It's A Book - By Lane Smith

Alice Dreger: Is anatomy destiny? | Video on TED.com

Alice Dreger: Is anatomy destiny? | Video on TED.com

Alvin Toffler to address 'The Future of digital Media'

Saluting Futurists! pt 2

 I should have added this name to the previous blog, but I think he deserves a section of his own...

Shirow Masamune. Imagine a world where you are linked in to the internet, constantly. The hardware is in your body. Or the hardware is your body, as you may be partially or fully cybernetic. You interface with translucent media player skins that appear before your eyes. A.I.s wonder if they can have souls or "ghosts" that survive beyond death...

The police and military have tanks with Artificial Intelligence, that sound like children when they speak. They have active camouflage body suits, rendering them near invisible. A Computer hacker can render himself invisible to you by hacking the processors in your cybernetic eyes...

That's the world of Ghost in the Shell. In the midst of the action adventure, you suddenly have characters dropping references to philosophers like Arthur Koestler or Frederick Jameson.

The character, "The laughing man" has a popularity among the Anonymous -sympathetic crowd only exceeded by their fondness for Alan Moore's "V". This is, no doubt, because both characters represent chaotic good while remaining faceless... Indeed, the laughing man can be interpreted as a wishful representation of what a hacker wants to be..

Masamune shows us a world of Virtual realities & Augmented realities, and dares us to determine which is more "real". His work is spiritually akin to Phillip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" & "A Scanner Darkly" in it's testing of phenomenology..

If Raymond Kurzweil is to be believed... Masamune's future is almost upon us...

Saluting Futurists!

I'd like to take this opportunity to recognize and celebrate those men of vision who helped shape the world of today. Some names you may know, some you might not:

Gene Roddenberry- The Creator and Producer of Star Trek (TOS) and Star Trek: The Next Generation. His inspiration and vision of the future inspired many future engineers and scientists to create the reality of the technology his programs only played at.

Jack Kirby- Artist & creator. Back in the forties, he helped create superheroes like Captain America, kid gangs like the Newsboy Legion and the Kid Commandos. He drew western, romance and big monster comics. With Stan Lee at Marvel, he had a hand in creating most of their stable of characters, like the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Thor...
At DC comics, he created the Challengers of the Unknown, Kamandi, the Demon, OMAC, and his Fourth World saga...
Speaking of which...
In his Fourth World saga, the characters are all supposedly the next generation of gods that survived after a Ragnarok type event, leaving two worlds; Apokolips and New Genesis. Unlike the gods of myth, these characters came from  highly technologic societies that opposed each other for the fate of Earth..
Certain of these characters carried a device called "Mother Box".

As you can see, these were small, portable devices, often used as computers or communicators, as well as having multiple apps beyond...
One character, Scott Free, aka Mister Miracle ,
used a device called a "multi cube", which was a high tech multi tool in the same vein as a Leatherman or Swiss Army knife. You can thank Jack for the iPad...

Alvin Toffler is the writer and professional futurist who wrote Future Shock, which detailed how technology was progressing in such ways that humanity will suffer from too much change too soon.
He also wrote The Third Wave which was a synopsis of how civilization had progressed and predicted how it would continue to progress in the coming years.. The Third Wave supposedly was used by the Clinton administration to guide setting policies on emergent technologies...

Ian Fleming- Original Author of the James Bond thrillers, also author of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In his novel Goldfinger, MI 5 Agent James Bond is issued two tracking devices, one the size of a packet of cigarettes, the other small enough to fit in his shoe heel... If you see the movie version of the story, the display of the location tracker looks eerily similar to a GPS map. Thank Ian for LoJack, and GPS tracing..

During the late 1930s and early 40s,   Lester Dent wrote the Doc Savage series under the nom de plume "Kenneth Robeson". In addition, Dent himself was an adventurer of sorts, being a sailor and world traveler. He also was a great reader and gadgeteer. Among the gadgets he thought up for his hero  to use or oppose were: Telephone answering machines, heat seeking cruise missiles, Ultraviolet light projectors, stun grenades, radio controlled drone planes, zeppelins, autogyros & helicopters, an Artic exploration submarine designed to go under the ice pack, collapsible boats, automatic machine pistols, non-lethal ammunition...


All these men are personal heroes of mine, of one sort or another.  They not only imagined great things, but lived extraordinary lives...

Show & Tell...

Thought I'd change up the blog a bit... Here's a collection of related items:

This is an abacus.. The oldest known mechanical computation devices were based on some type of using beads to represent units.

This is a slide rule, also known as a "slip stick"... It's based on using logarithmic progressions to perform multiplication, division & trigonometric calculations. My teaching myself how to use one greatly enhanced my knowledge of mathematics.. Unfortunately, it was only accurate to two decimal places, at best.

This is one of the earliest commercial calculators available. Using a Light Emitting Diode display, it could perform simple mathematical calculations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

This is the Texas Instruments TI-30-II, a second generation of the TI-30 "slide rule" calculator. Like it's predecessor, it had a range of functions beyond the simple arithmetic, including log functions, sine, cosine, converting values from radians into degrees, calculating squares and square roots. Note the Liquid Crystal display. By the time this calculator had been marketed, Hewlitt Packard had developed it's Graphic Display calculator, as well as it's alpha numeric programmable calculators...


I mentioned in a previous post, the incredible innovations that the 70's saw in consumer products, and how it possibly saved the economy at that time... This is also an example of that principle.

Schumpeter, the 70s & economic growth- Part 1

There is a theory I would like to advance. We often hear news pundits discuss the arguments  made between the economic of John Maynard Keynes and Freidrich Hayek. Government spending vs. Laisse Faire capitalism. Both sides claim that theirs is the explanation & solution for our current state.
I have a different view... I think the last fifty years  can be defined by the work of the Economist Joseph Schumpeter. Indeed, maybe the last hundred years, since the time of Marconi, Edison & Tesla..

My prime example would be the economic turn around of the 1970s.. We suffered massive unemployment, business shut downs, a world wide gas shortage (or embargo, if you consider O.P.E.C.s involvement) recession and "stagflation".. By the end of the decade, all this would be resolved..

Why? The dramatic amount of innovations that the decade had brought. My first example would be Bic. They didn't invent the ball point. They made a quality version that was cheaper. They didn't invent the butane cigarette lighter. They just made a disposable one priced less than a dollar. Felt markers had been around for a time. Bic gave it a finer point, called it the Flair tip. A shaving razor you could buy in any convenience store or pharmacy, and throw away when you were done. That changed travel toiletries at a time when travel was increasingly available for the middle class.

What made Bic an innovator wasn't creating new products, but by giving the world better quality products for a lower price. This helped drive the wave of consumerism better than govt. spending or tax relief. There are many examples of this happening during the same era, and I hope to show a few...