Futurist

There are 390 posts filed in Futurist (this is page 25 of 39).

The Daylight Saving Time Fog

I was on the agenda for yesterday’s City Council meeting. Lately I’ve been done with these in about an hour. This session had a few more detailed items for discussion, however, and I waited in the audience long enough that I began to lose focus.

It seemed like I wasn’t the only one with this affliction. Maybe I was seeing things through sleepy eyes but to me the whole room seemed remarkably devoid of energy.

An amusing parade then began at the Council table. City Attorney Tom McCormick, a man who usually stays glued to his seat lest the Councilors get themselves into legal hot water while unsupervised, quietly stepped away from the table and out of the room, returning after a few minutes. I’m not sure why Tom stepped away, obviously, but I do know that it’s very rare for him to do so.
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Cheap Thoughts: a new role for the U.S. Postal Service?

Speaking of antiquated ways of doing things, I’ve often wondered if the U.S. Postal Service might be better off transitioning to more of an IT role. Perhaps it could rebrand itself as a Information Delivery or Information Directory service and deliver both hardcopy (i.e., mail) and softcopy (i.e., email,fax,etc.) materials to Americans. I’ve often wondered if it should play the role similar to IANA in routing traffic on the Internet.

I’ve also thought before that the postal service missed an opportunity to take on the directory role by providing each American with a free .us email address.

The postal service has long been an information delivery service, it’s just that now an increasing amount of this delivery is taking place on the Internet. Could the USPS one day deliver packets the way it now delivers packages?

Phone numbers and 911 hangups

Someone in my office misdialed 911 this morning, causing the Morrisville PD to needlessly dispatch an officer. As far as I know it’s the first time this has happened at my work. The officer who responded almost certainly had better things to be doing than chasing down someone who fat-fingered a telephone number. That was one officer who wasn’t available for other, more serious calls. That’s one incoming call to 911 that tied up an emergency line and a dispatcher needlessly.

Dialing mistakes have always happened, of course, but the Triangle area has gotten hit particularly hard since the new “overlay” area code (984? I had to look it up) was introduced. The emergency call centers in Raleigh, Cary, Durham, and Orange County have taken tens of thousands of misdialed 911 calls since this change took place this year.
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Dangerous Minds | FACEBOOK: I WANT MY FRIENDS BACK

Dangerous Minds takes a closer look at Facebook’s throttling of posts. On average, posts are only seen by 15% of a user or page’s audience and posters must pay to have the post reach more of one’s audience. What used to work just a few short months ago is now purposefully broken, so Facebook can extort you into paying for the fans you already attracted.

But it wasn’t just the so-called “fan pages,” individual Facebook users were also starting to notice that they weren’t seeing much in their newsfeeds anymore from the various entities they “liked”—or even updates from their closest friends and family members. Something was amiss, but unless you had a larger “data set” to look at—or a formerly thriving online business that was now getting creamed—it probably wasn’t something that you noticed or paid that much attention to.

It’s the biggest danger of putting all of your digital eggs into one basket: Facebook’s walled garden may be one of the prettiest out there but it’s still walled. Your presence on Facebook is subject to the whim of the company’s latest profit scheme. We’re all social media serfs and Zuckerberg (or, more accurately, Wall Street) is king.

via Dangerous Minds | FACEBOOK: I WANT MY FRIENDS BACK.

Anti-science abounds

Bashing science has become popular with politicians lately. Yesterday I read Scientific American’s story bemoaning the beating that science has taken from some American politicians, many of whom have staked “anti-science” stances:

Yet despite its history and today’s unprecedented riches from science, the U.S. has begun to slip off of its science foundation. Indeed, in this election cycle, some 236 years after Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, several major party contenders for political office took positions that can only be described as “antiscience”: against evolution, human-induced climate change, vaccines, stem cell research, and more. A former Republican governor even warned that his own political party was in danger of becoming “the antiscience party.”

Americans are not the only ones science-bashing. Yesterday, an Italian court convicted seismic scientists of manslaughter for failing to predict an earthquake:
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Amtrak through NC hits highest percentage of growth in nation

Rail travel is hugely popular in North Carolina!

