A Modern Day Horror

It was a dark night made darker by the mass of trees that grew close together. The canopy of leaves blocked out the moon and stars leaving the ground in Stygian darkness.

A crashing of brush, cracking of sticks and bushes, and a blonde woman came running through the trees. Sometimes she would stumble on a rock or limb, but she would catch herself and continue running.

Behind her, not close but not far enough, a figure ran after her. He ran with sureness of someone who had traveled these woods many times. Dressed in a plaid shirt, jeans, and heavy boots that crushed the undergrowth with every step, he carried a large axe.

The edge of the forest came closer. The woman glanced behind her, the tight curls of her hair snapping in front of her eyes. She stumbled again, but ran on. She ran towards a car that sat on the grass.

When she got closer the car detected her key and unlocked the doors. The woman tugged the door open, dove in, and closed the door. She stabbed at the button that started the car, threw it into drive and set the car hurtling towards the road leaving behind a shower of gravel and dirt that blinded her pursuer.

Her cell phone had connected to the cars hands free system already. She called out, “Call 911! Call 911!” The operator managed to get her information and used the phone’s GPS locator to figure out where she was and called the police to let them know that there was an axe-wielding murderer loose in the woods.

A SWAT team arrived in a helicopter and used infrared imaging to find the maniac, who was already annoyed at losing his prey and being pelted by pebbles. The SWAT team brought him down with the use of night vision goggles and high powered assault rifles.

And so, even the venerable horror story must find ways to adapt to new technology.

Too Much Tuesday

There were a number of things I wanted to write about yesterday and I just forgot all about them.  Later in the day, when I was too busy, I remembered.  Then I cursed myself for forgetting and promised I’d write about them today.

As you can guess, I can’t remember what it was I wanted to write about. This is where a pen and pad come in handy.  Or a Sharpie and a hand. 

For no good reason I have signed up on Xanga, Twitter, Digg, and Pownce.  I don’t even know what the sites are, but I’m hip, cool, trendy, and current now. 

The seriously sad part is that I don’t have any friends.  I’ve got a couple on Facebook (I don’t care for Facebook), I have one “friend” on MySpace, even though I haven’t updated it in forever and don’t even know who this person is.  Otherwise, I don’t know anybody.

Nobody cares about what I’ve Twittered.  I honestly don’t even see the point of it.  Nobody cares about what I Digg.  I’m just a world-wide nobody.

So there’s all these websites, and all this stuff going on, and I have no idea of what it all means.  I should probably feel lost and out of it, but the truth is that I feel kind of liberated.  I’m not tied down to updating what I’m doing every five minutes (because, really, I don’t do anything interesting — EVER).  I just write my blog when I feel like it, and two other people look at it, sometimes.

Fifty Years From Now

The Way We Will Be 50 Years from Today: 60 Of The World’s Greatest Minds Share Their Visions of the Next Half-Century: Mike Wallace: Books ISBN: 084990370X ISBN-13: 9780849903700

There’s a new book out called “The Way We Will Be 50 Years from Today” edited by Mike Wallace. It has essays by sixty of the world’s top minds (why was I not invited?) on what they think the world will be like in the year 2058.

I have a problem with books like these because they don’t seem to be right. We should all remember how predictions from the past

ended up by the year 2000. No flying cars, no moon bases, no “kitchen of the future” with dinner tables that washed dishes for you. The only predictions that seem correct are the ones that are vague, like “computers will be really powerful” and “we’ll have a presence in space.”

In most cases, these predictions seem more like what the author would like to see happen rather than what will probably happen.

I can come up with hundreds of predictions for fifty years from now.

Most of them are mutually-exclusive. I’ve already written about a few of them, but you’d probably have to search around a bit to find them.

Let’s have some fun.

1) New World Order

By the year 2058 the global economy collapsed. The world became re-united under a central leader, a global president. Each country, in turn, is ruled by a local “governor.” Problems arise when these governors can’t get along any better than they did when they were absolute rulers of their country. The global president is completely ineffective at keeping peace. For the world’s citizens, nothing much has changed other than having a central head figure for aliens from outer space to contact.

2) Citizen Tracking

In the coming years, the citizens of the United States will complete their castration of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. They will give up their rights of privacy in the interest of convenience. The government will sell them on various programs, such as a National ID card, because it will make their lives easier by having a card that carries their bank information, medical history, voter status, drivers license, and other such things that can be used anywhere. The fact that it tracks everything they do is a minor side-effect. People will gobble it up. RFID implants will be used to keep children safe from kidnappers, hikers safe from getting lost, and your senile grandma from ending up in the wrong house. All tasty foods will be outlawed, due to being unhealthy, and replaced by a nutritious paste sanctioned by the government. Paper and coin money will be phased out so all transactions can be monitored to prevent terrorism. Don’t even think of smoking a cigarette. Alcohol will be permitted so everyone will be happy.

