f13.net

Link (http://www.buzzfeed.com/burnred/predictions-of-what-2011-would-be-like-in-a-1911-n-281t)

Surprisingly accurate. The only major miss is air travel.

 :oh_i_see:

My favourites:

It's not from 1911. It appeared in the Ladies Home Journal in December 1900.

I've taught the article in my class on the history of futurism for years, it appears in a couple of anthologies, it's well-known by folks who study predictions & futurism--it's a bit odd how it's suddenly been "discovered" by the MSM via a republication in the Saturday Evening Post and spewed all over the Internet as if it it had been unearthed from King Tut's Tomb. More importantly, at least some of what Watkins predicts in the article were ideas in common circulation among people looking ahead in 1900: faster, better transportation; bigger, healthier people; more efficiency (to the point of getting rid of redundant letters in the alphabet); forms of automation following the trend of industrial production; the control of nature.  The one thing he comes up with that I don't recall anyone else saying then is the idea about the remote transmission of photography, for which he definitely gets +1 prophecy points.

My favorite: Everyone will walk 10 miles.  Gymnastics will begin in the nursery ... exercise will be compulsory in schools.  They got the exercise part right, but not for the reason that they were thinking.  

Let's not forget the free University education.  Ok, the intelligent parts of the world have this.

I suppose the prediction should have been "University education funded via taxes" or something similar.  Still a miss.

The 10-miles walking, exercise thing is tied into eugenics at the turn of the century. There was a common perception that the overly educated new middle-classes were doing too much "brain work", e.g., being accountants, clerks, managers, etc., sitting most of the day. The fear wasn't that they'd get fat but that they'd waste away into spindly, pale absinthe-drinkers. There was a big medical panic about "neurasthenia", basically a male version of hysteria, in which men would turn into melancholy, pallid, overly emotional poetic types and just sit around inside sighing and reading and masturbating. The eugenics piece tied this whole fear to a belief in "race hygiene", that if Anglo-Saxon WASP men turned into effeminate intellectuals, all the "vigorous" races would overwhelm them.  This is where the Boy Scouts came from, actually, along with a bunch of other stuff. (Teddy Roosevelt's hyper-manly devotion to 'vigor' was all about this kind of thing, and he took himself as the best example, since he went from being bookish and sickly to being a he-man hunter and warrior and president.)  So Watkins was being upbeat about Boy Scout-style attempts to reverse neurasthenia and other modern ills, just like he was upbeat about technological advance in other respects (including transportation). It was a pretty common belief among a lot of the chattering classes in 1900.

See also :  HG Wells.

Yeah, Eloi-Morlocks is another example.

Also Martians.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/85916/martian_ambassador.jpg)

This part is true though.  He just missed the 'morbidly obese' & 'living in our parents basement covered in a fine layer of cheeto dust' part.

He obviously didn't play MMOG's.

No mosquitoes or flies.   :oh_i_see:

Blame the hippies at the EPA.

Another durable futurist trope, at least into the 1970s, actually--climate control + control of nature sufficient to eliminate all dangerous or annoying organisms. Pops up in all sorts of places (Disney's futuristic community that he was busy imagining just before he died was supposed to have no mosquitos or flies despite being in Florida, because it would be mostly under a dome or some other protective covering). Watkins was a pretty early example, but just think about it--this is the point where there are already giant swamp-draining projects underway in Panama because two years before Watkins wrote this piece malaria was linked to mosquitos for the first time, and early National Park managers were already talking about they could precisely stage-manage populations of animals in Yellowstone.

At that point they had also developed a number of effective insecticides, but weren't aware of biomagnification.

"He will live 50 years instead of 35 as at present."

I thought that was a bit suspect, and found this page (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html) with life expectancy data in the US. In 1900, a newborn white male had a life expectancy of 48.

A newborn non-white male could only expect to live to 32. Holy crap. No wonder people were getting married at 14 back then.

Interestingly, in those days it was all about getting through childhood. If you made it to 10, then life expectancy for white males jumped from 48 to 60.

My guess is that since they are age "0" figures they include infant mortality. Any baby who survives initially would've on average lived to over 32, the expectancy at 10 years of age was +40, making it around 50 years old.

So, if you didn't make it to age 10, then your life expectancy was still age 48?

No. It was just much more likely you would die between the age of 0 and 10 than between 10 and 48.

We used to have that, here in Australia (you still had to qualify for the courses). It got taken away.  :heartbreak:

I'm shocked.

Life without antibiotics and a lot of other drugs we take for granted sucked. "You got a deep cut from a rusty nail? Well, if you don't die from Tetanus within the week we'll see ifyour leg is too infected to save". I hate big pharma as much as anyone, but I'm really glad that a 15 minute drive to a doctor takes care of something that would have taken a month of fear and luck to fix in 1911.

I'm not sure anyone educated or who has watched any kind of medical show on TV takes them for granted.

