Alternate timelines as a way of learning history

When i was a youngling, i found history utterly boring.  That has now completely changed, possibly because i've lived through a lot more of it, but of course i'm not so much a history man as a philosophy man (and also a bit of an art poseur, though that's not immediately obvious).  One thing i'm not is the science guy, which really surprises people, but i'm really not.

Anyway, here's today's vid:

This is about one of my alternate histories, the so-called "Caroline Timeline", which is here:

http://althistory.wikia.com/wiki/Caroline_Era

The basic idea behind this is that most people feel things are just chugging along nicely until they reach a certain age, after which they gradually, or maybe suddenly, become an affront to the natural order of things and must be stopped.  For Gen-Xers such as myself, this happened with hindsight in about 1979.  The possibly illusory Post-War Consensus suddenly lurched out of kilter and history went in a completely different direction than most of us were expecting.  Keynesianism died, the Berlin Wall fell down, fundamentalism became more important and a horrible plague started killing homosexual men.  On the plus side, we didn't all get wiped out in a nuclear holocaust, a fact which surprises me even today.  Looking back on history and examining this more closely, it's clear that the seeds of this swerve are buried back in the mists of history and have maybe always been there but not necessarily apparent until recently.  Hence the Caroline Timeline.

The Caroline Timeline is my attempt to imagine where we'd be today if the trends apparent from 1945-79 had continued.  Some of the events are actually close calls in real time.  For instance, the "Curse of Tippecanoe" is the tendency for US presidents to die in office every twenty years.  Ronald Reagan was the first president not to die, although an assassination attempt was made against him.  Similarly, Pope John Paul II was almost assassinated but survived.  On the other hand, both Lord Louis Mountbatten and John Lennon were killed violently.  These events are "hair triggers" which had major consequences and the world today would've been different had they gone the other way.  Moreover, the real events are all improbable.  In the Caroline Timeline, they did go the other way.

Another aspect of the Caroline Timeline is that the "bonding energy" between spouses is slightly stronger.  To be less flippant and obscurantist, two divorces which happened in real history didn't happen over there, and as a result Punk Rock and Labour's Militant Tendency didn't happen.

Another major difference, and quite a contentious one, is that Moore's Law does not operate in the Caroline Timeline.  In 1820, in the real world, Augustus de Morgan was discovered at the age of fourteen in 1820 copying diagrams from Euclid's Geometry and went on to become a mathematician and logician, making innovations which eventually led to the machine i'm typing this on, the one you might be reading it on and the pipes connecting them.  Without the discoveries he made, these might not be impossible but they would be bloody massive and prohibitively expensive.  The reason this is contentious is that it stretches credulity to suppose that someone wouldn't have stumbled across them sooner or later.  It also depends on the idea that Moore's Law is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As it happens, i have another althist here:

http://althistory.wikia.com/wiki/Forward_and_Backward

In this one, technology is more advanced and politics closer to feudalism because James II of England had only one child and James Watt went to school at the age of six.  It's a nasty place and you wouldn't want to go there.

Both of these have stories based on them too.

However, the point i want to make is that this is a way of learning history which captivates the imagination and leads to debate.  As such, i would strongly recommend it as an approach to history

Lungless

Today's video was supposed to be about lung volumes but since i wanted to try out the new camera, i made a video on the world i missed out on when i described 'Here Be Dragons'.  I then accidentally uploaded the unedited version, but in any case Avidemux didn't like the codec, so it was a bit of a struggle and clearly a work in progress.  As a result, this is the real me, testing the quality of the video camera:

This is completely over the top of course, because doing a 1080p version of a talking head video is utterly ridiculous for its content.  However, according to my YouTube guru, who also happens to be my son, the quality of the audio and video has to be good.

Just on the subject matter, i've noticed that there are in fact six worlds in 'Here Be Dragons':  World Zero, Ancient World, West World, Realistic World, Aphrodite's Children and Ragnarok. I'd previous said there were four, i think.  Ragnarok is the most realistic.  It's an alternate timeline of this world where a superrnova generated a blast of radiation which destroyed all life on one hemisphere of this planet in the late tenth century. A minority of palaeontologists attribute the mass extinction of the late Ordivician 444 million years ago to such an event.  As a result, a mass extinction is underway and there are only a few hundred thousand people living in Ragnarok today.  Ragnarok is linked to Ancient World via an interdimensional portal called the Rainbow Bridge.

Two interesting things have happened on YouTube.  One is that someone i don't know has actually shown interest in the forthcoming book, which is great.  The other is that someone only one degree of separation from a subscriber to the Other Channel has commented on a video.  This is a bit weird, but good.  Maybe they will come together one day after all.

