provides heat right to the area for a number of hours OR a snake shaped object filled with sand that could be put in the microwave, heated up and then put on the problem. I got the snake.

Anyway the point is that the local drug store that used to just dole out a few over the counter medications and fill prescriptions now offers millions of choices. It's almost impossible to make a decision. Where is this all going? Will we eventually not need to go to the doctor at all? Will we all have portable heart defibrillators in our houses?

Leave the Lights On

The other day I had a posting about kids become fanatics about saving energy. On the extreme opposite end of things, I got an email from my friend telling me that he had installed solar panel and that meant no more worrying about leaving the lights on.

It's not really true that installing solar panels means that you can leave the lights on. If you are like most people and you install solar panels, during the day, you feed energy into the grid which the power company has to pay you for and at night, you draw from the grid (think non-solar panel energy) and you have to pay for it. Because the sun is such a GIGANTIC form of energy for a lot of people installing solar panels means their power bills virtually disappear.

But let's look at a future where we draw from multiple forms of natural energy, tidal energy, wind energy, solar energy. If we had enough to go around, would it mean that we would no longer have to be energy conscious? If we had solar cars would it mean that we would no longer have to worry about wasting energy by driving? What changes would this mean to our day to day lives? Or would it simply mean that we could make the changes that are so desperately needed at the present time?

To Hell With Scratch

It's hard to think of baking a cake as a technological innovation, but every few years companies like Betty Crocker, Pillsbury and Duncan Hines try and come up with new products that capture people's imagination that use new or existing technology to reinvent the wheel. My favorite these days is Warm Delights by Betty Crocker. You take this little powdered mix and mix it together with a bit of water in the included container. You squeeze a sugary goo over it, stick it in the microwave and you have this little warm fresh baked desert. It's really good for someone like me who can't really be trusted with a whole cake or batch of cookies. I particularly like the mini ones because they are the perfect serving. But these new fangled products come and go. Will this product be available in 10 years?

The purpose of this desert is to provide indulgence with limitation. Is this an important direction for food products? What is the future of desert?

Sunday Morning Shopping Spree

These days it seems that I find it harder and harder to get motivated to go to a store to buy things. As often as not, I'll set out to find some product and when I get to the store, which 'should' have it, it doesn't. So I end up going to another store and then another. So lately I've become an online shopper. Last Sunday I placed three orders from three different stores in about an hour and spent about $250. I always dread the 'delivery charge.' I even went ahead and bought an extra book on Amazon just so I wouldn't have to pay for delivery. The problem is that although having something delivered is actually providing me a valuable service, I don't yet see it that way. I saved the time of having to go to the stores that was freed up to do other things. I saved gas not driving to the stores and with gas prices these days, that little shopping spree would have been $5-$10 in gas.

But I do worry, what are stores will be left in the future? Will everyone eventually move to the Internet or will that siren lure of going store to store still motivate people to get out in the world and shop?

What Channel is That On?

One of the things that I love about a lot of the more science fiction TV that's on today is that it's on multiple times a week. I never really have to worry about two of my favorite shows overlapping. And many shows are even on the Internet so I can always catch them whenever I feel like it. So what does this mean to the future of TV? I was one of those people who gave up a landline in favor of a cell phone early on and I'd certainly be someone willing to save $50 a month in cable costs. But where will this new technology leave regular old TV that is accessible to everyone? Will one day only people with Internet access have the same number of programming possibilities that exist today with a basic cable package?

Yee Shall Not Partake of the P B & J

There's been a dramatic increase in the number of kids who are allergic to peanuts (Kids and allergies: When PB & J turns dangerous.) It's so scary that some schools are banning peanut products from their institutions. There are some theories that it's the super-clean way we live that is causing the increase in allergies. Other theories point to the use of antibiotics. The fact is that no one really knows at this point. Could we see changes in our culture as a result? I sometimes find myself worried about eating peanuts even though I'm not allergic just because I hear on the news so much about these allergies. There are foods that are banned in some ancient cultures, shellfish & pork for example. Were these bans originally based on a real problem with those foods that was perhaps lost?

