The future in their hands
By Jenny Sinclair
December 3 2002
Next
http://theage.com.au/articles/2002/11/29/1038386319127.html
As potential users of the next generation of mobile devices, the final-year
industrial design students at RMIT University have more than a few ideas
about how they should work.
In a series of designs using third-generation communications technology and
the Bluetooth wireless standard, the students have come up with some
surprising devices.
One group has designed a matching set of home-automation devices that
includes a rotating light that converts to a camera, a fully mobile
"control panel" with fingerprint security, pull-out screens and a phone
function.
Another, asked to design fully usable devices that would also help people
with disabilities, followed Apple's stripped-down design principles to come
up with a set of devices that work together to alert deaf users to incoming
messages and sounds around the home via a vibrating wristwatch, and a tiny
scrolling braille screen for mobile users.
The "youth" group made their devices out of silicon rubber for toughness.
They integrated a phone and wireless earpieces with a music player, and
built their personal network around a funky-looking personal digital
assistant that can change its screen design to suit the store the user
happens to be in. That group focused on letting users swap still images,
video and music files, a priority for teenagers.
Mobile workers were given a bright metallic suite including a phone,
camera, tablet PC-style device with an on-screen virtual keyboard, built-in
global positioning and the ability to store and send digital documents.
All the devices had to be practically, if not commercially, feasible and
even the roll-out screen on one device for mobile workers is available
JANUS
Prophets of doom
By Jon Casimir
November 29 2002
Icon
A much taller and better-looking guy than me - I think it was Woody Allen -
once said: "It's not that I'm afraid to die - I just don't want to be there
when it happens." Mr Allen, as he insists I refer to him, was only making a
joke at the time ... but what if he was onto something?
What if you could find out when and where you were going to die and make
arrangements to be somewhere else? Surely we'd all be happy to leave a
Post-it note on the front door saying, "Sorry, reaper old pal, but
something came up at the last minute."
The legendary The Death Clock - "the internet's friendly reminder that life
is slipping away ..." - claims it can help. It won't tell you where you're
going to shuffle off, but it will tell you when. And, armed with that
knowledge, you'll be able to minimise the risk of Mr Death finding you. You
could go somewhere so unlikely that he'd never think of it. Like Brisbane.
Or, failing that, you could simply convert to another religion on the final
day, one without the reaper's threat.
The Death Clock calculates our use-by dates based on life expectancy
averages. It checks your gender, then takes the human life span listed in
the CIA's World Factbook and adds it to your birth date.
Apparently I'm checking out on Thursday, May 6, 2038. As I type, The Death
Clock reckons, I have 1,124,843,091 seconds to live. By the time you're
reading this, that number will be quite a bit lower, and I feel I can
guarantee, even now, that most of those seconds will have been wasted.
For something as serious as your own death date, it's worth getting a
second opinion. The Life Span Clock asks the same basic dating questions as
The Death Clock but somehow figures my departure to be in 2077. Yes folks,
I'm going to live until 113. Hmm, so far I've tried two death calculators
and the response has varied by 39 years. There are blind dart throwers with
more scientific accuracy.
The Longevity Game is an American insurance company's contribution to the
world of death clocks. It takes its statistics from its own mortality
database and calculates that, if I were an American, I'd be due for my big
sleep some time in 2041. The very similar Life Expectancy Calculator at
Living To 100 reckons I'll make it to 2050.
Find Your Fate lets you predict your appointed meeting with your maker
another way, by asking a series of questions about your lifestyle, health,
diet, family history and environment. Questions such as "How often do you
eat processed meat?" and "How much time do you spend in the sun?"
There are no right or wrong answers. And since they all end up with you
dying anyway, there's not a lot of point in cheating.
Find Your Fate reckons I might live to be 80. The interesting thing is that
you go back and change your answers to gauge the effect that altering your
habits could have. If I change my exercise answer from "Once a week" to
"Never" - which is sadly closer to the truth - I'll lose only six months.
If I go the other way and imagine myself doing something vigorous every
day, I could add a little more than two years. Is it worth it?
TheSpark.com's Death Test has a darker sense of humour than its cousins. It
attempts to predict your demise by expanding on the usual list to include
questions designed to predict whether you'll be murdered or have a fatal
accident. How often do you rollerblade in traffic? How often do you walk
alone at night? Do you like to play with fire? Do you regularly light
firecrackers in your mouth and then spit them out at the last second?
