TDDPirate’s Ideas

Star Trek TNG world:

• The Game
• The Game

Real World:

• Facebook’s Farmville (a sample testimonial by a newly-addicted victim)

Why Companies Shouldn’t Use Robots In Chat is a rant about customer service by chat. Rob May wanted to cancel an account, and found the cancellation process to be difficult. From the character of responses, he could not determine if he was interacting with an human or with an IRC bot.

Why do I feel as if a time machine is on the threshold of having almost been activated?

Today I paid a brief visit to Olamot 2006, which is being held in Mediatheque, Holon.

Few minutes later, I was the proud owner of the ensemble of dead trees and colored ink, which is known as issue 14 of Dreams at Aspamia. I bought also three old issues, which were missing from my collection. Now my collection of Dreams at Aspamia is complete, or will be complete as soon as I get back issues, which I loaned to certain dear souls.

One thing which I noticed was the gender parity in the booths’ area. Apparently, women became interested in SciFi in a big way once it was combined with Fantasy, and several SciFi stories moved from the “thus it will happen so and so” category to the “thus it may have happened so and so”.

Upon reviewing in my mind the SciFi fans among my personal acquaintances, with whom I keep reasonably frequent contact, I found that the women among them outnumber the men.

The first cryptic E-mail message looked like a spam. I deleted it. The second cryptic E-mail message still looked like a spam. The third message came from Lysdon, whom I once employed as an information retrieval specialist in one of my projects. He asked me to reply to the E-mail messages from the Halutza UFO Institute.

Three days, a nice bank deposit of advance fee, a shower and change of clothes later, I saw the UFO in an underground hall in the Halutza UFO Institute. Seldon, the Chief Scientist of the Institute, explained to me that their scientists found few dark slabs, which have time-varying regular structure suggesting that they are storage devices. They also found that one of the slabs is undergoing changes all the time, and correlated some of those changes with changes in lighting and noise levels in the hall.

They made an experiment of trying to read the slabs and transfer the read data to the Institute’s computers. Reading all the slabs yielded about 10TB information, which was reduced to 30GB after lossless compression.

My assignment was to decipher the information and figure out what does the software embodied by the information do.

(To be continued sometime in one of the potential future timelines. Meanwhile I want to continue to read Introduction to Reverse Engineering Software!)

While Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg did not say so explicitly, there is an hint in their The Science of Superman that when he was launched by his biological parents to space, he had to pass through an event horizon.

To put things in context, Larry Niven already speculated about Superman in his Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex article, but from a biological point of view.

I was in Dizengoff Center because I went to see the Marlee Matlin starred movie. The movie was a cumpulsory movie for me, because was different from the usual mainstream movie. However I did not fully enjoy my experience viewing it. Compared, for example, to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, the Hitchhiker’s wins in a big way.

I did not like the philosophizations which filled the movie. Philosophy and story line did not integrate well, in my opinion. Any philosophical discussion which confuses the exterior and the interior of humans is incomplete if it does not consider also:

• Korzybski’s General Semantics
• Love

About the subject of love, I noticed that Amanda, the movie’s protagonist, was essentially alone. While she interacted with other people, and some of her relationships were not exactly superficial, they were not deep either. Missing was treatment of the deep relationship which goes into love, in which both parties create a new joint world and bear children into it. Then the children grow out of the world created for them by their parents and build their own worlds, and then they merge their own worlds with their own lovers’ worlds and so the cycle goes on.

In the movie itself, love was not deeper than relationship with a cheating husband, some flirtatious dances, or eroticism from the point of view of cognitive psychologists.

I encountered the word ‘defrobnication’. It sounds like a made-up futuristic Sci-Fi word. However a Google search turned up real definitions and uses for the word and related words like ‘frob’, ‘frobnicate’, ‘frobnication’.

Yesterday evening I went to the Hebrew Book Week in Yehoshua Gardens in Tel Aviv.
The booths were longer than what I remember from previous years. Some of the booths belonged to small book publishers. However, I did not notice poets trying to sell their poems outside of the booths.
It took me three hours to traverse all the booths, even though I skipped quickly booths featuring children’s and religious books.

I went out with one book - a book about the process and psychology of decision making. I also left few billions of red blood cells in the area, as I donated blood in Magen David Adom’s vehicle, outfitted with booths and equipment for donating blood, which was there.

Outside the area, there were few people trying to sell secondhand books. One of them had three issues (No. 1,2,3) of “Cosmos” - an Hebrew language Science Fiction publication, which existed before Fantasy 2000. The original price of the issues was 35 Israeli pounds per issue. The seller wanted 100NIS for the three of the issues. My offer was limited to 50NIS.

If anyone else buys those “Cosmos” issues, may I borrow them from the crazy and lucky buyer for reading?

In the story, Kelsey is a professional blackmailer. He asking Carson, a “client”, for extra payment of $16,940.00. The money is needed for paying Horatio. Horatio was another “client” of Kelsey until the statute of limitations for his crime kicked in. Now Horatio is trying to blackmail Kelsey to get back all money he paid him.

In the story, Kelsey and Carson find that there is a technical problem for Carson to prepare this amount of money and transfer it to Kelsey. So they decide that if Carson kills Horatio, this will solve the problem.

My nitpicking yielded an alternate end.

Carson contacts Horatio and promises him $20,000.00 if Horatio agrees to wait few more days for the money. Carson gets from Horatio a copy of his blackmail evidence. Carson uses it to blackmail Kelsey into ceasing to get money from him. This way, Carson gets off the hook, Horatio gets back his blackmail money, and Kelsey is a bit poorer.

Full disclosure: I am in favor of disengagement and movement of Jews from Gaza Strip to various areas in Israel.

Today I read in the newspaper about an ingenious public relations trick of the disengagement opponents. They sent to residents in north Tel Aviv an official-looking letter telling them that they must leave their homes and move elsewhere because it is planned to build underground train in place of their homes.

They reasoned that this would cause the recipients to feel the pain of being forced to move elsewhere.

The official response to the trick was angry one, but I think that this time the disengagement opponents did the right thing. They made a point, and their point had better been taken into consideration when arguing about the disengagement plan. Except for faster heartbeats, they did not interfere with the daily routine of the letter recipients. They made proper use of their Freedom of Expression.

They can make even better point, if they display their slogans (in quiet and non-interfering way) near cinemas which show the movie “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy”.