Tag Archives: creativity

“The laser’s red glare/The bombs bursting in air…”

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In this post-nationalist, one-global-economy world, we still talk about the brand effects of nations.

We expect that powerful lasers will protect our ships and our borders, slicing bullets in half and cutting planes/drones/UAVs to pieces.

“Look out for the hazardous debris falling from the sky!” cried Chicken Little presciently, paraphrasing.

Speaking of borders, our crackpot scheming pseudoscientists devised a method to protect borders from tunnels — causing pinpoint earthquakes that unsettle the ground several hundred metres in any direction, shifting the soil around reinforced smuggling tunnels, hopefully collapsing them without knowing they’re there.

Are we ever in as much danger as we hear security companies try to sell us that we are?

What is the percentage chance that your home will be broken into?

Have you or anyone you know ever been robbed or mugged?

Has anything been stolen from you?

Have you stolen anything (including office material and work hours from your employer)?

As we create the next generation of our species, we take these questions into consideration.

Can we genetically encompass a moral compass?

What about a lack of fear of others?

It’s easy to create a new species of spider which has no moral compass.

Like we’ve discussed, “eat and/or be eaten” rules Earth, a moral compass unnecessary.

How much of a civil society do we need when our DNA is significantly modified to handle new offworld environments?

How does one carve a niche when one’s genetic code designates one’s predilected destiny?

How much education can we cram into our genes?

What is the ideal citizen in 2037, 25 years from now, not far from an imaginary moment in Unix history?

Adaptable, of course.

What else…?

Who is Felicia Day and why have I never heard of her before today?

Part 2 of II: Randomised email pingbacks

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Do you ever receive email messages that show someone has tried to use your website’s email system to send email?

Here is the second part of two unplanned blog entries about randomised messages on the Internet — who says computer don’t talk to us semicoherently?  Can you imagine an off-Broadway minimalist play, “Waiting for G@dhelpme.plz,” where the players read these random messages to each other?  Have they already done so?:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at .
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.

<>:
Sorry, no mailbox here by that name. (#5.1.1)

The following message to <> was undeliverable.
The reason for the problem:
5.1.0 – Unknown address error 553-‘sorry, this recipient is in my badrecipientto list (#5.7.1)’

The following message to <> was undeliverable.
The reason for the problem:
5.1.0 – Unknown address error 550-‘Invalid recipient: <>’

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

—– Original message —–

Received: by  with SMTP id ;
Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:14:01 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <>
Received: from [] ([)
by  with ESMTP id ;
Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:14:01 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: neutral :  is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of ) client-ip=;
Authentication-Results: ; spf=neutral ( is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of ) smtp.mail=
From: “LinkedIn.Invitations” <>
To: >
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2012 10:43:59 +0430
Subject: New invitation
Message-ID: <>
Accept-Language: en-US
Content-Language: en-US
x-linkedin-template: inv_exp_member_02
x-linkedin-class: INVITE-MBR
Content-Type: text/html; charset=”utf-8″
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
MIME-Version: 1.0

—– End of message —–

Delivery has failed to these recipients or distribution lists:
The recipient’s e-mail address was not found in the recipient’s e-mail system. Microsoft Exchange will not try to redeliver this message for you. Please check the e-mail address and try resending this message, or provide the following diagnostic text to your system administrator.

The following email account(s) do not exist. Please check the address(es) and send the message again. Thanks:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at .
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.

<>:
This mailbox does not have enough space to receive your message.

<>… User unknown

Failed to deliver to ”
mail loop: too many hops (too many ‘Received:’ header fields)

Hello ,

We’re writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact () may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group. A few more details on why you weren’t able to post:

* You might have spelled or formatted the group name incorrectly.
* The owner of the group may have removed this group.
* You may need to join the group before receiving permission to post.
* This group may not be open to posting.

If you have questions related to this or any other Google Group, visit the Help Center at .

Thanks,

admins

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Delivery to the following recipients failed.

