Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

It’s almost always the case that the best Christmas presents are things that you’d never have bought for yourself but which seem perfect when you get them.

This year my best one is very definitely the Sony Reader which Wendy bought me. It’s the one that’s with me almost constantly and in use throughout the day. Why? Well, I’m doing a couple of Open University courses at the moment and that means up to four books totally around four inches in thickness to carry around. Instead of that pile I’ve a pocket sized electronic book which means that I can carry all those books around with me and read them when I get the chance rather than having to plan in advance to take them with me.

In fact I can carry around all the course books for all the courses which would have been pretty much impossible without the Reader.

The ebook technology is one that’s quietly zoomed ahead in recent years with the arrival of e-paper. The screens in these readers aren’t the same as those that you see in laptops. They’re not backlit, they’re quite slow to refresh (fine for reading, useless as a computer screen) but most importantly use virtually no power which means that the batteries last for weeks for even the most voracious reader and probably months for most people. Even my initial flicking around all the options and from book to book barely made an impression on the battery after a week. One thing to note is that the battery is only required when you turn the page and it makes virtually no difference to battery life if you take a second or a minute to read a page.

Thanks to Google Books there are millions of free books available for download. Beyond the free ones you can buy a great many books in ebook format these days though for reasons which escape me they are currently at pretty much the same price as the paper versions.

Downsides of it all? I miss the colour and the PDF scaling feature needs work. The metal casing makes for a cold read compared to actual paper though there are fancy covers that would fix that. The Pocket Reader doesn’t have an SD card slot so you’re limited to the 1/2GB internal memory. It’s not permanently online like the Kindle so no buying books on the fly although I usually mull over book purchases anyway.

Upsides are that the 1/2GB “limit” to internal memory means that it’ll hold over three hundred books which doesn’t seem like much of a limit to me. Copying books to the Reader is a whole lot faster than I’d expected: even copying a couple of hundred books was a matter of a few minutes. For normal books the 5″ screen is more than enough to display text at the normal size and in sensible chunks. That it’s not permanently online like the Kindle is a plus to me: Sony can’t see what’s on my Reader and neither can they delete things from it as Amazon have done.

In a word, this is brilliant.

Of course, for the pedants, the new decade actually starts on January 1st 2011 but, as with the millennium, I guess we may as well take the opportunity to celebrate twice.

What a decade we’ve had, eh?

Financially, the first one of the 21st century has been very much a rollercoaster  ride for the world and many of the people within it. The 21st century didn’t start overly well and the last decade finished on the worst downer for many a year. The last time it was so serious was way back in the 1930s and that took the 2nd world war to pull the world out in the end. This time, supposedly, we know better and have had loads of time to develop economic theories which’ll pull us out. Sounds good, but the minor fly in that ointment is that we went into this depression with those theories in place and they obviously didn’t work too well, did they?

Technologically the 21st century has been a major disappointment. Not only do we not have the promised flying cars predicted (well, not yet) but we’ve lost supersonic commercial travel, almost lost the hovercraft, lost the amphibious cars that we had in the 1960s and still don’t have a moon base. On the plus side we do have a space station, the beginnings of commercial space travel and the Mars mission is back in the frame. Electonics-wise the computers are lots faster, the storage lots bigger and we think nothing of “image processing” these days because even the cheapest digital camera does much more of it than the NASA computers ever did for the moon shots. From the science fiction world we can buy the Star Trek communicators for virtually nothing and the PAD (ebook reader) sales are finally taking off. Yet to come are things like warp drive (several theories postulate potential ways of doing it but it’s on the distant horizon) and the transporter (one that seems to have all kinds of theoretical and ethical problems at present).

Socially, we have all the tools in place from 1984 and have only the totalitarian state remaining to complete the picture. That’s perhaps the most worrying development in many ways as the technology making the 1984 scenario possible seems much more effective than the version sketched out in the novel would ever have been. On more positive fronts, the derogatory “self-publishing” of yesteryear is now everywhere and so widespread that we don’t even have a collective term for it these days.

