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Catastrophe!

What if…all computers shut down?

Have you ever forgotten to put your watch on and discover it missing while you are away from home? Similarly, ever forgot your phone?  How did that day go for you? How about going away camping where there was no electricity or television? Did you go through withdrawal? Could you do it?

My niece once asked me, am I ever without my iPad? And the answer was, for the most part, no. So this past weekend I forgot to pack my iPad when I was visiting my son. Did I survive? I did. But I have to say that I did have my iPhone and I also had my computer. What I did discover was how much I relied on my iPad. I use it all of the time. When I’m teaching, I always carry it with me. I can pull up an app to demonstrate some concept I’m working on to a student, or open up my e-reader to continue a book I’m reading. I love learning new things, so I’m constantly looking things up on the web. I also use it to play some word games. Having my computer with me helped, but it was limited to about 3 hours before I had to recharge it. My iPhone worked too, but it has a very small screen, which made it more difficult, especially if I wanted to do something that involved writing, like this blog. So I managed to survive the 4 days I was without my iPad. I wasn’t very happy about it.

Let’s take that to a grander scale. Suppose there was some solar storm, worldwide blackout, super lightning strike or something like that, that shorted out computer power supplies. And to make this interesting,  your tablets and phones, once the battery drained, couldn’t  be recharged, so no longer worked. What would happen?

The biggest implication would not be whether or not you could handle the lack of computers, but the worldwide implication of what computers do to run our lives. Think of national defense, traffic control (both on the ground and in the air), many of our appliances, communication, as well as our electronic health records (which are mandated by law) use computer technology. These are issues that would be catastrophic. Our own little problems of having no computers would not be the problem, true survival might be the bigger issue.

So let’s scale back on our computer shutdown issue. Suppose all of the global things do work, it is only our personal devices that are affected. Could you live without them, and if so, for how long.

I have an advantage over the large population. I’m old enough to have lived quite a long time prior to all of these things being invented. I got my first computer (Apple //e) in 1983. I was 33 years old. So I have been able to survive without computers through some of my adulthood years. Things like writing and research and reading books, I would be able to do without much difficulty. I would definitely miss the speed and amount of information that I can retrieve and of not being able to have the books and writing I’ve done always at hand. I would probably take more walks outside and put more energy into things like writing and storytelling. Unfortunately most of my life I have been around televisions so I would still watch TV unless that was gone too. In that case, I might suffer a bit more withdrawal. But I think I could do it.

One could ask, that if I thought I could do it, would I be willing to go cold turkey for a length of time, such as a week to prove it. The answer would be, “No”. I have no need to prove myself.

What about the rest of you?  A large number of you have only known life with computers and technology. Your lives are built around its use. Unless you are living in some Amish country or anti-tech commune, your experiences without technology are very limited. What would you replace your gizmo’s with? How would you spend your time? Could you do it, for any length of time?

What’s interesting is that I’m not the only person to think about this topic. I googled the question, “ What would life be like without computers?” This is the number of hits Google got in 0.69 seconds: About 124,000,000 results.  Try it yourself.

And what if computers had never been invented, where would we be all today? Your guess is as good as mine.

?tahw yaS

What if everyone wrote sdrawkcab?

The brain is a very talented organ. Not only does it allow us to see, hear, taste, feel, smell, move, etc. It has the ability to decode and problem solve. All of you that are reading this, obviously can read. So how do you handle the following 2 passages, that have been travelling around the internet for years:
For emaxlpe, it deson’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod aepapr, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pcale. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit pobelrm.
S1M1L4RLY, Y0UR M1ND 15 R34D1NG 7H15 4U70M471C4LLY W17H0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17.
Based on the limited research that I have done, neuro-linguistic researchers have been trying for years to explain why we are able to read those passages. They have a lot of ideas, but no definitive explanation.

Reading itself begins from birth as part of process of language. We learn sounds, and connect those sounds to words. The more connections we make to words the greater our vocabulary grows. When we are introduced to letters we begin to connect those sounds to letters and then to words. The more we learn to read, the more connections we make until those words become familiar and we see words, phrases and sentences without having to break everything down to its basic letter/sound piece. Think about it…when you see the word “cat” do you say “C” “A” “T” “cat”, or do you just see the word cat as the word “cat”?

I’ve been learning American Sign Language for years. The biggest problem that I have when someone fingerspells a word to me is that I still see the word they’re spelling as its individual letters. I haven’t made it to the whole word visualized memory, that I do when I’m reading the written word.

As your brain adapts to understanding words and writing, changes in those patterns seem to be easy for some to recognize yet still retain meaning as in my examples.

So, what if everyone started to write backwards? There are two different types of backwards? One way would be writing each word in reverse order, but keeping the letters and sequence of words in the same direction: enO yaw dluow eb gnitirw hcae drow ni esrever redro, tub gnipeek eht srettel dna ecneuqes fo sdrow ni eht emas noitcerid.

And the other way would be similar to mirror writing, where the entire piece of writing is a mirror image of itself.

