I ran across an article the other day that baldly stated that the survival instinct is not the strongest and most universal instinct. Creating value is. Surprising on the face of it, but the more I thought of it, the more I had to admit that there’s something to it. Conventional wisdom (which may actually …
It seems that our generation, and that of our parents, may be spared the horrors of Alzheimers. My maternal grandfather had it, and though I don’t remember much about it (I wasn’t even school age at the time), I remember enough to know that it was pretty bad.
I’ve mentioned before the problem of man-made junk in low-earth orbit, and the three plans (American laser, Japanese fishing-net, and Italian robo-satellite) so far suggested to combat it. Apparently the problem is even worse than I’d realized, and has reached a critical stage. If I read the American laser proposal correctly (which isn’t guaranteed), it …
Continue reading ‘“Space junk at ‘tipping point’, now getting worse on its own”’ »
ZDNet has a roundup here, everything from IBM’s fateful 1980 decisions on MS-DOS to this year’s HP TouchPad debacle. I thought it was interesting, as a my-God-it’s-horrifying-but-I-can’t-look-away kind of thing.
Science fiction fans have long been known to make replicas of things from their favorite books, movies, or shows. There was even a fellow in Britain who turned his apartment into a replica of the Star Trek ship Voyager a few years back. This, however, is the first full-sized building created from a cartoon movie …
Continue reading ‘“Replica of Disney-Pixar ‘Up’ house for sale in Utah”’ »
When we tell kids that they have to be careful what they share on FaceBook, that it can affect them in the future, it seems that even we don’t realize all the possible implications.
In 1985, the Wall Street Journal had a quote from an unnamed Xerox executive to the effect that “we’ll have a paperless office when we have a paperless bathroom.” Well, paperless bathrooms are here, but offices still use a lot of paper. In a bid to reduce that, Xerox has come up with self-erasing reusable …
Bruce Schneier points out a newly-published analysis on recent terrorism in the US, and provides his own comments (which I fully agree with). From one of the final paragraphs: The risk of dying in the U.S. from terrorism is substantially less than the risk of drowning in your bathtub, the risk of a home appliance …
A primary theme of this blog is that science fiction drives science. Apparently science is now directly feeding back into science fiction too. 🙂 I don’t expect this to really go anywhere. The motivation for it is pretty transparent: keeping NASA in the public eye now that there are no shuttle launches, so that Congress …
Continue reading ‘“NASA to work on approved sci-fi books”’ »
I doubt this sort of thing will become the preferred way to attend a wedding any time soon, but until recently it wouldn’t have been possible for the home-bound bridesmaid to attend at all. Telepresence will only get better — easier to use, more reliable, with more control for the remote user — over time. …
Continue reading ‘“iPad bridesmaid attends wedding via FaceTime”’ »