On the other hand there are interesting new developments on the horizon with peanut powder treatments and allergy-free peanuts.

In the end, which will win out? Treatment or banning? In the Matrix, the bad guy says that humans are like a virus. Is the planet fighting back? Are these allergies like an antibiotic for the planet to fight humans? Are we, just like a virus getting stronger and better to fight off these efforts?

Sports and Drugs

I'm not a big sports fan, but the use of drugs by sports celebrities has been big news lately. Marion Jones admitted that she used drugs (CNN article) which it's assumed helped her win medals in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. It's kind of crazy that 7 years after an event it turns out she wasn't the real winner. I wonder, will they have a special ceremony to honor the 'real' winners of the gold, silver and bronze medals? Will the person having gone home with no metal be happy to find out 7 years later that she actually is entitled to a metal?

Does this suggest that instead of only testing athletes at the time of an event, that sports officials should do medical tests and retain blood and/or other 'samples' indefinitely. As drugs change and technology improves should those samples should be retested? Does the fact that so many athletes have been found to be using drugs eliminate the idea of fair competition? What will the life of a pro-althete be like in the future?

Body Burden

I'd never heard the term Body Burden until I read an article on CNN: Tests reveal high chemical levels in kids' bodies. It has to do with the chemicals in the body picked up from the environment -- negative chemicals that is. There's a little more detail in the article: What's in you? One of the main chemicals they find in this little 18 month old baby is fire retardent that's used in many things found in the everyday home.


There's an old movie The Incredible Shrinking Woman where the character is exposed to a combination of everyday chemical products and it causes her to shrink.

Is the new Dawinism surviving the products that we create to protect and extend our lives? What products will eventually be removed from the market as these 'body burden' studies continue? What changes will we see in our everyday life?

Author Outs Character

So it's old news by now, but J.K. Rowling outed her character Dumbledore as being gay: (read the CNN article) While the Harry Potter books fall more in the realm of fantasy vs science fiction, I thought this news was worthy of notice. There's a huge group of people who don't just read Harry Potter, they obsess about the Harry Potter world. They learn every little detail of the books. I remember an interview after the release of the movie in which Hermoine is wearing a dress to go to a ball. One of the young fans being interviewed was very disappointed that the color of the dress in the movie was different from that of the book. And let's face it, it was some young fan asking questions about Dumbledore's love life that prompted the author to out him.

So will this change anything for anyone? It would be interesting if someone documented the lives of 'super fans' and saw how the events of the Harry Potter industry impacted their lives ten years or twenty years from now. And what about those kids who have already been taught that the teachings of Harry Potter are evil. What will they be like as adults? Is Harry Potter forming a generation? Generation X, Generation Y, and soon... Generation P? Will one day the far extremes of Generation P be arguing across the senate floor? What will they have to say to each other and will we be able to to trace it back to the Harry years?

The Truth is Out There

In the movie Serenity, the bad guys have a little problem on one of the planets they colonize and rather than try and fix the problem and/or report the problem to the general population, they just erase the fact that the planet was ever colonized or had any problems. People have vague memories of some sort of news about colonization, but nothing more.

At one time to research history, a person had to enter the dreaded 'stacks' of the library and flip through dusty old books to find information relating to their area of interest. If you were researching something that happened in the 1940s, it was more than likely that you would be looking at books that might have been written near or around that time in addition to more modern volumes. Today, more and more information is created first in electronic form which means it's far easier to access, but also far easier to change. Are we approaching the day when changing history is a simple search and replace function?

I wonder how the US text books present Columbus Day these days. On Columbus Day this year, there were protests (Columbus Day protest leads to arrests) because for some Columbus day represents the beginning of the end. In Japan there is a lot of controversy over how to present some of the events in World War II in textbooks (Japan’s Textbooks Reflect Revised History) and there's been protests about this too.

