May 7, 2012 Category :Uncategorized 0
here.
It’s a website. It has the theme of science, technology, and philosophy, with a mixture of big-picture stuff and fun stuff. Well, when I say “fun” I mean quirky stories about zombie ants, bionic eyes, or whether bacteria can survive in space. That kind of fun.
Feedback welcome.
May 3, 2012 Category :Uncategorized 2
Ridley Scott’s documentary series, Prophets of Science Fiction, contrasts one science fiction writer of the past with developments in science and technology that the writer seemed to have predicted or ‘prophesied.’ What was striking about the episode on Philip K Dick was the wide range of concepts and ideas that he explored that turned out to either be implemented or to have since gained scientific respectability.
Of course Dick, writing about dystopian futures, was always going to be prophetic in the sense that governments will always try to find ways to cling to power, lie, and monitor. Dick loved to invent new surveillance technologies – but his ‘inventions’ are now widespread to the point of being commonplace. The invisible cameras in A Scanner Darkly can now be purchased at an electronics store; the vast police database in Flow My Tears the Policeman Said is not too far from reality either.
Whether, as depicted in the short story Faith of Our Fathers, a government somewhere is putting hallucinogenic drugs in the water supply to stop people noticing that the rulers are in fact insect-like aliens, but hey, you can’t win them all.
But Scott’s documentary highlighted other Dickian prognostications that had never occurred to me. For instance The Man in the High Castle explores parallel universes in which a probabilistic event – specifically the outcome of World War II – has two solutions and follows two paths. In one reality, the reality that the reader inhabits, the Allies won the war. In the other reality, the Allies lost and America is divided down the middle by its conquerors. The Man in The High Castle is unsettling to read because it implores the reader to accept that the book isn’t just any book but is in fact a portal to a parallel universe. This was fanciful stuff at the time, although Dick was not the only scifi writer experimenting with the concept (Clifford Simak’s classic Ring Around the Sun also dealt with the notion of multiple, parallel universes). Yet today we find that the idea of many universes making up a “multiverse” is scientifically respectable, almost mainstream.
I was delighted to see David Hanson interviewed extensively for the episode, discussing what Dick’s work meant to him. There was footage of the rebuilt Philip K Dick android, and some discussion of how that idea was foreshadowed in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which Scott himself translated to the big screen in the movie Blade Runner). Scott did not mention the lesser known Dick novel “We Can Build You,” even though it has the most direct relevance to the android, more so even than in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or Blade Runner. In We Can Build You, androids are made with the specific intention of recreating historical figures (as was done with the Philip K Dick android).
Dick’s exploration of multiple realities, such as those in Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik and so on – can be seen as a vision of virtual realities. Dick not only predicted virtual realities but, as Kim Stanley Robinson said in the documentary, he predicted that people would become addicted to them, and that for some, they would be preferable to the real world.
A final rather ominous observation was made toward the end: that we can only hope that Dick’s vision of a world of permanent and irreversible ecological ruin from warfare and other human activity will not come true.
April 18, 2012 Category :Uncategorized 1
The observation has been made that my book about the Philip K Dick android doesn’t answer the question, Was it worth it?
It’s a good question, but can be interpreted more than one way. At first I took it to mean, “since the android head was lost, did this mean that the whole thing amounted to nothing?” Or, given the huge effort involved in bringing a dead scifi author back to life in android form, it might mean, was this a worthwhile thing to do?
In relation to the first question, (did it amount to nothing in the end?), the answer is no. At the time the head was lost, the android’s arc of fame had already crested. Now that doesn’t preclude the possibility that there were more things in store for it. “Phil” (as the android’s creators called it) could have become a permanent attraction at Hanson Robotics in Texas, for example, or gone on further tours around America or around the world. But even so – after the media buzz around its debut at the 2005 Chicago NextFest, its appearance on CNN, Discovery and so on, the spotlight had moved on, and so had the creators. In fact Hanson himself had been busy at the time promoting his next android after Phil, the Einstein Hubo, in conjunction with KAIST robotics in Korea, the inventors of the HUBO line.
