the hotel TV inflection point

we're at an interesting point of time right now from a hotel TV point-of-view ... every now and then you'll still get a room with tube TVs in the US, although flat panels predominate.

in 5 years, i doubt you'll see tubes anywhere in the states.

the future of a rising tide

good article about rising water levels and the marshall islands. i knew a woman in college who is marshallese ... i'm going to try and track herdown to see what she thinks.

http://m.yahoo.com/w/ynews/article/topstories/16?url=http%3A%2F%2Fxml.news.yahoo.com%2Fus%2Fnews%2Frss%2Frichstoryrss.html%3Fu%3D%2Fap%2F20101206%2Fap_on_sc%2Fclimate_disappearing_nations&.ts=1291684006&.intl=US&.lang=en&ref_w=frontdoors

the future of tom flanagan

i'm guessing this guy will be forced to resign his job in less than a fortnight:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/canada/8172916/WikiLeaks-Canadian-official-calls-for-assassination-of-Julian-Assange.html

{12/1 flanagan has now apologized for his remarks (of course).  there's currently a witch hunt against the wiki leaks people, so there's some air cover for flanagan being an ass ... i still think it may take him down.

http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/12/01/flanagan-wikileaks-assange.html}

article on the future of free speech ...

... relative to terrorism and the 'net.

http://m.yahoo.com/w/ygo-frontpage/lp/story/us/50927/coke.bp%3B_ylt=A2KIP62CT.1MGlkAvAIp89w4%3B_ylu=X3oDMTIxczZmZmR1BGNjb2RlAzMEY3BvcwMxBGNzZWMDbW9iaWxlLXRkBGludGwDdXMEcGtnA2lkLTUwOTI3BHBvcwMzBHNsawNtb3Jl?ref_w=frontdoors&view=today&.intl=us&.lang=en

tip jars

in the past i never thought i'd see those damn things on every fricken
service counter in the future.

i just used an electronic boarding pass ...

... off my hiptop for the first time in my life. really really fast.

very accurate.

and to think, i lived in the silicon valley for 20 years ... and it happened in vegas.

Hunters Exchange Fire Over What's Fair Game

great article about the past, and possible future, of hunting:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704518104575546253717892686.html?

travel documents of the future

given that:

a) the federal government is continuing to push on the concept of documentation -- both in the name of anti-terrorism and for the sake of illegal immigration.

and 

b) a change of parties at the top of the has changed nothing relative to travel and security ... the entire obama administration the US has been at homeland security threat level orange (the penultimate level -- red is the top, roughly translated as "planes are flying into buildings") ... americans have never been told by their government what needs to happen to lower the threat level.

and 

c) efforts to establish national ID cards seem to forever start-then-stall.

and

d) foreigners traveling to the US have to be finger printed and/or eye scanned.

my guess is that in less than 10 years, if you fly -regardless of nationality- you'll be required to have a passport.  this is going to shock a country where 85% of the people don't even carry that document.

data of the present

•    83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of
the people.
•    For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share
of residential housing net worth in the United States than all
individual Americans put together.
•    As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held
about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
•    The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States
now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation's wealth.
•    Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States
are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20
years.
•    Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in
the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
•    The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of
our national income.
(from the article here:
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/the-u.s.-middle-class-is-being-wiped-out-here%27s-the-stats-to-prove-it-520657.html?tickers=%5EDJI,%5EGSPC,SPY,MCD,WMT,XRT,DIA)

Blacks, Hispanics Continue to Lead in Mobile Data Usage - eMarketer

interesting stuff concerning the present:

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007807

quote of the moment

"Predictions of the end of civilization are nothing new, but the direst
prognosticators have, traditionally, existed on the fringes of society
where their dark visions can be comfortably attributed to an excess of
libertarianism or a shortage of Prozac."

-- bruce watson

companies that may die in 2011

pulled this off y!, who in turn grabbed it from a Douglas A. McIntyre article on 24/7 wall street.

***

Reader's Digest 

Blockbuster 

Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group

T-Mobile

Moody's Corp. 

