musings on our human ecological future

Champion of the Earth honoree and biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus has transformed the way we think about innovation and design. Benyus challenges us to study nature’s best ideas, then imitate its designs and processes to solve some of our greatest human challenges.

Google, Darnton ultimately worries, cannot be trusted. Because the history of literature and publishing since the Enlightenment shows that no one, however noble, can be trusted with control of the entire corpus of human thought.

I.B.M. plans to announce Monday that it is in the final stages of completing a computer program to compete against human “Jeopardy!” contestants. If the program beats the humans, the field of artificial intelligence will have made a leap forward.

The hype around Wolfram|Alpha, the next "Google killer" from the makers of Mathematica, has been building over the last few weeks. Today, we were lucky enough to attend a one-hour web demo with Stephen Wolfram, and from what we've seen, it definitely looks like it can live up to the hype - though, because it is so different from traditional search engines, it will definitely not be a "Google killer." According to Stephen Wolfram, the goal of Alpha is to give everyone access to expert knowledge and the data that a specialist would be able to compute from this information.

The Baby Boom generation (a world-wide phenomenon) has an expected life span of about 80 years. Born about 1950, most baby boomers should be dead by 2040. However all kinds of other powerful things are expected to happen by 2040. China’s economy is due to overtake the US in 2040. 2040 is the average date when the Singularity is supposed to happen. 2040 is when we expect Moore's Law to reach the computational power of a human on a desk top. 2040 is also about when the population of the world is supposed to peak once and for all, and environmental pressure decrease. This grand convergence of global scale disruptors are all scheduled to appear – no surprise – at exactly the date of this generation’s Maes-Garreau Point: 2040.

This George Dyson gem couldn't find a publisher in a fiction venue because it's too technical, and technical publications (including Wired) won't run it because it's fiction. Shame on them. Edge to the rescue.

Copyright 2006 by Vernor Vinge. The 2006 sci-fi novel.

The idea of bringing pragmatism to biology made de Grey think "I might be able to make a contribution. I became very aware by this time that biology was critically short of synthesizers -- people who brought ideas together from disparate fields who came u

"He's not actually completely naked. If you look closely, you'll see he's wearing a penis sheath, fashioned from a gourd indigenous to the La Chorrera region. He’s been dealing with stress by ‘discovering’ himself in the South American rain forest."

How is it done? How do you screw the taxpayer for millions, get away with it and then ride off into the sunset with one middle finger extended, the other wrapped around a chilled martini? Ask Earnest O. Robbins -- he knows all about being a successful con

fMRI scans reveal that the same part of the brain used when recalling the past is used when contemplating the future.

Group says Neuronet, separate from Internet, to be launched in 2007 purely for virtual-reality games and business apps.

ABSAFUCKINGLUTELY. Lockheed Martin has signed a contract to develop a supersonic jet for private transportation. To debut in 2013? MACH 1.6 HERE I COME

The Great Awakening -- With a Pill Called Modafinil, You Can Go 40 Hours Without Sleep -- and See Into the Future

FOSS Project designed to build a wifi detector ring.