Dreamland Massmoving tendencies

Another Project Dreamland news from our scientific advancements and technology department that brings us knowledge from the next century. This time they calculated an early estimate on a prediction function that would output the development of humanity and our nice little environment given some crude but essential variables of our times. It's something like a weather forecast and in the 22nd century pretty essential. You'll not be hearing wether it's going to be raining today, but if there is a mass protest and a civilian uprising, wether there are any wars coming up or if economy is taking a hit next week. This is similar to what Isaac Asimov already predicted with his brainchild the Psychohistory and it's becoming a reality. Ofc, it's not that accurate and it's error prone to unknown outside factors, but in the short to middle term it should provide us with good knowledge on where we are heading.

Dreamland Watch your Emotions (Live)

Another activity report from our social engineering department that sounded interesting. It deals about human conflict, aggression and how to better deal with them. The first part summarizes several real world conflicts of our time and how they get stuck with the sides moving, but not changing. How can these situations be solved?
This question is answered in the second part, where they present the idea, that it's important to live your emotions. When you hide them, they will aggregate, change you accordingly and explode later on. Humans become dangerous time bombs. It's important for everyone to live emotions, but unfortunately it's only possible in the rarest instances. To counter this they propose a device that feeds your mind with the satisfaction you need in this very moment. When you're aggressive, you're shown lots of pictures that feed your aggression and instead of enraging the participants, this had calmed them down. Sexually intensive persons were calmed by feeding them with sexual images in the right moment.
An advantage of this device is that it doesn't create images, but rather strengthens the participants fantasies and puts them in a more concrete context.

We understand that this is not a tool for everyone, but a help for people who cannot cope with their emotions. On a grand scale people vs people, it'd still be best to organize a football match!

Dreamland Travel Tubes

The future kind of transportation has recently been developed in our mobility technology labs and it's amazing. The basic idea is to have a system of tubes with a certain size, much like our streets, but below earth. They are designed in a hub like system where the bigger cities distributor nodes are connected through various tubes, which in turn are connected with smaller distributor nodes and finally to the end user or public terminal. Instead of a car, you'll own a cylindrical carrier device. You get into it, enter the destination and it will take you wherever you want and wherever you have access to. At first the system will be mostly public, but as the technology becomes cheaper it will connect to each and every household. The advantages of this system compared to the automotive transportation of the early 21st century are:
1. Higher throughput - the whole system will be computer operated and highly efficient, gone are the times of waiting infront of a street-light with no car coming from either direction and gone are the days of human error. Computers are not perfect either, but there will be a lot less accidents.
2. Greater speeds - the technology to move these devices will be similar to the technology of maglev trains which could already reach speeds of 500kph in the early 21st century.
3. Mixture of public and individual transportation - it's still individual transportation as you can get to any point from any point, however it can also be used publically if the state provides several carrier devices for public use, anybody could call them and use them to go wherever they please (or wherever they are allowed to go with them).
4. As green as the sources you generate electricity from and in general there will be a lot less contamination than with cars
5. Different tubes for different services - a passenger tube has different requirements than one for goods.

Basically it's like a gigantic pneumatic post system.

Dreamland Evaluater

Project Dreamland Inc. has to announce that we made a mistake. The "Understander", the machine we proudly presented last time proved to be inusable. We operated on some test persons, but none was able to reproduce the knowledge he or she gained during the operation. We could not even measure brain activity or receive any electrical signalling from the head, owing to some of the heavy force-fields we had to implement. Additionally the participants of the test showed signs of neural disorder after they had been enlightened and it seemed that the brain would undergo a rapid degradation process while being inside the tunnel. Unfortunately we have to conclude that this project failed.

We've also made a lot of thoughts on how to prevent this from happening in the future and we've come to the conclusion that only a solid autonomous machine evaluation process could help us in our future goals. We are thus trying to invent several automate "evaluaters", to aid us in determining the quality of our work. We are not thinking that they'll replace human evaluation in the near future, but as we've noted human descision making often is error prone and we felt the lack of a machine based approach in addition to the human jury.
The various thoughts on this machine circled around two basic ideas. First, we think about a very specific single-domain evaluation process implemented in a machine with detailed knowledge on the single topic only and a more general cross-domain evaluater that will try to link paths and determine the quality of our work given more general knowledge about a multitude of fields. We consider both evaluaters to be equally important, yet in some cases one might prove to be more useful than the other.
We're also using them to evaluate their own application in all the different fields and so far we could even think of a DSS aiding judges in court. It'll be interesting to get an overview of all the possible implementations and how they'll turn out.

