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Love me, love my Aggies

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An old saying goes that you don’t become an Aggie, that it is something you are from birth.  Your mindset is supposed to be more attuned to accepting the “Aggie way of thinking”, you hold some opinions that are adamantine, and that won’t change for anything.

I don’t know about any of that.  Coming from a foreign country at a young age I had no idea what an Aggie was.  College was in fact a non issue to a then 7-year-old kid recently arrived from Colombia.

It  was December of ’77 and my family and I were spending our first Winter and our first Christmas in Houston.  My mother discovered Foley’s, the local big name in clothes and housewares, in what was then the posh Sharpstown Mall.  She needed warm sweatshirts for her son and she picked an orange one with a cow skull and a maroon one with a block ATM on it.  The choice was left up to me as to which I would prefer and I gravitated towards the maroon sweatshirt.

Now, was this an example of fate making itself manifest through a simple choice in outerwear?  Did this simple choice unconsciously predispose me to one school rather than the other?  Or did the maroon jersey just feel more comfy?

I would like to point out that in between that Christmas and my application to A&M about a decade passed.  I had in fact applied to a variety of schools besides A&M including that other school up in Austin.  I had been accepted to that school as well as a couple of others but in the end A&M represented the best choice as far as engineering schools, which I intended to study at that time.

When I arrived in College Station my plan was to get on with my studies and not pay attention to any of the distractions of college life.  But being in a small town and around such a dedicated community of zealots, the camaraderie and esprit d corps  became contagious.

Some telling incidents occurred that first semester.  On a trip back home at a local grocery store an old gent approached me.  I was wearing school colors and he became visibly animated and shook my hand vigorously.  He had lost his ability to speak but the grin on his face spoke volumes.  He was just glad to meet another Aggie.

Another time I was working on the yearly bonfire.  It was around midnight and I was sitting by a small campfire resting.  An older student came by and sat with me and we started talking and talking for at least a couple of hours.  He shared a flask of something ‘non-regulation’ and a cigar.  Eventually he wandered off into the darkness.  Never did find out his name.

I began to develop a sense of community and belonging.

Now, I am not as fanatically devoted as many of my fellow former students when it comes to school ties.  I’ve known former students that won’t speak to friends and co-workers due to differences on the football field.  I remember during my freshman Spring Semester at school seeing an ad for a lecture for graduating seniors entitled “Can a t-sip (student from that school in Austin) be a friend”.  I rolled my eyes and wondered if they were being serious.  I would learn later on that in some ways they were being serious.  Happily that mindset was and never has been present within me.

But I do have to admit that I was one of those dumb Aggies that people make jokes about.

Just for the record, the first thing that they teach you at A&M IS how to write.  My first course was ENDG 105 engineering drafting and design.  I got one of those big pouches that they issue to architecture students.  A pouch full of rulers, pencils, erasers, and other odds and ends.  They then taught me how to write everything in block letters for blueprints and maps.  A habit that shows up from time to time in my handwriting.

I am one of those Aggies that stands steadfast by his convictions, feelings, and friends.

One of the things I cherish is the way that we don’t sway with the winds of change just for the sake of change.  We stand firm when it might not be the most popular or expedient way of doing things.  We will always greet and feel a familial feeling for any and all Aggies no matter when or where we meet them

I will always be one of those Aggies that wears his oversized  school ring everywhere.

That will wear maroon in a room full of orange, and that despite all the evidence to the contrary still believes that he went to the finest school anywhere.

My routes

I decided to share my walking and running routes for the past four years.

Mainly this is an excuse to air out my map making skills.  If you ever wondered what geographers do for fun, well…. this isn’t it.  I was using my mapping tools at work when this idea for a blog popped up in my mind.  By the way if you don’t have it yet, get Google Earth.  it’s a great little mapping tool.  Very easy to use and the basic version is free.

I started out with a mind-blowing 1-mile walk at night.  It took me half an hour and I came back sweating and breathing hard but it was a start.

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Then I “discovered” Hershey park and upped my game to 2 and a half miles of walking.  I would drive to the park and walk the route and within a month I had torn some tissue in my hip.  Any attempt at running was painful to say the least.  So I had to walk this route for 6 months.

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My next progression was walking to the park rather than driving.  Up to 4 miles now but still walking.  Taking a few short sprints here and there and testing out my hip.

