Let me tell you something important about your life. This is something that you know to be true about your life, but maybe you haven’t thought about it in a while, or maybe you have never thought about it in exactly these terms. Your life is a matter of days. So is mine. So is […]
In my new piece at H+ Magazine, I provide not so much a review of the movie Her as an exploration of the one of the bigger issues it raises, an issue that I don’t think is getting as much attention as it deserves. Some take the film to be a biting commentary on the state of […]
Virginia Postrel has written an intriguing piece at Bloomberg that some dill-weed of an editor gave a really unfortunate, and misleading, headline. Her piece suggests that quality of life, in this instance measured by something as seemingly trivial as entertainment options, is increasing even as other standard economic markers of well-being stay flat or dip […]
Check out this wonderful video from Jason Silva. I love what Jason says about changing perspectives. Right now I am standing at a desk, but I am also standing on the surface of a planet. (Actually, I’m standing a bit below the surface, seeing as I’m in the basement.) I’m also hurtling through space, following […]
On this week’s podcast we talked about disturbing futures — future worlds that aren’t necessarily dystopias, but that nonetheless don’t look terribly appealing to us back here in the past. I focused mainly on futures in which the population has abandoned some traditional aspect of the human experience. It isn’t always a bad idea to […]
Our new book project, a collection of ideas for making the world a better place entitled The World Transformed, has been going by the nickname “the World’s Longest Book.” I want to be quick to point out that the proposed Abridged Edition of the The World Transformed will not be anything remotely approaching the world’s […]
Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks so. He doesn’t believe that Elon Musk’s plan to send people to Mars is going to fly. I’ll just let him lay out his argument in his own words: The Columbus analogy is fairly persuasive, but it ultimately it rests on the assumption that things in the future are more or […]
Ricky can laugh it up about the UFO magazine and the horse in the pub, but Karl is correct that there are only so many noises that can occur. The piano keyboard analogy is actually kind of brilliant. Where Karl gets it wrong is his estimate that all noises have been used five times. More […]
This is my favorite XKCD strip ever, and that is saying something: Wow. Why do I feel so sad? Somehow, the idea of the bee image embedded in the orchid reminds me of this story, in which I raised the following question: This makes me wonder…are there other past events that we might get a […]
Imagine when we’ll see advertisements for 3D printer supplies that look no different from ads for inkjet cartridges or printing paper that we’ve seen for years. Things like this: (hat-tip: Shawn Thuris) My immediate thought — these spools look exactly like the ones I load into my lawn edger / trimmer. I wonder if they […]