How I learned to stop worrying and love the Matrix

You know those maths/logic problems you used to get involving farmers, foxes, chickens, grain & rivers? You know, the kind they don’t do any more because such reasoning tasks are regarded as too taxing & hard to assess in SATs (and because modern kids don’t know what farmers, foxes, chickens, grain or rivers are)? Yeah, well that was how I spent my Sunday. My maths problem involved tomato plants, bikes, troughs, garden waste, cars, Homebase, B&Q, two houses, a pub, and a rubbish dump. It took half a day to resolve.

Of course by the time I'd done all this the chicken was long gone. Crafty fox.

Last weekend I missed a friend's birthday and next week I'm passing on a different one. Is it because I'm ill or indifferent? No. It's because they happen to be at the same time as two other friends' birthdays, but at opposite ends of London.  Right now I'm typing this on a train to Edinburgh. The ticket cost nearly £100, yet I'm writing this in the last half hour of the journey, having just got my seat back from the elderly couple who I lent it to because they'd missed their train and ours was standing-room only.

So what's my point? Do I hate travel? Do I resent going to see people or do stuff? No. It's just that I resent having to travel and I resent it necessarily taking time. I want to enjoy it.

Poor Anansi paid the price of trying to be in too many places at once
Image & Story: http://www.africa.mrdonn.org/anansi.html

On Sunday, as I wheezed up yet another hill on my bike, or sat breathing fumes in another traffic jam, I bemoaned being born in a century that promised me jet-packs and hoverboards but delivered me congestion charging and fuel that costs more than mermaids' tears. "In Star Trek they can bloody teleport," I huffed. I recalled a dream I had long ago in which people climbed into "Stuff Sacks" that enabled them to climb out of an identical sack at a destination of their choice. In Harry Potter kids jump into and out of far-flung fireplaces with glee (or urgency, depending on the state of evil-wizard-ascendancy at the time). "Why can't any of that be real?" I mused.  And then something occurred to me:

Why can't reality, instead, be more like that?

Where we're going, we don't need roads.
Image: Back to the Future 2 (via: Alamy)

What if there was a way to see both friends at both parties, to get to Edinburgh without having to stand up for four hours or squeeze past three hundred other irritable sods crammed into the aisles just to hang on to a handle for dear life while I tried to do a wee on what felt like the piss-swept deck of a pirate ship in a storm. What if I could go to my mate Roy's wedding in Hong Kong next year rather than putting it off so that I can afford to eat in the meantime. The solution is surprisingly simple: I could just stay at home. We could all just stay at home!

Bear with me.

Last week I was trying to explain telepresence to my mum. I was trying to explain about sending a robot or a hologram to represent you in the real world that you couldn't (or couldn't be bothered to) get to.

"What? Like Second Life?" she asked. 

"No," I replied, "That's different because in Second Life and stuff like that nobody's there. In fact the world isn't real either."

"But, don't people make Second Life seem like the real world? I've heard about people having jobs and organising rock concerts and music festivals in there [my mum's cool]. Mind you, they're all still sat in front of their computers in the dark, aren't they?"

We don't want to end up like this. Gross.
Image: South Park (via Otakugoddess.com)

For now, maybe. But as I went on to ramble into her patient ears about increasing graphical power, video feeds that jack into your visual cortex and thought-controlled computers, I found that I was gradually talking myself around to arguing that most of the world's problems could be solved by everyone plugging themselves into computers en masse. The virtual world need not be your Second Life - it could be your Actual Life.

Yeah, that's more like it!
Image: The Matrix (via: Hidden Lighthouse)

Arthur C. Clarke said that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." A virtual world would render all travel instantaneous (barring a bit of loading-judder) and entirely optional. Want to go to your mate Roy's wedding in Hong Kong? Now? You're there. Want to fly there (plane optional)? Go for it. But there's more than that. A sufficiently advanced virtual world would be indistinguishable from the real world, but could, at a stroke, solve most of its problems:

Well that's the morning taken care of. Now lunch in Paris & dinner on Mars.
Image: Michael Dunning / Getty (via The Guardian)

