2009

Spoiler warning!

Three “rants” about Avatar: Sentient Developments: Avatar, the good, the bad and ugly, Clusterfuck Nation: Blue Christmas, A Most Stupendous & Audacious Undertaking: The REAL story of Avatar is in the ecology.

I did a brief podcast sharing talk at Future Camp at burning man, where I detailed some of my favorite podcasts, and then asked others to share, because there is a significant “finding cost” in locating excellent podcasts.

Mode mindless link propagation.

Collapse is the in topic this year – with climate change, peak oil, the credit crunch, the oncoming recession, terrorism, etc. etc. people are primed to talk about collapse:

Singularity University was launched last week at TED. Their motto: “preparing humanity of accelerating technological change”. Of course, anything like this is bound to stir up some controversy, and indeed Singularity University launched to considerable debate.

Mindless Link Propagation Post #1. Actually I hope them to be not too mindless.

So after long delay here is a follow up to my Weirdtopia promise. The “Utopia” and “Distopia” are from Eliezer Yudkowsky, the Weirdtopia’s are mine. I think it’s interesting to note how similar most of the “dystopias” sound to our current reality… I suspect that this exercise reveals more about the writer than about the future, but even so it’s a very interesting exercise…

Eliezer Yudkowsky, at Overcoming Bias (one of my favorite blogs), writes about Weirdtopia, the place which is neither Utopia (the projection of your hopes / beliefs) or Dystopia (the projection of your fears), but something altogether different and at least potentially better than Utopia to actually live in. His recent series on Fun Theory give potential civilization engineers much food for thought. The opposite of happiness isn’t isn’t sadness – it’s boredom. And it follows that a “perfect” world probably isn’t a very happy one.

What will change everything? 150 scientists, authors and public figures answer this question. You can learn lots. How to sum it up?

I want this “Meta Civilization” project to deliver on multiple fronts.