Will the children of the future have access to the data of the past and will they bother to access it? Many companies have data retention policies. Will we one day have data retention policies regarding our everyday lives to document who came before and what they did? Or will the future 'define' history? Or for those who believe that time is a dimension that will eventually be conquered, will we have viewers of the past so each generation can do their own research and interpretation of the past.

Another Kind of Hybrid

Apparently with ethanol as the latest and greatest form of energy, corn prices are going so high that the cost of corn syrup which is used as a sweetener in many products is impacting the prices of those products. According to a Wall Street Journal article, Seeing Sweet Savings, Heinz is developing new hybrids of sweeter tomatoes to address the issue in their products (think ketchup.


On the other side of the tomato world, whenever I got to my local grocer, there, right by the cash register, are the heirloom tomatoes. If you aren't sure what I'm talking about, they are the icky looking tomatoes sold at farmers markets coming in a spectrum of yellows, greens, reds and oranges and ranging from gigantic monsters to little tiny ones. I've only tried them a few times, quite delicious. These are supposed to be the non-hybrid tomatoes.

So what direction will food take in the future? If colonists were sent to another planet, would they take the heirloom tomato seeds or would they take those of the sweeter hybrids?

Baby Robots

If you can bare with the fact that this video is in Japanese, it's definitely worth watching: (YouTube link)



It doesn't surprise me in the least that someone would want to make a baby robot. With birth rates dropping in developed countries baby robots might be the future. Could it be when robots make robots that the importance of procreating becomes a part of their programming? Would adult robots take care of the baby robots? And if baby robots never grow up, do they have a purpose?

What Makes a Successful Robot?

In the old movies and TV shows robots (with the exception of the wonderful Blade Runner) usually didn't look like people. They had some semi-human qualities like the fact that maybe they could reach like a human or talk like a human, but in general, they weren't an effort in replicating a human. C3PO couldn't really move like a human and although the actor brought a lot of character to the robot, he was clearly a robot. 'Robot' in Lost in Space wasn't able to smile. And what about the Cylons in the old Battle Star Galactica. Not many human qualities there. But lately that's all changed. The robots in AI, I-Robot, and the new Battle Star Galactica all look more human and express human emotions.

Are we on the cusp of robots invading everyday life? And will those robots look like people? In ten years will the world be a different place? Will robots replace people on some jobs?

Utilitarian? Companion? Both?

By now, most people have heard of the Roomba, the cute little round robot that will vacuum your house for you. But did you know that people are becoming strangely attached to their little Roobas? There's an interesting article in the San Jose Mercury News (and many other papers) They love their Roomba about some of the odd relationships people are forming with their Roombas. Some people are giving them nicknames. Others are dressing them up. People are even willing to change their house around and do a little pre-cleaning to make their little friends more successful in their job. Kids have started a company, myRoomBud, making costumes to outfit their little friends.

Will a robot be more successful if it has a 'companion' aspect to it? Or is it the other way around? Does a robot have to have to be utilitarian first and companion second. Is that why Sony discontinued Aibo, the robotic dog?


What will be the first successful robot?

Children Take Over the World

A friend of mine was complaining the other day that her kids kept turning on the lights (and then leaving them on) after she made a big deal about turning them all off and explaining the importance of energy conservation. Sounds like a pretty normal scenario right? Well apparently this is not how all kids are reacting the information they get about global warning and saving energy. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal: Inconvenient Youths that talks about how kids are being taught so much about conservation in school that they are starting to put pressure on their parents to become greener. In the article some of the parents are questioning whether it's the school's place to introduce political topics -- like global warming. Is trying to educate a child to be a good citizen of the planet a way of teaching politics?


