So it really was 5G after all

We're often reminded that Isaac Newton did some of his best work whilst Cambridge University was closed during the plague year of 1665. But has anyone considered that we have not done our causal inference correctly. What if plagues are actually caused by an excess density of information? And it was that excess information that led Newton to discover gravity and calculus, written on the wind. So the Black Death of 1346-1353 was really the result of the impending wide availability of books to the great unwashed public. And the Spanish flu was a symptom of the incurably informed,  due to the forthcoming advent of radio broadcasts of news. The later avian and swine flu epidemics were no such thing as cross-species transmission of viruses: these were a side effect of the Internet. Of course, if we regard information as a form of life, then this should be unsurprising, since life is a form of information, and both spread virally in any case whether by syzygy or other means.

Coming back to the present, has anyone checked? Maybe Wuhan was the first city in china to have 5G deployed? But I'm not talking about the network - I'm talking about the handsets. Let's do some numbers. The mean life of a smart phone in the developed world is about two and a half years which is about 900 days. in the UK there are 65M people, so that means new handsets are arriving at the rate of about 70,000 a day. now what if the handset manufacturer didn't employ enough telephone sanitisers? What if they'd all gone home because of Brexit - maybe like fruit pickers, telephone sanitisers are like, seasonal zero hour contract workers. So there's your vector - 5G handsets. I know what you're saying: what about countries without any cellular networks yet, or precious little Internet, or poor satellite coverage? You'll note I've already discussed that above in earlier events. A high enough density of information in  the near future is sufficient to disrupt things in the present. The very idea that there may be very ideas coming over the horizon is worse than the early warning of an earthquake so well known to alert even the dumbest of our pets.

If only we'd been on the B-Ark, the telephone sanitisers, all this tragic loss would have been averted. Remember, people - be careful out there - too much knowledge can make you ill. Wisdom is often fatal, especially for the elderly, just when they've acquired so much of it - no coincidence there.

six of one

it was fifty fifty whether the relationship would outlast the lockdown, until the Discontinuity Girl came on the scene. The scion of a long line of breakups, she couldn't help it. It just happened everywhere she went, whatever the weather. And she wasn't a weather girl either.

What made it curious was that no-one could remember why, or even recall her much either. It was like she was a really strange attractor, once fallen for, then twice forgotten. Her orbit was too narrow, or else she came in on the ecliptic, and then went polar. It was hard to say - people were too upset with their broken lives.

One day, she got work in the film industry working for the London Film Makers Cooperative, and she never looked back. Mind you, she hadn't look back before, which could be the source of her secret sauce.

Some people say she came for the stars, but she didn't.

unreel

i've been trying to read. i usually get through novels in a couple of days. they're mostly some form of escapism - SF, Tec, or writers that have imagination - jeanette winterson, kate atkinson, thomas pynchon, you know...

so i first noticed the problem watching tv - in the ad break - usually we fast forward but this was streaming service that didn't let you. and all the people on the street, kids running to the new car, playing in the park - friends meeting, greeting, hugging kissing in bars, going cafe to caberet, like she sang. it reminded me of olden days, when all the guys like that would take out a cigarette, and act like bogart, offer it and a light to the girl. she'd be lauren bacall. long, cool, calm in a crisis. we don't see that any more.

i want to scream at the screen - that is so unreal. I reel. i can't take it. so i go to bed and try to read a book. and if it isn't 10,000 years in the future, or 1000 years in the past, i can't believe it. writers who were so convincing now describe fantasy scenes that make Avengers Assemble look like a walk in the park. literally. not figuratively, literally.

this is harder than i expected.

Leaky time time.

Frank K woke up with a start. it was dark. he didn't usualy nap this long in the lab. he looked over at his lap top, and noticed the dashboard showed his cloud app was still using 80% of Azure's global compute resources. including FPGAs. and GPUs. and RDMA NICS. omg. what could it still be working on? he had all sorts of resource threshold kill switches - why was it still going.

hours later, having dismantled several data centers he was still none the wiser.
and where was his missing evening and half the night? that was another mystery.

he called up his old mate Mills - Dave was the ultimate clockmeister - he'd be able to figure it out.

he shared the dashboard window over zoom, and said "i'm stumped - what is it? where did all the  time go?"

dave asked him  to point his camera at the DAGv7 boards connected to the bus boys.

"there's your problem" dave said - "you've got counterfeit clocks running off FTL Italian Neutrinos."
"so what does that do" asked frank, ever humble at the feet and feats of the bearded guru.
"well, you know about space leaks, of course - thing of  the past now we write all our systems in rust. but that doesn't stop what we now call a time leak. but in this case, the measurement device has coupled the processing to a quantum clock which has altered the local manifold, so that time is slowed right down on the board, but speedup everywhere else nearby - its like offload, only the opposite. thank heavens you didn't wire it the other way, or there'd be very little left to do til we get to the big bang again. Next time, call me earlier" he offered, expansively.