Communion Of Dreams


Put young children on DNA list, urge police.
March 17, 2008, 7:37 am
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Cory Doctorow, General Musings, Genetic Testing, Government, movies, Philip K. Dick, Predictions, Privacy, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Travel

Primary school children should be eligible for the DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain’s most senior police forensics expert.

Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.

‘If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,’ said Pugh. ‘You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won’t. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.’

“We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society” . . . and turn them into criminals by the way we treat them from the very start.

The Minority Report, anyone? No, not the movie, which was OK, but the original short story by Philip K. Dick, which also shows the dangers of a post-war military regime/mindset to a civil society.

See, here’s the thing: people will largely react to the way you treat them (yes, I am generalizing.) If you take one set of people, and treat them like criminals from early childhood, guess what you’ll get?

I am constantly dismayed by just how much Great Britain has become a surveillance society, to the point where it is a dis-incentive to want to travel there. In almost all towns of any real size, you are constantly within sight of multiple CCTV cameras, and there is increasing use of biometrics (such as fingerprint ID) as a general practice for even routine domestic travel.

But getting DNA of all five year olds, under the excuse that it will better allow for catching criminals? Scary. To then match that up with the notion that you can predict the future behaviour of a 5 year old, based on someone’s model of personality development is just plain insane.

And you know that if they can pull this off in Britain, there will be plenty of people who think it should be instituted here.

Welcome to the future.

Jim Downey

(Via BoingBoing. Cross-posted to UTI.)

6 comments


“Don’t blame us.”
March 10, 2008, 8:42 am
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Carl Sagan, Fermi's Paradox, Marketing, Phil Plait, Predictions, Promotion, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Society, Space, Survival, tech

What is it with big corporations turning to space-related gimmicks in order to promote their products?

Last week Phil Plait on his Bad Astronomy site did a post about a beer maker’s ‘plan’ to advertise using a laser to shine their logo onto the Moon. (The second comment in that thread remembered me, and I also posted a comment about my Paint the Moon project from years back when I was writing Communion of Dreams.) It’s really just an advertising trick – they’re not seriously going to try it from what I can tell. So, like my communal fantasy art project, no real harm nor foul.

More worrying is this bit via redOrbit:

Doritos to Broadcast First Ad into Space

The campaign to broadcast the first ever advert into space is launched today (Friday March 7) with University of Leicester space scientists playing a key part in the process.

The British public is being asked to shoot a 30-second ad about what they perceive life on earth to be as part of Doritos ‘You Make It, We Play It’ user-generated-content campaign. The winning advert in the competition will be beamed past the earth’s atmosphere, beyond our solar system and into the Universe, to anyone ‘out there’ that may be watching. The winning ad will also be broadcast on terrestrial TV.

Catch that bit about scientists from the University of Leicester being involved? Well, some of the facts reported in the long article strike me as being a bit dodgy, but there is little doubt that indeed the scientists have signed on, for their own reasons. From the article again:

Dr Darren Wright of the University of Leicester Department of Physics and Astronomy said: “The Radio and Space Plasma Physics Group and Department of Physics and Astronomy as a whole at the University of Leicester has a very high international profile in the area of Space Physics.

“An important part of this project is that it provides an additional component to the Physics and Astronomy Department’s ever increasing outreach program. The ad to be transmitted will be created by the public following a national competition thus increasing public awareness of space activities.

“The launch of this project as we embark on National Science and Engineering Week- with a range of activities taking place at the University of Leicester- is timely, and adds impetus to our efforts to interest people in science.

“The University is particularly committed to outreach programs along with the National Space Centre – the brainchild of the University of Leicester – and engaged in a number of programs with the wider public.”

(I could find nothing on the UL site about this, but it seems to not have been updated that recently.)

So, in order to better promote their university and outreach program, they are willing to join in on this gimmick with Doritos. The Doritos UK site (warning – it’s one of those Flash-heavy sites that assumes you have at least a gig of RAM running) even has this confirmation:

We’ll even beam the winning advert into space just for the hell of it. But if passing aliens pick up the message and invade Earth looking for tasty snacks, don’t blame us.

