The Beauty of the Overcast Day

I was working from home the other day and I noticed that there was a perfect layer of fog over everything. For some people this may have been a cause for dismay, but for me, it was a good sign. Since I work on the computer all day, on sunny days I have to keep the blinds closed because the sun makes it impossible to see the screen of my computer. On a wonderfully overcast day I can open the blinds and have a little piece of the outside inside.

Ten years from now, will we view the weather differently based on the use of computers. Will someday the computer be perfected and people will be able to use their computers and have the blinds open? Or is this one of those potential market capturing devices that no one has yet noticed?

The Future of the Pet

When Philip K. Dick wrote 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,' I wonder what he was thinking. The movie got twisted around in so many different ways, but the book had a whole element about electronic pets wasn't really covered in the movie. I think we are do for another generation of fake pets. I wonder what it is going to be this time. I'd like an electronic cat that goes and plays around the house dusting and vacuuming it as she goes. And she'd need to be a big cat so that my dogs wouldn't eat her.

Are Computers the New Automobile?

There was a time when it seemed so cool and neat to have the latest and greatest car. Every few years there would be so many innovations that there really was a difference between a car made five or six years ago and I can see why people would buy new cars. I live in San Francisco where buying a new car is more of a luxery than a need. No salt on the roads to cause rust. Here there are still old VW Bugs driving the streets just fine. Now that car development has slowed down a bit, it's hard to justify buying a new car.

I would never think of buying a new car every two years, but there is a product on the market that has me in its grips... the computer. A couple of years is a night and day difference between computers. I'm of course in the process of buying a new computer so I've got it on my mind day and night as I try and figure out which model to get. Do I really need that extra power? No, but it would be so nice to speed along the computing highways. Do I really need to get the fancy green one? No, but green is so in. And should I get the matching mouse? I could use the old mouse, but that green mouse is such a nice accessory. It's the same discussions that people have about cars, the bigger engine, the fancy seats,.

Computers still have a ways to go till they slow down in their evolution. What else can we expect in the future? What fancy accessories? What will the mom and pop computer look like and what will the speed demon have on his or her desk?

And what is an up and coming technology that will eventually suck the cash from our pockets on a consistent basis like the car and the computer?

How Much Better Can Schools Get?

Yesterday's post was awfully negative, so I thought I'd go the other direction today. With the assistance of technology, how much better can schools get? Besides I think this is how most Science Fiction writers try to go whenever they try and look at the education of the future.

What if there were a complete change in thinking and much more time, effort and funds were put into public education in this country. Would that change things? What if class size were reduced to 10 students per class max and there was enough money for all the special programs that anyone could wish. What long term effects would these changes have on society? Would other parts of society suffer because the money had been re-routed? If this was started today, what would walking down the street be like 25 years from now?

How Much Worse Can Schools Get?

I was listening to a teacher complain the other day about class size. It feels like I've been hearing the same old complaints since I was a kid:

There's not enough funds for -

• Supplies
• Textbooks
• Teachers
• Music and Art Classes
• Buildings
• Maintenance
• Sports Programs
• ... the list goes on.

It seems like the US has more money than ever so where is the money going and how much worse can it get? This teacher was mentioning a class size of 40 students in a room. Regardless of the age group, that's a lot of kids. How much worse can it possibly get and what measures will be put in place to make it possible? For instance if you had a class of 100 eight year olds what would be required. A lot more kids are being diagnosed as ADD. Is this because it's so much more important for a child to not demand individualized attention? Will 50% of the eight year olds be drugged so they can sit through a school day in a class of 100? Will restraints become an option? How about forced homeschooling where kids are forced to attend classes remotely so that they don't disturb the other students with their 'antics.'

And some other things to think about: What would happen if no one went into teaching? And what if there's no more football programs in schools? Where will professional football and baseball players come from? Is this why there's already players being imported from other countries? One day will most of the players come from other countries? Will it be almost like a gladiator situation where people are brought in from other places to play games, but they have no ties to this country? In a way, because the players on teams are generally not locals, it's almost like that today anyway.

Re-reading this it sounds like a political rant. Maybe that's why science fiction writers don't try and tackle this subject... too close to home and anything seems possible.

New Definitions for Siblings

Remember when there were half-siblings, step-siblings, twins, triplets, etc? Well now there are whole new definitions for siblings because of technology. I remember catching a special on NBC about a set of twins where the scientists who were in charge of one woman's in vitro fertilization didn't clean the pipette so she ended up with twins with different fathers: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9438648/. It was an easy catch since the fathers were of different races, but one has to wonder if it's happened before where the differences between the children were more subtle so that it wasn't noticed that they had different fathers.

