Have you ever spent so much of your life dealing with a subject that you begin to see it everywhere? After years of working on the physics part of my degree the mindset, life-style even, of physics has become a part of the way I see the world. I saw the first episode of Starz’s “Gravity” a week ago and as one of the characters drives his car off a cliff and lands it in the swimming pool of a passing cruise ship a flag went off and said to myself, “nope, not going to happen, not off that cliff, not there.” The next day I went to Google Earth, found the best place to drive off that cliff and did the calculations. Even if he hit 100 mph before launching off the cliff, and ignoring wind resistance, the best he’d get is down to the beach below.
But there is another element of immersion in my life, one that’s much stronger and stranger. For years, over a decade, I was immersed within this system, so much so that when I see something like this, of all things a Calvin Klein ad, my mind screams; Shadowrun! And immediately I’m thinking of the fantasy world where I got my first economics course, where I first learned about nanotechnology and the Mayan Calendar, where I first came to entertain the idea of a Dragon as president and will never look at bugs the same way. It’s where I first learned about the Yakuza, the Mafia, and the Russian Mob.
It was Shadowrun, with its blending of ancient histories and just-around-the-corner future technologies that fundamentally influenced my decision to double major in history and physics.
This isn’t to say that I believe that in 2011 (the Maya were off by a year after all) that magic will come back into the world, that Native Americans will take over the western half of North America because of their ability to wield the new magic, or that a dragon will take over Mercedes Benz (and other German companies)…but when I see VR being developed in the real world like that link above, I can’t help but get a little giddy over the thought of it all.
Funny, I’m the same way with technology. One of my favorite shows was (sadly “was” not “is” now) 24. But I used to get so angry when they would “send it to [my] terminal,” “open up a socket,” and “follow the protocol.” I used to pause it and explain to my wife that you really can’t get break in to a house, grab a random cell phone, follow a protocol while opening a socket to send the SIM data to a remote terminal.
A lot of times I will be in a situation and my mind starts thinking “I could build a robot that will do that. I can print up a few parts, put the bearings this way, add a stepper here, control it with a ATMEL uC and then interface with a C# console program to drop the data in to a database and then my webapp will display it this way…” I actually start thinking about the data structure that would work best, how I will design the parts to print out, what the GUI should look like, etc. Then I start to work on it the next day and spend a few weeks on it and get to a point where I realize it was really just easier to write out the grocery list than having a robot do it for me.
I bet you watch Mythbusters the same way I do: When they bust something my mind starts thinking about how I could get it to work and I spend a day trying to design (in my head) a better solution. I then tell my wife about how they did it wrong and how my way would work… did I tell you I have a very understanding wife that pretends to listen well?