Information

I’m sure by now, dear reader, you have come to the conclusion that information exists. It’s not a grand conclusion to make – we live in a time called the information age and you are reading this on a medium sometimes referred to as the information super highway. But I would like to propose a thought experiment for you. It’s kind of an odd one as I was woken at 2am by this idea and so it may not come through as well as I had hoped, as I write this at 2.40am.

Imagine, if you will, your body. It seems normal to you. Your lungs breathe, your heart pumps blood and your hair grows. Now your body has a few things that make it uniquely yours as well, the way you walk, the sound of your voice at the pattern of your retina. But where is all this information stored? Now imagine a computer; as you read this you are the benefactor of several functions of the computer that you probably don’t realise; the way your display works be it a CRT (cathode ray tube) or an LCD (liquid crystal display), both options format the information that they receive via electronics into a usable format that at the present point in time is relaying my thoughts to you.

All of these functions, from your heart to the text on screen require information. I have kept this list very short as to try and not confuse the issue, but there is one more thing I would like you to try and hold In your head at the same time. Your Chair. Chances are that, while reading this, you are sitting on some form of chair. Now the previous two examples I have given incorporate a process of active information transfer; your computer talking to Google and then translating that information which I had previously stored there as text back into a readable format for you, and your heart pumping blood around your body when stimulated to do so by an electrical impulse from your brain telling one half to contract and the other to do likewise in turn. But here is where things start to get tricky.

The chair too has information imbued to it – let us assume for the time being that it is a simple wooden chair with a padded seat. This chair was put together by a craftsman of some skill – be that skill great or little it required at least a basic knowledge of measurement, wood craft and how a nail works. With this information, the craftsman created an object to sit on that would support your body weight, and then he added a more comfortable seat to make the experience more enjoyable. Now that all of this information has been put into the making of the chair, where does this information go? Where is the weight rating or the stress tolerance of the nails and screws used in its construction? The chair still works without you, and I understanding such things, but all that information must be stored somewhere, because if I were to sit on a chair not designed to take my weight, an easier thing than you might think, the chair would fail because those same tolerances that had been put into the construction of the chair would be overcome and the chair would fail. But even the failure of that chair could be pre-determined if you had that original information, my weight information, and the information about how I would distribute that weight as I sat upon the chair.

This is also true of your heart, we know that if your heart receives the wrong electrical signals or those signals are over powered by an outside source, then your heart too will fail, or be brought back from having failed if the charge is supplied in the right way by someone with the right knowledge. And we find this again in the world of computers: give the computer incomplete or wrong information and it will be unable to perform the task that it was asked to perform.

And so we get to my Idea. All of this information must be stored, and it must be accessible in one form or another so that when I sit on the wrong chair, or the network cable is pulled from the computer, or the heart gets the wrong electrical signals, or a hammer strikes a nail, everything acts as it must according to this “programming”.

But where is it stored? Well, you may or may not have heard of metadata; it’s the data that is collected about, say, a phone call that is not relevant to the call itself. For example – I call my friend to talk about sound desks. The meta data associated with that call is the length of the call, who the call was from and to, where the call was made and received, and so on. The call itself was about sound desks but the meta data was still recorded so that I might be billed for the call (or that the government might snoop). But the metadata has nothing to do with the call itself.
Therefore, I am proposing a metaverse, a place where all information is stored, from the length of my call to how well the nail was hammered onto the chair to the quality of the nail when it was forged and what the elements were doing before they were made into a nail.

A place where all information exists, and must continue to exist so that all past and future interactions of this information may be recorded and predicted or reviewed. How many times will your heart beat before it fails depends on a number of factors both internal and external and is in some way relevant to the number of times my heart beats and the nail in the chair. It has long been said that everything is connected, but the question of where is it connected is what woke me up tonight. Why is it that if I hold a lighter to a candle it will burn but if I hold a lighter to a tap I will not get the same effect? Information. Information that goes back as far as time itself, Information that must be available and yet hidden so that when we see a chair we do not see all the backstory of every atom, of every fibre of wood, of the tree that grew from the seed that was planted from the branch that dropped it from, from, from.

All of this information must be able to be accessed at any given time by any given object or substance, but the information must also be immutable, unchangeable, or everything (that is related) would fall apart because a butterfly flapped its wings.

So as you go about your day, dear reader, try to think of the information metaverse, where all things are stored and interact according to...


Well, this is interesting...

The Screen Dichotomy

I am a gamer and a watcher of many things, and it occurs to me that we are getting into an interesting phase. Movies are starting to be remade; Judge Dredd, Robocop and Total Recall to name a few. Movies are getting less and less original and stretching bad franchises more and more. With Fast and Furious SEVEN coming up and a promise for three more thereafter, one must ask, has the movie industry become so dumbed down that we will never again see the likes of The Shawshank Redemption or Schindlers List? Will we ever again see the likes of good comedies like unto Robin Hood – Men in Tights, or the epics like Dances With Wolves, or must we be beaten over the head with Saw 15 and yet another Scary Movie or Final Destination.