Hell, my biggest fear these days is strains getting resistant.  I've no idea what we'll do then.

Apart from die in very large numbers.

You really gotta remember the life expectancy thing is about dying in the first three years, as per above. If you made it past 3, you had fair odds in 1650 of making it to 50-55, as long as the bubonic plague wasn't around. Infant mortality was the big thing keeping human populations just barely above replacement until about 1750 in Europe, a bit later elsewhere, and it didn't get better because of antibiotics. It was really just more and better food (improvements in agricultural yield + spike in global trade) and better sanitation and water in urban areas. But by 1900, improvements in clinical medicine were starting to push up the upper end of lifespan, too--antibiotics were starting to go into use, but the huge thing was the impact of germ theory on medical hygiene. 75 years earlier, a surgeon might saw off a wounded limb and then think nothing of going and delivering a baby with the blood from the previous operation on his hands.

Already happening and it's terrifying. Don't investigate it.



Think nothing of?  I recall watching a documentary where it was outline that keeping blood and puss and gore on your scrubs was a mark of a GOOD and Experienced surgeon.  You didn't ask for the guy with the clean whites, you wanted the guy with the blood-caked grungy lab coat.   Lister himself did this as late as 1871, after had published his paper about antiseptic surgery, if you can believe WIKI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lister,_1st_Baron_Lister

I can see that liberal arts degree is serving you well.  :grin:

OHNOES TEH HUMANS!

And sanitation, for fuck's sake. Took humanity long enough to stop shitting in the goddamned streets and rivers.

Oh, that got me.  Good show.

The rusty nail bit is sort of a red herring.  Tetanus thrives on porous surfaces in anaerobic environments, so a splinter off of a buried wooden stake is also fairly likely to have some pretty serious colonies.


Actually, we as a species haven't fully grasped that one yet.  Even those of us who live in parts of the world where germ theory, sanitation, and the hydrological cycle are well understood.

(http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/images/4/2012/01/873bcfef10c9c5d67fbb35faa5cd5062.jpg) (http://gizmodo.com/5878612/drone-pilot-discovers-river-of-meat-blood)
http://gizmodo.com/5878612/drone-pilot-discovers-river-of-meat-blood

I submit that the importance was grasped by some in that case.

I submit that the parties responsible ALSO grasped and determined after consulting the profit vs. liability chart it was worth taking a run and paying the minor fine later.

Assuming the picture isn't later tossed out in court for being illegally obtained.   :awesome_for_real:

The picture isn't the evidence, the investigation by the EPA (based on reasonable suspicion) is the evidence.

The picture prompted the investigation, though.. which would be fruit of the poisoned vine, wouldn't it?  IANAL though so /shrug.

Yes, but the picture is of a massive river of meat blood that is out in the open. I'm going with no issue to "eventual discovery" if there's an issue raised.

Doesn't the fact that it was a private citizen flying a private vehicle over unrestricted airspace discovering and then reporting it make it not illegaly obtained? Otherwise I'd be able to build a big privacy fence around my backyard and grow weed and poppy with immunity until the police stumble upon it for some other reason. Or a burglar breaking into a house and finding a rape room and pile of trophy skulls would be probable cause to search the house, right?

The second half of my post was actually about regulation and oversight, but I took that out lest we tread directly into politics, Do Not Pass Go.

Because we should just shoot modern anarchists right in the face.

Most of my rudimentary understanding of the law is that when an individual not acting as an agent of law enforcement finds something like the examples given, it isn't "fruit of the poisoned vine" as said.  They are free to be a good citizen and report it or ignore it.  Same as if a neighbor hears or sees something suspicious from the house down the road and reports it to the police, leading to a burglar being apprehended.

The problem is trespass and what constitutes that and violation of privacy.  The photo in question was taken with a drone flying over private property, not an aircraft.  Can I get an RC copter and play snoop?  Are the photos paparazzi take from trees and cranes outside someone's place valid, or an invasion of privacy?  Is it only /not/ an invasion when you suspect something?  What determines reasonable suspicion?  If think I hear noises can I use a heat camera to look inside your house?  Are these things you want to allow vigilante groups to do when police aren't allowed?

Ah, the wonders of the technology age.

Thermal imaging cameras can't see through insulated walls.

Shouldn't all walls be insulated anyway, in regards of not going broke on heating and air conditioning?

 :awesome_for_real:

Also, cabled for internet.  With an internal hoover.  And underfloor heating.

AND A TELEPATHIC USER INTERFACE !!!

I love how you use a gimmick account to show how we fail to live up to our ideal world.

I know.  He's the optimistic side.

Its not easy to be the Jekyll to Ironwoods Hyde, but nobody else wanted the job.  :awesome_for_real:

One of the links hints at the legality, specifically mentioning being below 400 feet.  I can't pursue the details right now but I suggest reading more on that toy-plane-dork site.