Raaaaar! My bag finally showed up, so I’ve been able to brush my teeth, put on clean kecks, gob up my hair into a rather fetching quiff, and go out and paint the town red. Instead of doing that, however, I’ve spent an hour an a half in the bath reading a technical report and a terry pratchett, and watched a bunch of brickfilms on the lobby’s WiFi system, which seems to leak as far as the 3rd floor nicely.
Not sure how much of this morning’s angst was down to being jetlagged (by theory I should’ve ben wide awake) how much due to Chicago being a city and cities not impressing me much, and how much was due to the lack of clean clothing and fetching quiff. Went to Nike Town which is as amazing (and offensive) a statement of modern brand totalitarian egotism as you could wish for, and went to the apple store where I discovered most accessory purchases for the iPod are not only expensive, but generally include one or more parts that you don’t need because they come with the iPod in the first place.
I started to write an entry on this when, after getting an 8:20 train for a 13:00 flight, the flight was delayed by an hour with the knock-on effect that I’d miss my 17:30 from philadelphia to chicago. But I decided that I wanted to avoid writing a pointless whinging blog (some of my whinging blogs have a point, though often well hidden, but this one was really just a venting of frustration). Besides, I’d roughly calculated that despite averaging about 16MPH all morning, by the end of the journey I would have averaged about 210MPH. So I could handle the austerity measures on the plane when they started to run out of drinks and ice, and I stoically stood for nearly an hour at the baggage reclaim.
The stoicism started to crinkle a little at the edges when, after reclaiming our baggage, the entire planeful of people was stood in line and given a choice: check your bags in again, go to the gate and hope there’s another plane and it has a space on it, or stand in line and hope the 2 (two (that’s TWO (2))) as in II people at the checkin desks saw you before the NEXT plane departed. Despite landing at 6, it was 8:10 by the time I was hurrying through the airport, skipping the food hall to make the gate by the boarding time of 8:20. Just in the nick of time I hear my boarding group called, and, double checking the flight number and destination (Chicago) on the gate sign, I pass my ticket to the lady and board.
The plane stinks of cigarette smoke and there seems to be a prevalence of weird stares and god references. I stow my carry-on baggage, lose a cover from an iPod earphone, and sit. Next to a guy who strikes up a conversation with me. During which I learn he is going to providence. Which is nowhere near Chicago. Way to go, gate people. So now I’m sitting at the gate, 40 mins after my boarding time, waiting for any mention that we’re boarding any kind of plane any time soon. Meanwhile the pizza stall in the terminal is whispering “you haven’t had an evening meal and it’s late…”
Hmmm.
Abstinence and the certainty of being present when they call flight boarding?
Pizza and a risk of missing my NEXT flight?
No contest.
Addendum: the flight left an hour after the revised advertised time which was 30 mins after the revised connection I was aiming for. The original plane (some 5 hours previous) had been cancelled, so it turned out I could’ve wasted those 4 hours anyway. When I got to chicago, thinking only of a bath, a toothbrush and a change of clothes, it seemed my bag had headed off on its own little tour of the USA. So this morning I am in the same sweaty socks I spent 24 sweaty hours in yesterday. Blleaurgh…
I was on a bus tour in Australia. Most of the tourists were kids in their early ’20s but there were some around my age (turn of the 30’s) one of them seemed to feel the need to mock everything about me. When she found out I did salsa, she was most disparaging.
“Salsa, I had a go at that. I thought it was a bit sad. Full of middle-aged people who were left on the shelf, whereas I’m -”
“- in denial?” I cut in.
She didn’t like that one bit. I don’t know if I imagined it, but it seemed she mocked me less often, but more bitterly after that.
Oops. I’ve taken the film off a microwave pack of worms without waiting for it to cool with this Transmat lark. My good friend and correspondent Gouldy writes:
Another thing to bear in mind is the processing power needed to copy a person - you’d need to freeze them comletely to 0 kelvin so that their
molecules and atoms stop moving. You’d need to record the quantum states of each and every atom in their body. Is there a way of
calculating the amount of bit-states needed to do such a thing? How many atoms does a person possess? It would be interesting to find out … try to find out!
Hmmm. this could turn out to be a major undertaking…
Kate, our resident Information Officer, fastidious to a tee, spotted that there is a novel of some description called ‘transmat’ and wondered how much I had pinched from it to make my last blog post. The answer is none. I suspect the term ‘transmat’ is quite old, as I got it from an 80’s computer game (was it ‘Spellbound’?). The idea of instant matter transfer has long been a popular one , Star Trek’s famous transporters being an example. I had a read of the excerpts of the book at Maxine’s Music Plus, but it makes the same assumptions that I find absurd in a lot of Sci Fi:
At first TransMat seemed harmless. After an initial stormy period, humanity happily adjusted to a solar system where personal travel was inexpensive, non-pollutant, and instantaneous.
In so much Sci Fi, the authors still persist in having inexpensive, pollution-free, instantaneous technological solutions to minor modern-day inconveniences. Ecology and entropy should tell us there is no such thing.
All conveniences have a cost. We get to choose within limits who pays the cost and how. Nuclear power’s Social, health, and environmental costs are supposedly outstandingly moderate, though citizens of Cernobyl may disagree. For a while, i’d been thinking about the practicalities of matter transfer using existing technology. Of course my ignorance is a blessing here. Optimistic filling-in of the gaps in my knowledge have made my little future possible. But what makes it interesting to me is what are the costs? What is the mechanism by which this fantasy might be realised, and how might it fall short of the fantasy?
To me that’s what makes a Sci Fi a Sci Fi. A lot of Sci Fi is really fantasy, with added space ships, time travel, or laser beams.
To me, Sci Fi is concerned with projecting outcomes. Thus it will normally be set in the future, and thus inevitably, will contain speculations about future technology, lifestyle and/or politics. It’s a fine line, but sometimes these speculations are more closely derived from the premise than others. In the worst Sci Fi, the technology comes as a free plot-device.
Star Trek for example is particularly lazy in this respect. At the start of an episode: “Captain we’re stranded cos the flux dilithiator is mogrified and I can’t unstooble it without parts from star fleet” and at the end of each episode “well I tried broadening the bandwidth of the finkle compensator and now it’s all better!” How is the watcher supposed to engage with that? Answer: as a work of fantasy.