Sunday, March 31, 2013

As opposed to reblogging the same picture a million times, which is Tumblr.

March 30th saw the the official premier of the current Clara Oswald, the new companion on Doctor Who, and I'm sorry to say that I found the whole thing to be a bit dull.  A couple of clever bits, but generally the episode was trying too hard in terms of setting up the new big plot point for the coming season, and showing off for the new companion. (Hopefully the new companion - we've seen the woman three times and she's still not really on board, in the most literal sense.)

I think that the companion recruitment process has become flawed - the last few pickups have seemed contrived, somehow. The joke is that the 2012 Christmas special gave us a charming, heartfelt scene between the Doctor and Clara, a meeting of minds and a meeting of hearts, a tender, magical moment that began the Doctor's return to the world after the loss of Amy and Rory, all thanks to Clara  - and then they killed her.

I think it's a shame that they didn't decide to go with the Victorian Clara as the new companion.  It used to be that the Doctor's companions came from the full range of time and space, but all the new ones have been uniformly British and modern.  Isn't it time for a different perspective?


However, full points for the following joke from Saturday's episode:
Doctor:  This whole world is swimming in wifi.  We’re living in a wifi soup.  Suppose something got inside it, suppose there was something living in the wifi, harvesting human minds, extracting them.  Imagine that…human souls trapped like flies in the world wide web, stuck forever, crying out for help.
Clara:  Isn’t that basically Twitter?
- Sid

"Better, Stronger, Faster."



I recently upgraded from my beloved but aging 6 megapixel Nikon D70 to a shiny new 24.2 megapixel system.  Shortly afterward, I had dinner with an acquaintance who, among other products, sells professional quality digital view camera backs. To my surprise, his top of the line sensors only weigh in at 80 megapixels of resolution.  I realize full well that pixel count alone doesn’t dictate quality, but I would have expected that high end pro equipment would go into the hundreds of megapixels – gigapixels, perhaps. 

But this gives rise to another question: at what point does technological improvement become redundant?  After all, if there’s a level at which a digital display contains more information than the human eye can differentiate*, why bother?

Ah, well then, obviously the next step is to upgrade the human eye.

And that may not be a joke. The creation of a direct neural link to hardware, visual or otherwise, would probably mean the biggest change in the world since the invention of the wheel, if not fire.  As one of my co-workers pointed out, the limiting factor in cell phone development is the human hand.  Current state of the art might well allow for all of the components of my iPhone to be crammed into something the size of my little finger, but the necessity to allow for physical manipulation of the controls makes that impractical.

Once that technology can be distributed here and there throughout your body – a node on your hand to answer calls, your retina overlaid with a HUD, an antenna plated onto your skull, the audio feed direct into your aural nerve, and so on – the nature of our interaction with technology becomes completely different, as much a part of our personal kinesiology as nodding our heads or blinking our eyes.

Not surprisingly, the concept is fairly common in science fiction.  William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy includes “simstim” as one of its props.  The concept is that headsets would allow the audience to experience a full sensory duplicate of a celebrity's glamourous life directly from the star's point of view:  visual, auditory, sensual, etc.

The exact process is characteristically undefined, but the most evident part of the technology is implanted artificial eyes, complete with corporate copyrights etched around the iris, that somehow transfer visual input into a digital format as well as functioning as eyes. (Presumably there are equivalent devices to allow for transmission of the other sensory inputs – in spite of the, ah, comprehensive nature of the experience, there’s no suggestion that all the critical aspects of the performer's anatomy are replaced.)

The technology of the Sprawl also allows for users to add sockets that allow them to access experiential information from silicon chips** and as a result be able to speak other languages or fly airplanes, at least as long as the chip is in place.

Samuel R. Delaney’s 1968 novel Nova posits a more physical approach, with interface sockets on both wrists and at both ends of the spine. These sockets allow the user to plug into any and all types of hardware, turning everything from flying a starship to operating the power winch for a fishing net into the same sort of directly experienced physical activity as climbing a flight of stairs or sweeping the floor. The result is a changed world, where everyone’s work has become a direct physical part of their lives, with a corresponding increase in personal fulfillment and worker satisfaction. 

The real question is not whether or not this sort of technology is feasible.  Medical technology is already taking its first fumbling steps into allowing blind people to perceive the world through hardware connections to the brain.  The question is a far more fundamental one:  would sockets be a privilege or a requirement?  This is a question that would depend entirely on how the interface system would be integrated into society.

On one hand, it could become the mark of the elite, where digital eyes and biomechanical hands would only be available to the now-infamous one percent, a sort of bionic bling. The other option is that it would become the mark of the underclass, a clear sign that the possessor has quite literally become part of the corporate machinery.

Hopefully there's a third option, an option closer to Delaney's future. where everyone would gain from the process, creating a world which was simultaneously larger and yet more personally connected than the one we live in now.   
- Sid

* The resolving power in pixels for the human eye is a difficult question, depending on whether you count all the photoreceptors or just the colour-sensitive cones concentrated in the central foveal area of the retina. Depending on what you pick as a cutoff, we may or may not have digitally exceeded the eye already.

** Daringly called microsofts:  you can almost hear the copyright lawyers salivating...


Saturday, March 23, 2013

It does? Really? Wow, thank you!

You Know You're a Geek When, Part 3.

DOCTOR:  Oh, hello!
AMY:  Doctor, what is that?
DOCTOR:  It's all right. It's an Ood! Oods are good, love an Ood. Hello, Ood.
Doctor Who, The Doctor's Wife
I was pleased beyond words to receive the following e-mail on Friday, cheerfully informing me that the banner layout that I'd done for our safety department looked ood. 


In my wildest dreams, I have never aspired to that level of accomplishment, and it was with a sense of satisfaction in a job well done that I sent the PDF to my colleague.
- Sid