Private Cities and Technologies of Liberation

If you’re reading this blog and not Let A Thousand Nations Bloom, there’s something wrong with you. That’s where I’m doing my substantive blogging – though that’s admittedly not very frequent lately. My most recent posts: Disney’s Private City Technologies of Control and Liberation

Norman Borlaug, the Greatest Person Ever, has Died

Since he’s not a eccentric pop star, Norman Borlaug’s death is unlikely to be particularly newsworthy. Here’s a short video outlining his contributions to human wellbeing: PC has a nice round-up of obituaries, etc.

One Laptop per Governor

It seems that someone is sending free laptops to US Governors (Hat tip: Schneier). The FBI is worried that they contain malware: According to sources familiar with the investigation, other states have been targeted too, with HP laptops mysteriously ordered for officials in 10 states. Four of the orders were delivered, while the remaining six [...]

SpaceSteading

The Space Frontier Foundation looks like an interesting organization. Their central goal of colonizing space is obviously a long-term one (though we should not underestimate the law of accelerating returns), but I suspect they’ll have an important role to play in the short term agitating for the removal of regulatory barriers to present-day commercial spaceflight. [...]

SpaceX Launches Commerical Satellite, Doesn’t Need Coercive Taxation

Awesome. Next step: SpaceSteading. A pioneering rocket company that wants to take over the job of sending U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station launched an imaging satellite into orbit late on Monday for a Malaysian firm, its first paying customer. Space Exploration Technologies’ Falcon 1 rocket lifted off from Omelek Island in the Kwajalein [...]

A Big Step for Cloud Computing

Google is releasing a Chrome OS: So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be. Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this [...]

Selling Weed on Twitter

It is state-sanctioned medical weed, though (Hat tip: @goodiemonster): California won’t let the gays marry but it does let people micro-blog (medical) drug deals. Meet former Northwestern J-school student Dann Halem, who is building an online business selling weed on Twitter. How is this possible you ask? (…) The @artistscollctve Twitter account went up last week and, in [...]

The future is already here, and it’s reasonably evenly distributed

This video from 1981 (hat tip: Jerry Brito) shows the remarkable progress of information technology in recent years. That which which seemed amazing yesterday is taken for granted today. Hyperland (1990) from Douglas Adams is even more remarkable in how exciting it made hypertext seem. If we think back even further, someone 300 years ago [...]

Regulation Will Kill Millions

A good point from the Fight Aging blog: I have said in the past that, from a pure research timeline perspective, by 2040 we’ll plausibly have all the technologies needed to repair and reverse aging. Unfortunately when we look beyond the laboratory, the field is strewn with roadblocks of legislation, slowing everything down. Even the time [...]

Technology and Freedom

Reason has a review of David Friedman‘s recent book Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World. In Future Imperfect David Friedman presents a wide variety of possible futures, “some attractive, some frightening, few dull.” Looking through a lens of science fiction and fact, Friedman explores how libertarian ideas can help us adjust our lives and institutions [...]