Politics / Tech / The Future / World , , 0 Comments

What to Make of the Metaverse?

Why it’s likely that the metaverse won’t be good for humanity.

In October of 2021, social media giant Facebook announced that it had changed its name to Meta. The ancient Greeks gave us the word Meta, who used it to mean ‘after’, ‘beyond’ or even to transcend. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg clearly chose this name for that very reason since he is looking far ahead into the future of his company, far beyond today’s two-dimensional experience of posting photos and text on Facebook. He wants to evolve Facebook into an entirely new experience, where we interact and socialize in a virtual 3D world.

There is great promise and potentially great value in this next epoch of humanity but will the metaverse usher in a golden age, or is it all what the Roman’s called bread and circuses?

CONTINUE READING
Tech / The Future / World , 0 Comments

Why you should love your products again

How an encounter with a turn-table can reorient your world view

Source : “‘Broken Heart'” by ImNotQuiteJack is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Remember Fonzie hitting the juke box? Or the Tardis landing in the wrong place (or time)? What about the Millennium Falcon’s warp drive going kaput? All are symbolic of our past experiences we’ve had with technology, and more specifically, the products we used to own.  But times have changed, and so too have the products that we buy. They are different than they used to be, so much so, that we now all but ignore them. And this indifference comes at a great expense to our civilization, and we need to look into the past to understand how we’ve got it all wrong.

CONTINUE READING
Politics / The Future / World , 1 Comment

What will inspire you?

What Pillars of the Earth tells us about our species and our future

“Star” by Kiwi Tom is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Recently, I finished the book ‘The Pillars of the Earth’ by Ken Follet. It’s about the fictional village of Kingsbridge that undertakes the building of a cathedral in 1100’s England. Truthfully, such a subject isn’t one I normally would be curious about, but Pillars is really a tale about the ruthlessness of politics, the will to power, the technical challenges of the age and the perseverance to overcome these. And it made me think about the architecture of today. Our modern society has significantly more resources, technology and materials to create buildings of such magnificence. But we rarely do. So how is it that a village of half-starving peasants managed to create something so grand, and we, with all our abundance choose not to? It’s because we lack something they had, something humans need, and without it, our future on this planet will be very bleak.

CONTINUE READING
The Future / World0 Comments

The Future of Funerals

Social distancing. Mandatory masks. The vaccine arms race. These are some of the new realities brought forth by Covid.  Another is the online funeral. Recently, I attended my first. I logged on early, eyes closed in quiet contemplation, and for the next twenty minutes, touching songs by Cohen, Sinatra, and Groban, accompanied me while I waited for the service to start. If you’ve ever sat like this, you’ve experienced how the mind drifts, and at some point, my thoughts went to the funerals of the future, and before long I concluded something with such certainty and wondered how a brilliant mind like Gene Roddenberry didn’t. The conclusion? Read on.

CONTINUE READING
Business / Entertaiment / Politics / Tech / The Future / World0 Comments

The Case for NTF’s

Beeple’s collage, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, sold at Christie’s

Why (and why not) NFT’s are here to stay

NFT’s or Non-Fungible Tokens are the new ‘thing’, the cool kid on the blockchain, for reasons I can’t completely understand but am nonetheless convinced of. And if that’s nonsensical enough to convince you to stop reading, then don’t. Let’s try to find out together and enjoy the process, since the art is in the telling.

CONTINUE READING
Politics / Tech / The Future / Travels / World0 Comments

Rise of the Drones

How Covid proves the future of warfare will be small-scale and robotic

Modern warfare is dehumanizing and it’s about to become small and dehumanized. In fact, Covid has accelerated the trend toward miniaturization, and cheaper, more distributed ways to kill. 2020 also shows us that Covid and its cousins will also continue to play and important role in the conflicts that follow. War will never be the same again.

CONTINUE READING
World / Writing0 Comments

A Word to the Wise

Gandalf, Yoda and Admiral Adama are a few of my favorite supporting characters of the sci-fi and fantasy genre. They each possess strength, character and a secret weapon that in and of themselves, could carry the story unaided and in truth, they do in the opening chapters, shading the hero from the harsh sun and giving them time to take root and mature. But they can’t shield the young sapling forever, they are old after all, and so our learned guides must pass the mantle of leadership to our heroes and it amounts to giving them the ability to operate independently in the world. In addition to teaching them to harness their latent superpower, they give them something of innumerable value – wisdom.

CONTINUE READING
Politics / The Future / World0 Comments

Take an Inch

My wife is brilliant. She is able to get me to do just about anything she wants. Just the other day, she points to some trim above the fireplace and says, ‘Can you take that ugly stuff down?’ I look up, grave, trying like hell to form some justification to keep it there, but I can’t. She’s right. It’s ugly. I look down at the dog for a second opinion but her big eyes stare back as if to say – c’mon, who you kidding? And with great reluctance, I go up the ladder and pry the wood down. Afterward, we both admire the trimless alcove, no longer ugly, but now terribly incomplete. I say, ‘We need to do something about that.’ My wife nods as if it was truly my own idea. And so, it goes, I calculate, cut, screw, fit, drywall, plaster, sand and paint, and if the measure of my work was a foot – then it all started with an inch, artfully suggested, and unknowingly agreed too.

CONTINUE READING
Health / World0 Comments

Chaos – Corona, Cars and Swimming Pools

In the weeks since Corona, people crammed grocery store checkouts, fought over the toilet paper and barricaded their doors to any outsider.  Why? Fear of dying? Well..yes. But there’s a bit more to it. You see, the virus breeds a particular type of fear for the fear of death is not equally applied to our reality. For example, swimming pools kill 10 people a day  in the US, yet there’s no unified call to fill them up. Automobile crashes kill over 3,000 per day and no medical officer has stood behind the podium with the appeal to scrap cars. So why do we not fear pools and cars as we do the virus? 

CONTINUE READING
Health / Politics / The Future / World0 Comments

An Eye for the Little Things

Corona virus

Two words that have launched a billion conversations, seemingly at the same time, and the cacophony makes it hard to distinguish what is being said and more so, what does it truly mean for humanity? The mainstream press has its own slants, the politicians their own skews and both look to the scientific community – not so much for wisdom – but to heighten the hype or justify their actions (or lack thereof). And we’re caught in the middle, not knowing what to make of it all. But I wonder if we’re ok with that on some level? Like there’s a slight contentedness with the state of confusion, because with it, we can out-task the responsibility to do something about it elsewhere.

CONTINUE READING

SEARCH THE CATALOG