Hahaha! See, it’s all just another joke, like the Moon/Beer Sign! Hilarious!

The problem is, there are real issues to be considered in taking an active role in broadcasting messages out in space, as I noted in this post from last June:

And I guess that’s where I come down on the question of whether or not we should be broadcasting “contact” signals out into the cosmos, in the hope of connecting with some other intelligent life.

Just about every major science fiction author has dealt with the question of alien contact at some point or another. Sometimes it is handled with an assumption of happy-happy E.T. helping us out, being part of the big brotherhood of intelligent species. Sometimes it is having us be lunch. Sometimes we’re the bad guys, enslaving other races or having them for lunch.

I tend to agree with Carl Sagan’s position that we’re unlikely to be at anything resembling technological parity with another race (and this is the premise of Communion of Dreams). And I tend to agree with those who advocate a certain caution in making our presence known in the universe. Via MeFi, there’s a very good article on this very topic in The Independent by Dr. David Whitehouse, formerly the BBC Science Editor and a respected astronomer, that I heartily recommend. An excerpt:

The fact is, and this should have been obvious to all, that we do not know what any extraterrestrials might be like – and hoping that they might be friendly, evolved enough to be wise and beyond violence, is an assumption upon which we could be betting our entire existence. When I was a young scientist 20 years ago at Jodrell Bank, the observatory in Cheshire, I asked Sir Bernard Lovell, founder of Jodrell Bank and pioneering radio astronomer, about it. He had thought about it often, he said, and replied: “It’s an assumption that they will be friendly – a dangerous assumption.”

And Lovell’s opinion is still echoed today by the leading scientists in the field. Physicist Freeman Dyson, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has been for decades one of the deepest thinkers on such issues. He insists that we should not assume anything about aliens. “It is unscientific to impute to remote intelligences wisdom and serenity, just as it is to impute to them irrational and murderous impulses,” he says. ” We must be prepared for either possibility.”

The Nobel Prize-winning American biologist George Wald takes the same view: he could think of no nightmare so terrifying as establishing communication with a superior technology in outer space. The late Carl Sagan, the American astronomer who died a decade ago, also worried about so-called “First Contact”. He recommended that we, the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos, should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes. He said there is no chance that two galactic civilisations will interact at the same level. In any confrontation, one will always dominate the other.

Sure, our broadcasts have been leaking out into space for a hundred years. But using a sophisticated system such as proposed for this absurd commercial is another story – there may be almost zero chance that such a signal could ever be picked up (even if there is intelligent extra-terrestrial life). But it is still a foolish risk. It’d be terribly embarrassing to have some other civilization get our snack food commercial, let alone to have them show up and decide that we tasted even better than the chips.

Jim Downey

1 comment


The one thing you know.
March 8, 2008, 10:08 am
Filed under: General Musings, MetaFilter, NASA, Predictions, Religion, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Survival, tech, Universe Today

There is one thing, absolutely, that you know – but most people don’t really believe it. That you are alive, and that you are going to die.

“Wait!” you say, “That’s two things!”

No, it’s not. Life and death are two aspects of the same thing. It is the fundamental duality of our nature. Now, the first part of that equation is generally accepted, but the second part is widely denied – hence the desire to split it into two separate items.

But it hasn’t always been like this. Most of human history, people have understood the connection – they were familiar and comfortable with death (even if it wasn’t to be desired). I’d even go so far as to say that much of the world today is still this way. It is really only in the last couple-three generations that those in the richer countries have lost a day-to-day connection with death.

Now, I lost my parents in my early adolescence, one to violence and the other to accident. I came to understand death, and mortality, just at the time when my world view was being shaped, just as I was developing the ability to understand the world in abstract terms. This made me different than most of my contemporaries, though more like how most humans have existed through history. Even through my crazy teen years I never once thought that I would live forever – I had no illusions that death could come suddenly and unexpectedly, and that it would eventually come no matter what I might try to do to postpone it. And while most people come to eventually accept death intellectually, I think that without experiencing it as part of your understanding of the world, you tend to never really internalize it. The more people live with death – whether because of growing up with it, or being immersed in it due to war or disaster – the more they tend to understand and accept it. In insulating ourselves, and our children, from the experience of real death, I think we have cheated ourselves of an understanding of it.

