By Harry Corlett — SpaceNews Neil Armstrong is dead. The space shuttle program is no more. The Constellation program has been canceled, and the main spacecraft is a wheezy 50-year-old Soyuz. Our cosmic escapades feel distant. All those memories of daring men and women of “The Right Stuff” will soon be lost in time, like tears in rain, unless as a species we recognize the urgent need to venture to the stars.
On Jan. 31, NASA honored all the members of Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia who perished while “furthering the cause of exploration and discovery.” Surely they would be devastated that their bravery and sacrifice might have been in vain as the great American pioneer flame gutters in the winds of political expediency.
QUOTATION(S): “…The mind that is anxious about the future is miserable…”
CITATION(S): “…If you plot the basic measures of the price to performance and capacity of information technologies (for example, computer instructions per second per constant dollar, bits of memory per dollar, or the total number of bits being moved around over the Internet), they follow remarkably smooth — and foreseeable — trajectories. This observation goes well beyond Moore’s Law (which says you can place twice as many transistors on an integrated circuit every two years); in the case of computation, it goes back to the 1890 American census, long before Gordon Moore was even born .… What’s predictable is that these measures grow exponentially, not linearly, though our intuition about the future is linear, which is hard-wired in our brains. This makes a remarkable difference. Thirty steps linearly gets you to 30, whereas 30 steps exponentially (2, 4, 8, 16…) gets you to a billion .… And it’s not just electronics and communications that follow this exponential course. It applies as well to health, medicine and its related field of biology. The Human Genome Project, for instance, saw the amount of genetic sequencing double and the cost of sequencing per base pair come down by half each year .… A computer that fit inside a building when I was a student now fits in my pocket, and is a thousand times more powerful despite being a million times less expensive .… In another quarter century, that capability will fit inside a red blood cell and will again be a billion times more powerful per dollar…”
NEWEST, PRACTICAL PRINCIPALS (TENETS) TO SEIZE SUSTAINABLE PROFESSIONAL, MANAGERIAL AND BUSINESS SUCCESS TENTES: (25) Correlate everything else with the ignored and unthinkable ‘else’ of everything else forever.
BOOK(S): The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. ISBN-13: 978–0316346627.
N.B.: Quotations, Citations and Success Tenets are by the Futuretronium Book.
Regards,
Mr. Andres Agostini Risk-Management Futurist and Success Consultant http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC
Brian Armstrong — TechCrunch Mt.Gox is gone. The one-time biggest Bitcoin exchange closed its doors this week and filed for bankruptcy this morning. Questions about the future of Bitcoin have once again been up-leveled to the headlines of nearly every major media outlet.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a string of issues in the Bitcoin space, from the transaction malleability bug that ultimately closed Mt.Gox’s doors to a corresponding distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that delayed transfers on multiple exchanges and services. These attacks, along with recent phishing scams and money-laundering arrests, have cast doubt on the Bitcoin space and caused consumer panic — which is fair.
But what hasn’t been communicated well is how those who are truly invested in the future of Bitcoin remain totally confident, because with every attack, breach, and arrest, Bitcoin is getting stronger and proving to consumers and businesses it is not going away.
Here is what is not being said about Bitcoin that should be.
More than 70 individuals with a combined wealth of $200bn (€145bn) are investing in space projects including travel, Knight Frank said ahead of its release of The Wealth Report 2014 on Wednesday.
A suborbital trip from London to Sydney will take about two hours and 12 minutes or one-tenth the time of flying by plane.
“New commercial space will be one of the most exciting investment sectors in the next 20 years,” Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, was cited as saying in the statement.
Silicon Valley sprung up on big open stretches of land where military installations had once been. Early semiconductor and computing businesses needed the space. But as Moore’s law progressed and mobile computing became the thing, the tech industry crept up into the seven-by-seven mile peninsula that is San Francisco. The city’s South of Market district is now nearly a strip mall of tech startups.
But tucked away in one of the neighborhood’s utilitarian office buildings is a technology company that harkens back to the early days of Silicon Valley: Planet Labs, founded by former NASA engineers, which builds satellites to photograph the Earth. Even so, the company doesn’t need a ton of space: Its satellites are about the size of a breadbox. The company recently recruited a batch of Stanford University students and built 28 satellites in 17 days in its cramped SoMa offices (pictured above).
Tomorrow is apparently “Future Day,” and not just in the same way that today is present day. March 1st is an unofficial holiday for transhumanists, designed to “elevat[e]the human condition” and maybe help us prepare for the robot uprising.
Started in 2012, “Future Day” was created Ben Goertzel and Adam A.Ford of the transhuman nonprofit Humanity+ to engender conversations about humanity’s role in a rapidly changing world. Future Day’s website states,
The pace of technological innovation is accelerating so quickly that it’s possible to perform this test in reverse. Google an imaginary idea from science fiction and you’ll almost certainly find scientists researching the possibility. Warp drive? The Multiverse? A space elevator to the stars? Maybe I can formulate this as Walter’s law – “Any idea described in sci-fi will on a long enough timescale be made real by science.”
3D printing is slow; so slow that printing an object several feet long is an arduous task that can take days. As a result, most 3D printers are tailored to printing small objects that take a few hours at most.
That could change for industrial-sized printers after the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and machine tool manufacturer Cincinnati Incorporated signed an agreement this month, 3Dprint.com reported today. The partnership will focus on creating a 3D printer capable of printing objects at 200–500 times the speed and 10 times the size of most current printers.
Steven Kotler — Singularity Hub So video games are addictive—this we know.
It comes down to dopamine, one of the brain’s basic signaling molecules. Emotionally, we feel dopamine as pleasure, engagement, excitement, creativity, and a desire to investigate and make meaning out of the world. It’s released whenever we take risks, or encounter novelty. From an evolutionary standpoint, it reinforces exploratory behavior.
More importantly, dopamine is a motivator. It’s released when we have the expectation of reward. And once this neurotransmitter becomes hardwired into a psychological reward loop, the desire to get more of that reward becomes the brain’s overarching preoccupation. Cocaine, widely considered the most addictive drug on the planet, does little more than flood the brain with dopamine and block its reuptake (sort of like SSRI’s block the reuptake of serotonin).
3D printing is slow; so slow that printing an object several feet long is an arduous task that can take days. As a result, most 3D printers are tailored to printing small objects that take a few hours at most.
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