Fiskal policy

It's not often you get the chance to say you're smarter than the shadow Cabinet Office Minister, from the BBC, we find Gordon Brown has cancelled his email account.

Francis Maude objects:

Mr Maude said: "Gordon Brown is spending taxpayers' money on the latest digital gimmicks, from Twitter to Flickr, but can't be bothered to give out a simple email address.

"The beleaguered Prime Minister is literally retreating to his Downing Street bunker, cutting himself off from an angry and disillusioned electorate.

"In the depths of a recession, it is a waste of taxpayers' cash to be hiring a £160,000 a year head of digital engagement and setting up an office in the virtual world of Second Life."

Now even I know that recessions are caused by falls in aggregate demand. Far and away the worst thing the government can do in a recession is to cut spending on anything.

And as for email I doubt very much it was of any use. I'm with Donald Knuth on this one.

The nolinkvisit rule of worthwhile Internet stuff

Like all denizens of the Interwubz I have, over the course of several years, collected records of everything I've read, touched, looked at, linked to, discussed, commented on, or visited - the sticky trail of webby spoor that will undoubtedly follow me for the rest of my life.

I back up bookmarks at Delicious, Google bookmarks, and locally, both in my browser and in big HTML gloms in my weekly monthly backups.

The other day when I did this I realised that the blog of Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod was not included in any of my bookmarks! I realised that over the years I've been reading his excellent weblog I've simply got into the habit of (I've never liked RSS aggregators - I've tried FeedDemon but found it deeply unsatisying somehow) clicking through when I visited Charles Stross' similarly excellent weblog.

It occurs to me that this behaviour can act as a kind of litmus test for genuinely excellent online stuff.

If you care enough about something to remember it without creating a link on your desktop or browser then it's almost certainly worthwhile.

Called it the nolinkvisit rule.

Finding Wisdom in the Mass

One of the problems with writing a blog is that when you get an idea for a post, an idea which may be the result of weeks of mental incubation (a la Hermann von Helmholtz's theory of the steps of discovery or James Webb Young's A Technique for Producing Ideas), you also find yourself tasked with the tedious chore of chasing down all the links, references, quotations, blog posts, magazine articles, or books that contributed to your idea and including them in your post as well.

The problem is similar to that of information overload: with so many possible sources of information and text, how do we know what to read? And how do you know what to include in your post?

Do you really have to include references to everything and anything that might have contributed to the idea in the text?

I can't surf the web for any length of time without discovering new websites that are well worth my while reading.

So what how do I allocate my time so as to achieve maximum utility?

My last.fm tastes

Courtesy of anthony.liekens.net.

New webcomics &c

A brilliant new webcomic Suburban Panic! here.

A nice mix of the humanist, atheist, rationalist, scientific, Epicurean, and general political whimsy.

Also a good use of the ComicPress WordPress theme.

I've tried said theme on XAMPP locally, and it works. I'm going to have to upgrade my hosting package but I think I'll wait until I'm comfortable with ComicPress and the general look'n'feel.

I mean it's OK at the moment, just a little web circa 2001 for my liking.

Ubiquity

Nice little add-on for Firefox from Mozilla - Ubiquity. Basically if you want to go from reading Guardian Unlimited to a particular page on Wikipedia, rather than go via a series of point-and-clicks through your browser's search bar you just press ctrl+space, raising a little black box on your browser, and type Wikipedia <some search term>:


This is just an early version, but I like the principle. It minimises the hassle of going from one particular webpage to another.

And Oh How the Mighty Have Fallen...

What a load of nonsense.

This is the best summary of what might have happened that I can find.

New Firefox 3

It is actually surprisingly good. Websites load appreciably faster. Other than that usability seem to be about the same.

There was actually a picture of an attractive woman in a Firefox top. But how could I pass up the crop-circle reference? Tears.

Firefox 3 has yet to do anything that seriously irritates me. This means I already consider it to be good software.

Back

Sorry for my silence over the last few days. Stuff's been happening.

Anyway I've found a new idle hobby: browsing through the images of the space in which people work on Flickr's Workspace Karma Pool and workspace.

There is something oddly compelling about workspaces. They are a reflection of our passions, desires, neurosese, habits, beliefs and ideosyncracies - a sort of voyeurism of the soul.

Voyeurism in general seems rampant on the web. Anyone who comments on FaceBook will mention the compulsively stalkerish aspect of it.

