Reality, with a little help

Allright, augmented reality will be all over us shortly, and literally. Are you sure you want to do this?

You will be using technology that adds information layers to your senses in realtime and connected to information systems around the world. There are already existing products or prototypes that do most of these things:

Add information about a person. The information you can dig out on the net about a person is staggering. Your blog, facebook and tweets, your memberships, your jobs, anything media has published about you - it's all there. Your crimes and your achievements. Soon it may be displayed in a bubble over your head: little icons or flags for tax evasion or being a member of a club, the name tag's size varying depending on your number of friends and followers.

Add GPS-navigation overlays to guide you. Finding a street, a store, the nearest trash can, public toilet or first aid kit, it will all be very, very easy.

Translate text. In real time. More than one language on the restaurant menu may become quite rare. This is already here.

Bring features to your attention. Knowing what you usually ask for and what you clicked on yesterday, it's no biggie pinpointing related things in your environment. If you researched Big Ben last week, you probably wouldn't mind being reminded the first time it comes into view.

Recognize persons or features. You will know it when the guy with 50000 twitter followers comes into the restaurant. Conversely, if you have a lot of followers, they will find you when you step into a restaurant.

You will know your heart rate, blood pressure, the time and temperature, how many steps you've taken today, that you're about to catch a cold and that your bus is late. You will see how much weight you've put on since yesterday. You will know the fire alarm went off at your kids' school and that there's no milk in your fridge at home.

There will be skins. Choose '70s to have everybody look like... on second thought, that theme will doubtless be outlawed. There will be goth skins though. Your boss will wear a long black cape (she will think it's cool) and the secretary will be in a corset and crinoline (he will hate you), if you choose. And you can exchange their faces for one another, too, not a thing they can do about it. It's only what you see in front of your eyes, anyway. (From the commercially acknowledged "suitable" skins appearing, it will take approximately 48 hours for nude skins to appear. 72 hours later an Avatar theme comes out and 2 hours after that it's pulled by lawyers, replaced 5 hours later by a theme showing green skinned aliens. By then, the most popular themes will be Horde skins and some cultural equivalent of Justin Bieber)

Crowdsourced applications will alert you to the location of the nearest cop, so you can get help. Or so you can make sure nobody's watching.

Your glasses will show you on what shelf in the store that particular brand of canned beans are.

The coffee shop will have your perfect blend ready on the counter as you walk by, with you morning bagel next to it, no matter if you're an hour early or late, it will still be fresh.

You will be alerted that you are about to burn your chili.

None of this is news to you, but have you actually stopped to think about how much your world is about to change?

How will we defend our integrity against this? There will be no defense against a political opponent who easily spots you and walks up to punch you in the face. You and those around you will no doubt get it on film (and post it on Youtube 60 seconds later) but there will be no way to avoid it. If you've ever been spotted in the jersey of the team from the north side of town, watch out if you're going to the south side.

Sitting in a bar and double-blinking at a girl you like - will it increase her like-count, or will it send an invitation to share a dinner and movie? That's user customizable.

But you will never walk down the street again, and not be recognized. The advertisement will call out your name, and will know you bought condoms last week and lice schampoo the week before that.

It's Minority report, it's Robocop, it's a hell of a lot of things. Not all of it is good and a lot of it will take you by surprise.

Set your sons up the bomb, pt II

You can have your state do it too:

http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/82R/billtext/html/HB02454I.htm

and it's on such a sublime level, too! This way they can hurt both those who believe in magic and those who study the world we live in!


I've been labeling it "magic", but I think I might change that to "panic."

Happy birthday

My son is 15 years old today.

I still remember, of course, the day he was born. I carried him out of the room and over where he got cleaned up a bit, and looking into his face I felt, down to my toes, he looked just like me. I never did any real investigating of how that feeling comes about. It can't be very rational, because I just don't look much like a baby. The features I saw in his face were mine, not my father's or my brother's. I think I mentally compared him to old pictures of myself and that's hard to link to any biologically motivated illusion. Mirrors and photographs are just too recent to have had any impact on evolution.

We named him Axel, which turned out to be a quite popular name in his generation. No surprise, though it really was hard to realize these things could apply to us. "Axel" after relatives and perhaps a bit after Axel Oxenstierna. (Not after A. Rose, who can't even spell his name.)

Fifteen years later he still looks a lot like me, but recently my greatest revelation has been not how much of my boy he is but how different from me he is. He's a whole other person, and in most ways, better than I am.

We've done a lot, especially the last 5 years. Music festivals and concerts, movies and books. I think it began about when he started playing online games and learned English and surfing the net. He was 6 or 7 then.

He speaks English more or less fluently and writes it better. He's better at my best school subject than I ever was. He reads books almost exclusively in English and he likes to switch off the subtitles on movies.