And those things we do not understand – in our gut – we fear. And too often, those things we fear, we deny.

OK, so what am I going on about, talking about death here on this nice, bright, pleasant (but a bit cold) Saturday morning?

This: Universe Today ran a piece a couple of days ago about a proposal by Jim McLane, a NASA engineer of over 20 years who now works for a private engineering firm, to do a one-person, one-way trip to Mars. From the article:

A return to the “get it done” attitude of the 1960’s and a goal of a manned landing within a short time frame, like Apollo, is the only way we’ll get to Mars, McLane believes. Additionally, a no-return, solo mission solves many of the problems currently facing a round-trip, multiple person crew.

“When we eliminate the need to launch off Mars, we remove the mission’s most daunting obstacle,” said McLane. And because of a small crew size, the spacecraft could be smaller and the need for consumables and supplies would be decreased, making the mission cheaper and less complicated.

While some might classify this as a suicide mission, McLane feels the concept is completely logical.

“There would be tremendous risk, yes,” said McLane, “but I don’t think that’s guaranteed any more than you would say climbing a mountain alone is a suicide mission. People do dangerous things all the time, and this would be something really unique, to go to Mars. I don’t think there would be any shortage of people willing to volunteer for the mission. Lindbergh was someone who was willing to risk everything because it was worth it. I don’t think it will be hard to find another Lindbergh to go to Mars. That will be the easiest part of this whole program.”

Now, some variation of this idea has been kicked around previously, even going back to the early days of thinking about getting someone to the Moon. McLane is to be credited with pushing the idea, but it isn’t really original. I’ve seen variations of the idea in SF as well.

Read the column. There is some fudging about whether or not this is really a suicide trip, or whether future tech would allow for the eventual return of the participant, or that this first person would be the initial colonist for an outpost.

But what I found particularly interesting – and insightful – were the attitudes displayed in the extensive comments (almost 200 at the time I am writing this). You only need to sample these to find out that a lot of people are saying that it would be just horrid to “condemn someone to die” for a pointless trip to Mars.

Folks, here’s a reminder: we’re all already condemned to die. Only the timing and manner of our death is unknown.

Plenty of people do things that they know will carry a high risk of death. Some do it for a thrill – there is a decided adrenalin rush in thinking you are going to die (and I think that this explains the popularity of both horror flicks and various games where ‘death’ is a possibility). But for those who understand death, they engage in these risks with an acceptance that while death may come to them, the goal is still worthy. They might be misguided, or misinformed, miscalculating either the amount of risk or the worthiness of the goal. But they are nonetheless making a choice that is not reflected out of fear or ignorance of death – rather, it is saying that they think that the possible timing and manner of their death is worth changing for the goal.

Because that is all you are actually doing when you take any kind of additional risk: saying, effectively, that you are willing to sacrifice some additional time living. You are *not* saying that you are willing to accept non-existence versus existence.  We are not “immortal unless killed” – we are going to die, sooner or later, in the fullness of time.  Get that in your head, and then deciding to do something like take a one-way ticket to Mars doesn’t seem so daunting.

Jim Downey

(Via MeFi.  Cross-posted to UTI.)

3 comments


What’s next? TSA-approved colostomy bags?
March 7, 2008, 10:58 am
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, Government, Health, Society, Terrorism

Teen Says TSA Screener Opened Sterile Equipment, Put Life In Danger

James Hoyne, 14, has a feeding tube in his stomach and carries a back-up in a sealed clear plastic bag. Hoyne said two weeks ago a TSA officer insisted on opening the sterile equipment, contaminating his back-up feeding up tube which he later needed.

“I said ‘Please don’t open it’ and she said ‘I have to open it whether you like it or not. If I can’t open it, I can’t let you on the plane,'” Hoyne said of his conversation with the TSA screener.

TSA officials apologized to James and said they’re looking into the incident to see what corrective steps need to be taken.

