World in the Satin Bag

10 Things You Learn About the Internet (in a couple months)

/

(Note: @amisuggests on Twitter remarked that this post sounds angry. I’m not sure why. Perhaps the tone in some of the items below suggests anger? For the record, this post isn’t actually an angry post, nor a reflection of some personal experience with the below items. These are general assessments of the Internet, some of them good and some of them bad. I’m not angry at all. I haven’t the time to be angry for the things mentioned below.) The last few months have been pretty intense. I’ve attended two conferences, I’ve had all manner of problems in my personal life, and a mountain of unnecessary Internet drama that would make Jonathan Swift roll over in his grave. Through the course of all of this, I’ve come to a series of conclusions about what I’ve learned about the Internet: YouTube is probably the biggest intellectual cesspool to ever exist. Worse than the United States Government. Worse than the most radical of political activists. Trying to have a conversation there is like trying to convince a tiger not to eat you. You keep talking, but nothing changes, no matter how persuasive you are. The Internet is the premiere place to say whatever the hell you want without worrying about or even considering the consequences. People you meet on the Internet will often violate their own personal rules to get back at you. This is attached to #2, obviously. These same people will make a public spectacle of your personal life if they think it will lead back to you and, in effect, harm you. And if you’re smart, you learn to shrug it all off like the petty, vindictive, childish nonsense that it is, without letting it rule your life. Because…it’s just the Internet. E-commerce is the greatest thing to happen to the modern world. I can buy anything I want online, and that’s freaking awesome. I can literally find information on anything I want on the Internet. That may not sound impressive anymore, but imagine a world in which we had to spend weeks searching through a library of books. I’d still like to do that, but I don’t have time to do that for everything I want to know. The Internet makes knowledge available to everyone. That’s kickass, in my book. Trolls and other inflammatory Internet types are almost as bad as child molesters, and sometimes fit into that latter category. Hulu, YouTube, and other video or audio services have revolutionized the way we watch or listen to anything. Likewise, they’ve revolutionized how we produce and distribute visual and aural content (i.e. music). Podcasts, webshows, and so on. There has never been so much free entertainment in the history of humanity. Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, and all these other nifty ways of engaging with the WWW are just the tip of the iceberg. Just wait. Something is coming that will change the way we do things now so much that it will cease to resemble the current way of doing things. Just look back to the beginning of the Internet and see the difference between then and now. The Internet is evolving at a rapid pace, and we have to try to keep up with it. There you have it. So, what have you learned about the Internet in the last few months? What about in the last year?

World in the Satin Bag

Question: Loading Time For This Blog

/

Someone recently brought up the unusual load times for this blog, which prompted me to make some changes to the content in the sidebars. With that in mind, I was wondering if those of you who are my readers could load up the blog and let me know if you notice any lags in load time (particularly lags in parts: do the sidebars load at about the same time, or are they noticeably distanced?). Thanks for your time!

World in the Satin Bag

Hitchens vs. D’Souza: An Interesting Debate

/

I just got back from a debate at the University of Florida between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza on the truth of the existence of God. Truly an interesting, if not downright amusing, experience. Some quick thoughts from me:–Hitchens absolutely won the debate. It wasn’t because he made the best arguments one could possibly make on the “no” side of the issue (I think others have made better ones), but because D’Souza really phoned it in tonight on both the logic fronts and the common courtesy fronts (ad hominem was the order of the day from the “yes” camp). –I find it rather interesting that, in this particular debate, the “yes” side (D’Souza) attempted to use material-world analogies in order to explain metaphysical-world realities, without noting the irony in their being irreconcilable. The fun thing about these analogies is that as soon as you apply the realistic framework of the world all of us agree exists (with the exception, perhaps, to those philosophers who try to argue that maybe we don’t exist, or know if we exist, and so on) to D’Souza’s arguments, they fall apart entirely. It’s like saying “I’ll talk about this apple as though it were God” without realizing that your audience can see the apple, but cannot see God. –There were a few crazies during the audience Q&A. I suppose that shouldn’t be a surprise, but I thought it was great that Hitchens (and D’Souza, sort of) took the attacks launched at him in stride. He’s been at this long enough, obviously (not just with religion, but with a host of other controversial topics), so he knew exactly how to deal with such things. –Hitchens and D’Souza are both quite good at making jokes about their respective opinions and the other side, and in good taste. I was happy about this fact because I think if they had been more mean-spirited it could have turned out nasty for either side (during the debate and from the audience). The audience responded fairly favorably on both sides of the issue, actually. –People who get into the line for book signings should have a book to sign. Hitchens got a little upset with this couple who tried to hand him a card instead of a book…I did too, because I wanted to thank Hitchens and D’Souza for the talk, but apparently Mr. “I can’t be bothered to show up on time to get a copy of the book” had to ruin that moment. Overall, I think the debate went rather well, despite the fact that D’Souza seemed very much out of his element. His arguments seemed sound if you didn’t think deeper about them, but the second you took that extra step (as anyone, religious or otherwise, should), most of the arguments fell apart or could be directly refuted by historical or scientific evidence (D’Souza did get a few facts wrong, unfortunately, which did not win him any favors from Hitchens or some members of the audience, religious and otherwise). Now all I can hope for is a debate between Dawkins and the guy who runs the Discovery Institute. That would make my year!

