Foreign Perspectives

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.

Now that I’ve come across the overall results for ED209 I’m finding that they’re quite fascinating reading.

For a start, despite everyone knowing about one of the questions in advance, 7 people didn’t answer it!

As expected, most people did the questions on the first two books as the third was a) perceived as harder than the other two and b) much thicker than them. In fact, over twice the number did the other questions and a mere 15% did the question on categorisation and early language development.

The pass rate on the seen question hit 97% and the marks on it were higher across the board with 16% on distinction compared to 7 to 10% at that level on the other questions.

The overall pass rate was 87% which implies that those that failed were largely confined to those that left the exam early and who hadn’t answered three questions. Although that might sound to some non-OU folk like it’s just a matter of sticking through to the end, the OU system is designed to weed people out as early as possible so you’d expect a fairly high pass rate in exams.

Finally, the big numbers on the psychology courses mean that there will be over 200 people doing the resit in April compared to around 500 for a typical normal exam in other subjects. Since the seen question for April is the same as it was in October, it’s unlikely that there’ll be much discussion as to how to go about answering it in forums or blogs though with the 97% pass rate on it that shouldn’t be an issue.

The exam result wasn’t supposed to be in until Friday but the scary message “course result” was there this evening. Somehow, no matter how confident you are, course results are always something of an unknown quantity and therefore scary.

As it turned out, I did even better than I was expecting to and slightly better than I’d been doing in the assignments which is exactly what’s been happening for the last few years.

Also on the OU front, the course texts for the Astronomy course (S282) arrived this morning. Although I’d really like to get going on that I’m going to need to get at least the cardiology course out of the way first I think.

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?