|
Announcements
See Coming
Events for conferences, seminars, and salons we recommend.
Accelerating
Change 2005 Was Amazing!
 [John
Smart] What an event! We sold out all 370 seats, and a
number of major media were in attendance. AC2005 was by far the
most insightful, productive and fun gathering of practical change
agents we've had yet. See the website for some
of the post-conference testimonials.
Because of our
generous sponsors we tripled sponsorship income this year, allowing
us to continue to offer the Accelerating Change Conference (ACC)
to our community at one-third to one-fifth the price of other world-class
technology futures events (Pop! Tech, Emerging Technologies, DEMO,
etc.). We will do our best to continue low-cost innovation going
forward, as we believe one of the most important features of ACC
is that it maximizes access and creates community for all those
passionately interested in better understanding and guiding accelerating
technological change. We seek to ensure a truly multidisciplinary
dialog on the extraordinary future we are creating together.
DVDs will be
available soon, and podcasts of all the speakers will be at our
media partner IT
Conversations starting October 6th, available for immediate
download at only $24.99 for the entire set, or you can get them
free at a rate of one per week. There were so many great new ideas
expressed over the two and a half days that it makes sense to download
and listen to them all at your own leisure over the next several
months. If you want to support our community we urge you to buy
the set and forward copies of your favorite audio files your friends.
Director's
Corner
[Jim
Turner] “The Only Constant in the Universe is Change”
— Spock, Star Trek. And, change, like technology’s
advances, is accelerating, not only in the world, but also here
at the Acceleration Studies Foundation. At the recent Accelerating
Change 2005 Conference, I had the opportunity to introduce
myself as the new Executive Director of the ASF, tasked with filling
the shoes of the inimitable Iveta Brigis who has
worked with John and Jerry to bring the organization to the place
it is today.
Without talking
about myself too much, I have been managing events and businesses,
both for-profit and non-profit, for over ten years. And, as I shared
with the AC2005 Conference audience, I have never experienced
the level of energy and excitement in a venue as I had the opportunity
to experience at that show. The sheer level of engagement that the
attendees and supporters of the ASF have is amazing to me and is
harbinger of the great things that we can do as a community. I am
honored that the ASF has asked me to help them and I am looking
forward to working with all of you to better understand the future
that technological change will bring. More
Call
to Action
Volunteer
for ASF at Robonexus –
October 6 – 9. [JT] The ASF is seeking
volunteers to represent us at Robonexus, the leading U.S. general
purpose robotics conference, 10am - 5pm, Friday, October 7 - Sunday,
October 9 at the San Jose Convention Center. You will be asked to
be at the ASF table on the exhibit hall for a shift or shifts totaling
a minimum of 6 hours, speak to people about the ASF Future Salons,
the Accelerating Change Conference, podcasts on itconversations.com
and futureconversations.com, and sell DVDs of our past conferences.
A basic set-up and breakdown may also be required for the first
and last shifts. ASF President John Smart will be attending, and
we are depending on our network of supporters to be our eyes and
ears at this key community event. In return you will receive an
exhibitor pass to the event.
Seeking
Dreamweaver Expert Users. If you are skilled in Dreamweaver
and would like to help us in our efforts to communicate to the community,
we are looking for you. The ASF is seeking a volunteer who can help
bolster our web page management. We are seeking somebody who is
already skilled in the use of Dreamweaver and has 4-8 hours a week
for at least six months to contribute to this very important purpose.
Please contact jimturner@accelerating.org
if you are interested in lending your time and talents to either
of these items.
Best
New Robot Ideas — AC2005 Roomba Contest Winners
  [JS]
Our ingenious AC2005 attendees gave us seventy nine fascinating
entries for useful new robots at Accelerating Change 2005.
The top five each won a free Roomba Discovery, and there were ten
honorable mentions. Check out the Package Acceptance Bot, the SnowBot,
the Skimba, the Greenba, the Car Wash Bot, the Laundry Bot, and
our other picks for the
top fifteen ideas for commercial or consumer robotics. All of
these have been posted to the reputation-driven ideas site, ShouldExist.org,
as well as emailed
to Colin Angle, Rodney Brooks, and Helen
Greiner at iRobot,
our generous sponsors of this year's contest.
Thanks to Sibley
Verbeck, Patrick Kenny, Paul Clarke, Antoine van de Ven, Raymond
Blackwood, Frank Paynter, Steve Harris, Keith Spencer, John Smart,
Lisa Tansey, Alan Hromas, Jim Pinto, Todd Logan, Jonathan Beard,
and Brad Templeton for submitting these great ideas
to the public domain. Thanks also to those whose clever ideas didn't
make our subjective cut this year. Let's hope we see all these cool
new products happen soon!