So what’s likely to come up during the coming decade? All being well financially things will get back on an even keel though somehow I suspect that it’s likely to be past the mid-point of the decade before we can truly say we’re getting through to the promised land. We still won’t have a base on Mars but at least we should be seeing the first stages of serious design for the mission well before 2019. Computers will, as always, be a whole lot faster and the storage will fill up just as quickly. Somehow I can’t see us going for the 300 megapixel cameras that would be doable by 2019 but I imagine that 3D ones will be the order of the day by then. Books may well have bitten the dust by then as the ebook readers should be in full colour and probably 3D capable by 2019 with a price close to that of a single hard back book. Time travel seems to be gaining a growing interest so perhaps we’ll even see the earliest developments on that front during the decade which is the one thing I reckon would spur on the first contact with aliens (sorry guys, but warp capable civilisations would present virtually no danger compared to those that could travel in time).

What about moi? Well, James will have gone through primary school and be close to starting university by 2019 which is a whole heap of changes to think about. Assuming that I continue on my present rambling journey through the OU I will have clocked up at least one more degree and perhaps getting around to settling down to do a doctorate by then. Dear knows where we’ll be living by then. I’d be betting that it won’t be France but aside from that who knows? Work-wise, it’s hard to believe but I should be within spitting distance of retirement by that point.

So Happy New Decade! Here’s hoping that the new one will at least finish much better than the last one did.

We’ve been trying to get a new roof on the kitchen extension since way back in April but finally we seem close to having it done.

What took so long was that for reasons which completely escape us, we’d a terrible job getting a builder to even come and look at it. In fact, before we left for the summer we couldn’t get any at all and when we got back in September Wendy had pretty much worked our way through the phone book before we managed to get a couple to come out.

Of course, by this time the weather wasn’t that great and we didn’t get the two days in a row of reasonable weather in November that he needed to get the first part of the job done. All being well though he’ll be turning up tomorrow morning as the weather forecast is looking good.

Once those couple of days work are done the rest is “inside work” so the weather isn’t an issue so there’s a good chance that we’ll get that completed well before Christmas.

Which “just” leaves the insurance repairs that couldn’t be done ’til this bit was.

Leaving aside the religious approach, supposing that someday it becomes possible for people to live forever, would you actually want to? In principle I would have always said that my answer would surely be “yes” but one of the odder Star Trek episodes has me thinking about that.

For a first premise, the assumption is that in living forever you’d want to live in a healthy state ie no sliding downhill into nursing home territory as we see these days when people get old. Obviously, living forever and gradually sliding downhill like that through illness and disease isn’t an overlly appealing prospect. However, even if you were perfectly healthly, would you want to do it? Let’s say the life was in the body of you as you were in your 20s ie no aging beyond that.

Forever is a very long time. It’s not 100 years or 1000 years or even a million years. Thus, if you were to try out different walks of life over time you’d eventually have done pretty much everything. Assuming that you were in a society that also lived forever then over time they’d collectively reach the point where everything was known. I imagine that there’d be new species turning up as time went by but aside from that all of science would be known, presumably also the society would stablise after a time so even the likes of movies would pretty much all have been done. Pretty much nothing would change.

How many of us would actually want to live in a society where everything that could be known already was known, where there was nothing new, where nothing changed?

When you’re trying to run a life in two different countries like we are at the moment there’s something of a nightmare in terms of administration load that can backup really fast.

This morning has been one of the days when I’ve tried to make major inroads with it all. Sadly the piles are still there but at least a number of important things have been sorted out this morning.

For a start there’s a heap of communication that needed done re selling our place in France. The combination of French administration plus time delays courtesy of the post mean that it’s sailing along at a snail’s pace and a month can easily go by with no visible signs of progress. Actually, a whole month did go by whilst we were waiting on a letter (nope, won’t fax, won’t email) from one place which I think was down to it being caught in the strikes in London.

Next up was sorting out some stuff re my OU courses. I’ve the flights booked for the residential now which leaves nothing more needing done with that until after the human biology exam in June. Also done was signing up for the Astronomy (S282) course which starts in February. That’s one that I’ve wanted to do for a very long time now but between one thing and another (well, mainly the modern languages degree), far too many years have gone by. That in turn should ease the path towards the astronomy residential in 2011 and indeed get my physics thinking back up to speed again in preparation for S207 in October.

Finally, there’s our Christmas letter which needed tidying up before we get all the cards away. As usual, the prompt for doing that has been the arrival of the Christmas card from Faye in Canada which has consistently been the first one that we’ve received ever since she started sending them.