A gastric feeding tube is no big deal, and not some strange and bizarre technology that should be a mystery to the fine people at the TSA. But it is a danger to compromise the sterility of such equipment, which usually comes pre-packaged and ready for use (such a tube needs to be replaced every few months, more often under some circumstances – and anyone who has such is smart to have a back-up available).

So here you have a sick kid (check out the video on the WFTV site) being bullied by yet another clueless drone with authority issues. What’s next, requiring all medical equipment used by travelers to be pre-approved by the TSA, so someone doesn’t bring on board an exploding colostomy bag or something?

Sheesh. As someone at BoingBoing (my source for this) put it:

Oh give the TSA a break. Who among us has NOT seen a child with chronic health problems and feared that they might slaughter us all with their sterilized plastic tubes?

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to UTI.)

2 comments


Collective awareness?
March 7, 2008, 9:36 am
Filed under: Artificial Intelligence, General Musings, Predictions, Psychic abilities, Science, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Writing stuff

[This post contains both minor and major spoilers about Communion of Dreams. As usual, I will insert an additional note prior to each paragraph where the spoiler occurs.]

I’ve written previously about psychic abilities, and specifically addressed how they may function in the way I use them in Communion. Via TDG, another perspective on how a collective awareness among humans which functions below the level of consciousness may demonstrate this. From the article about the Global Consciousness Project:

From then on, Dr Nelson was hooked. Using the Internet, he connected up 40 random event generators from all over the world to his laboratory computer in Princeton. These ran day in day out, generating millions of different pieces of data. Most of the time, the resulting graph on his computer looked more or less like a flat line. But during the funeral of Princess Diana something extraordinary happened: the graph shot upwards and reached for the sky. It was clear that they’d detected a totally new phenomena. The concentrated mental effort of millions of people appeared to be influencing the output of random event generators around the world. But how? Dr Nelson was still at a loss to explain it.

In 1998 he gathered together scientists from all over the world to try and understand the phenomena. They, too, were stumped and resolved to extend and deepen Jahn and Nelson’s work. The Global Consciousness Project was born.

Since then, the project has expanded massively. A total of 65 Eggs (as the generators have been named) in 41 countries have now been recruited to act as the ‘eyes’ of the project. And the results have been startling and inexplicable in equal measure. The Eggs not only ‘sensed’ the moment that Princess Diana was buried, but also the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the Kursk tragedy and America’s hung election of 2000. The Eggs also regularly detect huge global celebrations such as New Year’s Eve. Even more bizarrely, they sense the celebrations as they sweep through the Earth’s different time zones. The project threw up its greatest enigma on September 11th 2001. As the world stood still and watched the horror of the terrorist attacks unfold across New York, something strange was happening to the Eggs. Not only did they register the event as it happened, but the characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers began four hours before the two planes hit the Twin Towers.

The article, and the Wiki entry about the Global Consciousness Project, explain more of the background behind the Project. Basically, in the 70s experiments were done using random number generators to see whether individuals could effect the outcome of the machines. Some tantalizing results were found, and further research lead to even more possible evidence of some kind of psychic ability, particularly among groups of people. I followed a lot of this work being reported in the popular press and was always intrigued with it.

[Minor spoilers in the next paragraph.]

When I got to thinking about Communion, I decided to make use of some of the ideas generated by this research – ideas pertaining to the collective awareness of a large group of people anticipating some significant forthcoming event. This is specifically why I have the AI Seth being directed to perform large-scale analysis of discussion boards, chat rooms, personal blogging (though I don’t call it that), and so forth, to see if there are any keyword descriptors which pop up with some unexpected frequency. The assumption is that in a survey of a large enough population, some collective hint of the future is possible.

[Major spoilers in the next paragraph.]

It turns out that not only is there indeed a collective awareness operating, but that it clearly and closely reflects the personal experiences of the protagonist Jon, as seen in his ‘dreams’. Hence one of the meanings of the title of the book: Communion of Dreams. This, however, turns out to be just the tip of the iceberg – that there is not just a collective unconscious awareness that can be tapped into (individually through dreams, or statistically by seeing the sorts of things that people are discussing), but that there are other psychic abilities which have been artificially suppressed as a result of outside interference. I have my own thoughts on how these mechanism would operate, and some of those are hinted at in the text, but I decided that it would be better to leave some mystery about that, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Now, I am a skeptic – I do not ‘believe’ in things unless there is sufficient data to support a theory explaining how something works. But I also keep an open mind about areas where the data provide some insight but support no conclusions. This is one of those areas – and as such, perfectly suitable for use in a book of Science Fiction . . . as has been used by countless authors over the last 150 years or so.

