Sunday 26 September 1999
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Pic of the day: CENSORED! 1) Censored for the sake of decency... 2) Censored for the sake of sexual equality... 3) Censored in honor of Katie the Great, Hater of Feet. It's been raining like cats and dogs outside. Too bad I can't walk out in the rain, but that would probably be a bad idea with my bronchitis. (Of course, there are showers indoors too, so it ain't that bad.) Yes, it seems to have become a bronchitis by now. I remember the sound and the taste of it when coughing. Needless to say, I hate it.
On the bright side, it does little difference as long as I don't exert
myself. Which I would rarely do on a Sunday anyway. My washing machine
continues to wash shirts, like it did yesterday. I can always dry them
in the living room - it sure is dry enough. The place is so well
insulated that even now there is no need to turn on the electric
heating. I did boil a bit of water early in the day, but since then
it's been heated by the radiated energy of me and my portable computer,
plus whatever light it has been able to trap through the large triple
insulated windows. Of course, it is hardly winter yet. But even
then, there are few days when I need more than a little extra heating.
One way to heat the place in winter might be the SETI@home project. As I mentioned this spring, this is a voluntary project in which you fetch packets of raw data from their radio telescope, and run software to analyze and look for possible signs of messages from aliens. It is not quite the first, but as far as I know the first really large example of using the Internet to create a virtual supercomputer. I have run a couple of their data packets, but this program does really work the processor. If I run it with anything more than the lowest processor speed, my portable will heat to the point where its fan goes on. And the room will start smelling of chemical factory. You'd think that after several months it would stop. Then again, for all these months I have tried to avoid overheating it, precisely for that reason. I guess I should allow it to "burn it off" some day. That way, I would have this nice hot air fan all through the winter... Actually the chance of finding radio waves from other civilizations is probably close to nothing. If there were others out there, chances are they would not think like us. We've used radio signals regularly only this century. How likely is it that our civilization will be anything like this, a thousand years from now? Ten thousand? A million? If civilizations do not self-destroy within a short time, they may have a lifestyle that is utterly different from ours. Perhaps they live peacefully and take care of their own things, leaving the rest of the universe be. Perhaps they spend their lives in a virtual reality, letting machines take care of the mundane tasks of life. Perhaps they ARE machines ... either because their creators made machines that surpassed themselves, or because they made machines and uploaded their personality into them. While I do appreciate having a body, I don't think being uploaded to the Internet would be the worst thing that could happen. Sure, I would miss the taste of food, the smell of the forest after rain, the glint of a faint sun breaking through and making raindrops into jewels. On the other hand it wouldn't make much of a difference to my sex life. And I could chat and post to the newsgroups around the clock. :) If computers continue to double their capacity (and halve their price) every 18 months as they have so far, you could have some serious virtual reality way before the hundred years into the future where the movie "The Matrix" was set. You may not need to enslave people to get them to live in a virtual reality. It may become easier to get people to move into a virtual world than to make them go pioneer in the Asteroid belt. And finally there is the remote possibility that we have not, after all, uncovered all the laws of nature. That the innumerable advanced races out there in the galaxy have transcended the crude technology that we wield today, and live like angels. Perhaps their "telescopes" do not send radio waves but pure thought waves. And the sudden bouts of inspiration that sensitive brains have, may be Earth passing through one beam of mental waves sending from one civilization towards another. Perhaps our solar system has recently started to fly through the broadcasting field surrounding a nearby enclave of higher beings, and this inadvertently has set off the rapid technological advance and ever increasing intelligence of the last few generations... Now that's a truly Californian thought, looking as out of place here in Norway as a snow hare in Los Angeles. But of course, the world is one world now, and you who read this may quite as possibly live in California as in Norway. In which case I hope you can take a joke... Actually, there are to be "Alternative days" in Kristiansand, my nearest city, in the beginning of October. There will be a lot of New Age stuff, crystal healing and aura reading and the whole sack of cloth. Of course, they had "homo days" this summer and they use to have "gospel days" too. Norway is turning into a true pluralist society, a supermarket of life styles. And the wind from the West just keeps blowing. |