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I hate taking the same route up and then back so for my next step up I completed a loop round the park.  Up to five miles now.  Still mostly walking but jogging here and there putting together a half mile here, a quarter-mile there.  Eventually segments would merge together.  One nondescript Saturday morning I took a chance and ran the whole course.  I actually did a victory loop at the end.

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My daily run has now settled to about six and half miles.  I keep a couple of different routes to keep from getting bored.

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If I wake up late I use my “emergency” route.  A quick 4 mile course that I can finish in less than an hour and still feel that I’ve accomplished something for the day.

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On the other hand if I wake up early I go for my 8 mile route.  Took some creative routing to get it up to 8 miles.

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Finally there’s the 16 miler.  I have failed horribly on this route twice.  I get around 13 to 14 miles before I have to walk or rather hobble home.  If I ever hope to run a marathon I need to achieve this first.  I  think I need to work up to it.  But I’m in no rush.

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What is your running regimen?

If it was easy everyone would…

I’ve been getting an education these last couple of months into some of the inner workings of real estate and banking.  I have a real estate side project that has finally begun to get going after being stalled out for a couple of months.

Sure it looked simple and easy in my head.  Just sign a couple forms, a little paperwork, and suddenly all your plans will move ahead and before you know it you’ll be a real estate tycoon.

HA!

I thought some of the terminology in my line of work was esoteric.  Well.  It is.  But it turns out to be nothing compared to all the terminology used in the real estate game.  More than once I walked out of my realtor’s office with my head spinning from all these new terms that my realtor was throwing out at me.

Then there was the lovely business of securing a home equity loan.  Bouncing back and forth between lenders till I had them pinned down to their final and best offers.  Free hint.  They will never give you the best offer on the first go round.

Never.

Then you have to let go of one lender and they react as if you’re breaking up with them.  Not fun.

Then of course the reams of paperwork at the title office attesting to this that and the other thing.  Everything copied, notarized and duly delivered.  I sign and initial here, there, and everywhere.  In the back of my head a quote from the play Faust keeps repeating over and over.

“did we force ourselves on thee, or thou on us?”

So finally it’s all in and now the fun part starts, right?  Now comes haggling with property owners, finagling with contractors, paying for a dozen little items here and there that you hadn’t considered.  Crossing your fingers that you find a tenant.  Doubly crossing your fingers you find a tenant that won’t wreck the place.

No, not that simple.  But is it worthwhile?  Ultimately only time will tell but I think it’s something I had to do and I wouldn’t have done it if I had not thought it wouldn’t succeed.

My hope for this first time out (besides the hope of making money) is that I will be better prepared for the next time that I do this and better mentally armored for this type of business.

 

Conspiracies VII The New world order and conclusions

Difficult to remember but think I came back to my dorm room after classes one November night.  My roommate, Mike, had the TV on and tuned to the local network affiliate.  The Berlin wall was coming down.  Something utterly impossible.  Something that could not be and would never happen in my lifetime had happened and I was totally stunned.  I had no reaction.

 

 

I think it was the same way for many people.  As odd as it sounds a whole way of life, a mindset, an attitude was suddenly all erased and the wheels of history had gone down a different road.  That looming specter of nuclear war that I had pretty much accepted as an inevitability had just vanished in the pop of champagne bottles and fireworks being shot off on top of a wall.  What was left?

I think that we all had to come to terms with the “new reality”.  Some looked at it in a hopeful light and decided that we could now move forward without all the baggage of the last fifty years weighing us down.

Others not so much.

Maybe with that sort of mindset in place they almost welcomed George Bush when about a year later he popularized the phrase “The New World Order” in a speech concerning the course of history now that the Soviet empire had effectively collapsed.

 

New World Order wasn’t a new phrase.  Conspiracy theorists knew it from the beginning of the 20th century when globalists such as HG Wells, Cecil Rhodes, Elihu Root and Woodrow Wilson advocated for the dissolution of national boundaries and the establishment of a planetary governing body.  Globalism became the new nefarious conspiracy to replace international communism.

Previously little known groups such as the Council of Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg group, the Trilateral commission, Bohemian grove, and skull and crossbones suddenly became more and more scrutinized.  The innate secretive nature of these groups just fueled speculation to ridiculous levels.  Now here we are 25 or so years later and we’ve little to no more information on any of these groups or plots.

Then the 90’s brought a series of disturbing incidents and vaguely defined threats to liberty.  Desert Storm, Waco, Ruby Ridge, “clipper chips”.  Certainly pop culture fed the hysteria with shows like The X-files.  Then along came the mismanaged 2000 election with hints of fraud and shortly after that 9/11.

