I’m not kidding. You will be able to buy this very soon. Probably this year. A company has invented a toy called the Force Trainer that allows you to lift a ball by just thinking about it. It really is mind over matter. Electrical thoughts in your brain are transferred to the machine and this starts a small fan that blows the ball up a tube. It’s not quite levitation but it’s close. Two firms already in the mind control toy business are Mattel and Uncle Milton Industries.
I have just finished my second book (third if you count something with pictures way back in 1990). Yeah ha. Anyway, this means that I now have time again for other things. Top of the list is a three-month project looking at the future of public libraries. Next up is the new issue of What’s Next (issue 22) and I am badly behind with issues of brainmail so I need to catch-up with that.
On the subject of brainmail here’s a couple of bits from the new issue that is about to go up.
Fishy Theory
According to Prof. George Sugihara at the Scripts Institution of Oceanography, current fisheries management practice is exactly wrong. Instead of throwing the small ones back we should be keeping the small fishes and throwing the big ones back. This is because larger, older fish stabilise the fish population and provide higher quality offspring. Small fish can also struggle to survive when times are tough.
Grow Your Own
Sales of vegetable seeds in the UK have risen by 14% since late 2007 according to Suttons’ Seeds. In 2005 60% of Suttons’ sales came from flower seeds but vegetable seeds now account for 70% of revenue.
Food Provenance
A joint venture between China’s Shandong Institute of Standardisation and a Norwegian company called Trace Tracker has resulted in electronic ‘passports’ for food products. The passport is able to identify where a food is from and what tests, if any, the product has undergone. Expect to see more of this sort of thing, especially in Asia. Also expect consumers to be able to plug into this data via mobiles very soon.
Risky Business
Was the GFC (Global Financial Crisis) caused by the fact that people were in too good a mood? This is a possibility according to Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan. A study of 12 male and 12 female volunteers found that participants were more likely to partake in risky investment behaviour when other people were smiling at them. Moral: Never trust a smiling bank manager or accountant.
Top Energy Trends
According to a report published by Global Markets Direct, the top global energy trends for 2009 include; Stagnation in Capex on oil exploration and production, short-term oil price volatility (stabilising towards the end of 2009), reduced investment in clean energy projects, declining investments in new oil and gas projects, increasing demand for natural gas, rising electricity generation capacity, continued efforts by Europe to be less dependent on Russian gas, an increased role for nuclear energy and a continuing reliance on coal as the major energy source despite shifts to nuclear and other alternatives.
More brainmail at http://brainmail.nowandnext.com
This is a bit unsettling, not least the thought of whether or not I should be writing this. Anyway, I was reading New Scientist magazine yesterday and there was an interesting article about e-Bombs. What’s an e-Bomb? Well essentially it’s an electromagnetic pulse weapon that can, in theory, ‘fry’ the electronics of modern aircraft if they are not suitably shielded.
The technology was first developed by the US and Russia in the form of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) warheads, which were capable of burning out nearby electrical systems such as those fitted to aircraft and vehicles.
But that’s not the bad news. The really alarming thing is that EMP weapons are “not technically challenging to build” according to Yael Shahar, director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Israel. Moreover, the increased use of carbon-fibre reinforced composite materials in civilian aircraft theoretically increases the threat of terrorists using EMP weapons.
I’ve never watched Britain’s Got Talent, but a clip of Susan Boyle singing “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables on YouTube has left me (and a few million other people) speechless. Why?
I think it is because she is a human being. She has not been airbrushed, photo shopped or edited. She is the real deal. She is something that people can relate to minus the fakery and spin.
She is, in a word, authentic.
Had she been blonde and beautiful her voice would have been lovely, but it would also have been expected. What shines through here is raw unadulterated talent. And people aren’t expecting that. Ms Boyle also challenges conventional definitions of beauty. Last time I looked this video clip had been viewed around 40 million times on YouTube. Perhaps authenticity is back?
Funny but I’m starting to use my blog as a personal to do list…somewhere to put ideas where I know I’ll be able to find them in the future. Case in point a book called Desirable Future?: Consumer Electronics in Tomorrow’s World by Jack Challoner. The book is about what technology may be like in 2050 and could provide an interesting contrast to my own book Future Files, which also goes out to the year 2050 in part.
http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.23861
““People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.” Milan Kundera
If anyone would like a free copy of my 26 page trends report (2009+ Ten Trends: Predictions & Provocations) just use the link below and you can download a copy for absolutely nothing. Gratis. Zilch.
http://nowandnext.com/PDF/2009_complete.pdf
A link appears in the comments box below.
Evolution is generally thought of as a very slow process in comparison to human life spans. Consequently we, as humans, make no difference to the evolution of life on earth. However, from a purely biological perspective this is far from true. Approximately 95% of the terrestrial world is now actively managed for the benefit of the human species and as a result the new epicentre of evolution is mankind and man-made environments.
These new environments consist of our crops, our waste, and us, with human pathogens sitting at the very top of the food chain. Over 50% of all species on earth are now parasites and for a growing number of these parasites we humans represent the ultimate gourmet experience. In other words, as we expand environments and numbers, the evolutionary possibilities for microbes also grow. Hence new pathogens like HIV emerge.
We are already seeing weeds evolve to mimic the chemical properties of agricultural crops so as to avoid man-made pesticides. Similarly, insect pests are developing resistence to avoid new pesticides. The most immediate issue arising from such developments is antibiotic resistance, whereby parasites evolve in ever more virulent forms to resist our best efforts to kill them. So what then does the future hold? One scenario is that we will take a whole host of new pests and pathogens into the future with us and, ultimately, it will be the smallest species that survive simply because big species like humans will be unable to evolve fast enough to cope. In other words, from an evolutionary point of view, the future belongs to pathogens, pests and their invited guests.
As you might l know I loathe Twitter with a passion. I’m also not that fond of most blogs (I’m allowed to be contradictory OK). Anyway, I’m writing a new book about how digital communications (amongst other things) is changing how people think and act so I’m rather curious about a new micro-trend called Slow Blogging.
The idea here is that people are publishing faster than they are thinking and the rest of us have to spend time editing material as a result. But help is at hand. Nice sounding English person Russell Davies is asking people to send him postcards telling him what they are doing, which I think is a much better idea than Twitter. There’s also Todd Sieling in Canada calling for a “rejection of immediacy.” I can’t agree more. Writing and reading slowly is good for your brain and good for the rest of us to because we don’t have to put up with misss-spelt (sic) rantings about maters of no importance.
Perhaps the Slow Blogging movement should join hands with the Slow Food and Slow Cities movements and create a festival of slowness. Then again that might be a bad idea. I’ve given it no thought whatsoever. Act in haste repent at leisure as my mum used to say in the old days.
A contact at the Times newspaper just sent me an email saying that at ASDA (a UK supermarket chain owned by Wal-Mart) has announced that local food sales are up 41% on this time last year in England and Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland has also shown a marked increase in sales, with 29% increase in sales.
I’ve been bagging on about localisation being a powerful counter-trend to globalisation for some time and also, obviously, the importance of provenance, not only within food but also in other areas too. This is something that’s worth tracking in my opinion. I’d expect globalisation to slow in coming years with economic protectionism rising significantly.
BTW, just book a copy of a History of the Future by Jacques Attali. Report soon.