h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: The Sense Engine - A54289227
Author: dmitrigheorgheni - U1590784

Okay, here it is. The only invention I could think of that I wanted.

Like the song says 'Lord, we don't need another mountain...or another vegetable slicer...'

Interesting idea. A bit like going back in time, no?

and wow! and faint and magic and wow and faint and magic and ... I love this piece ... I will of course leave it to your colleagues to respond intelligently .... ....

....

that's what did it ... thankyou for awakening yet further my urgency to write ...

I wonder would I miss those shadows .. those memories that I can't quite access .... all those dots ............and half formed words .... in between lines ... when the Sense Engine is here ... no .. .. probably not .... anyway I could always argue with it .. ...

love it ...

H

This is great.

At first, the tone seems quite mocking - as in talking about Edison's technology groupies - but it doesn't detract from the intelligence of the ideas. Then it changes, with a beautiful evocation of times past -'christmassing the air' is lovely.

Ah, this is one of those that will keep me thinking for a few days - not about the past, I hope, but about all of the questions that such a machine raises.

This is absolutely lovely, dmitri. Maybe my favorite thing to come out of the Stretcher so far. It's an example for the rest of us, I think. And the final sentence makes that point well enough, too.

I need to comment on this sentence,
"To be there, just for a moment, in that kitchen, with the aroma of your mother's cinnamon buns christmassing the air as she opens the oven door, to see her with adult eyes, that lovely woman, some dozen years departed now, see her as she was, young and alive, with a gleam in her soft brown eyes because she loved holidays, and she loved children"
...because it made me tear up, and my mother never has been anything like the woman described there.

You've found an idea that has a profound beauty to it, not something trivial, and you've managed to sum up the entire Stretcher competition for me. Thanks very much.

I need to go out and work in the yard today and I'm looking forward to pondering 'desire, not necessity, is the mother of invention' while doing whatever the yard requires of me.

It does seem true that some inventions are born of yearning and not practicality.


Sense Engine is a curious pairing of words - good choice, that.

If this has given food for thought, I am gratified.

It made me think, and wonder which memories I'd like to relive. Those from my childhood or teenage years all feature my grandmother. There are more from when my children were small.

Interesting. I never thought about that before. It's quite an eye-opener.

It's a fabulous idea

It got me wondering which memories I'd like to relive at a level beyond the fragmented virtual that's all my mind can currently manage. Trouble is, if I went into such memories complete with a perception of *real* reality, I wouldn't want to come out - and if I did succeed in dragging myself out, I'd by crying about all the loss. It's one of those 'be careful what you wish for' wishes

Good thoughts, you guys.

If you're not familiar with it, I recommend a play called 'Our Town' by Thornton Wilder. (It makes a similar point about the intensity and sadness of memory.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLWewZO6z1w

Something like this happens in Sebastian Faulk's 'Human Traces'.

One of the two psychiatrists who the story follows witnesses a woman having her brain stimulated (I think in an attempt to cure epilepsy.) She begins reliving an experience from her past and doesn't want to come back to the present. When the psychiatrist later loses his son in the First World War, he desperately searches for someone who will stimulate his brain in a way that will take him back to a time when his son was alive.

Thanks for the fiction tip, MVP.

Makes sense - this actually works.

It's too much of a risk. What if they accidentally prod the wrong bit and you have to relive some horrendously humiliating experience that you've spent the past 20 years trying to forget? Suddenly it's there, at the forefront of your mind, and you've another 20 years to wait before it goes away again. Oh dear me no!

Still, if anyone could persuade me that this is a good idea, it's you - this is quite beautifully written.

Thanks, Danny. You're right, that would be terrible.

Wouldn't be better to make NEW moments like that, than to remember the old ones. Or make the spacetime coordinates that would generate such moments for everyone to enjoy? Humans couldn't begin to do it.
Perhaps...

Here's to new moments.

I wonder (idly) if spacetime is really just a big huge brain and what we think of as experience is just a result of prodding at its innards.

It's something to think about while eating

Or even drinking . I like that.

Great change of tone when you get to what you really want invented.

I know what you mean, I'd deary love to relive, re-see, some of the things I know I've seen but barely remember. It's so frustrating to know it's all in there but I don't know the key to unlock the files.

Elektrag and TB have very good points though. It's food for thought - a reminder to live every piece of every new moment in full maybe. Good ones that is.

Thanks dmitri.