Read the article. It might challenge your thinking.

Jim Downey

2 comments


Well, whaddya know . . .
March 5, 2008, 3:03 pm
Filed under: Amazon, BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, Jeff Bezos, Kindle, NPR, Predictions, Publishing, Science Fiction, Society, tech

. . . Cory Doctorow agrees with me:

My latest Locus column, “Put Not Your Faith in Ebook Readers,” just went live. In it, I discuss the fact what while there’s plenty of programmers who’ll hack you a little ebook business that runs on a phone, handheld game device or PDA; there’s a genuine shortage of high-quality manufacturers who’ll build you a great, cheap, hardware-based ebook reader, and that that’s likely to continue for some time.

He quotes his column at some length, which basically explains the economics of the problem. As I noted in my piece on the Kindle last November:

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.

I haven’t heard much about the success that Amazon has had with the Kindle to date, but I would guess that if it was revolutionizing publishing it would be more in the news. And I’d bet this is why.

Jim Downey

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Ecclesiastes VIII 15
March 4, 2008, 10:14 am
Filed under: Amazon, Civil Rights, Climate Change, Emergency, Flu, General Musings, Global Warming, Government, MetaFilter, Music, NASA, Pandemic, Plague, Politics, Predictions, Preparedness, Religion, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Weather, Writing stuff, YouTube

A good friend and I have a running joke about getting our six chickens and a goat, and retiring from the world to farm while things fall slowly into ruin.

But the thing is, it’s not a joke. Not really.

I’m not saying that everyone should fall into a paranoid spiral, become some kind of survivalist nut. I’m not ready to do that. But when you read something like this, it does make you wonder. An excerpt (please note, I added the embedded links in the following):

For decades, his [James Lovelock’s] advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists – but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language – but its calculations aren’t a million miles away from his.

* * *

On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on – all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won’t make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

“It’s just too late for it,” he says. “Perhaps if we’d gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don’t have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can’t say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do.”

Too late? Yeah, maybe so:

I opened the email to find an article about the most recent “comments and projections” by James Hansen. Hansen, you may know, is perhaps the most famous NASA climate change scientist. He’s the man who testified before Congress twenty years ago that the planet was warming and that people were the source of that warming. He’s the man who was pressured by senior officials at NASA, at the behest of the current administration, to tone down his reports about the impacts of climate change. Thankfully he seems to have resisted that pressure.

I read the article and then I read a related article by Bill McKibben. Hansen says, and McKibben underscores, that there is a critical maximum number of parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to heed to prevent climatic catastrophe. That number, he says, is between 300 and 350.

* * *

Can you guess how many ppm of CO2 are in the atmosphere now? Slightly below 350? Slightly above?

We’re at 383 parts per million and counting, well past the number Hansen suggests is critical. We are past it by a lot. We were at 325 parts per million in 1970! Um, I don’t think we can just suck all that carbon back out, ask billions of people not to have been born, tear down all of those new suburban developments, return to non-fossil-based agriculture, and innocently pretend it’s thirty years ago.

So, what to do?

Well, that’s the problem. Lovelock says that you might as well enjoy life while you can, as much as you can, before the shit hits the fan. The second passage, from a very long blog entry evidently by Sally Erickson, explores some options but focuses on the need to convince people that the shit has essentially already hit the fan, in order to radically change behavior sufficient to have a hope to save the world.

I am not sanguine about the prospects of making radical change, nor what that would really mean for our civil liberties. I think, unfortunately, that the mass of humanity just cannot deal with a problem until it becomes an actual, in-your-face emergency, but that once in it, we usually do a fairly decent job of slogging our way out.

