Google glasses and our future as Borg

This picture showed up on my Google+ feed the other day. I like it but It doesn't go far enough.  There's no Borg.

Allow me to present prediction number 6!

On the left we have Star Trek's Captain Picard who's been assimilated by the Borg hive mind. On the right we have the beautiful Diane von Fristenberg show casing Google glasses.


Combine The Matrix and The Borg and you have our future. We are all going to have an Internet connection plugged directly into our brains. Laptops, phones, and google glasses are stepping stones but they are still rather inefficient mechanisms for information transfer. Google glasses are simply the next baby step.

Think about it: you read text on a screen, your eyes convert the image to electrical signals and send it to your brain for processing. Same with your ears, and your fingers do the reverse. Why not just remove your senses from the equation and send the electrical signals directly to and from the brain? The Borge do, the matrix does and we will soon.

Don't worry it wont be that bad. The thing the Borg did wrong was its PR campaign. Going around threatening people and using violence to force people into the hive isn't the way you win hearts and minds. You get models and celebrities to wear the stuff and everyone else will follow... this is what Google is getting right!

If on first contact the Borg had rocked up to earth with a dolled up seven of nine telling everyone how great the collective is, earth wouldn't have been so anti-assimilation.

Resistance is futile!

German colonisation of Europe

I really like this 5th century map showing the settlement of Germanic tribes throughout the former western Roman empire, you can explain all of the major western nations from it. One of the points oft neglected in the history books is that the ruling elite of most nation states in Europe was german if you go back to when the roman empire fell apart.

The Franks (Franci) became the rulers of France, and the French still refer to Germans as the Alaman. The poor old Fresians (Frisi) lost half of the netherlands to the Franks. The Frankish language developed into what we would now refer to as Dutch. The franks who ruled France were assimilated. Louis and Ludwig both derive from the german name Clovis, the name of the first king to unite all the Frankish tribes.

The coloured borders are pretty much where the Germanic people end and the Slavic tribes start. The Germans managed to colonise quite a bit of slavic land in the intermittent centuries, however the russians reset the borders a bit when they single-handedly won world war II.

By and large I am not a huge fan of Thatcher, as neoliberal economics is one of the reasons the world economy is in the mess that it is. But, she did say something I find interesting in retrospect in 1989 when german reunification was being discussed: 

"We defeated the Germans twice! And now they're back!"

And right she was. The french realised this as well:

Mitterrand [president of france] recognized before Thatcher that reunification was inevitable and adjusted his views accordingly; unlike her, he was hopeful that participation in a single currency^[17] and other European institutions could control a united Germany.

Nice try france but thanks the the GFC Germany is having to take the reigns of Europe, to save it!