Category Archives: Communication

Super Powers

Super Powers – Why the Fascination

Posted on by

PsychicI think most people in the world have a fascination with Super Powers be they comic book type like flying or becoming invisible,  religious like with turning water to wine or returning from the dead, or psychic like telekinesis or clairvoyance. I’m going to make this a multi-part post with today’s focus being why we are so enamored with the idea of super powers.

Interestingly enough I think there is a relationship between frustration, which I spoke about the other day, and the desire for, or the hope that, super powers are manifestly possible. Everyday things happen in our life beyond our control and there is an undeniable thirst to be in command of what happens to us. I think this starts as a very small child when we have power over almost nothing. This is a frustrating experience and although as we grow older we gain more control there will always be elements of our life that we cannot steer.

So, that is a common human experience. I think it is one of the main drivers of our belief in super powers be they religious, psychic, or comic book in nature.

I read an article yesterday in which some researchers used the scientific method to look at clairvoyance. Simply put, this is the ability to know things before they happen. I’m going to talk much more about that article in the coming days but today I’m focusing more on why we want to believe in Super Powers so much that, in fact, many of actually do believe.

The belief in astrology is quite popular all over the world as is general belief in psychic powers in one form or another. Certainly the belief that there is a magical father up in the sky watching over us is the prevalent view of the majority of people in the world. That agents of this power are capable of turning water into wine, walking on water, ascending (flying) directly into the sky, packing a boat full of animals that under no logical examination could fit inside.

So, I’ve blamed frustration for this belief and our childhood but that doesn’t seem to me to be enough to explain why grown men and women still believe in nonsense. I’m not just attacking religion here. Many religious people agree with me that the belief psychic powers is madness. So don’t feel too picked upon!

The other big reason I think we believe in Super Powers of one nature or another is our imperfect sensory input. By this I mean our eye, ears, nose, touch, and taste senses. They don’t work particularly well and fool us all the time. Optical illusions are everywhere and our other senses are easily fooled as well. So we have this constant stream of input coming in but much of it is false. To my way of thinking this leads us to the conclusion that there most be something “more” out there. Something hidden in the shadows just beyond our reach.

Well, there is something more out there, x-rays, ultraviolet light, high frequency sound, and thousands of other things that we can’t sense but that doesn’t make them magical. It just means we can’t sense them with or normal faculties. With devices we see and understand these things but it’s difficult to separate my personal view of the world as brought to me by my senses and the logical view of world brought to second-hand through instrumentation.

Finally, I think dreams play a large role in this belief in Super Powers. We dream but don’t remember them fully and they seem filled with strange imagery and prophetic power. I’ll just give one little story here and then wrap things up. I was having strange dreams quite a few years back and started to record them. I’d advise a pen that is capable of writing while being held upside down. After a few months of doing this I found my dreams were completely related to my work, my family, my personal life, and things going on everyday. It was just my brain reorganizing them. There was no mystery.

So, that’s it. Tell me, do you believe in Super Powers?

[polldaddy poll=6042114]

Tom Liberman
Sword and Sorcery fantasy with a Libertarian Twist

The End of Print

Posted on by

Digital NewsI was one of the first converts to eReaders using Microsoft Reader and their proprietary .lit format. It still works and thanks to a wide variety of free eBooks I’ve accumulated a fairly good library. I also stopped reading newspapers quite a few years ago choosing to get my information online. So, maybe I’m not the most objective person in the world to declare print dead but I think there is a lot of evidence to suggest this form of media is coming to an end.

In this post I’m not going to try to prove that print media is dying by quoting a ton of statistics or convincing you with my irrefutable logic but simply look at what having media available in a digital format will mean for our lives.

One important point is that reading a book or a magazine on paper isn’t fundamentally different from reading it on your reader, tablet, or other device. People will still need to learn how to read and the written word itself is the same regardless of the medium used to deliver it. However, other than this the two experiences are quite different.

Let’s start with childhood. My mother read me books at bedtime from an early age and I don’t think that is going away but there is now the potential for the books to read themselves with audio files, images, and streaming video. We now have monitors in our minivans and airplanes it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to imagine them built into cribs. The media center now holds a vast array of movies and songs but soon it will hold all your books as well. Each monitor around the house has access to the media and thus all your books are at your fingertip at the cradle. I’m sure that plenty of parents don’t want to relinquish control completely to the reader but the screen might display colorful images and sound effects may boom out as you read the story to the baby.

As I grew older, I was reading on my own and my mother would return from the library with a new batch of books for me. The library and your eReader are going to soon become good friends. You’ll be able to check out books from the library simply by downloading them to your computer and from there it will broadcast to any device in wireless range.

