Yearly Archives: 2012

Exercise and gluttony

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My selfSim comes home from jogging and makes spaghetti. Hopefully I will be able to eat spaghetti again soon – my digestion seems to slowly recover (most of the time) from the antibiotics three weeks ago. 

The Zeitgeist – spirit of the times – is certainly strong. Today my pulse watch told me that I had burned 1500 calories (well, a bit more, but I think it exaggerates). And I was feeling all “Yay! Lots of fat burned!”

And then I thought “Wait, what? I’m not overweight! This just means I have to buy more groceries! The more I exercise, the more I’m going to eat.” That is certainly true in the long run, if any. And I actually don’t even run – I just take long walks with some jogging here and there.

I believe it is right, or wise, to exercise the body somewhat when I have a job that mostly leaves me sitting. The body is not built for passivity; it needs to be reminded that it is still inhabited, at least at my current level of development. I believe that when people become more alive inwardly, the need for external exercise becomes less. Certainly scholars and sages seem to live just as long as athletes, if not more so. So there is probably more to this than what meets the eye. But for now, it is an enjoyable way to stay healthy, I think.

So where does the gluttony come in? Well, in its crassest form, there is the notion of exercising more so that I can eat more. This is not all that different from the rumored practice of the decadent Roman parties, where people supposedly gorged themselves on expensive food, then threw up and went back to the orgy. OK, it is healthier and less insane, but the underlying mode of thought is disturbingly similar. They attribute this quote to Socrates: “Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.” I suspect most of us fall somewhere in between, but I also think we will gradually drift in one or the other direction over the years.

But even if you eat and drink to live, or mostly so, the fact remains that you eat more if you are physically active. Of course, if you have manual labor, if you work with your body, this is for the good of society (presumably). But simply by running around, it is within your reach to double your energy output. (Not that I am near that, even on my best days; but then I don’t even jog more than short stretches.) If you double your energy output and keep the same weight, you obviously also double your energy input, or in other words the food you eat. And once you’ve eaten it, no one else will.

Luckily we now live in a world where there is enough food for at least 9 billion people, perhaps 10, and we are only just over 7 billion. So other things probably count more, like throwing away food (huge amounts both privately and especially from shops) or distribution problems in poor countries. There is in and of itself no reason why we should need to eat less right now. And if we do, the first thing would be to eat less meat (and to some extent milk) since much of the energy in plant food is lost while passing through animals.

But there may be a future, not so far away, when food might be less abundant. Fossil fuels will surely continue to grow more expensive, and western agriculture (especially American) uses a lot of oil to produce all this cheap food.  So with more expensive oil, food will also be more expensive. This could put it out of reach for the poorest, and the more we in the rich world eat, the less there will be overall. So at that time, eating twice as much may cost someone else their life. That is a heavy burden … except we really don’t care usually. It is not like we can’t afford, most of us, to keep some poor kid alive in a developing country if we really, really want. But most of us don’t do it, at least not regularly. So we’ll probably not think of our eating that way either.

In either case, eating more veggies and grains should help keep the world fed for a while at least, and that may be all we need. The population explosion is set to stop and even reverse around the middle of the century.

Still, there are definitely purer motivations for exercise than eating as much as possible. And it may be that at some point I am going to change my exercise to  get more health benefits with less energy use, like hard interval training instead of long, leisurely walks. But for now, this is not a high priority. I just want to be aware of what I do, and not drift mindlessly like flotsam on the stream of time.

 

Pulse while jogging

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No. A high pulse while jogging is not a good thing.

After reading the transcript from my cardiologist, I pondered how to make my potential “superpower” of super-low resting pulse into something useful. When walking fast, my pulse is typically around 110-120 depending on the day. But jogging even a short distance brings my pulse up in the 140es, at which point I slow down to a walk again. No point in taunting the asthma to attack.