Washington
DC Future Salon Started
Two forward-thinking beltway residents, Ben Goertzel
and Bruce Klein have convened the DC Future Salon
and scheduled their first general meeting for October 5th, 7:30pm.
You can sign up on their Yahoo
group here to join online discussions and to receive emails
about coming speakers and topics. To learn more about ASF's growing
community of monthly salons, or to start your own, check out our
Future Salon
Network page.
Second
Life Community Convention
 Second
Life Community Convention, New York, NY, October
8-9
[Jerry
Paffendorf] Next Saturday and Sunday will see the first
ever Second Life Community
Convention, starting with a party on Oct 8 and moving to the
New York Law School for a full
day of sessions on the 9th (full
agenda here) This is the first significant real life gathering
of Second Life residents and users, Linden Lab employees, and a
wide variety of people otherwise interested in the SL platform and
the emerging Metaverse
— the social, media-rich, 3D Web that’s bringing together
video game interfaces, high-end 3D creation tools, collaborative
social software, and Google Earth-style mapspace.
The Acceleration
Studies Foundation is an organizing sponsor of this event, and the
ASF's Community Director, Jerry Paffendorf, will
be delivering the opening and closing remarks. Presenters include
new games journalist Mark
Wallace, co-author of the upcoming Only
A Game: Online Worlds and the Virtual Journalist Who Knew Too Much
(O’Reilly, 2006); Accelerating
Change 2005 speakers and Linden Lab CEO and VP of Product Development,
respectively, Philip
Rosedale and Cory
Ondrejka; and a number of entrepreneurial Second Life
residents, including Guni Greenstein, the co-founder
of ANSHECHUNG.COM; Fizik
Baskerville of Avalon,
Nephilaine Protagonist of Pixel
Dolls and others at work on a variety of projects, from games
to philanthropy. The convention will also have an inworld component
as described in a recent Boing
Boing post, so join us in Second Life if you can’t make
it to New York. Also check out the State
of Play Conference on law, videogames, and virtual worlds, occurring
back-to-back with the SLCC.
| Quotography
“The
Singularity [human-surpassing machine intelligence] is a frightening
prospect for humanity. I assume that we will somehow dodge
it or finesse it in reality. One way to do that is to warn
about it early and begin to build in correctives.” —
Stewart
Brand
"Nature is clearly intent on making humans
successful." — Buckminster
Fuller
"Do
the best you can, with what you have, where you are."
— Theodore
Roosevelt |
|
Resources
and Tools
A
Practical Wearable Computer: How to Make Your Own Tummy PC,
John Smart, 2005
  [JS]
Have you ever wanted to frequently review and update your agenda
or capture great ideas as soon as you hear or think of them? Ever
wanted to browse the web from your waist? Would you be willing to
wear a computer if it would double your daily productivity? Read
this brief article if you'd like consider taking the Tummy PC plunge.
Be warned...
24/7 access to your CPU can be addictive!
The
Acceleration Story in Five Spaces
ATimes
covers world news and insight in five "spaces," giving
one to three briefs in each space. The story of accelerating change,
the most fascinating story of our time, can be told as a story of
movement from outer, to human, to inner, to cyber, and ultimately,
to hyper space, the world beyond the present. Each of these deserves
understanding for a multidisciplinary perspective on the future:
Outer
Space (the world around us: science, the natural
and built environment, universal systems theory)
Human
Space (the human world: our bodies, behavior, minds,
human systems theory)
Inner
Space (the world below: energy, small tech, computer
"bodies", inner systems theory)
Cyber
Space (the virtual world: computer "behavior",
computer "minds", cyber systems theory)
Hyper
Space (the world beyond: new paradigms, phase transitions,
hyperphysics, hyper systems theory)
If
you have important stories to share with our 3,200 acceleration-aware
readers, we'd love to hear from you
Outer
Space
science (biology, chemistry, geology, physics, research),
the natural and built environment, universal systems theory (developmental
physics, hierarchical substrates)
Space
"Google
Confirms Free San Francisco Wi-Fi Plans," Om Malik, September
30, 2005
"Google-NASA
Partnership Rockets Web Debate," CNET News.com,
September 29, 2005
 [Commentary
by Jerry Paffendorf] Google has announced plans
to build a 1 million-square-foot campus at the NASA Ames Research
Center near their Mountain View, CA headquarters. Cooperative research
with NASA might include large-scale data management, nanotechnology,
massively distributed computing and the entrepreneurial space industry.