3) Civil War

The events in #2 transpire which creates a rebellious faction. Civil war erupts. While the government won’t use nuclear weapons within the country, it will use other forms of bombardment and land engagements. Chaos ensues, turning the U.S.A into a veritable wasteland. The coastal areas will remain within control of the

government in case other countries decide to use the opportunity to stage an attack on the weakened country, but the interior will be a lot more chaotic and dangerous.

4) The Star Trek Holodeck will be created

Creating a real-world Holodeck will be one of the major changes in human kind history. If you don’t know what a Holodeck is, you’ll have to read about it because it’s too much for me to cover right now. But if everyone had a large closet space that could be turned (for all intents and purposes) into an unlimited amount of space with anything a person desired within then it would be pretty damn neat. Since the US only has information type jobs, all work can be done in a networked holodeck environment. You could phase out janitors and stuff. You could do just about anything you wanted to do without leaving your home. I wrote a whole big thing about it, but you’ll have to search for it. It was last year, sometime.

5) The Creation Of Nanobots

The Feynman/Drexler vision of nano technology will change the entire world in so many ways it would be hard to count. People could live forever, cars and other items could be self-repairing, food would be plentiful and made from garbage, similar to the way the food replicator works in Star Trek. Artists would become the highest caste in our society because the only thing separating what you could have versus what your neighbor could have would be the styling.

Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology: Eric Drexler: Books ISBN: 0385199732 ISBN-13: 9780385199735

Okay, that’s five. I’m sure I could think of more, but I’m still tired and I’m still not feeling well. If I had some nano bots running through my system wiping out cold virus’ I’d be gold.

101th Post

There’s a store around here that’s selling a one terabyte hard drive for $200.00.  I find this interesting and also kind of annoying.

Back in 1989 or so I bought my first hard drive for around $500.00.  It

was a 10Meg drive.  That would mean that back then I would needed to have 104,857 10 meg hard drives to equal 1 terabyte.  Back in my day this was the stuff of science fiction.  Beyond science fiction.

Even NORAD’s super computer, W.O.P.R. didn’t have that kind of storage.  Of course, it was defeated by some kid with a 1200bps modem so maybe that’s not so surprising.  But still…  Gosh.

I couldn’t even begin to do the math to figure out how many 16K (that’s kilobyte) games would fit in 1 terabyte.  I could, but I’m not going to.  I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

Considering that most computers can use four hard drives (maybe three depending on how you set up your DVD-ROM.  That’s 4 terabytes.  Golly.

Self-Contained Thermo Reactions

I live in America. In fact, I was born here and lived here my whole life. I suspect that when I kick the bucket, it’ll bounce around on American soil as it comes to a stop.

I’ve always been brought up believing that America was the home of invention, innovation, and other stuff. The truth is, sometimes we’re a bit behind the curve.

One of the most important advances in technology has, apparently, passed us by. Left us in the dust. Ladies in gentlemen, I mean to say that we Americans have been surpassed in the area of beverage technology.

While the Japanese have been enjoying their self-heating sake for ages now, we have finally reached the level of technology capable of bringing us self-heated coffee.

But, my friends, I am happy to say that the Future is now here. No longer must you wait for Mr Coffee to drip your coffee out. No longer will you be lost in the wilderness wishing, just wishing, for a hot cup of tea.

OnTech has brought us a selection of self-heating coffees, teas, hot chocolates, and even soups.

It works by mixing water and quicklime, apparently. A scary sounding combination. But it hasn’t exploded on me yet, the one container that I opened. I presume none of the others would, either. Still, as I said, we’re sadly behind the rest of the world here and have already missed out on the self-heating sake containers that Japan has enjoyed for years now.

But perhaps we can use this experience to create new, more exciting, self-heating things. Such as TV dinners, or self-heating haggis. Perhaps we can research going in the other direction and have self-cooling beers. The possibilities could be boundless!

Technorati Tags: self-heating,coffee,sake,quicklime,mocha,tasty

Bits & Bobs

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything of substance. That’s not a good thing, since the purpose of these blogs is to write down anything regardless of content. At least once a day.

I seem to fall back on things I’ve written about before, and all of that is based on stuff in the past. Hopes, dreams, fears, things I used to enjoy but grew out of. All things that are part of growing up and growing old I suppose.

This is supposed to be a daily thing, though. And I’m not really supposed to care if you’re bored of it or not. Good for me, bad for you.

I haven’t had too much time for writing lately, with the new job and all. So what have I been thinking of lately? The past, mostly. As usual. In truth, a lot of it has been focused on the “Golden Age” of computers and video games. I’ve burnt myself out on that for the time being, though. There are very few people who are even interested, anyway.

