Posts categorized “Future Living”

Stephen Fry, the lovable rapscallion often thought of alongside cohorts Hugh Laurie and/or Rowan Atkinson, has been in Louisiana for a few days doing various bits about life in the N’Orleans area for a project of his. Well, life got very interesting for Mr. Fry very quickly on Sunday afternoon, and because he is such an aficionado of Twitter, we got to see the excitement first-hand.

The day started off pleasantly enough:

But at 2:39 in the afternoon he tweeted a rather more ominous message:

He tweeted again in the next few minutes (titling them simply “Uh-oh” and “Snaking its way down…”). Each tweet was accompanied by a photograph showing the progress of the tornado:

Then Mr. Fry’s tweeting ceased. This caused a bit of a sit in the Twitterverse—had he been swallowed up by the meteorological menace? Eventually, just over a half-hour later, Mr. Fry returned to reassure everyone:

Whew! And here we have another example of what a wondrous future we live in, wherein a man armed only with an iPhone and a Twitter account can give an immediate account of astounding weather phenomena. We don’t have to rely on the hope that someone caught some footage of it that might make it to the local news that evening, which might then possibly be picked up by a national news (or perhaps end up as footage in Mr. Fry’s Louisiana project a while down the road). Instead the connection is instant between the witness and the audience, without need for any pesky middle-men sticking their thumbs in it.

It also helps that I just so happen to have an incredible fascination with tornadoes.

Yesterday afternoon (as most of you are aware since most of you live/work in the greater Puget Sound area) there were two really loud booms in rapid succession. It honestly sounded quite a lot like when the Atlas foundry blew up a couple of years ago, they were so strong.

What happened was this: Obama was in Seattle. Wherever the president goes there’s very restrictive airspace rules; you can’t fly within a certain radius of him, etc. This is to prevent suicide pilots from crashing into whatever building/vehicle he happens to be in. Well, some doofus who probably didn’t even know that POTUS was in town was putting around in his little pontoon boat and strayed into restricted airspace. Immediately two F-15s were scrambled from the Portland area, and pushed over 800 MPH to intercept the offending airplane. Going that fast makes some gigantic sonic booms, which were heard for a couple hundred miles in every direction (I think the booms actually formed between Olympia and Tacoma).

In the moments immediately after the booms, though, nobody knew what had caused them. I walked outside and saw that everybody else (who was home in the afternoon) was also standing outside their houses. “Any ideas?” I called out to a neighbor.

“Nope,” was the reply.

Carrie got on the laptop and looked at the news websites: King 5, Komo 4, Google News, Tacoma News Tribune, etc. But this had happened only maybe a minute earlier, so there was no actual news yet.

So then I remembered that we live in the future, and I got on the computer and logged into Twitter. I typed “Tacoma” into the search bar and sat there while the tweets started pouring in from every corner of Puget Sound, from Olympia to Seattle and beyond. Immediately the two rumors were (A) some sort of gas explosion and (B) some sort of sonic boom. After a short while tweeters quickly realized that if it were an explosion then someone would have actually witnessed it and tweeted about it, which didn’t happen. So a pair of sonic booms seemed more likely. Eventually re-tweets started coming through about official word from the FAA being sonic booms. And then quickly the real story started taking shape on twitter long before it ever appeared on any news website.

This is what it’s like to live in the future. Instant information about any major event from those who witnessed the event. Sure, you have to sift through the speculation and rumors, but you don’t have to wait around and wonder what happened until the 5:00 news that evening anymore. News comes directly from the witnesses now.

Holy cow, yesterday I did a quick video chat with Jason of jeffthefish.com, and it was awesome! I have been wanting to do a video chat with someone since the 21st century rolled around, and now it’s easier than ever! I encourage you to get a Gmail account if you don’t have one, and set up Gmail Video Chat, and hit me up!