Dreamland Give Me a Break

Project Dreamland Inc. has made progress over the past couple of months in many ways. It has suffered setbacks and still stood against the flow of time which is cruel and not to stop. We decided we shall skip building a time machine or a teleporter. We don't felt we need to cover travel in time or in coordinates, so we thought hard about other means and we found that we need to build a machine that lets you view everything all at once, so that for a single moment, the duration of a thought, everything seems totally clear and makes perfect sense - so to say a machine that let's you UNDERSTAND!

We felt that understanding is more important than travel in time and travel in space. We felt that if we don't understand we'll never exit our shells and evolve as beings that really stand above the rest, beings that are meant to be God.

So we built a machine that will make you understand each and every thing, no question remains unasked, in fact the effect is such that all questions become meaningless because you know the answer before it already. A gigantic brain with the knowledge of everything and a connection to a metalevel where there is supposed to be the ideas that create this world.
Our research departments tried hard to really find the idea-world which is bigger and more powerful than that of our body. We knew it existed, because our brains made the connection and we could see that we could calculate with infinity, something which is never possible here. In the end we found it and we incorporated a tunnel in this device that you put your head in and be enlightened.

Dreamland Genre Classifaction

The question to be asked in one of our latest activity reports is: Why do music genres almost always focus around the style of music, but not the message it carries or is the message inherently tied to the style?

Our group of musicologists tried to dig into this question over the past months and came up with several different classifications that are not commonly used.
So if you for example open up Winamp 2.81, look at the ID3 tag of an mp3 and select the Genre drop down list you'll notice lots of different entries, probably over 100, ranging from A Cappella to Vocal. If you single out the most common ones, as far as this is possible, without digging into your more favorite ones, you'll still be left with lots of options. For one, we could divide everything into Alternative, Pop and Classic and explain that every others would be subcategories. In some cases this would work well, in some other cases this would not work so well, it is still a very abstract description and it is arguable if "Alternative" is just to satisfy the people trying to seperate their minds from the "mainstream". Overall it's pretty hard to distinguish between Alternative and Pop and it becomes even more so when more and more Bands from Alternative become popular enough, alternative music becoming popular. Additionally what to do with music such as 50s, 60s, 70s or the synthesizer music of the 80s - Alternative when they were Pop in the past? Still Pop or add them to the Mozarts, Beethovens and Bachs? There arises already a conflict, because Classic would suggest a classification that is time based, but Pop and Alternative much more focus on the number of people listing to it, radio stations playing it and popularity has more problems like Folk music which is hard to classify that way.
So the current situation is a compromise between classifying every band as own genre and just call it all music. It is trying to develop a name for the message of the various bands and artists, so that we have Rock'n'Roll, Rap, Hip-Hop, Rock, Metal,.. . And the message in this case both means the textual content (the semantics) and the envelope (the music/expression), because quite obviously the same vocal message can be sent in different envelopes and both is important to humans. We have yet to look into how exactly the semiotic framework applies here.

Based on this, we'll also more look at the message of the music for genre classification and examine content and envelope to fit the group or song into a genre. What we are going to develop is a matrix of textual content (love, rage against authority, hate, well-feeling,...) and music style based on some more easy factors such as beat, amplitude and some more complex ones as frequency analysis, cleaness and others. Given that we can put a good abstraction for textual content that is equally detailed for every entry we could classify all kinds of music, because what really differes us humans is not the text - all these feelings are inherently tied to humanity - but the envelope, which is on the one hand bounded by the limitation of our ears and on the other unlimited in our creativity of how to express things.

Dreamland Workshop for the living Dead

When you have come to the point, where it seems impossible to go on and Black Jack awaits for your arrival, you should always remember that you should have taken the Dreamland Workshop for the living Dead and reading on now is definately a step in the right direction. Find TEH theory on the universe, life and everything here.

(i) The first thing to keep in mind is that death is part of life as much as birth is. There is no beginning and no end and this beginning-end thinking stems from a look that is too close and focused. The apple grows and falls off the tree, the human is born, the human dies. If you however extract yourself from this view and view it from a larger distance you will always be able to see cycles and cycles over cycles. Next year the apple grows again and falls off again and will continue to do so. New humans are born with the combined genetic information.
(ii) The next thing to see is that there is infinity everywhere, but not in the sense that you can never reach the end of the universe, the infinity is that on the surface of a ball, no matter in which direction you go, you will never reach the end, however you may run across locations you have already been. The space is constrained, but the movement is not.
(iii) The third and final thing to remember is that everything is energy, as proven by Einstein's famous formula: E=mc^2 which basically says that energy equals matter. Energy cannot be destroyed and cannot be created it is available in various different forms which can only change shape. Electricity may become heat and heat may be transformed into movement. I have an activity report concerning energy transformations on my desk, which I will summarize at a later date.