This is one of the reasons that I decided to choose a pandemic flu as the cataclysm behind the ‘history’ of Communion of Dreams. As I have discussed previously, I made that decision for reasons of plotting, but also because I actually believe that we’ll likely experience some kind of mass die-off of humanity sometime in the next century, whether due to war, asteroid impact, plague, global warming or some other disaster. We’ve just been too lucky, too long.

But in a way, it is an odd sort of optimism, as reflected in the book, and as shared by James Lovelock (from the same Guardian article):

“There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that’s just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That’s the source of my optimism.”

And not to end it there, here’s a little something for counterpoint, I suppose:

Jim Downey

(Via MeFi here and here.)

2 comments


I, for one, welcome our new alien “Controllers”. Well, in 9 years, I will. Really.
March 1, 2008, 11:00 am
Filed under: Arthur C. Clarke, General Musings, Government, MetaFilter, Predictions, Science Fiction, Society, Space, UFO

Source at U.N. tells of secret UFO meeting February 12, 2008

I received the following email from two trusted colleagues (Clay and Shawn Pickering) regarding a reliable source informing them that a secret meeting occurred yesterday morning (Feb 12) at the New York office of the United Nations concerning the recent spate of UFO sightings. It appears that a number of nation states are concerned about the impact of increased UFO sightings and wish to be briefed about what is happening. Their source, who currently works in the diplomatic corps, had to travel for an early morning off the record meeting at the UN. Their source revealed that a secret UFO working group exists that is authorizing the release of such information to the public, in an effort to acclimate others to what is about to unfold. A date of 2013 was given as the time for official disclosure and/or when extraterrestrials show up in an unambiguous way. In the interim there will be acclimation related releases of information. Importantly, the source revealed that the events leading up to official disclosure will involve more ethically oriented extraterrestrials, and they will not pose a military threat to the world.

Aha! Now we know the real reason behind those UN black helicopters!

The above passage is from Michael Salla‘s site Exopolitics. But not to worry – the aliens, called “Controllers”, are actually not going to be revealed until 2017, according to Salla in this post:

What follows next is a report of a further meeting between Clay and Shawn Pickering and their confidential source regarding the UN meeting on UFOs held on the morning of February 12, 2008. They pointed out that the “unambiguous showing up” of extraterrestrial life – sitting over major cities – would occur in 2017, rather than 2013 as described in the earlier article. The role of religion and population growth was also allegedly discussed, and appeared to raise many issues at the meeting, especially for India.

A significant descriptive term chosen by Clay’s and Shawn’s source for the extraterrestrials that would show up in 2017 was “The Controllers.” Such a term has clear psychological connotations and was chosen to have a particular effect on the target audience – both UN member states in attendance and the general public to which the information was being leaked. This is a clue that Clay’s/Shawn’s source is conveying information that has been designed to trigger a certain psychological reaction that influences how issues are framed and discussed.

Hmm. Where have I heard of such a scenario before? Let me think . . . hmm . . . oh yeah, Arthur C. Clarke’s book Childhood’s End.

Clarke should sue for royalties. Sheesh.

Jim Downey

(Via MeFi. Cross posted to UTI.)

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Morphing expectations.
February 29, 2008, 9:19 am
Filed under: Arthur C. Clarke, MetaFilter, movies, Paleo-Future, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, tech, Writing stuff

It is nothing but complete fantasy at this point, and will likely be tomorrow’s paleo-future, but this “concept device” from Nokia is intriguing:

Featured in The Museum of Modern Art “Design and The Elastic Mind” exhibition, the Morph concept device is a bridge between highly advanced technologies and their potential benefits to end-users. This device concept showcases some revolutionary leaps being explored by Nokia Research Center (NRC) in collaboration with the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre (United Kingdom) – nanoscale technologies that will potentially create a world of radically different devices that open up an entirely new spectrum of possibilities.

Morph concept technologies might create fantastic opportunities for mobile devices:

  • Newly-enabled flexible and transparent materials blend more seamlessly with the way we live
  • Devices become self-cleaning and self-preserving
  • Transparent electronics offering an entirely new aesthetic dimension
  • Built-in solar absorption might charge a device, whilst batteries become smaller, longer lasting and faster to charge
  • Integrated sensors might allow us to learn more about the environment around us, empowering us to make better choices

To get a full sense of what they are envisioning, check out the demonstration video.