Movies have become his greatest interest and he dives into it like nothing else in life. By now he has long passed me. He has seen more films by more great directors than I have. Only one book on his birthday wishlist this year, and it turns out it's a novel that Herzog is filming - Axel wants to read it before seeing the film. Herzog is his favorite director, for reasons I cannot understand. The sentiment is sincere, I think perhaps more so than I ever was about movies or any other culture thing. I was sort of looking forward to get to watch a few action movies while he was a teenager but Axel prefers Almodovar over Hollywood.

I compare his interests and thoughts to my own at fifteen and it strikes me, I look like a hillbilly compared to him. It makes me proud and sad at the same time. By the time I was watching real movies, not just the odd Star wars or James Bond - in cinemas only mind you, no internet or dvd back then - I was closer to 18, and my taste was nowhere near the refinement my boy shows. We went to a local movie club last night, and Axel got a membership card - age requirement 15, I just said "he's 15 tomorrow" and that was that - and we saw Hrafninn flýgur (from 1984, "When the raven flies", this could be the only really worthwhile "viking" movie ever made or at least one of very few). It was great and Axel had a great time. I sat there thinking this might be as close as we'll ever get to that idea of seeing a guy movie together just us two. Ok, that wasn't really true, for instance we saw True grit just a week or two back.

Now I'm worrying about letting him get in touch with working life and about student exchange.

At least my daughter will always be my little girl... No?

Wall of text

Tim, this is for you, or for anyone who needs help getting rid of an hour or two browsing the interwebz.

Some of the topics I've been researching for my writing. I can look at the list and feel like at least all this work wasn't completely wasted.

Virology, genetics and the combination of the two. Horizontal gene transfer, huh - it's like nature is cheating. Diabetes, hemophilia and the digestive system. Ebola, rabies. Bats and rodents, virus vectors. Kept news feed on atom-level research in virus and drug manufacture. Back to some basic school chemistry and biochemistry long forgotten. Structure of the UN, organization of the CDC. Some geography and politics of various areas of the US. Hundreds of conspiracy theories, hundreds of delusions and extremists, militia and patriots. History of vampire literature and vampire myths. Some "unsolved" mysteries - like the Voynich MS and Oak island (Nova Scotia). A side track on pirate history. I didn't really need looking up algorithmic trading but did a little reading anyway. Spent a week getting to know Skykomish and to a lesser extent Seattle. There's a bakery in Seattle I want to visit someday. The human senses. UFOs - no really, there's some interesting things there. Maybe 100 historic Europeans, like Tycho Brahe, Hernan Cortez, the Sforza family. About two weeks' research on Torsten Stålhandske. ADHD, autism and Asperger's. Free running. Reading and re-reading roughly a dozen novels and series of novels, pinpointing what their draw-in is and what their weakness is, for me. In the process I've become a constant reader of liberal Kentucky blogs and a bunch of other things. Spent some time reading up on the biology of Borneo and Sumatra. Did case study on the topics I would have needed to look into for background of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and Baroque cycle, like thief takers and the myths and stories of that world (Neal is so awesome he probably already knew all of that but I would have needed to read a lot). The history of feminist, sexually explicit or pornographic literature; this was one of the harder topics to research without having time and materials provided by an institution or university, and probably also one of the topics where my results remain most shallow. I didn't really need to research Wikipedia but I've kept writing down notes and collecting loose ends about it. Cryptids. Cross-over research from my UAV hobby. Numbers stations. The lesser key of Salomon, demonology. Insular dwarfism.

When I put the topics together like that I feel less like I wasted over a year on non-productive procrastination. No the procrastination was probably the topics I didn't even know where to start researching - attraction and gender, fashion and feeling of self-worth, online truth, self image and expectation, technology as magic of the future

Clarke's third law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Gehm's corollary to Clarke's third law:

Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.

Set your sons up the bomb

Or, How to tease your kids by pretending to teach them something so that when they get older they'll definitely flunk any serious education in that awesome subject. Seriously, fundamentalist approved dinosaur teachings?


Says magic-believer mommy,

"We gave the boys the dinosaur book from the museum for Christmas, and they LOVE it ...because it's a book about dinosaurs that they can believe EVERYTHING they read!!...Yours truly, the mother of a future scientist/geologist/archaeologist:)"

Yes, it really is that awesome. And it teaches how dinosaurs lived along-side humans a few thousand years ago or so. Yup. Close your eyes, kneel and believe.


I'll throw in an additional free hint for mommy dearest as well: Believing everything you read is generally a really bad thing, and churches speaking about science is often especially bad.

I dreamt about

I had a dream this weekend, about me and me son. We were out driving, I don't know where we were going, it didn't seem like we quite knew. I think we were someplace near home, it was all open and flat landscapes, just like central Uppland. After a while we came to a place. Somewhere that tries to be some place, it had a parking lot and some houses. The parking lot was sort of big, in several sections but not in that industrial way like outside a big well planned shopping mall but like near some ancient attraction where the parking spaces are just sprawled about all around in little pieces. People were walking everywhere, it must have been a pretty popular place. Some houses where nearby, several of them pretty big though we were in the countryside. Two cars were just ahead of us and they were revving and playing, going much too fast, there were people everywhere. It was summer or late spring.