Privacy, at least as baby boomers understand it, will become a scarce and valuable commodity over the next fifty years.

Addendum: Also, what is with men and Moleskine notebooks? They're great, but most of the satisfaction in them comes from telling other people men how great they are.

This creates a pyramid-scheme-style cascade of smugness, starting with the likes of Mark Twain 100 years ago and carrying on to the present day.

And of course they are great. I mean they really are. They perfectly designed notebooks, and they cost a little more than most, but it's worth it.

[some smart-arsed blogging title like "Maxed Out" or something...]

You remember that Max Gogarty thing a few weeks ago?

To summarise: some 19-year-old guy was planning on blogging his gap year experiences (P.S. I'm kind of technically on a gap year and I'm also 19 years old) through The Guardian.

Guardian Unlimited and CiF being what they are his first post (which was to a reasonable standard, certainly better than my own scrawlings) was soon inundated by sneering comments.

The usual hazing then turned into a flaming of thermonuclear proportions as it emerged that Max Gogarty was the son of The Guardian's travel writer Paul Gogarty.

I read Max's blog post after reading Andy Pietrasik's response at the time and my immediate response was anger directed not at Max himself, but rather at the troops of anonymous drones who spent their day writing venomous comments about the Gogartys, The Guardian, and how this was as foul a piece of nepotism as the world has seen since James Murdoch was appointed CEO of BSkyB (and I'm not just saying that 'cos I didn't get the job).

I even wrote a blog post about how annoying I find the majority of the commenters on CiF (which I didn't publish because I felt it lacked panache).

But now I've changed my mind. I've decided I find the majority of commentators in The Guardian more annoying than the idiots who comment on CiF.

There's something about the London-centric, hand-wringing, do-gooder, middle-class, Radio 4-listening-to, we-should-be-in-charge, Save the Polar Bears, Gordon's All Right Really, pompous, Oxbridge, media intelligencia that really sets my teeth on edge.

But what exactly is it that I find so irritating? I listen to Radio 4 and I like London and I think Gordon's all right really. So why do I find Polly Toynbee and George Monbiot and David Aaaaronovitch (or however many as he has in his damn name) so irritating?

Maybe my irritation stems from the fact that I feel I ought to be tribally loyal to these loudmouths in the face of the Richard Littlejohns and Melanie Phillipses of this world and my rejection of their values constitutes a heretical offense.

Maybe it's because, like all bloggers, deep-down I secretly long to be a London-based urbanite intellectual?

Or maybe it's because intelligent bloggers like Chris Applegate at qgwhlm whose views I respect and agree with also think this is damn nepotism and so do random but pretty good blogs that Applegate points to here like The Last Bus Home.

Although I broadly agree with Rafael Behr that this constitutes a cruel and unusual punishment targeting an innocent I also agree with CiF commenter oniongravy here. This storm in a nanocup does demonstrate one of the little faultlines in the UK today - that between those who live in London and write articles for quality newspapers (and most of the crap newspapers as well) and everyone else.

Good Blogs Article

First up in my round up of decent blogs I've come across is some dude from Hungary. He recently read The Meaning if the 21st Century (like me) and has written a review (unlike me).

His blog, entitled Flow, can be found here.

Fellow Brit Lelly started to blog last year and her blog Mondo Bongo can be found here.

Then there's the Charles Stross. Anyone who reads this blog for any length of time will know that I hold Stross, his writings and his opinions in very high regard. Charlie's Place is here.

Like most people on the web I exist to do Cory Doctorow's bidding. Doctorow recently became a father (congrats!), and as a result his input into the venerable Boing! Boing! blog has diminished. Fortunately he recently recommended the excellent Jon Taplin (entrepreneur, commentator and general polymath).

Another science fiction writer Ken MacLeod deserves recognition for his excellent postings at The Early Days of a Better Nation.

From the geeky to the decidedly awesome (don't worry, it's a circular gauge) I advise you, the reader, to take in the wonder that is Girl with the One Track Mind by blogger Abby Lee.

Just go back to her earliest posting and read all the way through. Hers is an epic story of sex, feminism, evil old-media institutions, politics, sex, travel, experience, and insights into the human condition.

Some Indian guy I found who has resolved (like many people, including myself) to blog more often at Rants of a Survivor.

