Category Archives: Big-Box-of-Thoughts

The Reading Pill

  By Robert Watson | 31 May, 2013 - 12:00 | ,
2 Comments

Question: When you hear “turn of the century,” do you think about the year 2000, or the year 1900?

Earlier in the month I found used copies of episodes 5 and 6 of Star Wars at a local venue. They were pretty good movies, falling above the “I’m willing to pay five bucks for them” mark, but just shy of “I’m willing to pay five bucks and shipping to Amazon in order to complete the trilogy.” These were the digitally remastered versions, but I couldn’t put aside the thought that the future seemed so out of date.

Okay, we don’t have hyper-drive systems. But if you disregard the sci-fi staples, most of their future we already have. The real versions just have Apple logos on them.

And the things to come – oh, nobody thought of the internet back then. We’re probably not that far off from being able to replace a severed hand with a realistic robotic one. But the robotic hand of the future will have Facebook connectivity, so all your friends can stay up to date on what you’re touching. If you applaud at a concert, a “like” is added to the performer’s fan page.

The future is fun to think about, since it’s often our best hope of solving all our problems. Here’s a little gem. Today, predicted 90 years ago:

 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czr-98yo6RU&w=500]

 

Whenever I see videos like these, I’m usually more amused by what they get right than what they get wrong.

 

 

Photon bi-planes

In the 21st century, biplanes will still be all the rage. And they shoot photon torpedoes. Oooh, swish!

 

 

Last week’s post was, more or less, about science fiction turned reality. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, from the similarly-named novel? Totally a Kindle.

This week, let’s project ourselves into the distant future. Strap yourselves into your Chronoskimmer 450SL. We’re headed to:

 

 
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Tulsa, OK in the future

Tulsa, OK, The future.

1 November, 2112

 

 


The iHand is a success. The current election is at a stalemate. Don’t blame the iHand for that. Blame the iMouth, which filters all speech through factcheck.org. And debate is currently surrounding the pill. The so-called reading pill is a marvelous little wonder. When the “reader” swallows the pill, they instantly have the entire contents of a book bestowed upon them.

“In a little bookstore in South Durham, I found, in the corner, a display full of the classics. I’ve always wanted to swallow Lord of the Flies. I paid for my purchase, and a bottle of water.

“I was a little nervous about trying this new method of ‘reading,’ if you want to call it that. I closed my eyes and swallowed. Instantly, I could recall, with perfection, the plight of Jack.

“The book left me rather queasy. I then noticed the instructions: Take with food. Inexplicably, I had a sudden craving for bacon.”

Certainly, this would make learning much quicker. Math, science, history – learn it all in a pill that can be swallowed in twelve seconds. There was a Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin gets a “knowledge implant,” providing him twelve years’ worth of education in ten minutes. The little pill would be even more convenient.

But how much information could we fit onto a pill? We could start by figuring out exactly how the brain absorbs it. Or, we could not.

Since we’re being hypothetical anyway, let’s set aside the issue of information density and just put the sum of all human writings into a pill. Library of Congress? The entire Internet? All in one pill.

Here’s the question: Would you take such a pill?

Nobody should be surprised about resistance to the e-reader. Every new technology seems to be the “death of the current medium.” What do you want to bet that the development of the written word was initially blamed for the “inevitable” death of oral storytelling. After all, simply reading the words couldn’t ever be the same as hearing them. Humanity is richer for having stepped further, despite what initial concerns may have arisen. Imagine what history would say if it were passed through thousands of years of “telephone.”

At some point, though, enough is enough. What do we hope to gain out of reading a story, or studying a textbook – and when is that defeated by the medium it is delivered on? The so-called reading pill provides nearly instant consumption of a book. Is it too far?

