Not quite awake yet; 1/4 awake ten minutes ago, still 1/4 asleep;
eyes incompletely open. Had been dreaming about email. Was owner
or manager or something of a hotel that provided email service to
guests -- sometimes scene changed and I was email admin for tech
conf., but usually seemed to be hotel -- and we had email working
into the past some of the time but not always. First it was random
and curious and we wanted to harness it but didn't know how, then
I woke up around 11:00 and mumbled something to
anniemal
and fell asleep again, after which we'd gotten a subset of into-the-past
email to work but were having addressing problems. (How do we add
times to email addresses, how do we do error-checking to make sure
the destination address existed at that time, and more importantly,
how specific does the sender have to be and how does the sender
decide what time to specify.) And there were issues with certain
combinations of content and times, or something -- I had these fancy
graphs and diagrams like you'd find in science-for-general-public
magazines but not the math, and I was bugging all my physics
friends to help me with it, including figuring out whether we were
sending actual electrons or photons back in time (and whether the
particle or wave aspect was what the process hinged on) or just sending
some sort of "information wave" (like in ... can't remember name of
novel I read years ago set in Scotland with trickle of info back in
time via computer) separate from any e/m wave. As I woke up, even
while mumbling to
anniemal about weather, brain kept
screaming at me "must solve time travel problem! must solve!".
Had problems with into-future email as well, but there's a workaround
for that (store-and-forward); big question was error messages in
the form of past bounces ... how to keep store-and-forward queue of
bounces from growing too large if user tries to send mail to before
either source or dest addr. existed. Wanted to solve into-future
problem properly but just not as urgent as making into-past reliable
and creating proper addressing standards. Still want to solve it.
Wonder whether I'll get any farther if I close my eyes again. Anybody
willing to advise on information-propogation wavefronts and time
travel? Want to solve this.
Not sure whether waking up rest of way or re-crashing.
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Maybe I can even work in a sneaky bit that came to me outside of any dream a couple of days ago, and have characters talking about somebody having made a Fustian Bargain ... where the reader eventually finds out it's not a typo, but that instead of trading her soul for knowledge and power the person just got a really good deal on fabric...
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It sounds clever..... :-)
Thrice Upon A Time
Re: Thrice Upon A Time
Re: Thrice Upon A Time
And yeah, I was counting on the Scotland detail to be what helped someone identify it.
Re: Thrice Upon A Time
Dreams are not supposed to be for factual stuff!!
When I go to sleep I want to have dreams about flying and such, not spend the time at a blackboard!
Re: Dreams are not supposed to be for factual stuff!!