bizzare
This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 09 Mar 2007, by eyal matsliah.
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11 Mar 07
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Add Sticky Noten 16th-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to the historian Norman Davies, "the spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonised".
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09 Mar 07
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Add Sticky NoteUnder favourable conditions, sails produce far more horsepower than is needed to drive a ship. At marginal sacrifice in speed, by running the auxiliary propulsion system in reverse, this energy can be stored.
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maybe this can be applied to other systems as well, such as the conversion of breaking power into energy in hybrid cars
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Add Sticky NoteI am very optimistic about print as a technology. Words on paper are a wonderful information storage, retrieval, distribution and consumer product.
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is he joking ?
how can we share, collaborate and aggregate knowledge if everyone has their own private printed copy of it ?
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Add Sticky NoteThen, as populations shrink, demands on resources will be reduced. Nature will begin to repair itself, reclaiming what we have so hastily taken.
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really ? It's different than what Al Gore says in "an inconvenient truth"
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Enlightenment
I am optimistic about humanity's coming enlightenment. >
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I am optimistic about human relationships - in particular, about friendship.
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Peter Schwartz
Futurist; business strategist; co-founder, Global Business Network, a Monitor Company; author, 'The Long Boom'
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Creativity in science and the arts is open to hugely more than in the past.
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Enlightenment
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removed the incentive to do it to them before they do it to us.
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What went right? No one knows, possibly because we have been asking the wrong question - "Why is there war?" instead of "Why is there peace?"
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has shown that the overall trend is downward
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Things change for the better either because something went wrong or because something went right.
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Brian Eno
Artist; composer; producer (U2, Talking Heads, Paul Simon); recording artist
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Rodney A Brooks
Director, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); chief technical officer of iRobot Corporation; author, 'Flesh and Machines'
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I am optimistic that the two theories together will furnish a totally satisfying naturalistic explanation for the existence of the universe and everything that's in it, including ourselves.
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I am optimistic that, although the theory of everything will bring fundamental physics to a convincing closure, the enterprise of physics itself will continue to flourish, just as biology went on growing after Darwin solved its deep problem.
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I am optimistic that the physicists of our species will complete Einstein's dream and discover the final theory of everything
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And I am optimistic that this final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue death blow to religion and other juvenile superstitions.
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The final scientific enlightenment
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Richard Dawkins
Evolutionary biologist; Charles Simonyi Professor for the Understanding of Science, Oxford University; author, 'The God Delusion'
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The future
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The enduring pessimism of human beings about the future does real harm by persuading people, especially the young, to retreat from adventure and enterprise into anomie.
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Matt Ridley
Science writer; founding chairman of the International Centre for Life; author, 'Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code'
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If we are optimistic that failure to improve ourselves means merely that we haven't found the solution yet, then success is never due to divine grace (nowadays known as "natural resources") but always to human effort and creativity, and failure is opportunity.
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They always are. Why is that important? Firstly, because it is true.
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Whether solutions are possible
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David Deutsch
Quantum physicist, Oxford University; author, 'The Fabric of Reality'
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George Dyson
Science historian; author, 'Darwin Among the Machines'
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So, why am I optimistic? For this new generation of children with autism, I anticipate that many of them will find ways to blossom, using their skills with digital technology to find employment, to find friends, and in some cases to innovate.
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Many children with autism develop an intuitive understanding of computers in the same way that other children develop an intuitive understanding of people.
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Why? Because there is a remarkably good fit between the autistic mind and the digital age.
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But I remain optimistic that, for a good proportion of them, it has never been a better time to have autism.
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It is neither proven nor disproven that the increase might reflect other factors, such as genetic change or some environmental (eg, hormonal) change.
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though conservatively it is put down to better recognition, better services, and broadening the diagnostic category
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No one quite knows what this increase is due to,
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autism is on the increase. Thus, in 1978, the rate of autism was four in 10,000 children, but today (according to a Lancet article in 2006) it is 1 per cent.
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The rise of autism
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Simon Baron-Cohen
Psychologist, Autism Research Centre, Cambridge University; author, 'The Essential Difference'
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Print as a technology
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Walter Isaacson
President & CEO, Aspen Institute; former CEO, CNN; former managing editor, 'Time'; author, 'Benjamin Franklin: An American Life'
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I quickly realised that asking the opening question of ordinary train encounters, "Where are you from?", had become patently obsolete.
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I have recently become quite relaxed about all this. Computers' eventual power will probably not be in simulation or deception. Instead, by surpassing us in some areas, they will relieve our brains and bodies of repetitive effort. If they behave as other skeuomorphs before them, it will be computers' currently unimagined emergent qualities that we will come to value most, enhancing and complementing our humanity rather than competing with and superseding it.
