Sunday, July 27, 2014

SMART DUST AND WHAT I WILL MISS IN THE FUTURE




Tonight I am thinking about my life, as tomorrow I turn 75 years old. "Seventy Five", that is quite a number. How did I get here so fast?  Wasn’t it the other day I was dancing at the Pizza King in Queens, Roller skating at the Empire Roller Drum, and bowling at Freddie Fritzimmons Bowling alley in Brooklyn during my teen years.

After marriage I’ve been so busy raising a family, and working, I did not notice how thin and pretty I was.  I was always worried about keeping my family well and fed.  There was very little time for me.

What should my grandparents say?  They worked harder than I.  There were no washing machines and dryers, dishwashers or cell phones.  They had to boil dirty diapers by hand and dry wet clothes outside on the line.  To prepare a chicken, they had to pluck the feathers and clean it. Some had to carry ice blocks up stairs to their apartments and place it in their ice box.  And, they told me they came a long way since they were teenagers.

Being present today at the age of the greatest technology of all time, I feel very fortunate. With my computer at my disposal, I can research any question that comes to mind.  All I have to do is click on the google website and in seconds the information is there.  If my parents and grandparents could not afford encyclopedias, they had to take two trolley cars, even in the dead of winter to travel to a library to find the information they needed. The time spent would take almost a whole day. Everything is fast compared to the old days.  The mail and letter writing is almost extinct as we email now and if we needed it faster we’d text.

Just today I posted a picture on Facebook of a friend.  Facebook recognized the picture and tagged them to the individual’s Timeline, with their names.  How did they know their names just by the picture?  Amazing, I thought.  My grandparents would be overwhelmed.  I am aware of face recognition and eye recognition which to me is amazing. It is used to detect our enemies and terrorists.  We have RFID which is Radio Frequency Identification to detect items and people.
We certainly have come a long way since my grandparents.  I am sure our military has increased their technology; however I am not up on that at the moment.

Thus, I am thinking to myself in the early hours of the morning, as I am writing this down.  My life is three quarters over.  Some of my friends my age have passed.  They will never know what is ahead.  Will I? I am afraid not.  I sit here at my computer wishing I knew what’s in the future.

Recently I learned huge corporate companies like Intel, Cisco and Hewlet Packard among others have been working on Smart dust for years. I’ve heard of Smart Tours, Smart Phones, Smart TV’s , even Smart Alec, but not Smart Dust.  It aims to monitor everything from our enemies to the health and well-being of all of us. Someday it will tell how we think among other uses.  If you should notice a little dust around the house that looks iridescent, it could be Smart Dust and you may be monitored. 


Or you can surf the Internet for more research on Smart Dust.  It is real!