World in the Satin Bag

If I Had a Spaceship…

/

…with faster-than-light capability, without all the time paradoxes and other realistic nonsense that eventually ruined the fantasy of the science fiction pulps; if I had that, where would I go? I would head to every star that could sustain life, each with a reasonable habitable zone where planets might arise, or where we know planets already exist. Why? To answer, once and for all, the age old question: are we alone in the universe? Because, hey, if you’ve got an FTL ship and you don’t have to worry about time dilation, fuel (a problem for current propulsion models), and so on; if you’ve got that, then why not head out on a 30 second trip to Alpha Centauri and see a binary star close up for the first time ever, looking for that one little planet that might very well put truth to the words of countless science fiction authors who have proposed life around our binary cousin and in the universe (trinary, if you want to get darn specific)? Why not see the check every potentially habitable rock for signs of intelligent life and come back with an answer, laying to rest Fermi’s Paradox and establishing into law (or modifying) Drake’s equation? That sounds like a fantastic way to spend a few days in an FTL spaceship to me. What about you? So, if you had a spaceship with faster-than-light capability, minus all the negatives typically associated with a realistic vision of FTL, where would you go and why?

World in the Satin Bag

The West, Science Fiction, and No Future

/

Over at Genreville (on the Publisher Weekly’s blog), Josh Jasper asks a very intriguing question: Perhaps the future really belongs to people who’re hungry for it, not the ones who take it for granted. Does western culture take the future for granted these days, whereas rising cultures don’t? I think this really depends on who you talk to. Scientists, by and large, would likely take the future very seriously, and many geeks and technology-oriented individuals consistently display their love of the present and the future of the industry (in technology, of course, thinking about the future in logical terms is quite impossible, since the industry is shifting so rapidly that one can’t be expected to keep up). But scientists, geeks, and technology-oriented people are not the majority of the population in the West. They’re a minority; a fairly vocal minority (at least it seems so in the 21st century), but a minority nonetheless. Most of America (and other Western countries, I would assume) is fairly introverted, and I don’t mean that in a negative way. Most of us have to be, particularly now in this difficult recession. The future of things like space travel (kind of a thing of the past, really) holds no weight in a culture struggling to keep jobs, find jobs, pay bills, survive, and be happy (whatever that might entail). I think the issue here isn’t that we take the future for granted, but that most of us (obviously not myself) see no value in much of what Jasper is talking about. Yes, it has value. Absolutely. I would be a lying scumbag if I said that the future of space travel (near future) has no value, or that people aren’t excited about the futures of medical technology. The problem seems to be that, in the west, so much of our daily lives don’t feel as though they are influenced by the things that used to be the future or by what will eventually be our future. We don’t make an A to B connection between, say, the guy who predicted the cell phone in a science fiction novel or movie to the product itself. We benefit, most certainly, but the connection is not made explicit in our daily lives. This is a particular problem with space travel, as mentioned earlier, because as much as space travel is wonderful and has taught us so much about the universe, our planet, and even ourselves and our fellow critters, most people down on the ground and outside of the scientific and technology-oriented communities don’t see the benefit. And, countries that are now getting into the technology world seem more excited because, in that initial boom, it is exciting. When the Internet first started exploding in households, that was a big deal in the United States. Same with the car, the cell phone, and so on. But normality eventually reduces that to, well, normality. We take for granted such things because the value decreases with the increase of acceptance in culture. How does this translate into written science fiction (something Jasper brings up as clear separation between the West–who seems more focused on near future dystopia and far future impossibilities–and the non-West–with a focus on the excitement of the technological revolution)? Well, you could argue that all the problems I’ve discussed above have led to a public disinterest in that excitement. Space travel isn’t exciting to most. It’s mundane at best, and worthless at the worst (I disagree, but that’s me, and I’m not in that community of naysayers and for-granted-takers). The technological revolution is, in a way, over for us, and thinking about a future where we’re doing basically what has already been done, just on a grander scale, isn’t necessarily appealing or exciting. The future is, perhaps, mundane in the West for those who fail to see its value in their daily lives (not because they’re stupid, but because we have done a piss poor job of instilling that love and excitement one needs to make light of the present). So, certainly we take the future for granted (I’m intentionally conflating the future and the present here). In some ways, that’s a bad thing. How do we get that back into our culture and our science fiction (it’s there, just marginalized)? I don’t know. I’m not sure we can, at least not on the scale that would make for meaningful change. The inevitable future of cultural consciousness, at least as I see it, is that every country eventually reaches the point of mundanity about the future. For now, the non-West is booming with excitement because, well, to finally get your own space ship in space or to do all these new, futuristic technological wonders that you’ve yet to do (even though others have) is exciting. Wouldn’t it be exciting if tomorrow was the first time the United States put a man into space, or that someone had thought of the idea in a book and it was the first time for us, ever? Of course! But that’s not us. We’ve done it already, and the future/present isn’t offering something tangible for the masses to demonstrate that there’s still something to be that excited about. But, enough about what I think. What about you?

Scroll to Top