The general level of distrust, the misgivings, the overall respect for governments, and for international bodies such as the UN has plummeted.  The American people are more leery of government and its intentions.  Anything and everything can now be a plot against the general population.  Even the most innocuous of programs such as health care seem to have an ominous edge to them.

Those in power don’t help things.  They seem rather oblivious to the complaints and blindly plunge on.

The general feeling is now that anyone with power or money or both will do what they have to do to maintain or augment that power and money at the expense of others and not just financially but in terms of liberties and individual rights.

What could happen if this type of sentiment is not addressed?  Well in the extreme cases when people get shoved too far it could lead to a violent counter-reaction.  Just look at what happened in countries in the near east when their governments failed to react in a proper and timely manner to the complaints of the great many.  Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria are great examples.

At the very least it means that more and more of the population will become disillusioned by the political process and take less of an active role in their governments and leave decisions to a smaller number of people.  A sort of twisted self-fulfilling prophecy.

What’s the answer?  More rather than less involvement with the government, real and not just promised transparency in government, a more thoughtful approach to governing that is more reactive to the fears of those that aren’t on the leading edge of change.

I don’t think that conspiracy theories will ever go away entirely but I do think that if we make things more transparent and we have a more reactive government that we may minimize the effect on the general population that they have enjoyed in the last quarter century.

November

November is a sombre month.  I know it’s right in the heart of my favorite season but I generally don’t care for November.

September and October are what Fall is all about.  The cooling weather, the changing leaves.  Pumpkin spiced everything.  I know people tend to overdo it on that but still it’s in the spirit of the season.

I remember some of the cool Falls of my childhood with some of my brothers and their friends playing football on the front lawn.

Everyone in jeans and sweatshirts playing tag football that would inevitably degenerate into tackle football.  Eating a mouth full of grass and pine needles as I got driven into the turf.

Raking, raking, raking piles of pine needles in the front of the house.  Piles that seemed to be as tall as myself.  Resisting the urge to jump into them and then stuffing them into trash sacks and getting poked all over.

School, the beginning of the school year with all its changes.  New teachers, new classes, new classmates.  It fits so perfectly with those first couple of months of Fall.  Excitement in the air as the new school football season starts and everyone is wide-eyed, hopeful, and optimistic for a glorious season.

The colors and excitement of Halloween, the first of the 4 harvest festivals recognized in western culture.  The careful planning to pick out a costume, the parties to plan and attend, the festivities to mark as the season seems to build to a crescendo.

But then November occurs.  A sort of anticlimactic feeling comes down over everything.  November isn’t a bad or harsh month.  The weather isn’t bitingly cold as January but the days after Halloween feel like a bad hangover.  The colorful Halloween costume now looks ridiculous in the cold light of November.

Trees are freshly denuded of their lush leaves and now look something like a plucked chicken shivering in the cool weather.

That glorious football season has now either totally collapsed into defeat after defeat or it’s just lingering on too long.  School has become a daily grind of getting lesson after lesson done and waiting for the next test or quiz.

November is a serious month for serious people to get serious work done.  The big holiday of the month, Thanksgiving, is itself a serious and intensive celebration of labor.  Getting food prepared, the house clean, the silverware and settings all cleaned and ready for guests and finally the family all scrubbed and polished for the saturnalian repast.

I suppose that November is meant to be a breather.  A time to mentally prepare for the next two festivals of the end of the year that come so close together.  Christmas and New Years come at the same time to herald the onset of Winter and the beginning of the year to come.

November seems to be one of those oddball months without a defined character of its own.  Like April and August it doesn’t seem to fit very well in the calendar year and just seems to drag on.

But really it’s not their fault.   Some month has to hold those slots and they just happened to be picked.

All we can really do is hope that they will pass as quickly as possible.

 

 

the price

How can my arms feel like both limp spaghetti strands and like lead weights at the same time?

The plan sort of took shape about four years ago.  The general idea was to get back into some sort of shape after decades of neglect.  The first phase which I must say that I’ve thoroughly mastered, was the walking and then running phase.

This was where the heavy work of weight loss was to be done.  For the most part that has been accomplished.  From an all time high of 292 pounds I have reduced down to 184 pounds and still counting.  Right now I am probably at the tail end of what I can accomplish through running.  I will probably continue to lose weight but I won’t be able to garner as much benefit through running anymore.

