Look at that punk kid go. (Thanks Marginal Revolution.)
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Tags: Milton Friedman
Promotional video by Motorola, from just 25 years ago.
From Steven Levy’s new book about Google, In the Plex, comes this conversation between company co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin:
“It will be included in people’s brains,” said Page. “When you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information.”
“That’s true,” said Brin. ‘Ultimately I view Google as a way to augment your brain with the knowledge of the world. Right now you go into your computer and type a phrase, but you can imagine that it could be easier in the future, that you can have just devices you talk into, or you can have computers that pay attention to what’s going on around them.”
Page said, “Eventually you’ll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.” (Thanks NYRB.)•
Tags: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Steven Levy
Ray Bradbury voices his frustrations about space travel and politics in his 1996 Playboy interview:
“Playboy: When you talk about the future, you tend to talk about space travel. Do you really think it’s in our future?
Ray Bradbury: It must be. First of all, it’s a religious endeavor to be immortal. If the earth dies, we must be able to continue. Space travel will give us other planets to live on so we can continue to have children. It’s that simple, that great and that exciting.
Playboy: Will we really be forced to escape earth? Will we be able to in time?
Ray Bradbury: We are already on our way. We should back on the moon right now. And we should be going off to Mars immediately.
Playboy: Yet there doesn’t seem to be a rush into space anymore. NASA’s budget is being whittled away as we speak.
Ray Bradbury: How come we’re looking at our shoes instead of at the great nebula in Orion? Where did we mislay the moon and back off from Mars? The problem is, of course, our politicians, men who have no romance in their hearts or dreams in their heads. JFK, for a brief moment in his last year, challenged us to go to the moon. But even he wasn’t motivated by astronomical love. He cried, “Watch my dust!” to the Russians, and we were off. But once we reached the moon, the romance started to fade. Without that, dreams don’t last. That’s no surprise – material rewards do last, so the history of exploration on earth is about harvesting rich lodes. If NASA’s budgeters could be convinced that there are riches on Mars, we would explode overnight to stand on the rim of the Martian abyss. We need space for reasons we have not as yet discovered, and I don’t mean Tupperware.
Playboy: Tupperware?
Ray Bradbury: NASA feels it has to justify everything it does in practical terms.
And Tupperware was one of the many practical products that came out of space travel. NASA feels it has got to flimflam you to get you to spend money on space. That’s b.s. We don’t need that. Space travel is life-enhancing, and anything that’s life-enhancing is worth doing. It makes you want to live forever.”
Tags: Ray Bradbury
Kurzweil reports on a new spying device from China:
“A new aquatic microrobot that mimics the water-walking abilities of the water strider has been developed by researchers at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China.
The robot is about the size of a quarter, with ten water-repellent, wire legs and two movable, oar-like legs propelled by two miniature motors. Because the weight of the microrobot is equal to that of about 390 water striders, one might expect that it would sink quickly when placed on the water surface. But it stands effortlessly on water surfaces and also walks and turns freely.
It imitates water striders, mosquitoes, and water spiders, who are able to walk on water due largely to their highly water-repellent (superhydrophobic) legs.”
Tags: Ray Kurzweil
From a new New York Times article about smart cities comes this recollection about Buckminster Fuller, that dreamer, who somehow thought it would be good idea to build a geodesic dome over a large swath of Manhattan:
“At a time before urban planning was formally taught in universities, Mr. Fuller — a Harvard dropout turned inventor, engineer, architect and philosopher — directed his attention to cities.
He perfected and popularized the geodesic dome, and after building several smaller ones in the 1950s, he teamed up with the architect Shoji Sadao in 1960 to propose a dome with a width of two miles, or 3.2 kilometers, above Midtown Manhattan. The dome would have covered the island from the East River to the Hudson River, with one axis running along 42nd Street. It would have reached from 21st Street to 64th Street, covering the southern lip of Central Park.
During a time when air-conditioning was coming to many U.S. homes and businesses, Mr. Fuller said the giant dome would greatly reduce cooling costs in summer and heating costs in winter by reducing the ratio of surface to volume. Instead of each building’s having to be heated or cooled separately, the entire dome would be kept at a ‘very moderate temperature level’ throughout the year.
The glass would be threaded by a heating wire — much like the rear window of many cars — so that snow and ice accumulation would not become a problem. Melted snow and rain would be collected in catch basins and used for things like irrigation and cleaning.