Poverty, unemployment, disability and discrimination (of most kinds) could become things of the past once money, geography and even body shape become largely a matter of choice. Hunger could be largely eliminated as soon as most of the world was fed on efficient soy protein piped directly into our gullets while we chowed down on virtual steaks the size of our own heads (which, of course, would be scalable). The natural world, with its collapsing ecosystems, would begin to recover and tourism could flourish once again in places currently ravaged by it. The conquest of space, a pipe dream for some and a pointless waste of time to others, would become something that we could all do in an afternoon, with realistic details provided by the robots & satellites that are likely to be our only way of exploring anywhere in the foreseeable future. Even the global population should begin to level out as people who didn't want or couldn't look after real kids could opt for virtual kids that could, Simpsons-like, remain the same age forever (or for as long as their parents wanted them to).

Looking pretty good for a 33 year-old
Image: Matt Groening (via: Simpsons Wiki)

Sound like a nightmare? To be fair, it sounds a little nightmarish to me too, but that's a generational thing. A few thousand years ago the idea that everyone might leave their family farms to live in huge, faceless cities, reliant on complex economic & governmental systems for support at the same time as their bonds with family, tribe, the seasons and nature in general steadily broke down would have seemed equally distasteful and ultimately far-fetched. Yet cities arose, grew and spread and it is now a minority (and a small one at that in most "developed" nations) who still tend the earth in the increasingly empty open spaces in between. So perhaps it's more civilisational than generational, but the point is that we can, and perhaps must, get there.

In his short story The Defenders, Philip K. Dick imagined a world abandoned by humans as they fled below the surface, leaving robots to autonomously fight a supposedly never-ending nuclear war. After many years a group of humans, eager to see how the war is progressing, sneak up to the surface against the protestations of their robot soldiers, only to find a world restored to a paradise by machines that didn't see the point of fighting. Trapped on the surface to prevent them going back down to start the war anew, the humans ultimately decide to make the best of things and settle down to start up a farm with those of their "enemies" who have taken the same one-way trip.

They'd look after it better than us anyway.
Image:  Matt Brown

Would everyone in my brave new world embrace their new largely-virtual existence? Of course not. For them the earth would remain, if perhaps one in which the majority of their peers would be robots farming soya. In the film The Matrix, evil robots have enslaved humanity and trapped them all in little pods to use as living batteries (I know; don't ask), with a virtual world indistinguishable from reality piped into their brains to stop them from rebelling (despite brain-death being a lot easier to engineer). Laurence Fishburn's character tells a confused Keanu Reeves "The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth."

But who wants the truth anyway? Sure, most of us are happy enough living in a world in which we commute for hours every day, pass up on our dreams, or even seeing our friends & family, because we're too broke, too busy or too damned tired, and go to bed each night trying not to think about war, famine and the other horsemen of our modern apocalypse that we can't or won't do anything about. And at the moment we don't have much of a choice anyway. But you know what? When the Matrix comes along I won't be the only one thinking about pulling on that blindfold myself.

I'll take the blue pill thanks.
Image: The Matrix (via: Nassim Teleb)

The trouble with Daleks

No wonder they're pissed off all the time

The other night, caught betwixt sleep and wake, an image and a realisation drifted into my head and back out again seconds later: Daleks can't knit.

A report in the Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges summarises recent research, which has found that regular knitting can convey a number of health benefits, including:

• Reducing high blood pressure
• Relieving stress
• Developing hand-eye coordination in children
• Keeping arthritic hand joints limber
• Reducing the risk of Alzheimer's disease
• Increasing self-esteem
• Aiding in recovery from surgery or illness by keeping the patient relaxed and restful

No wonder that Daleks, condemned by their historically warlike behaviour (and 1960s BBC budgets) to have an array of kitchen utensils for limbs, show little or no aptitude for it.  There can be little doubt that low self-esteem lies behind much of their seemingly unprovoked aggression towards the universe in general; perhaps being able to take out some of their frustration through more creative outlets would enable to them to come to terms with the loss of Davros (he did all the fiddly work) and their constant unsuccessful confrontations with their many-faced time-travelling nemesis.

