On my way out of the municipal building yesterday, I passed Cindy Trumbower, volunteer coordinator of the city’s Parks and Rec program. She told me she just got back from a volunteer event where a bunch of students from Michigan State University had painted a city gymnasium as part of their Spring Break service. These kids didn’t hit the beach and stay drunk and rowdy for a week (even being from a chilly place like Michigan) but instead gave their time to help others. How cool is that? I thought that was just awesome and asked if she could provide the Parks board details at our next meeting.
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Futurist
There are 391 posts filed in Futurist (this is page 31 of 40).
Three trillion in change
As I was contemplating the $5-per-gallon gasoline price forecast by the end of the year, my mind turned to the three trillion dollars America has squandered over the past decade fighting two Middle Eastern wars.
What if America had invested that $3,000,000,000,000 in making our country more energy-independent rather than in blowing people up? What if this enormous nation of ours had used that money to build a first-class, high-speed passenger rail system that would keep us globally competitive as fuel prices continue to skyrocket?
Instead, we have thousands of dead and wounded American soldiers (kids, really), hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians killed, two battle-scarred countries of questionable stability, and a huge mountain of debt with little to show for it.
It has not been America’s finest moment.
Water system bills, revisited
Remember how I said that John Carman, Raleigh’s Public Utilities Director, has been going around telling anyone who’ll listen that Raleigh’s water infrastructure is aging rapidly and will soon need major maintenance? The Raleigh Public Record looked at the report put out by the city’s Water Utility Transition Advisory Task Force (WUTAT):
Raleigh’s underground water infrastructure, mainly pipes in the ground, needs more than $7 billion in repairs, according to City Public Utilities Director John Carman. These are not immediate costs, he said, but now is when Raleigh should be planning to replace pipes that will age out during the coming decades.
Carman told the Record the current financial model for the system does not put away any money to pay for replacing pipes that have a lifespan of anywhere from 60 to 100 years.
“We have $500 million worth of pipe that was installed before World War II,” Carman said.
Kudos to the Raleigh Public Record for raising awareness about this issue.
Cheap Thoughts: Time for Car 2.0?
Google's driverless car
As I was driving on the I-40 interstate the other day, I noticed how of the 12 feet of concrete devoted to a travel lane, the typical car or truck only touches two, one-foot-wide strips where the tires are. What a waste of the other 10 feet of concrete.
It made me realize how little the car has changed since it was first introduced. Oh, sure, plenty of progress has been made to the inside of the car, but what about the rest of what it takes to make a car go: the infrastructure? There are so many things we could be doing with cars but haven’t yet tried.
Why do we still build roads? All that impervious, land-hogging, surface, and only a fraction of it is useful to any vehicle. Well, the Romans did it, some might say, but thats because stones were all they had.
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Zeo: the gift that keeps on giving
Just put my Zeo Sleep Manager birthday present through its first test – the obligatory birthday nap. Five minutes of deep sleep in a 31 minute nap.
I’m going to enjoy putting this thing through its paces!
The Rise Of The Mayor-Entrepreneur
Here’s an interesting take from TechCrunch about how mayors need to think like entrepreneurs. If Raleigh is gunning to be a city of innovation it might want to take this advice.
On stage at last month’s Le Web conference Shervin Pishevar, a Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, stated “The World is a Startup.” It’s an interesting perspective, and I think what’s true for the world is also true for countries, states and municipalities. With developments like last month’s announcement that Cornell was selected to build a new tech campus in New York City, it seems to follow that if “a city is a startup,” then the best mayors are the ones who are looking at their cities in much the same way as entrepreneurs look at the companies they have founded.
via A City Is A Startup: The Rise Of The Mayor-Entrepreneur | TechCrunch.
Taking a u-turn on the one-way street
City of Raleigh Transportation guru Eric Lamb shared this story of one successful conversion of a one-way street to two-way in St. Catharines, Ontario. It provides hope that East Raleigh may also enjoy a renaissance once it banishes its one-way streets.
Two years ago, city crews went to St. Paul Street — the one-way spine of downtown St. Catharines, Ont. — took down the “no entry” signs, painted new lines and opened up the street to two-way traffic. According to planners, it would slow cars down, make the downtown more pedestrian friendly and spur retail development.
People, especially businesspeople, didn’t like it. And then they did.
“A prominent local businessman came up to me the other day and said, ‘I didn’t support it from the start, but this is the best thing you’ve ever done.’ ”
via Taking a u-turn on the one-way street | News | National Post.
Astronomers see more planets than stars in galaxy
The continuing discovery of exoplanets – planets outside of our solar system – is one of the most astonishing yet underreported advances in our understanding of the universe and our place in it. The number of known planets has more than doubled since 2008 to 700 and far more are waiting to be verified.
Astronomers are in agreement that at least 100 billion planets exist in our galaxy alone. That blows my mind. The universe is littered with planets, and life in one form or another is certain to exist on some.
“We’re finding an exciting potpourri of things we didn’t even think could exist,” said Harvard University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger, including planets that mirror “Star Wars” Luke Skywalker’s home planet with twin suns and a mini-star system with a dwarf sun and shrunken planets.
“We’re awash in planets where 17 years ago we weren’t even sure there were planets” outside our solar system, said Kaltenegger, who wasn’t involved in the new research.
via Astronomers see more planets than stars in galaxy – Boston.com.
Good things on the way
I just had an insight that some amazing, exciting things are on the way for me, things that will make my full, already-exciting life seem dull by comparison. Life-changing stuff. Perhaps even world-changing stuff!
I’m not sure what it means but I’m curious (and brave enough) to find out.
Cheap Thoughts: virtual citizenship
My Dutch friend and former coworker Guus Bosman was quoted in this Economist article about dual citizenship.
It made me think again that, in such an interconnected world, we may one day choose our citizenship by the way we now choose hotel and airfare rates on sites like Priceline.com: by comparison shopping online. Citizenship will become like today’s flags of convenience. Borders are becoming less important, are they not?
It’s not something I expect to live to see, of course, but it does make an interesting thought experiment!
AT THE height of the Dutch golden age, merchants exported their goods and their families to colonies on four continents. Four centuries later their descendants are less impressed by such adventuring. A new law proposed by the Dutch government aims not only to limit dual nationality among immigrants (in 2011 around 20,000 people gained Dutch nationality through naturalisation) but also to make it easier for the authorities to strip members of the 850,000-plus Dutch diaspora of their nationality, should they secure a second citizenship abroad.
Guus Bosman, a Dutchman living in Washington, DC, calls the proposal “mean-spirited”. Eelco Keij, a Dutch citizen in New York and one of the loudest critics of his government’s proposals, thinks that these days dual nationality is no more than “a harmless side-effect of globalisation”.