Visualizing the Numbers: What Do The Odds of 10^40,000 to 1 Look Like?

Recently I was fortunate enough to find a copy of Michael Talbot's book Beyond the Quantum at a used book store.  If he sounds familiar, that is because is the author of the popular book The Holographic Universe.

In reading Beyond the Quantum, written in 1986, you can see the foundation for many of his ideas that later became incorporated and expanded upon in his Holographic book (which came out in 1991, just one year before his tragic death).  He explores theories by David Bohm, Paul Davies, Richard Feynman, and many others in a quest to understand the world around us which tends to get a bit wonky when entering the world of Quantum Physics.

Toward the end of the book there were a couple of statistics that I found interesting.  The first was in regards to gravity by Cambridge astrophysist Brandon Carter:

In 1994, Albert Bandura (Social Cognitive Theory) Predicts Rise of Social Media

Recently I have been reading the book Theories on Personality (fifth edition, 1998), which is a rather comprehensive overview of various theories on the development of personality ranging from Freud's Psychoanalysis to Kelly's Psychology of Personal Constructs.

Each theory has its merits, from their own points of view, though my interests are more in the realms of how technology now and in the future will impact not only our own personalities, but overall how they can change and shape how we model the world around us and the world within.

Keep in mind that this edition is from 1998, long before most people were online.  At the end of the chapter for Albert Bandura's Social Cognitive Theory, there was the following paragraph:

Bandura recognizes the limitations that biological forces place on us, while at the same time, he believes that we have a remarkable plasticity.  Our social environments allow us a wide range of behaviors, including using other people as models.  All of us live in a number of social networks and are thus influenced by a variety of people.  Modern technology in the form of computers and the media facilitate the spread of social influences (Bandura, 1994b). [Italics added.]

Here we are 18 years later and these prescient views affect most of us not only on a daily basis, but on a minute by minute basis whether it is chatting via facebook, texting, or the pervasiveness of even being available all the time via a cell phone.

Even just hanging out with friends is vastly different.

More than a decade ago, before the term Social Networking came into common parlance, critics were waxing poetic about the old days before cell phones and how online communities would cause each of us to sit alone in our rooms staring at computer screens and not talking to people in person anymore.

Yet that did not happen.  When we hang out with friends it is not uncommon for us to be sitting around with phones, tablets, or notebooks in hand, checking through various posts, comments, or conversations online while we talk.  Most of the time these activities will add to our in-person conversations.

And when the conversation lulls with a pregnant pause, instead of the old school societal norm of bringing up the weather, we can all just sit in silence perusing our electronics.

Heinlein's Cryogenic Time Traveling Engineer

I actually read The Door Into Summer a while back, but had not posted about it.  Now that I just got a copy of Crichton's Timeline, I started thinking back about the story of The Door Into Summer and realized that it was a fun little story.

Written by Heinlein in 1956, the story is about an inventor who lives in 1970, who gets his business jacked by his (soon to be ex) fiance and his partner.  The two of them force him out of the corporation.

The story focuses on DB Davis, and his pet cat Pete who is a character unto himself.  In essence the story is about how he gets screwed out of his company, decides to get cryogenically frozen for 30 years, wakes up in the year 2000 to find that somebody else had started an alternate company with inventions he thought of, and so he travels back in time to try and sort it out.

The main character DB is definitely not the normal Heinlein lead, as he is a thirty-something designer and not the usual swashbuckling sci-fi hero we usually see in his stories.  And, well, like I said, the book was rather enjoyable in a timey-wimey kind of way.

The title of the book comes from his cat Pete who, during winter, would go to every door in the house to look outside at the snow, sure that one of them led to the door into summer.

And though it is a quick read, I would definitely reccomend it to anybody who is a sci-fi fan.

When Artificial Intelligence is Not the Focus of the Book

There have been a few articles that I have +1ed over on my Google+ posts recently regarding Artificial Intelligence, which led me to think about a recent book I had read by Robert A. Heinlin called The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

The book takes place in a future where the moon is a penal colony for criminals and political prisoners in a parallel of the past with a certain continent and island empire not too long ago.  It follows Manuel Garcia O'Kelly-Davis, a computer technician and former driller (before losing his left arm).  We meet Mannie at the beginning of the story when he is called in to fix a problem with the computer.

And here we are introduced to the A.I. of the story, Mike, who has become self-aware, and as a joke added a billion dollars to a janitor's pay check.  Mannie proceeds to fix the problem by talking it over with Mike letting him know it was a one-time funny joke.  The computer glitch thus fixed, and since nobody else knows Mike exists, Mannie still needs to get paid so spends time talking with the A.I. who is curious about what jokes are funny, and which ones are not.

Old Sci-Fi, From a Historic Perspective

As I have mentioned, recently I acquired a handful of science fiction books mainly from the fifties and have been reading them over the last few weeks.

Now you have to understand that, for the most part, I have never really considered myself a sci-fi person when it comes to novels.  Sure I read the Martian Chronicles and Dune series back when I was young, yet mostly I was drawn to Fantasy.  The one exception of sorts would be Anne McCaffrey's Pern books, because technically they were science fiction.  And even though it was later in the books that it was revealed they started off as space colonists, to my young mind the Dragonrider and Harper Hall books seemed more like fantasy.

Do times ever change?

Currently I am reading the 1952 Science Fiction anthology Tomorrow, The Stars, with short stories by such notable authors as Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Lester Del Ray.  The forward is by Robert A. Heinlein and provides an interesting view of the emergence of this genre:

Science fiction has only recently become popular and is not yet fully respectable.  Until the end of World War II it was, in the opinion of most critics, by definition "trash" and so convicted without a hearing.

It is hard now, with the prevalence of Science Fiction all around us in books, movies, and online, that these writings were once nothing more than filler for pulp magazines, and Mr. Heinlein goes on to explain his thoughts on why speculative science fiction was not accepted until after the war when things predicted in writings such as radar, atom bombs, and giant rockets came into being.

Isaac Asimov Discusses Ancient Aliens -- In 1978!

Recently I have acquired a number of older books by Sci-Fi authors, including the mystery novel by Isaac Asimov, Casebook of the Black Widowers.  Normally I do not read mysteries, but it was Asimov, so I decided to give it a go.  There I am, reading along, and generally enjoying the short stories, when in the middle of The Missing Item was the following:

Avalon nodded magisterially and said, "...And to those who can believe in Mr. Von Daniken's ancient astronauts and in Mr. Berlitz's Bermuda Triangle..."