It's a new world in terms of having kids. Biological parents, donations, surrogates, invitro... will there be new definitions that apply to the relationships between parents, children and siblings in the next ten years, what will they be?

The Original Famous Multiples

Yesterday I talked about the fact that it will be interesting to see the kids in Kate & John + 8 grow up, kind of like a science experiment, but how will people look back on this show twenty years from now.

In 1934 a set of identical quintuplet girls were born: The Dionne Quintuplets. These poor girls were taken from their parents and put on display for the amusement of the public.

A less famous set of multiples are the The Fultz Quads, four identical girls born in 1946, who I can barely find anything about on the web. They too were watched by the world when they were used in advertising campaigns, but they were also given shots of Vitamin C by a doctor who decided to experiment on them.

Will those of us who watched the show end up feeling guilty about taking part in the exploitation of these kids twenty years from now, or will it be more like looking back at the Osmond family... nothing but warm fuzzies?

Not Clean Enough

I was watching one of my favorite fluffy reality shows Jon & Kate + 8 the other day. In the episode, Kate, was trying to hire someone to help with the cleaning. For anyone not familiar with the show it's about a couple who have twins and a set of sextuplets. In this particular episode, it turns out that Kate is a clean freak. She mops the dining room/kitchen, wipes down the counter and stove and all the chairs three times a day.... and she has 8 kids. Okay, so I could see where just the fact that she has 8 kids means that if she didn't do this obsessive cleaning then the house would be a disaster. Needless to say, no-one can keep up with her clean freak-i-ness, so she ends up with no help in the cleaning department.

So one of the reasons I find this show so fascinating is that in the natural world, humans are generally not capable of having 6 kids born on the same day. First there was the technology that allowed Kate to get pregnant at all, since she unable to do so naturally. Then there was the technology that allowed her to carry the six babies as long as possible. They don't talk a lot about the fact that the babies were premature, but there is some mention of it, so there must have been a lot of technology to allow the premature babies to survive. In the episode I was watching three of the kids were using special breathing devices. They explained this was because the kids were premies. I don't think that these kids need the devices all the time, but several of the kids were sick so that might be part of it. There have been trips to the eye doctor where it was brought up that premies are more likley to have eye problems because of the oxygen they are exposed to.

I hope they follow these kids all the way until they are grown up because they are a science experiment of sorts and I'll be interested to watch what happens.

Seriously? Bar Codes?

I was watching Terminiator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles last night and as I watched the robots put bar codes on their captive humans, all I could think was: Seriously? Bar Codes? As we speak bar codes are becoming obsolete. I can't imagine that bar codes will be used even fifteen years from now. And would a robot even put a visual tag on a human? Wouldn't they just embed a chip under the skin? Wouldn't it be more practical for robots to be able to 'sense' different humans by internal identifiers?

As I watched the episode I started to think, what would robots dream of inventing? Would a world full of robots be more advanced and in what ways? In the show we see technological advances, but what would be the point of advancing technology for technology's sake? What would motivate a robot to create something new?

What Was that Smell?

Yesterday's blog about was about 'political correctness.' Today I was having lunch with my parents in an little cafe. We were sitting in a pleasant little garden outside when a couple sat down at a table near us. It wasn't really next to us. There was a decent amount of space between our table and their table. Suddenly this waft comes crashing down on us and it becomes hard to breath. My dad starts to talk about 'who is it that smells so bad?' My mom starts to sneeze. My eyes start to water. The woman (or it could have been the man) was wearing a very offensive fragrance. My dad started to complain loud enough that I'm sure the couple could hear and of course, I was a bit embarrassed, until my nose became so overwhelmed that I insisted that we leave.

My dad kept saying "I'm just not used to that anymore." At one time wearing perfume was so common that no matter where you went there was someone wearing a scent, but these days it's much less common to notice someone by smell instead of sight. And it seems like there's a lot more people who are adverse to the smell of perfume than ever before, either not liking it or in more drastic circumstances, being allergic to it.

So if twenty years ago, lots of women wore perfume everywhere and it was completely acceptable, but today it's much less common and many more people have allergies, where will we be twenty years from today? Will perfume be illegal? Will there be new allergen free, more subtle fragrances that are marketed as being easier on the nose?

And on that note -- Happy Valentine's Day!

and this blog will be on vacation until after President's Day!

I Can't Believe You Just Said That

I've come across one prediction for the future of the west coast in Ecotopia that couldn't be further from the truth. The reporter, who is the main character, discusses how people are constantly saying what they think and putting everything out there. In real life, it seems like the concept of 'politically correct' was invented here on the west coast. In seems like in today's world, it's often hard to know what to talk about to new people. You want to avoid anything that might be the least little bit uncomfortable. On the other hand, the book makes a good case that the more open discussions help different people to understand where the other is coming from and maybe see a different point of view.

