Futurist

There are 391 posts filed in Futurist (this is page 32 of 40).

Louis CK tops $1 million in downloads

Comedian Louis CK filmed his standup act and, rather than putting it into the Hollywood distribution system, posted it on his website for a $5 download. This weekend he surpassed $1 million in sales, just 12 days after he posted it. He’s tripled the money he put into it and the money’s still flowing in. The best part is that he gets to decide how to divvy it up, not Hollywood with its shady accounting!

It’s a great example of an artist connecting directly with his fans, cutting out the middleman. No wonder those Hollywood suits are pushing for dictatorial control over the Internet with the SOPA bill. They’re losing control and they know it.

hi. So it’s been about 12 days since the thing started and yesterday we hit the crazy number. One million dollars. That’s a lot of money. Really too much money. I’ve never had a million dollars all of a sudden. and since we’re all sharing this experience and since it’s really your money, I wanted to let you know what I’m doing with it. People are paying attention to what’s going on with this thing. So I guess I want to set an example of what you can do if you all of a sudden have a million dollars that people just gave to you directly because you told jokes.

via Louis CK: Live at the Beacon Theater.

Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works

The House tried to pass the “Stop Online Internet Piracy” bill out of committee today, only to run out of time. It wasn’t due to the lack of trying on the part of Rep. Mel Watt (D-NC). Rep. Watt acknowledges that he doesn’t understand the ramifications of the bill he is sponsoring, yet feels the need to press on, regardless.

It’s quite embarrassing, especially as a North Carolinian. As one commenter put it, Congress trying to regulate the Internet is like trying to build a bridge without an engineer. This misguided attack on America’s First Amendment must be stopped.

It’s of course perfectly standard for members of Congress to not be exceptionally proficient in technological matters. But for some committee members, the issue did not stop at mere ignorance. Rather, it seemed there was in many cases an outright refusal to understand what is undoubtedly a complex issue dealing with highly-sensitive technologies.

When the security issue was brought up, Rep. Mel Watt of North Carolina seemed particularly comfortable about his own lack of understanding. Grinningly admitting “I’m not a nerd” before the committee, he nevertheless went on to dismiss without facts or justification the very evidence he didn’t understand and then downplay the need for a panel of experts. Rep. Maxine Waters of California followed up by saying that any discussion of security concerns is “wasting time” and that the bill should move forward without question, busted internets be damned.

via Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works | Motherboard.

Health care


My wife and I were talking the other day about what passes for healthcare these days. As a runner, she gets some pain in her leg but the doctors are completely clueless as to how to fix it. It seems that more often than not doctors have no answers.

I’ve noticed the same in trying to get a diagnosis on various ailments I’ve suffered. When I bring some health mystery to my doctor for diagnosis, rarely do I seem to get my doctor’s attention. Doctors are great at being mechanics of the body – they can change a tire and even rebuild the occasional engine – but the deep insight into why something happens seems unimportant to them. The preventative maintenance isn’t a priority. I may be cynical, but if they can’t write a prescription for something they don’t want to bother with it.
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Americans Work Too Much for Their Own Good

This is a compelling op-ed on Bloomburg.com. American companies are way too stingy with vacation time! I’ve worked at a few companies that offered three weeks of vacation and it was heavenly. I’ve worked at others where you feel lucky to get two weeks.

Sooner or later, more American companies will learn that they don’t get more productive workers by keeping their noses to the grindstone.

By the mid-1970s, and especially after 1980, median wages weren’t keeping pace with increases in our capacity to produce. But flattening incomes didn’t derail the consumption train. Americans continued to buy more, in part by going deeper into debt, by having more members of the family enter the workforce and by working additional overtime. By the boom times of the late 1990s, Americans worked more than the notoriously workaholic Japanese.

The Europeans took a different path. In the second half of the 20th century, prodded by strong and active labor movements and social-democratic political parties, Europeans took a large chunk of their productivity gains in the form of more leisure. They now work only 80 to 85 percent as many hours as Americans, and when you consider that fewer people in Europe work and that they retire earlier, the difference is even greater.

via Americans Work Too Much for Their Own Good: de Graaf and Batker – Bloomberg.