The poor things would need an adaptor just to use that screwdriver
Image: BBC

If the Daleks are being given a rest for the foreseeable future (although we know the future to be changeable and far from linear), perhaps they'll have time on their hands (claws? suckers? manipulators?) with which to find a new way to express themselves. I for one plan to pick up some sticks and learn the ropes (threads? yarns?) one of these days; both in order to stave off some of the ravages of old age and to be able to produce one of these little cuties:

EXTERMIKNIT!
Image & pattern from Entropy House

In the meantime our time-hopping tin-tyrants might be better off starting with murals.

Self and public image could be improved no end through helping in community projects
Original images:  Thai Tourist Info, Starstore

The claw is a useful tool for threatening puny humans, or for holding a paint-roller to help liven up the local neighbourhood with cryptic messages

Lack To The Future

Last weekend I went with my family to the London Science Museum. In some ways I wish I hadn’t.

Don’t get me wrong; the museum district in London is one of the greatest assets the city has, and time and again throughout my life I have wandered through their various halls and exhibits and marvelled at the profusion of STUFF looted from distant places and times. I still feel this way when I step through the arched magnificence of the Natural History Museum and even on the rare occasions that I’ve ventured into the V&A, but on this visit I felt something was missing.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sciencemuseum/3751098099/in/photostream

Walking through the entrance (and another of modern life’s now-ubiquitous bag-searches), I found myself once more surrounded by the comforting grandeur of our mechanical past. Huge flywheels that tower over the milling crowds, and engines big enough to walk through speak of lofty dreams and the subjugation of nature by sheer wrought iron and willpower.  Past these to the Space exhibit, where rockets litter the rafters and shining lunar-landers stand frozen in the act of disgorging recreated history onto the virgin surface of a faux moon.  Here were the captive dreams of a million youths; preserved in amber for the inspiration and betterment of mankind. “Behold these wonders and dream of those to come! Then seize those dreams and build them of silicon and perspex and probably tyvek or something!” they called to me and to countless others as we gazed upon them through our hope-filled 1980s eyes.

But what of that future? In the late 80s my world was rocked when interactive computer simulations appeared at the museum. “What? I get to specify the size, fuel-weight and payload of a rocket, then watch it plough into the earth in stick-form? In only several dozen button-clicks and a moderately short loading sequence? The future is now!” Word spread, attendances boomed and interactivity became the order of the day. Walk into nearly any large museum now and you will find yourself surrounded by screens and buttons and things that go beep or whoosh or flash. The small child of my youth marvels at the magic cameras that project your thermal image onto a screen or displays that let you view a small patch of cityscape in 360 degrees by turning the screen around.

The small child of today though? They couldn’t give a toss.

The problem is that technology caught up again. What self-respecting nine year-old is going to get excited about mashing a barely-responsive touch-screen that tells you a series of facts about plastics when they spend their week at schools with digital projectors and interactive whiteboards and have now, in their free time, had to put away their Wii or Kinect in order to do so? It’s like dragging a ninja across town to see a display of Woolworths disguises and Nerf weaponry.

Not even trying. – it’s the little things that take the shine off

When my family went to the Science Museum last weekend, do you know what held my nine year-old sister’s attention longer than anything else and elicited her only “Wow!”s? The displays of gradually-decaying waxworks in the near-deserted rooms upstairs, charting the gradual evolution of medical technology. Computers and touch-screens she sees every day, but slightly unnerving papier maché surgeons hovering over Victorian dentists’ chairs are a genuine novelty. “You mean someone actually made these? But there are loads of them! That would have taken ages!” For the children of today, the technology of the past is the real wizardry.

All well and good, you might say. But what, again, of the future?

Feeling a creeping sense of despair rising through me, I consulted the museum map on a quest to restore my faith and to inspire in my sister some of the watery-eyed optimism that I had felt so long ago.  But where was it? Where was the look forward to what might be? Was it altogether absent; replaced by another gift-shop or corporate installation? No, wait! There! Far off in the corner of the map, right at the back of the top floor, was an apologetic-looking little room marked “In Future”. Leaving my sister & step-sister behind with my dad to queue for the Red Arrows 360 Degree Flight Experience machine (£9 a ticket and a half-hour queue for a 3-minute ride that they later described as “Alright.”), I set off at a literal run in search of the future I had feared lost in the rush to the present.