And then I used Google to learn more about normal pulse while jogging, and found numerous young people asking “Is it normal to have a pulse of [180 / 190 / 200] while jogging?” The answers varied in quality, but generally the answer is NO WAY! Most humans have a maximum pulse below 200 even when young. A pulse of above 180 should be reserved for when you try to outrun a tsunami, or during the spurt phase of a championship. Or in other words, don’t voluntarily bring on a pulse like that unless there is a cardiologist and a heart starter nearby, or unless your life is forfeit anyway.

(The exception to this is high-intensity interval training, where you exert your muscles and heart very hard for a brief interval. This is used by athletes who want to improve their maximum performance. As long as you know your limits and do it right, it is surprisingly harmless. But if you are not already an athlete, don’t do interval training without the OK from a competent physician. Get to know your max pulse and that you don’t have any illnesses that may interfere.)

Back to the joggers. It is likely (and sometimes they actually say it) that these people are in a similar situation as I, only younger. They have not actually been jogging before, but they have seen others do it. So they set off, but it is harder than it looks. Why is this? It is usually because the body is not adapted to this particular use.

Even if you are in good shape, when you switch from one type of exercise to another which you are unfamiliar with, the pulse will go way up for some weeks. In part the body simply does not know how to do this exercise efficiently. In part the muscles for that task are not developed. Two things happen to muscles when you start using them in a new way: 1) They add muscle fiber, if you are straining them harder than before, and 2) they add small blood vessels, if you are using them longer than before.

If your body tries to bring sugar and oxygen to the muscles but the blood vessels are too small and too few, the heart needs to work that much harder, and your pulse will go way up, even if you don’t have an illness. What you need to do then is to give your muscle time to adapt. This means weeks where you exercise in the new way but not too hard.

For instance, after I have warmed up by walking, if my pulse is below 120, I start jogging until the pulse passes 140 on its way up. Then I slip back into walking, which I am quite experienced at. When the pulse fall below 120 again, I can jog for another stretch. If you are young and don’t have asthma, you can go quite a bit higher than that, but the point is that you should not stress test your heart when your muscles can’t benefit from it anyway. They still need to grow to their optimal size, and interval jogging three times a week will be enough to make them do that. But you have to keep at it. There is no magic wand. You have to put time and miles into walking if you haven’t even done that, and later you do the same for jogging, and eventually running. It may look easy on TV, but you have to put your own miles into it.

When you’ve got your jogging right, you should be able to keep a simple conversation while jogging, without having to slow down to get your breath back. If you jog alone, you should be able to recite a poem, or a familiar prayer. If your pulse is anywhere near 180, I’d go for the prayer.

My belated superpowers

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Unfortunately I can’t manipulate time to slow down or speed up other people, but evidently I am slowing down myself. Not that this will surprise many… ^_^

The report from the cardiologist arrived, and I left it on the fridge for a while. Turns out it actually contains more details than I got when I was there (or at least other details – while there, I got to look at the ultrasound pictures and cool stuff like that).

The report could barely have been more upbeat if it were ordered by an elderly presidential candidate trying to convince the world that he was not going to keel over at the start of his term and leave the country in the hands of a pretty but cheerfully ignorant vice-president. Not that such a thing would ever happen. Anyway, upbeat. Vague pun intended at heartbeat.

Did you know I have physical superpowers? My mental superpowers are a matter of record, of course. I mean, you see them here almost every day. Plus, I used to be an amazing programmer, back when it was necessary to be an amazing programmer. These days, you can make whatever you want in some high-level programming tool, and the super fast computers will run it at a decent clip even if it is sloppily written, as long as the logic is not insane. I don’t really feel there is need for me as a programmer anymore. But the good news, if true, is that I now have superpowers of the body as well!

