“Whose woods these are…”
I’m still working my way back to blogging. I likely won’t be fully back until my work life is behind me, but I am getting past the shock of finding out just how right I was about management’s view of me. It’s been a week-and-a-half since I announced my intention to divorce them, and there has been nothing since the initial, “Oh, okay.”
It’s not unexpected. It’s not really even a surprise. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. I’ve realized that I am going through my second divorce. And both times it’s been due to the perception that my cons swamp my pros (and my prose). What really stings is the sense of unfairness caused by so many others saying, “I don’t understand their thinking.”
Yeah, me either, but so it goes. Set it aside; I have some catching up to do.
If you knew immediately what the title of this article means, you are almost certainly a Star Trek fan. You also know that a full list should contain DS9 and VOY. (And that, actually, there should be a ST: in front of each of them.)
It’s official, I really like science fiction author 
Recently I read his novel, 
Regardless, science does have the important and progressive feature of converging on the real world over time. Eventually 
I recently asked the question, “
I want aliens to come to earth.
If other civilizations exist, there’s some chance they’re more advanced than we are and may have solved the problems of intergalactic travel. If not, then they’re stuck on their planet as we are on ours. But if so, then they could be traveling around, and there is some possibility (however small) that they could show up here.
In some movies, aliens are raving, maniacal beasts of some kind. I suppose it’s possible that raving, maniacal beasts could cross intergalactic space, but it seems unlikely. Crossing space is hard and requires smarts (and energy and time). So a basic question is whether alien visitors would be more likely to be friendly or hostile.
But even the best intentions are not always enough. Steven Hawking has pointed out what happens on earth when societies with more advanced technology met societies without it. Things usually don’t go well for the latter. The question here is if a civilization advanced enough to cross intergalactic space might not be also advanced enough to handle first contact successfully. Certainly seems possible.
Then it can become an ‘us’ or ‘them’ problem, and sometimes intelligence is pretty good at rationalizing that ‘they’ aren’t ‘us,’ so therefore ‘they’ don’t really matter.
Another theme, ala 
The aliens in one of my favorite first contact stories, Contact, believed in God. They found it just as mysterious and wonderous as we do. The movie version, with Jodie Foster, is pretty good and very faithful to the book, but as is usually the case the book is much better. In fact, my favorite part of the book never made it into the movie. That’s the part about finding, deep, deep, deep in the digits of pi, a raster pattern of a circle.
Another idea from science fiction is finding a message in our “junk” DNA (as opposed to just finding a message in our junk). That message need not be from the Creator; it could just be from the Ancestors. (You have to admit, some Ancestor race seeding all those planets does nicely explain why all those alien species looked so very humanoid. So very human, in fact, that their women looked quite sexy!)
Let it also be said that aliens might also say, “Oh, that God stuff… haven’t outgrown that, yet, eh? Here, we can show you a few things that will clear that right up.” Advanced knowledge comes in all sorts of packages. One can only hope that, along with definitively finding the “God Maker Circuit” in our heads, we also find the “Morality Determiner Circuit” as well.
The digital age offers a new take on the whole book library thing. Video has gone from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray to streaming. Music has gone from vinyl to eight-track to cassette to CD to iTunes and streaming. In both those cases, I’ve now purchased the same damn thing multiple times. (A favorite movie line of mine is Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black, “Now I have to buy the White Album again!”)
Compact and portable, it can be used anywhere—at the beach, on a bus, or even sitting in an armchair by a fire. Even small children are able to operate one with almost no training. Yet it is powerful enough to hold as much information as a CD-ROM disc. Here’s how it works:
Experts are divided on the prospects for further increases in information density; for now, a BOOK with more information simply uses more pages. Each sheet is scanned optically, registering information directly into the user’s brain. A flick of the finger takes the user to the next page.
An optional “BOOKmark” accessory allows the user to open BOOK to the exact place last used in a previous session, even if BOOK has been closed. BOOKmarks fit universal design standards; thus a single BOOKmark can be used in BOOKs of various manufacturers. Conversely, numerous BOOKmarks can be used in a single BOOK if the user wants to store numerous views at once; the number is limited only by the number of pages in the BOOK.
