little bits of everything

Yesterday I had one of those moments, which is like opening a door in a wall in a garden and finding a country on the other side. In the uncommon  newsletter there was a link to an article on how stories change us . I followed a link to stories are waves , which was much more interesting. It talks about how story telling is getting a bit more like pre-Gutenberg days. It mentioned the  Organization for Transformative Works  and I found the project,  Archive of Our Own  which has 1.4 million  bits of fan fiction. That's a lot of storytelling.

I read SF pretty much exclusively as a kid and then as I grew up I read more widely. In recent years I've read more SF than in the previous twenty or thirty or so. One of the things that I heard for the first time when I came back to SF was the Singularity , the idea that one day we'd be able to upload our brains into a computer. I heard it first being talked about on Charlie Stross's blog, probably this entry Three arguments against the singularity  in 2011 (this blog post has been brewing for a while). He also wrote a book called Singularity Sky. If you read the  wikipedia article I've linked to  then you'll see it's been around for a while, since 1958. Probably the reason that it's being talked about more recently is because as computing power increases it become more believable. As neurons are more complicated than bits you can't measure the capacity of the human brain in terms of computer storage, but there are as many networked computers as neuro...