Un-freakin-believable. What’s the saying, that people always underestimate technological progress in the short term, and overestimate it in the long term? It’s true… ten years ago I’d have said this couldn’t happen in less than twenty years. (Oddly enough, I’ve never read any SF stories that incorporated credit cards at all, even technologically advanced ones …
I’d like to take this opportunity to remind children — and their parents — that Harry Potter and Hedwig are fictional characters, living in a fictional world, and that in the real world, owls do not make good pets. And if you want to sacrifice something, how about your tobacco habit? That would be good …
Continue reading ‘“Declining Indian owl population blamed on Harry Potter fans”’ »
The title has a question mark in it, but the article makes it pretty clear that there’s no question about it. It sounds like the science is pretty well established, and we’re just nerving ourselves up to take the next step. And once medical cryogenics is in common use on Earth, there’s little stopping us …
Continue reading ‘“Freezing Ourselves: Medicine of the Future?”’ »
The hardest thing about time is doing it. — Lord Corwin of Amber This is a ridiculously low-tech solution to the high-tech problem of keeping your computer from going to sleep while it’s working on something for you. The incongruity somehow appeals to me.
Stranger in a Strange Land was published 49 years ago, and it included robo-cabs. Flying robo-cabs, no less. And I’m sure it wasn’t the first. Come on, science — if I can’t have a flying car yet, at least hurry up with the self-driving one! 😉
I wish I could believe this sort of thing. I have no doubt that extraterrestrial life exists — merely from a mathematical perspective, it seems all but certain, just from what we know about life and the universe already. But that technologically advanced beings have visited Earth? I know far too well how easily humans …
Continue reading ‘“Sci-fi wars? Pilots say UFOs knocked out nukes”’ »
Excellent news for space enthusiasts! I heard an interview with one of the lead scientists on the LCROSS mission, who said you can get almost a gallon of water out of a wheelbarrow-full of lunar dirt, at least where LCROSS struck. That’s ridiculously rich, especially compared to what we expected to find, and it will …
Continue reading ‘“Our Moon is wet and welcoming, says excited NASA”’ »
Though a failure on the privacy front, this video is amusing to watch. Does anything strike you as odd about the movements of the curtain? Probably not, because we’re all habituated to computer-based automation and its limitations. But if it were controlled by a human, it would act quite different, anticipating the movements of the …
Continue reading ‘“Robotic privacy curtain moves across window to block snoops”’ »
This is the kind of thing that just wasn’t possible before the Internet. No single organization had the data needed, not even the government in some cases (and in others, only the government, who could manipulate it or keep it secret if they wished). Even now, only Google and maybe a handful of others have …
Continue reading ‘“Google tracks inflation with interwebs data”’ »
I found this to be an interesting article, but the essay that it links to fascinates me. Partly for the content, but even more for the erroneous thoughts it contains. For example: […] procrastinators know all too well the allures of the salient present, and they want to resist them. They just don’t. That’s not …
Continue reading ‘“The Many Reasons We Procrastinate, Including the Multiple Selves”’ »