Where will we be 20 years from now? Will there come a time when everyone explodes and decides to just go ahead and say what they think or will as a society will we become more introverted avoiding anything that might be the least bit uncomfortable. I sometimes think it would be fun if on election day for president everyone wore a shirt that indicated who they voted for. No more of this crazy polling. The reporter could say, "Well, Bob, I'm in a sea of red shirts here, but I do see a few blue shirts working their way through the crowd." It would be nice if it could be more like a friendly college football rivalry... no soccer type fans who do crazy things welcome.

It's Only a Litte Sorting

I'm re-reading the book Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach. It's one of my favorite books, but I haven't read it for many years. For anyone who doesn't know the story, its about the Western States of the United States succeeding to form their own nation 'Ecotopia.' On the back of my copy there's a quote from Ralph Nader:

"None of the happy conditions in Ecotopia are beyond the technical or resource reach of our society."

That kind of gives you an idea of the philosophy in the story.

There's a passage I really liked:

"Every Ecotopian household, thus, is required to compulsively sort all its garbage into compostable and recyclable categories, at what must be an enormous expenditure of personal effort; and expanded fleets of garbage trucks are also needed."

When this book was written in 1975 the idea of sorting garbage was very 'out there.' But today, here in San Francisco we have three garbage cans, the black one, for regular garbage, the blue one, for recyclables, and the green one for compostables. I too thought it would be a pain in the butt to sort my garbage, but what's nice is that while the black can has limits on it, you can put out as much recyclable and compostable garbage as you like. There have been times when I've put out six bags of garbage from the yard or extra boxes of recyclables after Christmas. It's also rewarding to know that a huge portion of my garbage is no longer going to a big old land fill.

The question is, will it catch on? Earnest Callenbach was right... it takes more effort and it takes more garbage trucks and what he didn't anticipate was the homeless who come around all week long trying to pick out the valuable bits of recyclable garbage such as cans and pop bottles. He also probably didn't anticipate the group of neighborhood kids that think its hugely fun to ride the garbage cans down the hills.

Science Fiction Short Stories - Call Signs

It's amazing how many online magazines there are for science fiction. Hard to say why. Maybe it's because in the science fiction sector are the early adopters of reading material online.

I recently read Call Signs by Cathy A. Chance on the online magazine Afterburn. In the story Cathy tells the story of a female clone pilot as she confronts a difficult situation that makes her change her way of thinking. Star Wars introduced the idea of a clone army (at least to me,) but there's never been much discussion about the possibility of female clones having value. Cathy's choice of having her pilots be women is an interesting/apt one considering that women have often played interesting roles in air flight. Amelia Earhart is one of the most famous pilots in history. Jeana Yeager flew the Voyager with Dick Rutan on a non-stop, non-refueled flight around the world. And who can forget Jessica Dubroff who died at seven trying to fulfill a dream of flying across the United States.

I think one of the reasons that science fiction shorts are so poplular is because we all can glimpse at just the edge of what the future holds and science fiction writers take one element like Cathy does her with clones in the military and gives us a glimpse of what might be. It also gets us thinking. I personally wonder what would happen if all pilots were women, clone or not.

Sometimes Technology Doesn't Help

I showed up for a doctors appointment yesterday at a big HMO and the person behind the counter got a defeated look on her face when I told her my doctor's name. It seemed that Doctor Jane (not her real name) had quit the facility over six months ago, but someone had forgotten to take her name out of the system so appointments were still being booked with her. This answer was a ltitle strange. I mean if she had said, her last day was yesterday or even last week I could have believed it, but six months? Were they getting people showing up everyday for the last six months asking to see this doctor? I had only made the appointment two weeks earlier so it wasn't a left over appointment booked far in advance, and the big HMO was efficient enough to send me a reminder card about the appointment.

Sometimes it seems like people don't know how to intervene when technology isn't working.

When the system is so automated that the person who handles the appointments has to rely on other people to make changes to the system such as adding and removing data it becomes faulty.

I might have been far more frustrated, but thanks to technology, they were able to find another doctor in the same building who was willing to see within thirty minutes of my original appointment. And my old doctor only used paper and pencil with no reminder calls.

Technology going wrong is a favorite topic among science fiction writers. It seems that no matter how well a system is designed, the human factor is always going to cause problems.

