Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Please don’t pay any attention to this posting. It is not for you… *

This graph presents indisputable fact: It compares US dollar growth as reported by the US government and Bitcoin growth (for all time), extrapolated by pure math.

I wish that this would put to bed the fake news, conspiracy theories, and “nothing backs it” nonsense. Unfortunately, seismic shifts in architecture or process take time for society to understand and accept. Early adopters will be the fortunate buckos. Timid or clueless denizens will complain bitterly about the unfair advantage of those who wise up before it hits a 6 figure exchange rate. Eventually, comparisons with legacy currencies will be utterly meaningless. It will become the currency. It will be the gold-pressed latinum of universal recognition and intrinsic value.

15 years from now, some will look back on our era and claim that the Winkelvoss twins were lucky. Risk, patience and an understanding of economics is not ‘luck’. They have the gift of prescience.

Bitcoin cannot be manufactured. Despite it being open-source and easily copied, it is very unlikely to be displaced by an altcoin or ICO. The fact that there will never be more than 21 million original bitcoin presents incredible opportunity to the frugal and wise—for a short time.

* Hopefully, few people will heed the siren call. Investing is Bitcoin might be good for you, but it is bad for the community. How so?! The more that individuals or institutions hoard, speculate or invest in Bitcoin—as opposed to driving adoption by actually using it—the longer it will take to gain traction as a functional payment instrument, or as the money itself.

So, this article is not for you. Move along. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

Philip Raymond sits on Lifeboat’s New Money Systems board. He co-chairs CRYPSA, hosts the Bitcoin Event, publishes Wild Duck and is keynote speaker at global Cryptocurrency Conferences. Book a presentation or consulting engagement.

Credit: (title & image): Peter Bergstrom
Did you catch the omage to both Star Trek and Star Wars? Look again

The power of the cloud, artificial intelligence, and machine learning is making smart cities and data-based Location of Things navigation a reality. Join the Principal Product Manager for Microsoft Azure Maps and others and learn how advanced location technology will revolutionize everything from autonomous cars to connected cities. Don’t miss this VB Live event!

Register here for free.

Location data is the foundation of technology: It’s what binds a device and a user, a user and the environment they’re in. And as location data moves to the cloud and gets smarter, powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, the number of potential applications for smart location data is exploding, says Chris Pendleton, Principal PM for Azure Maps. We’re on the threshold of creating a smarter society, built on the hundreds of millions of connected devices that together create The Location of Things.

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Cancer cells, by definition, are abnormal cells that divide with abandon and have the potential to spread throughout and wreak havoc on your vital organs and tissues. But what if you could tell those same troublesome cells to stop misbehaving? Israeli scientists think they’ve found a way to do just that.

A group of researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, led by Professor Varda Shoshan-Barmatz, PhD, have developed a molecule that prevents cancer cells from growing and turns them into normal, non-cancerous cells. This unique approach is based on siRNA (small interfering ribonucleic acid), a molecule that turns off a protein, VDAC1, that helps get energy to malignant cells. By targeting VDAC1, Shoshan-Barmatz and her team have essentially figured out how to make cancer cells start acting like regular ones.

So far, in vitro and mice models have suggested that this treatment might be effective for lung cancer, triple negative breast cancer, and glioblastoma (the type of brain tumor that John McCain is currently battling). But the applications might be even broader, and similar treatments might be one day used to combat an even wider variety of cancers.

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If someone tells you to go suck an egg, you might want to think twice about it if you live on the east coast. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last month that a Salmonella outbreak affecting hundreds of millions of eggs had been traced back to a farm in Hyde County, North Carolina. Public health officials have traced consumers’ illnesses in nine different states to the outbreak. Last week, the CDC released a map showing the outbreak’s spread.

Rose Acre Farms, the company responsible for the outbreak, distributes eggs all over the US, to both grocery stores and restaurants. As a result of contamination on the North Carolina farm, over 206 million eggs were exposed to Salmonella braenderup, a bacteria that causes severe diarrhea. The outbreak began in mid-April and appears to be slowing down, but in a multi-state outbreak like this, officials at the CDC may not hear about people getting sick right away. Therefore, the data on the case continues to evolve as reports roll in. The most recent numbers count 35 illnesses, 11 hospitalizations, and no deaths. Here’s a map of the outbreak’s current extent:

Article continues below.

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A new article out by Vicki Larson at the Marin Independent Journal that explores some #transhumanism.

I visited my parents’ grave on Mother’s Day, as I have every year since my mom died in 2010. I’ll be back on the 23rd, the fifth anniversary of my dad’s death.

I was fortunate to be able to tell them how much I loved them and appreciated everything they did for me before they died, so there are no regrets, nothing left unsaid. I miss them. A lot. But would I want to bring them back to life?

They’d no doubt be delighted to see the wonderful young men their only grandchildren have become. And I think they’d be pretty happy to know that I actually did get around to writing a book as I promised them I would as a teen, when I begged them to let me travel cross-country with friends to gather “research” for my Great American Novel instead of spending the summer working.

Continue reading “Facing a future of ethical dilemmas” | >

The Astana Global Challenge Summit 2018 will host a series of panels and talks on longevity and rejuvenation.

As it has every year since 2008, the Astana Economic Forum (AEF) is about to take place in Astana, Kazakhstan. AEF, now also known as the Global Challenges Summit (GCS), is an international and regional non-profit platform for public discourse on topics such as economics, globalization, security, global risks, energy efficiency, innovation, and, more generally, matters concerning the future of our world and society. It was jointly created by the Eurasian Economic Club of Scientists Association and the Kazakhstan government back in 2008, and over the years, it has hosted innumerable talks and presentations by scientists, economists, world leaders, entrepreneurs, Nobel laureates, and other key people.

In our rapidly changing world, where we sometimes struggle to keep up the pace with progress, initiatives like this are greatly needed and welcome. In order to address the global issues we will face in the coming decades, cooperation, dialogue, information sharing, and networking will be pivotal, and events like the GCS are instrumental in achieving success. The themes of the 2018 event, which will be held on May 17–19, will include global strategy, sustainability, the future of money, clean energy, a unified economy, and many others. Around 500 speakers from all over the world will be on stage to discuss these important topics, sharing visions and insights to build a brighter and safer future together.

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In “Engineering a Traiter,” the year is 2027, and a former military officer named Jay Roberts has just engineered a missile attack in downtown Houston — except he doesn’t know that it’s his fault.

This sombre graphic novel tells the story of Roberts, an army engineer working in Texas who’s been targeted by a militia eager to gain access to building codes in order to orchestrate a terrorist attack. With sophisticated A.I., the militia manipulate everything in Roberts’s life. The news he sees is curated to instil hopelessness and despair, and family members’ social media accounts are hijacked to distance Roberts from loved ones. Frustrated and alone, he eventually confesses security information to a “friend” he’s made online, allowing the militias the access they’ve been hoping for. Once they have what they want, Roberts’ social media is manipulated to make him look like a radicalized terrorist. When the attack occurs, he takes the fall.

The narrative may be science fiction, but it paints a realistic — if not paranoid — vision of the future. That bleakness is exactly what Brian David Johnson wanted when he began penning a series of graphic novels for the Army Cyber Institute at West Point.

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