It's a truism of science that the observer affects the thing being observed -
but it works the other way, too.
Anything unique and powerful can be very useful -- but different people will
see different uses for it.
Two (or more) heads are not necessarily better than one ...
One culture's "obvious and fundamental" may be another's "strange and baffling".
It seems humans aren't meant to have empathic powers and remain happy, Mike
thought. An empath who lived around the same people constantly found the flow
of emotions becoming easier over time -- like a stream eroding a deeper,
straighter channel through rock. And that stream could not be slowed. The
genetic engineering techniques that had made Linna and a handful of other
humans into empaths or telepaths had been abandoned decades ago -- too many of
them had gone mad, some committing suicide.
Linna was actually one of the more stable ones.
One of the luckier ones.
Linna continued: "It's too intense. It’s not just
you, it's everyone on the ship. Outwardly, there are the smiles, the jokes, or
at least some sense of being up to any task required of them. But underneath,
they're all a mass of anxieties. Feeling unloved or incompetent. I can feel
them holding back anger and saying the 'right' thing instead. Or not daring to
tell someone how they really feel about them. They ache."
(Dave Creek, "Some Distant Shore")
--
ANALOG Science Fiction and Fact
(September 2007)
... is the medium of comics inherently less sophisticated and impactful and
artistically deep than that of novels?
... revel in the oft-times wacky (racist, sexist, ageist, and whatever-ist)
detritus of forgotten pop culture, seeing in these decades-old effusions of the
mass mind hidden cosmic significances.
... employ a kind of erratic, non-linear plotting by synchronicity and chance
associations of characters.
... conspiracies as reality.
... ornate, recondite, witty, yet altogether engrossing and captivating style
...
... a mimetic piece that poetically keens a muted, heartfelt elegy for a free
spirit ...
... a poking and prodding at the tenor of reality ...
--
"On Books" by Paul Di Filippo
Asimov's Science Fiction
(September 2007)
Security Breaches:
Consider these 2006 news items. AOL accidentally released data about 19 million
searches by 650,000 users. The searches reveal Social Security numbers, among
other items most people tend not to share. The Department of Veterans Affairs
lost a laptop whose hard drive stored personal and financial data for more than
25 million veterans, active-duty personnel, and spouses. Ernst & Young, a "Big
Four" accounting firm, lost data on more than 200,000 Hotels.Com customers
through a laptop theft.
-- Edward M. Lerner,
"Beyond This Point Be RFIDs"
ANALOG Science Fiction and Fact
(September 2007)
Moore's Law:
Dependably since Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel Corporation, articulated
this forecast in 1965, the number of transistors on an integrated circuit chip
has roughly doubled every two years. Data densities more or less double in
eighteen months. Simply put, Moore's Law suggests that in five years computers
will be fix or six times more powerful than today, with ten times the storage.
-- Edward M. Lerner,
"Beyond This Point Be RFIDs"
ANALOG Science Fiction and Fact
(September 2007)
Google:
Google's cofounders began research on a search engine in 1996. By 2005, the
New York Times
reports, Google had index eight billion web objects, with more being added
continually; the aggregated data volume in those objects is vastly larger.
Constantly maintained indices enable us to search across those billions of
items, often within a fraction of a second.
Web objects ... [are] harder to parse and index ... Web objects include text
pages, images, Usenet messages, and linked files of various types. It all
keeps growing, of course. Google aspires to scan and make searchable
every book ever published
(although copyright issues may constrain that ambition).
And Google does most of its work with swarms of commodity PCs.
-- Edward M. Lerner,
"Beyond This Point Be RFIDs"
ANALOG Science Fiction and Fact
(September 2007)
Divide-and-Conquer
(Parallel Processing):
Large-scale computing challenges often yeidl to a
divide-and-conquer approach -- what computer scientists call parallel
processing. It's true of climate studies (many small atmospheric volumes
modeled concurrently), H-bomb simulations (far tinier volumes, in much shorter
time slices), and data mining (subsets of vast data aggregations). Specialized
computers harness many processors in parallel to more speedily calculate, sort,
and search. Such computers gain increased throughput with faster chips or
increased paeallelism.
-- Edward M. Lerner,
"Beyond This Point Be RFIDs"
ANALOG Science Fiction and Fact
(September 2007)
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Excerpts from Stanley Schmidt's "Adapting"
(Editorial in
ANALOG Science Fiction and Fact
,
September 2007)
Rise in Sea Level:
"... any rise in sea level means some coastal real estate will be going under
-- and much of the most valuable real estate in the world is coastal. Depending
on the actual amount of sea level rise, small to large amounts of cities like
New York and Amsterdam [and many parts of coastal Singapore, especially the
islands such as Sentosa] will be submerged, meaning they will have to be either
abandoned or radically (and expensively) rebuilt to deal with constant salt
water flooding, wave action, tides, and storm surges."
Rise in Temperature:
"Any rise in temperature means that some plants and animals will no longer
thrive where they now do, and the crops that are the economic lifeblood of
agricultural regions will no longer grow there. Weather will grow more violent,
with an increase in droughts, wildfires, and destructive storms (of which the
unprecedented 2006 Atlantic hurricane season may be a sample)."
It's Not the 'End of the World':
"Is it the end of the world if sea levels and temperatures rise a lot and huge
areas of cropland become unusable?
"Literally and emphatically, it is not. Sloganeers who shout 'Save the planet!'
are indulging in melodramatic and anthropocentric hyperbole. What they really
mean is, '
Save us!
', which has a considerable less noble ring to it. The planet is (at least so
far) in no danger from us. It has taken far more in the past than we're capable
of dishing out, and will undoubtedly do so in the future. It will still endure
quite a while; if we mess things up badly enough to destroy ourselves, the
Earth will simply go on without us, striking a new (and, as always, temporary)
balance with whatever is left over. It simply doesn't care whether we're part
of that future."
Adaptability:
"Adaptability is one of the most important characteristics of our species. ...
we have found ways to live in ... nearly every kind of environment found on
this planet: deserts, wetlands, Arctic tundra, the extreme altitudes of the
Andes and Himalayas. ... Small numbers of us have even managed to live for
significant periods in the very harsh climate of Antarctica and in an orbiting
capsule, and some of us dream quite seriously of colonizing other planets or
the Asteroid Belt. If we must, surely we can find ways that at least some of us
could live with a climate altered from the one we've taken for granted."
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