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21st Century Kids


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#31 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 28 April 2007 - 01:31 AM

Oh you can do this too at ' Cafepress ' very easy--just upload your art to their site and pick what shirts/bags/clocks or mugs you want your art work on. You don't have to pay anything for the basic store-- you get put your art on what you want, and make money for what you sell.

Here is a store with pro-cryonics stuff, a friend did: http://www.cafepress...75450/opt_/fpt_

and a picture of my daughter Avianna (age 10) in a shirt we ordered! (taken last month outside our church) :) http://www.gocryo.org/

(oh there is a fun cryonics quiz there too for any interested parties, with a few more spare minutes ;) )

#32 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 29 April 2007 - 03:32 AM

nice--awesome pillow! I like how you did the clock too :)

I hope you keep adding to your store--You could start a thread with immortality art!

We went to see an Imax show on the Egyptian Pharos, today, if the were alive today they'll all be cryonicists ;)

Kids had fun though.

Can you put up your athena art? My step-sister's oldest girl is named Athena...

#33 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 30 April 2007 - 05:56 PM

I ordered a pretty Athena art pic (the pink, on the pink shirt) for my Step-Sister's eldest girl! Thanks :) I like all your art-- see if you can the titles of your story pictures to come up in the cafe art press search-- many search for certain images...

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#34 avaquin

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Posted 30 April 2007 - 10:17 PM

I've read it and it's a good book. By the way, how many copies do you have at your house?

#35 avaquin

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Posted 30 April 2007 - 10:20 PM

Oh, and cool Athena art. My cousin's name is Athena! :)

#36 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 30 April 2007 - 10:37 PM

I have 250 copies at my house :)

Hey, since you read it will you write a review?

#37 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 01 May 2007 - 02:49 AM

pretty!

#38 patrice

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Posted 01 May 2007 - 05:49 AM

Buy a copy and donate it to your local library! They'll take just about anything "clean and fun". IMHO - this is a very inexpensive way to support cryonics.

-P

"They do not understand us, they cannot defend themselves from us, and they accept whatever we tell them. They not only accept abuse, but feel guilty whenever we blame them." - Maria Montessori

#39 avaquin

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Posted 01 May 2007 - 11:51 AM

Cool fish! :)

#40 avaquin

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Posted 01 May 2007 - 06:21 PM

Oh, and neat pictures. I think they'll sell well.

#41 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 02 May 2007 - 04:41 PM

Da Vinci, I like how your store has evolved--very nice putting Aubrey in-- leave that one up, I want to order one eventually. At the least--you should send him the link, so he can get that tile for his house :) !

Edited by wing_girl, 07 June 2007 - 02:51 AM.


#42 bgwowk

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Posted 07 May 2007 - 06:52 AM

I just finished it. It was impossible to put down near the end.

This is a really good story. Though billed as a kids book, it shows real depth of thought about many future technology issues, including AGI, human augmentation, cryonics, and personal identity. While much has been written about these topics by others, never before have all these ideas been put together in such an engaging and entertaining form.

#43 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 07 May 2007 - 05:15 PM

Gosh--thanks!

Helps me to keep working to promote the book, to somehow reach a larger audience of "2lst Century Kids" :)

#44 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 26 May 2007 - 11:26 PM

From an 11 year old boy:


The following review was handed to me by a fifth grade boy named C.J. who attends the Round Rock public elementary school my fourth grader, second grader and kindergardener attend. I had met him at the Scholastic Book Fair his mom was helping to run. I was discussing various titles in an aisle, with my children and somehow it came up that I wrote a book. My fourth grader got it out of her backpack and gave it to C.J. I must admit, when he asked me what it cost--I said nothing, just give me a review ;-). He ran to show his mother, who assured me that not only did he read all the time, he would give me his honest opinion. My daughter said she did not know him, just that he was in GT.

A few weeks later when I was visiting the school, C.J. saw me in the hall and said, "I read you book and I loved it!" I gave him a high-five! :-) He told me he was working on the review, and a few days later --this is what I got:


**********

The book "21st Century Kids" is one of my favorites. It grabbed me from the first sentence, "It's hard to remember your own death." Because you don't expect a book to start out like that. Then it just pulls you into the story so that you feel and relate to the characters. The vocabulary definitely helps to create a picture inside your dead, full of detail, so that it brings you into the story. Like the food they eat, they don't even talk about food in the story much, but she set off a side chapter about it!

The really cool part is that the book is very unpredictable. It's full of suspense and mystery. I never wanted to put it down. I would recommend this book to anyone that likes reading and that would like to try to peek into the 22nd Century.