The scalable dome, according to Mr. Fuller, became stronger and sturdier as it was built larger.”
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Six minutes of non-stop, unabashed Bucky Fuller:
Tags: Buckminster Fuller
As noted on Ray Kurzweil’s site, a small but fiunctional aircraft was created for the first time using a 3-D printer:
“Engineers at the University of Southampton have designed and flown the world’s first ‘printed’ aircraft, which could revolutionize the economics of aircraft design, the engineers say.
The SULSA (Southampton University Laser Sintered Aircraft) plane is an unmanned air vehicle (UAV), with its entire structure printed. This includes wings, integral control surfaces, and access hatches. It was printed on an EOS EOSINT P730 nylon laser sintering machine, which fabricates plastic or metal objects, building up the item layer-by-layer.
It took only 48 hours to print. No fasteners were used and all equipment was attached using ‘snap fit’techniques so the entire airframe could be put together without tools in about 30 seconds, according to Prof. Andy Keane. The aircraft took around 8 person weeks. It passed tests for speed, maneuverability, and climb rates.”
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Getting airborne:
Tags: Ray Kurzweil
What did Sandra Bullock and Coolio and Newt Gingrich think? (Thanks Reddit.)
In a new article in Wired, Clive Thompson interviews Microsoft’s principal researcher, Bill Buxton, about the “long nose” theory, which holds forth that innovations that seemingly come out of nowhere are actually incubated for a long time. At the piece’s conclusion, Thompson predicts which technology is ready to dominate in the next decade. An excerpt:
“Using a ‘long nose’ analysis, I have a prediction of my own. I bet electric vehicles are going to become huge—specifically, electric bicycles. Battery technology has been improving for decades, and the planet is urbanizing rapidly. The nose is already poking out: Electric bikes are incredibly popular in China and becoming common in the US among takeout/delivery people, who haul them inside their shops each night to plug them in. (Pennies per charge, and no complicated rewiring of the grid necessary.) I predict a design firm will introduce the iPhone of electric bikes and whoa: It’ll seem revolutionary!”
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Prodeco Technologies introduces the next generation of electric bikes:
Tags: Bill Buxton, Clive Thompson
José Contreras-Vidal demonstrates his brain-cap technology.
On Singularity Hub, David Hill argues that Borders going bust is good for writers and the book business. It may seem counterintuitive, but it’s really not. An excerpt:
“So with the loss of one of the key spots for authors to promote their work and for book publishers to make sales, how in the world is the end of Borders good for writers? The main reason is that it is accelerating massive change in the publishing industry by putting authors, and not publishers, in control of creative works.
For years, books have been entirely controlled by big print publishers. They’ve decided which authors get published and what readers get to read as well as when they get to read it. Furthermore, what gets published has had to fit into specific compartments that have been defined by marketing departments. The timeliness of print has also been a problem as it’s no secret that the traditional publishing route takes years from the manuscript to stock.
But e-books change all of that as authors can now dictate just about every aspect of production and marketing on top of generating the manuscript. Publishers have been slow to recognize that the power has shifted away from them to the writers themselves.”
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Where will Kat Von D go to sign copies of her tattoo books now?
Tags: David Hill
In Philip K. Dick’s too-bleak 1972 essay, “The Android and the Human,” there is, unsurprisingly, some truth:
“I would like then to ask this: what is it, in our behavior, that we can call specifically human? That is special to us as a living species? And what is it that, at least up to now, we can consign as merely machine behavior, or, by extension, insect behavior, or reflex behavior? And I would include, in this, the kind of pseudo-human behavior exhibited by what were once living men — creatures who have, in ways I wish to discuss next, become instruments, means, rather than ends, and hence to me analogs of machines in the bad sense, in the sense that although biological life continues, metabolism goes on, the soul — for lack of a better term — is no longer there or at least no longer active. And such does exist in our world — it always did, but the production of such inauthentic human activity has become a science of government and such-like agencies, now. The reduction of humans to mere use — men made into machines, serving a purpose which although ‘good’ in an abstract sense has, for its accomplishment, employed what I regard as the greatest evil imaginable: the placing on what was a free man who laughed and cried and made mistakes and wandered off into foolishness and play a restriction that limits him, despite what he may imagine or think, to the fulfilling of an aim outside of his own personal — however puny — destiny. As if, so to speak, history has made him into its instrument. History, and men skilled in — and trained in — the use of manipulative techniques, equipped with devices, ideologically oriented, themselves, in such as way that the use of these devices strikes them as a necessary or at least desirable method of bringing about some ultimately desired goal.
