Four-cast

When you come into a new year, it's typical for people to make resolutions that apply to yourself. The intention being, usually, to become a better "you" over the course of the new year. I on the other hand have made a list of inventions, technologies, or ideas that I would like to see come about in this grand ol' leap year of 2008. The idea here being to make a better world. I think at least four hopes are reasonable, especially since it allowed me to create a cool title.

1. Presence Dampener: You know when you're walking in a parking lot at night and you 'feel' as if somebody is behind you? And then there's your friend! Or when you're in a room all alone and you can just 'tell' when somebody has entered the room? Well never fear you pranksters! The Presence Dampener is a hand-held device that will actually cause your presence to disappear when activated! Studies show that the device works by phasing only your mass into a parallel dimension. Gravity will still act on you though, because this other dimension also has gravity, so don't fear. People will no longer 'sense' you without seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, or tasting you directly!

2. Abolition of Daylight Saving Time: I believe it no longer serves a purpose and should be banned from ever happening again. It was a good idea at the time, don't get me wrong. Farmers and the like needed more daylight during particular seasons, so let's shift the clock so that normal working hours are more in sync with daytime. Fantastic. Now we have floodlights, and less people are farmers or the like. I'm pretty sure we're done with Daylight Saving Time.

3. Conversion of English to Newspeak: If you've never read 1984 by George Orwell, I suggest you try. Now. In the book, the English Socialist party had created a new language that cut out tons of superfluous words. E.g. good, great, fantastic, and incredibly phenomenal became good, plusgood, doubleplusgood, and double-doubleplusgood. See how much easier that is than having all those other words? Simplicity is elegance. (1984 fans would be chuckling because of that sentence).

4. Discovery of alien life: I'm pretty sure I'd crap my pants twice if we finally found evidence of alien life, even if it's a fossil on Mars. It doesn't have to be alive, it just has to have been alive at some time. People talk about it all the time, but if it actually happened, can you imagine the mayhem? Maybe mayhem is the wrong word, but really, if you think about it, it'd be a double-doubleplusgood event! Wow.