Filed under: Amazon, Art, BoingBoing, Book Conservation, Jeff Bezos, Kindle, NPR, Predictions, Publishing, Science Fiction, Society, tech
A friend dropped me a note last night, asked what I thought of Kindle, the new e-book reader from Jeff Bezos/Amazon. My reply:
I think it is still a hard sell. $400 is a chunk for something which only kinda-sorta replaces a real book. And if you drop it in the mud, it isn’t just $7.95 to buy a new copy. But it does seem to be an intelligent application of the relevant tech, and sounds intriguing. There will be those who snap it up, just ’cause – but Amazon has a long way to go before it is mainstream.
That’s my guess.
As I mentioned in this post back in March, something like the Kindle has been a staple of SF going way back. Way back. But for all our progress in tech to date, I think it’ll be a while before actual paper & ink books are obsolete. It’s a simple matter of economics and risk, as I indicate in that note to my friend above. Joel Johnson at BoingBoing Gadgets says much the same thing in his review – here’s an excerpt:
Although I can hold a $400 eBook reader in my hand, it only feels truly valuable because I have a $7 book inside that I want to read. If Amazon can find a way to lower the barrier of entry on either side of the platform—a cheaper Kindle, or free content—it may then be worth wider consideration.
Bezos might be right, and me wrong. Certainly, I don’t have the track record he does, and haven’t earned the kind of money he has with his hard work and predictions. Then again, he has the wealth to afford being wrong for a long time before he is right, as may happen with this kind of project .
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Constitution, Cory Doctorow, General Musings, Government, NYT, Politics, Predictions, Press, Society, Terrorism
Over the weekend, news came out of yet another “Trust us, we’re the government” debacle, this time in the form of the principal deputy director of national intelligence saying that Americans have to give up on the idea that they have any expectation of privacy. Rather, he said, we should simply trust the government to properly safeguard the communications and financial information that they gather about us. No, I am not making this up. From the NYT:
“Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,” Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, told attendees of the Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s symposium in Dallas.
* * *
“Too often, privacy has been equated with anonymity,” he said, according to a transcript [pdf]. “But in our interconnected and wireless world, anonymity – or the appearance of anonymity – is quickly becoming a thing of the past.”
The future, Mr. Kerr says, is seen in MySpace and other online troves of volunteered information, and also in the the millions of commercial transactions made on the web or on the phone every day. If online merchants can be trusted, he asks, then why not federal employees, who face five years in jail and a $100,000 fine for misusing data from surveillance?
Or, from the Washington Post:
“Our job now is to engage in a productive debate, which focuses on privacy as a component of appropriate levels of security and public safety,” Kerr said. “I think all of us have to really take stock of what we already are willing to give up, in terms of anonymity, but (also) what safeguards we want in place to be sure that giving that doesn’t empty our bank account or do something equally bad elsewhere.”
This mindset, that allowing the government to just vacuum up all of our personal information, to monitor our email and phone communications, or whatever else they are doing but don’t want to tell is, is somehow equivalent to my posting information on this blog or giving some company my credit card number when I want to buy something, is fucking absurd. First off, there is a fundamental difference between what I willingly reveal to someone in either a personal or commercial exchange, and having my information taken without my knowledge or agreement. To say otherwise is to say that just because my phone number is listed in the phone directory, everyone who has the ability to do so is free to listen in on my phone conversations.
Even worse, it shows how we are viewed by this individual, and our government: as their subjects, without rights or expectations of being in control of our lives.
And the notion that we can just trust governmental employees with our private information is patently ridiculous. First off, saying that we should because we already trust commercial businesses with our private information is completely specious – how many times in the last year have you heard of this or that company’s database having been hacked and credit card, personal, and financial information having been stolen? This alone is a good reason to not allow further concentration of our private data to be gathered in one place. Secondly, think of the many instances when hard drives with delicate information have been lost by government employees in the State Department, at the Department of Veterans Affairs, or even at Los Alamos National Laboratory – and those are just the things which have actually made it into the news. Third, and last (for now), anyone who has had any experience with any government agency can attest to just how screwed up such a large bureaucracy can be, in dealing with even the simplest information.
I recently went round and round with the IRS over some forms which they thought I had to file. I didn’t, and established that to the satisfaction of the office which contacted me. Yet for six months I was still being contacted by another office in charge with collecting the necessary fees and fines – three times I had to send a copy of the letter from the initial office which cleared me of the matter, before they finally, and almost grudgingly, admitted that I owed them no money (for not filing the documents I didn’t need to file). These are not the same people I want to trust to handle even *more* information about me.