BP: (i'm leaving their description because it's interesting) The case against the BP brand is not so much that the company will enter bankruptcy. It is that BP may end up breaking into pieces for its own sake. This may be to put the liabilities for the Deepwater Horizon spill into a company that also holds escrow capital to cover the huge costs of clean-up and suits. BP may also want to separate its successful refining operations from its exploration business, or recreate an American- based company similar to BP America, which existed for two decades. A restructuring of BP would also allow the firm to take a badly crippled brand and give the oil operation a new name -- much as it did when it changed its name from British Petroleum. The second time may be the charm.

RadioShack 

Zale Corp. 

Merrill Lynch 

Kia Motors Corp. 

quote of the moment

"The number of new cars registered in Beijing in the first four months
of 2010 rose 23.8 percent to 248,000, according to the Beijing municipal
taxation office."

-- reuters

trivia of the moment

in the UK in 1966, BBC radio would play less than one hour of rock music
a day.

in that same period, half the british population listened to pirate
radio every day.

b1-66er 1, alternate futures 0

tiger woods not only made the cut in his first post-"scandal" masters, he made the top 5; giving me my first successful prediction here in the vitrine.

god it's great to be right; and all you sporting "experts" at NPR can kiss my ass.

kids in space

the space plan, announced by the obama administration today, will put
people on mars in the mid 2030's. (he also killed our return to the
moon, which is absolutely RIGHT.)

if that plan goes off -and there are a million ways for it not to (not
to mention that obama is no kennedy and terrorists aren't racing the US
to mars)- the command pilot has probably already been born and is a
couple of years old now. you don't know his/her name yet, but you
will.

the immediate moral: be nice to little kids if you wanna be pals with
the next spaceman.

Eating the Red Tablet

Above all else, the Silicon Valley focuses on technology.  There are only two speeds in this part of the world: fast and faster.  There's also extreme, and often warped, focus on the companies that do business here -- especially Google and Apple.

Today's release of Apple's iPad marks a true red-letter event.  I haven't seen this many people worked up over a software or hardware release since the original iMac (that was Steve Jobs's first "true" computer on his return to Apple).  People, especially the Apple zealots, are insane; I mean frothing at the mouth-and-rolling-their-eyes-and-drink-no-water crazy.

It's too late to give these "people" the proper dose of Rabies Immune Globulin -- not that they would have taken it anyway -- but my prediction is there's a much harsher fate awaiting the faithful: the chilling bite of a failed gizmo.

I have an usual and unique connection to this product.  In 1993 I was the Human Interface Evangelist at Apple, replacing (the heavy-over-hyped and self-qualified) Bruce Tognazzini.  One of the products under my wing was a thing called the PenMac.

The PenMac was a tablet computer with a stylus -- designed to be a super-portable-tuck-it-under-your-arm device that would run a robust subset of System 7.

As an evangelist, I pulled a move that I've never heard of, before or since -- I started a movement inside the company to kill the product before it was released.  Evangelists are supposed to support and hype products, not kill them; but I felt then the way I still do today -- I can only support a product I can believe in.  My technological word -especially when I had the backing of Apple and was writing for InfoWorld- carried a lot of weight.  It was important to me to not lie to the public.

The reason I helped to kill the PenMac was simply this: I felt there was no market. There was no discernible reason, need or market gap that the device could fill or satisfy.

Things are a little different now, but not a lot.

In the iPad's camp you have some pretty strong positive points that didn't exist in 1993:

• The Internet as a whole
• ITunes and associated content
• Portable book content (ala Kindle)
• And to a lesser extent the iPod and iTouch (giving a wider population familiarity with Apple products, producing what wags call the "halo effect")

The biggest competitor to the iPad, without question, is the portable computer -- and at the iPad introductory $500 price point, especially the Netbook.

And it's right here that we have a problem.

Now, Steve Jobs doesn't come from my don't-hype-what-you-don't-believe-in school-of-thought.  He'll gladly, and quickly, promote anything that might further the fortunes of the companies he is most heavily involved with (Disney and Apple) -- all the while holding a fairly heavy disdain of the world population as a whole.  Never forget, this is the man who: called color on computer screens "overrated" when he released the original Macintosh, ran a PC for months after re-joining Apple, and when asked at the most recent shareholders' meeting what kept him up at night said, "Shareholders' meetings."

Steve will tell you that Netbooks are worthless and overrated.  He'll also tell you that the iPad is better than the Kindle.