In the
CNET article’s comments, Andrew King wonders:
“Maybe with all of NASA's pictures of space, Google will create
something similar to Google Earth
(say, Google Universe) that will allow us to explore space just
like Google Earth lets us do for, well, earth.” It's also
clear that this deal provides a large amount of inexpensive office
space close to the Googleplex.
This Google-NASA
news comes on the heels of Om Malik's GoogleNet
speculation, the possibility that Google may be amassing nationwide
optical fiber network capacity on which it could launch free national
Wi-Fi using Google Secure Access. Their recent bid to offer San
Francisco residents free 300 kbps always on access to the web will
clearly make it a test bed for Google's location-based services
and apps. Csven Concord notes
this passage from a recent Business 2.0 article: "Google's
interest in Feeva [free broadband Internet service provider] likely
stems from the startup's proprietary technology, which can determine
the location of every Wi-Fi user and would allow Google to serve
up [local] advertising and maps based on real-time data."
As the mid-20th
century saw the US and Soviet Union in a space race for the moon
and stars, the early 21st century sees Google, Microsoft and others
in a search race for the earth and bits. Thanks to Alvis
Brigis for the link.
Human
Space
bodies (biology, health, neuroscience), behavior (business,
education, foresight, governance, innovation, pre-digital technology,
society), minds (psychology, spirituality), human systems theory (ecological
psychology, memetics) Conversational
User Interface
Smart
Talk: Speech-enabled apps deliver bottom-line benefits, Computerworld,
Robert Mitchell, August 22 2005.
 [JS]
Developing a good VUI (voice user interface) is key to
the success of any automated speech recognition (ASR) system. It
is exciting to realize that many of today's second generation ASR
call centers, made by companies like TuVox
(privately held) in Cupertino, CA, and InterVoice
(INTV) in Dallas, TX, are already twice as fast, for many types
of activities, than the human operators they are replacing. Companies
like NetFlix have recently installed the TuVox system to handle
massive increases in their call volumes. Datamonitor says that prices
in this market have dropped 30% over the last five years, and open
platforms (VoiceXML, Speech App Language Tags) have spurred competition.
A number of
prebuilt VUI and ASR modules have emerged using these open protocols,
making it easier than ever before to set up a system, but there
still aren't any good middleware/abstraction layer tools to help
with tuning the VUI system for local dialects and application-specific
vocabulary. Good tuning remains an art for experts, and can easily
double usage rates and customer satisfaction. Hopefully IBM, Microsoft,
or another systems integrator will soon introduce tools that make
tuning these systems a lot easier. If you'd like to know more, here's
a good
book on VUI design. Step by step we are building all the pieces
we need for a profoundly empowering conversational user interface
(CUI) for all our human-computer interactions. Thanks to Phil
Nelson.
Global
Development
Clinton
Global Initiative Conference, New York City, Sept 15-17, 2005
 [JS]
Occuring the same weekend as Accelerating
Change 2005, CGI was three days of panels and sessions
designed to spur government-business cooperation to solve some of
the world's hardest problems. The four primary subjects were Poverty;
Governance, Enterprise, and Investment; Climate Change; and Religion,
Conflict, and Reconciliation. Clinton invited 750 distinguished
political, business, and thought leaders, and a goal was set to
raise $1 billion for various programs, which was exceeded with 1.25
billion in commitments. Session
transcripts can be found here, and are a recommended skim. The
level of intelligence and compassion is inspiring. In addition to
financial contributions some specific
development commitments were announced at the event, and Clinton
stated that those who don't do what they promise won't be invited
back next year. Like the Carter
Center, the CGI is an object lesson in postpresidential power.
Let's hope the younger Bush is inspired to do the same in his retirement
as well.
