Stories tagged the future
Kennedy saw it.Courtesy US White HouseA concept for a plane that could make the trip from New York City to London in 90 minutes (a trip that ranks somewhere between going to the grocery store and going to the bathroom for me, in terms of frequency) was just unveiled at the Paris Air Show. It uses standard jet engines, along with rockets and ramjets. Also, it will use jet fuel made from algae. Pretty sweet.
Unfortunately, while it only takes an hour and a half to cross the Atlantic, it will take 40 years to arrive in reality. If it ever does. We'll probably all be riding pegasuses (or octopi) at that point anyway, so supersonic jets will seem lame.
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Usually images from the future don't come rendered in oil: Usually.Courtesy Ambroise-Louis GarnerayWhat do pirates hate? Lasers. I mean, duh.
So, naturally, the US Navy has developed a high energy laser that can be mounted on a ship and used to fight off attacking boats. The laser can disable outboard engines by setting them on fire. That's the other thing pirates hate: fire. Ha ha!
PS—Not that lasers aren't awesome, and not that I advocate more shooting things with guns, but how is this better than shooting things with guns? Any laser enthusiasts out there? Pirates? Pirate enthusiasts? Sailors? Explain!
Yeah, that's the future looking back at youCourtesy GeminoidDKUh oh. The future is trying to break down our doors again, and it's using its favorite tool.
No, not lasers—robots! Filthy robots. Robots, who steal our jobs and our women (or our men, whichever makes you angrier). Robots, who get more advanced with each passing year, until one day, as sure as the sunrise, they will go Skynet all over us. They will take everything that was ours. They will take our jobs, our mortgages, our more demanding pets, our horticultural chores, and humans will be relegated to a million lifetimes of lying on beaches and surviving off the food that robots cook but cannot eat. The end of history. As the man said, "That's it, man! Game over, man, game over!"
We humans have a few years left as the top dogs, but certainly not many. As you can see in the video below, robots have already advanced to the point where they can do many of the things babies can—smile, blink, twitch, look stupid—and at least one thing babies can't do: grow beards.
Game over, man, game over.
Gaze into the crystal ball to see what your future holds...: That's right, it holds a whole bunch of JGordon. Deal with it.Courtesy mararieSo…
So, Buzzketeers, you’ve been keeping something from me.
I thought we had something. I thought that we had a solid relationship built on trust, like… like a really nice but not fancy bungalow built on bedrock that doesn’t lie to you, or withhold information. Yeah, sure, I sometimes mislead you, or pass on scientifically suspect material, but that’s different. That’s for my own entertainment.
And don’t act like you don’t know what I’m going to say. That’s the whole thing, isn’t it?
Yeah, I heard. I heard that y’all can predict the future. And you didn’t tell me. Me, JGordon.
When were you going to mention that the secret’s out, and that a Cornell University scientist had demonstrated a small but statistically significant propensity for people (you) to predict the future? Were you going to wait until after the holidays, so as not to spoil the “surprise” of my gifts to you? Whatever. I got you all cashmere scarves. I thought you’d really like them. Surprise.
I hear that you were shown a list of words, and were able to recall mostly words from the list that would later be randomly selected by a computer. That’s super neat. Thanks for telling me about it.
I hear, too, that you were able to correctly able to predict 53 percent of the time when a curtained computer screen would have a sexy image on it. Cool. Maybe if you spent less time looking at sexy pictures, our relationship wouldn’t be going the way it clearly is.
3% above a 50-50 chance may not seem like much, but we both know it’s significant. Nearly as significant as the fact that you never mentioned it to me.
Do you know how that feels? I’ll show you how it feels:
1: Tomorrow, most of you American Buzzketeers will eat turkey.
2: Tomorrow, one of you will be eaten by a turkey, or turkeys.
3: Prince Philip will say something of questionable taste at his grandson’s wedding, probably to a woman or a foreign dignitary.
4. Your dad has a secret family in another state.
How do you like them apples? It’s not very fun, is it?
In any case, while the study stood up to the careful peer review of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, it’s probably all statistical wheeling and dealing, and I’d like to think that we can get over this.
I trust you’d tell me if you knew we wouldn’t.
That's actually a tear: The potato just received some horrible news. But it illustrates how full of fluid potatoes are.Courtesy ZooFariHere’s my impression of the future:
“Um, hey. How was lunch? Italian dunkers, eh? Nice. Gotta love the dunkers. Ate those right up, I see. Pretty good sauce too, huh? Got some extra sauce there, actually. Were you going to… can I have that sauce? Yeah? Oh, it’s SO good.”
Yeah, that’s the future for you. Man, is he hungry. Stuff you wouldn’t touch, the future will pound back like Captain Haddock with a bottle of Loch Lomond (before that fiasco in San Theodoros).
But the future is smart, because it realizes that Italian dunker sauce is in short supply, and it’ll take perfectly good extra sauce wherever it can get it.
Are you following the metaphor still? Were you thrown by Captaion Haddock?