But at the same time we are experiencing a massive leap in the level of television production. From seemingly nowhere we have fantastic series like Sherlock, The Newsroom and The Blacklist. We have Game changing series like Hannibal – made in the USA but with enough world-wide funding to keep being made without the support of any major American network, or Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, which has movie like effects on a TV budget and in a TV timescale.

Movies that take longer to produce and are shorter to watch are becoming worse and worse while TV that takes less time to produce and lasts longer is getting better and better. And then there is the inverse we are currently witnessing in the field of computer games (I speak mostly of PC’s here being a PC gamer only but I’m sure this applies across the board.)

More and more computer games are going to something like the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game or MMORPG, a format that doesn’t take a comparatively long time to program. A format that while playable, continues and continues with no end in sight. The shorter single story game, that takes much more time to program having to build everything from scratch, is becoming less popular, yet this is where the advancements are being made; and cost less for a better experience. These games have long been around and have continued to improve while the MMORPGs stagnate and become dull. With all the missions done, one can only interact with the other, often lesser intelligent, players, showing them what no one would show you and holding their hands through the same missions you have already completed for no apparent reason them save to now and then compare your equipment with your neighbour’s., all the while putting more and more money into in-game purchases and into the latest update of a game that costs you as much as a stand-alone game cost you and is far less satisfying. Meanwhile the standalone game gives downloadable content often at no cost or much cheaper for much more game play.

So here we arrive at an interesting position. Movies that take longer to produce are getting worse while TV that takes less time to produce is getting better; while MMORPGs that take less time to produce are becoming more prevalent and worse while standalone games that take much more to produce are continuing on an upward curve but are becoming less and less popular.

So here I sit dear reader, confused by this screen dichotomy, and I am reminded of the poem by AA Milne called Twice Times and as one got better as the other got wuss I ask myself and you – 

What can we expect from these two giants of screens going forward?

Where to from here?

And what new idea will change the game in such a way as to get everything on the up and up again?

Time

Time

{Writer’s note – an apology, because of the nature of English and the common ways of phrasing things, there will be a number of apparent puns about time in the following piece. None of these are intentional unless specified; they are just a happy accident of English}

Time is one of those things that seem to be the cause of a lot of people’s anger; they have too much, that must wait for too much of it, it seems to go on forever (pun intended), or conversely it runs away from them or runs out, runs short, or there is just none left at all. Movies play with its passage and it is the subject of many television shows, books and musings. Though after all that, it is largely misunderstood.

The thing about it is – we all have the same amount, or at least that is what the powers that be would have us believe. It seems to stretch out and contract entirely of its own will. As a child I remember that the hours, days and weeks stretched out before me as thought to eternity – or at least as far as the next term break.

And yet, as an adult, I find there are times that time disappears from me entirely and I find myself working absurdly late nights for reasons that escape me – not unlike the time before it.

This misperception of time is due largely to busyness with which we fill our lives. We have become, as it has been said, time poor. This is mostly down to electricity. Before we had easily accessible light facilities and entertainments that could keep us up and “interested”, or rather awake for hours on end, we were, largely, reliant on the sun to give us or daily portions. This gave us less time in which to be so busy and the nature of the work we were required to do before electricity became normal made us tired and being unable to complete more than a full day’s work, we rested for the evening content with our work.

But now we are so very busy and driven in what we must cram into a day that instead of a roughly 12-hour day, it has become far more common to start our days before dawn and return to our beds well after dusk, and so we have lost what a standard day means. This is not helped by the corporations that shorten our year as much as possible by starting Christmas sales in early November rather than the previous standard of only a few weeks before Christmas.

This disproportionate collapsing and expanding of how we view time has greatly altered our view of it. Combined with the media available on the subject I had thought that conversations on the subject would come easily and freely to many. But alas, this has not been my experience, especially on the finer points of the subject. Bring up, for example, the subject of eternity amongst most people and they will look at you blankly; ask them if life is predetermined or if free will exists they look at you quite quizzically. The fact of it is that in the last question the answer is simply that it depends on your point of view – something I thought most people had the ability to change; though when it comes to time they seem locked into a single point of view – of that being inside the current time stream.  Perhaps, as an exercise, you, dear reader, should try to remove yourself, or at least your point of view from the current time line and view the entire stream as though from a helicopter.

People often mistake time for an unchangeable constant that has only the appearance of speeding up and slowing down, so I will leave you with this small titbit. Time itself is changeable – and this is not only a theoretical thought experiment – time has been proven to be changed by physicists in an extremely simple experiment by taking three atomic clocks, leaving one standing still, and taking the other 2 on flights round the world – one east and one west. I will leave you, dear reader, to further seek any answers you may wish to find, but suffice to say that the answer is not what you think. But keep in mind – if you wish to live longer than others, live faster and higher – both have an effect on time.

So thank you for spending some of your time to read what took me some time to write about time, and next time I’ll try and be a little briefer between writings so that I might take, if you will allow it, some more of your time…