December 21, 2007
X Prize Cars is my new hobby! I hope to eventually make it a business as well, but for now I am just having fun researching the Automotive X Prize, the teams, and their cars. Today, Wired magazine gave the AXP some big press - apparently their next issue has the AXP as the cover story: 1 Gallon of Gas, 100 Miles - $10 Million: The Race to Build the Supergreen Car. My website is not really ready for prime time yet - I am still working on the logo (the graphic is the latest revision - subject to more change!), the navigation (I want little graphics for each featured vehicle in the second column), and of course on building up the content, but I think it's ready for people to take a look, anyway :-).
Posted by Eric Boyd at 11:12 AM | permalink
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December 19, 2007
I've been collecting alternative energy links for several months, and meaning to write about them here... rather than drag it out into six posts, here is the entire collection with commentary! We've got kites, tornadoes, tidal and nukes.
Continue reading "Alt Energy Update"
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November 5, 2007
As I mentioned, I attended the recent Foresight Vision Weekend Unconference, which used Open Space Technology for the unconference part. You can check out the wiki for notes that participants took during each talk, which I think is pretty cool. My session on Sustainable Transhuman Lifestyles went quite well - we had a lively discussion among about 10 people, and we all agreed that there is lots of interesting stuff to think about in terms of social and personal stuff relating to life extension. Mostly I wish we'd had a lot more time - we barely got started on that topic. Read on for more thought about the conference overall, my session, and some other sessions that I attended.
Continue reading "Foresight Unconference 2007"
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November 5, 2007
Accelerating Future: Forbes Looks at Transhumanism, which has a pretty table showing what people most want in terms of improvements. Smarter brains wins! Sadly life extension was not a possible choice - you'd think a lot of people would go for that! Half way down the list, 17 people voted for "more physical strength", and they may soon get that wish. Technology Review: Next-Generation Sports Doping talks about two new drugs in clinical trials which are designed to fight muscle-wasting disease. But the application of these drugs in normal people will cause muscle growth - and you don't even need to work out, like with steroids. In addition, because the drugs are much more narrowly targeted than steroids, they should have minimal side effects. The picture is of a Mighty Mouse, which has two gene-knockouts for the genes which one of these drugs targets. Pretty impressive! Read on for some thought...
Continue reading "Transhuman Era to Begin?"
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October 24, 2007
Google Calendar: Tech Culture, SF Bay Area, it's been a long time since I've mentioned the calendar that I maintain (see it on the right), so I thought I would top-level link it again. This month is pretty cool, there is a Long Now on Nov 9th, the Green Festival on the 10th and 11th, and most exciting of all is the Foresight unConference, a week and half from now, on Nov 3rd and 4th. I am hoping to host a session on sustainable transhumanism, so if that subject interests you, please sign up!
Posted by Eric Boyd at 10:27 PM | permalink
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October 11, 2007
Wal-Mart's Sustainability Summit: Greenwash it was Not (TreeHugger). Half way down the article, the author (Sami Grover) says this:
Having said all of the above, a huge question still remains – can a company that is based on selling as much stuff as possible, as cheaply as possible, ever be green? If they use half as much energy to produce a T-shirt, but sell four times as many, the environment will still suffer. This is a conundrum that goes to the very heart of the sustainability debate, and one that Wal-Mart does not have the answer to (to be fair, they don’t claim to either). Ultimately, so much of being green on an individual level is about buying less crap, and using what we have better. This author is unlikely to be shopping at Wal-Mart any time soon, and tends to avoid shopping as much as possible anyway. Nevertheless, we don’t see a collapse of our capitalist system coming any time soon (and we’re not sure we’d welcome it when it came), so we see any efforts by a company as large as Wal-Mart to make things better, greener and and with better conditions for its workers and those of its suppliers as a very, very good thing.
If we are going to survive the next hundred years as a civilization, we need to figure out whether capitalism can be sustainable, or not. Can we harness the huge machinery of our existing civilization to solve the problems it has created, or must we give it all up? Read on for some thoughts...
Continue reading "Sustainable Capitalism"
Posted by Eric Boyd at 1:43 PM | permalink
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September 23, 2007
The C-Realm Radiant Sun - C-Realm Podcast #49 part 1 and part 2. Once again I talked with KMO about transhumanism and sustainability. It actually occurred well over a month ago - I have been neglecting this blog and I hope KMO isn't offended by my slowness. I have rededicated myself to producing content on a more regular basis. So go, enjoy the podcast.
Continue reading "More C-Realm Goodness"
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September 21, 2007
Popular Mechanics: Google Lunar X Prize - Why Nobody Will Win, five reasons: Burt Rutan is busy; not enough in the purse, not enough time, too darn tough, it's cooler to be green. Although I don't agree with all of these reasons, it's interesting to see another critique of the Google Lunar X-Prize (check my critique from last week). I caught up with the X-Prize people at Wired NextFest and talked with them about this prize, read on for some more thoughts...
Continue reading "Lunar X-Prize Revisited"
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September 20, 2007
Wired NextFest, I was there on Sunday and it was a blast. Read on for some of my favorites including: 3D mars, a big multi-touch screen, the wheel surf, the OLPC charger, a $5000 3D printer, and more...
Continue reading "Wired NextFest 2007"
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September 13, 2007
Google Lunar X-Prize, a $30M dollar prize to send a robotic rover to the moon. They must rove >500m and send video, images and "data" back to Earth. Read on for some of my thoughts.
Continue reading "Lunar X-prize: Moon 2.0"
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