Fantasist's Scroll

Food science takes on a whole new meaning for the military.

According to this article on Wired News, the US military is trying to make better meals our service people. They’re working especially hard on the field rations known as “MREs”, or Meals Ready to Eat. Terrible things, for the most part. Nasty freeze-dried food that a soldier reconstituites in the field. Just the scent of some of these makes guys gag. So, that’s what they’re working on improving. Here’s hoping! (And, they still beat the nasty porridge that the Legions got. Blech!)

Here’s an interesting idea.

According to this article on the Japanese Times, the Japanese government is going to sponsor a five-year plan to build a robot with the “functionality” of a five-year old.
First, this is a pretty big challenge. Not only do they have to overcome the physical problems, but the mental and emotional problems as well. I mean, robots that walk are relatively new and they mostly have to be guided. This robot would walk and be totally autonomous. There’ll be a lot of processing power in that sucker. And, quite a bit of AI work will need to be done for it, too.
Second, there’s the time-scale. Five years, in my opinion, is pretty aggressive for this kind of project. Especially considering the state of the world economy in general and Japan’s economy in particular.

But, their thought is that this project would be like the US Apollo project. It was a giant challenge that cost a lot of money, but it also produced some amazing technologies that changed our world. Those new inventions, of course, changed the US economy tremendously. That change effected the world economy in ways that we’re really still feeling.
I, for one, hope that they succeed. The spin-offs alone will be worth it!

I don’t really think so…

R.U.R. was the play written by Karel Câpec that first mentioned “robots” and, ironically, it was in an industrial context. That’s where most robots are today, of course, but, in this article on his website, Marshall Brain speculates that we’ll see them in a lot more areas. The article says that he expects humanoid robots to take at least half of all jobs by the year 2050. Of course, people have been saying this for quite some time and it has yet to actually happen.
Personally, I don’t think we’ll ever get the necessary artificial intelligence stuff worked out so that such a scenario is possible. Though, I have to admit, computer technology advances at a ferocious rate. Still, the dream of a “robo-servant” has been around for literally decades and we’re only now getting remote-controlled robots that look vaguely like a human.

Of course, science-fiction is a lot more interesting if Mr. Brain is right and I’m wrong!

Here’s a disturbing little thought for anyone who wants to create literature for a living…

It’s one thing when songs are pirated, or movies, after all, we all know how much those artists make and waste, right? Well, okay, maybe they’re harder up than a lot of us think. Still, this article on Slate about publishing piracy really disturbed me.
I’ve seen this trend coming, really, but it still scares me. As the economy gets tighter, more and more people can justify in their own minds taking advantage of the pirate networks. It started with the incredibly inflated prices of software, then music and movies, and, now, books. The problem is this: in each case, there is a smaller and smaller margin. For one thing, the print industry is even harder to break into than the music industry, which is pretty damn hard to crack. What’s more, there’s an even smaller market for printed material than for music. (Not in my house, but, then, I’m a geek who wants to be a full-time writer.) I know, first hand, just how little an individual author makes off a published work. Piracy cuts directly into that small percentage of revenue.
So, read the article, think about it, and “go forth and sin no more”.

Something just seems wrong about that to me.

According to this story on Wired News, scientists have successfully cloned a horse and that same horse carried the fetus to term. So, in essence, the horse gave birth to its own sister. As I mentioned at the top of this entry, there’s something about this that’s unsettling to me. I really think we’re going a bit far with this cloning technology. I admit that I really liked it when we were talking about bringing back extinct animals, but we get this kind of stuff along with the “good” stuff. It really makes me wonder where it will all end up.
Cloning, of course, has been a theme in science-fiction for quite some time. Both the good and bad aspects of it have been looked at in detail, but there’s always room for more stories. Will we eventually clone soldiers so we don’t have to send “real” humans into battle? Will we ever clone extinct animals, like dinosaurs and the marsupial wolf? Will we clone people to harvest the body parts for transplants? These are just some of the topics that have been covered, in varying detail, in science-fiction already. Mostly, these are cautionary tales and, I think that’s a wise and telling statement from the writers.

Now, this is a service!

Ever wanted to look something up in the Bible? How about the Koran? Or the Analects? Or, really, just about any other religious text you could imagine? Well, they’re gathered all in one place on the internet, for free:
Sacred Texts Online.

They’re all there and you can download them, too! It’s well worth a look.

Well, it’s going to be banned in Malaysia.

At least, according to this article on Australia IT, it’s going to be banned. Malaysia is a very Islamic country and, in their religious tradition, a man can divorce his wife by saying “I divorce you” to her three times in a public place. Well, apparently, an Islamic Sharia court ruled that sending a text message via a cell phone counted! Obviously, a number of groups were quite upset by this and that’s what prompted the legislation.
But, it interests me because someone thought to do this in the first place. It seems obvious to me that the intent behind the tradition is to announce to the community that the couple are divorced, but that would be circumvented by using the cell phone. It just goes to show that people will use technology in very unexpected ways for a lot of different reasons.
So, here’s some speculation for you… How does technology effect your world? Would something like divorce via text-messaging be allowed? Would people in your fictional world be offended? I think it’s an interesting aspect of culture that’s worth exploring.

Kind of creepy, really.

But, I can see how it would be usefull. This article on the Sydney Morning Herald describes a new way to generate power from blood. Sure, the first comparison is to the Matrix, but it’s more likely to be used like the Six Million Dollar Man. This process really doesn’t create much power, so it can only power small devices. In fact, the article speculates that it will only be used to power internal “devices” or “enhancements”.
So, now, imagine a cell-phone implanted into your jaw and mastoid cavity that’s powered by your own blood flow. I can see it in the near future. Fascinating concept, actually. What else might this enable? What enhancements would you want to see installed? The answers to those questions are science-fiction stories ripe for the picking. Go forth and write!