None after a good dose of liquid amnesia, or a good shot with a Neuralizer. It's those little touches that make my job fun.
Of course it's even more fun to play with the travelers. It is amazing how often these time tourists have the memories of their trips wipes out. Especially if it's a big research project. I save that for the real pains in the ass. If I have to bail your ass out because you couldn't play by the rules, I can't help it if my aim isn't that good.
I just try to keep enough range to that I don't leave scars. 2 or 3 meters is a plausible mistake. Point blank is a disciplinary action.
All right, The English channel tunnel made sense. You had 2 countries that regularly traveled via surface craft back and forth. You have 2 large industrial economies on both sides of the tunnel. The route is short enough to make the trip and transfer shorter than attempting the voyage by boat or aircraft.
Now a tunnel across the Mediteranian is not going to work. First off, Tangiers is not exactly what I would call a "business" destination. Nor is Spain. You have to dig pretty deep on the African continent to find anywhere a typical European traveler would be going. Perhaps I am missing a pent up demand for travel from Africa. It didn't RTFA.
The next problem is travel time. Sure a ride from spain to Morroco would be a lot quicker via Train. A trip from France to Morroco a bit less so. From Scottland to Morrocco... well, only for the folks who want to do it because they can.
Finally I would like to note that the 2 countries involved are still involved in a few territorial spats. That is not a recipe for success on a multi-billion dollar project.
Actually a simpler explaination is that our era is so abominably boring that time travelers steer clear. Think about it, is there any point in history that you would last 10 minutes in, let alone find interesting enough to study?
I'd say Ancient Greece for me, but knowing my mouth I'd be swallowing hemlock by nightfall. Human history is filled with brutality and primative thinking. What is to say that future generations will not look back at us with the same aloof sense of superiority that we do to the people living in the Dark Ages?
What you would end up creating are a set of parallel senses to the natural senses, or at least a great big "digital" sense.
Remember, sensory processing begins at the nerve endings in the sensory organs. Much of your brain's interpretation of what the eye sees is handled in the first few layers of cells in the retina.
A second problem is that of resonance. Your brain produces a reference wave and measures sensory input as an interference pattern to that wave. While you could easily exploit that phenominon to transmit data to the brain, it would be nearly impossible to make it believe the information is coming from the sensory organs.
That is not to say you could not produce very vivid images using this new sense. I recall an experiment where researchers were able to teach a blind man to see using pressure transducers on his back. They had a camera that would translate a signal from a black and white CCD into pressure intensities laid out like a grid. The subject was able to adapt that system into a crude form of vision. There are also reports of deaf people who "hear" by feeling the vibrations of speakers, at least enough to enjoy music.
This sense would have to be developed in people. But I could see it as a powerful tool. It would be cool if my car could translate data from proximity radar system into my brain. Instead of relying on mirrors I could "feel" the road around me. Know where the curb is. Sense that Kia in my blindspot. Vibe that cop over the next hill with the radar set.
Would it be sense like we know them? No. Instead it would be sensations the likes of which we had never known before.
Let OUR kids eat dirt, and let the random's of the world let their kids continue to wallow in lysol disinfected bubbles. That way our decendents WILL be immune to the killer whatever comes down the pike.
We are about at the end of what the pure, objective, scientific method can tell us about ourselves. To delve any deeper into Sociology or Psychology forces us as the observer to interact with the system. It's not just "brain" studies. Physics has the same problem too. To study an atom requires bouncing a magentic field, a light beam, an electron, basically something that alters its behavior.
Whatever methodolgies we develop for dealing with this problem is going to be the successor to the scientific method. It will also put to bed a lot of the crackpot UFO and ESP crap.
Well, at least the parts that don't pan out under scrutiny.
The whole concept of causality is actually suspect. Sure it's popular in WESTERN thinking, but it's not universal.
So, what "caused' you to be born with Green eyes as opposed to Blue Eyes? Why do men have vestigal nipples? These are phenominon that exist, but they do not have a "cause" par-se. Causality implies a concious action.
