Web-@nywhere: A look at the near future of the recent past

About a month ago, a coworker bought a number of archaic digital watches for everyone in the office. He found them in the bargain bin of a thrift store in Waxahachie, and since they cost about a buck each, he thought they would be a fun gag gift. With replacement batteries I ordered online for $1.50 each, we managed to get the watches working again.

But these are no ordinary wrist-watches. These are Web-@nywhere personal computation devices, a conceptual waypoint between the calculator watch of the 80s and the first smart phones of the mid-noughts. It has an LCD graphic display with a resolution of literally dozens of pixels, but its big selling point is the ability to surf the web. It interfaces with a PC through the serial port and a bulky proprietary clasp that fits around the entire watch. With the help of an installation diskette (compatible with Windows 95/98), you can establish a data link with your PC, and then browse the web from the two-inch display on your wrist.

Like most modern consumers of the internet, you are probably thinking to yourself right now: "Why would I browse the web on my watch, if it's already connected to my PC?" But for the consumer of the turn of the millenium, this was the first foray into an exciting new realm of mobile computing.

Archeological web searching uncovers tantalizing hints about the history of this gadget. The original website for the Web-@nywhere company is long abandoned, the domain snatched up and re-cycled as a trashy SEO spam blog (the ultimate fate of all web properties who don't have owners who love them). But there are still third-party references to the product, disused auction listings and dusty forum posts, which we can piece together to form a narrative of a product that burst onto the scene and then faded away.

We first see mention of the Web-@nywhere watch in early 2001. America is still reeling from the bursting tech bubble and the realization that an illiterate buffoon has cheated his way into the White House. We are a nation that is newly cynical of the future. We want our gadgets and our "information superhighway," but we want them wrapped in the vestiments of a more familiar era. On March 9, 2001, the Web-@nywhere earns a brief but gushy mention on the Entertainment Weekly website. The retail price is $85, which in turn of the millenium dollars could pay for a household's restaurant budget for two months or more. It appears to have been listed in the SkyMall catalog, along with other seemingly-advanced yet useless gadgets like the spider-vacuum and the inflatable car passenger. In 2002 a verbose review of the Web-@nywhere by a consumer highlights its many design and software flaws, and admits that the core design feature of the watch, the ability to download 128k of text-only web content for later reading, is not terribly useful.

By the end of 2002, the cost of the Web-@nywhere has collapsed to $55, and then $20. By 2003 the first smartphone Blackberries take to the market and the Web-@nywhere disappears from the digital record like the Anasazi.

The consumer of 2001 must have been dazzled by the Web-@nywhere's technological promise. The front face is dominated by two main interface features. One is a four-directional rubber knob reminiscent of a joystick or early laptop control nubs. The other is a large button that functions a little like an enter key and a little like a left-click button.

The buttons along the sides of the watch are design holdovers from the age of digital wrist watches.The buttons on the right are mainly selectors. By pressing them repeatedly you scroll through lists of features and menu options. The interface is neither intuitive nor efficient. In the coming years, improved GUIs will make watch-style buttons like these redundant.

The most fascinating anachronism on the watch is the button on the lower left side. It wasn't until I had actually pressed the "backlight" button, and admired its under-stated green glow, that I realized I hadn't seen a backlight button in a very long time. In our modern age, although we still employ LCD interfaces in our mobile devices, their design aspects are much different than the late-twentieth-century watch backlight. We don't have a dedicated button for backlights because a color LCD screen is essentially invisible unless lit. Any attempt to interface with the modern mobile device will trigger a luminescence to rival the flashlights of my childhood. The power for this light comes from the fantastic improvements in lithium ion batteries we've seen in the last decade. The batteries power a long-range microwave transmitter, so there's more than enough juice to spare for mere display purposes. The poor Web-@nywhere watch has only a modest 3-volt power source, what popular vernacular had once designated a "watch battery." However, the Web-@nywhere display has one advantage over most modern devices in that it's perfectly readable in normal light and only needs a backlight when in a darkened room.

Sadly, the Web-@nywhere serial port connector and the proprietary software are lost to time. We may never know what games could be downloaded into the 128k memory. We will never have the joy of reading text-only web content from a two-inch screen. Nor will we be able to store our contacts and phone numbers on our wrist.

