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.