Tag: technology

Personal Windows

Friends, prompted by curious, started grilling me about some of my past life the other night. Those were my super-secret military days.

Since their questioning, I’ve drifted along currents of wonder about living amidst change and how small our windows of knowledge truly seem. Change is fast and constant. The military commands I worked in thirty years ago no longer exist; the weapons systems introduced during my career are being retired. Bases have been shuttered. They’re trying to retire the nukes I once controlled (a good thing, in my mind). God knows what’s going on in space.

I ended up in a medical start-up after my military career, first in sales operations, running customer service and spewing out reports about sales trends. We were part of a nascent business, per-cutaneous transvascular coronary angioplasty, moving into stent delivering systems for coronary applications and radiation therapy to cope with re-stenosis. After that, I moved on to another company in search of ways to cope with chronic total occlusions.

Life found me in Internet and computer security in my next phase, and then onto analytics. Whatever. I drifted through choices, jumping through windows when the opportunities arose, and was fortunate to have someone on the other side of those windows to pull me in and show me around.

The windows in our lives are always so small. They open and close so quickly. Technology accelerates the speed with which the windows open and close. For examples, consider how we now conduct war versus how it was conducted in decades and centuries past. Consider how we make, experience and enjoy music, and how we entertain ourselves. Yet, each window and moment is treated as though this is a permanent solution. Consider the plight of the coal industry, for example. They think it can be legislated back but technology and market forces have moved past them.

We, as humans, can only see and understand so far, and we argue and debate about what we see, what it means and what we need to do about it. Yet, each person’s life is defined by their personal windows. These are shaped by their culture, heritage, education, genetics and personal experiences, yes, but they’re also shaped by much larger forces. We often barely glimpse the shadow of such forces.

Sometimes – no, hell, often – I think we’re going around understanding the world backward; we believe reality shapes us, and we investigate how we shape it.

Maybe we shape reality. Maybe there is no past or future, there is only the window into Now.

Jump through it and keep on going.

 

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Remember…?

Tulipmania struck the civilized world in the sixteen hundreds. Do you remember that?

Do you remember when sock hops were really big in America?

Remember, “Longer, lower, wider?” That was often a new American car’s greatest advertising claim. One of the cars that bucked against that trend was the American Motors Rambler. Surely you recall it. You must remember the Corvair, right?

Do you remember drive-in theaters, or movies that cost fifty cents to see? Do you know what it means to drop a dime and why we say that?

How ’bout Pacman and Ms. Pacman? Do those games set off any memory chimes?

Do you remember ‘big hair’ and Members Only jackets? What about eight-track cassette decks?

I know you must remember 45s and LPs. What of Child’s Place and Children’s Palace do you remember?

Did you have a Walkman?  Do you now, or did you ever, own a Beta Max, or a VHS player? Do you now, or did you ever, own a Polaroid Land Camera, an eight millimeter projector, or an Instamatic Camera?

Do you remember erector sets and Lincoln logs? Are you familiar with Silly Putty, Super Balls and pet rocks? Perhaps, instead, you knew Hula Hoops.

Do you remember the Teapot Dome scandal, or the Keating Five, and Enron?

Perhaps you’re familiar with ESSO.

Do you remember G.C. Murphy? Man, we loved going to the mall and shopping at that five and dime, where we could buy sub sandwiches for a dollar.

What about S.S. Kreske’s? Remember when they became K-Mart, and remember when Sears bought K-Mart?

Remember when Craftsman Tools was part of Sears, Roebuck and Company, and their mail order catalogs? Sears, Roebuck and Company became Sears, and Sears is selling Craftsman Tools to Black and Decker.

And remember the U.S.S.R., and the Berlin Wall?

I’m just curious about what you remember, and what will be remembered in this age of selfies, Walmart, iPhones, Costco, Sam’s Club, Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. Remember Netscape Navigator, or Mosaic?

Do you remember Yahoo? Because Yahoo will be Altaba once Verizon completes its purchase of Yahoo. Speaking of which, do you remember MCI?

I wonder, how long will we remember Altaba?

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Today’s Theme Music

Sometimes the theme music is about trying to influence my mood, reflect a more general mood, or capture a sentiment. Today, pining for the end of 2016 and commencing the countdown to 2017, I turned to Bruce Hornsby and the Range and ‘The Way it Is’, 1986.

