District 9

We saw this movie earlier tonight and I highly recommend it. It was the best movie I've seen in a while. I was going to post a trailer for the film below, but the trailers I saw give away too many plot points, in my opinion (and the one that features interviews with the principals is more tendentious than the movie). I'm glad I didn't see them before I saw the movie, and I'd recommend you don't see them first either.

One nice thing about the movie, incidentally (don't worry, no spoilers follow) is that I didn't recognize any of the actors, who I assume are all South Africans. That enhanced the movie's documentary style. If the Peter Jackson (or whoever produces the inevitable sequel) is smart, he'll resist the temptation to stock the sequel with marquee name actors (I bet Charlize Theron's agent is already making calls). I doubt it though.

Life Imitates Science Fiction, Part II

In a previous post ("Life Imitates Science Fiction"), I mentioned hearing about a new gadget that was similar to a futuristic device imagined by the science fiction writer Michael Swanwick. Today I found out about something like another one of the machines mentioned in a Swanwick book.

Swanwick's novel Stations of the Tide mentioned machines called "surrogates" -- robots, essentially, that a person could animate and control remotely. An image of the person's face would appear on the video screen the surrogate apparently had in place of a head; the person could speak, see, hear through the surrogate, and move it around as well. The link above goes to an excerpt from the beginning of the novel, where surrogates are first mentioned. In keeping with his typical M.O., Swanwick doesn't waste much exposition describing the technology, he just mentions it and lets you fill in the details on your own from the context.

See the video below, for something similar to Swanwick's surrogate: the "Chungbot", named after U.S. Army Major Kevin Chung, a physician specializing in the treatment of burns. As he explains in the video clip below (which includes some graphic footage of recovering burn victims), the robot enabled him to check in on -- and assist in the treatment of -- patients stateside while he was deployed in Iraq.

Life imitates Science Fiction

Not quite, but close: The Atlantic's James Fallows blogged recently about the Livescribe Pulse Pen pictured above. His description of it reminding me of a futuristic pen described in the science fiction short story Radiant Doors by Michael Swanwick. First, here's Fallows describing the Pulse Pen:

Here's how it works: The somewhat plump looking, cigar-sized item, propped on a pack of special notebooks above and below, is both a ballpoint pen -- and a very sensitive, high-quality, high-capacity tape recorder.

[...]

The pen I have holds up to 2GB worth of recordings -- many many many hours' worth.

But in addition to recording sound, the pen also includes a very small camera at its tip, which many times per second takes pictures of whatever you are writing in the special notebooks.

[...]

[T]he pen registers exactly what sound you were hearing at exactly the moment you are writing a certain word, letter, or doodle. Then when you want to hear the recording, you can point the pen to that word and hear what was being said at the time. More on how it works here.

What does this mean in practice? Suppose you're having an hour-long interview, in my case -- or listening to an hour-long lecture as a student, or sitting through an hour-long business meeting. When something comes up that you want to remember, you can write a note at just that point ("Interesting point about Poland") and later go back to get just that part of the conversation. You do so by touching the pen's tip to the relevant phrase in the notebook, or moving your cursor to it on a stored online image of the page. No searching through the whole hour's recording; no need to make sure you write down every detail in real time.

Now here's a brief excerpt from the Swanwick story that features a pen from the future that performs a similar function. The premise of the story is that refugees from the future start appearing through "radiant doors", and governments have set up refugee camps for them. In this excerpt, the speaker/protagonist is interrogating a refugee about future technology:

I sat interviewing a woman whose face was a mask etched with the aftermath of horror. She was absolutely cooperative. They all were.

[...]

"What do you know about midpoint-based engineering? Gnat relays? Sub-local mathematics?"

Down this week's checklist I went, and with each item she shook her head. "Prigogine engines? SVAT trance status? Lepton soliloquies?" Nothing, nothing, nothing. "Phlenaria? The Toledo incident? 'Third Martyr' theory? Science Investigatory Group G?"

"They took my daughter," she said to this last. "They did things to her."

"I didn't ask you that. If you know anything about their organization, their machines, their drugs, their research techniques -- fine. But I don't want to hear about people."

"They did things." Her dead eyes bored into mine. "They --"

"Don't tell me."

"--returned her to us midway through. They said they were understaffed. They sterilized our kitchen and gave us a list of more things to do to her. Terrible things. And a checklist like yours to write down her reactions."

"Please."

"We didn't want to, but they left a device so we'd obey. Her father killed himself. He wanted to kill her too, but the device wouldn't let him. After he died, they changed the settings so I couldn't kill myself too. I tried."

[...] This was something new. I tapped my pen twice, activating its piezochronic function, so that it began recording fifteen seconds earlier.

"Radiant Doors" was one of the stories in Swanwick's Tales of Old Earth collection.