Now, if you are willing to entertain the idea that a higher power is pulling the strings then all issues of causality are neatly handled by "God", or "Chaos", or whatever you wish to call that system that orchestrates the absolutely preposerous chain of "coincidence" that our lives are made up of.
(Disclosure: I heavily lean toward the divine intervention camp.)
Frame of reference issues aside, Time Travel in itself is impossible. All you end up doing is finding an alternate reality that closely matches your world in the past. Once you have that issue squared away, it's a trival matter to ensure that the alternate universe ALSO happens to be in roughly the same place.
Amos would probably be studying the next step in "productivity" which will be the design of entire social systems from religion to the line at the DMV. Like it or not, we are manipulated every day by hucksters, salesmen, advertisers, even charities.
It's not going to be all that long till governments apply the same principles to "mind persuasion." Yes, the attempts in the past have been laughable, from WWII's Rationing Slogans to the War On Drugs.
But sooner or later they are going to get it right. Just look at DeBeers, who managed to invent an entire social custom wrapped around crystalized carbon. And clear, colorless crystals at that.
No imagine that persuasion in the hands of Uncle Sam.
So the question returns: How did someone who couldn't give a rat's ass about "techical details" get to be in charge of a project that is ALL "technical details?"
Whoever picked the managers, and supervised the managers, is as much to blame as the damn foam chunk.
One of the things that's been frustrating me as a writer is trying to avoid emulating the "Golden Age" sci fi style.
It just doesn't sell anymore, and everyone's first reaction is: This is just a copy of [Fill In the Blank]. What people forget is that the Golden Age writers copied the style of Jules Verne, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Granted the "Olden Age" sci fi writers didn't have a whole lot of sex going on in their books. Damn Victorians. But you can take that template back almost a century and a half.
Dude, if Philip K. Dick is relevant to your own time you need to stop dropping Acid. I love his work, but there is more to life than Paranoia.
And yes, I have read his stuff. I love his stuff. But I don't sit up at night wondering if I'm real or the world around me is.
I know that I'm a process running in a giant multiuser system with multiple layers of virtualization. Where I draw the line is in believing that knowing this somehow causes $#%@#$^@!%!#$%!@^H%BV No Carrier
My only complaint with Asimov is character development. Granted, some would argue that is the POINT, but each of his characters never seems to change course from where they started. It's greek tradgedy with robots.
This is from a devoted fan, mind you. IA has a permanent place in my private stash of books for that desert Island experience. But there will also be a bit of Dickens and Joyce to round it out.
First of all, let me just say that you are a smug idot. "Psychobiologically"?
It's a new field. There are millions of people on medications that fundimentally alter the behavior and state of mind of an individual by emulating another biological state. Everything from the Birth Control Pill to Zolopht to Ridaline uses that principle.
Thanks anyway, and next time remember how stupid you look when you try to use TLC sex documentaries to explain actual human behavior.
(Looks around). People are snickering at you. Dude, at least I had a point. And for the record I don't watch cable. I don't even own a damn TV. There are these wonderful inventions call Books and Periodicals. You should try reading them some time. While you are at it, I think there is a sale on Clue at Walmart. Get a Clue, it's cheap.
The thing you have to remember: Movie producers are geeks too. Art and film geeks. Peter Jackson made B-Movies for fun, and the Wakowski brothers adapted the Matrix from a comic book they were working on. Hitchcock was a geek. Speilberg is a Geek. Lucas is such a geek it hurts.
To be fair, Tokien was a geek writing to an audience of geeks. His dark art was linguistics.
Publishers and Movie Studios will continue to draw on geeks to write and produce movies because of how successful they are. The most successful movies are the novel ones that try ideas, and the people on the forefront of new ideas are... GEEKS!
At the risk of being a killjoy, people just called me whatever they thought was the most hurtful. Taxonomy be damned.
For my part I am. Descriptions are just the ways the lesser minds filter the world into little boxes small enough for their weak lobes to frob.
