Or James Patrick Kelly. Think like a dinosaur!

Welp. my work here is done. =)

Bubba, thank you thank you thank you for finding that John Weldon film. I have been looking for that for years now. Saw it once and can’t keep it outta my head.

Would there be a Greasemonkey option that would kick in when I’m channel surfing and if I see William Kristol on TV he’ll just be talking about pie?

When they market *that* option, I’ll seriously consider downloading my brain. Seriously, though, I”m so shallow and self-centric that my problem with the whole NanoHumanity field is the same as my problem with Libertarianism: Theoretically it might sound like an excellent idea, but the individuals I’ve actually met who are most committed are such dreary, obnoxious, undersocialized bores that I don’t want to spend a long wet afternoon in their company, much less the rest of virtual eternity. Given the choice of Glenn Reynolds forever and immanent death, I’d choose the carbon monoxide with a quickness.

mikey

It has been shown that quantum tunneling is significant in the movements of particles as massive as protons, even at room temperature, and it has been hypothesized that certain enzymes that involve proton transfers have specifically evolved to take advantage of these effects. Judith Klinman at Berkeley has been studying this.

This is a good, and interesting question. Here in ‘Silicon’ Valley, it’s been a critically important question for at least fifteen years. There were concerns that an effect called “quantum tunneling” would undermine processor accuracy at the 100Nm feature size. And many very strange, highly advanced workarounds were proposed. We are now going into production with dies at 45Nm. Still not a real problem. All we’re doing here, making processors at Intel and AMD, is manipulating electrons. Remember, electrons are the lowest mass particles that can occur and be manipulated in the world we live in, and the only Leptons we regularly manage.

So it turns out that up to some as yet unspecified level, quantum effects can be kept at bay. Science doesn’t sit back and be a victim of physics, it USES physics to manage materials and effects. That’s a good thing….

mikey

Lem has quite a bit to say about every ethical problem of note that science fiction can think of.

But probably the main thing that’s kept us from having all this marvellous doodaddery already is the fact that stupendous sums of money are wasted on things designed to kill people. Really, vast amounts are squandered on military hardware, research into better ways to make human protoplasm suffer and die, and training young people to become sociopathic enough to try to kill each other.

If things were otherwise, we’d probably already have those jetpacks and solar power, we’d have eliminated world hunger and created anti-gravity, and done all sorts of other groovy things. Except that the money (and hence research etc) has been squandered on death.

While I remember, I mentioned Overdrawn at the Memory Bank in my previous comment: that story does great work in investigating the intersection between hard storage (memory), running instructions (programming/consciousness), and locus of control (programmer/human consciousness). Gives rise to all sorts of questions and heavy thinking time, which is my idea of a great story.

Another thing I’ve noticed about science/speculative fiction is that the adventure stories and the harder tech stories are usually written by men, while the sociopolitical structure explorations are usually written by women. Has anyone else noticed this? I mean, C. J. Cherryh’s done some marvellous series about different sociopolitical structures, headlined by the magnificent Downbelow Station;Sherry S. Tepper’s got those highly emotive social crisis books; Ursula Le Guin did some marvellous classics such as The Dispossessed, and so on. I can’t, off the top of my head, think of a male author who’s done the same thing.

Oh, except that one whose name I can never remember, who wrote a book that I just loved to death, and now bloody well can’t find, thanks for reminding me. Drat yet again.

Hurrah, my friend Instant Preview saved me from the dreaded Unclosed Italics Tag embarrassment! Twice!

Yeah, and Cory Doctorow stole that idea for his awful novel “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom”. That book made me so mad I wanted to hunt him down and demand those 2 hours of my life back.

Algis Budrys had the inverse idea in his book “Rogue Moon”. There copies could be made, but the new copy was, of course, a different person as soon as the two copies started having different experiences.

All that said, I think life extension and cures for cancer are going to be way closer than a back-up firewire drive for all my stupid ideas.

Incidentally, this is a great little film about duplication…sadly I think there’s only a short clip of it available (I don’t do that Real shit).

Thge engineers in charge controlled the woman’s sleeping, waking, and moods by altering the levels of chemicals in the system. She even had arms, but the arms could not be positioned to commit suicide.

Which was all the woman wanted.

So is it still the same woman? She no longer has free will, if she ever did.

(pass that doobie over here. whose dorm room is this?)

Ya caught me mikey. Quantum uncertainty occurs at the sub-atomic level, not the molecular. Although no one round here thinks you’re a hoodlum.

But wouldn’t the electronic transfer involved in neuron activity also be at the sub-atomic level, since we’re talking about transfer of electrons? Electrons are where the Heisenberg uncertainty principle comes in.

Not bad, but wrong. The famous mathematician Roger Penrose has even postulated that quantum mechanical effects in the brain are the “Ghost in the Machine”, i.e. that these effects are the reason that artificial intelligence will never be achieved. But neurons firing involve the movements of atoms from one place to another, and therefore, quantum mechanical effects can be significant.

The only way transhumanism will allow immortality is by gradual replacement of human parts with artificial ones, and we’re a reallllly long way from that. Copies are just copies, not continuations of your consciousness.

Viz the topic at hand: Professor Booty, I’ve not read that particular Fred Pohl story, but I do have a more than nodding aquaintance with the works of John Varley, and in particular his story called The Phantom of Kansas. That one posits memory recording technology which allows you to record your ’self’ up to the current time.

And of course the issue with that is that as the heroine gets killed each time, each incarnation really truly dies, in the sense that (a) that body dies, and (b) the memories between the last recording and the death aren’t recorded. It’s a fascinating story, for a bunch of reasons, as are several of his other short stories.

His bestest everest short story, Air Raid, was sharp like a razor blade, the sort of story that haunts your thoughts for months afterwards. Years, indeed. Alas, the story was extended into a novel, Millenium, which was merely good, and subseqently made as a movie, which was appalling in almost every way.

I’m excited, however, to have just discovered that someone made a movie of one of his lighter stories, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, starring the inestimable Raul Julia. Now I’m going to have to spend lots of time trying to track that down, drat drat drat…