This report relates to a message you sent with the following header fields:

Message-id: <>
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2012 09:22:02 -0200
From: “” <>
To:
Subject: eFax: You have received new fax

Your message cannot be delivered to the following recipients:

Recipient address:
Reason: Remote SMTP server has rejected address
Diagnostic code: smtp;550-Mailbox unknown. Either there is no mailbox associated with this you do not have authorization to see it. User unknown
Remote system: dns;. (TCP|) ( server ready)

The original message was received at Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:24:38 -0400 (EDT)
from []

—– The following addresses had permanent fatal errors —–
<>
(reason: 550 5.1.1 <>… User unknown)
(expanded from: <>)

—– Transcript of session follows —–
… while talking to .:
>>> DATA
<<< 550 5.1.1 ><>… User unknown
550 5.1.1 <>… User unknown
<<< 503 5.0.0 Need RCPT (recipient)

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at .
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.

<>:
Unable to write /dev/null: invalid argument. (#4.3.0)
I’m not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

An Apology

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We want to apologise to you Earthians.

A friend of ours who used to work in the roadside gem mining tourism business in western North Carolina — where “seeding” buckets with gems is common practice — was responsible for cleaning the scoop on the Mars rover, Curiosity, before it left your planet for the planet of war.

As a practical joke, he “seeded” the scoop on the rover so that when the rover processed the Martian soil, the seeded material would give a hilarious test result for scientists to ponder.

Or so we believe he first said.

Since then, he has retracted his original statement and is seeking psychiatric help in order to avoid jail time which would have been administered by the Inner Solar System Scientific Crime Council in a summary judgement.

We are evaluating other test equipment on board the rover, wondering if the purple haze we see in some images is a result of him covering camera lenses with rubies, sapphires and other gems he collected during his youth.

The Apple computer corporation is cooperating in this investigation.

The U.S. State Department has denied providing consultation to the worker on the ability to backtrack from one’s initial statements and expect to be believed ever again.

More as it develops…

The Children of Peenemünde

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In our rush to judgement about the acts of others, we sometimes forget the children.

Where I spent most of my youth, the primary employer in our little town was a chemical manufacturing plant — the workers’ children were encouraged to be line workers, supervisors, engineers, scientists and/or managers for the plant.  Some worked in HR, janitorial/maintenance services department, or marketing, too.  Support companies provided auxiliary services and jobs.

Sure, we had a few fish kills in our town, increasing our catch-n-release program.

And at least one other factory belched out its share of microscopic malodorous miasma.

Rumours circulated about increased rates of cancer and mental disease due to our industrial base.

However, the employees had a high expectation that their children would follow the trail to the carpark and the factory gates, after secondary school/university, to make/design chemicals.

To an enlightened soul, it might seem to be a Sisyphean effort, children repeating their parents’ work.

With that, let us turn to other parental choices.

In a time of war, young men and women are sent to a secret location to develop a special weapon.

Young men and women, being young men and women, seek closer relationships.

Eventually, children are born.

Leading us here, to a graveside service, where, for one of the last times, the children born in Peenemünde during WWII gather to say goodbye to their parents or their parents’ friends.

Tonight, my wife and I sat down to eat dinner at Cafe Berlin, a local German restaurant open for over 20 years.

Toward the end of our meal, a man and woman sat at an adjoining table.

I recognised them from the graveside service because my college friend, David, had introduced me to the man, Klaus, and his wife, telling them about our college days.

Klaus, along with Dieter and others, are the children of Peenemünde, a group rarely discussed in history.

Klaus was going to follow his father and work for NASA but, rejected by another German scientist who thought hiring Klaus, a child of a fellow German NASA scientist, was showing favoritism, ended up in a career for Owens Corning, instead.

[On a side note, I write this from an Owens Cross Roads zip code — similar sounding name, n’est pas?  But no useful correlation.]

I rejected working toward a chemical engineering career and moved away from my hometown; Klaus was rejected from working toward a NASA career, moving away from Huntsville and “all the Germans” with whom his life, from the very beginning, had been closely associated.

These are important discoveries for me as I plot our species’ history back 1000 years from now.

You see, we conjure up our own images when a word like Nazi is spoken but there never was a universal person who represented the word itself.

