Filed under: Astronomy, NPR, Predictions, Science Fiction, Space, Titan, UFO
Lights in the sky. Strange lights. Lights that don’t move . . . right.
Must be aliens, stopping off for a visit, right?
Highbeams Of The Gods: Do UFOs Need Headlights?
Over at the Two-Way a UFO sighting over Colorado has been generating discussion and heat. In looking over the comments a question has come up which really strikes at the heart of the UFO issue. Someone astutely asked something along the lines of “Why do UFOs need headlights?”
Yeah. Good point. Are the aliens scared of running into a deer?
Exactly.
Pretty much the most crucial plot point in Communion of Dreams is that the alien artifact discovered on Titan is using some kind of stealth technology. (I’m not giving anything away by saying this, for those who haven’t yet read the book.) How and more importantly why this is the case is what drives the story.
I agree with the author of the blog post cited: “…any civilization with technology capable of spanning light-years ought to be able to hide themselves well enough to avoid detection from hairy apes with jet-planes like us.”
Bingo.
And that’s all I’ll say, or I will give away some spoilers for those who haven’t yet read the book. (And why haven’t you?? C’mon – it’s brilliant!)
Jim Downey
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Babylon 5, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, tech, Wall Street Journal
A good friend sent me a review in the WSJ about Physics of the Future. Here’s a good excerpt from the review:
That is the core message of Michio Kaku’s “Physics of the Future.” Despite its title, the book is not so much about physics as it is about gadgets and technology, described by Mr. Kaku—professor, blogger and television host—on a wide-ranging tour of what to expect from technological progress over the next century or so.
Much of the terrain Mr. Kaku surveys will be familiar to futurists, but less technically oriented readers are likely to find it fascinating—and related with commendable clarity. The changes that Mr. Kaku expects range from the readily foreseeable to the considerably more esoteric.
Augmented reality—in which useful data overlay what we see with our eyes—already exists in rudimentary form on smartphones, but Mr. Kaku predicts a time, only a decade or two away, when a much denser information stream will be fed directly to our retinas by contact lenses or optical implants. Want to fix a car, perform emergency surgery, or prepare a gourmet meal? The app will tell you what to do—and guide your work. Have trouble learning a foreign language? Expect a useful universal translator to do the work for you. And the ability to connect computers directly to human nervous systems will drastically improve the lives of those who are paralyzed, blind or deaf—as it is already beginning to do. Eventually, we may know the sort of virtual worlds illustrated in science-fiction novels like Greg Egan’s “Permutation City.”
Hmm . . . sound familiar? This is exactly the sort of tech I stipulate as being pretty mature (completely developed and integrated into everyday use) in Communion of Dreams.
Fun. I may have to get a copy of that book.
Jim Downey
(Thanks to ML for the link!)
Filed under: BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, MetaFilter, Predictions, Publishing
Via BB, this ‘bingo card’ from John Scalzi, on the subject of e-publishing:
Scalzi’s website contains complete information, and you should read it – Scalzi knows what he is talking about, and has been having these arguments for the better part of a decade that I’m aware of (I follow his blog, and see him discussing these issues on other forums, such as MetaFilter).
That said, just because he knows what he is talking about doesn’t mean that he is *always* right, nor that his position is a simple black/white one on the topic. He’s too thoughtful and nuanced for that.
When I voted to go the self-publishing/e-publishing route with our care-giving memoir, I did so fully aware of all the pros and cons (in large part thanks to discussions I’ve seen with Scalzi.) What he says is valid, but I find myself saying “yeah, but . . . ” as pertains to Her Final Year, largely because the care-giving memoir is a niche market, and therefore many of the problems with publishing are more manageable than they are for general or genre fiction.
But we’ll see. I’ll be asking for your help to beat the odds.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Emergency, Failure, Isaac Asimov, Politics, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society
There’s a sign in the desert that lies to the west
Where you can’t tell the night from the sunrise
And not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Have prevented the fall of the unwise*
Almost prophetic, isn’t it?
The homepage for Communion of Dreams has the following description:
The world I have envisioned in this book is recognizable, in the same way that the 1950’s are recognizable, but with a comparable amount of unpredictable change as between that era and the present. Most authors will avoid writing about the near-term future, because it is easy for a work to become dated. I’m not that smart.
Unpredictable change. Rapid change. Protests in Egypt started just a month ago. Protests in Libya started just a week ago. Then there’s Tunisia, Morocco, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia. Even China has started to get nervous about controlling discussion of events around the Mediterranean.
