Dense Memories

Sony has released/leaked specs for a 2 terabyte memory card. Before I hype things up though, that doesn't mean that a 2 terabyte card will be out soon - that just means that they've figured it out and it might happen someday. The next step will be to release flash cards with high capacities like 64 GB and higher.

I used to have a PSP and over time I managed to collect quite a few of Sony's Memory Stick Pro Duos. It's pretty amazing holding a little piece of plastic thinner than a piece of cardboard and only a little larger than my thumbnail that also holds several movies, games, pictures, and music.

My PC's hard drive is only 250GB, I have another external hard drive that has another 250GB. Neither hard drive is full yet. The external hard drive has about 50GB worth of ebooks.

A 2 Terabyte flash card smaller than your thumb is moving into the realm of adding expansion to the mind. I don't think it's known how much 'hard drive' space the brain has but why would it matter when you can plug a few microsofts into your brain with an entire library built in? Forget memorizing books so you can recite them, just carry the library of congress with you!

Via SonyInsider

The Kindle Turns Books Into... Kindle?

Is this the future? Are books really finally disappearing?
A few years ago E-Readers were a novelty gadget. Nifty but not very common or useful. Suddenly, however, it seems as if every company is scrambling to get a piece of the cake. Amazon, Sony, Barnes and Noble, and others, are trying to get the biggest slice.

Newspapers are struggling with the growth of the internet and many may soon fade. Unfortunately it seems like journalism is entering an electronic era and newspaper stands are probably going to disappear. Internet TV is becoming more common with 'internet only' TV shows that will begin to put pressure on even television. TV killed the radio star? Maybe someday it will be the Internet killed the sitcom star.

The great thing about some of the newest ereaders is their internet capability. Sony missed out with their latest generation but Amazon is using the Sprint network and the PlasticLogic is using AT&T's network to bring you your very own hitchhiker's guide. Make sure you've bookmarked all your favorite wiki's and you've got no reason not to know something.

Continuing Amazon's attempt to burn paper media, you can get some newspapers delivered daily to your Kindle. Coupled with the ability to view blogs, a few thousand books... why should we keep printing on dead trees? E-readers are smooth, futuristic, and even green.

I doubt that ereaders will completely destroy printed media. We still have radio shows even though we've got television, and we've still got libraries even though books are cheap and mass produced now. We may begin to see more 'digitally exclusive' books soon though. I imagine novellas and short stories may become more common too. They can be turned out and distributed much faster than thick hardback novels. Just write it up, get an ISBN, and contact amazon to start distributing.

What Amazon REALLY meant by calling it the 'Kindle'

Under 300

Today officially marks the day that I am under 300 pounds for the first time in 2 years. To mark the occasion I decided to make another blog post. I figure this will be a good way to keep updating my blog.

Right now my current goal is to turn my new PSP into an ebook reader. I'm not that into handheld gaming... I think the last handheld console I owned was a Gameboy Color. The PSP has been out for a long time but I never felt inclined to buy it until I heard about bookr... a neat little app for 'homebrew' psp's that lets you read pdfs and txts on your psp.

I'm kind of an ebook addict, I've probably got a couple thousand ebooks stored on my hard drive in a folder called "The Library" I think I have more books than would be humanly possible to read in my entire lifetime... and some of them would probably bore the hell out of me. When will I read The Calculus Gallery Masterpieces from Newton to Lebesgue?

But I have read a few books under the ebook format... the Ringworld series, Ender's Game, Ian Kerner's "She Comes First"... y'know, all books I wouldn't want to be caught reading in public. It's great because most people think that I'm playing an MMO or chatting with friends or on myspace, but in truth I'm actually reading a book on my laptop.

There are lots of ebook readers out there right now. A very popular one at the moment is the Kindle which gives you unlimited free internet access, so you can go to websites like wikipedia. The fact that such a device was created and sells means that there's a market for it. I think more and more people will get used to reading books on little screens, especially if the devices feel like a book.

Via XKCD

It's pretty exciting living in the future... I just expected it to have aliens... Why aren't we colonizing the Moon or Mars yet?

See you at 290 pounds!

Time Machines

I've been reading about time travel lately. I had forgotten this gem of science fiction/fantasy for awhile and rediscovered it lately when reading about the future of human evolution.

I can't count how many times I watched the old Time Machine from 1960. My parents thought cable TV would rot our brains and we lived in the middle of nowhere. My awesome grandpa recorded some cable TV for us and we had some videos of several hours of nickelodeon, and a few other recorded channels I don't remember.

One of the videos though, happened to have the old 1960 Time Machine on it. I probably watched the movie 100 times or more during my childhood. When the new one came out, I may have been one of the few people in the theater who actually remembered how good the old one was.

This DeLorean kicks ass.

HG Wells didn't have a very glamorous theory on the future of humans. The 2002 version had humans that were sexy, smart, and just like us. They even spoke english. The 1960 version had a bunch of dumb blondes fumbling around eating plastic fruit and watching each other drown.

But the story HG Wells wrote was so dark they actually censored him. After saving Weena [my old friend called her Weiner], in both movies, the protagonist fought the Morlocks, won, and went home. Except in the newest movie where the time machine fucking explodes and wipes out the Morlocks.

Weiner.

In the book, the protagonist doesn't care about Weiner, he wants to know the future. He travels into the future again and -snip-, sorry, the publishers didn't like what happens to humans and made him create a new draft.

In his original version, the protagonist goes into the future and kills some weird animal. Upon further inspection he realizes it was an evolved version of the Weinerhumans he had encountered earlier. They had lost their intelligence, and become mere cattle to the now arachnid-like Morlocks.

Clearly a race of Arachnids.

In the new version HG Wells wrote, he just gets rid of this scene altogether and the world gets dominated by crabs and then the sun starts eating planets. Hardly packs the same punch.

I like this story because it is a punch in the gut. So much sci-fi involves humans conquering the galaxy, evolving into über geniuses, or just becoming gods. And it happened to easily. We kept making our lives easier for ourselves until eventually we just hired an entire underclass to live under our cities helping us live out our awesomely leisure filled lives. We became dumb, weak, and a race of pussy communists. The underclass, apparently became dumb, savage, blood-loving hardcore republicans or something.

Then everybody became animals - there was no longer a drive for intellectual and physical development. It was as if McDonalds and video games took over one half of the world, and the blue collars took steroids and ate everyone.

I can kind of see that happening. People are getting lazier, and physically weaker. However, another trend suggests people are actually getting smarter. I don't exactly see how humans could evolve into a bunch of retards, but we could atrophy. If we don't use our upper brains would they atrophy and become vestigial? Could you imagine some version of humans in the distant future realizing that fat thick stuff in their skulls was for doing stuff with? It'd be like finding out that the appendix actually does shit.


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