Editorial Notebook; Life in the Information – New York Times Commercials no longer sit still and beg to be looked at. Instead, they become fly-like robots that perch on the pillow and whisper sweet nothings while you sleep. The next morning you wake up craving foods you’ve never eaten. Mr. Dick’s characters defend themselves by keeping their windows closed — and making heavy use of fly swatters. The idea is to get them before they get to you.
I remember them from his books as gen-manipulated flies, that is bio flies (grown) rather than robotic flies (built).
They are still much bigger than flies, more like bats, but they are coming:
Inhabitat » The Solar Powered COM-BAT Spy Plane In this season of specters and spooks, what could be scarier than a steel-winged robotic spy plane shaped like a bat? The aptly named COM-BATis a six-inch surveillance device that is powered by solar, wind, and vibrations. The concept was conceived by the US military as a means to gather real-time data for soldiers, and the Army has awarded the University of Michigan College of Engineering a five year $10-million dollar grant to develop it.
I don’t believe in silver bullets. They don’t work. Instead we have to get to work and make changes.
Without practicing one cannot be a good musician, without sitting not a zen-buddhist, changing one’s diet and exercising will always show more results than using diet-pills, enlightenment is a long haul, not a quick fix… ah, but how our brain WANTS to find the quick fix, the silver bullet. So, now some want to mess with a huge complex system (this planet) – in order to avoid making changes.
If you ask me, making fuel from food is a bad idea (((especially considering the size of the world’s population))), and so are nuclear power plants (((let a trillion small power-generators bloom… solar, wind, geo-thermal and stuff like this))) and geo-engineering. We are the ones who need changing, not the planet.
BBC NEWS | The ‘future of money’ goes mobile It could mean, for instance, that once a traveller has paid for a hotel room online the key to get in the room can be texted to them.
“In addition to the key itself the guest will also get a welcome receipt specifying the room he is staying at,” says Gard Gabrielsen from electronic lock maker Vingcard Elsafe that has developed a hotel booking system using NFC.
“He will also typically get the GPS coordinates to the hotel he is staying at,” he adds.
“But the key thing is that when the guest is then coming to the hotel he can totally bypass the reception desk and go straight to his room,” he says.
“The telephone itself will open the door by just presenting the phone in front of the card reader.”
Jean Renoir once told his son that without oil paint in tubes there would have been no Cezanne, no Monet, no Sisley or Pissarro.
Tin tubes containing oil paint were invented in 1842 and made it possible to take the canvas outside one’s studio. The medium of painting became portable and changed radically – Impressionism was born.
This reminds me of the Aboriginal idea that everything has to be dreamed to exist at all. Technology creates new possibilities for art, which in turn visualizes/creates a new dream, which in turn helps people look at the world in a different or new way. The centerpiece of that sentence is art. Art informs society. Art guides us to new ways of experiencing our world.
Greatest technological challenges facing humanity | Science | guardian.co.uk We only need to capture one part in 10,000 of the sunlight that falls on the Earth to meet 100% of our energy needs,” said Ray Kurzweil, a renowned futurologist and a member of the NAE expert group, in a presentation at the AAAS. “This will become feasible with nanoengineered solar panels and nano engineered fuel cells to store the energy in a highly decentralised manner.”
The article starts with this paragraph:
Reversing the effects of ageing, reprogramming genes to prevent diseases and producing clean energy are some of the biggest challenges for the next 50 years, according to a group of leading experts.
Clean energy and clean drinking water are certainly more important than reversing the effects of aging and preventing diseases. You can go here and vote for what you think is most important.
