cyberculture, commentary, cartoons, essays

EXAMINE THE NET WAY OF LIFE

NOVEMBER, 2011

 

IN THIS ISSUE:

WHETHER REPORT

HITTING THE TECH WALL

BARFERATURE

NEW cyberbarf KOMIX

BARFETTES

iTOONS

cyberbarf

HITTING THE TECH WALL ESSAY

The acceleration of technology since World War II has been mind numbing in speed and utilitarian ease. It was partly based upon the dreamers who left the rubble of a global conflict to imagine a utopian planet of jet cars, space colonies and interstellar space ships. But there has to be a finite limit to the amount of instructions that can be burned into a silicon wafer, or commands in a line of machine code to apply to a tangible object. How far has the world come may give us a glimpse of the future. And whether the world will hit a technology wall.

In some respects, the alternative way of doing things does not necessary produce the theorized results. The poster child for the law of diminishing returns is the production of ethanol. It costs more energy and resources to grow and synthesize the new green fuel source as compared to gasoline. Without massive government subsidies, ethanol cannot be economically produced in the United States. There are also sublime examples of this green waste. Electric cars are a good concept. But if one really looks at the core power mechanism, it is electricity. Most of the electricity produced in the US is coal fired power plants. So these green cars are really inefficient smoke stack machines. It would probably be more cost efficient to directly burn coal to heat boilers in steam powered vehicles. But steam powered vehicles were passe by the time of the first Model T.

If there was a barometer for sci-fi tech devices it would have to be the Star Trek television series. That show inspired many people to become astronauts, engineers and astrophysics researchers. Using the Star Fleet Technical Manual, copyright 1975, as a guide, how far has science fiction turned into science fact?

Automatic Doors. We take automatic doors for granted as they are standard retail design practice. Most of the out-takes from the series dealt with the cast running into unopened doors (which were manually operated on wheels by stage hands). But the first known self-opening doors goes back to the time of Heron, in the Age of Alexander the Great, where clever inventors used their knowledge to create temple doors that automatically opened when a follower approached it. It was this magic that would compel a subject to present offerings to the gods and loyality to their god king.

Talking Computers. Apple's new iPhone feature, Siri, is the latest in a line of speech generation software that have been around for decades. Most were off-shoots of dictation programs. Early Macs had built into their system an audio text reader. But the Siri beta is an interactive voice command, information search and audio result speaking program similar to the concept of the Enterprise's interactive main computer. There are dedicated programs and hardware that run certain tasks, whether climate control houses to automated machine assembly. But Siri attempts to bring the sci-fi gap of actual, real time, interactive conversations between man and machine.

Tricorder. This hand held device was an instant analysis machine. Chemical, organic, electromagnetic energy, motion, heat or whatever the script needed to move the story line forward. Again, we have dedicated machines especially in the medical field that are censors to take and display vital signs, heart rates, pulse rate and oxygen blood ratios. But to wave a wand over a patient to get an immediate diagnosis is something that is still far from a physician's grasp at this point in time. The closest thing of technology that scans within a body for diagnostic purposes would be an MRI machine.

Warp Drive. The principle of deep space travel is that a ship goes faster than the speed of light in a straight line by warping space itself to compress the distance from point A to point B. To our knowledge, no scientist has warped space or confirmed that particles can go faster than the speed of light. The European atomic collider team claimed to have observed neutrinos going faster than the speed of light, but that experiment result has not been repeated and is now questioned as being a false reading.

Phasers. These weapons are super charged laser devices that have various damage settings from stun to kill. Law enforcement has different forms of take down devices, such as a taser to stun a subject to the ground, to the kill power of high caliber bullets. There is also sonic cannon weapons to disperse large crowds. And an industrial laser that can cut through walls could possibly be adapted in time to a hand held weapon system.

Shields. The counter point to weapons is defense. The star ships had some form of electromagnetic shields that had certain frequency variations that deflected and/or absorbed the energy weapon beams of opponents. The Earth has its own natural shield against high energy gamma rays in form of the ozone layer that deflects the damaging energy. Most military personal device systems deal with body armor materials.

Probes. The star ship would launch a missile like probe to gather information from planets or phenomena in space. Man's best space probes have been the Mars rovers which are moving sample analysis laboratories that have sent back information to Earth on various compositions.

Holodeck entertainment. The fad of 3D films is the closest the mass movie audience has come to holodeck like technology. Remember those laser tag arcades where teams would run around in the dark shooting lasers at each other? That is more like the holodeck than a 3D movie. We do not have the knowledge to manipulate matter or the computer power to arrange a virtual map in a confined space.

Replicators. The assembly of any matter into any form was the purpose of the replicators, a literary device to allow ships to stay in deep space without having a billion tons of food stores to lug around. The closest thing to a replicator purpose box would be a microwave: you put in unedible frozen food and within minutes you have a hot meal.

