If you want to imagine a very alien-seeming society, Japan is often a good place to start for a Westerner.

Originally shared by Winchell Chung

Experts say “the flight from human intimacy” in Japan comes from having a highly developed economy and high gender inequality. “There’s a word for married working women: oniyome, or ‘devil wives.'”

At the same time, Japan’s population is shrinking and graying, setting up a “demographic time bomb” that could radiate out globally through the country’s Greece-level national debt and deep economic ties with China and the US.

http://www.techinsider.io/half-of-japanese-people-arent-having-sex-2015-7

According to Gordon Van Gelder, the publisher of F&SF, this competition’s closing date has been extended to 30 July.

So submit a funny rewrite that updates an SFF classic, and win modest prizes.

https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2016/competition1605.htm

“But what do we get out of the space program? Shouldn’t we spend that money on solving problems here on Earth?”

It’s not either-or.

Originally shared by NASA

Algorithm, created to help pick options for Mars, now helps with energy efficiency of homes on Earth: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/feature/how-a-solution-for-mars-architecture-helped-with-energy-efficiency-in-the-home

Via David Brin, a plan to send out automated spacecraft which will convert asteroids into other automated spacecraft and send them where we want them.

https://medium.com/made-in-space/how-we-want-to-turn-asteroids-into-spacecraft-e95d3214d787#.occaxwkbs

I’m picturing a kind of animist future world in which every living and nonliving thing is linked into a descendant of the Internet, and in which bits of intelligence have been incorporated into many of them – so you can have an actual conversation with a tree, and this is a normal part of your day.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/when-you-give-a-tree-an-email-address/398210/

Via Deb Chachra’s newsletter, an article which makes the point that the reason VR is cool is that instead of tiny muscles controlling a tiny joystick or touchpad or whatever, you are controlling the game with your whole body and your whole physicality.

(Friends of Damian Trasler will quickly detect why I thought of him while reading.)

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-07-14-vr-is-a-revolution-in-control-more-than-immersion

Originally shared by Larry Panozzo

Here’s an interesting thought. At one point we were primitive creatures in, colloquially speaking, a jungle. There are even still a few primitive peoples in actual jungles. But now what mankind has rapidly created is a technological jungle that most of us hardly understand, and nobody really understands all of it. As we progress, this jungle is only going to get denser, and while we will no doubt build machines to help us navigate it while simultaneously building machines to make it a better jungle, we still will be entirely dependent on the machines to navigate the jungle. At times we may find ourselves lost in our own jungle.

Furthermore, we are already reaching the point when individual pieces of technology become so complicated that nobody fully understands them. Google is 2 billion lines of code. I’m willing to bet some good money that no one person knows exactly how the google search engine operates, yet it does and billions of people rely on it.

The problem I see with this is that if we don’t engineer technology now that can troubleshoot complex technological systems, there will be a point when complex things break and no one can fix them without massive, expensive collaboration – just because no single person will know enough of the system! (I feel like this has already happened in economics and politics.) I’m not sure we’ve really reached this point yet, but it is at most just a couple decades down the road.

http://singularityhub.com/2016/07/17/the-world-will-soon-depend-on-technology-no-one-understands/?utm_content=bufferb2cab&utm_medium=social&utm_source=googleplus-hub&utm_campaign=buffer

Originally shared by Walter Roberson

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/pentagon-mass-civil-breakdown?CMP=share_btn_fb

You can’t own it, but you can kind of squat.

Originally shared by Winchell Chung

Outer Space treaty forbids anybody owning a planet, but there might be a loophole.

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2016/07/eternal-light-up-for-grabs/

You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Or could you?

Originally shared by Winchell Chung

It is possible to purchase Pokemon “lures”.

Businesses find that for about $1.19 an hour they can drastically increase their walk-in traffic by dropping a lure every half-hour.

http://www.inc.com/walter-chen/pok-mon-go-is-driving-insane-amounts-of-sales-at-small-local-businesses-here-s-h.html