Foreign Perspectives

In years gone by people might think you a little crazy to buy a professional SLR but at least you could keep taking photos with it for many years to come and indeed I still have my Nikon F3 bought shortly after they came out in 1980 and it takes photos just as well now as it did then.

Digital cameras are a different matter though.

I’ve a couple of photos taken with a professional digital camera way back in 1997. The £2000 camera used to take them was the top of the line at the time and yet these days the 640×480 resolution would be laughed at as even the cheapest of digital cameras can better that.

It’s the same today too. You can spent £3400 on a new Nikon D3 and bask in the luxury of 12.8mp images. On the other hand you could spend around £400 on a Nikon D40X and have pretty respectable 10mp images. That’s not to say that the extra 2.8mp isn’t worth having but rather that chances are that the successor to the D40X will probably cost around the £400 mark and offer it potentially as soon as next year; certainly two years on and the D40X’s successor will have a good deal higher resolution than the D3 and more than likely still be around 10% of the price.

So, as with computers, the best strategy is probably to buy the cheapest DSLR in the range with a view to replacing it in, say, two or three years time with the latest edition of the same model.

All the mobile phone companies offer to move your existing number from another provider thus letting you retain your existing number.

Unfortunately, that service doesn’t yet exist for e-mail addresses. That wouldn’t be too bad but many people tend to just use the e-mail address provided by their ISP so if they move house or change ISP you lose touch with them. Others seem to flit from one freebie e-mail provider to another pretty much all the time thus making their e-mail address pretty much useless.

It doesn’t need to be like that though. All you need to do is to buy a domain (costing as little as £5/year) which’ll come with an e-mail facility. This frees you forever from being tied to an ISP and telling people that you’ve changed your e-mail.

Which is how come I’ve had the same e-mail address for ten years now.

If you’re looking for a house in the UK at the moment, it’s pretty much the ideal time with lots of bargains around.

Usually to get a “bargain” you need to look for something well off the beaten track or needing some work done to it but at the moment that, for the most part, doesn’t apply. Whereas normally prices in the UK are usually firm, at the moment many people are open to negotiation so you’re quite likely to get an offer lower than the asking price accepted. Obviously not ridiculously low but you can probably start around 10% below the asking price.

Getting a mortgage is a different matter though as the criteria have been tightened up somewhat of late but if you’re able to bargain down the seller a little then the loan % should also go down and thereby make it easier for you to make that bargain purchase.

Let’s suppose our hypothetical time traveller was by chance able to make a really concrete prediction about what was going to happen say, next Tuesday, and it didn’t happen.

That would prove that he wasn’t from the future after all, wouldn’t it?

It’s not quite so simple as that. If he predicted that World War 3 was going to happen next Tuesday then you’re definitely dealing with a hoaxer. Major events like that which would have a considerable lead-up to them would be fairly definitive evidence that it was a hoaxer that you were talking to. On the other hand, if World War 3 was actually going to happen next Tuesday then chances are that you’d know about it too: such things rarely happen without a lot of preceeding events pointing to them happening well in advance of the event itself.

But what about more minor things? Sports results are a big iffy. For example, if you were to place large bets on the basis of what your “time traveller” said then that could by itself affect the outcome of the game.

And, that’s the problem really. Large scale events would have lots of preceeding smaller events leading up to them and thereby be largely predictable by many people whereas smaller scale events could be influenced by the very fact of the time traveller telling you about them.

Sure you’d know by his accent, dialect or language, wouldn’t you. After all, it’s only in science fiction programmes that everyone speaks English, isn’t it?

If he was from hundreds of years in the future chances are that the “English” that he’d speak (time travellers are always male, aren’t they?) would be a little different. However, early time travellers are probably only to go back a few decades or perhaps a century so the language won’t have changed that much. After all, you’d be able to understand someone from 1908 no problem, wouldn’t you?

To be fair, if you went back to 1908 you’d have a fair number of words that you’d be using which didn’t exist in the same sense as they did in 1908. Not that many completely new words mind you. Computers were around in 1908, it’s just that they were people who did calculations rather than machines in those days. An “inter-net” would be some kind of fishing net I imagine. Television is one of the few words that are genuinely new which didn’t exist back then.

However, John Titor used the Internet to send his messages so there was no issue of an accent or really of a dialect for that matter as both are largely confined to the spoken word.

What you might notice would be different ways of phasing things. For example, going back to say that “I called Helen” in 1908 would mean that you shouted out to her, not that you phoned her but then the difference in that is only obvious to us in 2008 and wouldn’t be obvious if you used the phrase in 1908. I suspect that in reality this kind of difference would be very difficult to pick up.