I refer to the observation that my resting pulse, which used to be around 55 back in 2005 and 50 last year, is now evidently 44. The portable heart monitor came to this somewhat disturbing conclusion, at least. Disturbing how? Disturbing in the sense that this is the resting pulse of a national level athlete. Well, for small nations like my native Norway, I guess. World class athletes may have slightly lower, though not all of them do. Just the outliers, the ones most people (but not me) have heard about. Yeah, baby. Magnus Itland, world-class athlete without even trying.

Actually, it is not quite that easy. On the contrary, the good doctor admits that “the patient has however a lower physical capacity than one should expect”. Uh, not if one bases one’s expectations on the patient not having exerted himself for even half a minute for the previous 45 years, I think. But yeah, the pulse rises really fast if I actually exert myself. Jogging for a brief stretch raises my pulse to 140. Of course, I have never actually jogged before, beyond a few steps now and then, so there’s that. Evidently to translate that ridiculously low resting pulse to actual working capacity, I will have to actually exert myself. Perhaps one day!

While I was at the lab, I asked him whether my low pulse wasn’t a case of bradycardia (as the Wikipedia rather strongly implies it is). The doctor did not think so. He said it came from there just not being much resistance in my blood vessels. He showed me ultrasound pictures that indicated less rough surface and plaque than normal for my age. Overall, I seem to have a body that is several years younger than my chronological age. This makes sense, I suppose, if my heart has beat less times than the heart of people much younger than me. By that measure, I may be closer to 40 than 53. Someone please tell my hair.

In fact, I suspect this is a lifelong trait: I reached puberty later than all the other boys my age, and I kept growing taller for longer than all the other boys my age. That probably means I was also immature for much longer than other young men my age, which certainly fits the fact. If this keeps up, I may die from old age much later than the other boys my age too. On the other hand, the sad truth is that most people don’t die from old age. They die from cancer, or heart infarcts, or stroke, or blood poisoning, or the flu, or being too demented to realize that the cows don’t need to be milked and they are not on the farm and it’s below freezing outside and the nurses who should keep track of them are playing Facebook games. Stuff like that. So my 120 years birthday is far from secure, alas.

But at least my cardiologist is giving me a chance. Thanks!

Intentionally left almost blank

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I keep writing entries on spirituality, religion and philosophy and deciding to not upload them, at least not yet. They may not be perfect, or they may be too perfect for me, or I just may have too much of my iceberg above water for its stability. In any case, I am writing but not not uploading. Perhaps it is a mistake, perhaps The World Needs To Know, but I have to make the call.

 

10,000 hours

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A rule of thumb says that a grandmaster of chess – or the equivalent in any other venue – has put in at least ten thousand hours of practice.
And by “practice” we mean “relentless pounding on the invisible wall of your comfort zone.”

Psychologist Anders Ericsson did the research that gave us the 10000 hours rule, although others have popularized it in books. Much of the “evidence” is anecdotal, admittedly. But you know why? Because most people don’t put 10,000 hours into anything except their work, if that, and in that case rarely with enthusiasm and relentless dedication. Most jobs probably don’t even allow you to challenge yourself that way for 40 hours a week, five years, as it would take at that speed. And even if they did, most workers would rather quit, if they could get away with it, than exert themselves like that for a company they didn’t own.

At my own workplace, we get reorganized more often than every 5 years, although there is some continuity, so that is not my excuse. I just suck at organizing my own research when it comes to something as unpredictable as humans and the way they use hardware and software. The hardware and software is the easy part, of course. “Everything in the world fits together, except humans.”

One of the more famous examples was the guy who decided to put his three daughters through this level of relentless chess training while they grew up, to see whether they really would become expert chess players. All of them did. In all fairness, so was their father. But there is not a 100% chance of the next generation inheriting the chess mastery, or even a 33% chance. And whatever chance there is, usually only applies to the sons. Chess is still a male-dominated mind sport, and certainly was when the girls were small. Of course, if they had had no talent whatsoever, they might have run away from home or worse. I am not sure how ethical it is to be the destiny of your children in such a way, I find it creepy. That said, girls could do worse than play chess.