Take your pick:

 

[contact-form subject=’Reading Pill Survey’][contact-field label=’Would you take a %26quot;reading pill%26quot;?’ type=’radio’ required=’1′ options=’Yes,No,Well%26#x002c; maybe…’/][/contact-form]

Status Quo, 2112

 

On Cliche Plots and Writing From Experience

  By Robert Watson | 30 July, 2012 - 22:10 | ,
1 Comment

They say “write from experience.” I’m not sure who “They” are. Perhaps “They” are like Bourbaki – not a real person, but a collection of people writing under the same name. “They” are certainly good at giving vague advice. “Write from experience” is a good example.

I have a nifty little journal which amounts to a vast assortment of scrap paper. This box of scraps has accompanied me from city to city since I moved away from my childhood home in 2001. Inside is a cache of the brain dumps of a young 20-something. Every now and then I sift through these, looking for something that can be worked through with the help of five to ten years more life experience. When that doesn’t work out, I can at least salvage a chuckle.

At one point I decided I would try to define “God” along the lines of “the cumulative knowledge of mankind.” Of course, that’s a spiritual no-no. God is considered to be all-knowing. But if you combine all the knowledge of mankind into one big ball-of-knowledge and stick that ball into one man, he doesn’t become God. A simple proof handles this claim.

Claim. The sum of knowledge of mankind, plugged into one man, doesn’t produce God.
Proof. My cat likes to pee on my couch. At first we (my wife and I) thought that, perhaps, his litter box was unacceptable. We cleaned it. That wasn’t it. He’s not mad at us. Trey, the dog I had growing up, used to like to leave “mad poops” whenever we left home. Milton, the cat, doesn’t do that. Every self-help cat owner’s guide on the Internet failed to provide an answer. And, in fact, the Internet is nearly the sum of knowledge of man-kind. If you throw in Google, and perhaps Jeeves, nobody can tell me why that cat likes to pee on that couch. The answer: God only knows. We sure don’t. Hence, the sum of the knowledge of mankind doesn’t produce all knowledge which can be learned.

With that out of the way, my home-brew philosophy needed a new concept of “cumulative knowledge of mankind.” This became The Perfect Man, the man who has learned everything there is to learn in the universe. But, the perfect man doesn’t exist.

The idea is that at any point in history, any single man has only accumulated a finite amount of knowledge. Put them all together and you still have a finite collection of knowledge. It’s a bit like counting an infinite number of sheep. While you can keep going forever, no matter where you pause, you’ve only counted a finite amount.
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The next bit was that mankind is converging to “The Perfect Man.” More or less, as time progresses, the huge ball of knowledge grows bigger. Conceivably, given an infinite amount of time, the ball could accumulate to everything there is to know. We’ll ignore the plausible heat death of the universe because it’s convenient to do so. I’m a mathematician, not a physicist.

I stopped about here because I found better things to occupy my time with. The last scrap had some sort of definition of “happiness” that revolved around the idea that seeking perfection was a lose-lose proposition. There’s no obtaining it, because it would take an infinite span of time to do so. Instead, one should find happiness in progressing toward it. It’s the journey, not the end, that makes life worthwhile.

I actually don’t think it’s a bad conclusion to live by. I’m certainly no longer a perfectionist, and likely better off for it.

As for writing fiction, the implication of all this is that it’s more or less impossible to write about something which you know nothing about. You could probably pick up any book on creative writing and find that piece of advice. But hearing it from a mathematician comes with bonus stories about the antics of cats.

All this also means that no matter what wild plot you concoct, it’s touched in some way by what you’ve done in your life. And I think this is what can make it acceptable to pursue tired, worn-out plots. In short, put your own spin on it. If you’ve lived a rich life, and have the skills developed to tap from it in your writing, it’s suddenly easy to breathe new life into anything. Every person has a unique set of experiences. Every person has a unique set of interpretations of their experiences. All you have to do is learn to extract them and get them on paper. Of course, that’s easier said than done. The art of fiction writing is knowing how to do that well.

Which brings me back to the phrase “write from experience.” What I tend to take it to mean is: Draw from the knowledge you’ve acquired, the sights you’ve seen, the feelings you’ve felt. Draw from the interpretations you’ve made and the conclusions you’ve reached. Write something that you’ve put you into. If you’ve succeeded in doing so, you’ve written something unique.