Cooler Dirt

We had an interesting conversation arising from an article we read on slate.com. The article stated that on Royal Navy SSBN’s (nuclear missile submarines), there is a safe containing a letter from the Prime Minister.

The letter contains the PM’s final orders to the captain of the submarine in the event he (the PM) is killed in a surprise nuclear attack.  The current PM, Gordon Brown, apparently wrote this letter out four times,  in longhand.

Previous PM’s have had to do the same thing, though all their orders have been destroyed.  Presumably, only they know what they wrote, but none of them have ever revealed the contents of their letters publicly.

This, obviously, prompted the question:  What did they write?

What would you write?

Here is the situation: You are the Prime Minister (or the President of the United States, or Russia, etc.) and you are tasked with writing your final orders to the commanders of your nation’s nuclear missile submarines.  These vessels carry enough firepower to vaporize the world’s largest cities, and most of the smaller ones as well.  (A single U.S. Ohio class submarine, for example, carries up to 192 nuclear warheads, each of them at least 5 times as powerful as the bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

Your orders will determine whether or not these submarines fire their weapons and kill millions upon millions of people.  (Not to mention leaving the survivors in a world radically different than the one prior.)  You are dead because your nation has already been destroyed.  You’ve lost. You’re only decision is whether to take the attackers with you to the grave.

We didn’t come up with an answer.  Neither do we don’t envy those who have to write these letters, or those who’s task it would be to read them.

(Photo courtesy jmuhles’s flickr page through creative commons license.  Thanks, jmuhles!)

technology conversation, nuclear, war

A conversation came up the other day about DVD’s.  Specifically, why do we own them?

You may have experienced the following phenomena:  You are watching television when you come across a movie that is just about to start.  You happen to own the movie on DVD, but for some reason you sit and watch it anyway.

Why? In your mind you know that you can watch it at any time.  Why watch the movie now?

After a brief discussion, we came up with the following reasons:

1.  It’s easier: Yes, it isn’t very hard to get up and go to your DVD player, place the movie in the tray and hit play, but it is more than pressing the channel button.

2.  It’s disposable: Something on TV isn’t permanent, it’s disposable.  You can turn it off and not give it a second thought.  If you stop the DVD, you have to get up, remove it from the player and place it back in its case/rack, etc.

3.  You don’t feel obligated: If you take the time and effort to pick a movie out of your DVD collection, place it in the player and start it, you feel an obligation to watch it.  Yes, you can pause it at any point, but you’ve gone through all the work and built an expectation in your mind that ‘Yes, I am going to commit to watching this now.’   It’s very different than finding a movie on a channel and setting the remote down.

All of this brought up another point: the digital revolution.   With the advent of digital technology (the access and recording of information into a digital format), all manner of media is becoming easily transferable and more portable.  Music, movies, books, photographs, you name it.  You can have it all on your computer, your Ipod, your cell phone.

How long will it be before you carry all of this on a Star-Trek like handheld device?  You may only have to carry around something like your cell phone to have access to all of these things.  You could play your movies wirelessly on your TV screen, or send your music to your stereo, or have your picture frames show changing images of your children.    With sites like HULU, you might be able to go online, click on the movie you want and watch it instantly, anywhere in your house.

So will DVD’s go the way of the 8-track or laser disk?  Clearly, yes.  But what they, or their successors, may be replaced with is…nothing.  At least, nothing physical.  With data being conveyed digitally at an increasing speed and with more and more ease, how long will it be before we all have personal tricorders that have access to every piece of media ever created?

And what happens after that?

(Photo courtesy john a ward’s flickr page through creative commons license.  Thanks, john a ward!”

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