Inner
Space
energy, small tech (nanoengineering, miniaturization),
computer "bodies" (automation, computer hardware, nanotech,
robotics), inner systems theory (acceleration, efficiency, miniaturization,
reductionism)
Sterling
Parabolic Solar
Solar
Power's New Hot Spot, Business Week,
Otis Port, August 2005
World's
Largest Solar Installation to Use Stirling Energy Technology,
Pure Energy Systems News, Sterling Allan, August 10, 2005
 [JS]
Another stunning advance in inner space technologies. Stirling
Energy Systems (SES) has signed an agreement with Edison International
to create a 500 megawatt (MW) third generation solar array consisting
of 20,000 parabolic dishes in the Mojave desert of California. The
previously most ambitious development plan was for the 12 MW Solarpark
Gut Erlasse near Arnstein, Germany. This deal would more than double
the 354 MW of solar power that SoCal Edison tapped in 2004, and
add 20% to its total renewable energy sources, at a competitive
price that is being kept confidential yet doesn't need any state
subsidy. In one swoop it would equal almost half the total wind
power (1,021 MW) presently being tapped by SCE. The deal should
bring in over $90 million a year for Stirling Energy once they are
operating a full 500 MW facility (they will ramp up to this between
now and 2011). The basic unit of the SES array is a 37-foot sun-tracking
parabolic mirror driving a power conversion unit (PCU) that is an
advanced Stirling hot air engine (picture left). What a beautiful
vindication of Stirling
engine (wikipedia) technology, which has been around for over
200 years and has captured the attention of many an inventor. You
may recall Dean Kamen trying to combine them with
Segways back in 2003 for third world cooking and clean water production.
 These
new Stirling dishes are more than twice as energy efficient and
significantly more environmentally friendly in production than photovoltaics.
It will be interesting to see which has a higher total cost of operation
(TCO), as photovoltaics are very expensive to make and have a short
lifespan of six to ten years, while Stirling engines need lubrication
on the moving parts, and only high tech approaches (gas lubricants,
vacuums, free piston designs, etc.) can minimize wear. Perhaps SES
has come up with a new low-friction design. Each dish generates
25 kilowatts of power (enough for a single energy-efficient home,
conveniently), and a 40 unit array is capable of 1 megawatt of output.
The prototype six-dish array has already had 26,000 hours of testing
at Sandia National Labs in
Albequerque, NM (see picture right, note the humans for scale).
Business
Week notes that with mass production, these high tech parabolics
could be slashed to a cost as low as $50,000 apiece. In Japan, homeowners
already install subsidized $20,000 solar systems that are less than
half as effective. Rural environments and even some urban homes
in the U.S. could handle a 37-foot mirror, and combined with highly
efficient vacuum flywheels today (and eventually, fuel cells), peak
energy during sunny periods could be stored and used throughout
the year.
Here's
what I considered the most inspiring quote, again from the Business
Week article: "Ultimately, Stirling dish farms with a
total area of 100 miles square could replace all the coal now
burned to generate electricity in the entire U.S. — if
some dishes get coupled to systems that can store solar energy for
use after sunset, such as massive flywheels and fuel cells."
We live on an amazingly energy-abundant planet. I remember learning
in high school that there is enough solar energy hitting our planet
to launch all the humans on it into escape velocity every ten minutes.
It is becoming increasingly clear to me that in coming decades we'll
only need to capture a small amount of that energy with highly efficient
and increasingly distributed solar systems to supply all the energy
that our species needs, for as long as we remain in our slow and
energy-inefficient biological forms. Thanks
to Iveta Brigis for the link.
Nanotech
Strong,
Transparent, Multifunctional, Carbon Nanotube Sheets, Science,
Vol 309, 1215-1219, Aug 19 2005
Ribbons,
Sheets, and the Nanofuture, WorldChanging, Jamais Cascio,
August 19 2005
 [JS]
Ray Baughman, Mei Zhang, Shaoli Fang and four others at
the the U of Texas at Dallas (UTD) NanoTech Institute and Ken
Atkinson at C.S.I.R.O. in Australia have developed a way
to weave long carbon nanotubes into flat ribbons. This follows on
a November 2004 advance where they downsized to the nanoscale methods
used to spin wool and other fibers to produce yarns made from carbon
nanotubes. The picture to the right (one of two videos available
here) shows a blue-gloved hand steadily pulling a meter long
nanoribbon out of the weaver much faster than you think should be
possible.
This
is a very exciting advance that will certainly lead to a host of
new nanoapplications, from new flexible organic LED (FOLED) displays,
transparent heaters for windows, low-noise sensors, artificial muscles,
and new structural applicationsn for nanosheets that are stronger
than steel, Mylar, and Kapton at the same weight. Starting from
chemically-grown vertically-aligned ultra-long nanotubes, this new
system can weave defect-free ribbon at up to seven meters per minute
(by comparison, commercial cotton weaving occurs at 20 meters/minute).
