Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Say what?
Jake and I made a buy-toys-for-the-underprivileged run to Toys R Us tonight. We bought some really neat building blocks as a boy present and a Chimera Barbie doll for a girl present. Really had to resist the urge to buy the blocks for BOTH the boy and the girl, since I think it’s terribly unfair that girls get all the boring dolls while boys get presents they can DO stuff with, but it’s not like we know these kids. And, face it, most five-year-old girls would look at wooden blocks (no matter how cool) and say, Blocks?
We were rung up by a young woman who looked about seventeen, and while she was helping us, a young man of similar age leaned over and said something to her. She said, “I’m sorry, but I have a boyfriend!” He said “No,” repeated himself, and she said, “Oh, they can help you with that at customer service.”
I’m wondering what he asked her. Maybe, “Do you have something real flashy that’s fun to play with?”
Oh, but it was murder on the road today. We now live in an area where folks don’t know how to drive in the rain. The freeway was gridlocked (which rarely happens here, even in rush hour) so we took surface streets home, and that was almost as bad.
When’s someone gonna come up with a teleporter?
D.
If someone does come up with a working teleporter, it better be the kind that flips you through a wormhole while physically intact all the way to the other end.
I’m not so keen on the ones that do a full destructive body scan, transfer the scan data to a receiving port and reconstruct you at the destination. Or worse, the kind that you saw in “The Prestige” (spoiler warning)……. where the process doesn’t destroy the original and it has to be rather messily eliminated.
“Me”, IMHO, is a continuity of consciousness in the same “hardware”. (I’m worried enough that the “me” that wakes up after being deeply anesthetized may not the same one that went under, just a rebooted version, but not (quite) crazy enough to seriously worry that sleep might do the same.)
To assume, as many writers do, that this continuity of existence (or “soul”) is maintained even if that consciousness is merely copied and transferred into duplicated hardware seems an unjustified leap of faith, (and even less likely given that this technology implies the ability to make more than one received version.)
In James Blish’s Spock Must Die!, McCoy and someone, maybe Kirk or Scotty, have this long-running argument throughout the book about whether it’s the same “me” at the other end of the teleport process. Twas the most memorable part of that book …
If my kids were given the choice of a doll or blocks they would go for the blocks. Girls like blocks and lego and Lincoln logs just as much as boys. So there!
Cool thing giving toys to charity.