I selected it because he sings, “Some things will never change.” He alludes to judgments based on appearance, beggars and the unemployed, and people’s callousness. “That’s just the way it is.”

I’m one that doesn’t believe that’s just the way it is, and things will never change. I’m not a student of history but I enjoy reading history. I know of other times when matters were worse for many in almost every term we can think of to phrase it.

But that’s not how it stayed. People hunted medical solutions to reduce and eradicate disease, or sough technological advances to benefit our planet and civilization, economic improvements for all classes in all societies, or pushed for freedom and equality for all without regard to how they, as individuals, differ or conform with anyone else.

I am one that believes that if we c0ntinue developing and articulating visions of a better world, we will achieve such visions of better lives for everyone. I turn to Bruce and the Range because that’s what one stanza states:

That’s just the way it isI
Some things will never change
That’s just the way it is
But don’t you believe them

Yeah, I don’t believe them. Things will change.

For the better.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

― Martin Luther King Jr.

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Big Data Spoke

A far future science-fiction exercise.

Collecting, collating and compiling data from Human databases and streams – government, social, medical, financial, historic, personal, personnel, death, birth and health records – revealed startling evidence.

Humans were dying less. Even those who could be resurrected, cloned, recovered, re-invigorated or re-born, were dying far less often. Fewer still were dying and remaining dead. Suicides were recorded with four zeroes after a decimal point. The population median age, already well over one hundred, was rising sharply, with less people deciding to even be reborn as a younger age with their adult memories intact. It seemed like that fad had fast faded.

Okay. But birth rates had also plummeted, falling like the temperatures on Castle Frozen when an Arctic front roared over the mountains and down across the plains. Less than two children were being born for every hundred people. Most of those children were not being permitted to age into maturity and adulthood but were kept as children for their parents’ entertainment.

The Council for Peace and Prosperity met on Castle Prime’s equatorial climate-controlled island to discuss general trends and concerns. The big data study on birth and death was a minor agenda item on the third day.

Most weren’t worried, arguing this was a burp, a blip. Yes, all were part of longer, greater trends, but the sharp drop-off was new. Those in the business of helping the dead return to life weren’t concerned; their business reviews were based on subscriptions and not a per use basis. Subscription rates were remaining steady. No losses were being recognized but the resurrection was a mature technology and had developed into a commodity. Profit margins were smaller. That was a concern.

Analysts also had deep dive data to present. Wars, warfare and violence remained at high levels but more people were avoiding killing one another. That unnerved attendees. It pointed to a training issue to many. Soldiers and officers needed encouragement to kill more quickly and readily. Perhaps studies were needed to understand what kept them from killing others when engaging them.

Such suggestions were quickly shot down. Studies like that were for the weak-willed or when appearances were needed that something was being done to mollify investors and voters until their attention wandered or other matters distracted them. No, studies weren’t needed in this situation; investors and voters didn’t know about these big data reveals. They would remain corporate secrets.

Second: population growth was required. Cloning was the natural solution. Adult clones were a ready market. Children had smaller and well-defined needs that were already being fulfilled. Adults were big children who eagerly embraced new toys and trends. Adults were willing to spend more on their toys, too, especially if said toys could be positioned as status symbols about wealth, power or influence. Most adults were sufficiently weak-willed and insecure or had such low self-esteem that they would be swayed by such bland and routine practices.

However…archaic laws remained in place against cloning a person to live more than one life at a time. Right now, cloning was permitted for only very small population segments and narrowly defined pre-existing conditions. Even that cloning was done well outside of the public eye.

Those laws needed to be changed. Immediate potential campaigns inspired the Council attendees. Contract pop and sports stars to headline campaigns. Say, they could be doing different activities on different planets, like skiing, surfing, fucking, dancing, performing, interviewing, whatever, marketing could work out those details. The point would be that doing these things simultaneously enriched the individual experiences and compounded their impact. The key behind the campaigns – there would naturally need to be several because to cover all the pop-culture segments – was to encourage envy about living a fuller life by living multiple simultaneous lives and fertilizing your life base. Having it done illegally by someone(s) popular and successful was the natural launching point. People loved lawbreakers.

Likewise, clone the best of the service members. Offer small bonuses for permitting the cloning. Simultaneously, initiate campaigns to overturn the cloning laws. Analysis would reveal which planets and societies could be open to such change and which would be the greatest influencers. New interpretations of founding documents and religious works could be published that seemed to encourage cloning as a religious right and even an expectation by whatever deities people worshiped these days.