The whole article brought to mind so many possible futures. Could there be a future where education become so narrowly defined that children have to take pre-taped classes over the Internet so that there can be no possibility of introducing 'un-sanctioned' topics.

Increasing Expectations

Interested in finding out your life expectancy? Try the life expectancy calculator on http://www.livingto100.com/ Here's what it made me think... can I realistically ever retire?

Does the whole idea of work need to change? In the future will fifty percent of jobs be reserved for those fifty and older? What trickle down affect would this have?

Are We Overstaying Our Welcome?

I was watching animal planet and there was one of those shows on that gives interesting facts. One of the facts was mammals live for approximately 1 Billion Heart Beats. Little animals with shorter life spans have faster heart beats and bigger animals with longer lifespans have slower heart beats.

There's an exception to this rule, us, humans, people...

People can have 2.5-3Billion Heart Beats.

What if the heart beat really were a way to track lifespan? What if everytime your heart beat a little faster, your life got a little shorter? "You just about scared me to death" would take on new meaning. I often think about the complexities of the human machine. People didn't used to have 2.5-3Billion Heart Beats. When average ages were lower, people had fewer heartbeats. It would be interesting to know what the upper range of possible heartbeats is.

Nobel Prize for Manipulation

Three scientists have won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine for "groundbreaking discovers that led to a technique for manipulating mouse genes."

Gene manipulation is an amazing subject. According to the National Institutes of Heath, the human genome has approximately 25,000 genes. It is so complicated with so many possibilities. Many people today have genetic testing done to see if they will develop a disease in the future or if they will pass that disease onto their children.

Michael Crichton's Next ambitiously tries to cover the many possibilities that Gene research may lead to.

Several of Robin Cook's Books have used genetic research as the basis for the stories.

As the knowledge of he human genome grows there will be endless possibilities for science fiction writers.

No Biometrics - No Entry

I got my monthly newsletter from the US Embassy in Tokyo. (I used to live in Japan and never bothered to unsubscribe.) Japan is instituting new immigration procedures starting November 23, 2007. Foreign nationals (i.e. US citizens and the like) will be required to provide fingerprints, a facial photograph and there will be an interview of some sort. It will be interesting to see if people are informed of this new requirement before they make the trip and how they respond to the new requirements.

The US instituted the US-VISIT program on September 30, 2004 (from what I could find) so basically the Japanese are just balancing the scales.

So soon traveling will mean that many countries will have your fingerprint and picture. Will this be a problem for some people? What could happen if that data is compromised? Could identify theft go to a whole different level?

The Ice Cream of the Future

A few years ago I saw a TV special on the making of Dippin' Dots and I wanted to try them, but up until just a few days ago I never saw them anywhere. Then there in the San Francisco Zoo, a stand was selling them. So I bought a little pack of chocolate dippin' dots for $3.50. There's nothing like a tourist spot for nice prices, right? Well I thought so until I went on the dippin' dot site where they sell them for $5.40 a serving if you buy 25 servings. (I'm guessing they must ship them in dry ice.)

The thing that caught my eye way back when I saw the TV special was that to produce Dippin Dots special sub-zero freezing techniques are used. According to their website the Dippin' Dots would stick together in a home freezer so only places with the proper equipment can sell the dots which explains why you can't get them just anywhere.

The dots were dubbed the ice cream of the future. It seems like they've caught on and even Oprah has given them her thumbs up. Is this really the ice cream of the future? Will freezers of the future have the little dots compartment? Probably not, but what is the ice cream of the future? Does ice cream have a future? Ever noticed that in science fiction there's always a lot of pain taken to explain the alcohol of the future, but not to talk about the ice cream and candy of the future?

The Language of Foreign Syndication

When I lived in Japan it was absolutely depressing how few US TV shows were on TV there. Of course a big factor is that it's very expensive to add subtitles to a show and if a show is too complex/sophisticated then it's just too damn hard to translate. On occasion I would laugh at the way that whole sentences would be translated down to one word. If you don't know what I'm talking about, there's a great scene in Lost in Translation where a photographer is giving instructions to Bill Murray in Japanese and the translator is telling him whatever she feels comfortable with.