It was a symbol toward which a large number of people were directed, as all symbols, just like these letters and words, direct us toward certain thought patterns and sets of actions.

The German scientists, engineers, and secretaries who worked at Peenemünde were part of the nationalistic efforts led by a few who espoused Nazi ideals.

History has already spoken for what made people part of Nazi Germany so I will not dwell on the subject here.

We are swept up by historical movements, some of which we see as we participate and some we only see in hindsight.

In Huntsville, just like other parts of the world, military R&D is both a technological and economic leader.

Innovation in military R&D spinoffs and dual-use projects find their way into chemical plants and fiberglass insulation plants, just like the children of Oak Ridge and Peenemünde become employees of them.

Today, I stood at the crossroads of history in a cemetery and wanted to cry out that we live not only in one of the most free countries in the world but the most habitable world within reasonable travel distance, also.

If only you could see what I see 1000 years from now, you’d want to cry out, too, at the nearsighted vanity and selfishness that has substituted for cooperative competition lately.

Do you know what it’s like to remodel your genetic code to make yourself into a whole new species?

Have you seen Homo genius sapiens reproduce itself in sufficient quantity to outpace the reproduction rate of our species?

Do you have a completely reprogrammable organic subsystem that you can swap in and out of your body like a car engine or computer module?

Can you imagine two or three people walking up to each other and melding to become one new person for the sake of the whole rather than the reduced ability of the separate parts?

When the definition of life is so volatile, so interchangeable, we will not care to bother with symbols that held us back in historic measures.

The children of Peenemünde, the children of Oak Ridge, the children of places like Semipalatinsk — they are the true experiments, the offspring who inspired the events occurring right now in front of you, setting us on a path toward a milestone in 13730 days, which leads us closer to our lives, our reconstituted sets of states of energy, 1000 years from now.

But I’m getting ahead of myself again, aren’t I?

I knew I shouldn’t have written another blog entry but storylines like these have a life of their own, finding their way out of the deepest, most secure locations, especially one’s thought sets.

In public, I am a neophyte, a N00B, pretending to barely understand how a smartphone works.

In private, the hidden laboratory churns on, giving me new ideas to share with you here or in the barely-audible whispers we give to a select few on whom we experiment in broad daylight.

Admittedly, this Doctor Heckle/Mr. Jibe persona gets the best of me sometimes, but it is a price I’m willing to pay in my sacrifice to feed the storyline, which feeds upon me, an entity riding my back, weighing me down one moment, and lifting me weightless into the air the next.

Until next time, dear readers, whether it be here or an escapee from my smartphone…

Before we part, let us look ahead a little bit, see where some of my millionaire and billionaire friends have stopped wasting their money on plastic surgery, focusing on more important biological research, growing new versions of themselves, starting with body parts made from personalised stem cells, until they can no longer distinguish their “original” bodies from their newly [re]constituted ones.

Then, one day, their stem cell “children” see where they came from and create whole new lines, new species, that take the concept of sentience to a level never imagined — from interchangeable parts to interchangeable individuals to interchangeable species, and then…?

That’s all for now.  My stem cell child is crying for attention.  No reason to deny it a well-deserved nurturing moment before asking it to volunteer for an experiment we have yet to dream up together, being of one thought set but different levels of experience with the known universe.

Am I alive?

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While I wait for my new LCD monitor with HDMI connection to arrive, thus turning my smartphone into my desktop/laptop PC at home and Internet phablet on the road, I shall write here once more.

That, and the overwhelming reader response to ending this blog, as usual.

This afternoon, I attended the funeral of a 98-year old man, met his widow, and am friends with two of his children, one who is a girlfriend of a longtime friend of mine from our college days in Knoxville.

I also saw some familiar faces from my time here in this community — 27 years or thereabouts — people like Peggy Sammon and Butch Damson.

Ninety-eight years young…

I cannot imagine living so long.

Meanwhile, a house wren hops up and down the window screen, looking for food, digging through the debris in the old, broken, rusted gutter hanging off the rotting eave.

I did not know the man who was buried today.

I felt like a fifth wheel, a stranger inserting myself into the graveside mourning of others.

