Caution: Singularity Ahead [DEFUNCT]

I was sitting with Caspian in his room, reading him some postcards he'd received in the mail. He's good with block printing, but handwriting is too much of a challenge for him to enjoy the content. He was being particularly wriggly. So I said: "Caspian, you're very wiggly. Can you go potty?" And so Caspian got up and headed to his bathroom. On the way he passed one of his toys - a piece of SWAG from TechEd 2005 which could loosely be described as an "octopus yo-yo" (there are several in the upper-left quadrant of this photo ). From a previous toy of this sort which easily disassembled, we called it his " sea jelly ". So he picks up the toy and says: "My jelly is very wiggly. It needs to go poo." So he picks it up, takes it to the bathroom, gives it a turn on the toilet, then has his own turn.

Written sometime in late 2004. Lovelock wrote in one of his books about Gaia that since a biosphere is self-stabilizing, and can maintain a dynamically unstable state (e.g. an atmosphere with lots of volatile stuff like oxygen) then based on spectroscopic observations of the atmosphere it should be concluded that there is no extant life on Mars since it isn't obvious and widespread. In retrospect, this is somewhat naive. In the late 1800s, life "obviously" would have radios and collosal engineering, hence people listened for radio transmissions and saw imaginary canals on Mars. In the mid 1900s, life "obviously" had a biosphere encompassing the atmosphere and surface. Since then we've learned that the extreme subsurface and other locations are places life can hang out - thermal vents, deep ice lakes, deep cores, etc. We can also conceive of radically different timescales and substrates for metabolic processes. I admit, my instincts say that if Mars had...

Picked up a book by Freeman Dyson (of Project Orion fame - the original "get to space by sitting on top of a nuke" plan). I've read things by and about Dyson and his fairly emminent children before ( The Starship and the Canoe , for example); it's a unique family, to say the least! This book - Imagined Worlds - is interesting, but not life-altering. It's scattered at best; adapted from a series of lectures, there isn't a coherent thread or direction in the book. And while each chapter asks intriguing questions, even on a micro-scale it doesn't come across as much more than rambling around a simple point. The quick summary of the book: Science has and will have a profound affect on human development. People tend not to learn from past mistakes. Technology evolves through trial and error; if you take away competition and/or the opportunity to try and fail, all you get are more collosal failures later on. So the most successful technologies - long ter...

Part I: Backups Being generally paranoid and a father, I was worried about Caspian while driving home the other day. Which led to a few thoughts in the “consciousness uploading” space. First off, backups. Many novels explore this concept, from Varley’s “Eight Worlds” to Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom – which probably represent my first, and then most recent fictional exposure to the subject. The concept is that either as a consequence of uploading technology, or just as a step along the way, or just as far as humans are willing/able to go, it’s possible to save a backup copy of a human brain. The copy includes whatever is necessary to restore one’s “self” in case of some catastrophic event – like total destruction of the body and brain. Anyway, it got me pondering about backups of Caspian, and how it’s just… primitive… that we don’t have such things available. An accident could snuff him out instantly. Sure, that was depressing. But now, the intriguing spin. If...

Wow. My little brother has moved out of my parent's house and - with his girlfriend - bought a house. And my little sister has moved out to an apartment of her own as well. Admittedly, I was living at home until I was 23. But still, it's hard to believe they're finally out on their own! Congrats, Nathan and Gillian!

So we're unpacking, and I run across an old book - Net Trek - Your Guide to Trek Life in Cyberspace . This was a 400-page paper book published in 1995 with details on Star Trek Web sites. I knew that I'd had my site and pages listed, but I'd forgotten that the reason I had the book is that they'd profiled me and sent me free copies. Here's what I had to say to the world circa 1995: Joshua Sean Bell Age 21; Calgary, Alberta Maintains mini-FAQs on Trek tech and a Website ( http://www.ucalgary.ca/~jsbell/star_trek.html ) Time [online]: 70 hrs/week Other Interests: NarniaMUSH, ASCII art newsgroups, and emailing "my girlfriend who’s in Texas" Favorite Episode: "Yesterday’s Enterprise" [TNG] and "Best of Both Worlds, Part I" [TNG] Mission Statement: "I’d avoided Star Trek on the Net for ages but eventually got sucked into rec.arts.startrek.tech when I got a copy of the TNG Technical Manual. Started writing and eventually ca...

(Written Spring 1994) Yes, it's an age-old equation. But specifically I'm talking about the interesting transition that I can see happened to me about three years ago. I crossed the boundary where my gating factor on doing most of what I'd like is time, not money. Previously (think: teenage/young adult years), limiting factors were "I can't afford that!". Now the limiting factor is "I don't have time for that!" Take software. Previously, I often lusted after a new game or other piece of software. Now I own games that I will never play, simply due to time. I even buy some of them - like Flight Simulator 2004 - just in case. It's silly - I have to stop doing it. I keep downloading cool games (see the Marathon entry) when it's really just meaning I will never finish other projects. (It's times like this that I can feel myself dying. It's terrifying.) There's a thread going on about how a modded the XBox is cheaper than a ...