Allowing the government to take this position – that the default should be that they can just take whatever information about us they want, so long as they promise not to misuse it – is to abandon any illusions that we are in any way, shape, or form a free people. It would turn the entire equation of the Constitution on its head, saying that the government is sovereign and we its subjects. That such a thing is even proposed by a government employee is extremely revealing, and should cause no little amount of concern.
Jim Downey
(Via BoingBoing. Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, Publishing, Science Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin, Writing stuff
In July I wrote a brief post about something stupid a book reviewer said in reference to Science Fiction, and about Ursula K. Le Guin’s brilliant response, as reported in a BoingBoing post by Cory Doctorow.
This morning, in looking at the stats for this blog, I noticed a very large uptick in hits on that post, and also a lot of people searching using some combination of Le Guin and Doctorow’s names. Huh? When I went to BoingBoing I found out why: Doctorow posted an apology to Le Guin.
In keeping with the spirit of that apology, and the Open Letter from Le Guin, I have removed the portion of her short piece (about half the paragraph) I had in my post “Damn.” I replaced the excerpt with the following note:
(10/15/07: Text has been removed because of copyright issues. See this post by Cory Doctorow for a complete explanation. Since I took the text from BoingBoing, I feel it only appropriate to respect the wishes of the parties involved and remove it now. You can read it in its entirety at the Ansible link.)
I don’t have a dog in this fight. I respect both Le Guin and Doctorow as writers. I don’t know what kind of ‘history’ all the participants have, and honestly don’t care. I still think that the initial book review was ridiculous, and Le Guin’s response perfect (you should go read the whole thing). Beyond that, I hope everyone is able to move on to bigger and better things.
And if you’re one of the people who found this blog by searching for info on this topic, I invite you to poke around a bit, perhaps download my novel (it’s free – info here). I won’t claim to be on a par with either Le Guin or Doctorow, but so far the feedback I have received from the 6,000 or so downloads on the book has been very positive.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Blade Runner, BoingBoing, Diane Rehm, movies, NPR, Philip K. Dick, Ridley Scott, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Wired
Via BoingBoing, an extensive interview in Wired with Ridley Scott about the upcoming release of Blade Runner: The Final Cut. From the prologue:
At age 69, Ridley Scott is finally satisfied with his most challenging film. He’s still turning out movies at a furious pace — American Gangster, with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, is due in November — building on an extraordinary oeuvre that includes Alien, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator, and Black Hawk Down. But he seems ready to accept Blade Runner as his crowning achievement. In his northern English accent, he describes its genesis and lasting influence. And, inevitably, he returns to the darkness that pervades his view of the future — the shadows that shield Deckard from a reality that may be too disturbing to face.
It’s an excellent interview. But then, I’m biased – I consider Blade Runner to be one of the best movies ever made, and certainly one of top SF movies. (In this I am hardly alone, of course – even Diane Rehm of NPR considers it one of her favorite movies.) The 1992 ‘Director’s Cut’ was a huge improvement over the original release, even with the crappy quality of the DVD. I particularly enjoyed this bit from the interview itself:
Wired: Dream kitchens aside, it’s a rather bleak vision of the future.
Scott:I was always aware that this whole Earth is on overload. I’ve been that way for 30 years. People used to think I was — you know, not exactly depressive, but dark. And I’d say, “It’s not dark, mate, it’s a fact. It’s going to come and hit you on the head.”
Exactly. Yesterday I wrote about the tension between visions of the future and the reality of scientific achievement. Clearly, the world of 2019 depicted in Blade Runner is not going to be here, at least not on that schedule. But that’s OK. It is still a very valuable cautionary tale and damned fine alternative future history. And I think that is all that any author or artist or director can ever hope to accomplish.
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Flu, Flu Wiki, General Musings, Health, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space
Fulfilling about 2/3 of all Science Fiction tropes ever created, it seems that there may be a connection with the impact of a meteorite and a mystery illness in a rural Peruvian village:
LIMA (AFP) – Villagers in southern Peru were struck by a mysterious illness after a meteorite made a fiery crash to Earth in their area, regional authorities said Monday.
Around midday Saturday, villagers were startled by an explosion and a fireball that many were convinced was an airplane crashing near their remote village, located in the high Andes department of Puno in the Desaguadero region, near the border with Bolivia.
Residents complained of headaches and vomiting brought on by a “strange odor,” local health department official Jorge Lopez told Peruvian radio RPP.
It wasn’t a little thing, either – it left an impact crater reported to be about 100′ wide and 20′ deep.
