Stone soup? No, stone salad

Fay and I hit the food pantry yesterday. We got our monthly food box (I always hit them the last Saturday of the month as it's about thenm things are getting pretty bare in my cupboards).

We also got the free produce.

I am *so* glad that some nice stores donate stuff as well as the more "generic" stuff.A few items of note:

A package of Tofurkey garlic sesame chicken
a pound of ground bison
a can of artichoke hearts
a *huge* zuccinni (over 18" long and 3-4" thick)
an orange bell pepper
some nice "spring greens"

The "stone salad" was some of the spring greens, mushrooms, red onion, cucumber, some of the garlic "chicken", pepper jack, aretichoke hearts, pepperjack cheese and dressing

Everything but the cheese and dressing came from thefood pantry.

And I'll be able to make several more.

the various other veggies always tuurn my ramen from something barely nutritious (ie carbs) into something reasonably good for me and tasty as well. And other things stretch my food a *lot*.

magi-tech and morality

I'm sure many of us have played around with what we (or one of the characters we write about) could do with tech on the level of Star Trek or other SF shows and books. Whicjh is prettuy much "magical tech (thus the "magi-tech" in the title)

I'd been thinking that the sort of sensor tech Trek (and others have) was really problematic.

It'd let you find all the nasty criminals, but at the cost of major league Big Brother or worse tactics.

Still it was fun to think about.

Then, one day, I recalled an old Asimov short story about gizmo that could view the past. Only it turned out to not have nearly the range claimed (centuries). The Powers That Be made a big deal of looking at the distant past, because that keppt people from asking "when does 'the past' begin?"

The answer, of course is "the tiniest frasction of a second ago". So the time viewr was better used as what Smith and others have called a "spy ray".

And that set me thinking on a new tangent.

If you set the right limits on your magitech, you can bypass a lot of the moral/ethical problems.

I decided to assume sensors that could get really good data for decades into the past. Questionable, but makes for such lovely possibilities.

Thus, rather than Big Brother watching everyone & and everything, you have a crimer or possible crime becoming known.

Our Heroes with their magical tech (from the far future, alien, and alternate timeline or whatever) can then look back at said incident and see what happened. And then follow the prepetrators back to their bosses, etc.

Thus any innocent people only get viewed/scanned incidentaly as the surviellance of the actual bad guys procceds thru the remote viewing/past viewing.

Our Heroes would still have to act outside the law to get info that can be turned over to the authorities, or act extra-legallyon their own. But at least they've dodged a major ethical hurdle.

more magi-tech

A few scenes that have featured in some of the daydreams about using Trek type tech now.

A drug deal is about to go down. Cue transporter effect and all the drugs, money and illegal weapons vanish.

A variant, leave the weapons until after they finish shooting at each other.

Terrorist group of your choice. Cue transporter effect. Weapons disappear. So do terrorists. The terrorists reappear in whatever place they'd least want to be. Holding cells, in front of families of victim (especially in cultures that go in for "personal" revenge), etc.