And to round off, Mark Frauenfelder (great name!) and an associate have created an online magazine called Dinosaurs and Robots. To view and download the magazine go to Boing! Boing! here and follow the link.

The First Post

I just discovered that the First Post, one of the better online news magazines is owned by Dennis Publishing, which is itself owned by none other than Felix Dennis!!

I'm fed up with blogging for today.

del.ici.ous

Since indulging in the web 2.0 goodness of del.ici.ous I have had less cause to blog. Suffice to say that little has caught my fancy recently.

My first six weeks at university (of Manchester) have been enjoyable and uneventful. I'm back home for reading week and have another four weeks at uni after this before Christmas.

Life is good.

Stephen Fry is Blogging

...and his blog is excellent. Superbly well-written, rather like the text-based equivalent of an episode of The West Wing. You feel you could lose yourself in the words even if they contained nothing of interest (and the articles are fascinating). Fry's posts have so far covered consumer electronics (yay!) and an in-depth analysis of the fame phenomenon, so they are fascinating in and of themselves as well as being brilliantly written.

Karma and Whuffie

Some ideas are so superbly good that when you first hear about them you wonder why no one thought of them already.

In the case of RapLeaf Cory Doctorow already did. In Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom he speculates how status will be determined in a post-scarcity civilization.

George Orwell points out in Animal Farm that "some people are always more equal than others". Presumably this will continue to be the case in a post-scarcity society. After all, if there is no measure of prestige, then what incentive do people have to excel?

In Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom a person's "wealth" or prestige is dependent on "whuffie" - a constantly updated measure of the regard other people have for that person, based on a network of neural-implants.

The RapLeaf project is an example of this sort of thing happening on the web. This also has the potential to be genuinely useful. If you meet someone online or stumble on an interesting weblog you can find out what everyone else thinks of them.

OK. From that point of view it might not be such a good idea. For the same reason we have representative democracies. Large groups of people who have not spent considerable time studying proposed laws cannot be expected to vote on them sensibly.

This is a problem with demarchy. But in the context of the web, it would mean that someone would be tainted with a "bad reputation" simply because their opinions don't chime with those of the majority of people who come into contact with them on the web.

I suppose this comes down to whether we can ever really trust "the wisdom of crowds".

I suppose in this context, and as long as it remains largely directed towards private profit-making interests, and as long as the majority of people who use it are reasonable and not there simply to cause trouble (Wikipedia works fairly well, after all...) then RapLeaf could be on to something big.

Science and Technology # 4

There is something amazingly satisfying about this cutting-edge, brass-alloy, white-enameled sextant, made by Cassens and Plath.

Improvements in efficiency in solar panels based on organic solar cells is good news. Keep up the good work, I guess.

In chemical engineering news: some guys at Rutgers have developed a method of spontaneously segregating two sets of mechanically identical sand-grains.

This sort of spontaneous organization is based on electrical charges. Another sort of spontaneous organisation is the Brazil nut effect. This is where, to quote Wikipedia: "the largest particles end up on the surface when a granular material containing a mixture of objects of different sizes is shaken".

It's a weird little corner of physics: it's fairly straightforward-seeming and simply, but gets more complicated the more you consider it.

I indulged in a little Web 2.0 goodness by downloading Last.fm. There are various irritations: like not being able to pause on songs you like, but most of my current irritations are based on ignorance.

It's fun to play but I can already feel myself feeling underwhelmed by the current state of the technology. It's always worth bearing in mind how hard it is to make anything work on a computer.

For me Web 2.o is the gradual removal of the distinction between "my" computer and "my" mobile and the embrace of a mode of existence where you access all your personal data anywhere and in any place.

Ideally, everything should be intuitive and porous: drag and drop, grab and alter etc. I suppose we still have a long way to go until this Platonic ideal is achieved.

Space, Global Warming, and Technology

Sorry I haven't written anything for a while. As I mentioned before I've spent most of the past few weeks doing exams, revising for exams, and dealing with the usual stresses that accompany these activities.

As always, an awful lot of stuff has happened over the last few days. Gordon Brown got to be Prime Minister. I'm looking forward to seeing what he'll do.

NASA is planning to launch a spacecraft called Dawn this July to study the asteroids Vesta and Ceres. When it comes to space development asteroids are the first logical source of real cash. They are large reserves of useful materials and aren't sitting at the bottom of massive gravitational wells, like most of the useful material in the solar system.