I remember hearing that Bay Watch was one of the most internationally watched shows. Apparently scantily clad men and women running on a beach is very easy to translate. Many science fiction series are very simplistic in terms of language which may explain why science fiction sells around the world. Some shows use complex new words to give the show an exotic-ness, but those words don't have to be translated.

Do producers of science fiction consider the possibility of foreign syndication in their language choices? What if they did? Would it change what we watch?

The Bionic Woman

I just finished watching the series premiere of The Bionic Woman and it hit me that I couldn't remember a single character's name. I was confused right from the beginning. The show has a kind of overall dreary/gray feeling to it. Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica) is in the first scene, so I thought Tivo had screwed up and I was watching Battlestar Galactica. Then a little bit later in the show to confuse me even more, Molly Price appears, who I thought was the same Katee character with a slightly different haircut. Sorry producer people. I need a lot more differentiation between characters, particularly if you are going to have the dark look and feel of a video game. Watching the show actually was a lot like watching a video game. In one of the last scenes there's this to-the-death type of fight scene (I say to-the-death because no one actually dies.) I had no idea what they were fighting about. It seemed like they were fighting just to fight. Maybe it's the chip implants. I didn't understand why the Jaime Sommers character didn't just use her nifty bionic legs to run away from crazy blond chick

It will be interesting to see where this show goes. The feel of the show is so much like Battlestar Galactica. I wonder if that will continue. I wonder if Jaime will get regular assignments like in the original. Will there be more character development? Ah... I just made a connection. Miguel Ferre plays some kind of boss guy in the show who insinuates that they'll just 'dispose' of Jaime if this doesn't work out. He played almost the same exact role in the movie Point of No Return (1993) with Bridget Fonda.

Future Vacation Spots Part 2

While I have very little interest in space flight because in my lifetime spaceflight is probably not going to get me anywhere except maybe space, it seems that there is a market for space flight. Richard Branson has already started planning: (Click here for YouTube)


And New Mexico is getting ready to build Spaceport America and cash in on people's fascination with space. Of course it makes sense. People are already taking vacations to go to the UFO festival in New Mexico.





Who will be the first 100 commerical travelers in space?

Future Vacation Spots

There was an article in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle: Fictional places we love: Travel guide to our top film, literary sites that talks about fictional places that people would like to visit. Most of them were pretty mundane fictional settings that easily could be real settings. For some reason they decided to exclude science fiction and fantasy type fictional settings. Maybe because the point was that people are looking to take vacations inspired by TV, film or literary places and today it's still pretty hard to come close to a vacation inspired by Star Wars. I did manage to find a tour (Boutrostours) to Tunisia that mentions visiting a location where Star Wars was filmed.

I can certainly see where people (even today) would want a more fantasy/science fiction related vacation. Where would you go? Would it involve space flight? Aliens? Nature at it's best? Personally, a vacation to space doesn't interest me. I like fictional worlds where I can fly without the assistance of a space ship. A luck dragon like in the Never Ending Story would be okay, or wings like in When the Wind Blows. Hum, maybe I should be looking into hand gliding or parachuting vacations. But it wouldn't really be the same.

I Know Where You Are

How would you feel if your every movement was tracked? If someone could look up where you had been throughout the day? What if your employer presented you with a summary of how much time you spent in the bathroom?

Doesn’t sound good, does it?

Now what if it’s your child and he or she is missing like the little girl in Portugal? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have to have a tracking device to find her? To know exactly where she is? And what if your grandfather with Alzheimer’s sometimes gets disoriented. Wouldn’t it be nice to know where he is just in case he doesn’t come home one day?