Third, begin a whisper campaign. Stir up the rabble: birth rates were down because governments were encouraging certain races, ages, classes, corporations and planets to give birth less as part of a greater conspiracy to reduce those populations, thereby undermining their impact and participation. People always hated and distrusted governments and were easily inspired to rise up against them. Blame regulations, too. That always fired up the fringes, and then the flames would spread.

Beautiful. It was all coming together. Off the record, they agreed that more wars could be initiated. Step up the activity against pirates, rebels, independent planets, and smaller corporations and systems. That would increase the death rate and probably the birth rate.

Sure, this wasn’t a problem; it was an opportunity. Open the floodgates and rake in the wealth.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

This choice for theme music, ‘Road to Hell’, has been around for a while. It’s hard to find a good recording of it online. A good recording is important; the song begins with the sounds of rain on a car and the sweep of wiper blades across the windshield.

The song’s sentiments, that we’re on a the road to hell, are reflected by various people and organizations. No matter the issues, politics or religions, who wins or who loses, someone will declare, this is the road to hell. Funny enough, every time I think of the road to hell, I think of a book by one of my favorite authors, Roger Zelazny, and ‘Damnation Alley’, which wasn’t a terrific novel. It’s appropriate to think of Zelazny and Rea together on a day like this, when surreal is the ‘word of the year’.

Back to the music, Chris Rea, ‘Road to Hell’, 1989. The song was originally listed as Parts I and II. Part I is like an essay with accompanying instruments:

Stood still on the highway

I saw a woman

by the side of the road

With a face I knew like my own

reflected

in my window.

Part II of Chris’ lyrics begins, “Well, I’m standing by a river, but the water doesn’t flow. It boils with every poison you can think of.” Too frequently, here in America, we’re encountering poisoned rivers and drinking supplies. Flint, Michigan leaps to mind, but a small city not far from my town has been enduring several months of boil and do not drink orders for their water supplies. Googling for such news turns up multiple more examples.

It does make one think, “Yeah, we’re on the road to hell.” Just in time for the holidays.

 

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Not Always Quick

I’m not always a quick thinker. Otherwise, I would have answers today.

It’s about a dream. Yeah. I should have asked myself, why are you dreaming this? I don’t recall ever featuring pigs in a dream before.

I was feeding a pig. He was a shiny little pink porker. He came downstairs in my house, a very happy and excited little creature. I had company. Friends were visiting. I didn’t want the pig downstairs. So I called him and led him back upstairs.

It was messy upstairs. It seems like we were in a transition. My intention was to feed the pig some cornflakes. He found some on the floor and gobbled them up, but he wanted more. I thought he spotted more but they  turned out to be scraps of paper. He didn’t want to eat those. As I searched for corn flakes to feed him, another pig, slightly larger but equally pink and shiny, emerged, along with a few cats. So I talked to them, telling them I was looking for food and was going to feed them, even as I couldn’t find the food that I expected. I headed downstairs to find some.

I had company, three former co-workers from a flying unit. Laying on sofas, they were watching television and playing games while they chatted to me and my wife. I was annoyed because they had disconnected the best television and were employing old cathode ray televisions on carts. I set about fixing that.

Meanwhile, another friend from the same unit showed up. I asked him what he thought of his new position. He replied, “This is what war sounds like.” Then, using a gallon paint can, he made a metallic rumbling noise that was loud and unpleasant. “All the time,” he said.

Others, less known but known, showed up. Setting up tables, they sat down to prepare food to feed me. I was embarrassed and grateful for their efforts, but I kept trying to tell them that it wasn’t necessary. They ignored me, continuing to cook.

Pigs…confusion…identity. It’s something to research and think about today, since I didn’t bother to ask myself for clarification when it was happening. I’ll need to think quicker next time.

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Blackbird

I’m often frustrated with myself, questioning my mind, cringing at things I’ve done in the past, and challenging my motives and stances, and trying to learn and grow. It’s complicated and wearying.

Part of this is about being a guy. As a guy, I enjoy speed, power, football. I’m a beer drinker, but was a Jack and Coke guy for decades, and a cigar smoker. I was known for being hard-ass about getting the mission accomplished.