The only functioning taste of 2001's future is a series of pre-programmed animations, and the option to change our local time to Paris.

I wanted to end this article with the declaration: The Web-@nywhere is the last holdover from the Dick Tracy vision of the future. How do you make a gadget more hightech and convenient? You mount it on your wrist of course.

But then I found out this morning that Sony is releasing a "smart watch." Like the Web-@nwhere it does not have its own internet connection, but has to be tethered to a device that does, like your smartphone, which almost certainly has a much larger and more convenient interface.

So in ten years, are we going to be looking back at the Sony SmartWatch and marveling at its weirdly useless design concept?

Yep.

You sunk my littoral combat trimaran!

The front page of this morning's New York Times has a stroke piece about the Navy's new combat vessels that reads like a page from the technical manual of Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds!. It even includes a cross section in the style of a Silver Age comic, with a sidebar explaining how different modules can be installed onboard for different missions.



Like maybe Thunderbird 4!



Sure, the story goes through the motions of presenting some kernels of serious political analysis, noting the debate about how many $700 million littoral interceptors we might really need, and the annoying questions about whether the things actually do what they are supposed to. But the lead paragraph is pretty clear where the Times comes down—on the side of: Dude, that is fucking cool!

"The Navy’s newest ship is designed to battle Iranian attack boats, clear mines from the Strait of Hormuz, chase down Somali pirates and keep watch on China’s warships. The ones built here even look menacing, like Darth Vader on the sea."

No wonder, as the story makes clear, both the President and his Republican buddy Jo Bonner from Mobile want more. They are so cool we are going to name one after Gaby Giffords! Because, you know, it will represent the spirit of frontier vengeance against tyrants...

Do you suppose it's a coincidence that this story appears at the same time as the military-entertainment complex launches its marketing campaign for Battleship—a movie based on the Milton-Bradley boys war game, brought to you by the post-9/11 joint venture of Hasbro, Universal Studios, and the United States Navy? Starring Taylor Kitsch as the prodigal SEAL, Liam Neeson as stone-faced Admiral Shane, and introducing Rihanna as the Esther Williams of deck gunners, the movie appears to be a brainless summer live action video game devoted to the semiotic fetishization of deep sea techno-leviathans. General Dynamics has the best product placement, and they don't even have to pay for it.



You know the globalist masterminds are behind this youthful propaganda when you see that the film features a Tora! Tora! Tora!'s worth of subtitled multinational naval officers united under a single command—blue helmets versus aliens who want to steal our oil! Bring the boys home, and instead get back to projecting our power with video game consoles attached to gigantic naval robots. The only people we'll kill with Rihanna's deck guns are alien others, and you can't even see them on the screen. How much do you want to bet Barry Obama played the game as a kid in Hawaii, after seeing it during commercial breaks of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea?



When you read stuff like this:

"A tour at the Mobile yard of a ship that is nearly complete, the Coronado, shows a bridge with consoles of video screens that allow the captain to drive with a joystick or from a laptop. The 400-foot ships can go faster than 40 knots, or nearly 50 miles an hour (the ones built in Mobile have aluminum trimaran hulls — creating less drag in the water and more speed), and are able to operate in 20 feet of water. They have relatively small crews of 75, decks for helicopters and a variety of equipment modules that can be swapped for different missions, like mine-hunting, submarine warfare or special operations."

You can't help but wonder the extent to which our 21st century geopolitics is influenced by the science fictional imaginations of a whole bunch of inner 11-year-olds with good lobbyists (and better publicists).



Is it too obscenely heretical to suggest the deep psychology of our escalating drone wars, of the ultimate Virilian combat system that replaces The Right Stuff with the stuff of first person shooters, is more Jared Loughner than U.S.S. Gaby Giffords?

B-4!

The iceberg’s accomplice: Did the moon sink the Titanic?

Have I mentioned here how my day job can be very, very cool sometimes? Take today for instance--it's been incredibly busy with the phone ringing off the hook with reporters from BBC World Service, Chile, Australia and other destinations wanting to speak with the Texas State researchers who authored this latest paper in Sky & Telescope. Now, I didn't contribute to the research itself, but I did work closely with all involved to present it in this concise, tidy package for mass media consumption. It's the Titanic, it's science, and it's fascinating.