Now, it remains to be seen whether this is anything more than a simple case of mass hysteria. I mean, if you’re some llama herder and a big damn fireball lands outside your village, it’d be pretty easy to get a case of the vapours over it.
But that don’t mean that it isn’t possible that there’s actually something to this. Panspermia (or more narrowly, exogenesis) has some fairly solid evidence behind it, enough to suggest that it is possible that there is some form of life capable of surviving coming to Earth on a meteor. And, if that form of life is similar enough to us, it could become a problem. A problem our biology might not be able to handle. One that would make a pandemic flu look like a nice little summer cold. One that generations of SF writers have speculated about. Except that in this case, it might actually be true.
Frightened yet?
Jim Downey
(Via BoingBoing.)
Filed under: BoingBoing, General Musings, Government, Heinlein, Predictions, Religion, RFID, Robert A. Heinlein, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech
Many years ago, I read a book which changed how I view the world. It was William Allen’s The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922 – 1945. I no longer remember whether I read it for a college class, or just on my own. And I can no longer really tell you many of the details of the book, but there was one overriding lesson I took from it which remains: that most people will go along with changes instituted by authority figures, so long as those changes seem minor and “for the greater good”. Because the thing about the Nazi rise to power is that it was enabled by ‘good Germans’ – the vast population who were not Nazi ideologues, but were unwilling to stand up to incremental infringement of their civil rights because it would be just too much bother.
I see this as a recurring theme in human history. It is the rare individual who will resist such creeping authoritarianism directly, though many others will find ways to subvert or resist passively (as happened in the USSR and Soviet-block countries), and still more often people will just leave a country under an authoritarian regime given the chance. This is a common theme in literature, and certainly in Science Fiction (read just about anything by Heinlein for the most clear-cut examples), so certainly I was familiar with the trope. But to see how it actually played out in one small German town was sobering.
And it is always sobering to see it play out in small ways in our country today. One such example comes from Michael Righi, writing about his experience of being arrested at Circuit City because he refused first to show a store employee his receipt and let his bag be searched, and then for refusing to provide a cop (whom he summoned) a Driver’s License. From a summation which Righi sent to BoingBoing:
Today I was arrested by the Brooklyn, Ohio police department. It all started when I refused to show my receipt to the loss prevention employee at Circuit City, and it ended when a police officer arrested me for refusing to provide my driver’s license.
There are two interesting stories in one which I thought would be of interest to Boing Boing readers. The first involves the loss prevention employee physically preventing my egress from the property. The second story involves my right as a U.S. citizen to not have to show my papers when asked. (Despite having verbally identified myself, the officer arrested me for failing to provide a driver’s license while standing on a sidewalk.)
You can read the full account at Righi’s blog, and I would urge you to do so. It is disturbing that he was treated this way, and admirable that he stood up for his rights.
But what is most disturbing are the number of commentors who criticize Righi for doing so. These are your fellow citizens who are perfectly happy to “just go along” in the interests of expediency, efficiency (cost savings), and for the common good. They don’t see why Righi should object either to his treatment by Circuit City or by the demand from the police officer that he provide proof of identity.
Now, I’m not saying that the US is in some incipient form of Fascism. But there sure are plenty of people with authoritarian instincts, and even more who are willing to accommodate those instincts in day-to-day life. And that is how rights are lost, freedom forfeit. As Righi puts it:
I understand that my day would have gone a lot smoother if I had agreed to let loss prevention inspect my bag. I understand that my day would have gone a lot smoother if I had agreed to hand over my driver’s license when asked by Officer Arroyo. However, I am not interested in living my life smoothly. I am interested in living my life on strong principles and standing up for my rights as a consumer, a U.S. citizen and a human being. Allowing stores to inspect our bags at will might seem like a trivial matter, but it creates an atmosphere of obedience which is a dangerous thing. Allowing police officers to see our papers at will might seem like a trivial matter, but it creates a fear-of-authority atmosphere which can be all too easily abused.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Astronomy, BoingBoing, Fermi's Paradox, Gene Roddenberry, General Musings, movies, NYT, Predictions, Quantum mechanics, Ray Kurzweil, Religion, Science, Science Fiction, Singularity, Sir Arthur Eddington, Space, Star Trek, tech, Writing stuff
“Grrrr.”
“Easy, Alwyn.”
“Grrrrr! GRR!” His growls grew from a distant throaty rumble into a near bark, as we came around the corner across from the lawn with the sprinkler. Yeah, my dog was growling at a lawn sprinkler. This is not normal behaviour for him.
