I’m not sure this is a trend as such, but the concept is certainly interesting. On top of the Copenhill power plant in Copenhagen the architect has placed a dry ski-slope. Why? Why not? The architect uses the term “hedonistic sustainability”.
I’ve started buying old watches, notably old diver’s watches from the 1960s and 1970s.
They are generally cheap as chips, unless you pick a big brand. The one in the picture is a fairly obscure Sicura from the 1960s (probably). It’s rather worn, which is why I like it.
It cost me £110, so if it gets lost I wouldn’t lose sleep over it, although the more I wear it the more attached to it I become. If only I knew it’s history. Who wore it and where?
One of the best bits about the watch is it isn’t that great at telling the time. This one gains about 40-minutes a day, unless I wear it to bed, in which case the loss drops to 10-minutes depending upon how much I toss and turn in bed (it’s self-winding). The point is I always know roughly what time it is, and if it’s absolutely essential that I do something bang on time I can always look at the clock on my phone.
Anyway, I think there is something loosely liberating about not knowing the exact time.
What’s this got to do with the future? Nothing, except that if pushed I suppose one might start to ponder the nature of time and the relationship of past, present and future. And when is ‘future’ exactly? I was speaking with a friend and sci-fi writer Lavie Tidhar a while back and his working definition of ‘future’ was when things got weird. But that’s now surely? My own ‘future’ tends to be 10-15 years out, but personally I’m more focussed on the present these days. Anyway, the future was always a bit of an excuse to get people to engage more with the present.
As for clock watching, I think the purpose of clocks generally is to be prepared for future events. That’s possibly the worst load of mumbo jumbo I’ve ever muttered in a blog post.
Just had a lovely lunch at Riddle & Finns (in Brighton) with my web guy Matt Doyle (from Robertson NSW). I should perhaps have used this image above (seen pasted to a wall in Brighton) for yesterday’s post about dead tech.
Not 100% true (floppy discs or zip drives anyone?), but I like the thought.
I’m having a clearout of my office and I keep stumbling on various things. Here’s the cover from someting I did 10 years ago, along with a list of 10 trends for 2010. They seem pretty on the ball for 2020. Someone once said that I’m 10-years ahead of everyone else, which perhaps could be read as meaning that anything I say now can’t be assessed, or isn’t meaningful, until 2030.
I cannot wait to re-read this little lot and work out what they got right, what they got wrong and possibly why. The World in 2020 (top) was written in 1994, Horizons 2020 (Siemans) in 2004 , Future Agenda 2020 (Vodafone) in 2010 and Futrecast 2020 in 2008.
I should perhaps point out that this isn’t photoshop, it’s an actual fire globe in Austria. Can’t help but think that Sydney fireworks missed a trick. Perhaps they should have asked everyone around the harbour to simply turn they phone flash lights on instead and given the cost of the fireworks to the rural fire service.
Following on from my Table of 100 Disruptive Technologies, I recently received an enthusiastic email from Max Nocerino, a Sci-Fi fan and aspiring futurist from Queens, New York. His idea is a table of future tech, but one that’s very much in the Twilight Zone, to borrow a Sci-fi reference. In other words, tech that’s highly improbable, but hugely impactful were someone able to figure out how to do it. Clearly some of these ideas will be ‘impossible’ given today’s science, but remember the Earth was once thought to be flat and about 6,000 years-old, so perhaps our understanding of most things can change given enough time. His first entry is Faster Than Light Travel, an idea I myself had on a Future of Space graphic recently.
Max’s explanation below, along with some detail from the Future of Space.
“This has been something that has been depicted in sci-fi since the beginning of time. Our first Moonshot is Faster than light travel; but is it possible? Many sci-fi mediums have depicted a parallel dimension called ‘Hyperspace’ that allows a ship to move many times faster than light and reach other Star systems in mere hours instead of thousands of years. The Millennium Falcon from Star Wars can travel at a little over than the equivalent of 4 quadrillion miles per hour and can reach another galaxy in roughly 100 days. Even if we could move at the speed of light; it would still take us 4 years to reach the nearest solar system, Alpha Centurai.
So how do we achieve this since we don’t know if ‘hyperspace’ exists and even if we did; we don’t know how to access this dimension. In 1994, Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre envisioned what was eponymously called the Alcubierre Drive, in which a ship could create a warp bubble around a ship that would fold space in a sense and make the distance between the vast void between stars, much smaller.
Another option would be to travel in through a wormhole like in the sci fi movie Interstellar. A wormhole is a hypothetical singularity Point in space that connects two points in space time and would allow a ship to be connected to another region instantaneously. Unfortunately, wormholes (if they exist) may only exist for seconds and may not be big enough for a ship to fit into. There is also now new evidence that even if this is possible; travel through one would still be slow. My personal idea for FTL would be to heat something to absolute hot or the Planck temperature where the laws of physics no longer apply and then the ship could pass through the vacuum since the expansion of the universe; the fabric of space time DOES move FTL. A ship would need a way to generate this intense heat and then shield itself from the heat (perhaps with a deflector shield). This is all speculation but since the universe itself moved faster than light at the point of the Big Bang; it is a possible phenomenon. We just need to figure out how to initiate it naturally….”
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BTW, for further context: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” Arthur C. Clarke.
Maybe that’s a bit over the top, but I just love this idea. The Resturant of Order Mistakes is a restaurant in the Toyosu district of Japan that is staffed by people with dementia and Alzheimer’s. The idea is to show that people with these conditions can be productive members of Japanese society (which, by the way, is ageing faster than any other country on Earth and gives us a foretaste of what many other societies will face in the future).
As you might imagine, customers do not always get what they ordered — but very few people complain. If nothing else, the idea teachers people to be patient and forgiving.
The restaurant is a twist on a 1924 Japanese story called The Restaurant of many Orders.
What a lovely thing to do. 2-minute video here.
(Thanks to Jules for this, btw).
I don’t remember where I heard this (I may even have read it in a book I’m reading called The Geography of Genius), but someone recently said that the golden age of den (camp) building was between the wars. I disagree, I think it was post WW2 and, in particular, in the 1960s before urban development went into overdrive. My own personal experience was camp building in the late 60s and early 70s when many of the bomb sites from WW2 were still vacant land. The big houses had generally been cleared, but the land had not, which meant I had acres of wild space on my doorstep. Probably trespassing, but nobody seemed to care back then. We dig huge holes, made bows and arrows , built fires and constructed camps.
So, my question is this. If the 50s, 60s , 70s or whatever were indeed the peak of den building (and generally of kids, especially boys, running wild outside), did this have a lasting effect on the imaginations of these generations? More to the point, given that kids generally play indoors nowadays, what is happening to their imaginations today? I’ve seen a study saying that creativity among kids started to decline roughly when video gaming and cable TV started to become popular and another study saying that the distance kids roam around their home has shrink considerably over the last few decades, especially since the dawn of the internet and social media, so maybe so? Or maybe kids just build things and roam around in VR rather than RL these days?
BTW, if you Google golden age of den, or camp, building you get zip, which means there could be something to be written about this. But not by me.
Book link here that’s vaguely connected.