Twin Future

Having twins is a random event, an occurrence at the early stages of pregnancy. Twins are as unlikely to have twin children as anybody else.

It occurs to me that in our world of families with very few but accurately planned children, having a hereditary trait to be give birth to twins would be highly beneficial, in a plain Darwinian sense. This would effectively force families to have more kids then they "planned". As for the religiously inclined children-factory style families, this is a way to produce more kids faster. Single moms that never go or go too late for another baby will end up having more offspring as well.

With current social system in place, it appears that we are setting ourselves for totally cool future where everyone has a twin! That would of course require that there be a genetic feature allowing for such a trait, not environmental stuff like artificial conception.

Year 2020

Applicants must present two bionics IDs and have at least five Google ID Level A hits.

Simulation at fingertips

Here's a peculiar video about computer simulations integrated with an awesome video interface.



In fact, tailoring special physics courses to computer game programmers has been an issue for a while now. They would do the stuff similar to this video, but mostly in gaming environment - trying to make it as [un]natural as possible. It will be great when this will become a mature technology. Too bad that people that are actually expected to know their stuff will be tempted to use a toy simulation like this. I call this toy simulation because the actual scientific computing involves quite complicated algorithms for unsolved problems, highly tuned for efficiency and usually ran on a supercomputer or a cluster. Fancy software but no fancy interfaces there.

Relevant for everyone is the part where the computer guesses the shapes and special marks to interpret them as certain objects and properties. It may well be that the way is being paved for a better computer interfacing, of the sci-fi movies sort. Toshiba's TablePC technology may turn out to be an early bird for these. Goodbye keyboards?