16550--Falling Toward Nerdvana

I have a smartphone.  Yeah, I know, so do millions of other people.  So what's the big deal?

Yes, they've become commonplace and we're quickly being jaded to their presence, but they're still a fairly new addition to our lives.  For me, they're overdue.

As a kid, I watched a lot of Star Trek (the original series).  It was in syndication and there wasn't a lot of sci-fi competition on TV, so the show's status grew and became very influential.  Still, not news, but my letters to Santa included requests for phasers and communicators.  OK, maybe the phasers would've been irresponsible to hand to a ten-year-old, but did the big man come through on the communicators or what?

I predicted Bluetooth back then.  Dick Tracy and his kind may have shown us the wrist radio (optional video) first, but I figured out that the better way to handle it was going to be having that easily accessible control unit and a wireless microphone/speaker in the ear.  That system is now finally available, too.  (anyone caring to send royalty payments may contact me through this sight for Paypal info)

Things change.  I tried to explain to my teenager about personal computers that used to have 64K RAM, becoming organizers and watches, with more computing power than NASA used to get to the moon.  His eyes glazed over.  Oh, well.

Still, it's the smartphone that's achieving awesomeness.  In Star Trek terms, they're becoming communicator/tricorder hybrids.  In conventional terms, we have "large" cell phones/small tablet/mini-computers to carry around and help us through our days.  The PDA of fifteen years ago might as well have been a Dayrunner by comparison.  No, they're not perfect yet.  We still have dropped calls and signal coverage issues and I don't think the Klingons are behind it.  Kirk could carry on calls from half a mile underground with the orbiting Enterprise.  I guess I could say we'd been misled about our mobile communication future, but we haven't quite made it to the 23rd century yet.

I'm eager to see what's next.

Small laser-based scanning units have been developed to analyze the molecular structures of objects at a distance.  To me, sounds like all we've been missing to make a tricorder.

Cybernetic micro-electronic components are being created with increasing frequency to be incorporated into living nervous systems.  Cybernetic remote control and telepathy shouldn't be too far off.  Neither should medical monitoring and modification be something we're waiting long to see as it seems that new uses for nanotechnology are being experimented with every week.

A friend and I are waiting to see the Playstation 9 offered as a package of nanites that will be inhaled and integrate themselves into the user's biology, allowing for virtual reality and augmented reality functions, communication and play.  We'll have forced our own synthetic evolution to handle our smartphone functions, and anything else we use computers for, directly through our brains.  That big cyber data cloud floating in the internet ether will become part of the collective consciousness.  Of course, there may be a certain percentage of seizures and/or hemorrhages and other neurological side effects, but perfection is a path.  The road to Singularity (human fusion with technology) is likely to be as bumpy as any of our significant advancements have ever been.

Let's face it, we still lose control of fire on a daily basis and look at how long we've been playing with that.  Anything we cook up is likely to have hazards to go along with any benefits.  We should certainly be used to it by now.  We don't live in a padded world.  Fortunately, we learn from pain and failure.  That means, however things work out with our next bold steps, we should manage some measure of progress as long as there are survivors to figure out the next step.

16397--Even Kids Know That Sticks and Stones Can Break Your Bones

I was recently posed a question about Star Wars' imperial storm troopers.  It amounted to, "What good is their armor, anyway?"  As someone who has watched the films many times and would like to continue (if I can get the whole "evil Jedi" thing out of my mind), questions of this nature are fun intellectual exercises.  In this case, it doesn't take the most critical eye to realize that it's a valid query.

Whether clone troopers or storm troopers, the uniformly clad, high-tech soldiers strike quite an imposing sight.  Watch them closely though, and despite their genetic engineering and thorough training, their armor doesn't seem to be helping them much.  These crack soldiers aren't just falling to blaster fire and light sabers, but suffer humiliating defeat to an indigenous shih tzu-teddy bear population armed with sticks and stones.  Sticks and stones, really?  This is the best they've got?  Look tough, but end up with your head being used for a drum?  So, they sunk all that money into big ships and death stars and...what good is their armor, anyway?

Well, nerd that I will admit to being, I bought a series of informative, secret-revealing publications released between the original film trilogy releases back in the early eighties.  They were a mix of print and pictures on glossy paper and if you unfolded them, each one opened to reveal a poster.  I never hung mine and they're, of course, safely tucked away with my many many comic books.  From those appetite-whetting offerings, I remember that the lightweight armor was supposed to be able to reflect anything short of a straight-on laser shot.  Now we all know that good guys are inherently better shots than bad guys, but I still have to question that armor's laser-reflecting capability.  I'd sooner accept that that particular specification is imperial hyperbole.  Maybe as the number of troopers went up and armor production demands skyrocketed, some corners were cut so the armor quality suffered.  Certainly, the lightweight material doesn't seem to do much against blunt impacts.  What does that leave them? 