The sinking of the ocean liner Titanic 100 years ago is perhaps the most famous--and most studied--disaster of the 20th century. Countless books and movies have examined in great detail the actions, choices and mistakes that led to the Titanic colliding with an iceberg the night of April 14, 1912, and sinking within hours, with approximately 1,500 people losing their lives in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.

One question, however, has often been overlooked: Where did the killer iceberg come from, and could the moon have helped set the stage for disaster?

Now, a team of astronomers from Texas State University-San Marcos has applied its unique brand of celestial sleuthing to the disaster to examine how a rare lunar event stacked the deck against the Titanic. Their results shed new light on the hazardous sea ice conditions the ship boldly steamed into that fateful night.

Texas State physics faculty members Donald Olson and Russell Doescher, along with Roger Sinnott, senior contributing editor at Sky & Telescope magazine, publish their findings in the April 2012 edition of Sky & Telescope, on newsstands now.

“Of course, the ultimate cause of the accident was that the ship struck an iceberg. The Titanic failed to slow down, even after having received several wireless messages warning of ice ahead,” Olson said. “They went full speed into a region with icebergs—that’s really what sank the ship, but the lunar connection may explain how an unusually large number of icebergs got into the path of the Titanic.”

A tide for the ages

Inspired by the visionary work of the late oceanographer Fergus J. Wood of San Diego who suggested that an unusually close approach by the moon on Jan. 4, 1912, may have caused abnormally high tides, the Texas State research team investigated how pronounced this effect may have been.

What they found was that a once-in-many-lifetimes event occurred on that Jan. 4. The moon and sun had lined up in such a way their gravitational pulls enhanced each other, an effect well-known as a “spring tide.” The moon’s perigee—closest approach to Earth—proved to be its closest in 1,400 years, and came within six minutes of a full moon. On top of that, the Earth’s perihelion—closest approach to the sun—happened the day before. In astronomical terms, the odds of all these variables lining up in just the way they did were, well, astronomical.

“It was the closest approach of the moon to the Earth in more than 1,400 years, and this configuration maximized the moon’s tide-raising forces on Earth’s oceans. That’s remarkable,” Olson said. “The full moon could be any time of the month. The perigee could be any time of the month. Think of how many minutes there are in a month.”

Initially, the researchers looked to see if the enhanced tides caused increased glacial calving in Greenland, where most icebergs in that part of the Atlantic originated. They quickly realized that to reach the shipping lanes by April when the Titanic sank, any icebergs breaking off the Greenland glaciers in Jan. 1912 would have to move unusually fast and against prevailing currents. But the ice field in the area the Titanic sank was so thick with icebergs responding rescue ships were forced to slow down. Icebergs were so numerous, in fact, that the shipping lanes were moved many miles to the south for the duration of the 1912 season. Where did so many icebergs come from?

Icebergs run aground

According to the Texas State group, the answer lies in grounded and stranded icebergs. As Greenland icebergs travel southward, many become stuck in the shallow waters off the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. Normally, icebergs remain in place and cannot resume moving southward until they’ve melted enough to refloat or a high enough tide frees them. A single iceberg can become stuck multiple times on its journey southward, a process that can take several years. But the unusually high tide in Jan. 1912 would have been enough to dislodge many of those icebergs and move them back into the southbound ocean currents, where they would have just enough time to reach the shipping lanes for that fateful encounter with the Titanic.

“As icebergs travel south, they often drift into shallow water and pause along the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. But an extremely high spring tide could refloat them, and the ebb tide would carry them back out into the Labrador Current where the icebergs would resume drifting southward,” Olson said. “That could explain the abundant icebergs in the spring of 1912. We don’t claim to know exactly where the Titanic iceberg was in January 1912—nobody can know that--but this is a plausible scenario intended to be scientifically reasonable.”

Shindig

I went to a party two weeks ago. I rarely get out to such things, at least those that don't involve giant rodents shilling the worst pizza known to mankind. This party, on the other hand, involved actual grown-ups and genre-themed literary discussion, among other things. And it took place in Austin, so you know the hip factor was cranked up to 11. Any dedicated blogger worth his or her salt would've written up a breathtaking account of the festivities that very night whilst tweeting an incredibly witty, blow-by-blow account in real time. These people are neither as lazy nor as easily distracted as I am. So sue me.