Charles Stross recently blogged a long and interesting article on space exploration and the economic difficulties of delivering cans of apes to distant star systems. I suppose we can only assume that when human civilization starts to really affect matter beyond our immediate solar system it will be through star-wisp style probes, rather than massive generation-ships, as Stephen Baxter imagines in this month's edition of Focus Magazine.

The star-wisps would carry a small payload that would be capable of "bootstrapping" itself to a more useful state using energy and material it would find when it arrives at its destination star system.

Stross makes a very good point that living in space (even in habitats like O'Neill cylinders) will probably be as difficult and uncomfortable as living on oil rigs or in the Arctic or in the Gobi Desert.

I think it's fair to say that when and if civilization begins to have a large material impact on the solar system it will not be through homo-sapiens living in bottles. It will be through artificial machines controlled by homo-sapiens living in comfort on Earth.

Global warming: From my point of view, I don't mind (in fact I would welcome) giving up personal automobile transport, but cheap international flights is one area where I feel resentful of the necessary sacrifice. A recent article at Physorg suggests the development of an electric plane. I can only assume from the article that it does not refer to an electrical jet engine, but rather to an old-fashioned propeller.


This is disappointing: currently I think the best possibility for have your cake and eat it air travel is alternative fuels, like Richard Branson has been plugging recently.

There is also the wonderful Smartfish project. The sketches of the plane look wonderful.

As for cars, driving on today's roads is an affront to the dignity of man. A sensible, low-cost/free, integrated, information-saturated and nationalised public-transport service is a necessary component of any developed nation seeking to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

I'm still cynical of hydrogen-gas as an alternative fuel. It seems wasteful to produce electricity to electrolyse water to produce hydrogen (assuming you don't use fossil fuels), transport the hydrogen, and then use the hydrogen to power a car or bus. It would be simpler to generate electricity and use it to charge a more conventional battery or super capacitor. There's a fascinating story on Wired about the Tesla electric sports car.

With the current hype surrounding Web 2.0 (Twitter, for example, which I have failed to use and will probably remove if it doesn't become more interesting) there have been a number of articles on the future, and how you predict it. This fascinating article on Slate about the future of the computer is an example. For all the recent advances in computer technology and communications technology we haven't even started to scratch the surface of how these two areas will transform our lives.

As computational devices ooze into the background and interfaces become more intuitive and ubiquitous (for example, Microsoft Surface) the potential for Black Swan events will increase.

All this makes predicting exactly what life will be like in the future difficult. An interesting book Imaginary Futures - From Thinking Machines to the Global Village by academic Richard Barbrook suggests that our ideas of imminent utopia have more to do with Cold War spin than any realistic analysis of potential future technology.

My own feeling is that the world is likely to get better for everyone over the next century, even as we find new and ever more cunning ways of making ourselves miserable. I suspect that at some point over the next 50 years the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, like the Sudan, Namibia, and others will experience an enormous surge in quality of life, which will make things better for everyone. Global Warming is just crammed with potential Black Swans.

I read an inordinate quantity of science fiction. I've never been able to identify precisely what I like about it: it's probably to do with the mix of optimistic escapism and extraordinary ideas.

Another interesting component is looking at what people in the past thought the future was going to be like. It seems to me that we here in Britain started the 20th century with the spectre of a European War between colonial powers hovering over our heads.

Following several decades of predicted global catastrophe (WWI, WWII, the Great Depression, the rise of dictatorships of various flavours, the creation of atom bombs and the start of the Cold War) people turned to science and technology to create a bright new future.

After this there came various waves of science fiction, dealing mostly with how people felt at the time of writing. Now that the future seems bleak again, with global warming, climate change, peak oil, and all the usual problems of Getting Along, it will be interesting to see how our view of the future changes.

With regard to this, Henry Jenkins writes about how this change in our perception of the future has affected science fiction.

I can't wait for it to be the future!

Girl with a One Track Mind

As I mentioned before, whilst camping in Wales I read several Guardians. In one of them there was an interview with “Abby Lee”, the pseudonym of a woman whose name I can’t remember.

Anyway, for the last two years she has been writing a sex blog. Recently she had it published as a book, and she was also “outed” by The Telegraph. She seems an interesting person, and considers herself a socialist.

