{"id":356,"date":"2009-05-02T22:15:34","date_gmt":"2009-05-03T02:15:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/?p=356"},"modified":"2009-05-02T22:15:34","modified_gmt":"2009-05-03T02:15:34","slug":"and-i-dont-feel-so-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/2009\/05\/02\/and-i-dont-feel-so-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"and i don’t feel so bad"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning* I had an idea for a short story\/novel\/work of fiction, the second this month. I don’t want to write it, but I do want someone else to, because it sounds like a cool story.<\/p>\n

* Where this morning = 4\/29, because that’s when I started the draft of this post.<\/p>\n

Today’s idea is about pens. Yesterday I went to a meeting and passed around my own pen with the sign-in sheet, and of course it didn’t make it back to me. Which is not a big deal — frankly, the library is nothing if not a repository for pens left behind, so I never want for pens. But I started thinking about pens, how they move around between people. What if there were tracking devices in them, cameras and recorders? What if the pens were semi-intelligent and they had a plan, an agenda?<\/p>\n

(Probably this was inspired by the evil pen that kills people in The Lost Room<\/a>, btw.)<\/p>\n

Pens left behind in the library might be part of the story, too. You decide!<\/p>\n

The other idea actually got a bit more fleshing out because I started thinking about the last time we visited my mom; it’s a 2-ish hr drive, so I made Jonathan talk to me about it for a while. The basic framework sprang from archaeology: archaeologists assemble knowledge of prehistory from an incomplete record.* No one knows how incomplete it is, and while they work in scientifically rigorous ways there’s still never 100% certainty with any interpretation of the past.<\/p>\n

* I remember a great diagram in the shape of an inverted triangle from my archy days that depicted the estimated amount of stuff (animal bones, I think, because that was my bag) that makes it into the archaeological record. Each level of the triangle depicted something else that happens to the bones: carried off by scavenger animals, crushed by accumulating sediment, etc. Probably under copyright; I can’t find it on the interwebs.<\/p>\n

(This goes for historical archaeology too, but I feel like the existence of historical records can make a big difference in interpretation.)<\/p>\n

Anyway, then I started thinking about ground-penetrating radar, and how it’s been such a boon to archaeology to have the technology to “see” sites before digging them up (and even instead of excavation, in some cases, since excavating a site essentially destroys it). And I started to wonder: what will the next technological breakthrough be? What if a machine were invented that could not only see the shapes of buried objects and features but actually tell you with certainty, this posthole is from a dome-shaped structure made of wood and skins, or this bone fragment is from a domesticated goat? That kind of technology could potentially completely rewrite prehistory and even history as we know it.<\/p>\n

As Jonathan and I talked about it we tried to come up with a plot, since this is really just a setup, but we couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t involve aliens, which is kind of lame (and makes the whole dealie too much a derivative of Battlestar Galactica anyway). And this is probably a book only an archaeologist would love, sigh.<\/p>\n

So if anyone wants to take these ideas and run with them, please do! Just write them quickly, because I’m almost out of things to read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning* I had an idea for a short story\/novel\/work of fiction, the second this month. I don’t want to write it, but I do want someone else to, because it sounds like a cool story. * Where this morning = 4\/29, because that’s when I started the draft of this post. Today’s idea is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[39,38,33,40],"class_list":["post-356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-archaeology","tag-books","tag-reading","tag-scifi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}