What it’s like to see color for the first time.
Category: futurism – Page 1,469
Stephen Hawking: Greed, stupidity greatest threats to Earth
LOS ANGELES — Physicist Stephen Hawking says pollution, greed and stupidity are the greatest threats to Earth.
Hawking told Larry King Now on Saturday that he’s worried by overcrowding.
“We certainly have not become less greedy or less stupid,” Hawking said. “Six years ago I was worrying about pollution and overcrowding. They have gotten worse since then.”
Michael Gove says Britain needs to create its own DARPA
I thought they already had one.
Alasdair Gray, the acclaimed Glaswegian writer and artist, penned a phrase now engraved on a wall of the Scottish Parliament: “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.”
Michael Gove, the controversial Caledonian Brexiteer, journalist and Conservative politician, has in turn declared his intention to seek the leadership of the UK Tory Party and thus become the Prime Minister, to “reboot democracy” in a new “start-up nation”.
Delivering his leadership pitch today Gove said: “I want this country I love – and which has given me so much – to embrace this opportunity for change with optimism and conviction.”
Interesting Futurism Animation 32
RNA polymerase!
Prehistoric Cave Contains a Hidden, 6,000-Year-Old Telescope
The telescope was used by prehistoric people to predict the changing of the seasons.
Scientists Accidentally Create a Battery That Can Outlast Your Device
Scientists at University of California, Irving stumble across the secret to long-lasting rechargeable batteries.
Man of the “Future Shock”: Remembering Alvin Toffler
No matter how many books crowded my parents’ living room bookshelves in my childhood home in New York, two always sat at eye level right in the center: Henry Kissinger’s Years of Upheaval and Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock.
Americans Doubt Future Popularity of Virtual Lovers
Robots have shown us disappointment in their delivery v. promises in the past. Therefore, I understand why consumers are disenchanted.
A survey finds many Americans seem skeptical or uncertain of future predictions involving robots, artificial intelligence and virtual lovers.
How VR Gaming will Wake Us Up to our Fake Worlds
Human civilization has always been a virtual reality. At the onset of culture, which was propagated through the proto-media of cave painting, the talking drum, music, fetish art making, oral tradition and the like, Homo sapiens began a march into cultural virtual realities, a march that would span the entirety of the human enterprise. We don’t often think of cultures as virtual realities, but there is no more apt descriptor for our widely diverse sociological organizations and interpretations than the metaphor of the “virtual reality.” Indeed, the virtual reality metaphor encompasses the complete human project.
Virtual Reality researchers, Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson, write in their book Infinite Reality; “[Cave art] is likely the first animation technology”, where it provided an early means of what they refer to as “virtual travel”. You are in the cave, but the media in that cave, the dynamic-drawn, fire-illuminated art, represents the plains and animals outside—a completely different environment, one facing entirely the opposite direction, beyond the mouth of the cave. When surrounded by cave art, alive with movement from flickering torches, you are at once inside the cave itself whilst the media experience surrounding you encourages you to indulge in fantasy, and to mentally simulate an entirely different environment. Blascovich and Bailenson suggest that in terms of the evolution of media technology, this was the very first immersive VR. Both the room and helmet-sized VRs used in the present day are but a sophistication of this original form of media VR tech.