Bugger...

Got the Honda back from the body shop last night.  The repairs are excellent, it really looks as new and you couldn't tell it had been in a prang.  OTOH they had to disconnect the battery and now the central control panel is dead.

In a moment I'm going to grab a torch and start looking for the control codes. :(

In other thinking, we might ditch this car and trade it in and get something more economical.  Even though petrol here is a lot cheaper than home, the cost is niggling at me and the knowledge that we could save over $900 a year in fuel prices with a more economical vehicle is quite high in my mind.

I'll noodle on it for another few days.

In other news, my desk chair has broken.

In other other news, the new Media Center is up and running and generally works well.  BluRay playback even at 720p is just beautiful and the HD MKV files play smoothly even in the high action stuff.  BUT...  try as I might I can't get the HDMI sound output AND the SPDIF to work at the same time, and I can't get the SPDIF to work at all.  I'll have to play with that this evening.

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Wither Communication...

Atomic Razor: As Above, So Below


In this, a nested series of Blog entries we have my esteemed friend pmcray commenting on a Blog entry by Brad De Long about an article by Jo Walton.  With me?  Barely?  Good.  That's something to do with the point I'm going to make to counter Ms Walton's original one.

Jo's comment that sparked this was: I don't think we'll ever get to the point where understanding the future would be like explaining Worldcon [i.e., the world science fiction annual convention] to a goldfish...

I'm less convinced partly because I've sat back and looked critically at my morning.  This morning I've had 3 conference calls, dozens of "conversations" in text in a variety of IM clients which clutter this nice new screen, sent some test messages and been involved in some email threads.  I would have trouble explaining to my mother, born 1931, that that was actually work.  I don't think this is going to get any better either.

As discussed in this article about work in 2015, somebody entering the work pool in 2015 at age 21 will never have lived in a world without IM or instant Person to Person communication.  Because we've been living through this, I don't think people really grasp how profound a sociological change this potentially is.  It's not a case of somebody post-singularity (whatever form that takes, and we're assuming it involves staying as recognisable humans) being able to explain what the _worldcon_ is.  It's actually being able to explain anything to them at all at least in a spoken form. 

Vinge's point, above, (and I was at his GoH speech at the 1996 Eastercon where he made the Goldfish comment) isn't that the Goldfish might have problems with the concept of the Worldcon but that the Goldfish isn't equiped to communicate with a human on any level, let alone about the Worldcon.  A post-human might be able to explaint to a pre-singularity standard-human what the equivalent of a gathering to share ideas and have fun is, but might not have any mechanism to exchange the data at any level to an unaugmented baseline person.

I am starting to see, in myself, the shift when it comes to an expectation for instant and direct communication.  I have a feeling of physical discomfort if I'm without my phone or if I can't get hold of somebody and need to ask them something.  I assume SMS communication just happens and that questions get answered instantly. 

I think we waste a lot of thought about IF there is going to be a Singularity for humans.  I am becomming more convinced we're thinking about the wrong question.  We should be worrying about what it will look like and if there's any place for the people who don't really want to take part.

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Liars...

The weather was meant to be nice this afternoon.  It's not and I'm feeling crabby.