Transformers

I never go to the movies much so my reviews are always a little, well possibly a lot late. I just watched the movie Transformers. The movie is worth seeing just for the special effects. The robots were brilliant. The only think I didn't like was the way the face of the evil guy seemed to move in an almost human like way. I would have preferred that he be more robotic. I got the movie through netflix which doesn't provide the 'special effects' cd when you rent the movie, but I would have loved to have seen how they got the robots to work because the effects were amazing. It almost made me want to go out and buy a gigantic flat screen TV so I could better appreciate them.

The only thing I found a little disconcerting was the fact that the movie kept reminding me of War Games. Teenage girl and boy fighting to save the world. Teenage girl kind of hot. Teenage boy kind of geeky.

What's With the Look?

One of my favorite blogs is Nathan Bransford's blog. He's a literary agent and has good tips on working with agents. One of the quirks of his blog is that he regularly makes references to the reality show America's Next Top Model on his blog which crack me up... for example: America's Next Top Surprisingly Essential First Page (the Finalists)

I too watch the show, and though I'm a little more embarrassed to admit it, I find the crazy knowledge the show provides sneaking into everyday life. The picture above is of a Gap ad that I see on my way to work in San Francisco. I can't help it, I've started looking at this ad with the same scrutiny as the judges on the show. What the hell is going on with this woman's hair? Why does she look bored? There's no intensity in the eyes and what's with the mouth? Was this the best of a whole set of mediocre pictures. I'm so sorry Ms. Model up there on the billboard. Pre-ANTM I'd probably have thought that was a great picture. I don't mean to be so judgmental. Maybe it was just that the previous ad in that spot of Ai Tominaga as seen here on the blog Asian Models (the second picture down) was just so much more in tune with San Francisco and that part of town and the season. After all the poor model in the picture above is sitting there in her shorts in the cold and rain. It makes me uncomfortable.

Okay so what does all this have to do with Science Fiction? Many reality shows in particular focus on giving either judges or contestants the power to eliminate based on relatively arbitrary criteria. Could these shows move our society further away from cooperation and mentoring to get along to a cut-throat eliminate that which you do not like and somehow have the power to do so?

And what will we do with all the expertise we develop in areas that have no relevance to our daily life? Ten years from now will every picture look posed? Will everyone sit around thinking how bad the facial expression was on grandma in that group photo?

Double Dipping

There was an article on CNN just in time for the superbowl: Beware the bowl: Double dipping spreads bacteria. I don't think that there was any doubt that double dipping spread bacteria... was there? But a study on the subject would have such marketability because of a Seinfeld episode. It must be so gratifying to do a study and have it picked up on CNN as major news. If you look on CNN there's a section called 'Popular News.' The news that everyone reads regardless of what is 'really important'.


Right now that 'popular' news takes up only a small space on the CNN site. How will that part of the news evolve over time?

Lost

Okay, this is a little late, but the lastest episode of Lost was on last Thursday. It was good like always.... you know totally confusing. The thing I liked was the re-run on Wednesday with the subtitles explaining what the hell was going on to bring you back up to speed. They should really think about doing that every week. Watching Lost is like reading a good book, but only reading one chapter at a time. It's hard to keep on top of everything. I read 9 of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time Series, but when the 10th came out, I had forgotten what the story was because there were so many characters and so many sub plots. That's kind how Lost is. I'm sure when the series ends it will end up going on forever because it will be one of those series that will be so great to watch on DVD.


So normally I try and keep my predictions to ten years into the future, but here's my prediction on what's going to be in the coming season of Lost. Jack and the other Oceanic six are going to get off the Island. Obviously we know it's Jack, Kate, and Hurley. We have to guess that it's going to include the dead guy in the coffin which I'm going to predict is.... Ben... too out there? Plus he wasn't on the flight, so maybe not. Anyway my prediction is that the six will get off the island at the end of the season with some threat hanging over their heads so they can't reveal that there are still people on the island. There will be a ton of back and forth between their life in the future and their life on the island leading up to the the end of the season. Then next season will be Jack, Kate, etc going back to the island to finish their unfinished business.

Eli Stone

Okay, I'm going to put my review of the season premiere of lost on hold to discuss the new series Eli Stone. I have to admit, I'm an instant fan. It reminds me a little bit of Monk. Take a series subject - mental illness and turn it into something wonderful and light hearted. But don't make it too light hearted (can you say Pushing Daisies?)My favorite character is Mr. Chen, the Chinese guy pretending to be a Chinese guy. I hope he turns out to be a regular. I'm not sure you can call this science fiction since everything is taking place in the main characters mind, but I figure that it feels like it's real to him so it's kind of like science fiction.

-- Excuse any typos. Blogger spell-check wasn't working.