So, to hide my face from the crowd, I stood behind a pocket camera snapping pics for the daughter and friends in Germany who could not be there while we who were gathered recited prayers together for the deceased.

I am of the walking dead myself, but my friends say Jesus loves me, this I [should] know…

Sorry, that last bit slipped out, a verse from a children’s song.

I did not know the man who was buried today but I was able to join his family and a group of strangers, sharing a subculture full of familiar songs, poems, prayers and rituals.

It was a window opening up the sounds and sights of my childhood.

It was a window of opportunity, listening to the stories about Rudi Schlidt from his closest friends and relatives.

Of course, I can’t hear so well so I’m not sure what anybody said, using their body language and voice inflection to tell me when I was supposed to smile, laugh, cry or do nothing but listen attentively.

Rudi was nearly twice my age when he died.

He made important contributions to the advances of rocket science.  He, like many in this town, could easily say, “As a matter of fact, I am a rocket scientist/engineer.”

His wife was secretary to Wernher von Braun, who may or may not be familiar to you.  Today, her face still shines with beauty at 91 years of age.

There is more and less than meets the eye, to be sure, but today I simply let the sights suffice to register my presence on this planet another day, amidst those who registered the absence of a friend, [(great)grand]father, coworker and fellow member of the community.

Am I alive?  I don’t know.  I explore the universe from atop this tiny planet of ours and wonder.  That’s all I care to know.  The rest is none of my business.  Gott behüte.

Auf wiedersehen, Herr Schlidt.  From the crowd at your graveside service today, know that you are/were loved.  Gott liebt dich.  Gott segne.

Hypersimplificationalisms

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It took a warning from my email system to make me realise that I had been making my life more socially complex than I had intended when I retired from working in an office environment several years ago.

Dozens of blogs I found myself following, filling my email inbox.

Hundreds of friends and family on social networking sites I found I had accumulated, creating a constantly-flowing social “news” stream.

Thousands of websites I found I was tracking.

Billions of people I found I had written about.

It took an interview with an author on the der spiegel website to make me realise that seeking social connections is one of the aspects of being a member of our species.

Instead of simplifying my life, I have jumped right back in to social connections, albeit mostly virtual ones.

Back to simplifying my thought sets so I can return to contemplating the vast universe of which we are a tiny part that we rarely see through the cloud of socialising that normally defines us.

To the dozens of fellow blog writers and hundreds of social network friends, I thank you for your hospitality and kindness.  However, I bow gracefully and exit from your lives.

I have other pursuits, none as important as friends and family, but ones I want to look for, nonetheless.

I had used this blog as a means of safely storing my written thoughts.  However, with my smartphone I have a new means of storing my thoughts without having to put them out here for everyone to read, allowing me to explore thought patterns I have kept to myself in order to avoid offending any of my friends and family who might see themselves in this continuous satirical viewpoint through a serial book of parallel lives.

Have, have, have…there I go again, sending Morse code to the universe!

This blog has come to an end.

Hardware-in-the-loop

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The one area of intelligence that my wife and I agree on is the definition of X-in-the-loop.

A machine that requires input from a person is a human-in-the-loop device/system.

All commercial automobiles require a person to operate the automobile (but that is quickly going to change).

Is a road full of automobiles that require no human input a sign of intelligence?

What about the Curiosity rover on Mars?

What features can we list that show autonomous functions in one subset, intelligent functions in another and a set of features in the subset of the autonomy/intelligence junction?

What makes the autonomous functions of my central nervous system intelligent or conscious?

What about the automatic connection of my laptop computer’s WiFi radio subsystem in this room to the WiFi router in another part of the house and then on out to the Internet?

What is pure hardware-in-the-loop intelligence like, no HID required/allowed?

If a database is updated by a software program which seeks to maximise its collection of available knowledge, knowledge that it alone determines is valuable, is that intelligence?

And what about the age-old arguments of the conscious-vs-subconscious thought sets?

These words are just a few that pass through my thoughts before I make a last-second decision upon another upon another, etc., until I type these words in a coherent whole row called a sentence, in exclusion of and in competition within a finite possibility (you won’t find Croatian or Sanskrit here without the use of an online translator, for instance).