The Transporter. This was created as a device to speed up scripts over the use of shuttle craft. NASA used shuttle crafts for missions to the orbiting space lab so the idea of using and re-using craft for space missions has been done. The teleporter is the hybrid of the replicator technology of combining sub-atomic matter and the power of holodeck computing to dissolve a human being into energy and then beaming them to a new location and then perfectly reassembling each sub-atomic particle, atom, molecule, cell and fluid to re-create that person. How a person's memory would not be erased as the brain's memory functions would be disconnected in transport was never explained by the writers.

Borg implants. Medical science has used various specialized machine components to help treat or cure patients. Heart pumps are used to replace damaged organs. Pacemakers are used to correct heart rhythms. Mechanical arms and legs have been used for soldiers to rehabilitate lost limbs due to severe battle field (mine) injuries.

Electronic clip board. In the early Star Trek episodes, a yeomanwould appear on the bridge with an electronic clip board that the captain had to sign off on. Today, the iPad appears to be such a paperless device in training. Whether tablets will replace paper will be debated for some time ahead.

Galactic coordination system. The show's navigation station could always plot its location based upon space beacons. In our modern world, the GPS system shows us our relative location on the planet's surface. Auto navigation devices like TomTom intergrate GPS and mapping program to give real time directions to drivers.

Hand held Communicator. The original Motorola RAZR flip phone looked just like the Captain Kirk device. In fact, most our smart phones have more features than the Star Trek communicator. A hand held, pocket global communication device has been made during our lifetime.

Ear receiver. The communication station operator had an ear piece to listen to transmissions. This ear piece device is the same as hands free bluetooth devices for the on-the-go cell phone addicted types.

Universal translator. We do not have a real time interactive language translation device. There are applications that translate text from one language to another. We do not have a univeral language translator because of the various dialects and speech tone variations make it difficult for a computer device to understand the suttle changes in sound patterns. Even with dictation programs, an operator has to train the program to recognize the operator's vocal and speech patterns. The only real time translation takes place at the United Nations, where human translators listen to speeches then broadcast the words in a different language through headsets. Maybe the Siri of the future will have the power of instant translation.

It will be interesting to see if The Future can get past the hurdles of science fiction technology.

 

cyberbarf

LIT FOR TWIT BARFERATURE

As we have mentioned before, the whole 140 character messaging limitation of Twitter has fostered the ill of people unable or unwilling to make comprehensive sentences for their text messages. Other critics have thought the issue of the character restriction has spawned a generation of grammerless acron-text smiths who have lost the art of word imagery. But it also made some scholars think they could tame the Twitter message beast by concentrating a story into 140 characters or less. Well, that is a challenge which we decided to take to this page. Instead of merely stringing words together, we decided to blend graphics to the twitterature structure to create the mosaic form of new expression we call BARFERATURE.

Our sixth BARFERATURE story board is called: BLUR.

A night of good time drinking ends in a blur. He found the perfect one. Then the room began to spin. Regrets. He does not know her name.

cyberbarf

SHORT SPEWS BARFETTES

 

It had to be hard to Apple's leadership team to make their iPhone 4S presentation knowing that Chairman and founder Steve Jobs was nearing death. The techn0logy and business writers assembled at the Apple campus felt underwhelmed by the event, and the reason for the tone was apparent less than 48 hours later. And despite the reception, a founder's passing and a weak economy, iPhone 4S sales broke a pre-order sales record and will more than double the sales of the original iPhone 4 in its first weekend.

About a week after Steve Jobs passing, the tech world lost another computer pioneer, Dennis XXXX, a man who co-wrote the C-Basic language which became the foundation for personal computer geeks and cornerstone of the UNIX platform for which most open systems are based today. He was a part of the continium of the Edison research laboratory concept: an industrial research and development unit of Bell Labs. The national telephone company had teams of engineers trying to come up with new ways to make the phone experience better: from eliminating operators with switches, to making calls faster over wires, to making call switching instanteous with the help of mainframe computers.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was first in line at the Los Gatos, CA Apple Store on October 14, 2011. He was there to get in line for the sales of the new iPhone, even though he admitted that he had already pre-ordered one on-line. He said that he was at the store in the early morning hours because he liked “the event.” One thing Apple is known for is its events. Woz was not alone; large lines of customers waiting for store openings were seen from Toyko to London to New York City. But Woz's presence at the Apple store was like a signal to the Apple loyalists that the company will forge ahead with great products without his friend, Steve Jobs.

This month concludes the run of the cyberbarf Komic (above). Ski, the publisher and cartoonist in residence, has not decided on what, if anything, will replace this top page comic in the near future. There was a thought of re-booting a fan favorite, Dr. Philistine, to grace the pages once again. He had been working on a new, 3D sci-fi comic written several years ago, but the actual modeling of 3D props and sets was time prohibitive during a very busy work schedule summer. He could surprise us with an old school, hand drawn comic. Or the space will be graced with a new feature. Stay tuned.

Ski hard at work

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EXAMINE THE NET WAY OF LIFE

 

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