Cryonics and our ongoing effort to build the ultimate life-extension toolbox

No person should ever die…. EVER!

Is that the direction we’re headed?

There are many reasons why people die, yet these reasons may all disappear as we develop fixes and cures for everything that ails us.

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The Library of the Future Series:
Part 2 - The Search Command Center

As a child, it was embarrassing to ask for help. I didn’t want people to think I was the “dumb student”, and I especially didn’t want to be the one asking dumb questions in a library around people I didn’t know. My assumption was that if I had to ask, I was obviously missing something. Perhaps I should wait until I was older and come back at a time when I was smart enough to understand the library.

My impression was that librarians were incredibly smart, and in an entirely different intellectual league than I was. I felt as if I hadn’t yet earned the right to be there.

While it may sound like I was slightly paranoid, and especially today, knowing that librarians are the world’s most uniquely helpful breed of people, I’m pretty sure this perception still exists among some of us today.

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Future games will become the ultimate playground for our minds

In 1977 when famed mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot uttered the phrase, “as a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also to seduce,” little did he know that his brainchild, fractal geometry, would become seductive to the point of being addictive.

Over the past decade, fractal geometry, the science that reduces the patterns found in nature to mathematical formulas and also enables us to create artificial forms of nature using the same math, has become the numerical engine driving much of the gaming industry, and more specifically, the hottest technique in gaming - procedural generation. Placing key creative elements in the hands of the player, procedural generation means the game doesn’t store millions of characters and background images, just the methods by which they can be built, leaving the gamers free to focus on creating the worlds in which their next adventures occur.

Where brilliant thinkers like da Vinci, H. G. Wells, and Mandelbrot inspired much of the world around us today, the world of tomorrow, the very world where we will be spending the later years of our lives, is now being imagined inside the young minds of today’s gamers as they learn to harness the awesome power hiding in each gamer’s toolbox.

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Next Generation Gaming is Not for the Faint of Heart

Life is a game. Every day we find ourselves in the middle of the game, involving the work we do, the people we hang out with, and the social structures that surround us.

But who exactly created this game? Each day we live our lives as animated playing pieces, playing by rules that others created. Conformity is a constant force, imposing a lifestyle that most of us were born into, saddled with goals that often go cross-grain with our personal strengths. All of this, however, is about to change.

In the future, the very near future, nothing we hold dear today will remain sacred. Not even the rules for our own game of life.

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Nanotechnology is a science riddled with paradoxes

Over the past year I have been eating, sleeping, and breathing nanotechnology, but feel like I have only scratched a little behind the ears of this enormous science. I had been following the industry, keeping up on the science for some time, but writing a book required total immersion.

The terminology is the toughest part. As I listen to the scientists talk, they seem very conversant with the difficult to pronounce “ology” and “ecular” words and the even more difficult concepts behind the words. But this is not the language of “average” people, or for that matter, the language of most of the “far above average” people that I know.

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Every industry has its own “favorite son”, but for many areas of new technology there are no real household names associated with them. There are no people like Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, or Chuck Norris rising to the forefront of these technologies. Put another way, these technologies represent industries without their own rock stars.

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“The fundamental unit of the new economy
is not the corporation, but the individual.”

- Thomas Malone & Robert Laubacher

Running a solo business in the past meant that you had a one-person practice, most often offering a professional service, well suited for lawyers, accountants, and doctors.  However, a new breed of solo business has emerged that allows people to leverage the power of the Internet and control a vast empire from their home office or wherever they happen to be.  Across the world thousands of people are giving birth to what is being called an “Empire of One”.

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Invisible to the human eye, nano diameter needles will be shot like clusters of bullets
from great distances to “pin” people to a wall or freeze their physical movement.
Nano needles, because of their incredibly tiny diameter, will be the ultimate
non-lethal weapon, leaving no visible wounds and causing no permanent damage.

I would like to begin by saying that I am not a fan of using nanotechnology for weapons or in any way, shape or form as tools of war. However, since the military is one of the key drivers of nanotechnology, and its use in warfare will be an inevitable outcome, our awareness of the possibilities will be a first line of defense against their proliferation.

On the optimistic side, I have high hopes for nano-weapons to offer precise solutions for the bigger conflicts, eliminating some of the causes for war, and generally contributing to a safer and more stable global environment. With precision comes less loss of life, not more.

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When the United States was founded, only 40 percent of the people living within its boundaries spoke English as their first language. Today that number is 87%.

For most of us, English is like the air we breathe: natural, given, right.  However, language is rarely a given, a fact of which many groups are painfully aware. Language is a key battleground for national and cultural conflict.
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Terrafugia - Redefining the flying car

What exactly is a flying car?

My life is a bit unusual in that I often have conversations with people about the topic of flying cars. Since I was a child I dreamed about the day that we would have flying cars. But, other than the vague notion of the flying car that George Jetson drove each day to Spacely Sprockets, we have no real definition of the flying car, until now.

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