What Steve won't tell you is that Apple can't compete in the Netbook market because once you strip away everything else, Apple wouldn't have a price-competitive product.  He can't tell you want it's like to own a Kindle -- because he doesn't use one.  He also won't tell you exactly how you should carry your iPad if you already have an iPhone and an iPod.

The iPad has a few obvious problems: no multi-tasking, captive applications (meaning you have to pay the Apple price), no Flash support (Jobs will rail on Adobe about Flash, but the truth of the matter is Apple fell asleep at the wheel relative to display -- if they'd been paying attention, Apple would have the standard, not Adobe), no USB, no keyboard.

Apple fanboys, being what they are, will be quick to either dismiss many of these complaints or throw out the ever-constant, "that will happen in the future."  (This is so pervasive that my pal Bo3b believes that when you buy Apple you are always buying the future, never the present.)

There are some other problems endemic to tablets:

• Touch screen is a bad idea.  For some reason, people in the 21st century haven't yet figured out that you don't want to be touching the item that you are also supposed to be viewing.  You end up not only needing to be sure your screen stays in touch registration, but also looking through the grunge, smears and scratches that develop as you use it.
• Tablets in general, and especially the iPad all but demand that you use them two-handed (some gestures require two-hands on the iPad), but in a mobile environment, often times that's the very last thing you want to do.  For this example, don't think "different," think "riding on a bus."
• Typing on a screen is absurd with no feedback.  Sure you can get a keyboard, but if you do, you have to carry that and a dongle along.  And when you do that you start moving further and further away from "portable."
• Although I haven't handled one yet, I'm fairly certain they'll be easily dropped.  (In fact, I would venture that 100 people have already dropped their iPads today).
• With the exception of the Kindle, there aren't any screens on the market that are easily visible in broad daylight.  Think "standing on a street corner."  The iPad could be, but I'll bet you it's not.

And don't forget the US economy is still perceived as hurting ... and when that's true, people don't spend money.  Ignore what the out-of-work sociopaths try and tell you out here -- the Valley economy is, even in the worst of times, healthy (Sunnyvale housing prices -- the very epicenter of the Silicon Valley -- rose 30% in the last year).  That, in combination with the inflated salaries of the area, gives people the inability to see that $500+ is a lot of money for a "toy."  People here will pay it without blinking, but when you live in an area where that number may equal the price of your rent payment, the story is different.

Mix this all together, spill it out, and I say right here, right now, the iPad will be a loser.  In the same way that the way Macintosh actually changed computing was to put mice on all Windows machines, I think the best Apple can do here is get people to pay attention to other/cheaper tablets.

It'll sell remarkably well out-the-gate.  Apple always gets more rapid early adoption than other companies (and the press never mentions that.)  But when it fails, Apple will do exactly as David Nagel said in the corporate communications meeting all those years ago, "We'll declare victory, stop manufacture and move on to the next thing."

There is one very important thing to note here, though.  I know a lot of people in the Silicon Valley, ranging from Chairmen of the Board of billion dollar corporations to QA bottom feeders.  Of all these people, the guy I know who has the absolute best understanding of portable computing is Fat Paulie.  He knows more about this stuff than you and I combined (and is so deeply embedded in this world that there's a gold Sumsung cell bearing his name).  And Paulie claims this iPad is a winner.  It will be so huge that it will actually define a whole new category of computing.

In closing I wanted to capture an email Bo3b sent to me about this last night.

***

The media is of course awash with iPad mania today.  The curious thing to me is that everyone is assuming this is a raging success before it's even shipped.

5 million in a heartbeat?  I see an analyst predict 2 million to 6 million in the first year.

I see the Times wanting $17/month simply for access to their news. I see these apps doubled in price.  I see the venture fund that doubled in size in order to push for more iPad apps. I see people writing that this is the savior of books, news, and magazine publishing.

This is all very curious to me, for an unknown product in an unknown niche. People are assuming that anything Apple creates is a winner, no if ands or buts.

I just can't see it.  A $500 toy that is good for web browsing does not seem to fit into the success category of either an iPod or an iPhone- where it's clear that everyone could use them.


