2011

 

Inspired by Arab Spring, this is an add-on to the famous Imad Hajjaj cartoon published in Jan 2010, when things looked exceptionally bleak in the Arab world.

Terabyte Gadgets

When I was little most gadgets commonly floating around had memory capacity measurable in Kilobytes. The most these gadgets could do was entertain you with very simple monochrome video games (think Snake or Tetris) or keep track of your contact phone numbers (this was before emails or the internet). The most capacious of these gadgets could serve as a minimal, single-language dictionary. That was about it as far as handheld devices go. 

Very few people bothered to dream of what the world would look like given memory capacity orders of magnitude higher.

As a teenager I lived in world full of gadgets that had Megabyte-level capacity. Those could engage you in more realistic gaming, with hundreds of colors and sometimes sound effects too. The best of them could store your notes, kick your butt at chess, or even store and play your favorite playlist of 20 songs or so. 

Very few people bothered to dream of what the world would look like given memory capacity orders of magnitude higher.

Today we are swamped with Gigabyte-capacity gadgets. These things can already display graphics that saturate your eye's visual acuity threshold, be it in the size of the color dots, the number of different shades of color, or the rate of change of colors over time. The result is images and videos that look just as detailed to your eyes as the real thing.

Sound is also saturated, so that the bitrate, maximum frequency, and maximum amplitude of sound stored and synthesized by these gadgets already makes it sound to your ears like the real thing.

Today you are able to store your entire music library, your entire photo album collection, your entire book collection, and your entire software/game collection into one gadget, shuv it into your pocket and walk around with it. You are also able to talk to your gadgets, and use them to store and play a bunch of your favorite movies and TV shows.

Very few people bother to dream of what the world would look like given memory capacity orders of magnitude higher.

If I told you I could fit 128 Terabytes of memory into one gadget (that's about 1000 times more memory than the best gadget on the market today), what ideas can you come up with to put all that memory to good use?

Here are some bad answers:

• Store images/videos at higher fidelity (more color detail, higher resolution, higher framerate, etc.):

While we are not exactly at the peak yet, we are pretty close. We need less than one more order of magnitude of memory capacity to get there. And of course, there isn't much point in recording higher fidelity media once we satisfy visual acuity threshold of the human eye!

• Store your entire movie collection and your entire TV show collection on one gadget:

Unlike music, people are just not fond of replaying their favorite TV/movies over and over again, say while driving or working out. Besides, in a world where internet connection is omnipresent, downlink bandwidth is ever more capacious, and video streaming is ever more easy, why do you need to cache your entire video library in your pocket? You can just stream any flick you can think of anywhere anytime!

Now without further ado, here is my growing

List of Good Uses for Terabyte Gadgets:

• Continual recording

Your visual memory doesn't have an Off button, and neither should the visual memory of your gadget! Gadgets today record video as a luxury, only for minutes at a time. Imagine a gadget that "sees" the world continually, and remembers what it sees. Combined with the ability to identify objects, colors, and text in what it sees, your gadget can then become your life companion. Your ever-loyal Passepartout. Your partner in crime! you can then ask it questions like: 

• "What was the price of that red T-shirt I saw at Macy's yesterday?" 

• "Show me the face of that guy I met on the train to Paris last summer"

• "Was the window open when I left my apartment this morning?"

•  "Show me some memorable clips from our camping trip of 2004"

• "Have I met this woman before?" 

• Walkabout Movies

Films are recorded today using multiple cameras, each at its own vantage point. The footage is then interleaved during the editing phase so that the resulting video shows the footage from only one vantage point at a time, hopping serially from one viewpoint to another over time, as the editor sees fit. The resulting digital file occupies about 4 Gigabytes of memory per hour of recording at the highest visual fidelity.

Now given Terabyte gadgets, you can potentially store the visual recording of each and every camera together into one file. Movies recorded using -say- 100 strategically placed cameras, given the capacity to interpolate visual signals, can be viewed from any imaginable viewpoint during playback! This way the audience can interactively move about the recorded scene freely, as if they were actually in there with the camera crew. As they move, the image they see and sound they hear change convincingly to satisfy the mind with the illusion.

