This is what the future was supposed to look like:
It’s a digital electric guitar, from 1984! It was called the SynthAxe, and it digitised the input from the (separate!) sets of strings on the neck and body and then output a MIDI signal.
If you’re wondering what the future currently looks like, here’s the Misa Digital Guitar:
(It’s a video). “running linux kernel 2.6.31″ – hell yeah!
Let’s imagine you wanted to align the keys on your keyboard into a grid. How would you decide how to line them up? There appear to be two approaches:
As you can see, this results in the bottom row of alphas being differently offset, depending on your approach. Option 1 leaves the keys closest to where you expect to find them (W and Z are nearly lined up already on a standard layout, so the only significant movement is in the home row). Option 2 leaves the keys arguably better-lined-up for traditional touch-typing, though:
Standard qwerty fingering (image from Wikipedia/KTouch)
In the finger-memory of a traditional typist, there’s already a keyboard grid: The left-most column in the example above extends from 1 down to Z.
But nobody’s really making grid keyboards apart from crazy ones like the above, right? Not full-size keyboards, anyway. But mobile devices (where touch-typing isn’t practical anyway) seem to be really into the idea:
Palm (or HandSpring, I guess, since it introduced the keyboard) went with option 1:
Meanwhile, Nokia seems to be hedging its bets (both of these devices are from 2009):
The rumoured Motorola Sholes Android phone (named after the inventor of qwerty?) uses a mutation of option 1 (the home row is also shifted to the right), unlike Motorola’s just-announced Cliq (which goes with standard option 1).
(And then, of course, there’s Dell, who apparently once offset one row of keys on a full-size, non-grid laptop keyboard, just to keep things interesting.)
But anyway, there hasn’t been enough cyberpunk in this blog post yet. Is a miniature keyboard really the best way to get text into a mobile computer? Here’s a real input device (originally from “Intelligent Image Processing” by Steve Mann, John Wiley and Sons, 2001):
Steve Mann’s septambic keyer
And yes, I’m mostly including that picture because it reminds me so much of Ghost in the Shell’s dismantled-cyborg imagery.
Cadets participating in ‘cyberwar’ games against the NSA (is that Wireshark up on the screen?)
The current anonymous-vs-scientology stuff has been reminding me of an idea from Ghost in the Shell: A “stand alone complex” which can result in people spontaneously engaging in copycat-like behaviour, but without an original. The director said he was trying “to underscore the dilemmas and concerns that people would face if they relied too heavily on the new communications infrastructure”. In the story, the complex manifests in many people claiming to be a famous hacker known as the “laughing man”, who hides his identity using a digital mask which looks like this:
Meanwhile, in reality, lots of people called “anonymous” have been protesting Scientology, wearing masks:
I’m not the first to notice a similarity, of course:
On a side note, if you like the idea of the laughing man, you may like this website, which automatically applies laughing man masks to detected faces in images:
Eco-friendly electromagnetic superbikes, miniskirts, and hi-gloss white boots:
Poster on George Street during APEC week:
Selected details:
[Title from Agrippa (a Book of the Dead), by William Gibson.]
Some pictures and news stories I collected in 2003/4:
(2004-02-24): “Dr Hoffman believes pain contains a significant psychological element which is why distracting thoughts by virtual reality lends itself so well to pain control.
‘Pain requires conscious attention. Humans have a limited amount of this and it’s hard to do two things at once,’ he said.”
(2004-05-11): I love this pic, but unfortunately I’ve lost the source for it. I saved it as “Seoul student training 040511″, but I must leave any further interpretation to your imaginations…
(2003-03-25): “Iraqi television broadcast these pictures of a coalition drone aircraft shot down and then paraded through the streets of Basra.”
Mostly grim stories of cyberpunk interest that I’ve collected, from the last year or so:
“Technology such as cloned part-robot humans used by organised crime gangs pose the greatest future challenge to police, along with online scamming, Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Mick Keelty says.”
“The machines, which are flown by remote control or using pre-programmed GPS navigation systems, are silent and can be fitted with night-vision cameras.
The images they record are sent back to a police support vehicle or control room.”
“Police say the Cylon camera will be used mainly while officers patrol potential hotspots such as Union Street, Mutley and the city centre … The message to the public is to enjoy yourselves but don’t misbehave because you don’t know when you may be caught on camera.”
“The robotic suit, which slips over a person’s upper body and arms, weighs only 1.8 kilograms (four pounds).
It was developed jointly by Activelink Co. — a venture of Matsushita Electric Industrial which is best known for the Panasonic brand — and Kobe Gakuin University.”
“If the subject tries to grab or disconnect the XREP projectile, the reflex engagement electrodes complete a circuit allowing TASER NMI to discharge from the Nose Electrodes, through the subject’s body, out to the hand that grabbed the XREP. … To maximize incapacitation, the XREP engine incorporates a microprocessor controlled optimal electrode selection technology.”
This Guardian article talks about Oscar Pistorius, a Paralympic sprinter with speeds that would currently place him 8th-fastest among able-bodied sprinters in Britain. He runs with Össur custom sprint feet (pictured). He’s asking to be allowed to compete in the Olympics, and there’s some debate over whether the feet constitute an unfair advantage. But I think the more interesting question is: As prosthetic technology improves, will we start seeing the best times coming from the Paralympics instead of the Olympics? Is it not at least theoretically possible that we could design a better sprinting leg than the human leg?
The article immediately reminded me of a great makes-you-think hidden detail from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a sci-fi story where many of the characters are cybernetically enhanced, having had various muscles and joints replaced with stronger artificial ones:
One of these characters mentions he’s a former boxing medallist; but if you look closely, you discover that his medal is a Paralympic one. It took me a few moments to work this out (“but he isn’t disabled!”): One possible future for the Paralympics is as the competition where humans with elective (and superior) prosthetics are allowed to compete; in such a scenario, they could become the most interesting competition, with the Olympics relegated to special-interest for the purists…
“Korea has developed its own android capable of facial expressions on its humanoid face.”
“The face is a composite of two stars, and its torso on a singer.”
cf. William Gibson’s Idoru