Not limited to chess and playing instruments (the most common examples), the 10,000 hour rule also applies to sports. Although in this case the life phase probably matters a lot, regardless of whether talent does. Skill sports you can get started on early, but strength and endurance sports are not for small kids, so your window of opportunity is narrower. Old age is not a great time to take up sports either, although it actually seems OK for running. There are several examples of men taking up running at the age of gray hairs and doing pretty well, running marathon long after retirement even if not winning.

Whatever thoughts I had about doing this, it definitely won’t happen today. Today my health is well below average (whining in my personal journal) and even my appetite is shot. But I have other interests as well. After all, one of my slogans is “surpassing numerous destinies while one is alive”. My higher aspiration may be to become a grandmaster of esoteric wisdom. But a more cynical observer may think I am closer to becoming a master of playing The Sims 3. ^_^

Me, a hollow flickering image?

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Insubstantial or larger than life? Or just having my head in the clouds?

As I was walking near the largest bridge here in Mandal, I reflected on the fact that I was as shallow as a picture, as hollow as an outline, and as insubstantial as an image projected on a canvas. Evidently I forgot to reflect on just how temporary I am, but I guess that kind of follows. ^_^

No, I was not tempted to jump off the bridge (it is anyway not high enough for instant death, although I am sure I would have drowned pretty soon). Rather, the reason for the somewhat extreme imagery was that I compared myself to the heavenly things that exceed my highest aspiration. By comparison, I am a very flimsy thing in whatever aspect of me you may study.

It is said that God does not exist, and in a literal sense I tend to agree, at least for a particular aspect of God. To exist literally means something like “stand out” (ex = out, as most exes may painfully know). God certainly doesn’t stand out. Rather, God is what everything else stands out from. If you watch a movie projected on a white wall, the pictures seem the only reality; they are colorful, ever moving, a variety of shapes and activity. In our mind, they are all there is to what we see before us. But in reality, the only substantial and lasting thing in front of us is the wall, which we do not see, and without which we would not see the images either.

(Only by withdrawing to some degree could God possibly allow the world to exist. A candle cannot burn in the heart of the sun, and the difference here is far greater than that. If God were to be fully present, there would be no room for anything else.)

Even the grandest things of this world are in this way flat and insubstantial, flickering briefly in time, compared to the Eternal. And not God alone, but even the created things of High Heaven – the Thrones, Powers, Dominions and various spiritual creations known and unknown – far exceed anything down here. Believe it or not. ^_^ I just say how I see it at this time. And mainly in a purely thinking way, for it is not as if I have been up there and peeked, to the best of my memory.

And yet there is this flickering little image of God still in man, though some may not know it and some may deny it, and some of us may greatly exaggerate our likeness. But there is this flickering outline of something greater even than the powers of Heaven, albeit only in potential. A potential which now, given my record so far and my limited lifespan, will surely remain mostly (at best) potential. The audacity of hope goes only so far – but it goes some distance.

From across the river, I saw the rows and clusters of homes stretching along the other side. Wishing to bless them all, each home and everyone inside them, I was quite aware that the blessing of my heart was very little worth. Even with a single soul, when met face to face, my heart’s blessing is insubstantial and likely to go unnoticed. Only for my simulated little computer people may my benevolence have any drastic effect, those who live in a small, simple 2-dimensional world far less real than ours. How much less then are the multi-dimensional realms of Heaven, far more real and permanent than the shifting sands of timebound Earth, bound to notice the coming and going of my heart’s unsteady thoughts.

And yet… I aspire to this, to be known in a higher realm, more durable and more real than this one. To taste of the crumbs of immortality, not merely out of a fear of death, but in order to gain the merest little substance, that I may be able to actually do something useful as seen from a much higher place. We may excel in our earthly work (though I currently don’t, unfortunately) but without guidance from Above our work lacks direction. It becomes one of innumerable chaotic movements that cancel each other out on a grander scale. One builds, another tears down. The work of a lifetime may fall to the fires of an hour. What is popular in one generation is reviled by the next. Unless we aspire to something beyond time, we don’t aspire much at all. So it seems to me.

