Recently, I nerdsploded. In fact, I have been nerdspoding for a while now. Because I read a news story and watched a video that told me something that just plain buried the needle on my geek excitement meter.

They have invented the fucking tricorder.

Well, okay, not exactly. For one thing, this device has an actual display (your smartphone/tablet) instead of just making vague sine wave type sounds.

But the basic idea is that it’s a little gizmo that can read the exact molecular structure of anything you point it at. You can get a whole spectrographic reading on absolutely anything as easily as you could take a picture of it.

And this BLOWS MY FREAKING MIND. I want one of these things SO. BAD. I want it so bad that I am pretty sure I am maxing out my capacity for acquisitional avarice. Just thinking of it makes me do the grabby hands.

And not for any of the rather sad sounding “practical” uses they go on and on about in the video. I mean, I am sure it can do those things and much much more, but hey, you can use a microscope as a doorstop if you really want to. That doesn’t mean that is what it is made for.

No, I want it purely because it is the single coolest piece of technology ever to me. It’s entirely gizmo appeal. The ability to simply know what everything is made of is the most amazing and thrilling extension to human senses since the invention of the camera. So much genuine, direct knowledge at your fingertips…the prospect makes me dizzy with anticipation.

I realize that not everybody will be with me on this. I imagine that most people would find it hard to see what I am so freaking stoked about. To most people, I would guess, this piece of technology is sort of neat at best and pointless at worst.

But I don’t care. I am happy to just sit here and revel in how much this makes me feel like I am truly living in the future. The ability to learn exactly what any random object is made of makes me feel like we are living in Star Trek. That we are one step further to that utopia. And that we are opening an astounding new vista in public knowledge.

I hope this thing really catches on. I mean, I know the average person won’t care like I do, but I hope it catches on as a curiosity or a hobby like metal detectors. It would take someone dreaming up a killer application for it, something that would either save or make money for people, or give them another kind of knowledge that they desperately want.

Find out if your mate is cheating? It could work.

The reason I want so badly for it to become ubiquitous (hey, maybe it will start to be built in to people’s smart devices!) is the incredible wave of improved accountability that would unleash on capitalism consumerist economies worldwide.

Companies that had been getting away with cutting corners on their products would suddenly find themselves up to their asses in alligators (or litigators, which are far worse). Say your chairs are rosewood when they are really just oak? Busted! Claim your herbal remedy is full of exciting sounding ingredients and it’s really just aspirin? Busted! Is that chemotherapy medicine counterfeit? SO DAMN BUSTED.

Capitalism thrives on those kinds of things. The bad players get driven out of the market and the good ones take over their market share. And we the consumers get better product cheaper.

And the thing is, we are just getting started. If this product catches on, there will be countless imitators, and where there are imitators there will be innovators who are looking for the edge that will make their version of the same thing better than the competition. In the future, there may well be versions that are more accurate, more helpful, or even versions that do things that are so cool and handy and wonderful that we will wonder how we ever got along without them.

What I am hoping for is the invention of a kind of Wikipedia of substances. A vast database of what things are made of (and what they SHOULD be made of) created by all those people scanning all those things all over the world. A database that anyone can access for research or just plain curiosity.

What an amazingly rich and deep dataset that could be! A database like that could replace dozens of years of research for many important projects and form the jumping off point for innumerable worthy studies of things too obscure to justify a big expensive study, but perfectly suited to small studies based on deep diving into deep data for analysis.

Heck, think of what it could do for medical diagnosis! So much of what now requires sending the patient to a lab and then waiting for the results could be done right there in the office. No pipettes, no centrifuges, no technicians. The doctor could take the samples right there in-office then point the SCIO at it, and boom, all the answers they need.

This device, the SCIO, and its offspring have the potential to create massive new efficiencies, and that is always where progress in the modern world starts. Someone invents something that replaces something expensive with something cheaper, and suddenly a brand new capacity is put into the hands of the masses, and great change comes about as a result.

This could be such a game-changer. It might not change things on the same scale as the changes made by the Internet or the smartphone, but then again, nobody could predict all the things that would come of those, either.

Try to imagine a future where everyone has a tricorder in their pocket. It beggars the imagination, or at least, it beggars mine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh, and I totally meant to do a video roundup today. Tomorrow, I promise!

Yup, time to describe a dream I had last night.

The first part of it that I remember clearly was Felicity telling me that she had gotten two tickets to something called Epix Arson, which was some kind of a big deal fetish dance party which might get pretty wild.

Or so I hoped.

She said that the bad news was that the tickets had turned out to be disappointingly expensive… to the tune of $300. I was, quite realistically, stunned by this. I live on nine hundred a month… that’s a sixth of a month’s income there.

