Society
I made up the term for myself because I like adventures, following angel and venture finance trends, building businesses, social entrepreneurship, and environmentally sustainable capitalism. But currently there is no word for capitalists who are socially and environmentally aware and who want to use capitalism as a force for good in the world. Pan-capitalism? Omni-capitalism? [...]
Universities (in the U.S.) are now going to be offering courses in such exciting Homeland Security topics as: how to hunt witches, how to protect against witch spells, and ….oops, that was in the McCarthy era. The new courses include Homeland (In)Security and the State, Jihad and the End of the World, and Urban Security [...]
This looks like an interesting energy project being opened in Toronto. Enwave Systems has built a three pipe system that pulls low-temperature water from the bottom of the lake Ontario, extracts the coldness from the water (the process is not mentioned), and then puts the water into the drinking supply. I would be interested to [...]
It’s Deja vu all over again. Renewable energy seems to be the topic of the day. Some odd combination of forces are driving interest in renewable energies (many of the things that I discussed in my previous posting on bioproducts). The web is cluttered with noise about bioproducts, solar energy, and other non-petroleum based energy [...]
Everything old is new again. It’s all about timing. These are only two of a few choice phrases that may describe something that is afoot here in British Columbia. Some major global, national, and provincial forces are in play that are driving the development of a new (to us) association that may be created in [...]
I was laughing so hard, my stomach hurt and I was in tears. I highly recommend this movie being hosted at Atom Films. CNET has written an article on the fact that this film has now received 10.4 million unique visitors in July – more than three times the number that visited Kerry’s and Bush’s [...]
Dan Gillmor points out in this posting a great little Flash animation developed by the ACLU that shows a customer trying to buy a pizza but the pizza company is connected to a master database containing the client’s work and home addresses, recent purchases, credit record, and health insurance. Bizarre and chilling all at once.
Mark Morford strikes again with his brilliant take on the circus show that is about to be played out in the U.S.: QUOTE There is a sense of lawlessness, of desperation, among the Republican party right now. It is no longer a question of simply which party will run the show or which platform will [...]
Those crazy Nigerians are really making the news today. In this BBC report, Nigerians are apparently scared to answer their mobile phones for fear of dying immediately. A half-formed thought about giving Star Trek Communicators to extremely superstitious people from another planet comes to mind. Can you say global culture clash?
This article on the Science & Consciousness review discusses the fact that brains appear to be persistent and consistent but their actual physical molecules are recycling in days, hours, and minutes. This makes me think of Steven Johnson’s excellent book Emergence: The Connected Lives Of Ants Brains Cities And Software wherein he discusses the life [...]
Richard Smalley recently testified to the U.S. Senate on how how nanotechnologies and distributed power grids are the future of power.
Here is a wonderful article on Laurance Rockefeller, philanthropist, philosopher, mediator, venture capitalist, conservationist. It is inspiring to say the least.
Here are some quotes that Jeff Harrow of The Harrow Group found: “If I were just setting out today to make that drive to the West Coast to start a new business, I would be looking at biotechnology and nanotechnology.” Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com From the May 14, 2004 Nanotech Insider http://www.forbesinc.com/newsletters/nanotech/ – Michael [...]
I love this article on Bob Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace, who along with others is competing in the X Prize competition for $10 million to build a private space ship. The space station will cost approximately $200 MILLION when it’s completed, versus the current International Space Station which has cost $50 BILLION – 250x more. [...]
Like we need any more evidence that the U.S. has turned into a police state, along comes this article about an innocent Nepalese man who has been in solitary confinement for two years in BROOKLYN, with no trials, no charges, and who has been kept in a 6×9′ cell with the lights on 24 hours [...]
I’m attracted to this weird piece for so many reasons. It contains social networking, human connection, breach of trust, and one man’s story about how he is managing to handle (or not handle?) his life. It is the story of a man named Odin Soli who created an online persona named Layne Johnson and wrote [...]
If you were having a baby and the test showed that the baby would have Down’s Syndrome, Tay-Sachs, deformed limbs, a cleft plate, deafness, dwarfism, skin disease, or any of a host of other known diseases, would you still have the child?
(Link to the original story in the New York Times. Subscription required but worth it.)
The author of this blog-post comments on how this seems intuitively sensible, which I agree with. The more people I meet, the more different they are, the wider their world-views, and the more we interact, the more I feel that I can think “between the cracks” of the different knowledge domains. So the lesson here [...]
Here is a somewhat interesting article on the small trend of authors opening up their manuscripts to collective writing and editing. Having just worked collaboratively with my colleague for the past three weeks using the great product called SubEthaEdit, I can say that this model REALLY needs to develop. I mean that in two ways: [...]
If you have not read anything about Burning Man, the anarchist art and culture festival held every year in the desert of Nevada, then you have been living under a rock. Here is a short but interesting article on the ongoing evolution of the Burning Man urban planning methodology. Picture building a city for 30-40,000 [...]
Sex drives all new technologies: Super-8 films, Videos, DVDs, the web. Well, now it’s time for orgasm-inducing porn on your…phone. According to this article, Europeans are building, building, building (pant) towards a climactic $1.5B worth of soft and hard-core porn purchases over their phones. A few lessons come to mind: • Selling sex is almost [...]
This is a great article from SF Gate on a whitewater rafting and paddling park that has just been built in Reno. And here is the photo gallery.
Along with a friend, I recently entered a business plan in the Telus New Ventures BC competition. My plan was about a service where every six months a person would get an updated report on their risk factors as more information was known. I pulled the plan because I do not have the contacts or [...]
This is a wonderful article from the SF Gate website about a man named Dick Grace. From football captain to Marine Captain, to VP of Smith Barney Investments, and now a reformed alcoholic and Buddhist who owns a niche Cabernet Sauvignon winery and spends his time, money, and effort raising money for kids around the [...]
I have been seeing a lot more of these inane new products arriving on the market. You know the ones, disposable dish washing pads (my old cloths have been working fine for YEARS), and now disposable toilet cleaning units. Clean it once and then toss it into the landfill. This was really starting to grate [...]
Here is the mission statement of Happy Planet Foods. I found this on their Abundant C drink and I smiled all the way through as I read it. If only all mission statements could be so human: Our mission is to astonish your taste buds, nourish your body, unite you with the best sources of [...]
Nice to see that people are focusing on the right spot here. Telecom regulations were set up to deal with the fact that telecoms were oligopolies with high capital and infrastructure costs. Now that this will no longer be the case with VoIP and voice/data convergence, some U.S. lawmakers are talking about scrapping telecom regulation [...]
Anybody with any interest in robotics, robo-ethics, brain augmentation, or why Sony’s great little bipedal doll is sitting in vast warehouses rather than selling like hotcakes should read this article about the Robo-Ethics Symposium being held in San Remo on the Italian Riviera. And I also had no idea that Alfred Nobel, father of the [...]
Here is an interesting cover story from the IEEE “Spectrum Online” website that covers the retina-scanning technology which is used to display images by beaming them directly onto the retina rather than using a screen in front of the viewer. Expect to see a lot more of this very soon. Personal, floating HDTV at a [...]
Here is a cool article from the S.F. Gate website on a program called Direct Access which provides housing in combination with 24×7 medical and counselling staff in order to house “the unhouseable” in San Francisco. It’s working, and it’s cost-effective. Locally of course, we have the Portland Hotel Society who have been serving that [...]