I don't "neatly" fall into any of your categories. I don't have the interest in academics to be a Nerd. While I can recite Monty Python and Gilbert and Sulliven from memory, I draw the line at fantasy languages. I do geeky things, but my interest in banging my head against a project is limited.
So how would you describe an engineering school dropout, who can't remember what's in his pocket but can tell you the commanders and major events of every battle of WWII, assembles his own Linux distro for projects, plays strategy games and RPGs, and doesn't own a TV?
It's ok, my Myers' brigs hedges on whether I'm INTJ or INTS. The exam where they test the quadrents of your brain shows me string in all 4. I'm even ambidextrous.
Let's face it in a black and white world, I'm plaid. My point is that there are many more of "Us" who are all of the above than fit easily into the grooves.
Slashdot Mirror
No banana for you!
Of course it's even more fun to play with the travelers. It is amazing how often these time tourists have the memories of their trips wipes out. Especially if it's a big research project. I save that for the real pains in the ass. If I have to bail your ass out because you couldn't play by the rules, I can't help it if my aim isn't that good.
I just try to keep enough range to that I don't leave scars. 2 or 3 meters is a plausible mistake. Point blank is a disciplinary action.
Granted, not my taste in tourist. But then again, tourists are always a country's worst export.
The Aussies and Antarticans would feel left out.
Now a tunnel across the Mediteranian is not going to work. First off, Tangiers is not exactly what I would call a "business" destination. Nor is Spain. You have to dig pretty deep on the African continent to find anywhere a typical European traveler would be going. Perhaps I am missing a pent up demand for travel from Africa. It didn't RTFA.
The next problem is travel time. Sure a ride from spain to Morroco would be a lot quicker via Train. A trip from France to Morroco a bit less so. From Scottland to Morrocco... well, only for the folks who want to do it because they can.
Finally I would like to note that the 2 countries involved are still involved in a few territorial spats. That is not a recipe for success on a multi-billion dollar project.
How about Erwin Schroedinger?
Stop dropping hints to these primatives or I'm going to have to report you to the Continuity Monitors.
I'd say Ancient Greece for me, but knowing my mouth I'd be swallowing hemlock by nightfall. Human history is filled with brutality and primative thinking. What is to say that future generations will not look back at us with the same aloof sense of superiority that we do to the people living in the Dark Ages?
Remember, sensory processing begins at the nerve endings in the sensory organs. Much of your brain's interpretation of what the eye sees is handled in the first few layers of cells in the retina.
A second problem is that of resonance. Your brain produces a reference wave and measures sensory input as an interference pattern to that wave. While you could easily exploit that phenominon to transmit data to the brain, it would be nearly impossible to make it believe the information is coming from the sensory organs.
That is not to say you could not produce very vivid images using this new sense. I recall an experiment where researchers were able to teach a blind man to see using pressure transducers on his back. They had a camera that would translate a signal from a black and white CCD into pressure intensities laid out like a grid. The subject was able to adapt that system into a crude form of vision. There are also reports of deaf people who "hear" by feeling the vibrations of speakers, at least enough to enjoy music.
This sense would have to be developed in people. But I could see it as a powerful tool. It would be cool if my car could translate data from proximity radar system into my brain. Instead of relying on mirrors I could "feel" the road around me. Know where the curb is. Sense that Kia in my blindspot. Vibe that cop over the next hill with the radar set.
Would it be sense like we know them? No. Instead it would be sensations the likes of which we had never known before.
Let OUR kids eat dirt, and let the random's of the world let their kids continue to wallow in lysol disinfected bubbles. That way our decendents WILL be immune to the killer whatever comes down the pike.
Then the geek shall truely inherit the Earth.
At least according to the whole non and semi-conscentual genre of Usenet postings.
Whatever methodolgies we develop for dealing with this problem is going to be the successor to the scientific method. It will also put to bed a lot of the crackpot UFO and ESP crap.