Nanotubes and nanosheets have such desirable structural and electrical
properties that we've barely begun to scratch the nanosurface of
their possible applications. "Rarely is a processing advance
so elegantly simple that rapid commercialization seems possible,
and rarely does such an advance so quickly enable diverse application
demonstrations," said Dr. Baughman. As Cascio notes there are
still a number of unanswered questions about environmental safety
(stray nanoparticles can kill fish, for example). But with appropriate
assessment and development we can expect major new benefits from
the nanosheet future.
Cyber
Space
computer "behavior"
(co-evolution, automation, symbiosis), computer "minds"
(computer software, simulation), cyber systems theory (holism, information,
intelligence, interdependence, immunity)
Virtual
Worlds/Active Video Games
 Revolution
Controller Revealed, 1up.com, Mark McDonald, September
15, 2005
[JP]
A video is worth 10,000 words, so check out this demo
trailer unveiling Nintendo’s new active video game controller
for their 2006 Revolution console. 1up.com describes the controller
this way: “Two small sensors placed near the TV and a chip
inside the controller track its position and orientation, allowing
the player to manipulate the action on screen by physically moving
the controller itself. For example, you could slash an in-game sword
by actually swinging the controller from side to side, turn a race
car just by twisting your wrist, or aim your gun in a shooter by
pointing the controller where you want to fire.” This is Nintendo's
attempt to create something entirely different and more natural
than Sony and Microsoft with their next gen console systems.
Nintendo’s
Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Mario Brothers,
Zelda, Donkey Kong, Pikmin, and other classic games) explains
the design philosophy: "We want a system that... anyone, regardless
of age or gender, can pick up and play. [Something with a] gameplay
style that people who have never played games can pick up and not
be intimidated by." That's exactly what will be needed in coming
years to bring us all intuitively into the Metaverse.
It will be interesting
to watch the Revolution compare to upgraded abilities of the Sony
EyeToy, which also allows movement-based input via a hands-free
camera set-up, with additional mixed-reality features like a virtual
bluescreen. If the Revolution offers greater movement precision
in world than the Eye Toy, it will have a valuable place in the
emerging world of Active Video Games, which can provide a major
workout during game play. EyeToy creator Richard Marks
spoke about new interfaces at Accelerating Change 2004,
a podcast of which is available
here via IT Conversations.
Hyper
Space
new paradigms (including evolutionary development),
phase transitions, hyperphysics (black holes, multiverse, string
theory, supersymmetry), hyper systems theory (computational limits,
emergence, phase transitions, technological singularity hypothesis,
developmental singularity hypothesis)
Theories
of Change
Evolution
Wars: Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design, Time, Claudia
Wallis, 8.15.2005
 [JS]
[2008 Note: At the time that I originally wrote this, I was still
under the assumption that we could call nonreligious (fully naturalistic)
theories of universal development or self-organization "intelligent
design." Soon after however, I came to realize that this field
had been so damaged by activities of the religious ID folks that
the use of this term must be abandoned. Just as "sociobiology"
had to resurface as "evolutionary psychology", so too
any respectable naturalistic theories of universal development can
no longer use the phrase "intelligent design". To do so
is simply counterproductive to good scholarship. Reedited piece
follows.]
While
a well-written piece, Wallis perpetuates the twin misconceptions
that any models of universal change which propose some form of universal
purpose or destiny must be non-Darwinian, and that all such models
should considered as either creationism or intelligent design (ID).
This is a shame, because models of universal development can include
Darwinian evolution as the central mechanism of change. Furthermore,
there are some scholars in the ID community (Michael Denton
comes to mind) whose philosophies of universal change (speculative
and untested theories) are not religiously motivated, but rather
seek to expose and address the limitations of conventional Darwinism
as a theory of all macroscopic change (in prebiological, biological,
and postbiological systems).
[2008
Note: Unfortunately, ID groups like the Discovery Institute have
in recent years pursued an odious agenda that seeks to get ID religious
philosophy taught as "science" in the classroom, and have
argued legal briefs that ID philosophy deserves "equal time"
with science in the classroom. Such actions have unfortunately irreparably
tainted the ID community and phrase as unscientific, even though
it didn't start out with this association. Gerry Wheeler,
Executive Director of the National
Science Teachers Association calls the ID movement "pseudoscience,"
which seems a necessary judgment today, because a significant fraction
of ID is now clearly driven by religious rather than scientific
motives.