So the android had wowed, entertained, amused, and intrigued audiences and visitors, had won awards and appeared on TV. The original goals of the android project had been accomplished and, assembled on a shoestring budget, it was more successful than its creators had anticipated. Therefore, the fact that the head was lost on a flight to San Francisco doesn’t nullify the project’s success.
But what of the other question? Was there a point to the whole thing anyway? Was it worth the time of a bunch of robot and AI enthusiasts to spend a year of their life resurrecting Philip K Dick?
I can’t imagine the answer to this being anything but “yes.” Sure, the android was at the edge of what could be done at the time (although things have moved pretty fast since). But it’s not just about the technology. It was a demonstration not only of what could be done, but what was possible. It opened up the idea of creating portraits of famous people not in two dimensions or even three, but four – as Dick himself described in the book “We Can Build You.”
But more than that, it was a fitting homage to Dick’s original and fertile imagination, creating him in the form of a machine that he never saw during his lifetime, but that he described in several books and was sure would one day arrive.
(note: Losing the Head of Philip K Dick: A Bizarre But True Tale of Androids, Kill Switches and Left Luggage, published by OneWorld, is available at Amazon.co.uk. It will be released in the United States in June 2012 by Henry Holt with the title, “How to Build an Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick’s Robotic Resurrection
April 18, 2012 Category :Uncategorized 1
Even when I was heavily reading science fiction, I tended to avoid time travel books.
Look, I can buy robots and space travel and even teleportation, in terms of suspension of disbelief, time travel was just a parsec too far. All the classic so-called conundrums and paradoxes of time travel seemed absurd, and merely proved that the whole concept wasn’t just impossible, it went against the fabric of the universe.
Standard Hollywood time travel is often of the back-to-the-future variety: the protagonist travels backward to change a key event in the past. In the case of Back to the Future, Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) visits an eccentric professor, accidentally travels back in time, and stops his parents from meeting each other. Oops! But with the professor’s help, he might be able to travel back again and undo the mistake before he ceases to exist.
In The Terminator, instead of the good guys it’s the bad guys who travel back, to send a robot assassin – a “terminator” – back in time to kill resistance leader John Connor’s mother, Sarah, before she can give birth to the future leader. Sarah is relentlessly pursued by an indestructible robot, saved at every turn in the nick of time by the resourceful Reese. Unfortunately the two sequels have exactly the same plot as the original, with the “twist” being that Arnold Schwarzenegger gets to play the good guy.
These kind of plots, though well worn, are okay for a pop-corn film but are really too silly to invest in a whole book.
The “go into the past to change the present” concept was also employed in at least two Star Trek movies (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek: First Contact), and has made numerous other appearances on the large and small screen. It was boredom with this conceit that put me off time travel. But then I discovered that some of the classic “golden age” authors such as Clifford Simak, Brian Aldiss, and others, had given the topic a much more diverse treatment than the hackneyed go-back-to-save-the-present plots might have indicated.
For instance, in Cryptozoic, by Aldiss, humans can go back in time, but only as observers. They can see events unfold around them but they cannot alter them. They can also see and interact with other time travelers. The book is about an artist who has traveled back to the cryptozoic era for inspiration, but has spent so much time in time travel that he is going mad. There is also a sinister sub-plot about him being chased by agents of a shadowy organization (or is that just his brain-addled fantasy?).
In Simak’s Tomorrow’s People, portals open from the future and people start walking out in the thousands. They are escaping from an apocalyptic confrontation with aliens that are all-powerful and bent on wiping out humanity. There is no hope, so they escape into the past… literally. They stop by in the present on their way back to a distant past millions of years ago, long before the advent of humans.
Phillip K Dick’s Now Wait for Last Year involves a drug that can allow you to travel backwards and forwards through time. However the drug is very addictive, and may send you insane. Now wait for last year explores numerous permutations of time-travel problems, from meeting oneself, through to changing the past and the future, and encountering numerous paradoxes.
