A speculative mind

I was recently watching a Q & A session on You Tube with the author John Scalzi. One of the questioners was asking about Scalzi's book Lock In . Lock in is an interesting book set in the near future in the aftermath of a pandemic that has left 1% of the population totally paralyzed (locked in), unable to move or communicate verbally. This is a huge health crisis (see any parallels today? But it was written in 2014) To overcome this, the technology has been developed to allow the consciousness of a Locked in patient to control an android body that allows him or her to interact with the outside world. The protagonist and narrator, Chris, is a lock in patient that through the use of a robot avatar is able to work as a FBI agent. What follows is a futuristic police procedural. The person talking to John Scalzi at this Q & A session said they had listened to the audiobook of lock In and noticed that there were two versions of the audiobook: One narrated by Wil Whea...

I have just finished The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings. Cummings was many things:   playwright, artist and novelist, but is most famous for being a poet in the first half of the Twentieth Century. The Enormous Room is a memoir of the time he spent in a French prison during World War I. With America not yet in the war, he and a friend volunteered for ambulance duty. Letters home intercepted by censors caused the French to think these two Americans were undesirables, possibly even German spies because they dared to state that they did not hate Germans. They were sent to a holding prison until their fates could be determined. All the men in the prison were housed in one ‘enormous room’ with minimal comforts and sanitation. Meals were sparse (when his friend was finally released, he was found to have scurvy). Some of the fellow prisoners probably (like Cummings and his friend) were no threat to France or anybody. But some of the prisoners were bad seeds. The good and th...

Confirmation bias is a phrase I have been hearing a lot lately. It is simply the tendency in humans to give more weight to evidence that supports their beliefs: to “confirm” them. I have been hearing about it and seeing evidence of it especially in the political realm of late. Oh, no party has a monopoly on this; everyone does it to a certain extent. Every time you see a meme on Facebook that makes you go “Yeah!” and immediately repost it, without checking to see if it is actually true, you are not only guilty of it, but are encouraging it in others. Let’s say, you take a firm stand on trade for example. You could be someone who believes in free trade, or alternately, you could believe in protectionism.   Whichever it is, you believe in it, and you want others to believe in it too, so you go about looking for evidence that supports your view. See, you are already in trouble. Instead of gathering evidence to see which model is actually better, you have already decided befo...

IOT stands for the Internet Of Things. This is an expanded view of the internet that doesn’t just connect computers or even phones. Never mind smart phones, now you can have smart houses, smart cars, and smart traffic lights. And it includes things like artificial intelligence and remote sensing. On the one hand it is kind of cool. It’s the stuff of science fiction. It is the world of George Jetson. Vending machine companies can get automated alerts that machines need restocking or their drinks aren’t being kept cold enough. Implanted medical devices can report the patient’s or the device’s condition. Industrial systems, factories and power plants can be monitored and controlled remotely. You can tell your house to turn the lights on and preheat the oven before you get home. Farmers can monitor temperature humidity, and soil moisture. With the advent of more cameras hooked into the system, police, fire, and ambulance people can see what is going on before they arrive on scene. ...