Skip to main content

My Toilet Ratted Me Out

I found a story on bbc.com that struck my funny bone. Tongue and cheek aside, though, this article is very poignant about our future in the developed world. It's not entirely unlikely that your entire life will be recorded by a camera. You can't go anywhere today without being seen by a camera.

Dumb cameras don't scare me. Sure you can make them auto-track and interface with a computer that knows where you are. Okay, big deal. Maybe Tom Hanks cares about that more than me. What does concern me is the growing interest in supposed smart home devices.

The BBC article made a cheeky comment about a toilet that knows when a woman is pregnant before she knows. Harumpf you say, that's a good thing. Well, how about if you're a cocaine user and your lovely smart commode decides to check on your drug use and then rat you out to the cops.

Worst yet, let's say you do get the fancy John, and you love that it tells you that your blood sugar is too high, or that you're eating too much sodium. What if it was hacked by a nefarious dude like me, and it starts alerting those coppers to your elicit drug use even when you're not. Hmm, that sounds fun. It's another level of disinformation terrorism that is only now starting with those phoney bomb scares in the USA.

So everybody has to make water, whether in a toilet, or on a tree. In the future with nifty smart devices, you can imagine a smart storm drain that is able to do quick DNA analysis. Oh snap, huh? So much for being a criminal. The minute you make water, either the dirty rat of a commode will rat you out at Jump'n Jimmy's Truck Stop, or else the sewer drain will start calling the coppers on you. Once you're identified by your urine, the army of eyeballs will turn their attention to you, and you won't be able to get your liquid life, a.k.a. Starbucks, without being molested by some billy who's waiting for charbucks. Maybe you can bribe him with a Carmel, Non-Fat, No-Whip, Sugar Free, Soy, Half-Decaf Mocha Frappuccino. With 2 Equals.

There was a book that I read recently titled The Light of Other Days by Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter. You should read this fiction book because it has a good message about our future. We may not be creating worm holes today, but we are creating a video archive of history that is unprecedented. In thirty years time you will be able to call up images of "yesterday" on just about anyone and anywhere in the world from your embedded cellular search device.

Does anybody want to start a Ludite colony?

Popular posts from this blog

Host Species Barrier to Influenza Virus Infections

The title of this entry was taken from a paper written by Thijs Kuiken, Edward C. Holmes, John McCauley, Guus F. Rimmelzwaan, Catherine S. Williams, and Bryan T. Grenfell. This paper appeared in SCIENCE Volume 312, pp 394 – 397. If you have the gumption to really know how viral infections cross the species barrier, then this is the paper for you. It’s written as a “perspective” rather than as a technical publication, which means there isn’t a bunch of jargon in it. You can also contact the authors of the paper at t.kuiken@erasmusmc.nl . A particularly interesting quote taken from the paper: “It is well established that, as the proportion of susceptibles in the population, s , drops (as individuals become infected, then recover), the number of secondary cases per infection, R , also drops: R = s * R0 . If R is less than 1, as is currently the case for H5N1 virus in humans, an infection will not cause a major epidemic.” (pg. 312) The value, R0 , “is the number of secondary cases produced...

UNTITLED

I like people who can talk straight and take it standing. There's not enough straight talkers in the world, and certainly not enough in the USA. It seems as though our opinions are illegal if they are not in-line with the normative line of acceptance. That truly seems Orwellian to me. That said, though, this blog is more about race and ignorance than about the Thought Police. There does not exist a more sensitive and inflammatory topic than race . You should read the Wikipedia entry on race as it pertains to humans. It may enlighten you somewhat. The USA has two presidential candidates in its 2008 Presidential race. One of them is sort of a pinkish-white color, and the other is something of a brown color. The pinkish-white one has an American heritage with clear ancestry back to Northern Europeans. The brownish colored one has an Indonesian heritage with some suspected ancestry back to Africa, although he also has European ancestry. Call them whatever race you want. Where I have ...

The Spinning Brain

Intuition is a phenomenon of the biological brain that doesn't have any physical explanation. Many people experience intuition with varying degrees of success. There are a variety of theories regarding intuition [1] and some people regard intuition with much caution [2] . Yet, I am happily in the camp that has learned to respect my intuition as it has proven time and time again to be correct. Recently, though, I'd been thinking about intuition and soothsaying . There are many cases of people who claim to see the future, whatever that might be. Maybe there is something to be said about this mystical phenomenon. Maybe there is a real physical process at work that we just haven't thought of yet. To this end, I am proposing a theory about human intuition. This theory, though requires some background in quantum mechanics . Specifically, quantum entanglement . I'm not the only person who has theorized about quantum entanglement and its role in biological congnition and th...