David Cameron: The next age of government

h/t to Chairman Sterling. The talk is quite optimistic and not sure if this age of government is all that novel as there still is government to begin with and the ubiquitous corporate powers that be won’t likely let people power really be people power. but still an interesting talk.

• IT research firm Gartner estimates Google’s data centres contain nearly a million servers, each drawing about 1 kilowatt of electricity. So every hour Google’s engine burns through 1 million kilowatt-hours. Google serves up approximately 10 million search results per hour, so one search has the same energy cost as turning on a 100-watt light bulb for an hour.
• This doesn’t bode well. Even though the average American performs just 1.5 searches per day, it is hard to imagine that this will not rise dramatically.
• The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that data centres are responsible for 1.5 per cent of US energy use. How much more will that be when we, and our gadgets, are doing hundreds of searches per day? Or when the planet’s 6 billion inhabitants all want equal access? We’ve all heard the future of information architecture is cloud computing. It just might be a cloud of carbon dioxide.

Human Energy Recycle System Can Generate Energy From The Movement Of Users

• The human energy recycle system is an innovative concept that can gather energy emitted by human or even pets. This energy is used to power other devices, ensuring a new lifestyle for mass people with reduced electric bills and complementing to the environment. The system comprises lightweight, compact and portable units named ‘Solution Units’, designed to be worn in different spots of the human body, which collects energy from spinning, shaking, human heartbeat, body temperature and various other types of movements, and stores the energy into the ‘Standard Battery’ inside. When emergency power is required for a mobile device, these units can be connected to the device directly. Alternatively, the energy of the battery can be stored in the ‘Application’ units for later use.

americansatori:

• What we said: This month, six breast cancer patients filed suit against Myriad Genetics, a company that owns both the patent on two genes that are associated with an increased risk for breast cancer and ovarian cancer and the patent on testing to measure those risks. Some of these women are suing because they can’t afford the $3,000 fee Myriad charges to determine their risk for breast or ovarian cancer. Some of them are suing because, thanks to Myriad’s patent, they can’t get second opinions about whether they should have their breasts or ovaries removed - no one else is allowed to perform another test for them.
• - Editorial, May 24, 2009
•  What happened: A federal judge struck down Myriad Genetics’ gene patents, deciding they involved a “law of nature” and had been “improperly granted.” The case could reshape intellectual property laws and have a big impact on biotech companies. About 20 percent of genes in the human body have been patented.
• What’s next: An appeal, of course. Expect this one to reach the Supreme Court. The high court should strike it down. Genes are the common property of humanity, not the private fiefdoms of individual companies.

Swarm of Bacteria Builds Tiny Pyramid 

Nanotech Construction!

More HERE.

• A tiny island claimed for years by India and Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal has disappeared beneath the rising seas, scientists in India say.
• The uninhabited territory south of the Hariabhanga river was known as New Moore Island to the Indians and South Talpatti Island to the Bangladeshis.
• Recent satellites images show the whole island under water, says the School of Oceanographic Studies in Calcutta.
• Its scientists say other nearby islands could also vanish as sea levels rise.

I’m not the messiah, says food activist – but his many worshippers do not believe him

• “I started getting emails saying ‘have you heard of Benjamin Creme?’ and ‘are you the world teacher?’” he said. “Then all of a sudden it wasn’t just random internet folk, but also friends saying, ‘Have you seen this?’”
• Their reasoning? Patel’s background and work coincidentally matched a series of prophecies made by an 87-year-old Scottish mystic called Benjamin Creme, the leader of a little-known religious group known as Share International. Because he matched the profile, hundreds of people around the world believed that Patel was the living embodiment of a figure they called Maitreya, the Christ or “the world teacher”…
• There are many elements of his life that tick the prophetic checklist of his worshippers: a flight from India to the UK as a child, growing up in London, a slight stutter, and appearances on TV. But it is his work that puts him most directly in the frame and causes him the most anguish – the very things the followers of Share believe will indicate that their new messiah has arrived…
• While his goal appears to match Share’s vision of worldwide harmony, he says the underlying assumptions it makes are wrong – and possibly even dangerous.
• “What I’m arguing in the book is precisely the opposite of the Maitreya: what we need is various kinds of rebellion and transformations about how private property works,” he said.
• “I don’t think a messiah figure is going to be a terribly good launching point for the kinds of politics I’m talking about – for someone who has very strong anarchist sympathies, this has some fairly deep contradictions in it.”

