I’m optimistic. I see no longer people accepting fuzzy thinking in the world. The change is not that people aren’t still saying under-informed things. The change is that if you’re in power and you say something under-informed, there are people out there with a voice who will take you to task for saying so.”
Neil deGrasse Tyson
The marketplace of ideas is truly a wonderful thing.
Category: Futurism
A HUD For Your Car
This looks interesting. Very interesting.
I wonder if one of the apps would give you cool reticles, so you can pretend to get missile lock on that annoying car in front of you. FOX TWO, MF’ER!
Personally, I’d like to play with it before dropping $300-$400, but I’m still cleaning up drool.
H/t Alan
Navy Rail Guns Closer to Reality
According to this article from Ars Technica, the U.S. Navy is set to field test its new rail gun in 2016 aboard the USNS Millinocket. The video in the article is pretty nifty as well.
It makes me wonder if/when we’ll be switching out our chemically-propelled small arms for hand-held versions of these. FSM, I love living in the future.
Friday Quote – Alvin Toffler
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those that cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Alvin Toffler, writer and futurist
This is “react, adapt, and overcome” raised to the next power.
Friday Quote – Robert Heinlein
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
Robert Heinlein, science fiction author
The Future Is Now
Last week, my computer got nuked by a thunderstorm. So, now I’m building a new desktop. To be honest, I bought the parts my brother and friend recommended and will be helping them as they actually build it. So, what does that have to do with the pic?
Parts have been coming in over this week. One of the parts is a 120 GB Solid State Drive. For those who don’t understand techno-speak (of which, I’m barely conversant), it’s a much larger version of a flash drive. Here’s the fun. It was packed in the box with another part, and I COMPLETELY MISSED IT. When I was doing delivery reconciliation, I noticed that the SSD was reported as delivered, but I never saw it. I decided to check the box again before I went into a tirade about people swiping stuff off of my front porch.
I carry an phone with 64 gigs of storage. I’ve seen thumb drives with the same storage. I don’t know why I was shocked at how small the SSD was. The thing was about the size of my iPhone.
Every so often I am smacked in the face with the realization we are living in the best times of human history.
I Read Way Too Much SF
Where was I reading that soldiers would never wear their uniforms off-base because it invited attack? Oh yeah, here.
I’m not claiming that our world is going to become the UN that Williamson describes. It’s too complex, with too many different forces vying for social control.
Still, I am a pattern-seeking monkey, which makes jumping to those analogies very easy. Kind of like the Christians who see Armageddon around the corner because something may, kinda, sorta, look like it came out of Revelations.
I need to go back to straight fantasy for a bit.
H/t Sebastian
Technology Changing the Face of Homework
Tuesday night I was helping my nephew with his homework. I won’t go into the blatant environmental propaganda, but I did promise him that I’d address the logical fallacies in his assignment when he was older.
What prompted this post? Several spelling errors were pointed out during my review of his assignment. What was his response? He grabbed his iPod and started up a spelling app. My brother and I exchanged looks and then came up with the same answer. It’s no different than if he looked the words up in a dictionary. If anything, it was better because the app assisted in finding the right words.
Sometimes even I have to shove down my inner Luddite.
GRPC Post 3
One of the nice things about coming to the GRPC is the sheer amount of literature that is provided. Let me make this clear, I am very grateful for what they have given me just for coming. Still, for someone who has been working hard on transitioning from dead tree to ebooks, the stack was a little frustrating.
To illustrate:
That’s the stack of books next to my iPad. A whole stack of ebooks is a hell of a lot easier to haul around than a bunch of tattooed dead trees.