***


4/5 addendum:
i learned yesterday that you can't print from an ipad.  if true, this automatically, and nearly completely, kills the market for senior citizens ... they view computers in an "older" way and really like to print.


***


{side notes:

• with the exception of steve jobs, all the people listed here used to run mac OS, but now run windows.
• i own stock in both apple and intel.
• this article was written on a $300 asus netbook in a round table pizza parlor -- i wouldn't have been able to do it on an ipad.}

the immediate future of tiger woods

as i was driving back from the movies last night (super-great tohoscope print of yojimbo at the stanford, thanks very much) i heard someone on national public radio (NPR), talking about tiger woods.

with certain notable exceptions, i don't watch TV, which, by default, means i also do not watch sports.

but i know about tiger woods.

i became aware of him from my favorite sports writer when tiger played golf at stanford.  the fact that he was local is what put him on my radar by nothing more than pure happenstance.  it was very clear to me then, as it was to anyone with at least half a mind who paid attention, that tiger was the next anointed child of golf.  it was obvious he was good, the big question was "how good?"

as he was finishing his first major event (i don't remember what it was), i was playing poker at the local poker room ... as with any casino worth its weight in reflective chrome, they had sports spewing endlessly and silently in the background, i watched intently between hands.  nearly everyone in the cardroom was ignoring his play, but i was rapt.  i figured the first big question about just what his career could be might be answered then and there.  as i am with most things in life, i was a tiger optimist; but i've been wrong before and i was certainly willing to take a free lesson while playing cards.

woods was tied for the lead and playing a sudden-death shoot-out.  the first hole was probably something like a par three (but could have been a two-shot par four) ... the direct line to the pin was over a daunting water hazard.  a safer approach was to play for the exposed end of the green and work your best with the shortest club in your bag ... but this almost certainly would mean a two-putt -- no golfer, no matter how great, will routinely sink 120 foot putts.

woods's challenger teed up (i don't remember whom -- some white guy) and in one gritty motion hit his ball into the water hazard.

the door was now open.

the obvious and easy play here is to shoot for the end of the green.  two-putt.  win.  shake a few hands.  hold a giant check.  talk about how much you love your parents.

but that's not what woods did.

he lined up straight at the hole, in a frame a mind that looked almost absent minded (but would become his trademark of concentration).  one smooth shot, straight over the water, a hop and a roll backward and his  ball comes to rest less that a foot away.

right there, right then, i knew i'd seen the future of golf.  people had doubted and challenged him.  "he's a good amateur, that's all."  "he's never truly been tried."  "being the best kid at your college means nothing."

i actually said, "man," under my breath, catching an queried glance from the dealer.

the cardroom continued to churn in dull, apathetic clicking, but i knew that in less than a year there wouldn't be anyone here who wouldn't know who "tiger woods" was.

okay, back to the present.

tiger's been away from golf for a few months now due to sexual improprieties (for lack of a better term) with women outside his marriage.  it's provided a feeding frenzy for the press-at-large, turning the entire industry yellower by the day.

last night, mr. NPR said that tiger's return to the masters was, from a golfing purist's point of view, a non-event.  "the question isn't whether he will win, it's whether he'll make the cut."

okay?

no.

i come from a line of people that have trouble picking winners, but we can always spot a loser.  i can tell you with absolute certainty, mr. woods may be a lot of things -- most of which i don't care anything about -- but he is no loser.

no one in modern golf has ever endured the pressure that he's continually under all the time anyway.  anyone with a modicum of chemistry background can tell you that turning the burners up make make the pot boil faster, but it won't increase the temperature of the boil.  he'll play just fine the only real question in my mind is how much he's been able to practice since his reclusion/media explosion.

unlike nearly everyone else who plays cards, neither by trade, nor by hobby, am i a sports bettor.  but i'm always willing to make money when the opportunity presents itself. and for this, dear reader, i offer you a chance ... i'll give anyone reading this 'blog 2-to-1 for up to US$1000 that woods makes the cut at this coming masters.  if you don't like that you can give me 3-to-1 and i'll bet you he finishes in the top 10 of the event.

remember, you heard it here first.

oh yes, and my free advice to you?  don't take your sports tips from NPR.

lack of future vision by the present

in the most recent wii "everybody votes" poll, the question was:

will electronic books/newspapers ever replace printed books/newspapers?