Like I said, nothing but fantasy at this point. For Communion of Dreams I mostly stayed away from nanotech, since the capabilities it presents in theory are so radically powerful. We’re still early enough in learning how to manipulate material at the molecular level that it is not yet apparent what the real limitations are – it would be fairly easy to envision nearly god-like powers becoming available. And for me, such power isn’t that interesting – there is just too much you can do with it, for it to be a worthwhile device for writing. I prefer a more nitty-gritty tech level, with real limitations and problems for my characters to learn to use and overcome.

But it is fun to see something like the Morph concept come along, just as it was fun back in the 60s to watch the Pan Am shuttle match up to the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey (an homage to which I have in Communion, though it may not be obvious).

Jim Downey

(Via MeFi.)

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I knew these days would come.
February 25, 2008, 12:45 pm
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Book Conservation, Firefly, Flu, Health, Hospice, Joss Whedon, movies, Predictions, Science Fiction, Serenity, Sleep, Society, Writing stuff

Last night we settled down with some dinner to watch a bit of Firefly, settling on Serenity (the episode, not the movie). At one point fairly early on, when plans have gone south at several junctures, the captain of the ship (Mal) is considering options, trying to make the best of a not-great situation. There’s this little bit of dialog:

MAL: We don’t get paid for this, we won’t have enough money to fuel the ship,
let alone keep her in repair. She’ll be dead in the water anyhow.
(Mal turns to the others)
We just gotta keep our heads down and do the job. Pray there ain’t no more surprises.

I looked at my wife, and we just nodded to one another.

* * * * * * *

We did a hard thing. And we did it well.

Caring for my MIL for years somewhat warped my perspective. First and foremost in our consideration was always what her needs were and how best to meet them. I’ve often talked about what that meant in terms of rewards and sacrifices, and I don’t intend to rehash that now.

But a couple of things have changed with her passing. First off, is the odd sense of disorientation. I’ve compared it in discussion with friends with almost having a sense of agoraphobia – a nervousness when out in the world I’ve never felt before. It’s really just a conditioned reflex, and will fade as I adjust to the lack of need to always being worried about Martha Sr.

Another thing which has changed is the need to return to something resembling a ‘normal’ life, with the usual requirements of work. I don’t mind work, never have. My life has never been easy (though it certainly could have been harder), and I’ve never expected it to be otherwise.

But sometimes you wonder if maybe it couldn’t be just a little bit easier.

Caring for Martha Sr those last weeks was more demanding, and lasted longer than anyone expected. Getting hit with the flu so hard following seemed a bit gratuitous, in the sense of the universe having fun at our expense. Both my wife and I are behind on our work, and while our clients understand, that doesn’t help the cash flow situation. I knew these days would come, and things would be a little rough for a while until we got settled again. But we’ll manage.

* * * * * * *

We did a hard thing, and we did it well.

What has come of a bit of surprise has been how some people have responded to that. There’s been some discord in the family about the disposition of Martha Sr’s possessions, borne mostly out of a misguided sense of guilt, from what I can tell. It’s really unfortunate, but everyone has their own way of reacting to death. If we’re lucky, with time the matter will sort itself out with a minimal amount of damage.

I’ve also seen others in different forums who have almost felt like they had to defend their own decisions regarding a loved one who has Alzheimer’s or some other debilitating illness leading to hospice care. I’ve witnessed those who almost seem resentful that we did what we did, because it somehow implies that they did less – that they cared less.

No. We were able to make this work out. Barely. Everyone has a different situation, and each family, each person, must come to their own conclusions, their own solutions. None is better or worse than another. Because my wife and I don’t have kids, we didn’t have to juggle that aspect of life at the same time. Because we live here in the same town as Martha Sr, and have professions which allow a considerable flexibility in terms of work hours, we were better able to adapt to providing care at home than most. Our solution worked for our situation – barely. Those final months were very demanding, and I will admit that I was pushed further than I would have thought was possible, and failed and succeeded in ways I never expected.

I will not judge another – this experience has taught me humility.

Jim Downey

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