The argument of this article appears to be that we are developing so many useful devices that would also work on the moon, we no longer have to invent a huge amount of infrastructure from scratch – which makes sense, and applies in many domains.

One advantage of being a technological society is that you have all of these pre-solved problems just waiting for the solution to be applied elsewhere.

http://futurism.com/colonize-moon-2022and-cost-less-aircraft-carrier/

Via Linda Dean. Sounds like what has actually been demonstrated here is an ansible – faster-than-light communication, which is useful once you start going far enough from Earth to get a lightspeed delay.

The rest of the piece is a bit of an oversell, unfortunately.

Originally shared by Harold Chester

Teleportation and warp drive, too. I hope this happens in my lifetime.

http://www.inquisitr.com/2975388/star-trek-tranporter-technology-breakthrough/

Originally shared by Winchell Chung

Better at stopping radiation as well.

Sounds like prime spacecraft hull metal to me.

https://news.ncsu.edu/2016/04/metal-foam-tough-2016/

The more things are connected, the more things can be hacked. 

Next time you put any kind of connected device in your story, consider asking: What happens if someone hacks this thing? What can they do that would cause problems?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhh3U2Swyfg&feature=share

I’m auditing a University of Columbia course on data science at the moment. This lecture is on detecting truthfulness in human speakers. The researchers created a corpus of speech, some of which was truthful and some of which was not, and analysed various features to see how easy it would be to distinguish. 

They also had human judges score the speech for truthfulness, and found:

– people performed, on average, worse than chance

– some people, however, performed much better than others

– training did not improve performance

– neuroticism in the scorer reduced performance

– agreeableness and openness in the scorer increased performance 

– post-test confidence did not correlate with ability.

In a meta-study, criminals were found to have the best ability to distinguish between truth and lies, and parole officers the worst (less than 50%, possibly because they expect people to lie more than they actually do). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUCMOueSHMA&feature=share

It wasn’t until nearly the end of this hour-and-a-half video (from 2008, so a bit out of date in places) that I figured a couple of things out. 

The main speaker, Jonathan Zittrain, talks about the difference between “sterile” and “generative” technologies. A sterile technology does only what its designers plan for it to do (like CompuServe, which gave you a menu which they controlled of things you could use the service for). A generative technology forms a platform on which people can build anything they want, and this creates tremendous and often completely unexpected value for everyone participating (like the World Wide Web). 

The problem is, not everything that some people want is desirable to the other people who are also using the technology, so the success of generative technologies utterly depends on the people of goodwill outnumbering, and collectively outwitting, the people of ill will. And in fact this is the problem of having a society in general.

If I can make a political parallel, sterile technologies are like dictatorships: they may work extremely well, the trains may run on time, medical school may be free, architecture may be magnificent, but only the things the dictator approves of will flourish. Those things will flourish mightily, but if your interests as an individual don’t align with those of the dictator, you’re going to have a bad time. 

On the other hand, an open society can generate things that aren’t centrally planned, and because they’re an environment which allows the creation of unplanned benefits for which people don’t have to gain permission, they are going to be more innovative as a consequence of being more free – if for no other reason, just because the interests of many different people are open to being served.

The problem is that an open society is inherently exposed to being taken over by people whose interests don’t coincide with those of most of the society’s members. Only the vigilance of the members against such a takeover – and also against the tendency to prevent such takeovers by attempting to close things up and move towards a sterile, controlled environment – will enable the benefits of openness to continue. 

I suspect I’ve just summarized John Stewart Mill. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAsb4gtEpaw&feature=share

Via MrsA Wiggins. This is a smart approach that tackles current ecological and economic issues head-on.

Originally shared by Sallie Alys Montuori

Food for thought.  Fairly literally, actually.

https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-the-frontlines-of-the-blue-green-economic-revolution-d5ae171285a3#.la4pla8cx

Who else saw this one coming?

You can now open your text editor (or browser) and write code that compiles into bacteria or yeast DNA, creating circuits, logic gates, sensors and the like.

http://phys.org/news/2016-03-language-cells.html

An enthusiastic presentation about indoor farming with sensors and data analytics. Part of the point is to make any place as good as any other place to grow food, and to figure out what conditions produce preferred results, so we don’t need to ship the food itself (the atoms), only the way of growing it (the bits). 

(16 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEx6K4P4GJc&feature=share