No Fiction No Reality

Last week I went to GCF2012 in Riyadh, and to be totally honest I only enjoyed 3 things: the networking, the Saatchi and Saatchi presentation & the panel of SciFi writers.
And what most enjoyable to me was the opportunity I got to spend some quality time with some of  best SciFi writers in the world (such as Catherine Asaro, Marl O'Green & Dr. Arlan Andrews) and got to discuss some very important fictional topics ;-)

The main topic that I was exploring is the effects of fiction and especially the scientific type on the advancement and prosperity of any society. I have always believed that the main drive behind advancement was SciFi, and would argue that we are yet to see any new invention or gadget that has not been dreamed up in a SciFi story before some engineer/scientist made it happen.
This is very apparent when you look at the contrast between the USA & Japan, each has its own rich and unique SciFi culture, and that clearly shows in the kind of technologies they are each working on. I would argue that the Japanese have a very deep emotional and psychological SciFi that looks more into the supernatural, while the USA has a much more materialistic kind of SciFi that focuses more on the physical looks, feel and power of technology. And this difference clearly effects how products are developed and designed in both these countries.

My point in most of the discussion was that you need a good SciFi culture to drive your economy , and when an economy's quality of SciFi production goes down, so does the economy it self. I believe that the main drive behind the fall of the US economy is what we see in the movie industry today, where they are now recycling SciFi ideas from the 80s. in my opinion that shows that the creative drive in this economy is drying up and no one is willing to invest in digging deeper to keep it running, therefore forcing it to dry off even faster.

But how dose SciFi effect progress and why? what are the main components in SciFi that if perfected would drive an economy forward? What is it about SciFi that drives us humans to advance? and more importantly, How is it that SciFi writers have the vision to know that the bold ideas they are presenting are actually scientifically possible even though every one at the time of writing it called fiction? and building on that, why is it called fiction when it turns out that it was possible?

But as usual my big mouth got me to places I did not intend to go, and I was put on the spot to lead something I did not intend to lead.
Dr. Arlan Andrews, when asked about SciFi in the Arabian world decided (without consulting me) to point me out of the audience as the future of the Arabian SciFi culture (thank you Dr. Arlan Andrews, for throwing that responsibility on my shoulder).

So guys help me out here, if we are to build a SciFi culture for the Arabic world (I know it is ironic that I am writing about this in English), what do we need to focus on to build this culture? how can this SciFi culture help drive us forward into the 21st century? and on a much more controversial topic, how would we have our own SciFi and what are the aspects that would differentiate us from the rest of the SciFi that exists in the world today?

The Emergence of a new Species

What happened in Egypt has come to show that humans do evolve. Infact that just happened.
As a species, this generation is totally different than their parents. The way they think, communicate, take decisions, process information or even coordinate.
These two are so different that the mightiest of the parent species was unable to grasp even the basic concepts of the new child species.
The following is a comparison to show how apart these two are & why I think this is evolution:
- Social: The previous generation was limited in its social reach to a hand full of peers, the new generation socializes on a global scale.
- Information: the old generation had slow data processing by reading books and waiting for information for days and some times months, the new generation processes thousands of bits of new information every day from all over the world.
- Processing: The old generation toke its sweet time to process information and take decisions, the new generation finds new information, processes it and make a decision in a few seconds.
- Communication: the old generation communicated with a limited number of others withing a limited space and it always was ONE to (ONE or Many), the new generation communicates with thousands of others and mostly in a Many to Many fashion.
- Technology: Historically the older generation are only slightly behind on technological update (since the updates were so slow) and were superior to their new generation by accumulated experience, NOW the new generation have passed their older generation technologically and have the ability to accumulate and transfer experience very quickly.

Ctr+Alt+Del

For all of us technical PC users we just love Ctr+Alt+Del, it is such an amazing feature that should be in any operating system (maybe that is why I do not like Apple).
Ctr+Alt+Del allows you to just kill any application or operation you do not like OR even just wipe out your memory and restart the system fresh.

Ctr+Alt+Del comes so naturally that it is the first thing that comes to mind when faced with any real life issues.
Take for example Education, the system is just so tangled and resources are so stretched it is almost in a deadlock and the output is Crappy. The system freezes a lot, and the script is almost never executed. The output buffer is so full it is corrupting the data, and the data burners are so over used and under supplied that they can no longer sustain quality.
Don't you think we need to Ctr+Alt+Del and just kill this process and fire up a second one?

What about the Economy? the debt is so high it is a joke, the bus's bandwidth is drained by recurring processes of interest that are like a virus overloading your CPU, and the memory is so overheated that it is making up numbers that never existed.
What do you say, Ctr+Alt+Del? trust me it will finally show you the real power of the system you are running this baby on.

And do not get me started on transportation especially in the developing world. The infrastructure project keep making memory calls to addresses way beyond the available address limit, and the CPU is not getting any useful data from the storage drives. Its like you are not getting smooth streaming although your T1 line is up, somehow one of these Trojans has triked your anti-virus and is now sucking up your bandwidth.
Come on, you must want to Ctr+Alt+Del by now. With all of these crappy applications running with such performance YOU MUST want to just kill them all.
These issues all seem to me like the Y2K issue, no one thought these systems through. Most of these issues could have been avoided from the start had someone paid attention while designing them.

Next time I will talk on some design issues (you know what you are supposed to do before telling people how great your application is), and maybe we can come up with some designs that are so Unreasonably Irrational that they might actually work.

My First Blog here

Some of you might already know me from my page on FaceBook and my blog there.

I will try on my blog here to present something different than what I am presenting on FaceBook.
My FaceBook page was and will remain as a much more personal nature than what I will be posting here.
Here I will try to show my wildly Unreasonable ideas to the point where it is Irrational to persist on perusing them any more.

The ideas I will talk about will cover a wide range of topics from Education, Religion, Science, Sports (eSports to be precise), Economy and even time travel.

I know that most of you might find these ideas utterly insane or even boarder line ..... (I can't really find the word for it, if after you read my posts this word comes to you please let me know).
So please do post your thoughts (and insults if that would make you feel good), oh and please try your best to kill these ideas and cure me of my Irrationally Unreasonableness.

See you on my next post