Image: sciencemuseum.org.uk

Off past the Red Arrows I flew, then through the History of Flight (the suspended planes of which still have the power to awe me) and… oh.

 The future's out there, somewhere...

  

Um, up a small ramp, around a corner, up another short ramp, through an inconspicuous door, around the IMAX, along a dark, notably-deserted, corridor and finally around one more corner to what must be the most remote part of the Science Museum; only ventured into by the most intrepid, the most determined and those who’ve got lost after going to the toilet at the IMAX. Still, the starry-eyed child in me was guessing the whole way at the sorts of futuristic delights that would await us when I at last reached my destination. “I wonder how they’ve managed to fit all the giant robots and space-TVs into such a small room? Probably with a teleporter or a shrink-ray or something,” it babbled…

This is what greeted my eye. This.

Stolen from the set of Doctor Who or Red Dwarf in the 1980s

From what I could gather it was a machine for entering personal messages; possibly to be displayed on that funky ring that hangs over the main hall displaying rapidly moving text that nobody can read. I couldn’t gather much from it, however, because it was broken. Apart from that, and another the same at the other end of the room, “In Future” was largely an empty room. There was nothing interesting on the walls, floors or ceiling; no partitions or cases; just three large, tilted, circular tables onto which had been projected some sort of Wheel of Fortune game (the same at all three tables) in which participants spin a wheel to find out when they’ll die depending on various randomly-assigned socio-economic and lifestyle factors. Rather like a flattened-out table-top fruit-machine at which several people can stand, simultaneously being bored without any hope of cash at the end of their mindless virtual button-bashing.

The future is a big empty room. We'll probably have to sell the furniture to pay for the projecty-tables.

But perhaps this is what the future holds.

Perhaps when museum’s curators and planners went to the greatest minds available and asked how best to represent the future that may someday greet us, they were met with the response: “Well, we’re all probably going end up in artificially-lit, windowless rooms, bashing buttons on tables while we wait to find out which aspect of our lifestyle is likely to kill us first. Oh, and you’ll probably be able to send short messages to be displayed on a big hoop or something.”

Do you feel lucky? Or just horribly, horribly sad...

It’s a cop-out though, isn’t it; no matter how apt. It’s like when zoos have a sign pointing to a room containing “The Most Dangerous Animal On The Planet” and you walk in to find out that all it contains is a mirror. “Ah, yes I see. It’s funny because it’s true." Lazy, cheap and depressing, but true.

When I trudged back to meet up with my family a short time later they asked me to show them the pictures that I have now posted above. “What’s that?” remarked my distinctly underwhelmed step-sister, “A game show?” I was suddenly reminded of Don’t Scare The Hare: a gameshow that recently raised a ripple of rubber-necking interest when it appeared like a floating car in the river of TV, before disappearing with barely more than a few apologetic bubbles.

  

In the show Jason Bradbury (off the Gadget Show), with narration from Sue Perkins (off lots of nice things), guides families through a number of vermin-themed variety gameshow tasks in order to avoid traumatising the eponymous 4-foot tall remote-controlled robotic hare. Does it need to be robotic? Does this add anything to the show other than the ability of the co-host to rotate its ears? No. It’s like Twiki from Buck Rodgers: theoretically a nod (and a cheekily raised eyebrow) to the everpresence of technology but in practice simply superfluous and irritating.

Image: mirror.co.uk

It's all fun and games until someone turns out to be really, really irritating.

Image: http://www.imglego.co.cc

So what do we take from this? That, once again, and in the week that the USA officially pulls out of manned space-flight, it is clear that ours is a generation that can’t be bothered with the future any more? That, like the vaguely-interactive table-top games I found at In Future, we’re jaded enough to know that most of us are doomed to spend our lives standing around repeatedly jabbing the same buttons until the future arrives anyway, according to whatever pre-programmed course or chaotically-assigned sequence it’s running down? Or does it just mean that it’s only fair for a museum, even a Science Museum, to be largely devoted to the past? Perhaps what I was really looking for all along was some kind of Future-House, in which eyes and minds might be dazzled by the wonders of human ingenuity.

Image: Getty Images

Where were you when I needed you?