If the Internet is now an extension of my thought set, am I a human-in-the-loop extension of the Internet?

I sit here, taking an occasional sip of black label Irish whiskey (“Black Bush”), looking at the clock, which shows 22:38, and contemplate going to bed, where I will not be directly disturbed by the Internet, although my dreams (my subconscious?) may work through thought patterns I’ve had today about artificial machine intelligence which date back to my childhood days of the 1970s and the promise of LISP/ELIZA and other AI programs that relied on pattern-matching (why does the image of trees appear in my thoughts right now?).

…data structures…hmm…

On the floor next to me, in addition to “Dictionary of Quotations” by Bergen Evans, “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert and “The Schizoid World of Jean-Paul Satre and R.D. Laing,” are two books that captured my attention several years ago: “I, Cyborg” by Kevin Warwick, and “Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence” by Andy Clark.

From them, I contemplated a novel I write using software agents in a database, with every word/phrase/sentence/paragraph/chapter hyperlinked/connected such that the story changed based on reading the reader’s online self, with a voiceover and accompanying 3D video that interjects based on the reader’s vital signs, the novel frequently switching to a series of random words to shake up the reader’s thought patterns, slipping in and out of the reader’s online life — social life, blog, game sequences, website, etc. — so that the reader soon could lose track of self completely in a world of half-plagiarism, half-homage collage.

As I write this blog entry, my software agent has jumped from suggesting the word I’m typing to suggesting the rest of the end of the sentence.

After hundreds of blog entries, my software agent has jumped from suggesting the rest of this sentence to write the rest of the blog entry for me.

Based on the research I perform on the Internet every day and the books I have lined up to read the rest of the week, as well as following my daily patterns, including eye movements, my software agent has written the rest of this week’s blog entries for me, suggesting that I skip using the Internet altogether today and go for a nice, relaxing hike in the cool autumn morning, using my “Internet of things” kitchen appliances to assemble a sandwich along with the rest of my meal/snacks to eat that my smartphone will remind me of when my vital signs show sign of hunger along the trail.

Readers of this blog can now no longer tell when I stopped writing these blog entries, or when I sometimes step in as a person-in-the-loop to tweak a blog entry as a surprise, because both I and the software agent use the trick of occasional misspellings and grammatical errors to give an ambience of authenticity to my/its speedy typing and lack of postcreation proofreading/editing.

Is this intelligence?

If all I do between computer programming gigs and life coaching, other than go out to eat, shop, attend football games, watch movies and travel with my wife, is write blog entries here, your only connection with me, could you say I am more or less intelligent than the output of my software agent?

What if my writing became more oblique and more full of interesting Internet links, would I (or, rather, my proxy) seem more intelligent?

When all of us depend on software agents to supplement or (perhaps) better yet, substitute for our online lives, is the Internet intelligent/conscious?

When software agents are interacting with software agents to create unique output that I and the other people who created their software agents would not have thought of, is that a sign that the Internet has become intelligent/conscious?

Is a “train” of autonomous automobiles traveling on a road an intelligent/conscious entity all its own, receiving stimuli from the environment and reacting as one just like a caterpillar or earthworm from our anthropomorphic view?

How can I say that my typing here is anything more than an autonomous response by my set of states of energy to the environment?

Am I really just a hardware-in-the-loop device like any other set of states of energy in the universe?

Why should I label “me” as a special condition of intelligence or consciousness?  Because I say I can see myself write this blog entry while I “see” thoughts that do not win the competition to make this blog entry a coherent sequence of symbols we call words?

The wooden mannequin on my desk has no autonomous functions, does it?

What about gravitational pull holding it down on the desk?

What about the photons interacting with its surface, indicating a series of paths from the incandescent light bulb inefficiently emitting more heat than light that reflects off the shiny surface of the mannequin into my eyeballs?

Obviously, I’d be more convinced if the mannequin started talking to me in a manner I could understand — arm gestures, leg movements, etc.

I shake the desktop and the mannequin shakes in responses.

