A friend of mine said, "Tell me when Facebook is over."

Just like the lack of communications drove so many historical plots, the writers need to insert blocks to communications today to make up for ubiquitous communications. I just saw the girl with the dragon tattoo (American version) and they made a point of showing when he couldn't get bars on his mobile. If he had, then he would have been able to make a quick call and the tension would be over.

One other thing about lots of SF (and SF books) is that everyone is really, really smart. Even the "dumb" people are smart. It gets tiresome at times especially if you are, like me, of average intelligence. I'm not saying that they should dumb down all the characters, but occasionally have someone who isn't preternaturally intelligent, yet is still a good person with other talents.

The rise of characters with autism and asperger's syndrome in fiction is interesting to me, but one thing they often like to do is give them some almost supernatural power to go with the downsides. I doubt you will see a character with asperger's or autism who is not a savant as well.

I just saw a movie called The Next Three Days with Russell Crow in which in the process of learning new skills he made mistakes, things didn't work out, he screwed up. I really liked seeing that because that is the learning experience for so many of us.

Then I read the article about how the trip to Mars would be much more doable if the astronauts only went one direction. [journalofcosmology.com] the story cam out the Journal asked how many people in the would sign up for what would be a one way trip the got 400 volunteers. But would that be okay with humans? Americans? Chinese? Russians? If you volunteered and WANTED to stay and die on Mars it would be like burning the boats when you landed in another country. Of course this could backfire when it came time to cut funding, some people would say, "We can't just stop sending them supplies! They will die!" but the supporters of funding cuts would say, "They knew that it was a suicide mission when they signed up, it's just a matter of if they die now or later. Maybe its time for them to start pulling their own weight. What have those colonists done for us lately? We have given them billions they have given us are some photos and "atmospheric data". Oh sure all of our "human eggs" aren't in one cosmic basket, but this "survival of humanity" insurance is too costly. Plus we are told that the odds of an extinction level event on earth is 100's of thousands or even millions of years away. What's the rush? There are plenty of starving people right here on earth we should take care of first and those people didn't volunteer!"

Troi "He's hiding something Captain."

Which reminds me of this story Sirtis tells at conventions.

Troi: "Captain, he's hiding something." There was one instance where Marina Sirtis had to say that line, and Patrick Stewart turned to her and said: "We know that, you stupid cow! You waste of space!..." To which Marina replied: "Well excuse me, your majesty! I don't write the lines, Patrick, I just say them, OK?!"

I really wish more people in the US could see them because they really are thought provoking.

Those of you who want to see them and have the bandwidth I'm going to introduce you to a service where you can watch them in their entirety. It's called tv-links and it is hosted out of Spain and the company is out of Romania. They are legit and follow international DCMA guidelines for content. They have contracts with Amazon, Apple's iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, Rogers Canada, Blinkbox, Lovefilm and many many other smaller Video On Demand and independent providers. They make money with the advertising around the videos and linking people to merchandising from the studios. I don't know what the contracts are like, but they are the point is, if they studios wanted to shut them down they would so watch away!

[www.tv-links.eu]

As Nick Burns would say, "Oh, by the way, you're welcome.

Now, if you are really a good geek and know how to install a media server on your PC connected to your TV or set top box you can use the media server product, Playon (at playon.tv) to stream the tvlinks shows right to your TV.

Now to Black Mirror. These are my favorite kind of SF, which I've heard called "future ethics" How do you act and what do you do in a world where technology can change how you live and work in profound ways? Everything from etiquette, to morality, to sexual mores to employment changes with this new technology. SF addresses some of these issues by exploring what it will mean in a human relationship.

I found the first one disturbing and instantly thought about how to protect against it. Then I thought about how it is already being used by Anonymous and the US government against people like Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

The second was profoundly depressing, especially in a world where the desire to be more than a 'cog in a machine' is one of the reasons that people do reality shows. Attention is a drug for lots of people in our culture.

The third one was interesting for lots of reasons. I think the choice of a lawyer as the main character was brilliant because lawyers are often the kind of people who are trained to use "hard evidence" to "win" conversations. They would love to use these devices to browbeat people in all areas of their life, even when they are not in court. One of the issues that this one didn't raise was privacy, remember the security guard reviewing the time the guy was out of the country? OMG! Talk about intrusive! This is the kind of thing that the TSA would want to use to keep terrorists out of the country forcing everyone to digitally strip even though I'm sure that terrorists would be smart enough to do things with masks, closed eyes, etc. But it would all be done after a 9/11 type attack as an excuse to show the government is "doing something." Millions would submit to the invasion of privacy to stop something that would not be used twice. (We are still having our crotchal probed and taking off our shoes.) And if you didn't want to submit you would get the line, "If you aren't doing anything wrong what do you have to hide?"

What is interesting to me is how many people actively offer up their lives for surveillance on services like Facebook and Twitter. It isn't Big Brother looking into your lives, it's Big Seller.

That service that I listed above? How can the afford to do this? They are selling something to the movie and TV studios, my demographics and my attention to their ads. I know it. But I'm willing to offer them some info for the ability to watch the shows for "free." I'm paid for the show with my attention and my demographic info, not unlike the guy in 14 million merits. 14 million merits made explicit the transactions. My attention is worth something to someone, but I don't have a counter showing how much my attention is worth, but the people placing the ads do. They know how much my demographic is worth and will pay more to get it. So if they want to reach people like me they advertise on io9.com.

"What's a dimininnninaa??

Here is the whole song.
[www.spockosbrain.com]

[oxforddictionaries.com]