So the iPod, or more to the point, the digital music player, was invented by a now unemployed furniture salesman.

Kane Kramer, took out a worldwide patent in 1979 when he was in his late 20’s for a media player that looked (at a stretch) similar to today’s iPod. Kramer theorised that the concept player could store only 3.5 minutes of music using the day’s technology. He dubbed it the IXI and planned to expand its capacity as technology advanced.

Jobs and Co have acknowledged Kramer’s achievement only in that they used him as a witness and consultant after patent holding company Burst sued Apple, claiming the iPod infringed on its own patents. As Kramer registered the original patent in 1979 he was proved to be the iPod’s inventor and Burst’s case was found to be groundless.

To date Kramer has only been paid for his consultancy fees during the Burst court case. As he allowed the patent to expire in the 80s due to his lack of funds to renew it, Kramer now has no legal claim over the iPod patent.

Lets not forget that Leonardo Da Vinci invented the tank, the mechanical clock, the helicopter and the aeroplane long before the Wrights got fixed wing flying machines off the ground. The man was thinking way beyond his time, and there is no doubting that he was extraordinarily talented, but he didn’t build these contraptions. The technology of the time wasn’t as advanced as his ideas.

Taking something from a concept and making it real is the big achievement. I wonder who it was that said, if the technology isn’t there yet, perhaps we need to get it there.

Who builds the building blocks so that people can not just conceive these ideas, but actually realise them?

For example, who invented flash memory or the hard drive? These are the real pioneers.

As readers of the blog will know, here at BEEZHOUSE.com we have taken quite an active interest in matters of religion, more specifically evolution. (For those keeping score, examples can be found here, here, at Idle Thoughts and even over at WDBGTD). Thus, I took a keen interest in an article that appeared this week in L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper. The article was headlined ‘Aliens Are My Brother’ written by Fr. José Gabriel Funes, Director of the Vatican Observatory. Yes, the Vatican has a newspaper (and a website). Yes, the Vatican has an Observatory, and it’s run by none other than a Jesuit priest! And apparently, the Vatican now believes in little green men from distant solar systems.

Funes, appointed by Benedidct XVI in 2006, said that the search for forms of extraterrestrial life does not contradict belief in God. “How can we rule out that life may have developed elsewhere?” Funes said. “Just as we consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’ and ’sister,’ why should we not talk about an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be part of creation”. Funes said that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens would still be God’s creatures. Ruling out the existence of aliens would be like “putting limits” on God’s creative freedom, he said. The Bible “is not a science book,” Funes said, adding that he believes the Big Bang theory is the most “reasonable” explanation for the creation of the universe. The theory says the universe began billions of years ago in the explosion of a single, super-dense point that contained all matter. He did say however, he continues to believe that “God is the creator of the universe and that we are not the result of chance”.

That said, as one blogger wrote, if extraterrestrials did in fact exist, they had better not be homosexual, or practice abortion.

Fr. José Gabriel Funes is Director of the Vatican Observatory, which has sites in Rome and in Arizona. Funes obtained his doctorate in Astronomy with the study of the kinematics of the ionized gas in the inner regions of 25 disk galaxies. Funes specializes in extragalactic astronomy. His field of research includes the kinematics and dynamics of disk galaxies, the star formation in the local universe, the relationship between gravitational interaction and galactic activity. I have no idea what any of that means, but it sounds bloody impressive.

Sources: BBC News, Shakesville, Catholic News Agency

To read the full interview/article in English, click here.

Or more to the point, what are we inventing and to what end? Do we really need all of this shit?

My nieces were playing an Eye-Toy game recently which involved cleaning windows. You had to clean the windows really quickly in order to score. I asked why they don’t clean the real windows instead, and they all just looked at me like I was the oldest thing they’d ever seen.

Eye-toy and Wii sound like cool ideas for kids toys, but Adult applications conjure up all sorts of horrible possibilities. I have as much pervert in me as the next person, but this virtual life industry is really beyond the pale, particularly the plastic sex industry.

Teledildonics is where we are headed. Dildonics are electronic sex toys; the Tele- is added for the remote or Cyber use and control of them. It’s fake sex, Virtual sex and I guess it illustrates that one who needs them has only a Virtual Life.

I wrote about Real Dolls recently after seeing a documentary about men who prefer “Synthetic Women” to “Organic Women”. These Real Dolls are inert lumps of skilfully moulded plastic. They all resemble porn stars and Pamela Anderson (same thing?!?) and just lie there whilst these geeks treat them in ways I don’t care to imagine.

As a result of seeing the program “Love Me, Love My Doll”, I decided to research Real Dolls and one of the individuals in the show, a lonely soul named Davecat. Like many people Davecat has a Blog, and he shares it with his Synthetic lover, pictures of whom appear on the site in various states of undress and activity.

Davecat recently saw an article that I also saw, regarding robotic breakthroughs in Japan. Imagine the possibilities. These robots can talk and respond to commands almost replicating human behaviour. Facial expressions, voices and movements are all very lifelike, but still spooky.

Combine this with Real Dolls and Hondas latest robotic breakthroughs around robot mobility and you have a walking (running), talking, rooting, machine. Who needs to get out there and meet people when you can order one online?

As all of this stuff takes over, are we all going to turn into Davecat? He seems a perfectly nice enough person, but he has grown used to not dealing with real people. We can all do so much now without dealing with real individuals that we forget how to behave. This can turn quickly into fear and dread, until we long for solitude and a virtual word in which we are the controller.

I find the real world pretty scary as it is. Meeting people is hard and sex is a minefield, but surely a world with no skin is even scarier.

Teledildonics

Teledildonics on Wiki

Researchers move ever closer to making mechanical versions of us.

Honda’s robot is now faster, friendlier