To
do my little part to attempt to address Wallis's misconceptions,
I wrote the following letter to the editor of Time:
“Evolution
Wars” unfortunately missed not only the full range of perspectives
in intelligent design [note: naturalistic scholars in universal
development should no longer use this phrase, as it has now become
inextricably identified with religious and religio-political actors],
but also some of the best reasons why Darwinism is an incomplete
model of biological change. The new theory of evo-devo, or evolutionary
developmental biology, as explained by such scientists as Simon
Conway Morris, Rudolf Raff, F.
John Odling-Smee and Brian K. Hall, helps
us understand that long-range processes of both evolution and development
are always at work in living systems. Darwinists understand long-range
evolutionary processes, but too many still assume that evolution
is the only long-range process of change working in any complex
system. Curiously, it is developmental cosmologists such as Lee
Smolin, Max Tegmark, and Martin
Rees, who are making the most progress in this area, at
present. They note that the “genes” of our universe
(its special constants, laws, and initial conditions) appear finely
tuned for the production of life, and perhaps even for accelerating
intelligence (Carl Sagan’s “Cosmic
Calendar”).
 In
the simplest and most biological of these cosmological models, our
universe’s genes self-organized, through many successive cycles
in the multiverse, to produce the life-friendly and intelligence-friendly
universe we live in today. This theory of intelligent self-organized
design proposes that, analogous to living ecosystems, our universe's
"genes, organisms, and environment" encode deep developmental
intelligence on a macroscopic scale, while they use primarily evolutionary
and chaotic mechanisms to unfold that intelligence on the scale
that we normally observe it. Evo-devo, whether applied to biology
or the universe, makes clear the shortcomings of evolution-only
models of change and does so without the need to posit any self-aware,
embodied designer that is distinct from the universe itself. Truth
is often stranger than we imagine."
Fun
We
all deserve a little fun every day. Send your entries for the next
ATimes!
Film
Grizzly Man,
Werner Herzog, 2005
 [JS]
If you want a slice of revelatory reality, I recommend Werner
Herzog's sensitive documentary about Timothy Treadwell,
a man obsessed with living with, loving, understanding, and (from
his perspective as a self-declared guardian) "protecting"
the Grizzlies of Alaska. Herzog documents Treadwell's frenetic life
and sudden death, made all the more tragic as his on-again, off-again
girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, died with him. For
all of Timothy's quirks and personal growth challenges (and his
isolation and constant self-filming made his character surprisingly
transparent), I came away convinced that we can do this
kind of inter-species cohabitation, but it requires some pretty
smart technology. If only Tim had been willing to carry a heavy-duty
Taser
strapped to his waist, he would very likely still be alive today,
engaging in fresh new antics and helping us all better understand
the limits and benefits of better human-animal communication in
the wild.
Liberator personalities
often have personal and public demons, and perhaps nowhere was this
more obvious than Treadwell's antipathy toward the U.S. Forest Service.
The two simple rules the USFS required that he chose not to follow,
1) moving his camp 1 mile every seven days, and 2) staying 100 yards
away from the Grizzlies, seemed entirely reasonable, and wouldn't
have interfered with him becoming the Jane Goodall
of Grizzlies. There was ample room for him to reach a win-win solution
here, but the harsh reality is that it would have involved him valuing
both his own life and that of his fellow humans a bit more, and
also being willing to occasionally inflict some pain, in self-defense
only, on his beloved Grizzlies should they try to attack him. Perhaps
these lessons can be learned if anyone else comes forward to take
his place, as I expect someone eventually will. If
you like this cross-species communication movie you might also enjoy
Passion In the
Desert, 1998, about a stranded soldier who tries to win
the heart of a leopard (I won't spoil it, see it if you want an
exploration of the nature and limits of the self).
 Scent
of a Robot,
Pete Miser, UV/Phactory, 2005
Is
your job or life getting kind of robotic? Feeling too automated
for your own good? Prescribe yourself a dose of Miser's self-realization
rap therapy [Quicktime, 3:48 in length]. Unplug. Chill. Remix! Thanks
to Alex Kawas.
Call
for Submissions
ASF
is always seeking interesting submissions for our Accelerating
Times (AT) web publication. AT is a "free
and priceless" monthly newsletter covering scientific, technological,
business, policy, and social dialogs in accelerating change. Anyone
may submit scan hits, mini-articles, pictures, artwork, quotes and
questions to mail(at)accelerating.org.
Accepted work will appear, fully credited, in future issues. Also
please submit your feedback on Accelerating Times articles
to the Future Salon
Weblog, beneath each article as posted. Thanks! |
