What's Fun?

I like speculation about the future as much as anybody. I enjoyed Edward Lerner's description nanobots in Small Miracles and I regularly read web sites such as Next Big Future. However, imagined technologies are not as fun as engaging characters and interesting situations. I have been reading John Scalzi's Old Man's War with a great deal of interest even though it contains technological absurdities such as FTL.

Why is Old Man's War interesting to me even though I don't go out of my way to read about military combat? Simply because the protagonist is an interesting, sympathetic, guy thrown into strange, horrible, and wonderful situations as he engages in combat with various alien enemies. Though I like futuristic speculations about resource depletion and transhumanism, character is at least as important as setting in making genre fiction fun for me.

Magic -- Speculations

I am not a believer in magic in a literal sense, though I believe in a somewhat airy-fairy way that there is magic all around us. For instance, though can't dominate the ecology as humans do, animals have senses that we don't and the smarter animals are aware, after their fashion, of things we can't perceive.

For example, dogs can identify some cancers by smell, and dolphins can echolocate structures inside the bodies of other animals. It is possible that, though they can't do geometry, even simple animals could have cognitive abilities we don't. For example, a dog might perceive patterns of smells that would correspond to differences in the compounds they are smelling.

To be able to do literal magic might correspond to having a sense normal humans don't. This suggests that in a world where magic is genuine all the wild metaphor of occult writings could correspond to things directly sensed by talented people but not describable in normal language.

It might be possible, in a magical world, to come up with dry scientific accounts of mystical phenomena that were of great utility but missed entirely the human experience of magicians. In the real world the formulas H2O and CN- are both useful description of chemical compounds though they say nothing of the experiences of drinking, bathing, being poisoned, or seeing blue.

Online Education and Cost

Many people are talking about the potential of online education to bring down college costs. However, there are some flaws in this. The major one is that the sciences, the visual and performing arts, medical and psychological disciplines, and music all involve observing and or manipulating the physical world.

While disciplines that involve creating a textual product, such as creative writing or accounting, can be taught on line, the lack of need for laboratories, patients, or materials means that these disciplines are already the cheapest to to teach.

I expect major cost saving to come from areas other than online education.

Binge Eating

last night I binge ate, unfortunately. The funny thing was I was able to stop this after consuming a large amount of protein. While I still ate too much eating a lot of meat without a lot of carbs or fat seemed to effectively terminate my desire to eat without leaving me painfully full. Has anybody else with the same problem ate meat as a strategy to mitigate it?

Small Miracles

I read part of Small Miracles by Edward M. Lerner. The technological gimmick, nanomachines that enter peoples brains and alter them was interesting. However, once the protagonist deliberately altered his friends brain, I lost interest in the book.

Part of it was simply a childish reluctance to read about bad things but it also, I think, had to do with the fact that nanomachine infection led, in all hosts, to possession by a super-intelligent psychopathic personality that was motivated to spawn more of the same.

I had two problems. One is the obvious fact that psychopaths have difficultly cooperating amongst themselves. This is probably why, though you find groups that in real are lead by psychopaths, groups that consist mostly of psychopaths don't have much power. In the story, however, the psychopaths organize to present a threat to the humanity of the world.

In real life non-targeted brain alteration would probably have different effects on different people and they would not perceive themselves as all being members of the same team though they'd all have similar abilities and disabilities.

Though Small Miracles is a good story it would have been interesting to see more internal action as the people who were changed confronted their new abilities and disabilities.

College Bubble Extrapolating

Some folks say that there is a bubble in college education. That having more people going to college leads to more demand for college training from employers, but little actual gain in knowledge. The thing is, employers don't want to hire people without college training since it provides at least some evidence that their hires have something between their ears.

Now let's do some futuristic extrapolation of how the college bubble could burst.

1. Reliable services could exist that evaluated potential employees on the basis of the material that has been posted by and about them on the internet.

2. More contests, not related to college, could spring up. If this were the case you might look to hire members of the top ranking pre-accounting team in the state, rather than folks with a degree in accountancy from certain schools.

3. Large employers could offer there own training programs and move the people who do well in these up the ladder.

I'm not sure which of any of these ideas would work in real life but all of them might make fun background material in a science fiction story.

Writing Fighting

In popular fiction there are a lot of fights. I've been in only a few and all of those I've lost but here are some observations from Karate class and other places. Use them, if you want, to make your fights more vivid.

1. Reach and range matter. If you are too close you won't have power, too far away and you won't connect. You need to be aware, hopefully more aware then your opponent, of what range you are at.

2. Training for fighting is partially mental, you have to get used to looking at your enemy even though he or she is noisy and intimidating.

3. Fighting people who are bigger is hard. They are obviously more powerful then you and they also have a longer reach. I don't what the best way to do this is but I would think that grappling or coming in below their guard would be more useful than trying any kind of jumping move.

4. People, to a degree, rise or fall to their level of training. Training, except when you are dealing with extremes, is more important than innate abilities.

5. Powerful weapons, such as modern firearms,  reduce the need for skill. An ignoramus with an AK-47 is very dangerous, at least in the short term, an unskilled guy swinging his fists around much less so.

Have good and hopefully, peaceful, day.