We have a relationship with each other, if not an understanding between us.

Is that a sign of intelligence/consciousness?

I cannot assume that what I anthropomorphically or anthropocentrically want to call intelligence/consciousness is what I will see when the interconnected wires and fibers we call the Internet becomes more than an automatic response to our stimuli, which is really all I am in one view, aren’t I?

Never assume the event horizon hasn’t already been crossed just because your definition of the impossible is the only one you can envision.

Hindsight is mostly 20/20.

Symbiosis is asymptomatic, in my book (but that’s the whiskey talking, not me).

Good night!

13,755 Days to Go

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In the warm evenings of the year, I sleep on a sofa in the sunroom, often woken up by my wife on her way to work.

This morning, after my wife left, I heard the pitter-patter of tiny feet and opened my eyes to see a squirrel licking up the dew on top of one of the skylights.

On the driveway yesterday, a line of ants moved back and forth from one location to another, unencumbered by hungry predators, the ants walking around dry leaves and hickory nuts that fall from trees in this miniseason of early autumn.

The sounds of residential construction hit my ears — hammering, sawing, splintering wood — and I wonder about not just the waste and fraud in the medical business but the waste and redundancy in construction.

As long as it’s cheaper to dump leftover construction material in landfills, we have no incentives to drive innovation in construction methods unless there’s also a profit motive.

How can we increase the profit motive without imposing fees or adding regulatory disincentives?

For instance, what happens to old material — shingles, tiles, sheet metal, nails, underlayment — after a house is reroofed?

Where are the innovators in the reuse/recycle field?

We can easily see the potential energy of water behind a dam but we can’t see the potential energy of material in a house before remodeling?

I look through the lens of my eyes and all I see are sets of states of energy devoid of anthropomorphic qualifications.

What if we all saw life that way, how some states of energy bond more readily than others, rather than superficial qualities that are in meme states only?

Outside the window, the redbud leaf that is full of holes and starting to yellow has a sense of beauty about it but beauty is truly only in the eyes of the beholder.  The holes chewed in the leaf indicate a set of states of energy found the leaf material useful for strengthening its bonds, not for any sense of beauty I may assign either one.

Let us not confuse our brain’s excess capacity for making sense of the world around us for more than what it always is — adapting to our environment to improve our chances to reproduce our sets of states of energy.

Some useful websites for today:

Fifty years until the next generation of real innovation?

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I’m floating in a thought set of two Thai teas right now so my ability to pull memories out of the nether reaches of the brain is muddled.

What is the difference between idol worshipers and the idolised?

What makes groups of people find true innovation?

Imagine the following conversation…

= = = = =

Today, we have brought together some of the brilliant geniuses of the past (as opposed to the non-brilliant ones, that is) — Tesla, Eastman, Marconi, Edison, Nakamatsu, Einstein, Khayyám, Curie — in order to find out their thoughts about today’s revolution in technology.

Moderator: “Gentlemen and lady, welcome.”

All: “Thank you.”

Moderator: “During this time of year, technology vendors tell us about their latest offerings in the open market.  We’d like your opinions about their engineering achievements.”

Curie: “I am a scientist, not an engineer.”

Einstein: “Me, too.”

Moderator: “No problem.  We only want your opinion about the practical applications of research you performed in your lifetimes.”

Curie: “Please proceed, Monsieur.”

Moderator: “Thank you.  Over the past few days, we have seen many devices demonstrated by company executives that are meant to simplify…”

Eastman: “Are you saying that executives themselves are simplifying something?”

Moderator: “No.  Let me finish and you see what I am trying to say.”

Edison:  “As both inventor and company man, I can tell you that simplifying your work for the public is no easy challenge.  Why, look at Tesla here.  Does anyone remember who he is.  I bet Westinghouse would have a thing or two to add if he were he.  By the way, where is he?”

Moderator: “Well, we put out a call for him but instead, strangely enough, we received an RSVP from a musical act calling itself AC/DC.”

Edison: “Very interesting.  Yet, you also invited me.  Were you trying to send a message?”

Marconi: “Who, me?”