44% of the people responding said "no" (and ND held the distinction of being the only state that had a majority saying nay).

this is not only wrong, but obviously wrong.  however people feel about books, magazines and newspapers today is based mostly on their previous experience with the medium.  you don't have to be a futurologist to know which will be cheaper (and ever-more-important, environmentally friendly) to produce. 

the question wasn't "when," it was "if." 

i wonder how the people of north dakota would have felt about papyrus back in the days of wax tablets.

quote of the moment

"Anybody who still believes that oil futures prices are a reflection of
the true state of the physical market is living in a time warp."
-- David Hufton of oil brokers PVM

in the past, the past was called ...

whenever we talk about the past today, probably the most common term
people use is "classic."
so here's a question for you ... in the classic times, how did they
refer to the past?
i was listening to a 50's re-broadcast of a duke ellington concert where
he was going to play some of his older 30's music.
"and now, ladies and gentlemen, a selection from our vintage catalog."

quote of the moment

"the desire to achieve a healthy old age is laudable indeed, and will be
even more so in the future."
-- jane brody, the new york times
(who apparently DIDN'T USE AN EDITOR for this piece in their health
section)

not actually blow offs

in the past i was a serious nose-to-the-grindstone student.  at the age of 8 i decided i wanted to be the valedictorian of my high school class because when i asked my dad what the word meant he said, "it's like being the best of the best."  i concept stuck and became a goal.

well, i made it.  4.0 back before there was such thing as "advanced placement," or grade point averages that could actually be higher than that (which are a disservice to modern society, by the way).

college was a different story.  i graduated bottom of my class with a 2.04 GPA("the lowest in the history of this university" as my oh-so-kind admissions dean informed me) ... not because of drugs, sex or rock 'n' roll (unfortunately), but rather because of severe depression, crossed with absolute revulsion of the way the university environment was run.  my hatred of the school is so intense that, to this day, i still don't refer to it by name in anything i write, including in my books.

there were two classes i took in the past that i considered to be blow-offs at the time that turned out to be incredibly (bordering on indescribably) useful.

one was spanish.  i took it for five years from three different teachers.  i thought it was hard and unwieldy.  my gringo accent was so bad that even i would flinch when i spoke.  when i did my homework i'd always arranged my pee chees in order of subjects i was doing the worst in, down to subjects i was doing the best ... that way, if i didn't have enough time to get everything done (from my endless procrastination -- which is one of my biggest problems to this very day).  inevitably spanish would either be on top, or just below english ... which made me dread it just that much more.

but there were some things i liked about the class.  it pushed an edge in me that needed pushing.  i was shy and uncomfortable with speaking in class -- especially when people were concerned about how you were saying things at least as much as what you were saying.  i needed that practice.  i could tell.

it also had a heavy theory aspect.that i found attractive.  i was becoming concerned with thing like past-perfect tenses of verbs.  weirdly, spanish was making me better at english.

over time i got confident and cocky.  i was reading cervantes in spanish (in fact, my comprehension in spanish was better than it was in english -- probably because i paid closer attention when i read spanish).  i knew about the mestizo problems in mexico.  i re-wrote the ending of a famous spanish story i didn't like and produced it as a radio play*.  i picked up smatterings of other languages -especially russian- because my teacher had made the mistake of saying "no english will be spoken in this class -- ever," instead of saying, "we will speak only spanish in this class."

and then i quit.

but what i didn't know is how important spanish would become in my later life.  it lets me travel with impunity in spanish and italian speaking countries.  it lets me read french and understand the gist of it.  it helps me understand latin.

i've lived most of my life in the western US.  spanish is easily the second most common language here.  there are physical and sociological areas where it is easily the predominate language.  i actually speak it a couple of times a week -- and read it at least every-other day.

yes, my diction is still abhorrent and i've lost the ability to conjugate in anything but the present tense.  but spanish class gave me the confidence to ignore all that and communicate.  i don't care if my listener laughs, cries, sneers, shudders or snorts when i talk as long as they know what the hell i'm trying to say.  i'll even pantomime like marcel marceau as i butcher one of the world's loveliest languages if i have to; but i never walk away misunderstood.