Today in The Week I read an article that claimed that George W Bush’s Republicans had lost the approval of the South Park Republicans. As much as I like South Park, and agree with their general sentiment, I disagree with the specific “…I hate conservatives, but I really hate fucking liberals…” where their general sentiment is the idea that you’re either a bible-bashing redneck or a self-righteous liberal activist like Michael Moore. I feel sympathy with my fellow disaffected youth across the pond, but why don’t the Americans realise that everything that underpins America is liberal.

For Americans it seems that “liberal” has become synonymous with soft, self-serving (in the sense of personal image, rather than the financial selfishness of conservatives), smug, celebrity driven causes. In some cases it seems that “liberal” is almost seen as being …shudder… socialist!

I know there are probably millions of USAmericans that are liberal and also aware that Michael Moore is the worst sort of propagandist (the ones we all feel we have to agree with anyway), but my overwhelming impression of America is of blindingly stupid (and inevitably old and decrepit) politicians, largely ignorant masses, a healthcare system like something out of the 19^th century, and of course George W Bush.

OK. Here’s the problem. Every day people go out into the world in whatever country they live in and try to earn enough money to pay the bills, feed the kids, and maybe generate a little surplus for enjoying the finer things in life. However if we’re going to do this effectively we need to compartmentalise our lives a little. Those of us who read newspapers regularly, watch TV, read blogs, and generally try and retain a feel for the world around us have to build walls between “real life” and “news life” in order to function.

By this I mean that if we were to suddenly realise exactly how lucky we are, and also realise the the existence of and the depth of the suffering and hard work of people in other countries are required to undergo to ensure we have eight different types of coffee to choose from, or innumerate plastic toys shoved into our semi-recycled child's portion meals we know damn well we shouldn't be buying but feel oddly compelled to anyway.

I don't know what we'd do if the repressed masses abroad decided they'd had enough of selfish fiscal policies and corporate-based economic repression, but I doubt it would be very pleasant for us.

Stereotypes are a neat way of compressing all the information that streams into our consciousness (or would if we paid any attention to it) into a nice, clear little labels that mean we can get on with the business of living without having to worry. This kind of mental compartmentalisation is quite important, but can be a problem as well.

The problem is stereotypes are such a damn-fine brain tool that we’re always a little reluctant to give them up.

Somewhat tortuously, this brings me back to Abby Lee. For me, the key flaw in socialism is that is replaces economic tyranny (e.g. the wage slave or the inhabitants of 19th century workhouses) with a different type of control (as in Stalinist Russia or North Korea). I think key to any reasonable socialist state is democracy which, for some reason, always seems to be lacking in radically socialist (i.e. communist) countries.

I would probably describe my own political position as secular, humanist, liberal-socialist democratic. In terms of the less-than-perfect "political spectrum" I'd say I was ever so slightly left of centre.

The Ultimate Gadget

For some time now I’ve been ruminating on “the ultimate gadget” (that’s right, you heard me – ruminating). The problem is that every time I pursue this train of thought I commit singularity and have to reboot. The thought process generally goes something like: “foldable, hi-definition, 3D electronic paper with eVisors and a neural interface…!!! Then singularity hits and a mere pre-transcendence homo sapien such as myself cannot know wot of the wonders available to the vast and cool and unsympathetic posthuman intellects of the beyond…
So in an attempt to create a useful thought experiment, here are some guidelines:

• All the technology used in the gadget should be feasible by the standards of 2006.
• By “gadget”, I mean a handheld device. Clearly cybernetic cyborg-implants are disallowed by the first point, and anything I can’t carry around in a jeans pocket is also out.

The gadget would be the form factor of an Orange SPV M5000 except it wouldn’t have the annoying asymmetry of the aforesaid device, and it should be slightly longer and thinner, more like that of the Sony Ericsson P910. The dimensions would probably be about 12 x 7 x 1.5 cm. In this aspect the gadget would resemble a mini-laptop/tablet, with the screen and a compact, QWERTY keyboard available on the interior of the clamshell. However the screen should be touch-sensitive when the device is in “PDA mode/camera mode”. The supplied stylus should of course have a little cap under which lurks a black ball point.