The other is about being a human. As a human, I want peace, freedom and equality for everyone. As a human, pro football is barbaric; speed and power – Formula One, NASCAR, fighter jets and rockets – are unnecessary indulgences. As a guy, those things are awesome, and pro football, as practiced by the NFL, is cerebral but violent, graceful, fast…and violent.

Within those boundaries, I grew up in love with speed and technology. They’re most ultimately married in aerospace technology in my thinking, part of science fiction’s magnetic appeal. And within that domain, there is little like the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.

I was stationed at Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan, for four years in the early 1980s. Kadena AB has long runways and is strategically located on the Pacific’s edge. Blackbirds, dubbed Habus by the locals, flew in and out all the time. Being down on the flight line and watching one take off just after sunset, when the sky is a diluted Royal blue and watching those big engines release orange and blue tongues, was beauty in motion. Wheels up, they turned up, and quickly disappeared. I watched until I could no longer see it.

New Atlas has a terrific interview with a Habu pilot. Brian Shul was shot down and left for dead in Cambodia before being rescued. Eventually becoming an SR-71 pilot, Loz Blaine had a nice piece on him, well worth reading for the human side of people using this technology.

The two links embedded in the article are also worthwhile. Both are funny. One is about an air speed pissing contest posted at Opposite Lock. The other is about doing a favor for an ex-SR-71 pilot via a slow flyby and giving some young boys something to talk about, published on Foxtrot Alpha.

I hope you check them out and enjoy them as much as me.

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Greetings from a Sexagenarian

Back when my mother was in her late seventies, she went dancing on Friday nights. She often mentioned how much she enjoyed it, and enthused about the old people and their dancing skills and energy.

That always drew my laughter. “The old people? Mom, you’re old.”

Impatience snapped through her response. “I mean the really old people, you know, in their nineties.”

While I understood her point, it amused me that she didn’t think of herself as old. Now, at sixty, I understand better.

My wife was in a conversation with a man in his mid-eighties. She’s a few years younger than me and mentioned to him that she was middle-aged.

He seemed amused. “Middle-aged? Isn’t that well behind you?”

I was taken back when she told me. If she’s younger than me and she’s not middle-aged, than what am I? What constitutes middle-age?

Does it matter?

Not really, and yes, and no. Middle-aged, as already demonstrated, is a vague, inaccurate term. Definitions by psychologists and institutions vary, as it does by era and culture.

Part of it, which disturbed Mom, and bothers me, are the connotations associated by these terms, young, middle-aged, and elderly. Think ‘young’ and contemplate the images and ideas springing to mind. Substitute ‘elderly’ and ‘middle-aged’.

Yet, in most of the advanced world, these labels mean less and less. So I’m taking up the Latin route. I’m sixty, so call me a sexagenarian. I like it. Easy to spell, and it has sex embedded right in it. Mom, in her eighties, is an octogenarian.

I mean, what does middle-age conspire to mean? I’ve been accused of being immature, old beyond my years, and an old man before his time. I’ve also been deemed young at heart by some, immature, or young in spirit by others. My older friends – in their late sixties to upper eighties – call me their young friend.

It’s all context and impressions. Like everything else, a spectrum of behavior, expectations and impressions establishes others’ perceptions and judgement. Yet this can change by day. Give me a short night of sleep and I can appear as a cranky old man. Pour a little beer in me and I can be as immature as a two-year old. Mostly, I’m somewhere in between.

I don’t dress ‘old’ but nor I dress ‘young’. I adopt dress that is neat without calling attention to me. My hair is thinning and retreating as fast as antarctic ice (but with less alarm), and when the sun gets its rays on it, it goes silver and white. Do I care?

Hell, yes.

And hell, no.

See, I’m trapped on that spectrum. I logically understand aging and its impact. I also appreciate the freedom of aging, and its limitations. I know I can’t do anything about it, nor influence others’ impressions of my age and their labels, so why care? But then someone says, “Isn’t middle-age behind you?” and I’m newly irked.

In the future setting of my novels, ‘Returnee’ and ‘Long Summer’, you can bet it’s addressed, because we’re driven by advertising, perception and self-image, themes that sharpen in that future setting. You can bet that a civilization that has developed a technological work-around to dying has done the same with aging’s impact and their appearance.