The second phase, and what has turned out to be the harder phase, the upper body and torso phase began this year.  Exercises to increase muscle mass, exercises to burn fat, exercises to increase flexibility.  So far it hasn’t gone very well.

Let me be clear.  I am not expecting to look like some sort of body builder at the end of this process.  My philosophy behind this fitness plan is somewhat similar to the train of thought that I took when purchasing my Dodge Charger.  I was not looking for a car to go out racing every weekend but at the same time I did want a car that would have the muscle to get around other traffic when and if necessary.  In the same way I don’t expect to be overly muscled at the end of this process but to definitely have the strength and flexibility necessary for whatever eventuality arises.

Unfortunately (or maybe I should say fortunately) you can’t just go out and buy a body like that from a showroom.  You have to be willing to put in the price in both time and sweat.

First I had several abortive attempts to self start the process and those sputtered to a halt after a week or two.  Then after I realized that I needed someone to keep me on course I went looking for a trainer.  Apparently a much harder chore than at first blush.

I found several ads for trainers in the local papers and websites but the offers ranged from fairly clueless people who seemed to know less than I did to die-hard workout fanatics that would have me exercising 24 hours a day.  The local health store manager offered to connect me to a trainer he knew but the trainer never called back.  Finally I got a trainer through a local gym but things didn’t work out after a month.

So I’m almost back to square one.  I know a little more about the process than when I first started and I have made some inroads into forcing myself to work out 4 times a week without excuses but I know that I am all over the place.  I need to be more focused.

The plan right now is to first of all continue working out.  Some sort of exercise is better than nothing after all.  Next to re-double my efforts and find that right guide to get me on track.  Lastly to carry on.

The plan is working.  It’s not going to be one of those overnight success stories but it will succeed.

Rivalries

It’s not the best of years to be an Aggie football fan.  The season has begun to turn sour.  But age puts these things into perspective.  Seasons come and go just as chapters in our lives begin and end and what was a disappointment this year may turn to joy the next.  I rarely let it affect my mood as I once did.  Certainly I’ve lost the fiery passions of my youth with regards to the game over the last twenty years.

I think part of that has to do with the new league that we find ourselves in.  In 2012 we broke with the schools in the Big-12 conference and moved over into the SEC (southeastern conference).  Partly to forge an identity of our own but mostly we moved for monetary reasons.  the reasoning went that we would step out onto the national stage on our own and we would no longer be subjected to constant comparison with our sibling school down the road.

Gone were the old rivalries with Baylor, Tech, and of course texas.  Saturday afternoons in the Fall.  Traditions shared from generation to generation for a century were now gone with the stroke of a pen.

Now we’ve been assigned rivals.  Yes, assigned. The league office announced in 2013 that the University of South Carolina would henceforth be our rivals.  As if they were assigning dance partners for us at some elementary school cotillion.  I hardly know anything about them, certainly nothing that would lead me to believe that I want them to be our rivals.

I look across at the rest of the conference and I have to admit that I find it hard to work up any sort of antagonistic feelings against any of them.  Alabama is the big bully of the conference but I harbor no animosity towards them.  Perhaps it’s because we beat them in our first meeting against them or just simply that Alabama is a good team and I find it hard to find fault with them.  LSU?  We’ve had some run ins with them in the past but we don’t hold much contempt for them.  The rest we really don’t know.  I don’t mean the team statistics.  Any fool can look those up online.  What I mean is that we don’t have a shared history or experience with these schools.  Perhaps with decades to come some sort of rivalries will unfold and to new generations this will seem perfectly natural.

To me it won’t.  Rivalries, whether you perceive them to be good or bad are essentially relationships. Relationships can’t, or at least shouldn’t, be terminated so abruptly.  Bonds exist, bonds that have lasted decades and ought not to be ripped away for considerations such as money or TV ratings.

I still miss those gaudy burnt orange flags, that garish marching band, that ludicrous popgun cannon, that overgrown walking hamburger, and our yearly “family reunion” just after Thanksgiving.

Starship troopers – Book review

[Author’s note – This is the next in a continuing series of book reviews for sci-fi classics.  Troopers, as I well refer to the novel from now on, is one of the more influential and controversial sci-fi novels ever written.  In it we see Heinlein’s writing begin to turn away from the juvenile novels of his early career and his move towards his more libertarian views.  The novel is both loved and hated by critics for its content and to this day sharply divides readers.  Heinlein is one of my favorites and I will no doubt review some of  his other works later on in the series.  As always, spoilers from here on out so if you don’t want to know, stop reading.]