I think, at this point, of Tom Paine’s comment about or another party of the Europe of his time: ‘They admired the feathers and forgot the dying bird.’ And it is the ‘dying bird’ that I am concerned with. The dying — and yet, I think, beginning once again to revive in the hearts of the new generation of kids coming into maturity — the dying bird of authentic humanness.”
Tags: Philip K. Dick
It’s always curious to me that negotiators, whether politicians or the opposing sides of sports leagues, so often delay working on an agreement in earnest until they place themselves under severe time constraints, which would seem to be the worst time for those in disagreement to reach a compromise. The reliably lucid James Surowiecki explains why negotiations go bonkers under time pressure, in his article on the debt-ceiling debacle in the New Yorker.
“You might think that there are benefits to putting negotiators under the gun. But, as the Dutch psychologist Carsten de Dreu has shown, time pressure tends to close minds, not open them. Under time pressure, negotiators tend to rely more on stereotypes and cognitive shortcuts. They don’t consider as wide a range of alternatives, and are more likely to jump to conclusions based on scanty evidence. Time pressure also reduces the chances that an agreement will be what psychologists call ‘integrative’—taking everyone’s interests and values into account.
In fact, by turning dealmaking into a game of chicken, the debt ceiling favors fanaticism. As the economist Thomas Schelling showed many years ago, ‘It does not always help to be, or to be believed to be, fully rational, coolheaded, and in control of oneself’ when it comes to brinksmanship.”
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A dramatic interpretation of the American economy, with Slim Pickens in the role of John Boehner:
Tags: Carsten de Dreu, James Surowiecki
That’s a lot of lost luggage. (Thanks Reddit.)
"Synthetic telepathy, as the technology is called, is getting closer to battlefield reality." (Image by PaulWicks.)
Discover has an article by Adam Piore about the U.S. military’s plans to develop a thought-helmet which would allow soldiers to wordlessly communicate with one another in the battlefield through synthetic telepathy. An excerpt:
“The mind reader is Gerwin Schalk, a 39-year-old biomedical scientist and a leading expert on brain-computer interfaces at the New York State Department of Health’s Wads worth Center at Albany Medical College. The Austrian-born Schalk, along with a handful of other researchers, is part of a $6.3 million U.S. Army project to establish the basic science required to build a thought helmet—a device that can detect and transmit the unspoken speech of soldiers, allowing them to communicate with one another silently.
As improbable as it sounds, synthetic telepathy, as the technology is called, is getting closer to battlefield reality. Within a decade Special Forces could creep into the caves of Tora Bora to snatch Al Qaeda operatives, communicating and coordinating without hand signals or whispered words. Or a platoon of infantrymen could telepathically call in a helicopter to whisk away their wounded in the midst of a deafening firefight, where intelligible speech would be impossible above the din of explosions.”
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More about the brain-computer interface from the good people at IntendiX:
Tags: Adam Piore, Gerwin Schalk
Solar cells. (Image by Georg Slickers.)
In “10 Technologies That Will Change The World In The Next 10 Years,” an article by Julie Bort on CIO, one number jumped out at me. Is it really possible that a city with one million inhabitants will be built somewhere in the world every month over the next two decades? Seems high, but I could be wrong. In any event, we should be expanding our use of solar power as fast as possible. An excerpt:
“No. 6: The power of power
The human population also continues to grow, and [Cisco’s Chief Futurist Dave] Evans estimates that a city with 1 million inhabitants will be built every month over the next two decades. More efficient methods to power those cities are becoming a necessity, particularly solar energy.
‘Solar alone can meet our energy needs. In fact, to address today’s global demand for energy, 25 solar super sites — each consisting of 36 square miles — could be erected. Compare this to the 170,000 square kilometers of forest area destroyed each year,’ says Evans. Such a solar farm could be completed in just three years.
Technologies to make this more economically pragmatic are on their way. In June, Oregon State University researchers showed off a novel, relatively affordable, low-impact method to ‘print’ solar cells using an inkjet printer.”