If we had Asimov’s psychohistory, perhaps we would have been able to foresee this shift. But even then, I have my doubts. It is one thing to say “people want freedom” and another to not be surprised by what is happening. You can call the internet, Twitter, and mobile phones transformational technologies all you want, but that doesn’t mean you understand *how* the changes they augment will actually play out.
History is full of odd twists and small turns which topple rulers and determine the outcome of wars. Yes, certain forces can come together to create the right environment – to supersaturate the solution, as it were – but then almost any kind of catalyst can precipitate a radical change, and which kind of catalyst makes a difference. I think this is what we are seeing with the sweeping turmoil in the Middle East and Mediterranean – a phase change, as it were, from one reality to another.
This isn’t the first such phase change I have seen. The collapse of the Soviet Union was another. I grew up thinking that it was an implacable enemy, a monolith which would last forever if it didn’t kill us all first. When I traveled behind the Iron Curtain in 1974 I would never have been able to predict that 15 years later the whole thing would just tumble into dust. But then again, no one else did, either.
And that’s the thing. As I work now on the prequel to Communion of Dreams, set just a year in the future (but not our future – a related one near at hand) it is easy to envision other kinds of radical change which would come to create the world of my novel . . . and perhaps our own.
(2/26/11) An addendum: for a further, and much more insightful – not to mention more informed – discussion of the changes in the Middle East, read this article.
Jim Downey
*Alan Parsons, Turn of a Friendly Card.
Filed under: Brave New World, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, tech
Two more technological news items that bring us closer to the cybertech from Communion of Dreams. The first is a millimeter-scale computer designed for implantation in an eye to monitor for glaucoma:
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A prototype implantable eye pressure monitor for glaucoma patients is believed to contain the first complete millimeter-scale computing system.
The second is a big step forward in brain-activated control of mechanisms thanks to an implanted grid of electrodes:
The method is called electrocorticography, which involves placing a thin plastic pad full of electrodes on the brain’s surface to measure its electrical activity. And it holds promise as being more accurate and telling than other efforts to understand the brain.
* * *
The goal behind decoding the brain’s signals is to allow individuals to control machines with their minds alone. The science holds tremendous potential for people with limb loss, spinal cord injuries and neuromuscular disorders to move and communicate.
As I think I’ve mentioned before, coming up with the tech of 2052 was mostly a challenge because I had to figure out what would slow things down enough that whatever I said sounded plausible.
Jim Downey
(Hat tip to my sis for the second link.)
Filed under: Government, movies, Nuclear weapons, Paleo-Future, Predictions, Science Fiction, Terrorism, YouTube
About a year before I was born, the Strategic Air Command had a little movie made for training purposes. Here’s a nice clip from it:
And here’s a bit explaining the story behind the movie:
Washington, D.C., February 19, 2011 – “The Power of Decision” may be the first (and perhaps the only) U.S. government film depicting the Cold War nightmare of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear conflict. The U.S. Air Force produced it during 1956-1957 at the request of the Strategic Air Command. Unseen for years and made public for the first time by the National Security Archive, the film depicts the U.S. Air Force’s implementation of war plan “Quick Strike” in response to a Soviet surprise attack against the United States and European and East Asian allies. By the end of the film, after the Air Force launches a massive bomber-missile “double-punch,” millions of Americans, Russians, Europeans, and Japanese are dead.
60 million American casualties, actually, when all was said and done. And that was the “winning” scenario.
Is it any wonder that much of the popular culture (and the science fiction) of the time was concerned with dystopian futures, frequently involving apocalyptic nuclear war? It truly was a form of MADness.
And we came a lot closer to that actually happening on several occasions that most people realize. I’m not going to bother to dig up all the references, but in addition to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Yom Kippur War there were multiple instances of false alerts due to mechanical and communications failures which came to light following the end of the Cold War.
Is it any wonder that I have a hard time getting too worked up about the threat of ‘terrorism’? When you grew up expecting a nuclear holocaust, the prospect of random bombings doesn’t seem that big a deal.
Jim Downey
Got a note from a friend last evening:
Isn’t it cool to actually use the scientific method to figure these things out? I feel like I should send a thank you note to my high school chem teacher.
* * * * * * *
Last week one day when it was warm, I took advantage of the opportunity to get out to a nearby shooting range. I needed to proof some test loads for one of my guns, before I reloaded a bunch of ammo to those specs. That went fine.
