Fantasist's Scroll

Blog of a fugative heiress?

Maybe, maybe not. I saw the story on Wired News, but it’s been other places on the ‘net, too. It’s possible, of course, that this fugative from a repressive, arranged marriage is legit, but there’s enough controversy surrounding it that it quite possibly is just a stunt. Some have speculated that it’s just a creative attempt to generate some buzz about a fictional account of an escaped “poor, little rich-girl”. Who knows for sure? No one, yet. I’m sure it will come out eventually, but for now, no one really knows. It certainly would be an interesting literary device. In fact, I had thought of doing something similar, but in a fantasy setting.
My idea was to have an electronic version of a fantasy character’s diary. In particular, a Marco Polo-like character who would allow the reader to explore the fantasy world I was creating via journal entries. It’s an idea that I may still pursue.
In any case here’s her blog if you’d like to check it out.

Science fiction comes to the desktop, again.

Well, it looks like someone has finally developed a true, 3-D display. The company is called Actuality Systems and the display is called, simply, Volumetric 3-D Display. It’s still fairly primative, but it’s real 3-D without the use of special glasses. So, once again, science fiction writers have invented the future. The page of photograhs are simply amazing and worth checking out. There are just so many reasons to develop this technology that I can’t begin to list them all. But, for instance, imagine an MRI viewed in 3-D…. It’s mind-boggling, really.

Very cool.

Would you like to have the Anime Network on your cable system?

Well, they’d like to be there! If you don’t have them already, there’s a website that you can go to get them to request the addition to your local cable system. You just fill out the form and they’ll even FAX it over to your cable company for you! Pretty Cool!!
Just hit the site, then go to the thing that looks like a banner ad at the top of the website. Put your ZIP code in and follow the prompts. It’s just that easy! And, if you’re in the greater Houston area, fill out the form so we can get the Anime Channel!!

Do we actually live in one “slice” of the Multiverse?

Well, according to this article in Scientific American, we just might! Multiple universes have been a staple of science-fiction for as long as the concept of other planes of existence have been contemplated, but physicists think they might actually exist. It’s hard for me to hear the term “multiverse” and not think “comic book”, but the comics industry apparently borrowed the term from quantum physics. Who knew?
Anyway, the article is pretty darn interesting and brings up some interesting thoughts about different ways that this multiverse might exist. Pretty much every possible configuration sounds like something that a science-fiction author has explored at one time or another. The good news is, though, that far from being a deterrent, my familiarity with science-fiction made it easier to understand the rather heady theories being tossed about.
If you’re contemplating any kind of “alternate” anything, including alternate history, this article should give you a jump start on the underlying concepts.

Okay, here’s a new angle…

Here’s a news story from Yahoo about a guy who claims to be a time traveller who “knows” what the market is going to do. He started with an $800 portfolio and in two weeks made over $350 million! What’s interesting is that no one can seem to find any record of the name this guy is using prior to December of 2002. He’s apparently claimed that he’ll tell us where Osama Bin Laden is and how to cure AIDS as proof that he comes from the future. Well, I’m game!

This does point out, though, why that old sci-fi favorite of travelling back in time to buy the right stocks on the stock market wouldn’t work. You’d have to be pretty darn careful or someone, somewhere would notice. On the other hand, it could just be an interesting plot twist. Of course, there’s still the old lottery gambit. You know, going back and getting a ticket with the winning numbers on it. Hmm… That one has some possibilities. Oh, and combine the two and you’d have an interesting tale of greed! Of course, time-travel is really more the realm of fantasy than science-fiction. Asimov came up with some rules about time travel that seem pretty solid to me. He was, after all, an actual scientist and a genius to boot. Also, he’s still one of the most prolific writers of our time. Still, those time travel stories have always piqued my curiosity….

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The Rosetta Project is really rolling now.

I first read about this in a news story in Wired. Their goal is to create a permanent, or near permanent record of dying languages. Their goal is to preserve at least a thousand of the roughly 7,000 languages on the planet. They expect more than 80% of those languages to die out due to globalization and modernization. What Wired talked about was the method they plan to use for preservation. Somewhat suprisingly, they don’t plan to use a computer-based technology. Rather, they’re going with a low-tech, but durable and easy to use, disk etched with examples of the same text in all 1,000 languages, just like the famous Rosetta Stone that allowed us to dechiper ancient Egyptian. (The text, incidentally, is the first book of the Bible, Genesis.)

But, what interests me the most is the on-line language search engine and the Comparative Word List Generator. With this bad-boy a person can generate lists, or tables, of the translations for the 207 most widely used and important words in language. Now, not every language listed has this table compiled, but the major languages all do and quite a few of the less major languages do, too. In any case, it sure is cool to play with when thinking about creating a language. Shoot, they even have grammars and phonologies and orthographies for hundreds, in some cases thousands, of languages. It’s well worth checking out!

Well, I’ve finally updatd the Language Generator.

I added several new base language files. Several of them are mashed together from a couple of different sources to get meta-language base files. Things like several East Asian languages together to form a NeoAsian base. And several of the Near, or Middle, Eastern languages mashed together to form a Middle Eastern base. Of course, I also added an Egyptian file, an Albanian file, a very large Japanese file, a Polish file, and a Turkish file as well.
My favorite, though, is a combonation of Latin and Tsolyani. It makes some really interesting output.

Enjoy!

The wrist computer comes of age.

Finally, one of the promised future technologies arrives. Remember the Dick Tracy cartoons? They always had these wrist communicators complete with visual interface. Well, guess what? Fossil is set to start making them!
Well, they don’t let you see other people yet, but they do let you take advantage of wireless communication to get all kinds of interesting data. They actually seem to have two models, depending on what you want to get done, but either way it’s cool. Now, this is what I call a Personal Digital Assistant!