Moderator: “No.  Please let me continue…”

Curie: “Gentlemen.  Let our moderator finish what he had to say.”

Moderator: “Thank you.  Anyway, we have a lot of devices to talk about so I’ll get right to it.  We have placed on the table in front of you several of the latest products — some of them still in the prototype stage — that we would like you to comment upon.  Let’s start with this one, the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx HD.  Who would like to comment first?”

Tesla: “Okay, I will bite.  What is this interesting toy?”

Moderator: “This is a mobile phone.”

Tesla:  “A phone, you say?  Where is the receiver?”

Moderator: “Well, that’s the thing, sir.  You see, it is the receiver.”

Tesla: “A-ha.  I see this is like a tiny television, is it not?”

Moderator: “Yes.  Good analogy.  You’ll also be glad to know that it uses wireless technology to send and receive radio signals…”

Marconi:  “A wireless?  Why didn’t you say so?  How do you power this device?”

Moderator: “With a battery.”

Edison: “AC or DC current?”

Moderator: “DC.”

Edison: “Very exciting.  I can see why Westinghouse chose not to show up.  What about this musical act, AC/DC?  Did they finally decline the invitation?”

Moderator: “No, they decided to show up by proxy.  Here, let me show you.  Mr. Marconi, if you will hand me the phone…?”

Marconi: “Certainly.”

Moderator: “I’ll just bring up the music app…”

Eastman: “‘Music app’?”

Moderator: “Oh, sorry.  This phone has its own built-in memory…uh, well, not unlike camera film…”

Eastman: “Really?”

Moderator: “No…I mean…well, Ms. Curie, your research into radioactivity, combined with Einstein’s work on relativity, has opened up many engineering and science fields, including work on erasable memory.”

Tesla: “You can erase memories now?  Fascinating…”

Moderator: “Well, not human memories, I mean…”

Tesla: “Oh?  Well, that’s too bad.  Imagine being able to erase ordinary memories from your mind so you could create more room for important research…”

Moderator: “Anyway, let’s get back on schedule.  Inside this phone, like most of the devices we’ll review today, are miniaturised computing and memory units, not unlike the analog computers some of you are familiar with.  Back to the demo!  Here is what the rock band AC/DC sounds like…” [plays “Back in Black” by AC/DC]

Einstein: “Very interesting use of distortion…”

Moderator: “Yes, these are electrified instruments.  If you gather closer, you can see the band performing.”

Curie:  “Looks like that young man is wearing his pants a little short, n’est pas?”

Einstein: “I am impressed that the men can see what they’re playing with their hair so long.”

Moderator: “Yes, I understand what you mean.  Anyway, let’s move on.  Here is the next device, the Nokia Lumia 920.”

Tesla: “Why is it sitting on that little hot plate?”

Moderator: “Well, sir, this is exactly the sort of thing I thought you’d appreciate.  The ‘hot plate,’ as you call it, is a wireless charger for the battery.”

Tesla: “Wireless electricity?!  If I was still alive, I would be sainted for this, wouldn’t I?”

Moderator: “Yes, sir.  In fact, there is a movement to do just that.”

Tesla:  “All those years in isolation, fearing that no one would understand me in this or any century, let alone on this planet…”

Moderator: “And for you, Mr. Eastman, this phone has a camera.”

Eastman: “What do you mean?”

Moderator: “In fact, there are two cameras, one that faces away from you and one that faces you, which detects your face and will turn off if you stop looking at it.”

Eastman: “Amazing.  But this is all it can do?”

Moderator: “We have more product offerings to show you from manufacturers such as LG, HTC, Amazon and Apple…we can get to those later.  So far, what do you think about our incredible technical achievements?”

Einstein: “I don’t know.  I mean, we had telephones and cameras in my day…”

Tesla: “And I demonstrated wireless radio so long ago…”

Marconi: “No, I did.”

Tesla: “Whatever you choose to believe is up to you…”

Curie: “But what do they do, exactly?”

Moderator: “Madame, these devices — the smartphones and tablets, as we call them — allow scientists and doctors from around the world to gather together in realtime.”