A movie filmed that way would result in a digital file at 400 Gigabytes per hour in high fidelity, which pretty much necessitates Terabyte memory to hold a modest collection of say a dozen movies.

What would you do with Terabyte gadgets? Let me know!

Coincidental Destiny

 

Some people would say it was meant to be, some others, that it is just a great coincidence.

Come to think of it, I don't really see the difference!

Isn't coincidence the vehicle by which 'fate' slowly and imperceptibly materializes itself? And what is fate anyway, if not that labyrinthine path we chart by reacting to a plethora of mundane coincidences that bombard our journey through life?

A tiny little enzyme swims within the confines of a bacterial cell, bumping haphazardly into all sorts of oddly shaped molecules that make up the magical living goo surrounding the nucleus. Its dance, shaped by unpredictable forces that lie entirely outside of its control, can be described as chaotic, and its brief encounters with molecule after molecule, completely coincidental.

Except that, as a wise observer will eventually conclude, there is nothing chaotic about the dance of our little enzyme. Because sooner or later, as chance ultimately grants it an encounter with that one special molecule it is looking for, magic starts to happen: its valence electrons suddenly latch onto the newcomer in such a precise way as to lock the two bodies in an exact geometrical fit. What seemed like a random bump suddenly metamorphosizes into a perfectly precise bond that can only be said to have been carefully planned by a talented choreographer.

One might proclaim - if one was an enzyme - that this chance encounter with that one perfect molecule must have been a fit of destiny no less. That his molecule was made for him and him for her. An other enzyme -less poetic and more informed about the anthropic principle- might claim that it was nothing more than a remarkable coincidence, just the effect of the law of large numbers playing out: You don't win the lottery because you're special, someone just has to win and it happened to be you.

In a sense, both points of view are right:

Every little bump with every little molecule is a coincidence. But which molecules click and which ones don't is no coincidence; it follows directly from the laws of chemistry governing -at once- that one little enzyme's affairs as well as those of entire universe at large.  Those few simple laws, governing everyone and everything, have been at work for a very very long time. During that time, a plot emerged in which our enzyme plays the role of seeking one particular kind of molecule.

To fully explain why one particular enzyme is good at bonding with one (or a few) particular molecule, you'd have to account for events that took place thousands of ions ago, starting a long and very slow process of natural selection that can be described as projective, as in deliberately shaping one particular enzyme, generation after generation, to be better at bonding with one particular molecule. An enzyme, not aware of such voluminous history, is entirely warranted in making use of an effective theory that it was meant to bond with this molecule apart from any other. It exists for a purpose, it is there to perform a function, and that's where the language of intention eventually leads to the idea of destiny.

Destiny in this sense is simply the accumulation of an intractable number of events over vast lengths of time, resulting in a present reality that is best understood by a teleological approach, so that people and things are actors playing roles according to a plot in a universal theatrical masterpiece.

Gravity, magnetism, locality, symmetry. You start with a few such universal laws, so very simple and elegant. Now add a huge amount of random events to shake things up a little, and eventually, out of sheer randomness, a predictable set of events emerges:

An enzyme bonding with its long-awaiting molecule, a cell undergoing metabolism, eventually realizing its dream of becoming two cells. A lung breathing cool fresh air into an awaiting body. A heart beating inside a sensitive human being, charting her way through life, bumping into all sorts of wrong people, until eventually and surely, two human beings naturally gravitate, bump and click. As if it was the most natural thing in the world. As if doing otherwise would be swimming against the current or disobeying a grand tenant. As if it was…. meant to be.

The paradox of chance and necessity, while thus explained, doesn't lose the least bit of its marvel. There is no need for anyone to hold the ropes or orchestrate the show. Just a few simple rules of attraction, a shake of randomness, and everything else follows, so very naturally.