Each Segues column starts with something tech-related before quickly branching out from there into a tangentially related thread. These articles are born from my thought and speech patterns that regularly contain quickfire transitions. For one of my birthdays, a friend made me a crown that said “King of the Segues”. Actually, it said “King of the Segways” and that was the day we learned how to spell segue correctly.
“Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.” — Abraham Lincoln
Whoa, hold on there, Mr. Sixteenth President. Immortality? That’s kind of a tall order. Sure, you may have been off hunting vampires, so the idea of immortality wasn’t that far of a leap for you. And you achieved an immortality of sorts through your deeds as one of the most revered figures in American history, but not all of us can lay claim to acting as president during one of our country’s most tumultuous times or killing supernatural beings. No, we have to try to find our immortality through different, more attainable ways. Thankfully, technology looks like it might be catching up to this long sought-after goal of not kicking on to the afterlife (or absence of one). Our priorities might be a bit skewed though as we go about processing how to talk to loved ones from the beyond, if there is a beyond (there’s that doubt rearing its scientific head again). However and first, whether through malice or for no other reason than just because, a few pranksters have taken to shuffling some more well-known faces off this mortal coil in digital ways even though they’re still clearly alive.
Tweets from beyond
There are enough false reports of famous people’s deaths out there to choke a horse. To death. Bill Cosby recently had to refute his tweeted death for the fourth time and managed to plug the Bill Cosby App while he was at it. Cosby joins other falsely reported celebrity deaths such as Hugh Hefner and Jackie Chan. While Hugh Hefner’s death didn’t make it much farther than Twitter, which he then dismissed in his own Playboy way of claiming to tweet from the bedside of his 27-year-old girlfriend Shera Bechard, Jackie Chan didn’t end up so lucky. Thanks to a fake CNN article, the news of Chan’s early demise spread to celebrity news sites with a sense of legitimacy that Twitter simply doesn’t have. The site with the fake CNN article has been since taken down, but you can see the story about Chan’s fake death on this similarly fake site made to look like an Australian Yahoo News page that still exists for some baffling reason. So far, this has been little more than a nuisance to a minor few, but not along ago, these false death rumors spread to the realm of national security and the idea of media bias.
Back on the Fourth of July, Fox News’s Twitter account was hacked by a group calling itself The ScriptKiddies who tweeted that President Barack Obama had been assassinated while at a restaurant in Iowa. This news didn’t even have the chance to turn into a small ember, let alone spread like wildfire, before the tweets were removed, Fox News suspended their own account, and the Secret Service got involved. It’s one thing to mess with an aging nudie magazine publisher hopped up on Viagra and a martial arts movie legend, but it’s a bad idea to start screwing around with the Commander in Chief. No word yet on how deep the hole is The ScriptKiddies now reside in.
Scan the QR code for love
Six feet down isn’t far enough to hide away from technology thanks to the Living Headstone from Quiring Monuments. Straight from the creepy site:
Quiring has created a new type of headstone which connects people regardless of where they reside. Our “Living Headstone” memorial blends the timeless traditional value of granite headstones with the newest technology available, to provide an interactive “living” memorial legacy for future generations.
This “living” memorial is accessed by scanning a QR code placed directly on the tombstone or entering a unique URL that then sends you to a website that has family information, photos, and anecdotes about the deceased loved one in “a virtual archive that will remain accessible for future generations.”
For 65 bucks, you too can talk to family and friends from beyond the grave for up to five years. No need to limit this to just tombstones though. The eerie QR codes can be applied to anything you want to use as a memorial. So, grandma can read the kiddies bedtime stories long after she’s expired with the simple wave of a smartphone. What a handy way to make the grieving process cold and impersonal while also allowing you to not actually move on with your life.
Stephen Hawking vs God
Few people have equally suffered as much and achieved such great heights as Stephen Hawking. At 21, Hawking was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and has had his health steadily decline since then. At the same time, he’s never sought sympathy and has gone on to become probably the world’s most renown theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He’s written best sellers like A Brief History of Time and went on to host the documentary series Stephen Hawking, Master of the Universe. Of the many foundation-changing theories Hawking is responsible for, one is the prediction that black holes emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking (or Bekenstein–Hawking) radiation. Throughout all of these discoveries, he’s continued to face medical setbacks. These many setbacks and his scientific reasoning led him to give this quote to the Guardian on May 15, 2011:
I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
For Hawking, there is no chance of recovery. He can’t tweet that his physically debilitating motor neuron disease has been a hoax this whole time. His scientific and cultural achievements (plus, his many film and TV appearances on everything from Star Trek: The Next Generation to The Simpsons) are the legacy he’ll leave behind, so it’s doubtful he’ll use a Living Tombstone. As with the many other lessons that Hawking can teach us, maybe here’s another one. Don’t worry about what comes next. Concentrate on the now.
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