I come home, and later in the evening come across a formerly unread statement by Fridthof Schuon: “If a man seeks to realize that which in fact immensely transcends him, he must  a priori conform to this end or model, for otherwise he will fail either simply by collapsing of else by being broken”. I had to go back and read it over and over.
… that which in fact immensely transcends him…
Yes. It does. I am messing with things that are of a completely different order. And I may fail utterly in the end. But without this aspiration, everything is and remains hollow, just flickering images that are gone when the lights go out. I do not simply accept that as my life, all else untried. I may lose my courage and my patience, but I would rather not do so before even starting.

There are those who think we can go from nothing to something through effort, lift ourselves by our own buddhastraps as Robert Godwin puts it. As a Christian (even if a sucky one) I think we can only move upward through the power of grace. That is not to say that this happens without our consent in details, or that it happens through magic or ritual in an outward way. The new life can only grow at the expense of the old, and accepting this in practice may well be called an “effort”. It certainly can be called suffering, by the original human personality which experiences restriction and the prospect of annihilation, absolute destruction. Of course, if the New Man ever gets the upper hand and gets to write this journal on his own, the concept of suffering is likely to be very different.

Spiritual asparagus writing

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I wrote yet a couple more saintly entries based on the two latest books I am reading. I really need to stop doing that. Reading something is not the same as having absorbed it, even in an intellectual sense. Much less having let the word become flesh.

Asparagus writing. You know, unlike fruits that have matured or vegetables that have grown to maturity, asparagus are picked while they are shots, just coming up from the ground. There is a farm near Riverview where they sell these in the spring. Not a bad word about asparagus (at least if you suffer from constipation, of which they are the antithesis in my experience). But I really should not write about religious metaphysics as soon as the first green shots of it peek up in my mind.

Mouravieff, first impressions

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A few days ago I got a packet from Amazon.com: Boris Mouravieff’s Gnosis: Exoteric Cycle, the first of three volumes in his life work Gnosis. The next two, which I have not ordered (yet at least) are named Mesoteric Cycle and Esoteric Cycle. Exoteric refers to the outward form of religion, Esoteric to its inward and hidden meaning. I have not seen the word Mesoteric anywhere else, but it would presumably lie in between the two, as its name implies, as well as its number in the trilogy.

Even the 5 start reviews freely admit that Mouravieff is a bit apart from consensus reality, if you know what I mean – it can be hard for the casual observer to say whether the man was out and out crazy. So I expected a challenging read. To my pleasant surprise, the beginning was quite sane, or at least quite similar to my own understanding. Here’s from the start of the actual book (after several levels of introduction):

“Man is so caught up in the toils of mechanical life that that he has neither time to stop nor the power of attention needed to turn his mental vision upon himself. Man thus passes his days absorbed by external circumstances. The great machine that drags him along turns without stopping, and forbids him to stop under penalty of being crushed. Today like yesterday, and tomorrow like today, he quickly exhausts himself in the frantic race, impelled in a direction which in the end leads nowhere. Life passes away from him almost unseen, swift as a ray of light, and man falls engulfed and still absent from himself.”

Isn’t that the sad truth? It certainly fits my observations. Even people who are smarter than me are easily pulled along by this “machine”, or the maelstrom of physical life. By experience we know that various physical goods (like food and shelter) makes life a lot more comfortable very quickly. So it is oh so easy to assume that accumulating worldly goods is the fast lane to happiness. But the faster we run this race, the less time we have to check whether it really works. It doesn’t.

There is an article going the rounds over on Google+ from time to time, “Top five regrets of the dying” as recorded by a nurse doing palliative care. There is nothing new and surprising in this article, it is exactly what you would expect. Not more sex and bungee jumping, but less time in the office, more time with friends, and more honesty, courage and simple happiness.