it's not an exaggeration to say that spanish class, crossed with a rick steves book i once read, is what gave me the ability to travel the world. and i've seen a fair amount of it.



and it wouldn't have happened without spanish class.


and that's cool.


the other class that's been unreasonably helpful is typing. i took it in 8th grade to fill in a place in my schedule that didn't really have any other classes that i could tolerate. it seemed like the least hateful option of what was available.


the class in itself was a riot. all the hottest cheerleaders. a couple homely girls. all the studliest football players (because they wanted to be in the class with the hottest cheerleaders). and me. aside from being the only circumcised man in a turkish sauna, i have never been more out of place.


manual typewriters were a bitch (although the mechanism itself was pretty cool). my speed was abysmal. my manual dexterity laughably questionable.


but ...


if your main male competition is a bunch of football players who are either ogling the chicks asses (make no mistake, they were definitely worth ogling) or figuring out how they can jump out the back window when the teacher wasn't looking (it wasn't worth jumping out of), it's not hard to stand out as best boy in class. i remember my teacher nearly weeping, more than once, when she saw both how incredibly hard i was trying (while having the most pathetic of results), and simultaneously feeling sorry for how hormone-lacking i was in this world of full-on rage.  


as i recall it was the last B i ever got in school (valedictorian qualifications don't start until 9th grade).

my graduation speed was 32 words per minute.


having worked in the computer industry (or simply taking a look at how many fricken 'blogs i have), i don't have to tell you how important typing has become.


sure, i have never figured out how a shift key works, but my speed with my thumbs only on a hiptop is almost exactly equal to my 9-finger speed on a manual all those years ago (fast enough, in fact, that i've had strangers truly agape watching me type).


yeah, i might hold regret over the fact i never had a piece of that cheerleader ass, but i'm sure as hell glad i never jumped out the window. (and knowing what i know now about ass in general, i wouldn't trade it.)




*i ended the story with "and castello washed ashore, with his severed leg tucked under his arm," instead of whatever insipid sappy ending it had.  the teacher loved it.  several years later i came very very close to being assaulted by a woman who had translated the same story as a senior project in her spanish class, with the same teacher.  when she handed in her translation, the instructor said, "that's not how this story ends," and summarily gave her a C+.  this, in turn, would have endangered a goal she had of being valedictorian had it not been for long discussions, some forms of definitive proof.  (probably resulting in her shaving five years off the end of her life.)  it took me awhile talk her down off the psychological ledge. in fact i was surprised by how hard it was to even put a sentence together, as she pummeled my chest.  que lastima.

bilingual computer games of the present

here in the future nearly everyone in the first world has a computer, or access to one. they've been smaller, cheaper and more sociologically important than we imagined in the past.

like in the past, computers can be tedious and annoying, but they're still mostly fun and fascinating.  they're also a LOT easier to use now ... easy enough that you don't need to be able to program to use them -- the vast majority of users don't even know how.

there are tons of games and millions of ways to waste time socially, both with friends and people you don't even actually know, but here's one of my favorites ...

we now have software tools letting you translate from one language to another.  they're extremely fast, taking only fractions of a second to do a change, and can translate from-and-to all the major languages in the world.  (english, by the way, has become widely used -- in a large part because of its pervasiveness in rock n' roll, believe it or not.)

these translators are also sublimely inaccurate.  you can almost always tell what something means, but the translations are riddled with funny and/or bewildering errors.  and this, in turn, lets you play a game ...

you can take a sentence, translate it to another language and translate it back to see how far afield the translation has gone ...

for example, the sentence:

tomorrow i will ride my bike to school

in spanish becomes:

i mañana en mi bicicleta a la escuela.


but when translated back is:


i am on my bike to school.


so the game you can play is to translate something back and forth between languages until the sentence never changes in english, then show someone that sentence and have them guess what the original sentence was before it went insane.  now sure, i'm the first to admit this isn't the funnest game to ever be invented in the future, but you have to believe me here, it's not the worst (and it's way better than most of the stuff shown on future TV -- a medium so poor that i don't even watch it).


so after translating a sentence back and forth out of icelandic (and don't wig out -- nobody lives there, even in the future -- i just use the language because i can) here's my final draft ...


all d4rw1n to do is give me three oranges, a rabbit and basketball and I will take him to be the greatest man never born.