---- Fan of 21st Century Kids, Fifth Grader, Round Rock TX


**********
(It is nice to be hearing back from children other than my own, that they actually like the book! I've heard from some verbally or via their parents, but if I get any more written reviews--I'll share them here.)

#45 Athanasios

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Posted 26 May 2007 - 11:48 PM

Wow, congrats on the review. It doesnt get much better than that.

#46 Live Forever

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Posted 26 May 2007 - 11:49 PM

I agree, good stuff.

#47 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 26 May 2007 - 11:54 PM

The kid is such a cute kid too-- blond hair, round face--goofy big grin--wears glasses--has a green plastic bead on one side and a blue one on the other! It is so much fun talking with children about futurist issues--they are not yet jaded by life. Plus I'm not sure many adults would come up and high-five me exclaiming they loved my book ;)

#48 advancedatheist

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Posted 31 May 2007 - 03:54 AM

I've read up to page 182 so far. It reminds me of a lot of other SF I've read. (I call it the Two Dozen Rule: If you've read a couple dozen SF novels by various authors, you've pretty much read them all.)

But then, I understand that Shannon wants to reach an immature readership that will learn about these ideas for the first time.

Several observations:

The part about FM-2030 (page 6) bummed me out. I knew FM slightly, but I understand he had suffered about a day's worth of warm ischemia before Alcor could get him back from New York, so Shannon's poor prognosis of his revivability wouldn't surprise me. I've also accepted that my friend, cryonicist David Zubkoff (Leonard's brother), has probably died the True Death because he deanimated in his apartment in Nevada and went undiscovered for several days. Alcor froze the sloppy mess any way.

The world in the latter 22nd Century has a lot of the material culture Daniel H. Wilson discusses (and even ridicules) in his book Where's My Jetpack? Flying cars, of course, but also dolphin guides, space vacations, holograms (or probably more accurately "foglet-grams"), mind-reading devices, anti-sleeping technology, invisible camouflage, something better than invisible gills, smart houses, something better than food pills, self-contained skyscraper cities, ray guns, "cryogenic freezing' (Wilson's words), and of course space colonies.

The novel's skyscraper school in Langeles City, BTW, reminded me of Wilson's description:

Past visions of the future were technological Utopias -- or dystopias, depending on your viewpoint. The self-contained skyscraper city was supposed to house a future population of extremely efficient, highly productive, and very possibly suicidally depressed human beings. When there isn't a blade of grass left, when your "window" is actually a video display piping in a view from miles away, and when there isn't a level below yours because of the molten magma, you'll know that the antiseptic dream of the skyscraper city has been realized.


Avianna's and Avryn's version of Hogwarts sounds fairly pleasant by contrast, but the novel makes it clear that humans even with their enhancements have to live in ecologically sealed environments because pollution has made a lot of the planet uninhabitable, so Wilson's caricature doesn't sound too far off-target.

The part about moving the age of majority to 25 make sense, because current neuroscience shows that the part of the brain that handles judgment doesn't fully mature until the mid-20's. (Auto insurance becomes cheaper at that magic age for some good empirical reasons.) The society rationalizes it by pointing out that the neurologically immature can get sucked into the Matrix and never come out. Hell, that has already started to happen. I would have liked to see how Avianna's society handles the Krell Machine problem, but the poor girl has enough on her plate already. How do you keep both children and malignant adults from harnessing nanotech and AI to harm others?

Jermane's training to become the ultimate warrior through gaming and simulations reminds me of what happens accidentally to the slacker hero of Travis Taylor's novel, The Quantum Connection. I haven't seem evidence that gaming helps to develop warrior skills in the real world; American kids who've grown up playing warrior games and then entering the armed services don't seem to have any advantages over less technologically sophisticated Iraqis who want to kill them. (And experienced drill instructors have remarked upon the poor physical condition of the current crop of recruits compared with generations past.) But I'll allow that with unspecified enhancements you could turn into a super-warrior through software. Ted Chiang's neurologically enhanced character in his excellent story "Understand" provides an example:

I know my body afresh, as if it were an amputee's stump suddenly replaced by a watchmaker's hand. Controlling my voluntary muscles is trivial; I have inhuman coordination. Skills that normally require thousands of repetitions to develop, I can learn in two or three. I find a video with a shot of a pianist's hands playing, and before long I can duplicate his finger movements without a keyboard in front of me. Selective contraction and relaxation of muscles improve my strength and flexibility. Muscular response time is thirty-five milliseconds, for conscious or reflex action. Learning acrobatics and martial arts would require little training.


One final observation: Why doesn't Avianna's society keep back up copies of human minds, like in Wil McCarthy's Queendom of Sol novels? It can clearly copy the contents of human minds to plug gaps in the memories of damaged cryonauts like Avianna's brother Avryn. This seems like a significant oversight in a society that places a lot more value on human life than the one we currently live in.

