From the category archives:

World-scale issues

Moscow Report (II):
Russians embrace a radical vision
of nanotechnology

December 21, 2011

(This is followup to my brief post from Moscow.)
Because I’m primarily known for the concept of an advanced, atomically precise nanotechnology, the enthusiastic welcome I received in Moscow at Rusnanotech 2011 indicates how the idea is received in Russia. With that in mind, here are some markers of Russian interest in the concept:

Dmitry Medvedev speaking [...]

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A rich visual display
of quantitative money information

November 25, 2011

Here’s a huge, data-rich visualization of the money dimension of McDonald’s meals, billionaires, the Moon landing, income quintiles, and the like. It’s well done, spans 12 orders of magnitude, and kept my attention for entirely too long.

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Quiz Question:
What is wrong with this model of computation?

August 3, 2011

In the news today: “Governments, IOC and UN hit by massive cyber attack” (BBC)
How did the attack work? In a mind-numbingly ordinary way:

“An email would be sent to an individual with the right level of access within the system; attached to the message was a piece of malware which would then execute and open a [...]

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My next book: Radical Abundance, 2012

July 21, 2011

I’m now working on a new book, Radical Abundance, scheduled for publication in 2012 by PublicAffairs. The book has a wide scope in both its content and intended audience, addressing scientists, a general reading audience, and thought leaders in the policy arena.
Radical Abundance will integrate and extend several themes that I’ve touched on in Metamodern, [...]

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Looking toward 2050 with Royal Dutch Shell

July 18, 2011

I recently returned from a scenario planning meeting in London with Royal Dutch Shell, where I joined a group exploring technology-driven aspects of global change. Topics ranged from health care, synthetic biology, and geoengineering to artificial intelligence and the future of the internet; I outlined prospects for high-throughput atomically precise manufacturing as force driving broad [...]

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I blame a deep flaw
in current software technology

April 12, 2011

Metamodern had vanished at the end of last month while I was traveling, and for a week or so I forwarded it to this stand-in page. As you can see, the blog is now up and running.
The stand-in page outlines a (re)emerging software technology that deserves several orders of magnitude more attention. Current software is [...]

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Fukushima — where are the Parrots?

March 24, 2011

Here are two Monirobo robotic machines — radiation-hard, 2.4 km/hr, 600 kg robots, recently arrived on site:

These probably aren’t very good at exploring wrecked buildings, viewing fuel storage pools obscured explosion debris, sampling smoke plumes rising from (?), etc.
Here’s a Parrot AR.Drone — iPhone controlled, resistant to multiply-lethal radiation doses [update: > 10 times the [...]

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Tsunami disasters
and the cost of making things

March 11, 2011

When I wake up to news of a coast smashed by a tsunami, I see yet another sign of our relative material poverty, a sign that our civilization hasn’t yet mastered the art of making things.
Japan, by modern standards, is rich, yet costs deterred the construction of deployable barriers able to resist fast-rising sea*. If [...]

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Nano drug carrier (!!!)

December 8, 2010

This news just in:
A ‘buckyball’ — a spherical molecule made up of 60 carbon atoms — has been turned into a vial just big enough to hold a single water molecule….
The authors say that uses for the vial could include acting as a carrier for drugs in the body.
(News item)
As The Onion might ask, What [...]

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For the next Nobel Prize in Medicine,
I nominate…

November 3, 2010

During a three-month test across eight hospitals, several continents, and almost 4,000 patients, a new technology reduced serious surgical complications by 36% and deaths by almost 50% — in raw numbers, over 150 cases of severe harm and nearly 30 patient deaths.
This performance was demonstrated in the spring of 2008 with the prototype [...]

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Why “Science Policy”
is a mistake from the start

October 29, 2010

Science and engineering drive the great technological revolutions of our time, and it might be helpful to have some idea of what they are — for example, to recognize that they are fundamentally different. Colin Macilwain offers a guide for the perplexed:
Science is mainly concerned with unearthing knowledge. Engineering seeks to deliver working solutions to [...]

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The problem: a metacognition deficit

August 27, 2010

…there’s a metacognition deficit. Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate…
Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.
David Brooks, (“A Case of Mental Courage”, New York Times)
Brooks begins with the story of how [...]

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