This post at Slate is for all my conservative friends — and I’m looking at you dad — that have sent me links over the years arguing that the West is doomed because Muslims are outbreeding us by some ratio. It turns out that population growth rates are declining world wide: the populations of China [...]
Nature is reporting on a recent study that “examined the trends in crop yields for four key global crops: maize, rice, wheat and soybeans” and concluded that “although yields continue to increase in many areas, we find that across 24–39% of maize-, rice-, wheat- and soybean-growing areas, yields either never improve, stagnate or collapse.” That’s [...]
DesignBoom has posted a lot of images from Hartmut Essinger’s archives detailing his early work with Apple. While the images are from 1982 to 1985, only a few of the designs were implemented during that period. The rest seemed to have seeped into the design consciousness of the company. As I’ve noted before, I always [...]
EDx is interesting. Google is interesting. EDx + Google is, to be honest, a little terrifying.
Why are we always looking back? Because when you look back, you know what you are going to see. You know what you are going to say.
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 [...]
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.
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!
Bauerlein’s likes to stir the pot, but his post here feels close to the mark, and the discussion that ensues is quite good.
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 [...]
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
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.
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.]
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 [...]
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.)