The library as we know it will eventually cease to exist because there won’t be a need to store millions of books as they become digitized. This reminds me of the library scene in Rollerball, my all-time favorite movie, which doesn’t paint such a rosy pictures of a world without books. Still, I think this is largely a good thing except perhaps for certain library employees. Not to say there won’t be a library, it will just be fundamentally different than we see today. In the library of the future the librarian will help you find digital versions of the material you want to read.

Your young student will get their text books in digital format and for all of us who got that twenty times handed down copy of school material that was bordering on disgusting this can’t seem like a bad thing. The school backpack industry might need a rethink. This will save schools a huge amount of money in purchasing the material in the first place and it will change the landscape of the textbook industry dramatically. All companies that make their money by printing material on paper and selling it are eventually going to have to find a new way to do business. I think the paper industry will take a major hit as well although the fact that every house has two or three printers might prove me wrong in that regard.

As adults we will no longer subscribe to print newspapers and magazines but simply get them wirelessly each day or week or month on our devices. I’ll be able to read the latest news at any time, anywhere.

A lot of people view this future with trepidation with the idea of mass censorship and book destruction but I see this as a liberating moment. Anyone with an idea can distribute their book without the need for a publishing house, a  printer, a distribution network, and all the other things that were necessary in the past. My own books are published by me, distributed by me, and publicized by me.

That’s going to be the difficult part of the new era of digital print. There’s going to be plenty of good and interesting material out there but there will also be an awful lot of self-published dreck. The consumer is going to have find out what is to their tastes and what is not, rather than being told by the publishing industry. Not that bad a trade-off.

All this media means lots of ideas, lots of books, lots of stories, lots of choices and that can’t be a bad thing. So, don’t fear the new era of digital media, embrace it. Go out and join the digital world today by purchasing an eReader of some kind and buying your first book. If it happens to be The Staff of Naught (only $2.99), all the better! 🙂

Like, Tweet, Comment, Digg, Stumble, Pinterest, or otherwise share because you can join the era of digital media right now.

Tom Liberman
Sword and Sorcery fantasy with a Libertarian Twist

Language and Ideas

Posted on by

LanguageThe other day I saw a post from my friend Dora the Explora in which her husband misspelled a word on the shopping list and it got me thinking about the importance of language in communication. We use words to express ideas and those words have particular dictionary meaning but also personal meaning. What happens when there is a disconnect between these two meanings?

Let’s say you’re giving a lecture to a group of people about the Hindenburg tragedy of 1937. You correctly use the world “Dirigible” and no one has any idea what you are talking about. You spend valuable minutes of the lecture explaining the meaning of the word. Later you decided to use the word “Blimp” as it is more commonly understood and generally derives the same meaning within the context of your lecture.

I think it’s obvious which of the two scenarios is technically correct but the real question becomes which one is better for the particular situation?

There are two arguments. One argument says that you merely have to get across your idea which is the point of all communication. This argument says that text speech common among tweeters and cell phone users is perfectly acceptable if the audience gets the message. If I had written “SMS language” instead of “text speech” above would you have known what I was talking about? This argument applies to the written word as well. In particular, if my friend wrote the shopping list with the correctly spelled word would her husband have brought home the wrong item or nothing at all in his confusion?

The second argument insists that grammatical correctness is essential to properly conveying the message. If I say “Blimp” instead of “Dirigible” the people in the audience who know the difference between the two will have the wrong idea and those who don’t will use the mistaken word as a synonym for the correct word thus spreading misinformation. Also, when my friend’s husband gets to the store the label on the shelf is going to have the correctly spelled word which might lead to confusion.

Isn’t language fun?

So, what’s the answer? As usual, I’m not going to simply state a bunch of facts and leave it at that. You may have noticed that I tend to have an opinion and I’m not particularly shy about sharing it.

I think we should go for grammatical correctness as much as possible because anything else can lead to confusion. The ideas you express might be misunderstood if you use an incorrectly defined word. I think the person giving the lecture on the Hindenburg tragedy should learn from the first lesson and incorporate the meaning of the word dirigible into the lecture from then on out. The more accurate we are with our words the less chance there is of misunderstanding. And misunderstanding causes more trouble in the world than just about anything else!

If you want to see an example of the havoc a misinterpreted message can do, go here.

I am open to SMS language for words like with, w/, brb (be right back), lol (laugh out loud), 2moro (tomorrow), although they do lose meaning when the person reading the message doesn’t know them. Generally, words like this are more akin to abbreviations and acronyms/initialisms than ill defined mistakes.

Here is a great list of words that are commonly misused. Check them out and see if you use invalid (not illegal) words!

Tom Liberman