Edited by advancedatheist, 31 May 2007 - 04:43 AM.


#49 bgwowk

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Posted 31 May 2007 - 04:34 AM

Mark, you need to fix your Krell Machine link. I think you meant this article

http://www.grg.org/charter/Krell2.htm

which to me reads like a sufficiently sober and realistic glimpse of the Singularity to actually be depressing.

#50 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 31 May 2007 - 04:37 AM

Thanks for the analysis!

The society does have brain backups (Avryn's is backed up before he goes into space). There are strict rules on putting your consciousness into robotic form if you have a human body however (on Earth only, not the other planets). The rule makers on Earth at that time are concerned with duplicate consciousness' (you can't have your brain back up, turned on in robot form till your body has died, for instance)

(In the sequel Avryn's brain back up is activated, as he must make 'the leap' when he finds that the robotic mission is not allowed to return to Earth. )

I've not read Daniel H. Wilson, or Ted Chiang. That being said, I believe I most likely extrapolate from current 'futurist forecasts' much the same world building information.

I love writing for children, as they are very open-minded to these issues. I like giving an entertaining story that grips their imagination--they've not heard this stuff before and I try to mix the 'real possible science' with the fun - enough to keep them interested in the characters plight... hence possibly a sequel someday. I struggled with making the science readable for kids, keeping the explanations simple and engaging--I hope they take away new thoughts by the end. I'm the "Proselytizing Immortalist" I confess :)

#51 advancedatheist

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Posted 31 May 2007 - 04:40 AM

Mark, you need to fix your Krell Machine link.  I think you meant this article

http://www.grg.org/charter/Krell2.htm

which to me reads like a sufficiently sober and realistic glimpse of the Singularity to actually be depressing.


Thanks for the correction. Of course, as Eliezer Yudkowsky points out, superstimuli could cause the Empty Planet Syndrome as well!

#52 advancedatheist

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Posted 01 June 2007 - 01:30 AM

Poor Avryn. He didn't get his robot war. Killing the Luddite Eurestans doesn't look very sporting any way.

#53 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 01 June 2007 - 02:37 AM

Hey, thanks for the corrected link! Since I did not know the term 'Krell Machine' I'd followed the link to interesting reading, but not the term I was looking for. I recognize it of course from many things. (the paper left out Michael Perry's book 'Forever For All' , one of my favorites!)

Well the in the sequel, Avryn is awakened in a world that has been passing laws against the A.I., sure we could get a war going as the book is not yet written :) (he just finished 'Robot Riots', the boy loves the subject--and really can't wait till the Transformers movie comes out!)

We'll just have to see which side of the robot war, Avryn will be on ;)

#54 Mind

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Posted 01 June 2007 - 09:19 PM

I just finished the book. I think it is a great sci-fi read for young adults. Sci-fi is very tough nowadays because technological progress is so fast. Shannon does a good job balancing what is occurring now with the futuristic scenarios. Kids should be able to grasp it.

#55 Richard Leis

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Posted 02 June 2007 - 08:54 AM

Very fun read. There were moments when I was so eager for that future to be here now. Also, I think the book is an excellent introduction to these concepts for younger people (and many adults as well).

#56 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 03 June 2007 - 12:47 AM

Thanks, it is fun to entertain and project ideas about how the future could be :)

Edited by wing_girl, 19 June 2007 - 04:11 AM.


#57 jonano

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Posted 24 June 2007 - 08:54 PM

http://noumenon.rode.....hes-cryonics

Children’s Book Preaches Cryonics
April 25th, 2007 by Roderick Russell

Cryonics – the act of cryopreserving human remains for possible future resuscitation – is the subject of a new …wait for it… children’s book.

Though the practice of cryonics has been going strong for forty years now and has seen treatment – however scientifically unsound those treatments have been – in several Hollywood movies and many books, never has it been featured as a central part of a children’s storybook with an eye towards being both engaging from a story-standpoint as well as accurate scientifically.

Nonetheless, this is precisely what author Shannon Vyff attempts with her new children’s book 21st Century Kids. As a cryonicist and Alcor member herself, Ms. Vyff may be uniquely positioned to write an accurate portrayal of the scientific basis of cryonic suspension for an audience of young readers, but one question remains – should she?

As an extremely fringe science – despite the amazing progress that has been made over the years – members of the cryonics community always get excited when a new publication is released featuring the science in a positive light. Ettinger’s The Prospect of Immortality was of course the text that arguably started it all, but several works of fiction have caused quite a positive stir as well, including Halperin’s The First Immortal (which I was pleased to consult on) and Nagata’s Tech-Heaven, both engaging works of science fiction. And why wouldn’t cryonicists be excited about positive media? Constantly struggling against the current of mainstream medicine, those involved in the cryonics community have shown remarkable willpower in maintaining their efforts in the face of constant obstacles – positive feedback and representations should be celebrated.