Eastman: “So you have solved the problem of teleportation?”

Edison: “Yes, has the ultimate goal that us scientists, engineers and inventors kept from the public — traveling through space and time — reached fruition?”

Moderator: “Not exactly.  Check this out.  You can see one another’s faces and hear your voices nearly instantaneously, though.”

Tesla: “And all this takes place wirelessly?”

Moderator: “Yes.”

Tesla: “This is all you have achieved in the decades since I’ve been gone?”

Moderator: “Well, not exactly.  We have sent men to the moon…”

Curie: “No women?”

Moderator: “That’s right.  But more than one woman has gone into outer space…”

Curie: “…and cured cancer by now, I imagine.”

Moderator: “Not exactly.”

Together: A collective sigh.

Tesla: “So what you’re saying is that the work we’ve done is just being worked and reworked all over again, combining and recombining the hard years of research for which we sacrificed our lives, our reputations, our…”

Einstein: “Precisely my thoughts.  I suppose by now someone has absolutely proved or, God forbid, disproved my theories and moved on to more important science?”

Moderator: “Not exactly.”

Einstein: “I see.”

Nakamatsu: “You may think that these are unimportant achievements but I can tell you that the research does not progress as fast as you think it does.  Just like in your day, there is so much competition that a lot of redundancy prevents inventors like us from making significant progress.”

Khayyám: “These smartphones, as you call them.  What else can they do?  The tablets appear to be a magic slate of some kind.”

Moderator: “Yes, sir.  Let me show something that you might find interesting, as simple as it seems to us today — the graphing calculator function.  You just plug in the formula here…and a graph of the formula, or function, is displayed there.”

Khayyám: “Wonderful, wonderful.  It is poetry in motion!”

Tesla: “The more I see these things, the more I ask myself whether you have carried my research to its conclusion.  Can you control minds with these smartphones?  Is there a universal mind behind them?”

Moderator: “Sort of.  Some people call it the web browser-based search engine.  Others call it wikipedia, baidu or google.”

Khayyám: “‘Google’?  Is that a mathematical term?”

Moderator: “In a way, yes.  Some say it is an intentional misspelling of the word ‘googol,’ one followed by 100 zeroes.”

Khayyám: “So the universal mind is truly mathematical?  It is just as I thought.  I can return to my eternal meditation upon the true meaning of the philosophical poet who dabbles in mathematics.”

Moderator: “Well, that’s about all the time we have.  What I’m gathering from you is an intriguing mix of disappointment and satisfaction.”

Tesla: “Yes, your devices are fun to look at.  However, where are the brilliant minds of today?  Have they not advanced science any further?  Are they just building upon our old research?”

Einstein: “I suppose the atomic bomb is a thing of the past by now, given what you’ve shown us, opening up young people across the world to break down barriers of ignorance and connecting together their joy and vigour, ridding the world of unnecessary violence.  No, wait, don’t say it!”

Moderator and Einstein in unison: “Not exactly.”

Moderator: “Thanks again for joining us.  Since it seems I have not completely impressed you with our ‘all-in-one’ devices, let’s reconvene in…let’s say, oh, another 100 years and see if I can’t knock your socks off, as the saying goes.”

Curie: “Don’t call me until you’ve found a cure for radiation poisoning.”

Tesla: “Don’t bother me until they’ve found more practical applications for my inventions like mind control or creating earthquakes to move mountains.”

Khayyám: “Call me anytime but give me more time to wake up from my meditative sleep, next time.”

Einstein: “Hey, if you don’t have to put me back to sleep right now, I won’t complain.”

Nakamatsu: “Wasn’t the floppy disk a great invention?  I thought so.  The tiny memory card there is not so different, is it?  Let me show you what I think it’ll turn into next…”

Edison: “I want to know one thing.  How many iterations will it take until those things are so tiny they’ll fit inside your ear where DC power is the only way to go?  Take that, Westinghouse, wherever you are!”

Marconi: “I’m with Tesla on this one, despite our previous differences.”

Tesla: “It’s about time…”

Moderator: “Yes, the concept of time is still something we share in common.  Until next time, dear readers!”