Monthly Archives: April 2006

Welcome to the Future!

This could very well be the web site that changes your life. No kidding!

Are you ready for the future? Are you sure? And more importantly, is the future ready for you?

We’re so glad to have you here. You’ve landed on an archive page, so if you want to see what we’ve been up to lately, click here. For a quick dose of good news, visit out sister blog, L2si, where we feature dispatches from a rapidly changing, rapidly improving world. Or you can go here to see what’s happening with both blogs and find links to our podcasts.

So please, make yourselves at home. Have a look around. We’re glad to see you!

CLEVER

It stands for “Compact Low-Emission Vehicle for Urban Transport:”

The prototype, a skeletal speedster which had safety netting in place of body panels, exhibited the general design and technology of the vehicle rather than its actual, finished appearance.

It has the compactness of a motorcycle but the safety of a car, and cornering is smoothed by a tilting technology developed by mechanical engineering students Matt Barker, 29, Ben Drew, 27 and their instructors.

clever.jpg

I’ve been wondering for some time why somebody doesn’t build a car-like frame around a motorcycle. Motorcycles get great gas mileage, but they tend to be invisible to some of the less…attentive drivers out there. This would be as visible as any small car and it gets 108 miles to the gallon.

Who needs a hybrid?

It's a New Phil, Week 17

I was only home one full day last week, Saturday, giving me seven days on the road over a period of eight. As I have noted previously, business travel can be particularly challenging for the weight loss program. So I was very pleased to see no change in my weight with yesterday’s weigh-in, meaning that I have maintained my overal loss of 43 pounds.

On the subject of caloric restriction, a topic raised in last week’s entry, reader ktistecmmachine made the following very interesting comment:

What about the quality of life associated with CRON. I know it’s possible that those few extra years gained could last you through until the next big break, but don’t you think that by eating less food, your performance in life and what you can take out of it will be less than what you would get otherwise, despite the extra linear time?

I think I’ll have to file that under “crossing that bridge when I come to it.” So far, the moderate reduction in calories has been overwhelmingly beneficial where quality of life is concerned. I have more energy, I look better, my blood pressure is down, etc. Obviously, there is a point where these kinds of returns begin to diminish. Otherwise, everybody would just give up eating altogether and live in optimum health.

If and when I start to see energy levels going down rather than up, I’ll have a choice to make. But at this point, I can only say that I look forward to having to make that eventual, difficult choice.

It’s a New Phil, Week 17

I was only home one full day last week, Saturday, giving me seven days on the road over a period of eight. As I have noted previously, business travel can be particularly challenging for the weight loss program. So I was very pleased to see no change in my weight with yesterday’s weigh-in, meaning that I have maintained my overal loss of 43 pounds.

On the subject of caloric restriction, a topic raised in last week’s entry, reader ktistecmmachine made the following very interesting comment:

What about the quality of life associated with CRON. I know it’s possible that those few extra years gained could last you through until the next big break, but don’t you think that by eating less food, your performance in life and what you can take out of it will be less than what you would get otherwise, despite the extra linear time?

I think I’ll have to file that under “crossing that bridge when I come to it.” So far, the moderate reduction in calories has been overwhelmingly beneficial where quality of life is concerned. I have more energy, I look better, my blood pressure is down, etc. Obviously, there is a point where these kinds of returns begin to diminish. Otherwise, everybody would just give up eating altogether and live in optimum health.

If and when I start to see energy levels going down rather than up, I’ll have a choice to make. But at this point, I can only say that I look forward to having to make that eventual, difficult choice.

Better All The Time #29




Dispatches from a rapidly changing, rapidly
improving world
#29
04/28/06

We’re a bit overdue on getting this edition out. But that’s what you’ve
got to love about good news — it always arrives at the right time.

Will There Ever Be a Machine as Smart as a Human?

Vernor Vinge says that’s not the relevant question. The question is what happens next. Of course, we all knew that. But nobody can talk the Singularity quite like the guy who named it.

Excellent interview via the latest Glenn and Helen Show.

Lots of great stuff, but my favorite part would have to be Dr. Helen on the subject of virtual sex. Let’s just say she’s skeptical.

Check it out.

But How Would We Tap In?

High gas prices are the problem. Black holes are the unlikely ultimate answer:

A new study finds that the supermassive black holes at the hearts of some galaxies are the most fuel efficient engines in the universe.

“If you could make a car engine that was as efficient as one of these black holes, you could get about a billion miles out of a gallon of gas,” said study team leader Steve Allen of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University. “In anyone’s book, that would be pretty green.”

Granted, we probably won’t really be harnessing them to power automobiles. But they’ve got to be good for something: probably enormous engineering projects a century or two down the road that we can only vaguely conceptualize at this point.

The article goes on to make the rather offbeat point that black holes are also “green” in the role they play in preventing the galacgtic version of urban sprawl — by basically sucking everything in the vicinity in and annihilating it all.

Er, okay. Pretty handy, huh?

UPDATE: Meanwhile, here’s the low-down on some less exotic energy alternatives.

Third on my List

1. Flying Cars

2. Jet Packs

3. This Thing:

The Aeroscraft is a heavier-than-air vehicle currently in development for use in the near future — a prototype should be finished by 2010. It will be able to haul massive amounts of cargo and transport hundreds of passengers in luxury with quiet, electric engines. It will also be able to take off and land without an airstrip. The Aeroscraft is sort of a hybrid — it carries helium, like a blimp, but its shape provides lift, like an airplane.

I’m telling you, we need more ships in the sky. If you’re going to travel with a group, it should be a graceful and elegant experience. If you just need to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, that’s what items 1 and 2 are for.

aeroscraft-3.jpg

Solution in Search of a Problem

I think this mobile office of the future will probably have some use, but perhaps not the use that the designers intend. As a moderate-to-frequent business traveler, I haven’t observed the lack of office space to be much of an issue. And where it is an issue, the lack of parking space is going to be an even bigger problem (which the article does acknowledge to an extent.)

Still, something like this might have an application for construction sites or managing emergency relief efforts. Also, the military might have some use for it. In other words, it might be a solution for those who are already charged with setting up temporary, mobile office locations.

But for the business world? I don’t know. It seems to me that hotel rooms solve the part of the problem that telecommuting doesn’t.

Willard Triumphant

In the case of an interspecies smack-down between human beings and lab-rats, who do you think would win? You might say the answer is obvious, but let’s look at this for a moment.

What have we got going for us? Opposable thumbs, big brains, civilization/technology/control firmly in place. The lab rats are ours to toy with (poor things.) They don’t stand a chance.

Or do they?

The one thing they would appear to have going for them is a lack of regulatory prohibitions concerning their advancement. For a lot of pretty sound reasons (along with a lot of Luddite/buzzkill reasons), you can’t just go out and build Human Being 2.0. But there’s little if anything stopping somebody from building Lab Rat 2.0, 3.0, 9i, Lab Rat 2009 Mega-upgrade, etc. The lab rats might go blasting right past us. Then it’s their show.

Could it happen? Well, it seems unlikely. But people are talking about it nonetheless. Maybe as a precaution, we ought to give a thought as to how we can make treatment of lab animals as humane as possible. We should probably be doing that, anyway. But, you know, if the shoe might one day be on the other foot…