Roam Lemney
Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.
Friday, December 26, 2003
Almost time to...
Almost time to ... ummm ... well, actually, to act like an old fart. Which I am.
Y'see, it's another year almost gone by. Another round of technological advances that made our heads spin, another crop of ideas, technologies, gadgets, and pure scientific discovery that would have been unimaginable a few years earlier.
My father was born in 1927, in a sleepy town outside Austria, in a world that was still recovering from WW1. A world, furthermore, that didn't have half the advantages we have now, so recovery took time. We don't comprehend that, nowadays. A country is torn up by war, we move in the UN and Red Cross and a few volunteer organisations, six months later the news shows this dramatic recovery. Oh yeah, and we have almost instant news now, too - my father was sometimes lucky to find out in the European newspapers, things that had taken place a month ago in the USA. And news from Australia, well that was right out.
My dad ran off to join the German Marine at the age of fifteen, and after WW2 he took an apprenticeship as a butcher, then studied and became an advertising artist in Vienna, and there he met my mother. 1955 or 1956, my mother's parents moved to Vienna from the family farm to join what were soon to become my wedded parents. The first time Mum switched on an electric light, they crossed themselves and were apparently very uneasy about light that didn't come out of a candle or oil lamp.
My father owned a car, which placed him firmly in the well-to-do class at the time. And he went back to studies, this time in agricultural engineering. Soon after, we were on our way to Arabia, to Bahrain Island, to start a dairy / market garden farm for a newly oil-rich sheik, who was making money off people like my father who owned 'automobiles' and needed 'benzene' for them.
On Bahrain, we had air conditioning (gasp!) and (oh envy, oh wonder!) a record player and television. Saudi Arabia of course had all the most mod of the mod cons, with all that newfound wealth floating around, so we lived fair and square among a millionnaire playboy set at that time. Oh yeah, I came along in 1957, we were on Bahrain from 1960 to 1963, at which time we'd fulfilled the contract of the dairy farm. I became used to speed boats, dhows, fast American and European cars, airplane flights back home once a year, Meccano sets of baffling complexities, and much to the credit if St Christopher's Convent run School, I became enthralled witrh books, learned Latin and French (in my first year in school mind you, and was made familiar with set theory and other mathematical and scientific learning, I know now that the time from about age three to age - say - nine are knowledge sponge years, I soaked up curriculata and extracurriculata almost in minutes. On my first day there I spoke not a word of English, by the afternoon I had worked out hello, my name is Rupert (and if any of you readers ever let on I'll kill ya!) and the magic word for all us first-time mum-deprived miserable little bunnies - 'home!'...
By the end of the first year I could converse in poorly accented but grammatically and syntactically correct French, and manage some Latin, as well as having picked up English. My life has always been a little faster because of that initial start of parallel multitasking I needed to undertake to make this all happen. A lot of Baby Boomers were expatria and learning more than one culture. I was learning Arabic, and the gentle art of Arabic crudities, from the coolies on the farm, picking up an English Catholic education complete with formal everything, and still maintaining an Austrian home life. Within a few years, we left Saudi for Australia. After a bried few stints as a farmhand on various farms, my father went and studied again, this time to become a powerhouse engine driver. In that period, stereo became the standard for record players, and cassette tapes replaced the opne reel messagetapes the grandparents sent us the news on.
They felt quite hip because they had a small tabletop reel to reel tape recorder, (oh, about 30cm by 30cm by 17cm high, weighed about 8 to 10 kilos...) and we with our newfound Arabian sophistication, wished they'd discover cassette tapes. By the time I was ten I was firmly hooked into electronics, could service some appliances and equipment, and finally took a traineeship with an airline to develop my skills. In here, things like transistors had started making themselves felt, although a lot of aircraft back then flew with valve technology under the hood. Panasonic's donut-shaped Panapet wrist radios were all the cheerful rage.
I started to predict how technology would help foster even more technology once I realised the implications inherent in video cassettes, of being able to transfer a whole visual concept in mov ing visual form, and how that would start accelerating as phones and videos came closer together (hey I'm a visionary, what can I say) and started to look at this relative newcomer on the scene, integrated circuits. With integrated circuits, I thought, it was only a matter of time before they stacked up the layers to get more into one chip. Well, they're still trying to do that now, so I may yet be right...
And with the advent of chips and logic gates, one could now build a 4 bit computer that programmed through front-panel switches and outputted through what were then very high tech front panel red LEDs. I bought one and built it. And lost interest fairly quickly while I tried to design a way to make a small dirigible fly with a video camera and transmit signal back. I never got either off the ground...
But by the late 70's when I left the traineeship and came back to Australia, Sir Clive Sinclair had made a small personal computert for under $200, and I bought one. A few years later, in the mid 80'2, I was busy buying enough parts to build a 286 AT class PC, and in mid 1990 I had my first Pentium, now I have P4 machines, Xeon machines, mobile Pentium laptops, and a pocket organiser that runs Win CE. (As well as rings around my 286, 386SX, 486DX33, and probably my first pentium 75 as well...)
Also in that time period, we went from stethoscopes to xrays to mri and CAT scan and PET and hundreds of other medical techniques like laser eye surgery, stainless steel stents to keep arteries open, keyhols surgery with cameras inside the patient, exploding of kidney stones, hundreds of pharmaceutical innovations, and a leap from basic genetics to a map of several species' entire genomes.
My father's stroke after surgery last year could have been prevented had it happened this year, with advances in the treatment of stroke, and advances in the carotid stentowhatevery that he needed on hos right carotid and which sent the blood clot shooting up to kill half of his brain.
Similarly, if I manage my emphysema wisely, I expect that before it becomes too bad there will be treatments available, there are already fine high-efficiency artificial lungs out there that can put oxygen into the blood, and it can't be too long before they develop another one to scrub the CO2 out.
In this year I've seen almost twice as many new ideas and technologies emerge and start prducing results, as there were in the two years before. Nanotechnology has been whispering along ever so quietly in the background, and now suddenly, there are nannies at work in a variety of manufacturing processes and products, and in a few more years, nanaparticles with receptors and iron pellets will detox my body should I overdose on Es or some other drug, or if I catch several varieties of diseases, or possibly even for various heavy metals, and while the developers say that FDA tests are five years away, I think three years is more a fair estimate.
Each technology reinforces another, which then leaps ahead and reinforces yet another discipline. There are websites out there now devoted to picking when the so-called Singularity will occur, the moment when scientific and technological advances hits the asymptote of the curve, when advance overtakes the capability to cope with it.
I don't think there's far to go. I learnt to multitask and learn fast due to my childhood experiences, many of my contemporary Boomers aren't quite there. But GenXers are there, they are so fully there... They grew up with multitasking, learning things fast is the rule not the exception - and are more capable of absorbing the multitude of new things that come along these days than your elders, aren't you?
To you, it seems unthinkable to not have a wired world. You probably can't imagine that my homework right through to the end of High School was all done on paper, usually written by hand but later I got my hands on a small Lettera Olivetti typewriter, and I saved my pocket money for several months to buy a Casio calculator... I planted vegetable gardens and wasn't overcome by ennui when the seeds took months to grow into plants and then another few months to produce vegetables... And I knew for a fact that cancer would kill you, there was no such thing as AIDS, and we'd have a base on the Moon as soon as we got that first load of astronauts up there...
You *expect* things to happen fast. Most would feel like we were missing a limb if we couldn't read news online, would feel timewarped if we picked up a magazine with this month's date on it and last month's news inside.
So - what's 2004 going to bring us? No coals please, but I reckon we'll get a few things that will have definite wow factor.
These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.
I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.