My company got me a cell phone. For Valentine’s Day I got one of those Bluetooth ear piece things. As much as I love the old computers and stuff, this is one of the neatest things ever. If, back in 1984, someone had told me that there would be a device that would let someone read a paper, talk to someone a hundred miles away, and take a dump all at the same time — well, I would have laughed. Why anyone would ever want to take a dump while on the phone is completely beyond me, but it is possible. Just having a wireless ear piece is awesome. Being able to voice dial numbers using it is icing on an already sweet cake.

Yes, I know I’m about four years behind everyone else. There’s no need to point that out to me.

I’ve decided to teach myself Common Lisp. I’ve never looked at this language before but seeing as how I’m drifting down memory lane I’ve decided to see what all the fuss is about. Lisp is pretty big in the Artificial Intelligence comm unity. Perhaps I can learn enough over the coming weekend to get my Turin Test Beating AI working.

Technorati Tags: bluletooth,lisp,computer,cell phone

Frozen in Paris

When I read that Paris Hilton may have herself frozen when she dies, I immediatly thought of two things:

1) Why wait?

and

2) Idiocracy

I wonder what it would be like for scientists in the far flung future to thaw out Ms. Hilton.

Just a Couple of Things

The Department of Defense would like to beam electricity down from space. To me, this is good.

The sun has been pumping out energy since forever, and it will go on shooting energy out into space for a few million years more. Nearly all of that energy is wasted. So why not create some big solar collectors in space and beam all that sun-goodness down to Earth where we can convert it electricity? No more using fossil fuels to make the power plants work. And no more nuclear waste to worry about.

As usual, I don’t think they’re thinking big enough. I think we need a lot of them out there and beaming energy down so that everyone can use it. I, for one, would like to see my electric bill go down. If we’re using a nearly inexhaustible resource then all we have to pay for is the technology that keeps it working, and the initial launch and building.

George Lucas in creating a Star Wars based television show. I hope it’s better than the last three movies.

I noticed that if you search for “Jaime Paglia” on Google, I come up as the third or fourth item. Maybe it’s just because I’m doing the searches on laptops that I use all day (although I used one that I’m sure I haven’t touched yet). Either way, how useless. There are tons of other sites out there with better stuff than what I wrote (which was really nothing).

New Technology

    I was just reading an article about how technology is ruining kids lives.  And I can sympathize with it.  In fact, I think technology is ruining everyone’s lives.
As a society, I believe we’re less patient now.  In the old days we would get our information from weekly or monthly magazines, or even the daily paper.  None of which is updated on the fly.  Now, with web pages, we expect all information to be up to the second.  And when we learn that there’s a new movie being made, we want to see it now, not later.  We torment ourselves reading everything we can about these things and then we bitch mercilessly when they don’t show up.
As an underage boy, back in the day, you had to work at getting a glimpse of a naked woman.  It meant scavenging through your parents room, the garage, the back shed or the workroom looking for your dad’s hidden stash of Playboy’s.  If he didn’t have any, or your parents were divorced and you were living with mom, you had to settle for not-at-all-sexy photos of women in Redbook or Reader’s Digest.  If you were lucky, there was a Vanity Fair laying around.  In a worst case scenario it meant shoplifting  a magazine at the 7-11.
Now, some really raunchy stuff is available just by typing a few letters after everyone has gone to sleep.  Granted, it can be made difficult by putting in a firewall and other parental locks.  Do not make the mistake of underestimating the lengths a pubescent boy will go through to view an image of a naked woman.
As adults we’re not much better off.  You can’t hide dirty pictures on a computer.  Not from your wife or girlfriend.  The woman you thought was incompetent with computers will, somehow, manage to become intimate with keyloggers, web browser caches, temporary files, and undeleting programs.  And she’ll still refer to the act of completely erasing a hard drive and re-installing the operating system as “rebooting.”  Just to annoy you.
Why do I never use my name on my blogs?  Because a potential employer might look it up and get offended by something I say, or a picture I post, and not hire me.  Worse, I may get fired.  It used to be that what you did in your non-work time was your own — not anymore.  Now, if you have a public web page you are open to scrutiny by anybody and everybody.  Is that really a good thing?  Just as you’re checking up on what your new girlfriend is doing on MySpace or Facebook or Zango or whatever, so too, are they doing the same to you.
Remember making all those prank calls?  With caller ID you can get yourself in trouble.  Big trouble.  Did you do something stupid at that party?  No problem, no one will remember and it will be forgotten.  Except that someone took a picture of you with their cellphone and uploaded it their web page.  You really like that girl/guy you went out with but you made some not-so-nice comments on your web page about them.  Uh oh.
Yeah, so while technology has helped us out a lot (like putting TV’s in refrigerators so you don’t have to skip Oprah while cooking) it’s also put a big crimp in a lot of lifestyles.