Instead of getting terminal cancer, I recommend reading the article. Also, at least the first chapters of Gnosis. The effect is somewhat similar. In one word: Sobering.

What if … instancing?

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Today is fluffy entry! We all know that parallel worlds only exist in science fiction and such. (Of course, so did communications satellites and flat-screen TVs…)

Not only are online roleplaying games becoming more and more lifelike: The real world is also becoming more like one of those games. (Or rather, our image of the real world is changing to that. It seems reasonable to assume that reality itself does not change.) Recently, science seems to verify that there is a lower limit to size. Particles cannot be divided into smaller particles forever: The so-called Planck size puts an absolute limit on how small things can physically be, kind of like the pixels on a screen limit the graphics of video games. Some scientists also claim there is a Planck Time, a smallest possible unit of time, playing a similar role in reality as the clock frequency of a computer.

Real life seems to have gotten the occasional upgrade as well: When I was a kid, it was doubtful whether Earth could actually feed 5 billion humans. Now we are 7 billion and produce enough food for 10 billion, although much of the food is wasted, some is used for “biofuel” and some is lost in transport. The laws of nature are supposedly the same, but the software – the human mind – has been upgraded. This is superficially similar to how a multiplayer online game is upgraded to handle more simultaneous players as it becomes more popular. And human life has certainly become popular lately.

So far, though, we have not seen instancing in real life. In MMORPGs, instancing was spearheaded by City of Heroes 8 years ago these days, and has later been adopted by other games both older and newer. In CoH, most missions were “door mission” which you entered through the front door of a more or less random office, warehouse or cave opening. But even if two teams went through the same door, they came into different – sometimes strikingly different – locations, each of them unique to the team.

In addition, CoH had zone instancing. A particular part of the city, such as the newbie area Atlas Park, might get so full of heroes that there would not be enough villainy for them all to stop, not to mention that the abundance of special effects and unpredictable movements might slow down the computers. So past a certain number of heroes, the next arrivals would go into a new instance called Atlas Park 2, and after that Atlas Park 3 etc.

It seems unlikely that we will have instancing in real life! But if we did, what form would it take? I have of course given this much thought. (As Scripture says: “The eyes of the fool is at the ends of the world.”) The result is a fictional “n-space”, based on an utterly imaginary second time dimension. Modern cosmology assumes that there may be an infinite number of alternate universes, that the possible universe branches continually every time two different outcomes are possible. One where Schroedinger’s cat is alive, one where it is dead, and so on. If it were possible to travel sideways through these universes (which would require a second time dimension, as far as I can see), we could get to worlds where humankind failed to arise or survive, and claim them for ourselves. (Of course, the victorious Nazi empire might already have done that – but probably not, since most major scientific breakthroughs seem to involve Jews at some stage or another…)

Right now the whole concept is as fictional as can be. I may, in fact, use it in some of my fiction; I have several half-baked ideas to that effect. One important factor is the cost and convenience of traveling between timelines. It would probably require some kind of base station, although it would be interesting if one could have personal worn shifting devices or at least car devices allowing one to shift the car to another timeline. This would probably not be safe enough to be widespread, even if it were technically possible. (Besides, the more impossible the technology, the more impressive it should look, right?). A more reasonable approach is building a large gateway through – a portal to the parallel world. If the cost of sending things to a nearby world was similar to a trip to the moon, it would probably mainly be used for science and to bring back exterminated species, stuff like that.

If it was feasible to keep a permanent “gate” to an empty instance of Earth, where you could drive through for a modest fee, we could start building a new city in the same place as an old, dig a new mine in the same place as one we had emptied etc. I really doubt anything like that will ever happen in real life. Then again, now that the idea is out there, who knows. There is a saying in Genesis that when humans all have one language, nothing will be impossible for them. Perhaps it is safer for all if the Chinese stick to Mandarin for a while yet…

Technology by 2015

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From YouTube by DesireFanatics

This handsome fellow on YouTube is a living person roleplaying a sim – because actual sims don’t have tablets yet. Millions of us use some form of datapad as a natural part of the day, but it is actually so recent that you don’t find them in computer games, nor in pretty much any novel that has reached print yet.

