Dreamland new media

Well let's think about new media and let's start off with something we consider a postulate:

New media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only better: they succeed because they're worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. -- Cory Doctorow

Dreamland Meaning Of Life

Interesting results surfaced in our philosophy department this week. I've got an activity report in my hand that is a major step forward to discover the true meaning of life.
Without any further comments here is the report:

Project Dreamland Inc.
The Meaning Of Life
Ongoing research, activity report no. 14A42
Lead scientist: Helmut Bremmel

The philosophy department is close to find out all about the meaning of life and we are very proud to state some of our results in this report.
...

Let us think about a human, one that is blind, deaf and mute. And while any real human being would still be able to taste or feel a touch, this one cannot. So, this person is missing all of our 5 senses and to rule out any possibilities of undiscovered senses, let us say this human is not receiving ANY input from the world it lives in. The question arises if a person such as this is able to live and if yes, if it would develop and in what way?
Our assumption was that without any input a human being will not develop and will die. This is not so wrong, as history tells us in an experiment, that babies when growing up without love and attention will eventually die.
Now, if we can conclude that the state of receiving no inputs is death, we may conclude the opposite, that a state of receiving many inputs is life. Actually this would be our definition of life: It is the state of a being that is able to process inputs at points when there are many inputs to process.

The meaning builds atop of this as the work becomes the purpose. The purpose or the meaning of life is to process inputs. There's no obligation to derive anything great or to achieve anything outstandingly. We can go so far as to say it doesn't demand any form of output. A living being, one that is processing inputs, is only supposed to continue what it's doing. What could be simpler? And what could explain more why death hits us that hard?

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.