Today personal GPS trackers are still fairly uncommon, but there are a lot of companies out there trying to cash in on the concept:

Corrigo sells a product that allows you to track your employees.

GPS Nanny has a product that you can put in a car to track your teenagers movements, with or our without their knowledge.

Of course you don’t even have to go for some exotic product. You can just get your kid a Verizon cell-phone and order the Chaperone service.

What will people’s expectations of privacy be twenty years from now when children have grown up with these systems in place? And how conniving will children become to get around these systems?

Cure for cancer or solution to our energy problems... or?

An inventor in an effort to cure cancer discovered a way of burning salt water using radio waves. See more on youtube.




It'd be a really neat idea of course to find new alternative fuels. The little segment doesn't go into how much energy it requires to create the radio waves which is maybe why it's more of a fluff story.

Humans are primarily made up of salt water. Hum... makes one think, doesn't it? The military is working on a system called the Active Denial System that uses millimeter waves to make a person feel like their skin is burning. Same principles?

Journeyman

I watched Journeyman last night. It's the latest TV show to jump onto the science fiction bandwagon. NBC lined it up right after Heros so fans like me would just keep right on watching. Of course these days I don't know if a lineup has much meaning; after all, I tivo-ed both programs and didn't watch them until the next day. The only reason I knew about Journeyman was because somehow the commericals for it were compelling enough to get noticed even while I was fast forwarding through them.

So what's my favorite thing about Journeyman? Well the fact that one of the actresses is named Moon Bloodgood. It's got to be a stage name right? In any case it's a great name. As for the show, I'd have to say that it's off to a rocky start for me. It is basically Quantum Leap reinvented. The main character is flitting through time to somehow correct problems in time. At least that's what I can tell so far. It's going to be interesting to see in the coming weeks how they explain the phenomena that pulls the main character 'Dan' through time.

I think the biggest problem I have with the show right now is the element of fantasy that they've included. The rather young couple with a young son owns a gigantic house in San Francisco. They didn't inherit it because 'Dan' has already traveled through time and visited the house and it was owned by someone else. I guess they might have inherited the money to buy the house; still a huge house like that. They have some explaining to do on that point. Maybe he uses his time travel powers to make them win the lottery.

They definitely have a lot more challenges making a show like this today then even ten years ago. They have to be very, very careful to make sure that they use the right cell phone at the right time and the technology is changing so fast that by including technology in the show, the show may become dated almost immediately. These days it's not unusual for a person to carry a cell phone, pda, mp3 player and possibly a laptop. 'Dan' even wore a bluetooth earpiece in the show.

The funny thing was that while they were being so careful to monitor the cell phone technology, they never bothered to change the hairstyle of the main guest star. Over about a 20 year period (I think) the guy had the same hairstyle. Sorry, even guys change their hair a little.

Outsourcing

I was reading an article about how to make your life easier and diving into one of the links they provided I came across a company in India named Get Friday where even an individual can outsource some of their daily work to India. A couple of tasks that they listed on their 'rarer' task list:

-Reading Bedtime stories to a young child on phone.

-Talking to parents in our client's stead.

These really bring to mind where the world might be ten years from now. Will we all have overseas personal assistants? What would you outsource?

In the End there are Endless Possibilities

Death has certainly has become more technical over the years. There’s an article in AARP that says the average price of a funeral is around $6000. I’m assuming they mean here in the United States. I think everyone worries and a lot has been written about all the ‘what-ifs’ of over population, but what happens when there’s no room for cemeteries? How will the funeral evolve? Earlier this year some of the remains of Star Trek’s Scotty (James Doohan) were sent into space. What if the first colony in outer space is actually a colony of dead people? What if we started burying people on the moon and then everyone would always be able to look up into the night sky and remember their ancestors? Wonder where Aunty Sue ended up? Well, she’d be up there. Everyone would be up there. Of course it’s not a very good idea since we humans represent part of the earth’s resources and we should probably be trying to figure out the best way to recycle. And it seems that’s becoming a possibility as well. The Green funeral business seems to be on the rise: Click here for an article in USA Today. I also found an online calculator that asks a series of questions and then tells you would be worth – if you dropped dead and donated your body to science. What would the medical practice be like if we all had no choice, but to offer ourselves up to the be used for medical research? How would that work?