Troopers was a controversial novel even before it was published.  Written at a time when public opinion was beginning to turn away from unwavering support for the military, the original publisher rejected the novel.  Heinlein was incensed by this rejection and decided to end his long association with this publisher and he also decided to begin writing books that dealt less with action and more with abstract concepts and ideas.

As a former military man he had the utmost respect for the military and one of the ideas he wanted to explore is what a world run by not a military dictatorship but a military democracy might look like.

One of the biggest misconceptions that the book has suffered in its history is that Heinlein was promoting fascism through this book.

During his life Heinlein progressed in his political views from being quite progressive (he supported Upton Sinclair in his bid for the California governor’s race and was quite active in the EPIC movement in the 1930s), to being quite conservative in the 50s and 60s, to finally settling into a libertarian stance by the 70s until his death.  One thing that he was never about was being fascist.

In the novel the idea of universal suffrage has been replaced by earned suffrage.  The entire world is now under one single global government.  Although everyone is a resident of Earth, not everyone is a citizen.

Heinlein makes a distinction between protections and privileges.  While everyone enjoys equal protection under the law not everyone enjoys the same privilege and the primary privilege denied to some is the right to vote.  Only those that agree to serve the state can vote.  Here is where the confusion lies.  Many critics charged that Heinlein meant only those that served in the military could vote but the text clearly states that any sort of government service would suffice.

The central idea that Heinlein is trying to get across in Troopers is that citizenship was not just a passive concept that was handed to the individual at birth but an active concept that had to be earned by merit otherwise it became a stagnant and meaningless construct.  Food for thought for a country such as our own where sometimes less than 50% of eligible voters turn out for elections.

The story itself is fairly straightforward.  We begin with a “flash forward” as the protagonist, Juan Rico, engages in a battle on an alien world wearing a futuristic space suit called power armor and from there we flash back to before the war when Juan, a young man born into a rich Filipino family, falls in love with a young lady who is enlisting in the military.  Trying to win her favor he enlists and is promptly disowned by his father.  With no choice he goes through basic training.

During training the enemy, a race of arachnid aliens, destroys Buenos Aires and kills his mother.  Now driven partly by revenge we follow along as Juan participates in several major battles.  He is sent to officer training school.  During his training he reunites with his father who is now also in the military and they reconcile.  The novel ends several years later as he finds himself now in charge of a company of troopers preparing to invade the enemy homeworld.

Along the way the narrator engages in a series of discussions with professors and instructors that are really expositions of thought concerning several of the key concepts that Heinlein wanted to cover in the book.  These include debates on merit based suffrage, how the current form of government had evolved, the root cause of all wars (Heinlein’s conclusion was that the root cause of all wars was economically based), the morality of using violence to resolve disputes, and the strengths and weaknesses of a “free” civilization such as humans had versus a totally communistic civilization such as the type that the arachnids had.

A note on the alien arachnids.  Physically they were described as a giant version of a spider crossed with an ant.  Arachnid civilization was subdivided into a caste system of warriors, workers, and royalty.  The worker caste did all the manual labor, the warrior caste did all the fighting, and the royalty caste included not only leaders but scientists and engineers.  The caste system not only described the jobs held by each arachnid but extended into their physical structure.  Arachnids for one caste were different from arachnids for another caste.

The entire arachnid civilization worked as a hive mind working for the good of the whole.  The suffering or the death of the individual did not matter as long as the hive prospered.  To Heinlein this was what contemporary communism represented.  The individual subsumed into the state and made into nothing more than an insignificant part of a larger machine.

The influence of Troopers has been primarily felt in the military.  The novel has become suggested reading in some branches of the military and several key concepts have worked their way into contemporary strategic thinking.  The primary concept of making the military into an all volunteer and professional army is the prime effect.  At the time of first printing the U.S. still relied on a large, unwieldy, and badly trained conscript army.  In the last half century the military has reduced in size considerably and the training and equipment for each and every soldier has more than made up in the amount of offensive potential.

Other things like the power armor concept, a mechanical and armored exoskeleton, worn by characters in the novel are well under development and will probably enter service within the next 20 years.  The concept of mechanically enhanced strength is  currently under development.

In pop culture the novel has affected a genre of Japanese animation called mecha anime.  This has spawned entire anime series and movies as well as live action Hollywood  movies.

For me though the main takeaway from the novel is the discussion of what it really means to be a resident versus a citizen of a nation.  The citizen has to take an active interest in the welfare of the nation otherwise he is nothing more than a spectator or commentator just criticizing from the sidelines and never taking responsibility for making the situation better.

