I had a Dream (by sarah)
Actually I've been having lots of very vivid dreams which doesn't bode well for sugar levels but I haven't got the results of the Glucose Tests back yet - by this time with Jean's pregnancy I had gestational diabetes. But then I often have vivid dreams - many of them are what is termed lucid and I have some sort of control on them. Part of this is the fact that when pain levels are high I don't actually go to sleep properly so I am in a sort of resting trance. They have benifits but it makes it harder for you body to repair itself from injuries - this isn't mumbo jumbo this was out of the Drs mouth at the pain clinic when they attempted to medicate my sleep when we lived back in Essex.
Anyway I thought I really needed to share lasts nights dream. It starts with me trying to get to a PhD interview at Reading University - the PhD is about modeling other solar systems and exo planets etc... I have no idea if Reading does this sort of thing but it was Reading in the dream - the only issue was Alaric was running late so instead of having a nice sedate drive to the interview we had to high jack a state of the art plane from the local army base type place.
As we took off I noticed the tail wasn't actually attached to the plane but the whole thing was segments held together a bit like a kite - the tail itself looked remarkably like a cray fishes or something lobstery only in shiny metal.
We get to the university and I am late - I haven't read the notes on what the things is actually about but they agree to see me anyway as there is only one other candidate - a UG astrophysics girl. I then proceed to think on the spot and tell them that they need to reassess everything. I tell them that what they need in a lovely large database with a nice archive mode - this is sort of a giant wiki with the ability to pull meta structures from the data such as phase diagrams. You see I don't just want to make a database of the planets and the physics but why not add all of mineralogy and astronomy?
Why not had layers where people can choose the data to run their simulations and the like? In the dream I'm in a pale yellow room with aging equipment and they are like - we don't have the money to pay the programmers and our stuff never quiet works.
Of course it doesn't I crow - your not programmers and you just use which ever language you happen to have picked up. Then I tell them not to worry - I'll make the database - I'll make the initial system and we can have people adding their own stuff!
It would be massive and everyone would argue about things added which is were the archive system would come in - they could just take an previous theory ect... With this we could easily extrapolate the composition of planets around other stars. It could have the ability to swap between notations so no more issues over what a Chemist calls a metal compared to a Geologist compared to a Astrophysist etc...
I have to say at this point there was decent in the interviewers - there is of course a problem of who the data belongs too and would we have to pay and keep it secret - that would hamstring the project - it would kill alot of their grants dead etc... alter the peer review system. Subjects that I have touched on before whilst awake!
But then I point out that it would have commercial applications and launched into a whole thing about the gaming industry being a growth sector and how you could build games engines on this thing! (again this is something we are sort of doing anyway in the real world but not with real physics).
I point out that scifi authors and the like would love to get their mitts on such a database too - for it would make world building a lot simpler and you could make smaller custom ones.
They were still like but we need someone to make all this and we just wanted a data monkey to enter numbers into spreed sheets. I laugh and say I can build it for them (I can't but I'm planning on using an advance version of Alaric's Ugarit.).
Anyway it ended with me negotiating to mainly work from home and stuff.
Part of me is now going - this needs to become real! We need to have this database - an extention on an idea I had a few years ago! And Alaric was like that is exactly the sort of thing the archive mode of Ugarit would be good for. The arogance of me in the dream was a suprise though. Besides last time I had a PhD interview I told the person their project was recording the wrong things - which didn't go down too well :/ And this dream is just that rite large - plus there is no way I am going to be doing anything academic for a while either - but it was a cool dream non the less!
Wed 24th Nov 2010 9:12 am 
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By Sasha, Fri 28th Jan 2011 @ 12:04 am
Sarah, there are several things no-one ever bothers telling a little girl, but a good one is that no-one ever gives you power. Ever. You just take it.
I know the pair of you can build this. I suggest you do. And don't go waiting for anyone's permission.