So I got all stressed as to how I was going to pay her for my ticket. There was a vague someone in my dream who didn’t get why I was so upset, and I got all indignant and huffy and said “Because a hundred and fifty dollars is a lot of money to someone like me, OKAY?”. Clearly, they had struck a nerve.

Somehow, this segued into me wandering around a dream-fiction version of the high school I went to, Three Oaks Senior High. It wasn’t the real thing, more like a vague impression of it.

Just like my dream version of my home town of Summerside.

And the thing is, every room was completely empty. No desks, no chairs, nothing on the walls. And the rooms no longer had doors, just curtains that flapped in the breeze of the windows,which were always wide open.

Throw in the white walls of Three Oaks, and the effect was very summery and pleasant. I wandered the halls in a state of grand and expansive nostalgia, saying to myself “Ah yes, this room!” and feeling very good indeed.

Eventually, though, the emptiness of all the rooms started to bother me, and so I said to someone “I understand that it’s the middle of the summer and you are ‘between shows’, so to speak…. ”

I don’t remember the end of that question, nor do I remember its answer. I do remember saying to said person that I had graduated in 1991, and I was there just to look around and remember.

Eventually I deduced that the place had been heavily remodeled since I had been there last. Parts of this fictional version of my school (again, not the real place) had been merged via the removal of walls, other parts had been entirely renovated. All in all, the place felt fresh and new and full of new life.

That’s not the freaky part, though. The freaky part didn’t come till I sat down to write this blog entry, and was going over the dream in my mind, when I suddenly realized that this dream took placed in a cleared out version of the same fictionalized version of my high school that I had been to…. in another dream!

I had even remembered, within this recent dream, that a certain door used to lead (rather surprisingly) to a very chic restaurant/nightclub, with candles on each table and people dressed up to the nines in a way that was very attractive without being gaudy or showy.

Like a laid back jazz version of fancy dress.

It had been, in fact, the sort of place where a beautiful chanteuse who is also the romantic interest of the hero sings a slow, smoldering torch song that mesmerizes all the men in an old fashioned black and white movie.

Kind of an odd thing to have connected to a high school, but dreams don’t have to make sense.

And the thing is, I remembered all this during the recent dream. I was remembering a previous dream within a dream! My dreams have become excitingly meta.

As I wandered further, I ran into someone saying “You’ll never guess where I am going!” and I was just about to say “Epix Arson?” when someone else said it first.

Then all this somehow segued into me being in some kind of minimalist Skytrain station with Felicity, possibly on the way to getting to Epix Arson. It, like my fictional high school, was all bare white walls, but instead of being brick it was smooth white stone. There weren’t a lot of people around.

I remember that the way it worked was there was two levels, an upper level where you waited for trains for long trips, and a lower level which was reserved for shorter trips.

Or maybe the other way around. I guess the one level’s trains went further but the stops were further apart geographically.

And everything was okay at first, but the station kept getting weirder and weirder until it started to seem a lot more like Mos Eisley than my sleepy home town of Summerside. And I started getting more and more apprehensive.

And then I realized Felicity was no longer with me, and I was mad at her for abandoning me in this weird place.

I wandered around looking for something familiar, and finally I saw what seemed to be a small bar at the end of one corridor. I was so freaked out that I wasn’t making any assumptions, and so I asked the refreshingly human and normal looking bartender, rather tentatively, “Do you take… Canadian money?”.

Luckily, she said yes. Then I asked her if she knew how to make a Grasshopper, which is a lovely minty cocktail that I adore. She said yes, of course.

And there’s where I apparently ran out of tape, because I don’t remember any of what happened there.

Time for analysis. I feel like there is something very important about my high school being all open and fresh and empty and summery, and how good I felt there. It’s like I was leading a better version of my life, one in which I was secure in my self-worth and worried about a lot less things and felt joy, nostalgia, and truly free.

That is the version of me that I am striving towards, and I felt grateful and privileged that I got to visit it for a while.

I have no idea what Epix Arson means, although I think that in the dream, it represented my freeing myself up emotionally, sexually, and romantically. It is exactly the sort of thing that a freer and more joyful version of me would love to go to.

As for that strange last act, I am not sure what that means. Being mad at Felicity for abandoning me made sense. Not that she ever would do that in the real world, of course. But I have severe abandonment issues and part of me always expects that people I count on won’t be there when I need them,

So maybe the whole “things getting weirder” business was just a setup for that. But I dunno.

I have a lot of dreams where I end up lost. I think perhaps my mind is trying to free itself from my tendency to be afraid to explore because I want to know where the road goes before I set foot on it. In order to do this, it has to force me into situations where I have no choice to explore, and leaving me there.

So maybe all this time, I’ve really been abandoning myself. For my own good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.