This Matt Jones talk at TechnoArk introduces the idea of Mujicomp, the widespread use of simple, interactive, and social gadgets. It’s a speculation about where the future of hand-held devices might be heading. Jones offers some examples of items that are almost there, but doesn’t really offer a good idea of what the object might [...]
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Open Sailing is an effort to build a new way to live and work on the ocean. Open_Sailing 4 minutes concept from Cesar Harada on Vimeo. “Open_Sailing is an international community trying to develop the International_Ocean_Station as an open-source project, developing hardware and software to enable intelligent human activities at sea. The project started as an apocalyptic [...] Over at Shareable Rachel Botsman interviews Casey Fenton, founder of CouchSurfing. Rachel Botsman: One of the themes I explore in my forthcoming book is how collaborative communities quickly form “trust between strangers.” How did you create trust from the outset within the CouchSurfing community? Casey Fenton: Right from the beginning, we wanted people who had never [...] Nicholoas de Monchaux’s Local Code project is an effort to find way to utilize the forgotten and neglected spaces in a city. Cities are filled with parcels of land that belong to the city, but are neglected because they seem to have little practical value. These are the little bits and pieces that fall by [...] What will those crazy kids at MIT think up next? “Cornucopia is a concept design for a personal food factory that brings the versatility of the digital world to the realm of cooking. In essence, it is a three dimensional printer for food, which works by storing, precisely mixing, depositing and cooking layers of ingredients. “Cornucopia’s cooking [...] The following is post 45 of 152 (so far) in Bruce Sterling’s State of the World 2010, an annual conversation over at the WELL between Sterling and the WELL netizens. The discussion ranges far and wide, and brief essays like the following on the networked future of healthcare pop up regularly. I put the passage [...] Intel is saying that we’ll regularly be using brainwaves to control our computers by 2020. I think the headline of this article is way off: Chips in brains will control computers by 2020. This isn’t about implanting chips into your brain. If there must be an implant it will probably be more like an RFID VeriChip [...] Hank Hyena at H+ estimates that tank-grown protein will be on our grocery shelves in 3-10 years. “In-Vitro Meat — aka tank steak, sci fi sausage, petri pork, beaker bacon, Frankenburger, vat-grown veal, laboratory lamb, synthetic shmeat, trans-ham, factory filet, test tube tuna, cultured chicken, or any other moniker that can seduce the shopper’s stomach [...] In this Washington Post op-ed Gregory Clark considers a future where robots steal our jobs! Rather, what does a future look like when machines and software seems to be increasingly capable of performing unskilled labor once thought to be the sole province of humans? “I recently carried out a complicated phone transaction with United Airlines but never [...] Once a health services reform bill is passed the teabaggers will turn from their outrage that insurance companies should actually have to honor their contracts, to the new issues of the day. Improving our education system and reducing pollution are two issues coming up soon, so we can expect a new round of lies and [...] Holographs you can feel. (h/t Presurfer) I guess Netflix shipments and Amazon packages aren’t enough for the post office. At this rate how long before stamps are a dollar each? So long, snail shells “Combine the impact of new technologies with the gut punch of the recession, and in the past year alone, the Postal Service has seen the single largest drop-off in [...] At least Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) has his priorities straight. Since the economy is awesome, everyone has health care, and the world is at peace Brownback and other Republicans can address the world’s most pressing problem – human-animal hybrids “created in laboratories.” As Chris Harris at Media Matters points out this will address the imminent threat [...] Here’s a quick glimpse into our weird-ass future. “For example, the next generation of implantable devices to control prosthetic limbs will likely include wireless controls that allow physicians to remotely adjust settings on the machine. If neural engineers don’t build in security features such as encryption and access control, an attacker could hijack the device [...] Bruce Sterling on favela chic, gothic hightech, the next ten years, and how to get rid of your stuff. “ I have a new fantasy. Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, Katherine Harris, Ronda Storms, and Sally Kern travel the USA speaking at tea bag demonstrations. They become so popular that the Republican party is fractured, which leads to a narrow Palin victory at the 2012 Republican Convention. Palin’s campaign in 2012 will for years be compared [...] Senator Bill Nelson has taken the lead on abolishing poisonous Chinese drywall in the US. The next step is to help Florida become a producer of EcoRock (as seen in the video below). Nelson’s leadership on drywall issues, and Florida’s aching construction industry, combine for a rare opportunity to bring new, sustainable businesses to the sunshine [...] Wayne Garcia has been advocating that Tampa pay close attention to what other “All-America Cities” are doing. He’s right. This is a great source of best practices Tampa should be learning about, and in some cases, emulating. He’s been tagging his All-America City posts and you can find them here. Go here to see a larger version of the image below. A sharp-eyed Reddit reader notes the discrepancy between the CNN headline and the headlines surrounding it. As William Gibson notes – The future is already here, it’s just not well distributed. The next iteration of Gmail will combine Google Chat, Gmail, Google Docs, and the rest of the Google online suite of apps into one multi-capable tool named Google Wave. It’s sort of a wiki-esque re-imagination of email that includes a lot of AJAX functionality and API extensibility. The following demo is sort of long, but [...] The Logan ProxTalker helps autistic and other nonverbal children communicate. (Adults too, I suppose). It comes with cards that have an image or phrase and and RFID tag. When you hold the card up to the ProxTalker it speaks what is on the card. You can place up to 5 cards on the ProxTalker to [...] Stephen Wofram and Tim Berners-Lee are working toward similar ends. There have been some signs of disappointment with the new Wolfram|Alpha. But the common comparison with Google demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding what the W|A does. The Wolfram|Alpha search engine needs data the way Google needs documents. In this talk to Ted Tim Berners-Lee discusses his Linked [...] Hope you’re enjoying/will enjoy/enjoyed your day at Tropical Heatwave. In a recent column Brian Eno notes that while the music industry may be collapsing, “the live music scene is exploding.” “Similarly, outdoor festivals have mushroomed. There are more than ever, and they’ve become temporary communities—somewhere between circuses and communes and summer schools, offering political debate, craft [...] via C/NET: What if your refrigerator got its own electricity bill? “The big idea that Tuck and I discussed is a concept that’s only now boring its way through the thick bureaucracies of the utility companies: what if, instead of power companies charging for electricity at the power meter, which is the point of where it [...] A gaming neuro-headset can glean some of the same information used in the fMRI experiments this article talks about. “Contrary to the notion that daydreaming is a sign of laziness, letting the mind wander can actually let the parts of the brain associated with problem-solving become active, a new study finds.” What I want is [...] Nice dystopian SF video from Serbian band. Strip – Duh Iz Lampe (via Beyond the Beyond) This is something that has been percolating in the back of my mind lately, but which I don’t really have the brainial powers to articulate (nonetheless, I persist). The topic of design as the metaphor du jour came up the other day and I remembered that I had read the following article, but couldn’t remember [...] Ahhhh… Over at Forbes Joel Kotkin suggests that Tampa and the cities along the I-4 corridor focus on “medical services, business services and light manufacturing” as a substitute for tourism and development. That sounds like pretty weak sauce to me. I’d like to see a huge hobbyist culture develop around the arduino, which leads to [...] |
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