Entries Tagged 'the future' ↓

This is worth clicking on to see closer up.

This is called Gato. Stealing power from public utilities. This was shot in the Rocinha Favela in Rio.

There’s an excellent post over at  Fake Steve Jobs about what, I expect, we all consciously or instinctively know about our culture right now. Fake Steve’s rant is inspired by this great comparison of the fears of Aldous Huxley vs George Orwell in comic form, the words of which were taken from the book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Stuart McMillen, which will definitely be going on my must-read list.

Brave New World is still one of the most amazing books I’ve ever read.

I recently finished Feed by M.T. Anderson, which was an incredibly adept, modern take on Brave New World and highly recommended.

Now then, I’m off to play Risk on my iPhone. And did I mention it’s efffking hot here?

WTF? I live in Portland! The city will drown in a sea of heat wave.

Obvious conspiracies were being hatched here:

The racket they made was unbelievable.
Whereas the next pond over was completely empty:

Is this something I should know about? I find that with a season of very odd weather and climate change, I’m spending a lot more time looking for signs. Though now that I think about it, I’m not sure it would be such a great thing to be forewarned about the apocalypse.

Also, along the lines of  apocalypse-thwarting news, happy inauguration day!

Genius idea:

http://www.google.org/flutrends/

Fantastic way to use search data and to watch an epidemic unfold.

How can communities utilize this data to minimize an epidemic?  It might be the case that by the time the data shows a danger- it’s too late, as the spikes indicate the epidemic has successfully spread.

Imagine if you could be alerted to any acceleration of  a trend. Say you limit the search to a region and see a doubling or tripling of searches over a 2 day period (click on Arkansas, for example, as of today). Would having a sort of ’snow day’ actually increase net productivity for a given period of time, considering that if you didn’t, you’d have a larger portion of the populace infected? Though the flu is communicable over about a week’s time, it appears, and you can infect others before you experience symptoms. Would it be worth having a text-message alert system where residents could sign up to be alerted to accelerations in the data? – and could that be done without causing paranoia and/or causing people to remove themselves from society unnecessarily?

And what’s the difference between Idaho and Oregon – there’s no scale to measure by, but it appears they are hypochondriacs in Idaho. –actually, I’m guessing that’s the effect of a lower population density on the spread of the disease. Compare Idaho to California and you can infer that higher density in California enables fast-spreading infections, whereas the infection travels slowly in ID.

My kids have just gotten over fevers – and the teacher said it went around the school. It does make you wonder if there’d be a net-gain in school days if everyone were kept home from school for a, say, 3-5 day period, at the beginning of an upward trend, rather than having an infection cycle over a couple of weeks.

(from this nyt story)

In this case, a picture is worth about a hundred gazillion words.

But while the picture is fascinating, more than anything I’d like to know what those words were.

“So now, again, is this the way to the bowling alley, or the war room?”

Speaking of which, I’m guessing Barack will be improving his bowling. 

Correction! He already has a transition plan for that.

Sorry everybody if I have something to do with this:

I have had a really lucky, great year – I have to keep reminding myself this as the rest of the world seems bent on spiraling itself into some kind of panicky little hole.

I’ve moved into a new house (with a wormhole in the center of the livingroom floor!), Couch is being published, Walker Tracker is going great, my kids are healthy and I’m happily married.

I hope you’re well and that you’re busy depression-proofing yourself too.

If not? Buy a bottle of red wine,  turn on the music loud and cook the New Brunswick Stew from this book.

Make sure to drink at least 5/8th of the bottle of wine while cooking.

That’s the best cure for the blues I know.

I mean depression-proofing in the emotional sense – but we do a lot of wealth building/depression-proofing here in the financial sense by making massive batches of soups and freezing them. Having stores of your own canned goods and frozen soups is one of the wealthiest feelings I think you can have. All that nourishment is stored away at your own home – not subject to bank runs or abstract financial instruments. It’s harvest time! Put away some of that summer for deep in the winter.