Assuming that you know how to read to begin with, I believe that over time, your brain would figure out what it was decoding and be able to read what was written with the same success as you had with those earlier passages. Of course once your brain has successfully been able to read backwards, you are bound to have difficulties, at first, trying to read a passage that is written in the right direction. The learning curve would be faster each time.

Of course learning how to write backwards is the other skill that would take some time to learn. For the mirror writing that I did on this entry, I had the help of the computer and the internet.

And then what if…you had to read this whole blog entry backwards. You’ll have to try.

Click on this link to try: B Blog 2017 – Mirror Backwards

Say what?

What if Animals could speak?

When you think about animal speech there are two different directions that you can take. One has to do with their own language and how they communicate with each other. The other would be what if they could speak to humans so that we understand them and vice versa.

Clearly animals do communicate with each other, so I won’t dwell on that, since that is not a What if… question. But what if they could talk/communicate with humans?

I would like to look at this from different perspectives. One is the way that they do communicate with us, using their own language and other methods of communication and the second being the way they communicate with us using our language, either by us teaching them our language in one form or another, or my fantasies of being able to communicate with animals on a non-verbal intuitive way which you can read about on a previous blog entry:  http://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=421

Some animal sounds and actions do communicate with short messages. A cat’s different meows;  dog’s bark or wag of their tail sends us information of love, affection, hunger, fear; or to use an example from a 4th grade student I was talking to, a crocodile making a hissing sound to warn off other animals from its territory.

We can train certain animals to understand what we’re saying, but that is usually rote training of commands, like sit, heel, play dead, etc. I wouldn’t consider that teaching them a language.

Scientists have attempted to teach apes how to communicate using sign language:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/six-talking-apes-48085302/

Chimpanzees – Viki (1940’s, 1950’s)Nim, Washoe (1960), Sarah, Lana;  

Orangutans – Tilda  – Cologne Zoo, Germany  whistled, clapped hands, smacked lips, deep-throated human-like garbled sounds (2010), Chantek (1978 – ?)

Bonobo – Kanzi doesn’t use sign language; he uses different combinations of lexigrams, or symbols, to communicate. (1980’s)

Gorilla – Koko (1970’s – present) (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla))

I found that there are some animals that actually try to mimic human sounds. Here is a sound from a beluga whale named Noc, who started mimicking human sounds while held in captivity:

Now compare that with my son at about 1-½ years old: 

If they only could have talked to each other?

I’m pretty sure that this research doesn’t prove in any way that animals can learn to speak our language, or for that matter humans learn to speak, with understanding,  like animals. But just think of all the variations that might occur, should that be a possibility. Would all animals have some sort of universal language? If they learned our language would they be native to the places they are living, not to mention would animals of the same species have different dialects? Just check out these interpretations of animal sounds in different countries: https://goo.gl/khNO8n

Also think of the potential benefits and dangers to us being able to cross communicate. What could we learn from them, and them from us? What alliances could be made between us? Think of organizations like the U.N., Red Cross, NATO, etc. What would be the impact of having interspecies search and rescues? You think Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. are bad trying to get along and agree, what about adding thousands of other species into the mix? And what about negative alliances? What would another World War look like? I rather not think about that.

For me, I’ll continue to imagine that I can talk and communicate with animals. I understand what they’re thinking and can be the interpreter for them when needed even though I still have a bit of difficulty in reading some flies, gnats  and mosquitoes. I hope they accept my apologies if I’ve misinterpreted their thoughts as death wishes.  

On second thought, what if all this time, animals were communicating and speaking to us and we were the ones that refused to learn their languages and respond.  I guess that is a What if…? for some other day.

A to Z Blog Challenge 2017: Theme Reveal – What if…?

Last year was my first attempt at the A to Z Blog Challenge. I really enjoyed it. I spent that period of writing, focussing on things I knew about. I wrote about Life’s Choices and Life’s Changes. I wrote about things in my life that I had experienced, what decisions I made, what I learned or gained from those experiences and decisions. So what’s left for me to do this year? I could, if I desired, write about the same theme. At 66 years of age, I certainly have had enough experiences to come up with more ideas for changes and choices. But I want to try something new.

I asked my family and friends for ideas for what I should have as my theme. “What if you wrote about the same thing?” “What if you wrote about teaching?” “What if you made up stories?” “What if you wrote about storytelling?’

Listening to all of their ideas there appeared to be an over-riding theme. It occurred in all of their suggestions. “What if…?

I now had my theme. I plan on using each of my What ifs…? on each letter of the alphabet. Now all I have to do is figure out what to do for each letter. To do that I brainstormed myself and with the help of my family, friends and students that I told about this challenge, who knew about what I did last year. This gave me lots of ideas to write about. I’ll share all those ideas in my reflection writing at end of the challenge. You can read about what I chose as the days go on, once the Challenge begins. What if … something happens to me before I begin writing? We’ll that’s always a possibility. I guess you’ll find out on April 1st.