But in fairness, it was an odd lawn sprinkler. A big plastic dog lawn sprinkler. White, with black spots. Looked vaguely like a St. Bernard in size and shape, but a Dalmation in coloration. The hose attached to the tail, which fanned water all over while doing this odd jitterbug wag. Looked like some overgrown kid’s toy. Which it might well be. Since I don’t have kid, I don’t keep track of these things.
Anyway, it was clear that my dog thought that it was some kind of bizzaro-dog with a serious bladder problem. Perhaps an Alien Zombie Dog or something. So, he did the natural thing: he growled.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
As I’ve noted before, I’m a big fan of the original series Star Trek and of Gene Roddenberry. But one of the things which has always bothered me about that series and most other SF television or movies is the fact that so often the Aliens are depicted as some variation of humanoid, albeit with a little makeup and prosthetics as the budget would allow. Though, in fairness to Roddenberry (and others in different series now and then), sometimes there was an attempt made to depict alien life as being just completely odd, unlike anything we’ve known or seen. This notion that extraterrestrial life might be difficult to even identify is a staple of good Science Fiction, of course, and one of the topics which I explore at some length in Communion of Dreams (and part of the reason why we never meet the aliens responsible for the creation of the artifact). It gets back to “Haldane’s Law“:
Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we CAN suppose.
(Which is decidedly similar to Sir Arthur Eddington‘s attributed comment: “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” But since I am talking more about life here than astrophysics, I thought I’d go with the evolutionary biologist…)
But now actual science has perhaps caught up with Science Fiction. From the New Journal of Physics comes a paper discussing what seems to be the discovery of inorganic life. The abstract:
Abstract. Complex plasmas may naturally self-organize themselves into stable interacting helical structures that exhibit features normally attributed to organic living matter. The self-organization is based on non-trivial physical mechanisms of plasma interactions involving over-screening of plasma polarization. As a result, each helical string composed of solid microparticles is topologically and dynamically controlled by plasma fluxes leading to particle charging and over-screening, the latter providing attraction even among helical strings of the same charge sign. These interacting complex structures exhibit thermodynamic and evolutionary features thought to be peculiar only to living matter such as bifurcations that serve as `memory marks’, self-duplication, metabolic rates in a thermodynamically open system, and non-Hamiltonian dynamics. We examine the salient features of this new complex `state of soft matter’ in light of the autonomy, evolution, progenity and autopoiesis principles used to define life. It is concluded that complex self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter that may exist in space provided certain conditions allow them to evolve naturally.
That’s a bit dense, so let’s go to the critical bit from the Press Release:
‘It might be life, Jim…’, physicists discover inorganic dust with lifelike qualities.
Until now, physicists assumed that there could be little organisation in such a cloud of particles. However, Tsytovich and his colleagues demonstrated, using a computer model of molecular dynamics, that particles in a plasma can undergo self-organization as electronic charges become separated and the plasma becomes polarized. This effect results in microscopic strands of solid particles that twist into corkscrew shapes, or helical structures. These helical strands are themselves electronically charged and are attracted to each other.
Quite bizarrely, not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma.
So, could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive? “These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter,” says Tsytovich, “they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve”.
Obviously, there’s more to it, and it is worth reading at least the entire press release, or the full paper if you have a chance.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
There’s another possibility, of course. This one can best be summed up as being that life is “a dream within a dream“. The latest popular version of this is “The Matrix“, wherein life is an artificial reality construct, designed to keep the human ‘power cells’ docile. But this too is an idea extensively exploited in Science Fiction, with many different variations on the theme. Of late, this idea has been more and more tied to the concept of a ‘Singularity’ , with speculation being that we are just some version of post-human research/recreation as a computer construct. And in a piece published yesterday in the NYT titled “Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch” this gets the mainstream religion treatment:
Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.
But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.
. . .
David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, says Dr. Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis isn’t a cause for skepticism, but simply a different metaphysical explanation of our world. Whatever you’re touching now — a sheet of paper, a keyboard, a coffee mug — is real to you even if it’s created on a computer circuit rather than fashioned out of wood, plastic or clay.
You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for being a good person.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
My own prediction is that unless we are extremely fortunate, and extremely open-minded, we’ll stumble badly in our first encounter with any real extra-terrestrial intelligence. Chances are, we’ll completely mistake it for something else, or try and see it through our limited perspective, not unlike how my dog mistook a lawn sprinkler for a wierdly-colored St. Bernard. If we’re lucky, we’ll survive that first contact, and then go on to see the universe with less prejudiced eyes.
If we’re *very* lucky.
Jim Downey
(Some material via BoingBoing.)