before you guess, i'll give you a hint.  here's the same sentence finalized with a different translation program (and believe it or not, this stuff in the future is all free -- you don't even have to check it out of the library or anything ... this time i'm switching back and forth between russian):


entire d4rw1n must make in order to give to me 3 oranges, rabbits and basketballs and I [rasmotrim], which was large always oh persona.


don't be fooled by "you get what you pay for."  here in the future there's a lot more free stuff and a lot of it's good -- this just happens to be a bit of a soft spot.  (and no, i have no explanation for the [rasmotrim] comment -- that word means as much to me here in the future as it did in the past ... which is to say, nothing.)


think think think.  what could it be?  well the first one is actually pretty close.  here's my original sentence:


all d4rw1n has to do is give me three oranges, a rabbit and a basketball and i will consider him to be the greatest person ever born.

in closing, as we say in english-japanese-english, "And the reader who becomes the thought and love, I acquired favorite farewell value from future."

the meta topic

from the point of view of the past, one of the things that would have surprised someone about the future is how little we talk about the future in a good sense now.  in the past there was an obsession with the future -- most of it was expressed in science fiction, but much of it was talked about directly in science fact ... we'll go to the moon and establish a base ... we'll farm the oceans ... alchemy will become a reality and we'll figure out how to turn lead into gold.

now whenever we mention the future, it's nearly always in terms of tragedy or trouble lurking just over the horizon ... global warming will kill the entirety of the planet ... there will be a world food shortage ... the oceans buckle under human-caused environmental strain.

(as an aside, my opinion is that much of this future pessimism is caused by television news ... feeding a society that seems to infatuated with fear ... but i'm not wholly informed here -- i don't watch TV.)

in the past there was some talk of trouble in the future, but nearly always it revolved around one of two things: population explosion, or seemingly inevitable nuclear war with what was then known as the USSR.  but unless you were someone like robert mcnamara, you didn't really worry about this stuff -- you left that to the bigger wigs as you tried to figure out just how big the flares in your pants should be.

the world today holds twice as many people as it did in 1969.  given that, if you showed someone from the past the world today, from a ecological point-of-view  (now we say "green") they'd probably be shocked at how little air pollution there is ... and for good reason, it was far worse before things like smoke stack scrubbers and catalytic converters.

if you asked someone from the past to guess what the cleanliness of the future would be like from here, they'd venture that a 40-year future would be even cleaner, given the vector we're on right now.

whether or not that's true doesn't matter.  i think the sociological meta question is more interesting: if we've done this well to this point, why do we no longer have optimism?

welcome to the future vitrine

like any science kid in the 60's (now known as a "geek*"), i had a fascination with what the future might be like.  flying cars, picture phones and men on the moon, sure ... but there'd be other stuff too.  i'd think about it, talk about it.  play with toys about it.  i thought it was amazing and thrilling and scary and so, so very cool.  i couldn't believe that i'd actually live to see the 21st century.


well, i live there now.  and, not surprisingly, it's both more and less than i was expecting.  


the whole purpose of this 'blog is to write about the future from the point of view of the past, the past from the point of view of the future, and the future from where we pen at the moment.


i'll be joined on here by my good friend, d4rw1n.  a close friend of my brother's growing up, he's now a power international trade lawyer in washington DC.  together we've trod the deserts of rajasthan, danced to kraftwerk and eaten the very best in cheap oysters.  he heard about my idea and it struck a chord.  d4rw1n's an analyst and a titan ... i'm extremely interested to hear what he has to say.


we'll be updating this sporadically, but continually.


(side note: i've always called this idea, "i live in the future," but some spudnut has locked that blogspot address without updating it so i've settled for this name instead.)


if you'd like to contribute a piece, either as a one-off, or as an ongoing member, please let me know.  we'd love to have you play along.


before you go, consider this: right this very moment is the youngest you'll ever be for the rest of your life.  


(and ask yourself this question, is the comment above tangential to the topic as a whole?  or is your answer far more sinister than that.)


welcome to the future vitrine.  i hope you enjoy the view.




*a term that, in the past, was more of an answer to a trivia question than anything else -- it referred to carnies that would bite the heads off of chickens in sideshows.