A speculative mind

  One of my favorite songs by Pat Benatar is “Anxiety” from her album Get Nervous . Seriously, you should be listening to it while you are reading this. Not that it has anything specific to do with this blog; I just like the music. Some fantasy novels or movies are based on the premise of turning back the clock. The hero has the opportunity to go back to when they were a child or when they were in high school, returning them to the simple carefree days of their youth. If the djinn in the bottle offered the same to me, I think I would say, thanks but no thanks. I remember what those days were like, and there was nothing carefree about them. Now, I don’t want you to think I had a terrible childhood. I had good parents and siblings. I never wanted for anything important. But it seems to me, I was worried all the time. When I was a little kid, I worried about getting shots. If I was told I didn’t have to get another shot for five years, then that was the beginning of my five-year w...

  At what point will computers become sentient? At what point will they become sapient? What’s the difference? Webster’s defines sentient as “1: Responsiveness to or conscious of sense impressions. 2: Aware. 3: Finely sensitive in perception or feelings”. Webster’s defines sapient as “possessing or expressing great sagacity” (wisdom). Science fiction stories speculate about humanity meeting a sentient or a sapient species. Some stories use the two terms interchangeably, but they are quite different. A sentient species is one that is aware of their environment. They are sensitive to their surroundings and other organisms around them. As a standard, this is not high bar. There are even plants that can sense their surroundings and react accordingly. They could be called sentient. Meeting alien life that is sapient is where things get interesting. This is where things like the “Prime Directive” in Star Trek would come into play. The idea that sapient life should be allowed to ...

  There seems to be varying opinions about prologues. Some readers hate them, won’t even read them. Why? It is part of the story. If the author had titled it “Chapter 1” instead of “Prologue” they would have read it without question. I guess it is because people feel that if it is a prologue, it is not really part of the story and they don’t want to waste their time on preliminaries. I am sure those same people would not read the “Acknowledgements” or the “Forward” or the “Afterword” either. I can understand being anxious to get to the story. Something made you interested enough to buy or to checkout or to borrow this book. You want to get to the meat. But the prologue (if there is one) is part of the story. It often tells us something about a character or a situation that we may need to know later. It may be there to set the emotional stage for the story. It is a gem, a kernel of information. Then again, I have read some prologues that were not all that enlightening or useful to...

  I wouldn’t call The Institute by Stephen King a horror story. There is a bit of paranormal activity in it, but evil that we see does not come from the people who possess paranormal powers, but from others who control them. The people who have psychic abilities are all children. The real horror of this story is that those children are kidnapped and abused. The main character in the story is Luke, a twelve-year-old who has a remarkable brain. The kid is a budding genius who even though he is in a school for the gifted, has moved beyond what that school can teach him. In the next year he plans on entering MIT to study engineering and Emerson to study English at the same time! But he is kidnapped and taken to a mysterious institution in the backcountry of Maine where he meets other kids who have also been kidnapped. Has Luke been taken because of his remarkable brain? No. The Institute doesn’t care about that. They only care that he has a mild ability to move small objects with hi...

  The two dystopian novels of the early 20 th Century that set the standard for dystopian novels, were Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It is interesting that neither author was primarily known science fiction writer. I read Brave New World when I was in High school. It was not required reading. I just read it on my own to check a famous science fiction book off my list. I don’t think I got much out of it. I know I didn’t get much out of it, just the basic plot: A society where happiness is the only good. Everyone has sex with everyone else. A “savage” makes an appearance and it upsets the applecart. I doubt if I got much of the nuance or the humor. I definitely would not have gotten the Shakespeare references. In fact, there are a lot of references my 17-year-old self would not have gotten. I just finished reading it again. With age comes more understanding. The compelling insight into this “Utopian” society comes from the outsid...

  I was listening to Benjamin Netanyahu on the radio. He was justifying his change in the law that removed power from the Israeli Supreme Court, saying that it was the will of the people. Majority rules. This made me think of “Tyranny of the masses,” a concept that notes: just because a majority of people are for something, that doesn’t make it right. I am sure you can think of historical examples where the people of a country supported a policy that was demonstrably wrong. When everything is completely governed by majority rule, the rights of the minority can be subverted by the majority. The framers of our American Constitution knew this, and tried to put in some checks and balances into our system of government. This was to guard against all forms of tyranny whether from a dictator, or from tyranny of the masses. One of those checks is that we have a representative government. The people themselves don’t pass laws, but instead elect representatives at the federal and local lev...

  My wife got me started watching reruns of Station 19 , a show about Seattle firefighters, a spinoff of Grey’s Anatomy . Like Grey’s Anatomy , it is a typical Hollywood take on an important job, meaning: cue the soap opera subplots. But it does have some realistic portrayals of the kinds of things that a firefighter might encounter, even if some aspects are exaggerated. Anyway, it got me reminiscing about when I was a firefighter. I was a volunteer firefighter in a small coastal town. My situation was different than that of a professional firefighter working in a large city. In my 10-year career as a fireman, I responded to something more than 500 calls. That might seem like a lot in the abstract, but a firefighter in a big city department might do that many in a few months. In station 19 , much is made of the danger firefighters face and their stress it puts on their loved ones (of course they have to ramp up the drama). Firefighters do face dangers. Some of them are injured ...