A company called SolarShip has debuted its plans for three heavier-than-air airships that use solar panels built into the roof of their envelope to power themselves. The short video they have released illustrates the concept really well: I almost used “demonstrates” but these are clearly computer animations — very well done animations keyed over actual footage for some stunning realism. I love seeing people re-thinking supposedly old technology like airships using modern materials to create new possibilities, and I like to imagine what it would be like to work in such a company.
Posts Tagged: future
19
Aug 11
Save the Galaxy: Kill Humans
I really want to be asked to be a part of one of these think tank speculative fiction / future-casting affairs where someone asks you a question like: Would contact with extraterrestrials benefit or harm humanity? Discuss. Discovery has more on the results of one such exercise held at Penn State.
1
Aug 11
The L.A. Times has a short article, with lots of great links, about the rise in popularity of long-form non-fiction. If the monograph is dead, as many lament, viva the readable book!
1
Aug 11
Bauerlein’s likes to stir the pot, but his post here feels close to the mark, and the discussion that ensues is quite good.
27
Jul 11
Emory Gets It
Notice the high production values of this piece from Emory University’s Youtube channel: the faculty member is well-lit and the sound is good. Now imagine how little effort the actual piece took, once the infrastructure is in place. It’s getting the infrastructure in place that is the work. But Emory clearly gets that promoting their faculty as content producers, as knowledge creators, is key to everything else they do and that it can be done using the same infrastructure that is already in place for university public relations and, probably, for distance learning.
25
Jul 11
The Best Thing about the Past Is the Future
Singularity Hub has a great collection of predictions of the future from the 1960s. While the various technologies predicted then look a bit silly now, the houses, to my mind, hold their allure.
futurehouse_bluesky.jpg
21
Jul 11
Another Future of the Book
Here’s yet another future for the book. From what I can tell, most of the futures look pretty much the same. Sliding, zooming, etc.
The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.
6
Jul 11
Flying Car in Reality
Who hasn’t dreamed this? If only I still had my history of cars book I had when I was a kid that had as its last entry the future flying car.
The future is here. (It’s just not evenly distributed yet.) [A nod to Tim O'Reilly for getting it so right.]
16
Jun 11
Geek Anti-Intellectualism
Larry Sanger has written, in a very heartfelt way, about what he sees as the rise of anti-intellectualism among the technorati, which he dubs “the geeks” but I think maybe my use of “technorati” is more useful here. I won’t repeat Sanger’s argument here, which really sort of traces how the idea in the public’s mind that the internet places the “wisdom of the world at our fingertips” has come to be fully embraced by the builders themselves of that infrastructure, who I think Sanger suggests should know better.
Perhaps more interesting than his post are the comments it draws, a fair number of which are individuals claiming to be “anti-intellectual” because “intellectuals don’t do anything” or because “intellectuals are elitist.”
My mind quite literally boggled at this. Here are people writing and reading about a very fine cultural/social point and they don’t consider themselves to be intellectuals. Now, I admit that anti-intellectualism has always had an enormous amount of cache in mainstream American culture, but the internet was largely built by folks who wished to have no truck with that kind of thinking, folks who wanted to think and wanted to think outside the constraints of their thinking having to have immediate application — what else is a blog for goodness sake?
What has happened here? Has geek culture shifted or has it grown to accept more individuals, many of whom don’t necessarily believe in the same things? (Please note that I am not arguing for any kind of cultural purism here. I am just a little stymied by the shift from Tim Berners-Lee and Dave Winer to the “intellectuals don’t do nothing” that seems to have occurred.)
Here’s the link to Sanger’s post. Go read it, and the comments, for yourself.
2
Jun 11
1966 prediction of the home computer
I don’t know who is digitizing these old futuristic films, but my thanks to them. Nowhere does the past reveal itself more than in its versions of the future. (Hmmm … there might be something to explore there in an essay, story, or class.)
22
Apr 11
More on Tor
Tor’s site is just getting better and better. Great original stories — sometimes re”print”ed from paper editions now hard to find. Great blog posts. Great re-reads. Great community. This particular post during their dystopia week caught my eye: Dealing with Real Dystopias is Part of My Job. Now I know why I want to be a scifi novelist: you get to be a futurist consultant. Or, as the program is called: Strategic Foresight and Innovation.
Truth really is stranger than fiction.
8
Apr 11
One University Future
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports from the “front line” of higher education as glimpsed in a national conference of college trustees. It’s not pretty:
The center has redesigned courses on more than 100 college campuses, and Ms. Twigg points toward a body of evidence suggesting that course sections can be scaled up to serve many more students without sacrificing quality. While the course redesigns differ from campus to campus, they often involve the use of low-stakes online quizzes to promote student mastery of material. Such quizzes and other online tasks can replace the need for class time and reduce the number of professors required to teach a course, Ms. Twigg said. On average, the course redesigns reduce costs by 37 percent, she said.
22
Mar 11
Uh Oh … Time Messaging Coming Soon
Not time travel, but the ability to send messages into the future or past. Think I’m kidding? Read on:
One of the major goals of the collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson: the particle that physicists invoke to explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that it will create a second particle, called the Higgs singlet, at the same time.
According to Weiler and Ho’s theory, these singlets should have the ability to jump into an extra, fifth dimension where they can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past.
“One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes,” Weiler said. “Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future.”
From PhysOrg.com.
15
Feb 11
Harvard’s ManageMentor
It looks like the *Harvard Business Review* has sufficient status as a brand that Harvard is giving it its own on-line content storefront: Harvard ManageMentor. It’s worth clicking on the link if only to watch the introductory video, which is an interesting combination of marketing and something else.
10
Feb 11
The World Is Getting Weirder
I note this now because I just finished reading an essay about how Chinese employees somewhere in Beijing go to work 9-to-5 to hack into Western energy company computers. Because, I guess, they worked during our night, the operation was called “Night Dragon.”