Time to catch up on some Scientific American articles I’ve read over the last few weeks.

Remembrance of Things Future
An interesting article on how a writer in December 1900 thought things would be a century later. As expected some right:

• ready cooked meals will be bought from the equivalent of bakeries
• no street cars (ie. trams) in large cities

but mostly wrong:

• mosquitoes, flies, rats and mice will have been exterminated
• the alphabet will not longer contain C, X and Q
• all traffic will be below ground, consequently
• cities will be free of noise
• Nicaragua and Mexico would be part of the USA

Full article
Complete list of original predictions

Infinity
Hard question of the year: Does infinity come in different sizes?
Hard answer: Yes.

This back-page “Fact or Fiction” article from January’s Scientific American contains some interesting insights, and some interesting mathematical sleights of hand. We probably all accept that there are an infinite number of integers (the natural numbers 1, 2, 3 …). And between each pair of adjacent integers there are an infinite number of fractional numbers (2.1, 2.11, 2.111, 2.112112 …). That means there are infinity to the power infinity real numbers (natural numbers and fractions) – which is an infinitely different ball-game in terms of defining the size of infinity.

Love, Sex and Robots
Finally an item from the March Scientific American which considers the proposition that we might one day (soon) be able to have a relationship with, marry and even have sex with, a robot of the opposite sex. Scary? Probably for most of us. Fantasy? Probably not. After all go back 100 years and the idea of male homosexual marriage was absurd. Apparently there is a lot to be said for allowing the socially inept [my phrase] to gain some mutual comfort from a relationship with a robot. And there are already experiments showing that children (at least) will spontaneously treat a robot as (almost) sentient, for example by putting it to bed when its batteries run flat. I see the arguments, but I remain firmly skeptical.