Friday: Hili Dialogue and Blade Runner Day

November 1, 2019 • 3:00 am

by Matthew Cobb

Hili is old skool:

Hili: I hope that you see the advantage of paper books over texts on the computer screen?
Malgorzata: In what regard?
Hili: The comfort for a cat.
In Polish:
Hili: Mam nadzieję, że dostrzegasz przewagę papierowych książek nad tekstami na ekranie komputera?
Małgorzata: Pod jakim względem?
Hili: Wygody dla kota.
Norm Walsh sent this picture of a NZ cat, via Heather Hastie:
A cat tweet from Heather Hastie:
A recently-discovered amazing quoll fact (don’t know what a quoll is? Find out!)

Another amazing discovery:

A victorian joke:

 

Come on, we’ve all been there:

A mashup of Obama and Tr*mp’s announcements of US forces killing terrorist leaders:

And finally, today is Blade Runner day – the Ridley Scott film which, as its opening shot states, takes place in November 2019. Nothing ages so quickly as the past’s future. We don’t have replicants, flying cars or much of what was predicted. If you want to, chip in below – What happened? What predictions about the future are we currently making that will look equally off-key? (Yes, I know this was fiction, not an actual prediction. Lighten up back there.)

Here’s one Tweeter’s view:

The bottom images are a reference to this recent moment:

38 thoughts on “Friday: Hili Dialogue and Blade Runner Day”

  1. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner never saw the coming of the mobile phone. It’s been pointed out Deckard has to use a public phone, albeit with video. This is the sort of problem futurologists are up against.

    Reply

      1. As our host stated, it is hard for a futurist to get things right. I think the best they can shoot for is to have real-life science and technology take inspiration from their ideas. Star Trek has done this a few times: the effort to duplicate the Medical Tricorder and the Alcubierre Drive, the former much more real than the latter.

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        1. One thing about the communicators is that they are marketed as “sub space” which, I think is meant to suggest they are not constrained by the speed of light.

          In reality they only work at the speed of plot which often means not at all.

          Reply

          1. One of the best things about Star Trek is its inventive names. The whole “subspace” thing is a good example. It hints of quantum tunneling, as well as an unknown “ether” over which we can communicate.

        2. I’d say if that’s the “best they can shoot for,” that’s damned fine. They are futurists, after all, not time travelers. Just to remind those who know much more about this than I, here are a few things inspired by science fiction, and I stress “just a few” https://www.bbc.com/news/health-38026393. Just last night I heard someone on the radio discussing how Jules Verne’s science fiction influenced future technology.

          Reply

          1. I’d say if that’s the “best they can shoot for,” that’s damned fine. They are futurists, after all, not time travelers.

            There is a half-serious argument that the absence of tourists proves that time machines are, and always will be, impossible.
            Actually, it only proves that any future time travellers are utterly uninterested in humans.

          2. There is a different argument that says you can’t visit a time prior to when your time machine was built – can’t go outside your space-time cone from there & then. That might explain why no time travellers have visited yet & said “hello.”

          3. That’s an acceptable argument, but you then have to explain time cones without tripping over your own tongue.

    2. Yet Dick Tracy had his wrist radio back in the 1950’s!

      Yes I agree, futurology is incredibly difficult. We have (effectively) tiny pocket supercomputers connected to the Internet yet we still don’t have robots (in the sense of intelligent self-aware mechanoids). It turns out massive processing power is simple to achieve yet artificial intelligence is a far more difficult problem than anyone suspected.

      cr

      Reply

  2. Instead of saying something stupid like – He died like a dog, something more reasonable like, He died like my presidency.

    Hili is correct, books are better and better for you.

    Reply

    1. Say what you will, our current president is the master of improv stand-up comedy.

      And marketing. Has he ever not mentioned his books, his golf courses, his hotels?

      Reply

  3. “Come on, we’ve all been there”

    Well I have stayed at the Premier Inn but I never tried to have sex with a pile of leaves in the car park!

    Reply

    1. Took the leaves inside and ordered a bottle of champagne from room service, didja? Nice to know romance isn’t dead. 🙂

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      1. If I remember correctly, there is a human with not just one conviction for having sex with a pavement. I think somewhere in Wales, but I’m not sure if both offences had the same piece of tarmac as correspondent.

        Reply

    3. What red-blooded male would not feel his sap rising when he listens to the song “Autumn Leaves”?

      It is quite telling that the original French lyrics were written by a man with the surname “Prévert”.

      The falling leaves
      Drift by the window
      The autumn leaves
      Of red and gold

      I see your lips
      The summer kisses
      The sunburned hands
      I used to hold

      Since you went away
      The days grow long
      And soon I’ll hear
      Old winter’s song

      But I miss you most of all
      My darling
      When autumn leaves
      Start to fall

      Since you went away
      The days grow long
      And soon I’ll hear
      Old winter’s song

      But I miss you most of all
      My darling
      When autumn leaves
      Start to fall.

      Fall-ing in love has a new meaning!

      Reply

  6. Blade Runner Day?? I could swear that 3 or 4 years ago on a post having to do with born/died this day etc I commented that a character from BR, Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer) was supposed to be born that very month, only to die in Nov 19 on a rooftop in LA. It was ignored of course

    Reply

  8. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Mayan revival ENNIS HOUSE is one of the main characters in Blade Runner – it serves as Deckard’s apartment [or rather a studio-built copy for the interior shots]. It’s a neo-noir film that retrofits elements of the future over the top of the past to create a visual archaeology, thus we have symbols we recognise peeping out from under an imagined future – the classic elements heighten the weirdness: the Tyrell Corp Mayan pyramid & an office within lit by an ordinary lightbulb, the 1930s/40s women’s fashions, Deckard’s apartment art deco lamps & C. R. Mackintosh chairs.

    Overall the main predictions [non-technological] are on course for arrival somewhat later than the film suggests, but still coming: corporations taking over from all other forms of government, mega-cities & the unplanned, unregulated expansion of Favela-style hovel shelters for the underclass majority, brutal policing & erosion of human rights, pollution. [Pinker’s optimism about the now isn’t going to pan out].

    Reply

    4. According to Wikipedia, the Ennis House was ‘marked by structural instability’ from the start, and has been badly damaged by bad weather and earthquakes over the years.

      Another illustration, if one were needed, that great architecture isn’t a lot of use if the damn’ building won’t stay up!

      Reply

      1. Agreed, though – looking at the photos – that should have been trivially easy to reinforce against seismic and all other loads at the time of construction.

        cr

        Reply

  9. “Blade Runner” is one of my favorite films. The scene I like best is when an old guy in the marketplace whips out an electron microscope to lift the serial number off an artificial snake scale.

    Reply

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