Poor Science Museum; it’s not your fault the future overtook you. You're a brilliant museum and I love you. But for now it looks like if I want to see the future and hold it in my hands I know what I need to do: I’m going to get a copy of New Scientist and read it in a mobile phone shop.

So it goes.

Keep A Lid On It

I don't want to die. There, I said it.

Of course I accept that it's bound to happen sooner or later (although if my plan to have my brain scooped out and placed in a robot body comes to fruition I'm aiming for a lot later), but that's not to say I want to gamble with it now.

With all this warm weather we've been having recently (and with all the physiotherapy I've been having for my accursed gammy wrists) I've decided that this is the week that I'll dust off my bike and start cycling to work again. I've even considered signing up for one of those Boris Bikes that seem to be filling the streets of late; bringing a certain continental joie to vivre to our busy, ill-tempered and overcrowded road network.

Image: UPI news pictures

The problem is that the joy of the Boris Bike (for me) is the idea of carefree opportunistic wanderings through the Summer streets of London. I want to be walking down the street, see a bike rack and take off for a jaunt to explore strange new sights and possibly find a market or something else suitably decadent.

What I don't want is to have to be carrying around a bike helmet at all times, just in case. As it is I watch these blissful free-spirits wheeling past me with a mixture of envy and pity as I see the sunshine on their faces and the Reaper on their shoulders.  Figures from TFL show that 34 people were injured riding Boris Bikes within the first 2 months of the scheme commencing, with 13 requiring emergency services. While this, of course, represents only a tiny fraction of the journeys made, it still leaves me unable to see a passing Biker, wind blowing in their carefree hair, without feeling a powerful desire to scream at them “Get a fuppin lid! For the love of God!”

A former colleague once told me, in hushed tones, that the whole bike helmet thing is an industry-led conspiracy and that in accidents in which one falls sideways off their bike and hits the side of their head on the edge of the pavement a helmet is actually more likely to result in a broken neck. I told him that I would note this and would henceforth promise to daily curse the charlatans who had sold me a product that would only protect me if I were to be involved in any number of more conventional accidents or one day headbutt an oncoming van.

Anyway, where was I?

Ah, spontaneity, yes. So the other day I got to thinking about how, if at all I and others of my lily-livered ilk might be able to hop on a bike without lugging a lid. Having dismissed bike-mounted helmets (hygiene, size and theft problems) and futuristic force-field-generating headbands (not real) I got to thinking about whether anyone had managed to create a decent portable bike helmet. And it seems they have, with varying degrees of success and plausibility.

Image: Ribcap

www.ribcap.ch

First up is the Ribcap beanie, which is essentially a padded hat. Designed in the first place for snowboarders, it is, even according to its own publicity, on safer territory protecting you from a tumble in the snow than a tarmac stage-dive. At £60 a go, however, that’s quite a wad for something that’s essentially “better than nothing.”

Image: CyclingChat.co.uk

For those looking for safety above style there’s the funkily-monikered Dahon Pango folding cycle helmet. This is a “proper” bike helmet, with sides that fold up to make it more portable. In fact, according to the manufacturers it folds down to half the size of a traditional helmet, but since this is practically all in terms of depth it’s still going to take up a fair amount of space in your bag (in fact practically the whole bag used in the demonstration video) and at a cool £80 it’s none too cheap either.

Finally then we come to a jaunty offering from France, with a collapsible helmet that really meets my personal brief. If you, like me, want affordability, economy and above all portability, why invest in padded wool or funky new-age plastics? What you want is wearable origami.

Image: Yanko, via Treehugger.com

Created with an eye to the Paris Vélo (the absentee father of Boris’ Bikes), this helmet has been produced by designers Caroline Journaux & Adrien Guerin to be the perfect solution for the opportunistic cyclist. While there is no mention on the Yanko site of exactly how much protection it would offer in the event of a fall, or even of when (or if) it will ever be for sale, this is a product on which I will be keeping a close (and careful) eye.

Image: Yanko, via Treehugger.com

And in the meantime, if anyone comes up with a bike that fits in your coat pocket or that headband-mounted force-field I’ve been banging on about, please let me know. I’ll be the one sitting on the bus, wishing it was a bike.

