Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Science & Technology’ Category

As it stands, I suspect not and ironically the problem is because it tries to frame what’s essentially a belief system in terms that could be put across as science.

The biggest problem with it in scientific terms is that it starts from the premise that everything that exists now was created out of nothing about 6000 years ago. This causes the direct conflict with science in that there are proofs that show that life existed on earth for many millions of years and that the universe has been around for billions of years. The scientific theories that show those ages are inter-linked and many of the underlying principles behind them are used to make 21st century life work too: just about every piece of technology in your house (including the house construction itself) relies on at least some of those scientific principles.

However, supposing that instead of a creator (or rather Creator), there were a race of beings with a civilisation billions of years old. Could such a bunch of people simply create an earth with all the pseudo-history in the form of things like fossils that appeared to be millions of years old? I suspect that the answer would be a clear “yes”. Asking whether or not they would bother to do that is no more relevant than it would be for bacteria to attempt to understand our own reasons for doing things.

Science basically ignores that possibility and attempts to explain things as they are (or appear to be) and goes on to use that knowledge to improve things. Creationism assumes that there’s no point in attempting to understand it and would leave us in the dark ages.

Differences in the questions and the interpretations of the answers on websites seems to be increasingly common lately.

At the top of the annoyances list is the bank which, as part of their security set up, asks what is your mother’s first name yet when asking you to confirm your security details asks what was your mother’s maiden name which, of course, is a completely different question and with a different answer.

Even more insidious is Facebook as I’ve just found out. I generally get around to looking at it once every couple of months so just got around to setting up a bit more of my profile on a whim a few weeks ago. One thing I noticed was that you can now say you’re in a relationship with somebody that’s on Facebook. The options under that are extremely limited for the complicated lives that people lead these days and basically look like they’ve been written back in the 1950s. Anyway, the only one that seemed to match up me and Wendy was “in a relationship”. Snag is that at the other end it asked Wendy to confirm that she was my girlfriend which doesn’t really equate to “in a relationship” to me and doesn’t really come close to describing said relationship seeing as James is now 8 and we’ve been together for getting on for 10 years.

Can’t people sort out these two-place questions?

Isn’t it amazing at what a relatively small amount of natural pollution can do?

Whilst we all knew that Iceland was covered in ice, volcanoes and lava, very few people gave it much thought aside from when their banks all went bust. Why should they? After all, it’s a tiny place quite a long way from anywhere. However, now that just one of their volcanoes has erupted we find that northern Europe is basically set back 50 years in terms of travel and with no end in sight. Despite all the advances in modern technology (or rather because of them) there doesn’t seem to be any easy short term solution.

Will this make any difference to global warming? Yes, but probably not a whole lot but then this is just one volcano.

Listening to some people talk about how it’s affected them, it’s quite laughable how far they expect the airlines go in helping them. One lady on this morning was wailing about her severely disabled being stranded in Paris after a Eurodisney trip. The airline had provided accommodation for one night but said that was all they’d do. Presumably that one night was more than enough to sort out alternative travel arrangements: after all, Paris is pretty much the hub of the French travel system so there’s no shortage of means to get to and from it. The disability thing was stressed as medication was needed yet there’s no shortage of medicine, doctors or medical facilities in Paris. Granted, it’s a nuisance and a major one to be stranded like this but planes aren’t the only means of getting about and getting “stranded” in a major European city is hardly the disaster that some people make out.

It’s been almost a month since I started using the ebook reader so I’m really getting settled into using it now.

Although it’s “only” got 1/2 GB of memory that’s proved not to be any kind of restriction at all. Frankly, I doubt that I’ll ever fill it with books that I’m actually going to read. The manual says that it’ll hold 350 books but I suspect that it’ll be more in reality for me (the number depends on the length of the book and if it’s illustrated). Although 1/2GB doesn’t sound like much in computer terms it’s an awful lot of books. To give you some idea of just how many books you’re really talking about, consider that the library in our son’s school has “only” 10,000 (about 14GB) and in terms of footage that 1/2GB is equivalent to roughly 7 shelves of books each 5 foot long.

Actually those stats make for some sad reading in some ways because I suspect that once these readers drop some more in price the day can’t be long off when libraries will cease to exist, at least in their current form. Even now, if you get one of the connected readers you can buy books directly from the reader so in theory you have access to a library of millions of books regardless of how much memory your particular reader has.

What’s it like using it though? Well, one “problem” that I’ve encountered is that I find that I read more with it than when I’m reading the equivalent “real” book. That’s starting to become a slight problem in that I’m moving further ahead of the course schedule for both the human biology and the astronomy courses that I’m doing at the moment than I was planning to. Thus it seems likely that I will complete all of the reading for the biology course around the end of this month rather than the end of the following month as per my schedule. It’s also extremely useful for the astronomy course which has a whole bunch of books amounting to a couple of inches thick in total which I can flick between as necessary, something that I just wouldn’t have done with the paper books.

Although in an ideal world I’d have a screen on the reader about A5 size rather than the A6 size that I currently have, that’s really only because of the diagrams that are in my textbooks. They are readable on the A6 screen but barely. Having said that, with an A5 size reader I wouldn’t be carrying it around all the time so I’d not get as much reading done.

Colour would definitely be nice for the textbooks and that’ll come in a few years time I expect but normal books are in black and white anyway so I suspect that colour isn’t really a big deal for many people using the readers at the moment.

Availability of books hasn’t been an issue for me as yet though there seem to be a lot of ebooks available these days and the number will only increase over time. There are loads of classics available free too although if you’re really keen you can buy these too (they’re the ones sitting at the lower end of the price range usually). In practical terms, you can get a fairly sizeable chunk of ex-copyright (ie older than 75 years) books ranging from Shakespeare to the popular books of the 1930s (and some later ones too) free. That includes such things as the massive Webster dictionary of 1910, the Encyclopedia Britannica of the same vintage (though not called that for copyright reasons) and a whole bunch of stuff that sounds really impressive to have on your reader. Included amongst that is the “5 foot bookshelf” of classics which dates from the early 1900s and from whence I did my shelf calculations above.

If you’re flicking through the demo readers in the shop you might think that the slow screen refresh rate is just way too slow. However, it actually seems to work out at close to the speed at which you’d be able to turn a page in a normal book and it’s best to think of it in those terms. You might flick through computer screens fairly quickly but you don’t do that with books, do you? The only downside of that is that video obviously isn’t possible so science-fiction style animated books aren’t a runner with the current generation of readers but wait a few years and they’ll turn up.

One not so obvious point is that people don’t know what you’re reading. So, the OH has the impression that I’m constantly reading the textbooks which is good in some ways, although not so good in that she thinks I’m totally obsessed with the courses.

Definitely a very worthwhile thing to get.

We’re all getting older and, thanks to the baby boom generation, there are more and more products to deal with that on the shelves these days and increasing number of medical treatments too.

But do you really want to stay young looking forever? I imagine that most peoples’ first reaction is a very definite “YES” and that would certainly be the answer were staying young an easy thing to do. The problem is that it isn’t easy and takes up increasing amounts of time as the years add up.

Those age spots that may be starting to appear will increase in number as your years add up thus it’s gonna take more time to cover them up as the years mount. Likewise for other treatments to cover up the cracks and wrinkles not to mention the hair to be dyed.

The alternative is to aim to gain a distinguished appearance gradually which is going to be much less time consuming I suspect.