But the whole idea of “visiting the past” or the future shows a lack of understanding of what the past and future are. The past is fixed, and the future doesn’t exist. There’s no future to travel into because it hasn’t been created yet. We don’t live in a deterministic universe, where the future is a road, all nicely laid out for us, and all we have to do is drive the thing. It’s more like the road is getting built as we drive. Determinism died with quantum mechanics. Even if you know everything there is to know, any event is still probabilistic. Those uncertainties add up over lots of events, so that in the end, all that is ahead is unknown.
Science fiction that acknowledges this, such as Aldiss’ Cryptozoic, can actually be more surprising and thought-provoking than stories that do not. Ignore these fundamental truths about time and you end up with contradictions, paradoxes, and hopelessly messy plots. Such stories may be fun, but they are based on a misunderstanding about how time works, and therefore they’re ultimately, unsatisfying. Time travel is a fantasy. It’s not science fiction.
April 12, 2012 Category :Uncategorized 1
I recently caused a bit of a stir by announcing to friends that I was reverting back from margarine to old-fashioned butter. (if you’re thinking that my friends must be easily excited, you’ve got a point). The reason is quite simple. Calories in butter are about the same as calories in margarine. Sure, it’s about 20 percent more, going by the tub of each that are currently in my fridge, but the big difference is… butter tastes a damn sight better.
So the ledger for butter comes out like this:
* Negligible effect on total daily calories.
* Non-negligible effect on total daily aesthetic experience.
Therefore, butter wins.
Oh but wait a moment, my friend John protested. It’s not about the calories, he said, it’s about the saturated fat content. Isn’t that why the world switched to butter in the first place. Why, yes it is. And I had a ready-made answer in return: the scientific claim that saturated fats are worse than unsaturated fats has been weakened of late.
Take, for example, these news reports: Good news on saturated fats (from the always entertaining and enlightening John Tierney) and What if Bad Fat isn’t so Bad?
Okay, so those are just media reports, and we know how badly wrong the media can get science. If you look at the published research you get contradictory findings.
Part of the problem is that a lot of this research is epidemiological and involves cross-country comparison because that’s where you find major qualitative differences in diet across large numbers of people. but this is pretty uncontrolled and it’s hard to isolate the cause of differences in life expectancy between, say, Germany and the US. But what has been emerging lately in quite a clear picture is that the big culprit for life expectancy, obesity, and coronary heart disease (and so on) is total calories. Everything else is secondary. If you have a low-calorie diet, you can get away with pretty much anything.
As another friend (yes I have more than one) Conrad pointed out, the diet of people in Hong Kong isn’t particularly nutritious, yet Hong Kong has an exceptionally high life expectancy. The one remarkable feature of the typical diet there is that it is low-calorie.
This brings us back to butter. Sure, butter’s slightly higher in total energy than your average synthetic mass of margarine, but the impact on daily calorie intake is slight. The whole point of the move away from butter in the first place was not to make modest reductions in calories but to stop eating saturated fats: a motive that the health research community is no longer so so sure about. So the whole reason for the existence of margarine is undermined, and it simply doesn’t taste as good.
For me, butter is back.
April 9, 2012 Category :Uncategorized 0
Last weekend, I took my son to a model train expo that had taken over a local school hall for the weekend. displays couldn’t all fit into the hall itself, and so there were model railways packed into classrooms and along corridors. Many of the exhibits were spectacular.
Their appeal was not just in the rail lines, elaborate though they were, but the surrounding scenery: the diarama that is constructed around it. These are works of art, and as anyone who has dabbled in diaramas can tell you, they not quick to create. There were tunnels and bridges, mountains and lakes, cities and rustic towns.
Some were of real-life locations, such as railyards in Western Sydney, while others were purely fictitious: imaginary lands where rail lines and trains dominate the landscape and where no house is more than a short walk from a station. » Continue Reading
