Living in the future

Yesterday I had an interesting medical test: a "capsule endoscopy". You fast for a day (like for a colonoscopy, but not quite as stringent -- you don't have to drink a gallon of laxative), then swallow what looks like a vitamin capsule, but actually contains a battery, an LED, and a Bluetooth-enabled 360-degree camera. It takes two photos per second as it goes through your stomach, small intestine, and large intestine, until either (a) it comes out the other end, or (b) the hospital staff decide it's gathered as much useful information as it's going to, and take off the Bluetooth receiver and monitor you've been wearing all day. It was pretty cool watching nearly-real-time video of my intestinal tract, particularly since all of this would have been the stuff of science fiction a few decades ago.

Of course, I spent most of the day sitting in a hospital waiting room, with the capsule making its way through my gut. I had my laptop, so I could write programs to run over terabytes of data on a thousand computers in Iowa, and I could live-text-chat with a colleague in Tokyo -- the usual stuff. But some things never change: the A/C in the waiting room was set to about 60F, and I was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt because it's August, and the hospital staff (all cleverly wearing sweaters themselves) didn't have a blanket to lend me, so I also spent most of the day shivering.