Filed under: BoingBoing, MIT, NASA, Predictions, Science Fiction, Space, tech
Via BoingBoing, word of a new design of space suit under development at MIT which would replace the bulky pressurized suits used for the last 40 years:
Newman’s prototype suit is a revolutionary departure from the traditional model. Instead of using gas pressurization, which exerts a force on the astronaut’s body to protect it from the vacuum of space, the suit relies on mechanical counter-pressure, which involves wrapping tight layers of material around the body. The trick is to make a suit that is skintight but stretches with the body, allowing freedom of movement.
This is exactly the kind of suit I envisioned for Communion of Dreams, something that looks more like a wetsuit than a small spacecraft. Not that that is a new idea, since it is also the kind of suit envisioned by many SF writers and movies/shows since the 60’s. It just makes sense that the tech would evolve this direction, not unlike how early deep-sea diving rigs became more sleek and user-friendly over time.
There’s another benefit to the direction that the MIT team is going with their design: it will aid in maintaining physical conditioning, which is always a problem for prolonged weightlessness. From the news release:
The suits could also help astronauts stay fit during the six-month journey to Mars. Studies have shown that astronauts lose up to 40 percent of their muscle strength in space, but the new outfits could be designed to offer varying resistance levels, allowing the astronauts to exercise against the suits during a long flight to Mars.
Images available here.
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, Press, Publishing, Science Fiction, Slate, Ursula K. Le Guin, Writing stuff
With The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon has finally made the only use of genre fiction that a talented writer should: Rather than forcing his own extraordinarily capacious imagination into its stuffy confines, he makes the genre—more precisely, genres—expand to take him in.
Gah. That’s from Ruth Franklin in Slate on May 8th. Brought to my attention by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing. But he made up for it by posting this response from Ursula K. Le Guin:
(10/15/07: Text has been removed because of copyright issues. See this post by Cory Doctorow for a complete explanation. Since I took the text from BoingBoing, I feel it only appropriate to respect the wishes of the parties involved and remove it now. You can read it in its entirety at the Ansible link.)
Damn. And that’s only about half of it. Not for the first time I read her work and think “I wish I’d written that.” But hey, anyone who writes science fiction is obviously just an untalented hack, according to Ruth Franklin, so I guess it can’t be any good.
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, Firefly, Guns, H. G. Wells, Heinlein, Joss Whedon, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, SCA, Science Fiction, Serenity, Society, Space, tech, Writing stuff
There’s a long and wonderful tradition of mixing genres in literature, and science fiction in particular has always had a tendency to appreciate anachronisms, to play the game of “what if spaceflight had been discovered/introduced 100 or 500 years ago”, or to suppose that for some reason some critical tech wasn’t discovered until well after it actually was in history. You can have a lot of fun with this, of pretending that H.G. Wells or Jules Verne (or even Mark Twain, for that matter) were writing not fiction, but suppressed fact, in their stories, and then extending the tech from that point forward. Conversely, someone like Joss Whedon can have a good time giving the crew of Serenity conventional modern firearms rather than futuristic weapons.
I understand that. I can enjoy an anachronism as much as the next guy. In fact, I was very heavily involved in the SCA for about 15 years (to the extent that I was King twice, held all three peerages, and served in numerous offices including Society Marshal). That’s how I met my good lady wife, and many of my closest friends.
But I don’t really get the whole fascination with Steampunk. Oh, sure, there’s been a lot of good fiction done in the sub-genre. But it’s like it has taken on cult qualities. People go nuts over it – BoingBoing sometimes seems to be Steampunk-crazed, and a search turns up almost 200 entries on the site with that theme. It’s not just appreciation of the literature – it’s the whole “build a steampunk this or that artifact” that has people all excited.There are whole publications and websites devoted to home-brew steampunk projects, not to mention clothing & accessories, weapons, et cetera. A good buddy of mine sent me a link to this ‘Steampunk Jar of Articulated Fireflies‘ yesterday, all excited that he had all the materials on hand to build one, except the phosphorous BBs. Um, OK…thanks for that, but, uh, why would you want such a thing? It’s like Star Trek fandom suddenly took over the defining aesthetic for some significant portion of society, and started making it cool to have your own bat’letH and creating a market for cell phones that function like Original Season communicators. I mean, it’s just plain weird that it has penetrated so far into the culture, with no sign of slowing down.
Yes, of course some of my reaction to this is touched with envy. It’d be a rush to have my fiction engender this kind of fan creativity. Well, to a certain extent it would be. I think the first time I came across someone with a subcutaneous bone-conducting mic/speaker based on my description in Communion of Dreams, I think I’d freak out…
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 