For Womanhood and the Empire!

I am of course mainly blogging and making YouTube videos as a form of procrastination upon procrastination.  For some reason i am continuing not to understand, i can upload any old rubbish to my other channel and get masses of views very quickly, but take care and thought over what i stick on the main one and get very few.  I really wish i knew why this happened.

Anyway, here's today's video:

It's called "Steampunk for Womanhood and the Empire!" and needs a bit of context.  When you watch a YouTube video, you get the option to read captions, which are generated by computer from the audio.  These captions are very bad indeed, and seem to have an accuracy below 1%, though i presume they're working on improving it.  When this happens, i will be rather sad because this kind of thing will be impossible.  This is nostalgia waiting to be born.  It reminds me of when i put the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales through Microsoft Word 5's spellcheck and it claimed to be about something it referred to as the "yoga zone".

Speech recognition is an AI-hard problem.  Back in the day, it was thought that thinking machines (a term once in vogue describing computers) would be difficult to program to do things which humans find difficult.  This turned out not to be so.  Instead, many problems thought to be hard to solve were in fact relatively easy and things which humans find so easy they don't even notice they're doing them are still impossible in spite of the Moore-corrected hundreds of millions of years which have passed since the first electronic brains were built.  Into the former category falls chess and arguably psychotherapy.  For years now, computers have been better than any human will ever be at chess, although it took a while for that to happen and the solution is rather boringly that rather than thinking about it, they just try a huge number of possible moves before making the best.  However, they've only recently been able to walk, they can't really see the way we can and, as the above video demonstrates, they don't understand spoken human languages and can't transcribe it.  This is particularly surprising because computers have been able to "understand" FORTRAN and other programming languages, which resemble English, since the mid-1950s.

To some extent machines are able to transcribe human speech.  In the 1960s there was a speech typewriter which could produce type in response to someone speaking Morse code to it - the human would go "dit dah dit" and it would type an R, for example.  The IBM Shoebox was another example (from 1961!):

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/specialprod1/specialprod1_7.html

This system worked by exploiting the fact that every English spoken digit had its own combination of high- and low-pitched sounds in a particular pattern.  The IBM Shoebox example inspired my mechanical speech recognition calculator in 'You Could've Thought Of That'.  So machines can recognise certain forms of speech provided they're quite narrowly restricted, and in fact given a less software-based approach they can be better than computers at the same level of technology.

This raises the question of what kind of object a human being is.  It's tempting to see a human as a robot controlled by a computer, but the fact that what we find easy, computers find hard and vice versa suggests that although human beings are sort of robots, they are not robots controlled by computers but, if they are machines at all, and as lumps of matter we are in a sense machines, the intelligent things we do are not the result of computer programs at all, and we probably aren't computers either.  This suggests to me that there is something out there in technology phase space which is in fact an Artificial Intelligence device, but it's nothing like a computer, though like a human being it could simulate one - but then a computer can also simulate a rain storm, but nobody gets wet if it does.

The actual story

This is an award-winning steampunk short-short i wrote which parodies Victorian melodrama in an alternate nineteenth century.  I've deliberately obscured the content but as it happens, hiding somewhere on YouTube is a video of me reading the real story.  It will be in the ebook, but the ebook is of course written by a different version of me than the version you see here because i want it to succeed alone, without anyone who reads it actually knowing me.  The use of the knife in the middle of the story makes no sense in this video but does in context.

Just to fill in the background:  this is similar to my "Backward and Forward" alternate history on the Althist Wiki on Wikia.  Technology is more advanced than here because James Watt was sent to school (in reality he was home educated and ended up improving Newcomen-style steam engines) and James II's son, James Stuart, Duke of Cambridge, survived to become James II's heir, with the result that there was no Act of Settlement.  Ultimately, this results in the European empires staying in power into the twenty-first century and colonising the Solar System at the same time as retaining a pre-Enlightenment political system with no real parliamentary democracy and the death penalty for shoplifting.  It's a nasty place, Backward and Forward - the Third Reich and Hitler would just be another power there and would probably be perceived as rather too liberal.  The story i read in "For Womanhood and the Empire!" is from a somewhat similar world, but one in which the future Queen Victoria was assassinated in a coup and a republic was established in the British Isles.

Yesterday evening's video was very different:

This is "Going The Extra Chamomile For You", the second of my herbal videos and also the first of a series based on terrible puns.  This video is entirely candlelit in an attempt to create the calm, restful atmosphere which chamomile generates.  Chamomile was our friend when Holly was a baby.  It kept us all calm, kept her botty smooth and helped with her conjunctivitis.  Chamomile is brilliant stuff.  If you haven't already become a fan, try it now!