The Ending of the Matrix Trilogy

When I was in high school, my biology teacher put forth a question that plagued me for many years: How do you know that you are not just a brain in a vat that someone external is providing all the stimuli to? Over the years I came up with an answer. It would simply be too much trouble and a waste of time to provide me with this whole complex world. No one person is worth that much trouble. And then the movie the Matrix came along with a really GOOD answer to why it would be worth it. I thought the first movie was fantastic. It addressed that burning question. It also created this amazing scenario where people could escape that fate to what was basically a really horrible reality. There were so many concepts that movie addressed so well. The machines tried to make a wonderful world, but all the human crops died. I loved it when one of the characters betrays the other characters to try and get back to a life where he didn’t know any better.

The fact that the Matrix was going to be made into a trilogy opened up all sorts of possibilities for how it would end. In my made-up ending, it turned out that Neo and his friends were actually in a second level matrix. Whenever people seemed to fight their programming they would escape into another made-up world created by the machines that was even worse than the first. They’d be content knowing they’d escaped being under the control of the machines when in fact they really had never really escaped. Anyone else out there who thought they had the ending pegged before the last movie came out?

What if everyone had a laptop?

There’s a company One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) that came up with the idea of the $100 laptop so eventually everyone could have one. They didn’t make the $100 target, but they have come up with a pretty nifty product. It’s cute. It’s fun. I’d certainly love to have one to play with. I’m guessing it would probably be way better than the Palm I bought a few years that I never use. Want to see it. Here it is on YouTube:



So here’s the thing…. This laptop is supposed to be for education in developing countries, but most people in developing countries don’t have access to wi-fi…… so how is this going to work? There’s actually a map in Wired Magazine this month (Sept 2007) about how expensive it is to get broadband service in most countries, esp the developing countries.

What if this gizmo was used to change the world here? What if every student was given one of these laptops with all their textbooks already input so all that a kid had to carry around was that little laptop? Can you imagine the braniac with no backpack full of books? I think we all know the day is coming when books become rarer… there have been multiple devices for years now, but what if all kids grew up reading their class material on computers. Would that change things? There are so many ‘what ifs’ of this could go on for ever. The question is I guess: Is this going to be the product that changes the world? If not, why not?

The World of Science Fiction

I know exactly when it became clear that I was going to be an adult science fiction reader. The summer between middle school and high school I was given a reading list: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I liked them both, but Brave New World offered up something completely different, new ideas to think about and new ways of seeing the world. I remember thinking, would it be so bad if the world was like this? Almost everyone in that world was really happy. In fact, in my mind it was the main character who kind of screwed things up for everyone else. Everyone had been conditioned to really enjoy their lot in life. Needless to say, at thirteen, I wasn’t someone very happy with my lot in life so this instant fix idea seemed quite enticing. Was this bad? When we discussed the book in class the my English teacher pointed out that many of the innovations that Aldous Huxley came up with in 1932 had become closer and closer to a reality. Today it’s even closer to a reality, lots of people taking antidepressants, euthanasia is becoming more acceptable, and making babies is getting more technologically advanced everyday. How the heck did he know all this? That was the book that did it for me. I transitioned from a child reader to an adult reader and my adult reading would include the wonderful genre of science fiction. I’d always be on that quest for the next fix that would get me thinking about all the possibilities. What book was it for you?

This blog is going to discuss both fact and fiction. What are the latest technical innovations and where might they lead? What science fiction (books, tv and film) is out there for those of us who love this genre and what does it get us thinking about? Please feel free to comment.