The Once and Future Way to Run

Here’s a thought-provoking look at how the way people are running today may be leading to more injuries than the way people run naturally when they’re barefoot.

It’s what Alberto Salazar, for a while the world’s dominant marathoner and now the coach of some of America’s top distance runners, describes in mythical-questing terms as the “one best way” — not the fastest, necessarily, but the best: an injury-proof, evolution-tested way to place one foot on the ground and pick it up before the other comes down. Left, right, repeat; that’s all running really is, a movement so natural that babies learn it the first time they rise to their feet. Yet sometime between childhood and adulthood — and between the dawn of our species and today — most of us lose the knack.

via The Once and Future Way to Run – NYTimes.com.

Off the caffeine again

Remember my love-hate relationship with coffee? I decided to become a caffeine underachiever again and stick with decaf after I read how caffeine greatly inhibits REM sleep stages. Being a lucid dreamer (or at least, trying to be), I value REM sleep because thats where lucid dreaming takes place.

It’s not as if I’ve had lots of caffeine lately. About 1/3 of the coffee beans I had been grinding have been caffeinated. Even that little amount provided a strong addiction, enough so that when I cut it down to about 1/10th this week I had a few days of unpleasant headaches. By the third morning, though, I was fine without it.
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About those solar panels

Raleigh's going solar

I spent some time Friday at a dedication ceremony for the City of Raleigh Parks Department’s new greenhouse. One might think that a greenhouse wouldn’t be exciting but this is no ordinary greenhouse. It’s got energy-efficient features, it’s fully automated, and for the first time it provides the City the ability to grow any type of plant during any season. Raleigh’s parks, streets, and highways look so sharp because of the work of the Parks and Recreation Department’s horticulture and landscaping teams, who keep Raleigh looking beautiful through the careful stewardship of our trees, plants, and flowers.
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Neutrino particle traveling faster than light?

Every now and then, a scientific discovery delivers to us smug mortals a healthy kick in the head: reminding us that for all our bravado we still don’t know squat about how the universe really works!

Neutrino particle traveling faster than light? Two ways it could rewrite physics.

European scientists are shocked by an experiment that showed neutrino particles moving faster than light. The result, if confirmed, could challenge Einstein’s signature theory on relativity or point to a universe of more than four dimensions.

via Neutrino particle traveling faster than light? Two ways it could rewrite physics. – CSMonitor.com.

Smartphones and the world around them

Smart phones should not be new to me. Though I haven’t owned one until a few weeks ago when we bought LG Optimus V phones, I have of course been around them since the first iPhone came out. I would’ve thought that I would be well-familiar with them now but one insight into smartphones really surprised me.

Up until the smartphone, computers were by and large completely ignorant of their surroundings. For instance, old-school computers would not have noticed any effects at all during our recent 5.9-magnitude Virginia earthquake, but a smartphone could’ve! Smartphones can detect movement and motion and direction and position and orientation: a myriad of physical-space properties which were completely alien to most computers not very long ago. Some ambitious geek could write herself an app which aggregates the accelerometer readings of thousands of smartphones and uses that data to detect and pinpoint earthquakes, for instance. This is what fascinates me about my new smartphone: the potential it offers for physical-space interaction.
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San Diego blackout

Hassayampa switchyard

One of my enduring memories of visiting Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines twenty years ago was passing by the base’s power plant. There was row after row of semi-truck-size 250kw diesel generators, all roaring away and belching unfiltered black smoke into the thick tropical air. The civilian power source frequently suffered brownouts so the base had to generate its own electricity.

I never thought that Naval Base San Diego would suffer the same conditions, but yesterday millions of San Diego residents lost power when a problem at a switching station in Arizona sent the San Diego County’s electrical grid crashing down within minutes. Being an electricity geek with a fascination for electrical malfunctions, I had to find out more about this situation.

According to the Arizona Public Service press release:
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