21 April 2009

The Condition of Moo

The twenty-first century to date has been very odd. The day before yesterday I was sitting in a Lebanese restaurant in Soho listening to someone in California playing "Yesterday" on a pretend ocarina. The Californian ocarinist (who was surprisingly competent, given the instrument they were working with) remained serenely unaware of my existence.

The day before I'd seen another iPhone simulation, this time of one of those plastic cylinders you get with a picture of a cow on them, and if you turn them upside down they go "moo". (The phone has a picture of a cow on the screen. When you turn it upside-down, it goes "moo".)

If nothing else, this demonstrates effectively that science fiction's function isn't predictive. As I said to the friend whose phone the second one was, any aspiring Grubgecks who'd tried to put this in an SF story 50 years ago would have been told by their editor to take it out because it was far too silly.

No comments:

Post a Comment

(Please sign comments -- it helps keep track of things. Offensive comments may occasionally be deleted, and spam definitely will be.)