Raleigh, N.C. — Amtrak’s Piedmont route, which runs from Raleigh to Charlotte, grew by a higher percentage of riders than any other route in the nation during the last fiscal year, according to the latest data from the rail service.

The route set a new record of more than 162,000 riders and had the best percentage increase of all Amtrak routes, with a jump of 16.2 percent over the previous year, Amtrak said. The 2012 fiscal year ended Sept. 30.

It sure makes me wish the USDOT had awarded our state something more than the paltry $1.5 million from the billions in stimulus rail funding that were awarded two years ago:
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Diaspora and Tent: open alternatives to Facebook

After several weeks of shocking revelations about Facebook accounts being hacked to say things their users never intended, needless to say I’m quite depressed about the state of social networks. I am actually considering shutting down my Facebook page since I can no longer be sure what I’m reading there is what my friends actually put there or instead the work of some outside (or inside) hacker.

There’s Google Plus, of course, but who’s to say that it couldn’t fall under the same spell (or under the same misfortune) that Facebook did?

What if there was another alternative, completely free and open? Sort of like an “RSS on steroids” that would share the content I created from a server I managed? What if it took the best of blogging, Twitter, and Facebook and tied it together with a flexible content-protection system that emulated “friends” or “circles” only it worked across separately-owned servers?
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Oil and those who can afford it

Gas prices in late February, 2012.


We were driving back from my daughter’s soccer game in Wake Forest and I remarked to Kelly how I just don’t like to drive anymore.

“You know those kids who are avoiding buying cars? “I said. “I know how they feel.”

Kelly apparently doesn’t read my blog (see how influential I am?) so I had to bring her up to speed about the Millennials’ trend of waiting a few years or more to get their first drivers licenses (and I’m not talking about DMV being that slow).

I don’t know how anyone working at minimum wage can afford to buy a tank of gas. I really don’t. I’ve also read some opinion pieces that say that gas is bound to get sharply more expensive in the not-so-distant future.
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ABB lights up Marbles with $1 million donation

I meant to say something about this yesterday because it’s so chock full of awesomeness. Power grid giant ABB is donating $1 million to Marbles Kids Museum to build an interactive power grid play area for kids. When I told my kids about these plans this morning, their eyes lit up like a solar farm at full sun.

Bravo, ABB, and congratulations Marbles! (Oh, and hey ABB: we’d love to have you in downtown Raleigh, too!)

Global engineering firm ABB, which builds electricity grids and designs utility equipment, is donating $1 million to Marbles Kids Museum in downtown Raleigh to develop an interactive play area that will let tykes pretend they are operating wind farms and power plants and lighting up neighborhoods.

ABB officials said the donation symbolizes the Triangle’s emerging reputation as a national smart-grid hub known for attracting research, startups and federal grants. ABB, which employs 2,000 people in North Carolina, made the initial payment of $100,000 Wednesday. ABB will also contribute equipment, including motors, towers, cables, transformers and control systems.

The exhibit is scheduled to open to the public in 2014 and shows interest in downtown investment by a global conglomerate that does not have a downtown presence.

via ABB lights up Marbles with $1 million donation – Local/State – NewsObserver.com.

Holding China back

During a recent visit to the wonderful Quail Ridge Books (boy how we need more local bookstores), I picked up a copy of the latest Foreign Affairs magazine. I used to subscribe to Foreign Affairs as an enlisted sailor in the Navy, trying to learn more about why the military was doing the things it was doing. It’s a wonderful (if pricey) magazine. Anyhow, the latest issue has an essay that says China sees America as a bully out to block its rise.

I don’t think that’s an accurate view of America-China relations. If America really wanted to thwart China, however, here’s how it would be done:

  • Keep selling Buicks to Chinese as fast as we can make them. The goal is to make China so car-dependent that its already notoriously-overcrowded streets become permanently gridlocked and the country becomes ever more dependent on oil. Chinese were once happy using bikes and scooters to get around but Buicks and Mercedes are the new hotness. It’s hard to live large on two wheels, right?
  • Export movies to China reinforcing the car-centric culture. See above. It’s all about face and keeping up with the Joneses.
  • Encourage China to build up an oil-dependent military, building a fleet of gas-guzzling ships and aircraft.

With the rest of the world going green by reducing car dependency and building greener military fleets, this strategy should set China back for decades.