Radio telescopes are interesting things. Some people from this here university are trying to build a part of one, and my boss is handling the contract for its construction. Apparently, they don’t take the form of solitary installations anymore; they are now made up of fields of sensor poles, standing massed like tress, dotted around the globe (though all in the same hemisphere, I think, so that they will all point the same way space-wise), and then connected to a central supercomputer by the magic of fibre-optics. This central computer is then switched on for five or six seconds, during which time it takes in as much information as it can store. Wired magazine (well, their website) have got a story about “cloud” computers. This cloud idea is meant to be the next big thing. Rather than storing your software and files on your fallible lump of plastic at home, you keep them on some server many miles away and just access them with a simple – and I hope cheap – little computer. I suppose Hotmail and Facebook are examples of this principle, but people are now supposedly coming up with ways of writing documents, making spreadsheets etc from afar. People with complicated TVs don’t need to own DVDs or videos, they just request permission to view some remotely held recording of a film. Obviously I can’t do that because my TV only shows black and white images of the coronation. So will anyone actually store information in future, or will it all be held by these networks? And what happens when the network collapses? Much safer to have a DVD on your shelf in such an event, just as it is safer to keep your money in the form of a pile of tenners in the event of stock market collapse. Ah well. None of this is very new really, but I was struck by seeing three examples of the trend in quick succession. Once everything’s been digitised and we’ve shredded the books to make compost, we’ll find ourselves in a pretty pickle once civilisation collapses. We’ll be like Montag and his chums in Fahrenheit 451, clustering together to remember books that we’ve read. My inner mental memory store of two verses of Prufrock and a couple of my own poems will not stand me in good stead with the other book rememberers; they’ll call me names and steal my lunch money. The word for camcorder in Anathem is speelycaptor, which I like.
ReaderGift 003 - telescope implicate email
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But if you keep your money under the bed, you lose 5% every year due to inflation ... best to convert into gold.
ReplyDeleteI don't think gold will be very useful if the whole system of finance (collaborative mass let's-pretend game) fall.
ReplyDeleteI recommend investing in a flock of pygmies. They can be bred for labour, food, and new forms of business based on the exchange of exotic pornographic live dioramas.
Haha yeah! If only they could come up with some genetic freak, half chicken/Butlins Red Coat, which could entertain or be eaten as the needs must. Perhaps even throw in those jellyfish genes (http://thetranshumanexpress.wordpress.com/2007/12/12/fluorescent-cats/) so it could light up the bomb shelter too. That would be a real money spinner in the end game...
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