This entry is inspired by a question on Quora: “What technology trends will most dramatically change the world by 2015?”

My take on this is that 2015 is only three years away. Barring some “black swan”, some great and unforeseen event, technology has to already exist now to have much effect three years from now. It also need to either be extremely powerful or be easy to scale up / mass produce on a global level.

In light of this, my candidate is the Android tablet. Two things must go right, but seem likely to: 1) Android must not be forbidden on grounds of patents (as Apple, at the very least, would want); 2) Android must remain free, or nearly so. In this case, the free software combined with cheap mass produced hardware, will make relatively powerful tablets available to literally billions of people. Most of the tablets (and many of the people) will probably be made in China; this makes this prediction vulnerable to upheavals and war in that area. But then, most things by 2015 will be vulnerable to this.

The iPad has remained the tablet of choice since it first hit the market, but the success of the Kindle Fire shows that there is a large market among those who can’t justify the price of the iPad. There is an even larger market among those who can’t afford a Kindle Fire. The cheaper these things become, the larger the market. At the extreme, it is not unreasonable to expect a billion or two of them to be sold.

People my age and older tend to still think of the world as consisting mainly of a few rich countries and a sea of abject poverty covering the rest of the planet. This is no longer the case and hasn’t been for some time. There are a few rich countries and a few poor countries, and a large “middle class” of countries. Most of the world’s truly large countries fall in this middle range. And most of the people in them could potentially afford a cheap Android Tablet. Why would they, you may ask?

Because unlike mobile phones, tablets have a large space for pictures. Even if you are barely literate (or less than that), you can recognize the face of a friend or the logo of a company. Even for the fully literate, this may be faster. And for them, this is where things really take off. They can bring up lists of prices, quickly seeing where they can buy something cheaper or sell it for more.  Weather forecasts can be seen at a glance and studied in detail. And tablets are great for reading books and magazines. The explosive growth of e-books in recent years is mostly due to tablets of various sorts: Back when you only had the PC and the mobile phone, the growth was much slower. Today, e-books sales overshadow all physical formats combined. Magazines are following suit.

With cloud computing and compression technologies (like the one now used in the Opera Mini browser, cutting up to 90% of the need for bandwidth), you won’t need high-speed networks for the tablets to be useful. Of course for the actual middle-class, the use for entertainment will drive the spread of faster networks and wireless access points branching off from fixed-line Internet. In addition to streaming movies and music, I expect an explosion of “hangouts”, the real-world answer to the picture telephone of science fiction.

There are good reasons why the picture telephone never became a success. Most people just don’t consider themselves that beautiful at all times, and have more faith in their ability to make their voice sound good in five seconds than their hair, makeup and jewelry. Rightly so, I dare say.  However, the less improvised and very optional “hangout” (a function currently driving the spread of the Google+ social network) is another matter. It is something you join if you are motivated for it, usually as part of a group (although it is possible to have a 2-person hangout). While not everyone likes it, it is becoming more and more popular. When this function is fully implemented in cheap Android tablets, it will become an easy way for relatives to stay in touch after some of them have moved to the big city; it will let long-distance couples experience more intimacy than an ordinary phone; it may even be useful in business, as a quick teleconferencing or to show products. And it will be able to deliver on this in less than three years, I expect.

There are other technologies with far greater potential to transform society, especially in biotech and possibly nanotech. But they are unlikely to do so in three years. The Android tablet, on the other hand, has already started its victory march into the markets of what was once the “third world”. Why would they go through all the outdated technologies of the past, when they can leapfrog into the same future as we… only cheaper?