These things allow us to view the universe life and everything as a process of reoccuring cycles that will continue in limited space for an infinite amount of time and with a limited amount of energy (=matter). The universe is an automata!

An automata is simply described as a 5 tupel, with states, input, output and 2 functions, one that produces output and the other that advances the state. The universe is slightly different as there is no input. This is called a feedback automata and means that the universe advances in state solely based on its current state. The transition function is that of the laws of physics, chemistry, mathematics,... but much richer than what we know now. If the universe produces an output is yet unknown.

And here comes the very first thing again: cycles. The universe, which is nothing else than the current state of the feedback automata may come to a point where it has been already and because only the current state is used to decide the next state, the universe cycles. There exists a special automata which has a cycle of maximum length and where the universe passes each possible states except the zero state.
We can only speculate on wether our universe is an automata with maximum length that will transform into all the different possibilities or if we are trapped in some cycle that uses only a part of the possible states of the universe. A requirement would certainly be that the space is discrete, if this is the case, is still unknown.
Anyway, if we'd acknowledge the Big Bang Theory this would mean that eventually the universe will collapse again and the Big Bang will reoccur expanding the same universe again. There you have a cycle and you can split it up at any point to have your beginning and end, it will still be a cycle.

It is clear that this restricts our abilities of free will and such as we are all part of a function whose behavior is given, but only predictable as the exact calculation would require an automata the same size of the universe, which is impossible to achieve when we cannot escape our universe.
We cannot change our future, we can only explore it. Those who expect a manual on what to do, much as pretty much all religions deliver may be dissapointed, but I cannot help you.
Our departments are going to examine this for possible applications and technologies. I perceive interesting things to surface.

Dreamland Tarjetas

Last December, head of Project Dreamland Inc., Mister Donnie D., started a campaign to reduce the plastic card overflow in his wallet. As he counted there have been 14 cards, some obsolete, lots of potentially important bills and several coins.
The tarjeta that has been developed and that will probably enter QA in a few decades is an all extensible, modular, lightweight and yet highly durable polymer card using latest carbon polymerisation technology and high durability treatment. It is the one card that will replace all the others and that everyone has been waiting for.
At the same time this is your credit card, bank account card, membership card to all your organization, refund card,... think of any possible card, the tarjeta it is!

Security is guaranteed through biometric technology like fingerprint and free-will detection so that you cannot be forced to use it.
You also never need to take care where you left it, just call it and it will teleport in.

Dreamland Universal Translator

We found it necessary to invent an online universal translator to faciliate communication with other people. However there arose several problems during the development and because our staff is deployed all over the world, the current version is of littel use. We used several neural nets and support vector machines to train it, but after hours of talking and training it would only translate form the click-clack tones of kalahari-people to a little spoken accent in the tibetian mountains.
We are working hard and meanwhile try to use our hands, legs and video conferencing system to ask our way through. Mr Donnie D is pressing for a final version, but it can take months before it could possibly translate into and from spanish.

Dreamland HQMover 0.23 beta

Project Dreamland Inc. will move its headquarters (HQ) to Spain next week. We'll settle somewhere around Málaga and Granada - ubiquitous that we are!

Dreamland HIV Protective Suit

It's called condom, actually, but if you prefer you can name it "HIV protective suit".
The tech geeks of you may add a model number such as MkIV.

HIV protective suits save you from getting AIDS, which stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and is a very nasty illness that turns a simple flu into life threatening danger.
They don't save you from dying though, that is inevitable.

Btw, I am trying to write a script based on the story "The Last Trumpet" by Isaac Asimov. Drop me a mail, if you've read it and got a good idea.

I just rolled a dice

And because I lacked a real one, I just read the rand(3) manpage and wrote a small Hello World like program. I needed a dice, because I could choose between 6 things which I have to do or want to do and I really couldn't decide at all which I should give preference.
Of course it's pretty obvious that I should do that stuff that I have to do first and that I want to do later, but I couldn't do it that way and I was torn apart between striking a balance (in favor of what I want to do) and following my duties. So here is the list:

#1 answering e-mails
#2 doing stuff for university
#3 playing guitar
#4 playing computer games
#5 write an article for this blog
#6 empty the trash can

Okay, now I am done! Next roll....