But one cannot help wondering if a children’s book is really something that is needed in the industry. Such “education” smacks of religious indoctrination – and Ms. Vyff’s ties to not only Alcor but also the Methuselah Foundation and the Immortality Institute as well as her adherence to a calorie-restricted lifestyle make her seem more of a fanatical extremist than a well-intentioned, innocent children’s author.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Ms. Vyff is a fanatical extremist. In fact, I applaud her involvement in the life extension community, and right now, caloric restriction is genuinely the only demonstrated method of life extension – despite what vitamin, cosmetic and biotech companies would like us to believe (and buy). Goodness knows that I myself have a strong history of involvement in the cryonics industry and I too have been intimately connected with many of the organizations surrounding the community (transhumanist, extropian, etc…).

I am by no means condemning her involvement with the wider life extension community. But beyond the scientific obstacles facing cryonics, there is the fundamental problem of selling the idea. What the public face of cryonics needs is an effective sales and marketing team behind it, and unfortunately this new book falls prey to the same marketing mistakes that most previous attempts to popularize the science have.

The announcement for the book landed in my inbox in the form of a press release from Rachel Damien at Event Management Services, Inc. in Clearwater, Florida. The subject line itself was enough to turn my stomach: Is Cryogenics The Answer To Living Longer

Anyone even remotely connected to the industry knows the ages-old struggle with the popular media over the use of the correct term – cryonics – and not the more popular misnomer cryogenics. Perhaps this use of the wrong term was calculated specifically to appeal to a more general consumer – but there’s absolutely no sense in perpetuating this error any longer. Any reader that would be hooked by the term cryogenics would be equally hooked by cryonics. The least that the PR team could do is to use the proper term.

Never one to dismiss a solid argument for lack of aesthetic appeal, I am nevertheless extraordinarily appalled at the overwhelmingly amateur design of the book cover and the accompanying website. The important aspect of this work is indeed its content, but for it to be a success in both sales as well as market penetration of the idea itself, it needs to appeal to the popular market. I wish it were not the case, but sales are significantly driven by first impressions – packaging, marketing, and appearance.

As I mentioned above, Ms. Vyff’s associations – whether I endorse them or not – radically alter the perception and acceptance of her work and make it comparable to books filled with bible stories by devoutly religious authors. If you’re not already devoutly religious (or in this case, staunchly logical and accepting of cryonics) you’re never going to bring these books home to your children. Compounding the perception problem is the amateur design, making the work seem even more untrustworthy.

Lastly, every endorsement on the book is by an industry-related name, not popular names. Though I and all others in the industry will recognize the names of Robert Ettinger, Aubrey deGrey and Nick Bostrom, virtually nobody else in popular society will. Whether Ms. Vyff is appearing in the popular media or not (perhaps especially because she is), she needs to display endorsements from household names on her book. This is the only way in which the popular culture will take her seriously. It’s unfortunate, but it’s true. As it stands, I predict that until the marketing changes, 21st Century Kids will never meet a significant audience beyond those already closely related to the industry.

I certainly wish Ms. Vyff the best of luck in her endeavors. I have no ill-will towards her nor do I disapprove of what she’s done. There remains the question of whether or not it was truly needed and moreover, whether it will truly help to popularize cryonics and reverse the many misconceptions about it - which she stated as one of her goals. But like most cryonics PR efforts, it suffers from a terrible salesmanship issue that, until resolved, will continuously keep cryonics on the fringe.

Cryonics represents the only stopgap measure in the fight for extended life for individuals facing death today while we vigorously pursue viable active life extension technologies. It is a crazy idea, but it’s also our only chance while we wait, and much crazier ideas have become mainstream with minimal effort. What the cryonics industry faces is a problem with marketing. Solve that problem and we’ll see that research will become largely unencumbered.

#58 baerta

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Posted 29 June 2007 - 10:41 PM

Shannon,

Bravo! I'd certainly like two signed copies. I'll email you to get this happening,

Baerta

#59 Shannon Vyff

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Posted 30 June 2007 - 12:20 AM

They shall be in the mail tomorrow, thanks --please give me your feedback!

#60 dnamechanic

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Posted 15 August 2007 - 02:17 AM

Hi Wing Girl,

A librarian at the Garland (TX) Public Library System indicated they would like to have a copy of your book.

I didn't want to part with my copy. So I am purchasing two more of your books.

I recall that you prefer we order directly from you instead of Amazon.

Also will provide the Dallas Public Library System with a copy.




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