The gadget would have a camera similar to that of the imminent Sony Ericsson K790i. 3.2 MP, a substantial lens, autofocus, macro modes, and a xenon bulb for flash photography. The flashlight should also have a lower power setting which allows it to be used as a torch (a very useful feature of the K750i). There would of course be a cover to protect the lens – and the cover should not cover the flash. The gadget would have a smaller camera inside the clamshell for video conferencing. It is worth pointing out that beyond about 4 megapixels other factors start to affect the quality of the photographs you take much more than the number of pixels. I think building an optical zoom into the device is reasonable. The camera and cover should be flush to the surface of the back of the device, and be of a similar consistency material-wise so that it is not irritating or uncomfortable to hold.
The gadget would come with a full suite of entirely open-source, free and tech-hippy-friendly software including all the office basics, games, a web browser, basic photo and picture editors, sound recorders, media playing software etc…
Speakers and microphone (both for mobile-phone capability and note taking) would have to be included, of course. External function buttons could include pause/play, stop, back-forward buttons, a camera button and a voice record button, as well as the all important “hold” slider switch.

Connectivity options would include: a USB/Firewire data cable (presumably bundled in the box) a standard audio jack for speakers and earphones, an IRDA port located near the top end of the device (this would mainly be for use as a remote control for TVs, VCRs, DVD players, PVRs etc), Bluetooth, wireless a/b/g, EDGE, GSM, UMTS etc. The device should be able to function as a removable USB pen-drive with the cable. Included in the box should be adapters that allow the device to communicate with phone outlets and LAN cables.
One feature I’d like to include (but sadly cannot for feasibilities sake) and would like to see on mobile devices generally is a cross-spectrum sensor that allows the device to communicate in huge numbers of different ways across all conceivable areas of the electromagnetic spectrum. Updates and information about protocols could be downloaded and put in place through software mechanisms. This is a bit like black box technology, where you simply have a lump of stuff that does something depending on what you do to it. I suspect that this is one technology that will emerge from widespread nanotechnology and the invention of computronium, but I should really leave it out of this experiment as such a device isn’t quite here yet. For an example of the sort of universal gadgetry I mean read the sublime Artemis Fowl and the Eternity Code by Eoin Colfer.

Processing power and RAM should be sufficient to play games to a standard similar to that of, oh, say an old Gameboy Advance, after all, if you could play PSP games with PDAs there would be no need for a device designed specifically for gaming – right?.
The device should come with a hard disk of a type similar to that found in the current generation of iPods. Flash memory is still at the 2-4 GB stage, and I’d use flash over a vulnerable hard disk any day, but the disk would of course be cushioned, buffered and have a facility similar to those of Powerbooks, whereby an on-board motion sensor removes the stylus from the hard disk when a sudden motion is detected. The top-end iPods currently have 60 GB hard disks, so I’ll go for one of those.

Among the many ebooks that should be included with the device include a static version of Wikipedia, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, The CIA World Factbook, IMDB Movie Database, US Army Survival Manual, The Bible, Koran, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, the Encyclopedia of Mythology, Foldoc Dictionary of Computing, Buddhist Dictionary, BBC Health Medical Notes, and How Stuff Works (all currently available for Palm, Windows handheld and Symbian users in TomeRaider format – now you know why I need the 60 GB hard drive).

It would be nice to be able to receive TV on a mobile device (in a ho-hum, should be done sort of way) and to be able to view all the freeview digital channels and record them and transfer them to a PC.

Thinking about it, I have absolutely no preference as to size and form. Something like the P series from Sony Ericsson or the old Nokia we-swear-its-not-a-brick would be fine, although the Orange SPV M5000 is almost perfect.

If you happen to be sitting in the park and an idea for an absolutely killer SF short about cyborgised spiders infiltrating an extreme-extropian libertarian enclave in a decrepit habitat in orbit around Pluto and you just have to write it down, fast, ’cause the words are right there in your head… Then an external keyboard would be good, something like those supplied by Palm and Nokia, amongst others. Ideally the keyboard would be foldable and not much larger than the device itself, so that you could whip one out of one interior jacket pocket and the other out of another interior jacket pocket.

GPS navigation facilities are obviously a must-have, and while we're talking about satellites and whatnot, why not have a satellite phone built in as well?

There is no doubt that such a device is entirely feasible with today’s technology, but usually when you try to put too much functionality into a device it becomes a jack of all trades and a master of none. I think (hope) that my perfect gadget (or something very like it) will be on the market before 2010, and shortly after that there will be all the eVisors and singularity-gifted consumer goods a presingularity liberal capitalist could wish for.