Here’s what I’m saying: in the next few decades, we’re going to be super hungry for energy, food, and water, because there will be about 9 billion of us on the planet. So, in addition to coming up with new ways to produce of all of these things, we’re going to have to look for areas where they’re being wasted right now, like all those puddles of Italian Dunker sauce being shoveled into the cafeteria trash bins.
Example: drinking potato chip water.
Potatoes, as it happens, are about 75% water. When we turn them into potato chips, we get rid of all that water—we bake it, dry it, and fry it away. Considering how much we love dried potato products, that’s a lot of water wasted.
But that doesn’t mean we should stop eating potato chips. (NEVER!) Instead, some factories have been installing equipment to reclaim water that would otherwise be vented out of potato processing facilities as steam. One of the factories where the technology is being tried may be able to recapture as much as 3,000 liters of water an hour (about 790 gallons an hour). This water, already clean and pure, can be reused in the factory, or even sent back into the municipal water system.
Although the article doesn’t mention it, I’d be willing to bet that there’s another product being recaptured with the water: energy. Steam, after all, is just water with a whole bunch of heat energy in it. With the right equipment, heat can be extracted from steam, and reused for anything from cooking to powering heating and cooling equipment.
Do you see now? The future, with its peanut butter covered fingers and greasy South Park t-shirt isn’t quite the loser you think it is. It’s using all that Italian Dunker sauce, in ways that you never imagined possible.
Very much like thisCourtesy Jeff HenshawChill out, everybody. I can tell you’re all stressed out about the future, and why it’s not here, and where the flying cars are, and the laser-powered washing machines, and the genetically engineered dog-faced cats, and all that other stuff we were basically promised.
You feel like you’ve been cheated. I can see it on your faces.
Well don’t worry. The future is here, and it’s called Japan. Check it out: a machine that recycles regular old office paper into brand new toilet paper! Finally! A solution to our office paper surplus/toilet paper shortage, and a great new reason to be absolutely horrified of staples!
The new machine, called “White Goat” (because, duh, like a goat, it will eat almost anything, and it excretes something you want to rub on your orifices), will turn 40 sheets of office paper into one roll of toilet paper in about 30 minutes, at a cost of about 11 cents a roll. I’m not sure if this cost includes only the paper, or also the electricity and water the machine needs. That’s sort of important.
White goat costs somewhat more than a real goat (about $100,000), and will likely be much more difficult to eat when it has outlived its usefulness. Still, it seems like a clever in-house recycling thing, and it makes me wonder what sort of similar, and perhaps more practical, devices could be made for organizations with lots of a particular kind of waste.
Here’s the White Goat in action:
See, when I look at magazines (often), I get all frustrated that, like, the stupid things won't just read themselves at me. Like how the TV reads itself at me.
I am a busy sort of guy, and I don't have time to interpret symbols into words and words into mental images. Let's cut out the middleman, I say. That's exactly why I was so thrilled to see this announcement on the internet for an announcement in a magazine. While the first announcement had to be read the old fashioned way, wasting valuable minutes and brainpower, the latter announcement, the magazine one, will actually be in video format. It will announce CBS's fall schedule, and it will announce how delicious Pepsi is and how you should buy it. (With money, and soon.)
The magazine video uses a 2.7 mm thick LCD screen with a tiny rechargeable battery. The screen has a 320 x 240 resolution, and the chip it's on can hold about 40 minutes of video.
I was kind of thinking that the wave of the future, as far as video-zines go (my term, so hands off), would employ OLED technology, seeing has OLED screens can be super thin and flexible. But OLED displays are still way expensive, and while CBS no doubt wants to impress the New York and LA subscribers to Entertainment Weekly with their extravagance, they don't want to impress them with that much extravagance. Not for Jenna Elfman.
Um... very briefly, I believe that LCD screens work by altering the shape of a layer of film in front of a light to change the color of light that passes through that film. When the film has lots of little cells, the cells can be altered individually to make the tiny dots that form a video image. OLED screens, on the other hand, are sort of like screens made up of thousands of the little LED lights you find all over the place, except the LEDs on the screen are very very small—they're actually made of organic compounds printed on the screen, and they're activated (made to emit light) by having electricity flow to specific spots on that screen. More or less. So, once again, add lots of these little bits of light up, and you have an image. And hopefully someday some brave and proud network will put OLEDs in a magazine, to make it easier for us to learn about season 14 of two and a half men. (At that point it will be 2.5 men because Charlie Sheen will be dead, and his character will be computer animated. A half man, if you will. Or maybe the kid will cross dress every other episode.)
Robots are stealing our jobs: Even when our job is to eat bugs.Courtesy manbartlettYeah, hooray, robots can walk. I’ve been walking for, like, most of my life. A robot can make sad faces. Whatever. That’s practically my specialty. A robot can simulate excruciating pain and horror. So? Nuts to “simulate”—I live it.