Well, at least the parts that don't pan out under scrutiny.
So, what "caused' you to be born with Green eyes as opposed to Blue Eyes? Why do men have vestigal nipples? These are phenominon that exist, but they do not have a "cause" par-se. Causality implies a concious action.
Now, if you are willing to entertain the idea that a higher power is pulling the strings then all issues of causality are neatly handled by "God", or "Chaos", or whatever you wish to call that system that orchestrates the absolutely preposerous chain of "coincidence" that our lives are made up of.
(Disclosure: I heavily lean toward the divine intervention camp.)
Frame of reference issues aside, Time Travel in itself is impossible. All you end up doing is finding an alternate reality that closely matches your world in the past. Once you have that issue squared away, it's a trival matter to ensure that the alternate universe ALSO happens to be in roughly the same place.
It's not going to be all that long till governments apply the same principles to "mind persuasion." Yes, the attempts in the past have been laughable, from WWII's Rationing Slogans to the War On Drugs.
But sooner or later they are going to get it right. Just look at DeBeers, who managed to invent an entire social custom wrapped around crystalized carbon. And clear, colorless crystals at that.
No imagine that persuasion in the hands of Uncle Sam.
Of course when they throw it up on an LCD projector it's completly illegible. Then it becomes my problem to figure out why the display isn't working.
(Goes back to cleaning gun collection.)
Whoever picked the managers, and supervised the managers, is as much to blame as the damn foam chunk.
My bad.
It just doesn't sell anymore, and everyone's first reaction is: This is just a copy of [Fill In the Blank]. What people forget is that the Golden Age writers copied the style of Jules Verne, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Granted the "Olden Age" sci fi writers didn't have a whole lot of sex going on in their books. Damn Victorians. But you can take that template back almost a century and a half.
And yes, I have read his stuff. I love his stuff. But I don't sit up at night wondering if I'm real or the world around me is.
I know that I'm a process running in a giant multiuser system with multiple layers of virtualization. Where I draw the line is in believing that knowing this somehow causes $#%@#$^@!%!#$%!@^H%BV No Carrier
This is from a devoted fan, mind you. IA has a permanent place in my private stash of books for that desert Island experience. But there will also be a bit of Dickens and Joyce to round it out.
It's a new field. There are millions of people on medications that fundimentally alter the behavior and state of mind of an individual by emulating another biological state. Everything from the Birth Control Pill to Zolopht to Ridaline uses that principle.
Thanks anyway, and next time remember how stupid you look when you try to use TLC sex documentaries to explain actual human behavior.
(Looks around). People are snickering at you. Dude, at least I had a point. And for the record I don't watch cable. I don't even own a damn TV. There are these wonderful inventions call Books and Periodicals. You should try reading them some time. While you are at it, I think there is a sale on Clue at Walmart. Get a Clue, it's cheap.
To be fair, Tokien was a geek writing to an audience of geeks. His dark art was linguistics.
Publishers and Movie Studios will continue to draw on geeks to write and produce movies because of how successful they are. The most successful movies are the novel ones that try ideas, and the people on the forefront of new ideas are ... GEEKS!
For my part I am. Descriptions are just the ways the lesser minds filter the world into little boxes small enough for their weak lobes to frob.
I don't "neatly" fall into any of your categories. I don't have the interest in academics to be a Nerd. While I can recite Monty Python and Gilbert and Sulliven from memory, I draw the line at fantasy languages. I do geeky things, but my interest in banging my head against a project is limited.
So how would you describe an engineering school dropout, who can't remember what's in his pocket but can tell you the commanders and major events of every battle of WWII, assembles his own Linux distro for projects, plays strategy games and RPGs, and doesn't own a TV?
It's ok, my Myers' brigs hedges on whether I'm INTJ or INTS. The exam where they test the quadrents of your brain shows me string in all 4. I'm even ambidextrous.
Let's face it in a black and white world, I'm plaid. My point is that there are many more of "Us" who are all of the above than fit easily into the grooves.