Related post:
Tags: Dave Evans, Julie Bort
Carl Zimmer writes in the New York Times of scientists using the city as laboratory, examing the evolutionary changes wrought by the necessities of urban life. An excerpt:
“To study evolution, Jason Munshi-South has tracked elephants in central Africa and proboscis monkeys in the wilds of Borneo. But for his most recent expedition, he took the A train.
Dr. Munshi-South and two graduate students, Paolo Cocco and Stephen Harris, climbed out of the 168th Street station lugging backpacks and a plastic crate full of scales, Ziploc bags, clipboards, rulers and tarps. They walked east to the entrance of Highbridge Park, where they met Ellen Pehek, a senior ecologist in the New York City Parks and Recreation Department. The four researchers entered the park, made their way past a basketball game and turned off the paved path into a ravine.
They worked their way down the steep slope, past schist boulders, bent pieces of rebar, oaks and maples, hunks of concrete and freakish poison ivy plants with leaves the size of a man’s hands. The ravine flattened out at the edge of Harlem River Drive. The scientists walked north along a guardrail contorted by years of car crashes before plunging back into the forest to reach their field site.
‘We get police called on us a lot,’ said Dr. Munshi-South, an assistant professor at Baruch College. ‘Sometimes with guns drawn.’
Dr. Munshi-South has joined the ranks of a small but growing number of field biologists who study urban evolution — not the rise and fall of skyscrapers and neighborhoods, but the biological changes that cities bring to the wildlife that inhabits them. For these scientists, the New York metropolitan region is one great laboratory.”
Tags: Carl Zimmer, Jason Munshi-South
U.S. military testing nukes in Nevada in 1951. Silence makes it more chilling.
Ivan Illich was a radical priest, who, during the ’60s and ’70s, was embraced by liberals and conservatives alike, each group able to read their ideology into his sharp critiques of institutional education. Illich didn’t always seem to know what he wanted by way of an alternative, but he knew what he didn’t like. Apart from rigidly structured education, Illich also had his doubts about technology, concerned that we would interpret the world around us first and foremost through tools. In that sense, he was certainly prescient. Largely forgotten by the time of his death in 2002, Illich was eulogized by longtime friend Jerry Brown, former and future California Governor, in the Whole Earth Catalog. An excerpt:
“In the Seventies, facing sharp criticism from the Vatican, Illich withdrew from the active priesthood and refrained from speaking ever again as a Catholic theologian. Instead, he focused on the nature of technology and modern institutions and their capacity for destroying common sense and the proper scale for human activity. Illich identified the ‘ethos of non-satiety’ as ‘at the root of physical depredation, social polarization, and psychological passivity.’ Instead of welfare economics and environmental management, Illich emphasized friendship and self-limitation.”
Tags: Ivan Illich, Jerry Brown
I’m not a gamer, but Dwarf Fortress seems fascinating. The most complex and organic video game ever created, it’s the work of brothers Zach and Tarn Adams, who plan on continually and gradually improving it, like painters who expand on a single mural their whole lives. An excerpt from Jonah Weiner’s New York Times Magazine article about the game designers and their creation:
“Dwarf Fortress may not look real, but once you’re hooked, it feels vast, enveloping, alive. To control your world, you toggle between multiple menus of text commands; seemingly simple acts like planting crops and forging weapons require involved choices about soil and season and smelting and ores. A micromanager’s dream, the game gleefully blurs the distinction between painstaking labor and creative thrill.
‘Playing Dwarf Fortress is like taking the controls of a plane right as it’s taking off,’ says Chris Dahlen, editor in chief of the gaming magazine Kill Screen. And, he added, ‘flying a jet is a lot more interesting than just riding in a jet.’
Dwarf Fortress is too willfully noncommercial to have any discernible influence on gaming at large, but it is widely admired by game designers. Programmers behind The Sims 3 reportedly played Dwarf Fortress when they were making their game, and several homages to Dwarf Fortress appear in the blockbuster fantasy game World of Warcraft. Richard Garfield, who created the hit card game Magic: The Gathering, once attended a Dwarf Fortress fan meet in Seattle to introduce himself to Tarn. ‘I told him there’s nothing out there quite like it,’ Garfield recalled. He suggested ways of broadening the game’s appeal, but ‘that stuff didn’t matter to Tarn. The charm of it is that he’s making exactly the game he wants to make.’
