As a science fiction writer, he was one of the big three -- along with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. He is no doubt most famous for 2001: A Space Odyssey, but my personal favorites are "The Nine Billion Names of God" and Rendezvous with Rama (just the first one; the sequels didn't live up.) As a scientist, he will be best remembered for his contribution to the idea of placing communication satellites into geostationary orbit.

In futurist circles, he will long be remembered for his three laws of prediction:

1. 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.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
   

I am especially fond of the second one. I hope to live to see the third.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Last night (Friday, October 26^th), at Phil's kind invitation, I had the distinct pleasure of attending the Boulder Future Salon's monthly meeting and participating in a lively and far-flung consideration of the month's selected topic: "Moore's Law"

Continue reading "Boulder Future Salon Considers "Moore's Law"" »

Posted by Michael S. Sargent at 03:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Several days ago PC Magazine published an article entitled "Five Ideas That Will Reinvent Modern Computing."

The writer finished with a 13 year timeline (2007-2020) of "13 technologies guaranteed to change the world."

You'll want to read it all.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 01:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This Reuters article:
Centennial time capsule car found ruined | Oddly Enough | Reuters

Got me thinking about a couple of things. First, how might the time capsule have been done better (please confine speculation to approximately mid-century technology), and second, what would constitute

"an advanced product of American industrial ingenuity with the kind of lasting appeal that will still be in style 50 years from now."

with respect to early twenty-first century technology?

Please discuss in the comments.

P.S. I think I'll do some checking into how the economics of the capsule contents might have been improved. I'll let you know if anything particularly interesting comes of that.

UPDATE (Moments later): a bit of searching yields a price range of about $900 to $11,000 for similar era Belvederes in conditions ranging from semi-restored to ... iffy. A restored 1956 done by hot-rod legend Boyd Coddington's shop goes for $29,500

UPDATE FROM STEPHEN:

I'm reminded of Doc Brown's 70 year preservation of his time traveling Delorean:

Notice how this was portrayed in Back to the Future III. Dr. Brown put the vehicle up on pylons. It's covered. And it's in a sealed room.

A mine would be far superior to a natural cave because caves tend to be damp (they're usually formed by water). The preserver could choose a place in the mine where drainage is assured. Barring a cave-in or the renewed mining activities, this sort of time capsule would be perfect.

But even as portrayed in BTTF III, certain parts - like the rubber wheels - didn't fare so well. Even a carefully preserved car would need a lot of work before it would be ready for the highway.

Posted by Michael S. Sargent at 09:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here's my third and final video from the library conference I attended week before last. This is a kind of rough cut made up of leftover snippets which still managed to work together pretty well. There's discussion of demographics, virtual reality, the economy, bilingual education, and flying cars. James Hughes of Rutgers University gives some more of his rather bleak outlook on the future; then he provides some interesting generational perspectives, along with Karen Hyman and Peter Bromberg of the South Jersey Regional Library Cooperative; as promised, Salvador Avila gives his unconventional views on bilingual education; finally, New Jersey State Librarian Norma Blake provides the best answer ever to the question about why we still don't have flying cars.

Once again, I'm less than pleased with the quality. These videos look great on my computer, but I really have to strip them down in order to get them to "mere" 100 MB mpeg files -- I remember when 100 MB files were considered to be kinda big -- not sure what I'm doing wrong, but I'll keep working on it. This lkast one was little longer than the first two, so it required more extreme scaling down. Meanwhile, I'm putting the nice big fat files onto a DVD for use by the New Jersey library folks. I could probably makes copies available to others, if there's any interest.

Part one in the series can be found here; part two, here.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Heck, don't just think about it. Do it.

Of course, this would be a lot better if we could do it two-way. I'd certainly like to send some e-mails to the me of a few years ago. But I can understand where there are logisitical difficulties in providing such a service.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

For the next few days. I'm going to be working at a conference in Las Vegas.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 01:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seems like there was not time for half of the celebratory stuff we had in mind. What a shame.

But, we can still cut the cake....

Continue reading "Too Busy a Week...." »

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 04:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)