In the midst of this silliness it also asks what seems to be to be a more
pertinent question than most of the serious sites: how healthy do you feel?
According to the Death Test I'm most likely to die on October 18, 2042.
It's tipping cancer as my most likely nemesis, followed by heart attack and
then alien abduction.
Of course, all this speculation assumes that my life is a little train on a
statistical track that will not be derailed by something unexpected. It
doesn't take into account the odds of me being knocked down in the street
tomorrow by an obese Australian child on a scooter. And at a time when
George Bush is considering mass destruction in the name of avoiding mass
destruction, it doesn't take into account the possibility of bigger
factors. Such as the end of the world - which, however you look at it,
would put a crimp on any rest-of-your-life plans.
The end-of-the-world crowd have been pretty quiet since their apocalyptic
hopes for the millennium (hands up everyone who now feels nostalgic about
Y2K hysteria) fizzled out so pathetically, but there are still plenty of
prophets of doom out there, spruiking for their various causes. It doesn't
matter what party costumes are available, someone always wants to come as
Chicken Little.
At the more responsible end of the scale, the Bulletin clock - aka the
doomsday clock - first conceived in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists, has been gauging the nuclear threat ever since that year,
regularly informing us how many minutes from midnight we are. In February
this year the clock was moved back to "Seven minutes to midnight", the
worst position it's been since the Reagan era.
Also responsible, in a Douglas Adams kind of way, is Armageddon Online, a
cheerful exploration of the possibility of what the pointyheads like to
call ELEs - extinction level events. Here, you can read about
super-volcanos, mega-tsunamis, meteor impacts, virus pandemics, hypernovae
and other highly imminent threats to all life as we know it.
By way of one example, "many people believe that a small brown dwarf star,
called Planet X, orbits our solar system. When it passes at its closest to
Earth, in June 2003, its magnetic force will stop the world rotating for
several days, with cataclysmic consequences." If you're thinking about
buying anything on lay-by, try to defer payments until after that date.
The rogue star theory aside, Armageddon Online is pretty good at being
scary but decidedly vague on actual dates, though it does point out that
the US super-volcano we know as Yellowstone Park is about 40,000 years
overdue to blow up, black out the sun and choke most things that breathe.
Exit Mundi has a similar intent, examining the various ways the word
"human" could become past tense, from the very big bang (large object
crashes into Earth) to the very little bang (mankind suffers slow
anticlimax of sperm death). It's a fascinating and often funny site but,
again, it's short on the sort of information you can set your watch by.
Let's be realistic - the "why" of the end of the world is less important
than the "when".
There are, as it happens, many people willing to come up with actual dates
for the end of the world, but unfortunately most of them have post office
boxes in Loon County. Most of them are the kind of people that decent
Christians feel embarrassed about - nutjobs who use the Bible to prop up
their weird fantasies.
It's the End of the World as We Know It ... Again is a wonderful resource
for anyone interested in this apocalyptic prophecy. It's a one-stop shop
detailing the hundreds of past predictions that have gone wrong, as well as
the future ones yet to go wrong.
Site operator Michael Lewis has collected the rantings and warnings of
hundreds of Date Setters through the ages, from the outpourings of lone
fruitcakes to those of established religions, cults and even politicians -
Ronald Reagan once remarked that we would be the generation that saw
Armageddon.
Chris Nelson's A Brief History of the Apocalypse does a similar thing,
tracking Doomsday prophecies all the way back to 2800 BC and an Assyrian
tablet which allegedly read: "Our earth is degenerate in these latter days.
There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end."
Clearly, the Earth is still degenerate, but the end has been slow in
arriving. Which doesn't mean it won't show up next week. You could, of
course, choose to believe any of the around-the-corner theories lined up by
Nelson and Lewis, which include: the 2003 Planet X concept, the 2012 end of
the Mayan calendar and the destructive arrival of aliens in 2035, a
cornerstone of the Raelian belief system.
Nelson and Lewis log at least another 40 other premonitions of
curtain-fall, each due to happen in my lifetime. And if you really want
more after that, you can head to Crank Dot Net, an essential guide to
online crackpotism, or Apocalypse and Millennium Fever Links.
Remember, sooner or later, someone is going to be right. Here's hoping you
live to see it.
http://theage.com.au/articles/2002/11/29/1038386305668.html