Great. It’s all great. Robots are programmed and built to do all sorts of inane stuff, and people love it. But I’ve been able to do this stuff forever, and nobody’s giving me high-fives and kisses. Cool, a robot can remember your name. I can usually so that. A robot can remember your credit card number. I can for sure do that. Give me a chance people, and you’ll see how much better than a robot I am.
But no. Robot development rumbles onward, and, once again, robots are taking a brave new step where I’ve stepped years ago: they fuel themselves by eating bugs.
Some artsy science people in London have designed self-sustaining robotic furniture. The robots digest organic matter (bugs) in “microbial fuel cells,” creating enough power to run a clock (I can do that) or light up lamp (I could probably do that), and eat more bugs (done). Microbial fuel cells, by the way, are sort of like batteries that run on decomposing matter. Chemicals in the fuel cell (I think) pretty much steal the electrons being produced by bacteria as they break down organic fuel. I can’t do this, but, then again, no one is asking me to. MFCs seem like pretty interesting technology, actually. More about them here, if you’re interested.
The designers have made working models of a fly-attracting lamp that works like a pitcher plant to capture its victims, a wall-mounted clock with a sticky conveyor belt, and a table that attracts mice onto its surface and into a trap door, where (I guess) they are digested to death. (I can’t help it… it’s like the Pit of Carkoon! Argh. I’m always going to be this way.)
It’s all pretty neat, although the small mammal attracting and digesting table might be a little much. That one seems like a case of somebody getting a little too arty or a little too sciencey for their own good. I mean, I could lure and eat a mouse, and hold your food for you, but would you want me to?
Not Annie: I tried this on my own eyes, bu they were too gross.Courtesy tryingmyhardestOh, my goodness. What did I just write?
What I meant was “TVs on contacts, popped directly into eyes.” Except that I would never write “popped” and “eyes” in the same sentence.
Anyway, it’s looking like the future is still a bright place to live. Especially if the TVs stuck to your eyeballs are malfunctioning. See, Ian Pearson, a British “futurologist” (that means that he’s a guy who thinks about living in the future, even though he actually lives in Britain), has gotten some press lately regarding his prediction that we’ll have contact lens TVs/computer monitors within the next ten years. Displays integrated into contact lenses would superimpose images over what we see of the real world (or, as I like to call it, the “real” world), and, potentially, could be powered by our own body heat.
The technology such products would be based on already exists, according to Pearson. It’s just a matter of shrinking it down to size, and sticking it on your eyes. Contact lenses with non-functioning circuits and lights have already been tested on rabbits, which, after 20 minutes of exposure, had no particular complaints.
While the lens TVs might add a slight tint to your eyes, other people (or, as I like to call them, other “people”) would not be able tell what you were watching. So, while everybody might assume that the guy with the glowy eyes is stumbling around watching something very naughty indeed, I’d actually be watching the video of my sixth grade play, Annie. The joke is on you! (Although I suppose it depends where I have to insert the VHS tape—the joke might also be on me.)
Pearson also declared that we all could also have “digital tattoos” in the near future. Aside from letting the world know what you thought was cool the day you got the tattoo, this digital ink could potentially “pick up on the emotions portrayed by actors in TV shows and create impulses allowing us to feel the same emotions.”
I’m really into this digital tattoo thing, and I’ll tell you why. First of all, I have always really wanted to feel what it looks like Will Smith feels like (I’m guessing “sassy” but it’s hard to say at this point.) Also, I’ve found that my favorite emotions are the ones I feel in my skin. Emotions like “humiliation,” and “second degree burn”. Yeah, those are about two of my favorite emotions (so naturally “Home Alone” will be viewed frequently), and I think I’m not the only one. This one is going to take off. Zoom!
Now, it turns out that this report on the future was commissioned by the British electronics retailer Comet. I don’t think that this fact should affect our reception of the predictions in any way (Comet, after all, probably just wants to know what they’ll be selling in a couple years, so it’s in their interest to have an honest report), but I am a little sore that Pearson is getting paid for this sort of thing, and I’m not. Come on, now! I’m always coming up with great ideas for the future.
Instant cat whiskers
Instant cat whiskers… for girls!
TVs on bullets
The last meal you’ll ever eat (trademarked)
Playstation 5
TVs on teeth
Laser-powered lasers
Better spaceships
Hinged money (for folding)
TVs on money (regular money, not the hinged kind)
Non-functional t-800 model robots
Electronic smile cream
The technology exists, people, it’s just a matter of time and engineering. So where’s my freaking check, Comet?
I didn't have access to the original schematics: so I drew some of my own. That's me up there.Courtesy JGordonI don't know about this... if God had meant for man to fly, He would have created us with high-power hoses attached to our butts. So unless this guy was born this way, I think he might be committing a crime against nature.
This seems kind of fakey, but also kind of totally awesome. And here's a year and a half old post from Wired.com that seems to be the patent for this very same water jet-powered recreational vehicle.
The future is shaping up to be pretty cool, my friends. Pretty cool.