I also planned on getting in a little pistol practice with a couple of my pistols I rely on for self defense. That didn’t go fine.
One of the guns had a problem. It failed to fire. I checked the ammunition, and determined that the firing pin wasn’t striking hard enough to initiate combustion. This was bad, and could have led to all manner of very negative outcomes.
* * * * * * *
Listening to the Diane Rehm Show this morning, they were talking about the protests and political situation in Wisconsin. One of the people Diane spoke with was the current Governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels. Governor Daniels had been Director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Bush II Administration.
During the discussion, Gov. Daniels started in on how government deficits were what was driving the problems in Wisconsin. And he made a comment to the effect that this was just a reflection of the problems we’re having all across the country, particularly at the Federal level.
So far, so good. Deficit spending really *is* a problem, and it needs to be resolved at all levels of government. I couldn’t disagree with Gov. Daniels a bit on that.
Then he said something else: that the problems were all due to government spending, and that further cuts had to be made, in particular to the ‘entitlement programs.’ By this he meant Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
* * * * * * *
Yesterday I had the time to take apart the pistol which had malfunctioned. Based on what had happened, I knew to look at three possible causes: a problem with the ammunition; a problem with the firing pin; a problem with the spring which drives the hammer forward into the firing pin.
I had ruled out the ammunition as a likely cause. Yeah, the first couple of rounds I tried were reloads (my own), and it was possible that I had either gotten a bad batch of primers or they hadn’t been seated properly. But the third round I tried was factory ammunition. Factory ammo can also fail, though in my experience that is fairly rare. The chance that I would have three failures in a row with different ammunition struck me as highly unlikely.
So I’d probably find the source of the problem in the gun, with either the firing pin, or the hammer spring.
I did the basic dis-assembly, breaking the gun into a couple of main components. One of these was the bottom of the gun, the part that has the frame & grip. At this point I could test the strength of the hammer manually, and see whether it had adequate power. It did.
So I turned my attention to the top of the gun, the part with the slide and barrel and that stuff. Getting to the firing pin isn’t exactly difficult if you know what you’re doing, but it does mean you’re basically taking the whole thing completely apart. And it’s not something you do as part of a routine cleaning – the bit which holds the firing pin and makes it operate properly is pretty closed up, and designed to not need detail cleaning very often.
* * * * * * *
Income disparity in the US has gotten consistently worse for the last 40 years. It’s about twice as bad now as it was in 1968.
Remember the Social Security “lockbox“? How about the “peace dividend“? Do you remember how, during the latter part of the Clinton Administration, there was so much of a budget surplus that there was actually a discussion about the damage it would do to our economy if we retired too much of the national debt?
What happened? Where did these huge deficits come from?
Actually, I think there are a whole bunch of reasons. An economy as massive as ours is subject to a huge variety of forces, both internal and external. But let’s boil it down to the bare essentials:
- Increased spending.
- Decreased revenue.
Gov. Daniels, and most of the rest of the political class these days, is saying that the problem is almost entirely increased spending. And that therefore, the way to fix the problem is to decrease spending.
That would perhaps work. But what if it is due to decreased revenue instead? The Bush tax cuts, recently extended, dropped the US federal government’s total income from taxation below the historical averages. Furthermore, we’ve seen a steady decline in tax rates on the upper income earners and corporations for the last 50 years – the top marginal tax rate during the Eisenhower administration was 91%. For most of the Reagan Administration, it was 50%. During the Clinton years it was just under 40%. It dropped to 35% thanks to the Bush tax cuts.
And during the same time we’ve seen such huge declines in the tax rates, we’ve also seen a growing disparity in income distribution.
* * * * * * *
Got a note from a friend last evening:
Isn’t it cool to actually use the scientific method to figure these things out? I feel like I should send a thank you note to my high school chem teacher.
My friend was responding to the information I had shared about the problem I had with my gun, and how I had tracked it down thanks to a little application of the scientific method. Proper analysis, test the theory, draw conclusions. Problem solved.
But he could have just as well been responding to trying to determine what was the problem with our national deficit.
I think most people don’t really mind some income disparity – we all want to think that we will be rich, ourselves, one day. But the analysis of what is going on with the deficit is another matter, particularly when you start talking about making substantial cuts to programs which make a huge difference for the bottom end of the income distribution. Just going back to the tax level and policies of the Clinton era would not solve all our problems.
But it sure as hell would be a good place to start.