It becomes an exercise for the characters and their thinking. Many embrace genetic sculpting to develop a look which they like and others appreciate. It’s just like hair, mustache and beard styles and colors, or even jewelry. Some take up the approach, how do I want to look today? What color should my skin, eyes, and hair be? Others emulate famous people, but more establish a look and keep it. A few chose to resemble cats, dogs, dragons, centaurs, and other creatures. It’s almost free and relatively easy.

The 4G in my future (the fourth generation of space colonists) have taken it to an extreme, part of their statement about who they are and their stand. Their leaders look prepubescent. That fad is spreading. They think it’s a meaningful statement of who they are and represent, but others who have lived longer and done more, mostly understand how little that appearance really means. There are some who are more easily swayed, or want to be included in the new youth movement. It’s fun to think about and one of the great joys of writing fiction.

In one of my vaguely conceptualized ideas, people who become zombies immediately look young and beautiful, which sways a large segment of weak thinking people, who want to look young and beautiful again. And as zombies, they have no cares about work, taxes, politics, wars, civil rights or the environment.

Which takes me from here to there and back again. Because, after all, weren’t we really talking about mindless zombie thinking about what it means to be old?

 

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‘Speak, Memory’ and Me

‘Speak, Memory’  is a recounting of one person’s creation of a bot based on a friend to cope with their grief. The bot is based on her friend’s emails. It is a fascinating read into how one person turns to clever use of technology and information to bridge her loss.

The tale has meaning to me for my writing. Memory is an enormous aspect of the future in ‘Returnee’ and ‘Long Summer’. While death is conquered through complex machinations involving resurrection, regeneration or cloning (multiple paths exist), and diseases and illnesses are staved off by embedded nano-meds (which use compilers and teleporters to seamlessly import medicines and treat you without pause), memory is a larger problem. First, your pre-death memories must be stored and accurately restored to you when you’re returned to the living. People living longer need to remember more, especially as space exploration and colonization exponentially expands and technology keeps racing ahead. Memory thus becomes augmented with biological drives as well as networks. You’re constantly connected.

As part of this extrapolation of what might be, memories of specific people, such as grandparents, are further developed through big data/social media mining. This creates a far deeper and broader database of their personality. Further, the database is housed in an avatar and AI dedicated to being that person. So, for example, your grandfather can be summoned into your presence as an avatar and converse and interact as your companion, even though he passed away several hundred years ago, or still lives, but is on the galaxy’s far side.

Last, as people struggle to remember specifics, many have created a separate avatar that houses the augmented, expanded personal memory. For Brett, his memory is an attractive tan blonde. He does not name her but calls her ‘memory’. Madison Handley, however, once based her memory on Mal Reynolds from ‘Serenity’ and ‘Firefly’. After out-growing it, she changes her memory’s appearance and disposition several times. By the time of ‘Long Summer’, when she’s become a pirate, her memory has taken on the aspect of Grutte Pier, the Frisian pirate formally known as Piers Gerlofs Donia.

As a further component of memory and extended living, I had to determine what route memory will take. Are future people’s memory perfect? What does it mean to perfectly recall a moment? Recent studies show that our memory is very imperfect, and those imperfections help us cope with existence and survive. Oh, the lies we tell ourselves. As part of that, which version of memory is collected? The perfect, unbiased version, or our personal edition? In the end, both are collected but only law enforcement normally accesses the perfect memory to resolve conflicts and solve crimes.

The rest of us prefer our personal recollections.

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Nobel Prizes

Love the Nobel Prize for Physics this year. You’ve probably heard but I’m a pedantic beast so I’ll tell you that three Brits, working in the US, won the Nobel Prize for their work in exotic matter.

David J. Thouless, F. Duncan M. Haldane, and J. Michael Kosterlitz are the three awardees. Being a science fiction fan, I love such work that pushes our thinking into new directions and recognizes new potential.

Over in Medicine, Yoshinori Ohsumi won for his work on cells that eat themselves in a process called autophagy. I pay less attention to medicine than physics, so my reaction was…whhaaat?

These discoveries and the explanations behind them unroll reams of imagination and story ideas. I swear my brain began overheating. I’ll never understand this stuff but it’s cool to think about theoretical applications and situations, and how you can take off into new directions. So many ideas and stories, so little time. My mortality and human limitations really limit me.

(Hah, and there’s another kernel of an idea for a story/novel/incident. So many ideas….)

Knowledge! Got to love it.

 

 

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