In Vivo Veritas

How does the Galactic Capital City/Planet work? It struck me the other day that Coruscant - the city-planet on which all that boring diplomatic stuff happens in the first three Star Wars films - has no economy. Well, not a monetary-based one anyway. I know of course that there is nothing outside the text but I wondered if this was possibly the future for humanity on this very-real planet, where technology has taken over almost all the work that we at present get paid for. Sooner or later our technology is going to get to a point where no one actually has to do anything other than think - and even that will go out of the window. Will we then live in a paradise of permanent leisure where everyone just gets and does what they want without any need for the money to do so? Of course we won't. Wouldn't it be lovely though? Someone I know - until recently a Maggie fan of the highest order - has started suggesting that a world based on a monetary economy is doomed to failure (something to do with debt apparently - maybe he has a point there) and we should work towards one based on barter and resource. From what I remember, the governments of the world have done their best to monetise any resource-based economy by taxing payment in kind so we can't all just go off and start swapping our abilities without handing over money and expect no not get a visit from Mister Inland Revenue ... which is a pity. Of course if the point at which the technology makes such a world possible coincides with the point at which our consciousness can be absorbed into the machines, such laws would need a radical overhaul anyway.

Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't be better to set up the robots with a few unimpeachable regulations and let them get on with the boring stuff of keeping the world happy without them having to worry about being actually paid for it. Sorry - not a good thought is it. Bye for now.

To The Gills

Even with the Kindle I'm still left with a huge pile of books by the side of the bed. I know I really need to do something about. And now the logical-yet-ephemeral collection inside the Graphite Slabette is growing at a rate fare higher than the normal acquisition of reading matter. I like the idea of having all sorts of reference matter on hand.

Anyway, this entry is by way of bring up-to-date the reading log.

Polished off on Christmas Day between various gift and food frenzies was the now-traditional QI Annual - this year H for Heroes (and some villains). Next came Bill Bryson's At Home which was not the encyclopedia of Household Gadgets which I had imagined but a book about whatever the author wanted to talk about that he hadn't already covered in other books, triggered by loose association with the rooms in his own house. Interesting and moreish it was. After that comes the also-now-traditional Schott's Almanac 2011, still unfinished but being consumed in an unnaturally linear way for what is really a dip-in volume. Now we are back to Quite Interesting Limited with The Second Book of General Ignorance which of whistled by like one of Douglas Adams' beloved deadlines. It's not all purchased literature - from the library is Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World which while interesting leaned into spittle-flecked sophistry at times (I don't believe I just dissed Carl Sagan). Now into The Human Voice by Anne Karpf.

Just found the 1000 Journals website which is packed with superior versions of my own scrapbook.

On Finally Being Led by the Nose

A lovely graphite slab - something so much like a real version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that some people have "Don't Panic" Laser-Etched in large, friendly letters on the sensual grey soft-touch back cover - The Kindle 3 - an icon like a limited-edition 4AD CD - a self-contained holder for any amount of information you could want. You can keep your iPad - that glassy show-off is Liberace to The Kindle's Chopin.

Mine is already packed with literary loveliness for which I have not paid a penny - all selected with a single touch on the machine itself without all that tedious mucking about with USBs.

And still it can be improved. The display lends itself to Henri Cartier Bresson coolness by just being only able to display in black and white. Amazon have exploited this possible failure in the face of all the colour than abounds in the world of portable devices by setting the sleep savers to be famous authors and other icons of high-culture such that when switched off, the machine looks like something not electronic at all. Here is Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Jules Verne and many others of that ilk. Of course after a while of the children switching it off and on and off just to see who will come up next, I am bored with these and want my own. So with a few downloads and no more than the copying of a single file to the machine, I have hacked it to use my own grey scale, 8-bit, 600x800 portraits - heroes all of them. And not so high-brow any more - more popular culture. And this annoys my wife who thinks the aloof apartness of the machine has been compromised by the masses - I imagine she thinks it is something like displaying a Warhol in Tate Britain. However, I am not to be diverted from this - my eReader - my rules so they will remain until I get bored of them as well and they are replaced with another set of favorites.