Jim Downey
From the end of Chapter One of Communion of Dreams:
“Commander,” Jon stood and shook the man’s hand. Their palmkeys met, but Jon received nothing. Military. Needed a special encryption to activate. Jon noticed the small bulbs of pinhead cameras under the man’s eyebrows. Also standard military cyberware.
From the BBC today:
Artist forced to remove head camera implant
An artist who had a camera implanted into the back of his head has been forced to remove it after his body rejected part of the device.
Iraqi-born Wafaa Bilal had surgery last week to remove one of three posts holding the camera in place as it posed a risk of infection.
I suppose we still have a little ways to go.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Augmented Reality, Music, Predictions, Publishing, Society, tech, Weather, Writing stuff
Last night, in the middle of a particularly impressive blizzard, I came in to my office to check the weather online and get the latest news. I clicked on the link for my favorite weather website, and was thoroughly confused. No, they had the blizzard there. But they had completely changed the design of the site – the switch had been made while I had dinner and watched a movie.
There at the head of the newly redesigned site was a friendly little note that scared the shit out of me:
Notice Anything Different? Click here to find out what’s new and improved at Weather Underground!
Oh, no!!!!
* * * * * * *
Three classic anecdotes/sayings, all related, but each with a slightly different lesson to offer:
1. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
2. Two cowboys are working on a fenceline. Without warning, a rattlesnake bites one of the cowboys on the leg, and he falls to the ground writhing in pain. “Do something!” he shouts at the other cowboy. The other cowboy draws his revolver and first kills the snake, then takes careful aim and shoots his buddy in the leg – right where he’d been bit. The first cowboy screams, “why the hell did you do that??” The second cowboy responds, “I don’t know how to treat a snakebite. But I know how to treat a gunshot wound.”
3. One evening, a guy is walking back and forth under a streetlight, looking down and obviously searching for something. Another fellow walks up and asks “lose something?” “Yeah, my keys,” says the first guy. “I’ll help ya look,” says the second. They spend about a half hour looking all around the lamppost. Finally the second guy says “I don’t see them around here anywhere.” “Oh, I didn’t lose ’em here. I lost them down there by the corner.” “Then why the hell are you looking for them here?” asked the second guy. “Light’s better here.”
* * * * * * *
I clicked the link, and got the explanation: they were introducing their new design tonight! After 2 years of hard work and functionality testing, they were confident that everyone was going to LOVE! the new site!
They were wrong. I didn’t love it.
And seemingly neither did a bunch of other people, as I found out on their blog and FaceBook page. Sure, some folks liked the ‘clean, fresh’ look (what, is this a mouthwash or something?) but a whole lot of others didn’t. Gone was a nice large page which gave you everything at a glance – current conditions, a small radar image, and easy to understand graphics forecasting conditions for the next five days. There was a ton of information there, and you could see everything easily, then go into further detail with just a click. It had been replaced by a series of smaller boxes slightly left of center, which contained much less information and in a smaller font. You could still find everything, but you had to scroll down the page or click tabs to do so.
* * * * * * *
1. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
This is perceptual limitation. Quite literally, you see the world in just one way. There is no ‘other’ option – there’s not even an awareness that another option is possible.
We all have this for some things. It can be a religious belief. Or sexual orientation. Or how to cook. Or a thousand other things. We just see one way that things are, and are completely blind to any difference, usually very stubbornly so.
* * * * * * *
I couldn’t for the life of me understand why they had done this, why they had made the change they did. It was clearly an inferior product – harder to use, large amounts of whitespace on my monitor for no good reason. Until someone use said that the site had been “iPadized” – that is, formatted for the iPad.
Ah.
* * * * * * *
2. Two cowboys are working on a fenceline. Without warning, a rattlesnake bites one of the cowboys on the leg, and he falls to the ground writhing in pain. “Do something!” he shouts at the other cowboy. The other cowboy draws his revolver and first kills the snake, then takes careful aim and shoots his buddy in the leg – right where he’d been bit. The first cowboy screams, “why the hell did you do that??” The second cowboy responds, “I don’t know how to treat a snakebite. But I know how to treat a gunshot wound.”
Here is still a functional limit, but one based on an awareness that there are other potential choices. That doesn’t really change things – there is still only one thing to be done, at least in the current time frame, no matter how clumsy it is in practice. Perhaps later you can learn about the other choices, turn them from being purely theoretical into actual options.