Strangely, it didn't turn into a nightmare where I hit the gas to get away from the kids driving too fast.

One of the cars, I think it was a small BMW estate, had pulled ahead, then turned around and came back full throttle. I could imagine him showing off to the rest of us and he wasn't looking at what he should have been looking at. People were milling about. Some young men were loitering and not paying attention to the cars, too cool to care. One of them was just standing in the street and that BMW just ran head on into him. It was a nasty accident though not spectacular. Just real. Except I knew I was dreaming, just waiting for it to turn nightmare-nasty.

In my dream I thought huh? Am I not supposed to wake up now? But it wasn't a real nightmare.

I pulled my car over diagonally behind the run-over kid. The BMW sped away and went off. I hit the warning blinkers and fumbled for my phone, stepping out.

Nobody else was moving. Nobody was doing anything. The driver was gone. The kid's friends melted away into the scenery and nobody else was stepping forward. Frantic, I found myself trying to do the right things, calling for an ambulance and doing what I could for the kid.

My son was awkwardly moving around and I tried to tell him how to act.

In that instant I understood that this wasn't a nightmare about something I did or had to do but a nightmare about my son.

And then I woke myself.

Later the next day, I went to get some movies at the library. I found two movies I knew my son wanted - The drunken angel and A streetcar named Desire, the old one with Brando and Leigh. Yep, that's his taste. But best of all, I found Cyrano, and Axel sounded like he'd really like watching it. For some reason, library movies are in much worse shape than rentals. I don't quite understand why, people must be less careful with them maybe because they're free. Maybe these movies just see more traffic.

After dinner we popped Cyrano into the player and started watching. Cyrano is such a delightful movie. Axel just discovered knowing languages is fun and though he doesn't know any French he does know a bit of Spanish and I'm trying to encourage pretending you know languages just so you can pick up a smattering of it.

"Holy crap he's speaking in verse all the time!"

Delightful. Of course, just then the movie just... ceased. Popped out the disc and sure enough upon inspection it's clear this disc isn't playable. It's so scratched it's a miracle we could even watch the first ten minutes.

We are not to be deterred however, it's Saturday and we're set for a movie. Next we try Streetcar. Inspecting that disc would have been cheating so we didn't and the first ten or fifteen are just fine. We sit there adapting to new manners, new language, another way to condense drama.

Of course, that one didn't work either.

Now we're laughing at the hopelessness of it all. I say we'll check the online rental. We're talking about other times when movies haven't worked for us and we're agreeing that this is worse than all of them, even worse than when Queen of the damned failed in the last ten minutes.

We find 8 1/2 in the rental menu, but there's an Almodovar as well, and Axel really likes those, partly because it's Spanish. So we choose that one - All about my mother. I hadn't seen it, don't know what it's about.

Turns out it's about a kid being killed in a car accident. Freaky, with the dream the night before. Then the film changes. This film turns around so many times, you never really settle into the story. The kid's mother is into theater and one play is in focus for most of the movie. At first we don't notice what play it is.

After a few minutes more Axel suddenly exclaims, holy crap, it's Streetcar.

And it is. It's Blanche and Stella and Stanley. I just sit there taking in this weird situation and it's like the whole dream the night before and the whole evening, everything has just been leading up to this story about Spanish prostitutes.

Nothing else of consequence happens this evening but I will never forget the BMW and Streetcar named Desire. I'm not the one to believe in hidden life messages in dreams but sometimes it's hard to stop your mind from wandering.

Now I just have to figure out what that dream meant.

frustrated

I've had problems with my lower back for about 15 years. I've been to doctors and therapists and they've confidently given me training programmes and told me to quit smoking.

Side note: There *is* a possible connection between a bad back and smoking - smoking hinders the blood flow and if the muscles in the back are a little too weak the smoking can be what breaks the camel's back, so to speak. None of the doctors bothered to explain this so I just thought they were bullshitting me with the standard "quit smoking" formula.

I've had x-ray of spinal discs. I've been more or less handicapped at times. Especially in later years it has been worst in the mornings and I've had to become careful with what beds I sleep in, as some could almost paralyze me. In the mornings after getting up I sometimes get a sharp stabbing pain in the lower back that hurts so much my whole body just shuts down. I just fall to the floor like a ragdoll. Way scary to feel it coming while walking in the stairs.

This new year's, I slept on one of those new air matresses while we were visiting my folks. It's about 2 ft thick and they come with an integrated reversible electric pump, I'm sure they're being sold everywhere.

I slept like a baby and had no back pain when I got up. That has not happened in years, literally.

So last weekend I went and bought one just to see if it was really true and not some freak coincidence. I've slept on it every night since then and ... wow. I'm like a new person. I'm 25 again.

Rumour has it it's similar to sleeping on a waterbed. I'll be shopping for a really good bed shortly. Right now I'm so relieved, and at the same time so frustrated at all the professionals I've paid to help me and who never considered this or asked about it. I thought my bed was as good as they get but evidently I was wrong.

At the same time I'm angry that I've been so ignorant and naive, myself.