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I grew up with Alan Turing's unsettling vision of a future machine indistinguishable from a human in its reactions. Ray Kurzweil's provocative prediction of the impending "singularity" - the point when computer intelligence would start to leave humans gasping in its intellectual wake - added to my fears.
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Skeuomorphism
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Timothy Taylor
Archaeologist, University of Bradford; author, 'The Buried Soul'
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I see much of the history of technology as an unplanned trajectory in which emergent skeuomorphic qualities often turn out to have been critical.
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Both these corks are skeuomorphs - objects that preserve formal vestiges of the constraints of an original no longer strictly necessary in the new material.
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There is no doubt that the environmental challenges of the next decades are daunting, and they will require all the power of human striving and creativity to overcome them.
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Population forecasts vary, but they all agree that human population growth is slowing.
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I am optimistic about humankind's ability to reach a sustainable balance with other life on Earth, in part because the number of humans on Earth will soon start to decrease.
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Demographics
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W Daniel Hillis
Physicist; computer scientist; chairman, Applied Minds, Inc; author, 'The Pattern on the Stone'
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We are the first generation in history that has watched the human population double in our own lifetime, and no future generation is likely to see it again.
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I have friends whom I know only through email conversations but who are as dear to me as my college roommate and dearer by far than my next-door neighbour.
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Friendship
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Judith Rich Harris
Independent investigator and theoretician; author, 'No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality'
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But friendship isn't dying out: it's just changing, adapting to the changes in the world. People are discovering different ways of getting together.
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It may be harder to find a bowling partner but it's easier to find someone to chat with, because there are more ways to chat.
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It means that 90 really will be the new 60
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This goal deserves a priority and commitment from governments akin to that accorded to the Manhattan project or the Apollo moon landing.
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Even if we discount climate change completely, the quest for clean energy is worthwhile on grounds of energy security, diversity and efficiency.
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This effort can engage not just those in privileged technical environments in advanced countries, but a far wider talent pool.
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My number-one priority would be much-expanded research and development into a whole raft of techniques for storing energy and generating it by "clean" or low-carbon methods.
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Later in this century, mind-enhancing drugs, genetics, and "cyberg" techniques may change human beings themselves. That's something qualitatively new in recorded history - and it will pose novel ethical conundrums.
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And we could readily raise the funds - were there the political will - to lift the world's two billion most deprived people from their extreme poverty.
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We're becoming embedded in a cyberspace that can link anyone, anywhere, to all the world's information and culture - and to every other person on the planet.
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The innovations that will drive economic advance - information technology, biotech and nanotech - can boost the developing as well as the developed world.
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The energy challenge
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Lord (Martin) Rees
President, The Royal Society; Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics; Master, Trinity College, University of Cambridge; author, 'Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity's Survival'
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There are indeed powerful grounds for being a techno-optimist. For most people in most nations, there's never been a better time to be alive.
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When we hit upon the correct models for collaborative knowledge-collection online, there will be a jaw-dropping, unprecedented, paradigm-shifting explosion in the availability of high-quality free knowledge.
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In particular, I am optimistic about humanity's prospects for starting exemplary new collaboratively developed knowledge resources.
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Larry Sanger
Co-founder, Wikipedia
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The Australian philosopher Peter Singer attributes it to the inexorable logic of the golden rule: the more one knows and thinks, the harder it is to privilege one's own interests over those of other sentient beings.
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The award-winning science writer Robert Wright points to technologies that enhance networks of reciprocity and trade, which make other people more valuable alive than dead.
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Most people, sickened by the headlines and the bloody history of the 20th century, find this claim incredible.
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This is just one example of the most important and under-appreciated trend in the history of our species: the decline of violence.
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As horrific as present-day events are, such sadism would be unthinkable today in most of the world.
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In 16th-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning,
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The decline of violence
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Steven Pinker
Psychologist, Harvard University; author, 'The Blank Slate'
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It will become increasingly difficult for countries to stay outside of future treaties such as Kyoto - partly because of international pressure but increasingly because of pressure from their own populations.
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If a single first instance of global governance proves successful, it will strengthen its appeal as a way of addressing other problems - such as weapons control, energy management, money-laundering, conflict resolution, people-trafficking, slavery and poverty.
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Big government
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The future may be a bit more like Sweden and a bit less like America.
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Technical solutions will hopefully be found, but the process will need to be primed and stoked and enforced by legislation that would be regarded as big-government socialism in the present climate.
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The acceptance of the reality of global warming has, in the words of Sir Nicholas Stern in his report on climate change to the British government, shown us "the greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen".
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Published: 21 January 2007
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Global warming, the war on terror and rampant consumerism getting you down? Well, lighten up: here, 17 of the world's smartest scientists and academics share their reasons to be cheerful
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What are you optimistic about?
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Public Stiky Notes
how can we share, collaborate and aggregate knowledge if everyone has their own private printed copy of it ?
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