Scene from the justifiable panned movie version of Starship troopers

Real world to virtual world comparisons

I suppose it was inevitable.

I was sitting (in a virtual sense) in the East Commonlands in the game Everquest looking for bears, wolves, and giant spiders.  Why?  I needed money, virtual money but money nonetheless.  I needed to buy a piece of armor for my character and killing monsters for a copper piece here, a silver there wasn’t cutting it.  So I was gathering pelts and spider silks in order to auction off to other players and earn enough to buy this armor piece.

That was back around 2000 and I was part of the emerging virtual economy.  An economy that had some real world implications.  For wherever there is a need and a way to pay, there will be commerce.  Some bright spark got the idea that all these make-believe items and make-believe money could be sold online to other players for real world money.  Soon someone worked out an exchange rate, so many platinum pieces per US dollar and suddenly I was part of a nation that had a larger economy than Bulgaria.

Amazingly it had all begun rather organically.  In a fairly unused corner of the game lay an underground tunnel with a large cavern.  Players would sit there and broadcast their items for sale to anyone in the area.  People would meet and exchange the item for virtual money.  Soon dozens of players sat around doing the same.  The game developers took note and set up a more formal auction zone and system.  They still took the position that selling things for real money offline was against the game rules but they really had no way of enforcing this.

Professional “farmers” began cropping up.  These farmers set up game accounts to do nothing but gather raw materials to sell to players or to gather up virtual currency to sell on websites.  Players would set up the deal offline and then meet clandestinely online to receive their goods.

The in-game economics also got skewed.  Some players would hoard things like spider silk or high quality bear pelts, items used to make other in-game items, and artificially inflate the price of these raw materials.  Other players might retaliate and swamp the market with low prices and collapse a market.

The game developers helplessly admonished players not to do this.

I left Everquest around 2004 and took up Warcraft and found that the system first pioneered back in Everquest was fully formed and flourishing in Warcraft.  If anything, it was worse.  You could “buy” a high level and fully equipped character on a website and skip all the training and leveling up.  Of course such people were usually morons when it came to game play but that didn’t stop them.

Farming was worse.  A report in 2011 told of prisoners forced to play games to gather “virtual currency”.  This was getting insane.  It’s just a game!

I have to admit this was one of the reasons that I left online gaming.  It was becoming work and I had nothing to show for the long hard hours spent in-game and now some teen can come in and short-circuit the process and buy his way to the top?

Money.  It ruins everything.

the convergent world

I wrote earlier in the year about the reasons why I wasn’t going forward with Google Glass.  Most of those reasons still apply but this week we took a major step forward.  The next level in mobile connectivity speed has been reached.  Trials for a 5G network.  This may one day remove one of the major stumbling blocks to ubiquitous mobile communication.

Devices will be created to take advantage of this and to keep up, most carriers will have to have higher data transmission rates.

Yet even with this major milestone I am still hesitant about devices such as Google Glass.  Privacy issues aside, and believe me that’s not a small thing, I still see Google Glass as a somewhat clunky and perhaps even a dead-end technology.

I believe that ultimately the technology will reach the point of not projecting something over a small screen but directly manipulating a user’s brain waves to augment reality.  Nanotechnology would be introduced into the body and would manipulate the signals from the optic nerve to the brain to introduce “artifacts” into the field of vision.  Basically you would gain the benefits of something like Google Glass but it would exist only in your imagination.

Besides the nanotechnology that would be injected into you or perhaps swallowed in a pill you would have some sort of transmitter/receiver implanted under the skin to handle all the internet traffic.  Such devices do already exist and some have had the operation to have similar devices implanted already.

The nanotechnology could even go further and introduce sensors all around the body to monitor vital functions like heart beat, muscle tone, digestion, even blood chemistry.

Some of the first results in memory manipulation and memory decoding are being done at this moment and it may be possible to manipulate, record, or erase memories like a hard drive.

Now, is this a positive or a negative development?  Like anything made or dreamed up by a human it has potential for both.  We already bristle at the abuse of our privacy online.  Inviting the technology inside of us may lead to even greater abuses.  People releasing our medical records, our location, our thoughts is a seriously scary thing.

Once again the technology is outpacing the ethics.  Really the only one that has even obliquely tackled this idea is William Gibson.  We have some ideas but we don’t have much time.  Technology keeps moving forward.  Should we?