* * * * * * *
After much complaining and gnashing of teeth on the part of many commentators, someone at Weather Underground added a “Classic Site” link to the above announcement. Word quickly spread of this, with people explaining how to change the necessary bookmarks and whatnot to get back to their preferred website design. I did – it was nice to have all the functionality I expected back.
Of course, others now started to chime in that they liked the new look, and that the complainers were just resistant to change.
* * * * * * *
3. One evening, a guy is walking back and forth under a streetlight, looking down and obviously searching for something. Another fellow walks up and asks “lose something?” “Yeah, my keys,” says the first guy. “I’ll help ya look,” says the second. They spend about a half hour looking all around the lamppost. Finally the second guy says “I don’t see them around here anywhere.” “Oh, I didn’t lose ’em here. I lost them down there by the corner.” “Then why the hell are you looking for them here?” asked the second guy. “Light’s better here.”
This one is really similar to #2, but I think with one subtle yet important difference: there is an awareness of the limitations of a given tool/choice, but it is nonetheless still so appealing that it gets used in ways which are really inappropriate or counter-productive.
* * * * * * *
And here I think the mistake was made by the web designers. Perhaps they didn’t intentionally set out to optimize the new site for devices such as the iPad – it is entirely possible that this has just become a prevailing design aesthetic because of such devices, and since they are relatively new, the whole aesthetic seems new and exciting.
Technology changes things. Long poetic narrative was suited for oral presentation or a scroll-format codex – with the development of the book form we know now (pages gathered together) back around the first century, that probably had an impact on the decline of that literary form, since the necessity to flip pages back and forth tends to break up pacing. Old 78 rpm records could only play for about four minutes – the slightly smaller discs about three minutes – and so that became the standard length for popular songs. LP records opened up musical possibilities and so saw experimentation with longer songs. There are countless other examples.
But that’s just my perspective – based on my preferences and expectations. I’m not used to using an iPad, and don’t own one, so do not consider it as an option. It could well be that such a format will become the standard – and those of us with large monitors still tied to a desktop machine will be nothing more than dinosaurs. Until the next big change comes along and redefines things again. (Perhaps the cyberware augmented reality systems I predict in Communion of Dreams? We’ll see.)
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Constitution, DARPA, Emergency, Government, Politics, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, tech
The power to turn off is the power to destroy.*
I’m talking about exactly what we’re seeing in Egypt at present: when the power of the state is threatened, it will resort to almost any means to survive. Specifically, the government of Egypt has shut down the internet, mobile phones, and basically all modern communications in order to better control civil unrest.
And some in our government want the US to have the same power:
On Thursday Jan 27th at 22:34 UTC the Egyptian Government effectively removed Egypt from the internet. Nearly all inbound and outbound connections to the web were shut down. The internet intelligence authority Renesysexplains it here and confirms that “virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.” This has never happened before in the entire history of the internet, with a nation of this size. A block of this scale is completely unheard of, and Senator Joe Lieberman wants to be able to do the same thing in the US.
This isn’t a new move, last year Senators Lieberman and Collins introduced a fairly far-reaching bill that would allow the US Government to shut down civilian access to the internet should a “Cybersecurity Emergency” arise, and keep it offline indefinitely. That version of the bill received some criticism though Lieberman continued to insist it was important. The bill, now referred to as the ‘Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act’ (PCNAA) has been revised a bit and most notably now removes all judicial oversight. This bill is still currently circulating and will be voted on later this year. Lieberman has said it should be a top priority.
Think about that. Do you really want to hand over that kind of power to the government?
Or perhaps I should say: “do you really want to validate that kind of power in advance?” Because I am not naive enough to think that the government wouldn’t just do this in the event of a real emergency (in their opinion). But like with Lincoln suspending habeas corpus during the Civil War, there should be some check on such a decision after the fact – which there may not be with such a provision already in place. Handing someone that kind of power in advance is like handing them a loaded gun – they don’t necessarily have to use it in order for it to be a factor in all decisions which follow. Just the threat to use it is powerful, and shifts the whole dynamic.
Take another look at what is happening in Egypt. We never want to have to get to that point in trying to *reclaim* our civil liberties. Granting the government specific power to shut down the internet in order to ‘save us from a cyber security threat’ is just another in a long line of steps preying upon our fears. Don’t give in. And tell your senator what you think.
Jim Downey
*Marshall‘s actual quote was “The power to tax is the power to destroy.” From McCulloch v. Maryland.
Communion Of Dreams 