After nine years of development, Dwarf Fortress is, from the perspective of game play, perhaps the most complex video game ever made. And yet it is still only in ‘alpha’ — the most recent release is version 0.31. By version 1.0, Tarn says, the game will include military campaigns and magic, along with scores of other additions. He showed me a four-inch stack of index cards, color-coded and arranged into umbrella categories, to keep track of his goals. ‘I like being able to hold the game in my hands,’ he says.
I asked Tarn when he thought he and Zach would reach version 1.0. ‘Twenty years from now,’ he replied. ‘That’s the number we talk about.’ He chuckled at the prospect, adding that even when that milestone arrived, Dwarf Fortress would keep growing. ‘This is going to be my life’s work.'”
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Let’s play Dwarf Fortress:
Tags: Jonah Weiner, Tarn Adams, Zach Adams
TED Talk by Markus Fischer of Festo.
Tags: Markus Fischer
“The sun is zooming in / Engines stop running / And the wheat is growing thin.”
Marshall McLuhan was born on July 21, 1911, and to celebrate his century mark I present the following excerpt from Jane Howard’s 1966 Life magazine article, “Oracle of the Electric Age“:
No people in the history of humanity, McLuhan insists, ever faced demands as grueling as those that confront us. We are witnessing simultaneously the end of what he calls the Mechanical, or Gutenberg, Era, dominated by movable type and later mechanical forms, and the birth pangs of the new and entirely different Electric Age, which he sometimes calls the Age of Circuitry, or of Information. As his books The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media explain, the change is the most traumatic since the transition 9,000 years ago, from the paleolithic culture to the neolithic, from hunting to agriculture.
The change, says McLuhan, is making movable type obsolete and with it books, newspapers, magazines–in fact all kinds of printed matter, including the sentence you are now reading. We will also have to junk the by-products of the Gutenberg invention which, says, McLuhan, have created our culture’s visual, literary, detached, linear approach to life. This dooms a lot more linear by-products than you might think, including railways, clotheslines, stocking seams, the grid system in city planning and stag lines at dances. Even points of view must go–“because it’s no longer possible to take a fixed position for more than a single moment.” So must jobs, which are fragmentary in nature and do not suit the new age in which people crave roles with depth involvement.•
Tags: Jane Howard, Marshall McLuhan
On Boing Boing, neurobiologist David J. Linden pushes back on futurist Ray Kurzweil’s vision of nanobots being introduced into our brains in the near term, making it possible for us to communicate with external hardware and extend our memory and intellect almost infinitely. An excerpt:
“Don’t get me wrong. I do believe that the fundamental and long-standing mysteries of the brain will ultimately be solved. I don’t hold with those pessimists who claim that we can never understand our minds by using our brains. I also share Kurzweil’s belief that technological advancement will be central to unlocking the enduring mysteries of brain function. But while I see an exponential trajectory in the amount of neurobiological data collected to date, the ploddingly linear increase in our understanding of neural function means that an idea like mind-uploading to machines being usefully deployed by the 2020s or even the 2030s seems overly optimistic.” (Thanks Browser.)
Kurzweil’s take:
“Still not within the nervous system, you got 20 years, 25 years, these nanobots, these blood cell size devices will be going in our bodies keeping us healthy from inside. We’ll have some go inside our brains to the capillaries not invasively, there would be interacting with our biological neurons so it’ll extends our memory, our decision making faculties, put our brains on the internet and they also enable us to enter virtual reality environment from within the nervous system.
So, for on to go in the virtual reality environment, the nanobots will shut down the signals coming from I realize in my real skin and create the signals that will be appropriate for the virtual environment and that will feel like I’m in that environment and I’ll have a virtual body and those environment could be the same body I have in real reality, it could be a different body, a couple could become each other, experience relationship from the others perspective, teacher could design a student to become Ben Franklin in the virtual constitutional congress not just dress up as him but become that character and this virtual environments would be like websites, you’ll have millions to choose from and some will be recreations are beautiful earthly environments like the Taj Mahal or the Mediterranean Beach.”
Tags: David J. Linden, Ray Kurzweil
Yikes. It’s like she was drowned and came back to life to avenge her death. (Thanks Reddit.)