Those shell casings they keep their troopers wrapped in actually do provide important benefits that have nothing to do with traditional armor concepts of protecting from enemy attacks.  The white exterior does serve the purpose of reflecting ambient light and heat, thus helping to keep the soldier within cooler.  Inside the armor, the clone trooper can be kept comfortable inside a climate-controlled mini-environment.  Wherever you drop these guys across the empire, whether it's desert or jungle or frosty outside, they can stay as comfy as home.  Let's face it, a comfortable worker is an efficient performer so imagine how effective a stormtrooper can be if he never even has to break a sweat.  Ideally, I would also expect that they would be afforded at least limited protection against harmful gases, bugs and biological pathogens.  Suddenly, stormtrooping is more fun than camping.  It's not xenophobia, even if we do like to think of the imperial forces as bad guys.  Back on Coruscant, I'm sure the main senate building is equipped with all sorts of decontamination protocols.  When the soldiers are on the move, it's far more practical to wrap each one than to try disinfecting a planet.

The films also show us that the stormtrooper helmets contain communication equipment.  Rapid, clear communications with fellow soldiers can be vitally important.  I would also think that the standard gear would provide a considerable amount of audio-visual enhancement to the soldiers, making it worthwhile to wrap their heads in those helmets.  Additionally, if I were designing them, the helmets would also provide tactical information displays fed by the armor's computer systems.  Each trooper would be able to see an area map, know where his unit members were, see augmented reality, monitor vital signs (his own and his squad's) and even administer drugs.  That last one, I would expect to include things like painkillers and stimulants.  Depending on how much equipment one wanted to put into the armor, biological manipulations could be done bioelectrically through systems linked to the monitors.


So those stormtrooper suits aren't completely useless after all.  How about that?  Still, as impressive as they might seem in the lab, any squad still needs to be forewarned about any stick-toting, rock-throwing locals.  Any weapon or technology is only as formidable as the people behind it.


Are there any other modifications you think would be a "must have" for a soldier on the go?  Foot and calf massaging boots?  Waste recyclers?  Muscle augmentation?  Pez dispenser?  What are your thoughts?

16313--Firing on all cylinders...

     What do you mean there are people who can recite the digits of pi out to thousands of decimal places?  Who has that kind of free time?  Worse, what about the roomful of people who sat around to observe?  They were so impressed by the feat that they felt compelled to watch?  Alright, I don't know their reasoning.

     What I'm thinking, though, is that if you're impressed by some feat of memory or calculation, innovation or creative thinking, you should strive to accomplish your own.  Those people who put on a show of remembering and reciting something they heard thirty years ago, while playing eight simultaneous chess games and solving calculus problems in their head aren't freaks.  They're simply focused and practiced at performing particular skills.

     Did you know that homo sapiens is the weakest mammal in the world?  I'm not saying you couldn't overpower your kid's gerbil.  What I mean is that we have the lowest muscle to mass ratio of the mammal world.  So how have we been able to push all the other critters around for so long?  The answer is the same as I tell my kid when he asks for a new computer.  "You've got that thing on top of your neck."

     Yeah, I'm talking to you.  You've read this far so don't try to deny it.  You have a brain and we both know it.  The biggest, baddest supercomputers still take up huge rooms and run on megawatts of power just to be able to perform at a fraction of the capacity of that thing on top of your neck.  With its 100 billion neurons and quadrillion synapses, your brain is estimated to have potential processing power equivalent to 100 petaflops (10¹⁵ floating point operations/second).  That’s a lot.  On top of that, it's portable, self-cooling and runs on about 20 watts of power.  Your body is its robot slave.

     Your brain is as big and bad as you want it to be.  With focus and application, you can do those things you always wanted to do.  If not, you're not using the equipment right.  Be creative.  Go write that book you've been putting off writing.  I'm not saying it won't be hard.  That's where the practice part comes in, because after you write you'll be rewriting.  That's OK, though.  Work is the price of excellence.  Don't get stressed chasing perfection.  That's the mirage in the distance.  Leave it out there for the next sucker.

     Instead of stringing together a bunch of numbers in repetition of an infinitely long bunch of digits that's already been figured out, you're going to use your personal organic supercomputer to arrange twenty-six letters into a unique pattern one million letters long that will be so amazing people will voluntarily read it again.  They might even go see the movie version.  No matter what Hollywood does to it, it has to be better than the movie version of pi.  What were those guys thinking?  Talk about not using the equipment right.

     Any questions?

Don't live wanting.  Don't die wondering.
Phoenix