The occasion was the release of Chris N. Brown's labor of love, Three Messages and a Warning, an anthology of Mexican science fiction and fantasy writing co-edited by Brown that had just celebrated a major booksigning event over at Bookpeople just a few days prior. Two of the authors in the anthology, Pepe Rojo of Tijuana and Bernardo Fernandez of Mexico City, flew in for the event. There is an unwritten law amongst the Austin SF community that international writers are not allowed to leave town without attending a party, so a party was thrown in their honor.

Of particular interest was the venue of this shindig--the new abode of Brown, the Edgeland House. I can honestly say this was the first event I've ever attended on a set straight out of Logan's Run. While not quite as eccentric-cool as living in a Ballardian missile silo, the sheer weight of its eco-futuristic gravitas is mind boggling. The floor is heated. The ceiling is designed as a digital projection display. Plus, they had lots of good beer that flowed freely. If Brown had any business sense, he'd charge 50¢ a ticket for tours and make a killing. He's got his own swimming pool with a built-in waterfall, people!

Most of the usual suspects of the Austin writing scene showed up and one point or other, including Don Well, Lawrence Person, Stina Leicht, Jessica Reisman and Derek Johnson. Lots of other people flowed through as well, but as I don't actually live in Austin, I'm not quite cool enough to hang with them or reference them on a first-name basis. Yet.

I, for one, am counting down the days until the first Turkey City is held at this residential wonderland of concentrated genre aesthetic.

Considering the Network as the radar detector of the Multitude

The Sunday before last, as I loaded up visiting Mexican writers Bernardo Fernández (Bef) and Pepe Rojo in my pickup for a day-trip half-way across Texas and back (their pilgrimage to meet the Maestro of East Texas noir), my passengers registered astonishment and alarm as I pulled out my radar detector and turned it on. It was early, we were tired, and the thing makes creepy electronic squawks. But the real source of their fascination and low-level anxiety was their presumption that any such device designed to help the citizen evade detection of his or her law-breaking by the police must surely be illegal.

I assured them it was lawful (without any jingoistic gringo proclamations of Texian liberty), only to later second-guess myself, knowing that there are a few states like Virginia where they are prohibited. I accepted my guests' assumption that radar detectors are a uniquely American thing, a consumerized derivative of freedom of travel and the right of revolt lurking behind Second Amendment jurisprudence.



Turns out that was wrong—radar detectors are legal in Mexico, if perhaps not all that useful to keep you out of trouble. But it is also clear that Bef is right in his assumption that the state will reflexively resist efforts by the people to conduct surveillance on power. As evidenced by the Brazilian government's prosecution of Twitter this week for hosting a site in which users can alert others to then locations of police roadblocks, radar traps and drunk-driving checkpoints. Causing one to wonder whether the the notion that you can't put toothpaste back in the tube would translate well into Portuguese.

My conversation with my visitors reflected our common presumptive fear that the use of a radar detector, whether lawful or not, will provoke the prosecutorial ire of the state and its agents. It's certainly one of the first things you want to hide if you get pulled over, even where legal, and even when you haven't been speeding. That fear is well-conditioned by state power, and always has been. But the Brazilian Twitter case is an enlightening glimpse into how that paradigm is being upended by network culture—in which the network serves as the ultimate radar detector.



Mexico provides a compelling example of how computer-based social networks enable the citizenry to turn the tables on power, and countering fear through the unity of multitude. Nelson Arteaga Botello of UNAM has done amazing work studying how citizens of Monterrey and other northern cities cial-ntwking.pdf>use social networks to conduct counter-surveillance of narco blockades imposed on their metropoles. The network provides the people with the means to monitor and evade the control of the sovereign, be it a constitutionally elected government or a band of violent warlords (or, as in most cases, some combination thereof).