Making the USA into one state…

• Most intelligent people recognize that suburban sprawl is a blight. A lot of people also realize that walkable cities and well-planned communities would be a huge improvement on ghost malls, suburban slums and other hideous after-effects of developer greed and stupidity. Livable cities are the hallmark of a true civilization.
• That being said, there are a lot of radical ideas out there that have the strong whiff of elite social engineering. This may or may not be one of them, but fitting the entire population of the US into a territory the size of New Hampshire seems a bit extreme, don’t you think? But we’re living in a time when plans are being drawn up to bulldoze any number of Rust Belt ghost towns back into farmlands. All bets are off.
• We’re also living at a time when it seems that the country is being goaded into disintegration, mainly through media shills rejiggering our political symbols and myths into social weapons. It could turn out that certain parts of the US could be radically transformed into sci-fi habitats surrounded by forest and farmland. Keep an eye out for signs of this in the days to come.

My favorite line from the infographic: “we’d all be neighbors!”

• Today’s cryonics scientists believe that this future may be a mere 100 years away. Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., the world’s largest cryonics company, charges US $150,000 to freeze and maintain a body and $80,000 for a head, typically paid for with a life insurance policy.
• Ralph Merkle, a nanotechnology expert and a director at Alcor, believes the best approach lies in developing nanorobots that can repair the body at the cellular level before thawing. They would fix or replace diseased and deteriorated tissue as well as the tissue fractures and denatured proteins that result from the freezing process itself. The revival process would, ideally, restore the physiology of dead persons to a pristine level, not only undoing the damage of whatever disease or accident killed them but also enabling them to return smarter and healthier than they ever were in life.
• ”We’re talking about a fundamentally more powerful medical technology than we have today that will continue the evolution of the concepts of life and death,” says Merkle, who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford.
• Before the body is cooled to –196 degrees Celsius (the temperature at which liquid nitrogen becomes a gas), the person’s blood is replaced by a cryoprotective solution that doesn’t freeze at those temperatures. Technically, the body and cryoprotective solution are not frozen but vitrified — that is, they solidify into a glassy substance that’s free of ice crystals and the damage they can cause.
• The first step in the future regeneration process would remove this vitrified liquid, letting physicians use the circulatory system as a series of tunnels through which they could run nanomedical robots, nanomaterials and a removable high-speed fiber-optic network connecting to an external supercomputer.
• ”It takes about 10 to the 25th bits to store the molecular structure of the brain,” says Merkle. ”The processing power to repair the brain alone might be 10 to the 37th; switching operations — the equivalent of 100 million copies of today’s fastest supercomputer running flat out for three years. With Moore’s Law doubling computer power every year, we’ll have that kind of computational power in a single supercomputer in about 26 years,” he adds.
• ”Give it another 10 years and the price will drop from $100 million to $100,000. Somewhere around 2050, that much computational power will be readily available to individuals.” And it doesn’t matter if Moore’s Law slows down, Merkle says: ”A person at the temperature of liquid nitrogen can literally wait centuries.”

Imagine a future in which millions of families live off the grid, powering their homes and vehicles with dirt-cheap portable fuel cells. As industrial agriculture sputters under the strain of the spiraling costs of water, gasoline and fertilizer, networks of farmers using sophisticated techniques that combine cutting-edge green technologies with ancient Mayan know-how build an alternative food-distribution system. Faced with the burden of financing the decades-long retirement of aging boomers, many of the young embrace a new underground economy, a largely untaxed archipelago of communes, co-ops, and kibbutzim that passively resist the power of the granny state while building their own little utopias.

Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality. The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian “hacktivists.”

Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they’ll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it’s coming.