Ideas.

March 19, 2007 · Filed Under Technology and Gadgets · Comment

I’m sure someone could establish a rule for this. What is this? Well, it’s our capacity to dream things up which, eventually, become reality. Old Leonardo did it with the helicopter and other things. H G Wells and other Sci-Fi writers have done it too. What starts out as pure imagination often becomes reality, although the time it takes for fantasy to become reality can often be hundreds of years. Although, having said this, I am almost under the impression that we are starting to turn dreams into reality much more quickly nowadays, aided, no doubt by the ability of computers to, in effect, accelerate time. Manual calculations which would have taken years, can now be completed in seconds. Thus speeding the rate with which we are able to transform our ideas into reality.

I’ve always found the Star Trek teleportation a fascinating concept, but it seemed no more than pure science fiction. But now scientists are making the first few tentative steps towards making this particular fantasy reality. This almost begs the question: ‘Where do scientists get their inspiration?’. I’m sure more than a few have read quite a lot of science fiction and then started thinking.

If you can imagine something, it will one day become reality . This is something I would put money on, although I doubt I would be around to collect my winnings. Unless, that is, eternal life becomes reality, which it will. One day.

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Blue Ray - new tech, but old problems?

March 19, 2007 · Filed Under Technology and Gadgets · Comment

It looks as though DVD’s are about to be superseded by these Blue ray high definition data discs. However, I’m not convinced that they are the bees knees.

Recently we’ve had a few DVDs from our local rental shop which have been, very annoyingly, stopping half way through our chosen films. We do clean the things before popping them in the player, but the scratches these things seem to accumulate just seem too much for our player to handle. This may be because the player is not that new, or this could be down to the overall fragility of these plastic discs as media. I suspect Blue ray discs will be just as fragile, possibly more so seeing as they contain even more data than DVDs. I know that error correction mechanisms are built into the players, but only thorough use will establish how effective this correction is going to be at overcoming the scratches and scrapes these discs seem to pick up through quite normal handling.

Now, what I would like to see is a solid state chunk of memory that is large enough to hold all my music and films, but that can be read on just about any player. Such memory would be light, robust, and small. Oh, and it would need a quite enormous capacity and would need to be able to be rewritten to many times, unlike flash memory which stops working after too many re-writes, from what I understand. A nice small reader would be good too, something that could double up as a portable music player or that could transfer music to an iPod thingummy as and when required. When you wanted to buy, or rent a film, or music, you would just take the memory block to a shop pop it into a reader, pay and have the film etc. downloaded to the memory. Such an operation could also be done wirelessly or via the www.

The only slight problem would be that of back-ups, although I’m sure an enterprising company would allow you to up-load your index and then re-charge a new memory block in the event that the old one was destroyed by a fire or a three year old.

Just an idea.

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The big meeting - My son

March 19, 2007 · Filed Under Italy, Me, Milan, My son · Comment

Well, we had the ‘big meeting’, only it was not that big and it lasted around half an hour including an endoscopic examination of my son’s nose, which revealed that all was OK.

Two specialists and one head of department and a couple of stray doctors were there to observe. The scans were examined and it was concluded that our little one was too little to operate on and that the mass that had shown up on the scan was most likely just mucus. I did ask about the possibility of the mass being a tumour, but was told that this was unlikely as the experts who had looked at the scan would have been able to recognize a tumour. It was decided to keep little one on antibiotics for the indefinite future and to keep scanning every so often to ensure that the mass was not getting bigger.

Am I happy? Well, sort of. I’m not too happy about regular antibiotics and, after speaking to an old family friend who is a retired doctor, I’m not sure that the antibiotics are going to have much effect, apart from maybe keeping bugs at bay. The possibility of inflammation was discounted. So that was that. It has to be said that outwardly, our little one seems to be very healthy and is growing at a pace.

The other one who does not seem too convinced is our wee one’s mum. She has not said much, but I can tell that she is still very worried. Mums are expert worriers, my own mum is a champion at this, and I know she is not alone. Until you have children I don’t think you realise just how attached physically and emotionally mums are to their offspring.

I’m remaining optimistic, mainly because of my son’s general excellent health. We shall see. Only time will tell.

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