Technology: Friend or Foe?

Sat Aug 09 2003 06:17PM -0600

I am currently experiencing technical difficulties with my cel phone. Apparently one of the towers is malfunctioning, and I therefore cannot connect while I am in my apartment, which is quite unfortunate because, while the DSL service has be reinstated, our land line is still dead. So, except for the Internet, I have no way of contacting the outside world.

But I just finished reading The Chain of Chance by Stanislaw Lem [quick review on Vitrifax][ description on Amazon.com] and I totally dug it. It's about an ex-astronaut hired to figure out why 11 people have died over the course of 2 years. First off, there's the ex-astronaut angle that I find intriguing simply because I have been fantasizing about space medicine. Then there's the fact that * SPOILER WARNING * (highlight the space between the braces) { there is a lot of pharmacology involved. It's practically a warning about the dangers of polypharmacy, not to mention a harbinger of chemical warfare. } But, yeah, I found it eerily prescient about how terrorism would be the biggest threat to the world, and yet, the so-called free nations nonetheless traffick in nefarious methods such as biological and chemical warfare. (This book was finished in 1975.) And finally, it is a detective story of sorts, a more serious version of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams, though definitely not unrelated. The most implausible things, given enough time, become very probable, and Occam's razor and Bayes' Theorem aren't as useful as they were now that we must submit to the theories of quantum mechanics.

Lastly, today, I hit up Subterranean and watched Jenny Choi (whom I randomly discovered on mp3.com and was intrigued because she started out in Chicago, particularly in the neighborhood where I live) and 50 Foot Queenie (a PJ Harvey cover band) perform at Estrojam, making me once again realize that I need to CREATE. Damn it. And all I've got is this stupid blog.

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