little bits of everything

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...

Tomorrow's World (along with Top of the Pops) made Thursday evening the best TV evening of the week (in fact the best evening of the week, but that's another story). We would be shown some really cool new inventions, many of which had great potential to change things. I don't remember many of them appearing in normal life though. When I worked for a small electronics company I understood about how much is involved in bringing things to market, and making them on a big enough scale to make enough money to make more. I remember when the Walkman was first shown, something which did change how music was listened to. My memory of the way it was presented, which many be flawed, was that the revolutionary part was not the small tape mechanism, but the headphones. The inventors had found a way to get good quality sound from a tiny speaker, because after all, who wants to walk around with a big pair of headphones on? I also remember when the digital camera was first shown. Al...

Last night I borrowed the binoculars that one of my sons got for Christmas and looked at the moon and stars - the first time I've done that for quite a few years. Wanting to find out more I was looking at I've been wandering through some astronomy related web pages, mostly the International Astronimical Union (IAU) and found that: don't pay to have a star named after you - it's a con there appears to be no single master database of stars as you might expect, though there are conventions on naming there are loads of ways you can take part in astronomy and all sort of other fields science, from analysing things, to letting your computer do work when it would otherwise be idle the IAU are working on the naming of exoplanets (those outside the solar system)