Second Person Narratives

At the moment I’m writing an essay entitled Language and Occupation as part of a dry-run for my AS level revision (translation: I was looking for somewhere to start revising English, which is impossible, so I defaulted to doing my homework…) and just before I got to the interesting bit about J.L Austin’s speech acts I got bored and wandered off into blogland.

Charles Stross’ latest piece clubbed me over the eyes – he was talking about something that was very close to the rambling discussion of speech acts I was trying to bolt together. He discusses how the first, second and third tenses are used (or aren’t used) in fiction. Generally we use the third tense (he/she/it) when writing about something. If you take it that reading is the closest thing to telepathy we’ve managed to develop: Stross describes the third person version of telepathy as

…an omniscient telepathy cam weaving among the actors like an attention-deficient mosquito, landing to suck a moment's thought here then buzzing across the room to slurp a transient meme there…

Generally speaking the use of the second person is rarely used in fiction (one exception that comes to mind because I reread it recently is Strata by Terry Pratchett. In Strata Pratchett uses second person imperatives “Consider Kin Arad, now inspecting outline designs for the TY-archipelago…”). Stross proposes to do just that though. He explores what the concept of blogging may have meant for someone ten or more years ago:

Obviously, you know what it feels like to read a blog. But cast your mind back in time ten years —, no, make that fifteen — to a time before you encountered the net and before blogs had been invented. Try to imagine yourself as an aspiring SF writer who's read about this internet thingy, and about some experimental hypertext tools (from Xanadu and Hypercard to Hyper-G by way of Gopherspace and WAIS, with a side-order of this funny compromise thing some guy with a double-barreled name is tinkering with at CERN). As this aspiring SF writer, you've decided to write a novel set in 2006, a novel in which this internet thingy your tech-head friends keep gassing about in the pub is everywhere. And you start trying to work out just what that might mean. You've heard about email, and that intuitively makes sense. You've possibly heard of AOL or CompuServe or CIX and, if you move in academic circles, of USENET, and the idea of a bunch of people talking on a multi-user bulletin board isn't that strange. And there'll be some kind of easy-to-use hypertext system that lets ordinary folks add data to it.

But what are the ordinary folks going to add to this hypothetical global hypertext thing? What are they going to talk about? How are they going to use it and what's it going to feel like?

Asking these questions, your traditional, instinctive, bad-SF approach is to explain everything in nauseating detail: "Johnny sat down at the HyperTerminal and typed in his password. The computer verified his identity and let him in, throwing up a picture of the InterWeb. Johnny thought for a moment: where do I want to go today? The answer was obvious. Like all other communications media, the InterWeb had only really taken off once it was adopted by the porn industry as a replacement for Betamax tapes; now, finding anything useful in it was like walking down a strip mall full of flashing red neon signs and questionable window displays. But Johnny wanted to research his dissertation topic. So he typed in the address locator of Google, a popular information clearinghouse that scanned the rest of the InterWeb daily and indexed it, allowing keyword searches." (And so on.)

A more sophisticated approach that increasingly became the norm in more literary SF over the past couple of decades is to show. "Johnny picked up his laptop and logged on. Windows opened on its desktop, pop-up ads flashing garish offers of hardcore p=orn at him. Annoyed, he brought up a browser and headed to a search site to continue researching his dissertation." This mode is a whole lot less clunky, but it's got a crippling handicap: the author has to make the leap from technical description ("typing his password into the HyperTerminal's keyboard") to action ("he logged in") in a manner that is comprehensible to the reader. Because, let's face it, if you've never seen a computer the second version of this story is a whole lot less accessible than the first. Early SF was seen by its authors and their self-ghettoized readers as a didactic, educational medium exposing them to new ideas about technology and the way we might live. You could show the first version to a 1930s reader and they'd be able to follow the plot: the second remix is incomprehensible, because the referents for the action simply aren't there ("laptop", "logged on", "browser", "search site").

Sorry for piling that down there but it is an excellent comment on how SF tends to be written, especially the long, protracted infodumps that are necessary to introduce the ignorant reader to a new concept.

One of the best authors I know when it comes to not making this mistake is Ken MacLeod. In his early books (Stone Canal and The Star Fraction from the Fall Revolution sequence) MacLeod casually drops references to both advanced technology, and references to events that have taken place in real history – the result is a book which merits rereading after a couple of months or several hours of googling and Wikipedia exploring, but its density and originality are extraordinary.

Well I gotta get back to my essay. Such is life.