Welcome to the World of To-Meh-rrow

Last week Google's regular novelty banner featured an interactive image celebrating the 160th anniversary of the first World's Fair, known as The Great Exhibition and held in the purpose-built Crystal Palace in 1851; a showcase, inside and out, for the best the world had to offer - not just the cutting edge of the day, but a spyglass through which ordinary people could glimpse the world of tomorrow.

Image - Google

Last night I found myself talking to a friend who had just come back from a day at Grand Designs Live. "I don't know what I expected it to be," she said, "but it was just a load of stalls selling paint. I wanted to feel inspired; I wanted to feel... something..."  It turned out that she'd gone to the show in the hopes of finding rather more inspiration than she'd expected from the Ideal Home Show ("Yeah," put in another friend, "that was shit."), but it turns out that's simply not what these shows are about; they are trade shows, pure and simple. This may come as no surprise to anyone (it certainly didn't to me), but it got me thinking about what we, as a society, seem to have lost.

Earlier in the day we had been to visit the Dirt exhibition at The Wellcome Collection; a history of dirt, grime, disease and the ways in which societies have sought to tackle them. In one corner there was a collection of posters & other materials from the first International Hygiene Exhibition, held in Dresden in 1911.

Image - Franz von Stuck (via Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden & Wikipedia)

Image - germanhistorydocs

Here was a gathering to showcase the pinnacle of medical science from around the world, organised by the owner of a mouthwash company, who would a year later go on to found the German Hygiene Museum. And although, yes, many of the exhibits were products for sale, the Exhibition represented the idea that by bringing together and sharing these ideas we could create a better world (Sadly in this case, the same museum and even the same spirit would later be co-opted by the Nazi regime to spread the "science" of racial medicine, until it was bombed by Allies during WW2. It has since been rebuilt and returned to its original purpose of spreading genuine medical knowledge.).

All of this got me wondering what had happened to the spirit of the Great Exhibition and the World's Fairs that followed it. What happened to the moving walkways, the walking, talking, smoking(?!) robots and cities under the sea? What even happened to the World's Fair?

Moving walkway, Paris 1900
Image - Brooklyn Museum Archive (via Wikipedia)

Underwater City, Futurama, 1964 New York Word's Fair
Image - Jeffrey Stanton

It turns out that the World's Fair is still alive and supposedly well (competition is well underway to decide the host for 2017/2018); it's just that, well... nobody cares any more.

In the 1950s London rebuilt its South Bank for the Festival of Britain and people flocked from around the world to marvel at what was possible and what they could expect to see in the future. In the year 2000 we got the Millennium Dome which, as far as I remember from my visit, was notable for having a 2-storey McDonald's with a lift (and some kind of machine from BT that would have put your face onto a little 3D Elliot cycling E.T. across the sky, if only it had been working at the time).

So what changed? Maybe not enough. Maybe after more than 150 years of waiting for the walkways, the robots and the bubble-cities we simply became too cynical. And not just we, the public, but the corporations that used to sell us these visions of the future that inspired short-term dreams but ultimately long-term bitterness at their undelivered promises. Perhaps it was safer to rip up the beltways, send the robots to Butlins and let us all literally watch paint dry until we gave up caring about the future, unless it was in terms of mitigating our impact on it.

Titan the Robot
Image - Butlins

Maybe I'm completely wrong though. I'm sure there are plenty of people ready to point out that there are many more trade shows now annually than we would have had in a decade 50 years ago and that events such as E3 and MacWorld continue to draw crowds of millions a year to marvel at the shape of things to come. I know this because I looked it up. I know this because of an army of friendly geeks on Twitter. But I won't be packing up a picnic to go check them out with my grandparents, my mum and my fictional dog.  It seems that, for now at least, the World of Tomorrow is a thing of the past.

A Blog In The Ocean

When I told my girlfriend I was starting a blog her first question was "What's it about?". This gave me pause, because I hadn't really intended it to be about anything really. I had envisioned it as being something like Seinfeld, but without the jokes, or characters (she hates Seinfeld anyway), but bearing in mind I actually couldn't think of anything to write about the project sort of stopped there. Until I got all pissed off about the Grand Designs Home Show and decided to throw a pebble at the internet and see if it skims.

Here are words.