The difference between Twitter feeds about speed traps and Wikileaks dumps of the government's classified interoffice memoranda is just one of degree. Without secrets, government must either persuade the populace of its legitimacy, or abandon legitimacy for force of arms. We can expect a decade or two of efforts by governments and other powers (corporations, cartels, and perhaps copyright holders) to try to use law (and force) to prevent the popular use of the network to expose institutional secrets, and it seems certain they will all inevitably fail. Trying to control the use of communications networks is like trying to exterminate the rhizome under your lawn. (Ironic, perhaps, that a technology designed by the military-industrial complex to ensure viable communications in the event of nuclear attack ends up appropriated by the people and able to withstand attack by its creator.)



The biggest challenge to fully realizing the power of networks to enable the citizen polity will be this: the Network we consider our public space is really just an aggregation of private networks, owned by parties who are much more amenable to government pressure than a distributed and informed multitude of individuals. Consider Wikileaks, which the U.S. broke by exploiting its control over the electronic payment networks that control substantially all of the transaction commerce of the globe. The U.S. government doesn't need a reasoned legal basis to shut down Wikileaks—it just needs to communicate to MasterCard, Visa, Amex and PayPal that there will be adverse consequences if they don't conduct themselves in a, you know, PATRIOTic manner.

As our networks become the town hall of our emerging global politics, the radar detector is going to be squawking a lot.



Recommended reading:

Peter Singer, "
Visible Man: Ethics in a World Without Secrets"—Harpers, August 2011

Nelson Arteaga Botello, "Violence and social networking in Mexico: Actors and surveillance technologies"—from "Cyber-Surveillance in Everyday Life: An International Workshop," May 12-15, 2011, University of Toronto

Ardath Mayhar has passed away

Joe Lansdale is reporting that Ardath Mayhar has passed away. For those of you unfamiliar with her, she was the reigning empress of Texas SF writers. She was named SFWA Author Emeritus in 2008, one of the first media releases I wrote as SFWA publicity chair, and one of my happiest. I met her many years ago, so long ago, in fact, I can't really remember a time when I didn't know her. My first SF convention, Aggiecon 20, is the likely date. She was a fixture at many Aggiecons way back when, the gracious grandmother figure with knitting needles stuck through her bun of hair. To everyone in Texas science fiction circles, Ardath seemed eternal.


Ardath Mayhar and Neal Barrett, Jr.

She wrote many, many books. Too many for me to list here, but her SF Encyclopedia entry makes a pretty good starting point. She ran a bookstore in East Texas for many years with her late husband, and helped many writers over the years with advice and by teaching in workshops. Nobody who met her came away unimpressed. One of my fondest memories of her came in 2000, at Aggiecon again. Her health was declining, and her convention attendance was becoming sporadic. I hadn't seen her in several years, but this time, if I recall correctly, Joe Lansdale brought her along so she wouldn't have to drive. That year, Harlan Ellison was guest of honor, alongside Terry Pratchett. In between programming events, Ellison was sitting at a table in the MSC Ballroom, having a discussion with a handful of fans or writers or somesuch. I was sitting to the side, content simply to listen. Ardath wandered in right in the middle of the discussion, and the transformation that came over Ellison was immediate and dramatic. He dropped everything and literally doted on Ardath. He got her a seat, brought her into the conversation and went out of his way to defer to her. Ellison, for all his reputation and ego and every bad thing ever said about him, Knew Who She Was, and showed Ardath a magnificent amount of grace and respect. Ardath had that effect on people.

We are all diminished by her loss.

Tonight in Austin: Mexican SF reading

Tonight the Mexican writers Bernardo Fernandez (aka Bef) of Mexico City and Pepe Rojo of Tijuana will be
reading at Book People to celebrate the publication of Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, our new anthology of Mexican fiction in translation. Bef is a novelist and comics auteur whose latest novel, the narco thriller Hielo Negro ("Black Ice") won the 2011 Grijalbo Prize. Pepe is a professor of media studies and fiction writer who received extensive coverage in 2011 for "You Can See the Future From Here," a 6-week series of science fictional interventions at the Tijuana-San Diego border crossing. At tonight's event, the authors will read from their contributions to the anthology, and discuss the role of the fantastic in Mexican culture and the Mexican perspective on the future.


Links:

Book People event page.

Great Austin Chronicle story about the book by Roberto Ontiveros.

Video reading by author Alberto Chimal (postproduction by Morgan Coy of Monofonus Press/Teleportal Readings).

If you are in Austin, please come by the event—I promise it will be worth the trip.