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Okay so it's got a cute factor but it's a good few refinements away from operating on the nanoscale. Nice to see a giant mockup actually working, tho. 

Was just talking to a mate, at the weekend, about how solar was almost ready to destroy the oil economy. Come back home and find this. I'd seen a meme on facebook and thought it was some kind of photoshop wind up. Turns out team america might be on verge of actually saving the world this time. America! Fuck yeah!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlTA3rnpgzU#t=389

Explained more succinctly than I ever would

It's not my land. It's ours. And no one is hunting... If anything, we're farming, and all the cross-pollination going on helps everyone.

Dunno much about cellular biology research but this sounds like it could be a big deal?

Any rational human: Please don't do this inconceivably stupid thing you complete fucking retards?

Crazy bastards making the decisions: We need these for FREEDUMZ!!!

This disparity in ownership and the greed factor of massive stockpiling will become irrelevant in the next couple of decades. In case nobody has noticed yet we are on a roadmap to the invention of Star-Trek Replicators^tm. Anything that can be manufactured, sold and consumed will be manufactured and consumed on the spot. There's no middleman. There's no "sold".

A molecular printer spits out any consumable on command. The only time a human gets involved is ordering then using the output. No-one sources the components, no-one assembles it, no one delivers it, no one manages the process of coordinating supply to production to order fulfilment. Who get's paid? What costs money? How does one earn money? Who's going to want to collect money? What use is it to them? These are the kinds of questions that come with replication.

I'd say you're being pretty optimistic about the timescale involved though I'd be delighted if you were right. If you're talking about a full on post scarcity society, I can only think of a couple of theoretical models off-hand and both pretty much change it into a reputation/social standing tool.

The main problem before reaching this stage is getting everyone in the position of relative privilege to stop fucking over several nations and actually co-operate on a long term basis. Probably worth a new thread to discuss this further if you care to?

My timescale predictions are optimistic by the standards of anyone who thinks it's twice that or more, and pessimistic by those who think it'll be sooner. Truth is no one knows. I make a best guess based on shit going on now, where that came from and how long it took to get there.

So this, right now, is pre-replicators

Shit going on now is they're printing really fucking tiny and they're poking individual atoms around now and forming them into complex lattices and tubes. For me (as an interested layman) this level of fucking tiny skillz has been coming to my notice, increasingly over the last 10-15 years.

Computation has miniaturised and seems headed to graphene with recent breakthroughs in stamping tri-laminate sheets to provide transistor function. Before replicators we'll have nanoscale "smart plastics" only they won't be plastic, they'll be graphene(and stuff to follow it)-based polymers functioning as nanoscale robotic supercomputer clusters, forming physical arrangements on command, increasing in granular resolution as the tech matures and miniaturises.

So this covers all the solid, synthetic, electronic objects we rely on to live. Furniture, Kitchen equipment, clothing, transport, utility. It's all imbued with the ability to rearrange form and function on a verbal command. This shit is super-strong (hundreds of times stronger than steel, super-conductive (most conductive material on earth) and super-lightweight (laminate panels, 3 atoms thick). You won't need much of it to build assume the shape of your dwelling of choice. Get this - this shit requires carbon, yknow? That shit that everything is made of. Graphene has recycling built in. We can make the motherfucker out of our 20c garbage.

Biotechnology will do the same for organics, nutrients, medicine, printing custom flaura and fauna, downloaded from Wiki-Bioforms. Learning to code biology (once we suss it out) gives us access to an already existing self replicating nanotechnology which produces all the stuff you need to keep consciousness alive, that the nanomachine tech path cannot provide. This distinction itself becomes moot as bio borrows from nano and nano copies bio and the two disciplines merge and create a unified smart matter platform.

My prediction:

10 years would surprise me (but not too much).

40 years would seem feasible if there were no breakthroughs and shots from nowhere-leaps in tech over the next ten years.

20-30 years is not ridiculous - the part of 20-30 that is 20 is, by definition, not ridiculous and it sounds fucking awesome and it makes me happier than 30-40 and it's more realistic than 10.

Replicator? Pretty much but it's not a beam of light so y'know what I'm betting will happen? People will go "Yeah but all that that is, is them little na-ner machines making it look like it's a replicator.

But fuck those future assholes, my question is asked of the assholes right now - how long can we go on pretending that there's not enough shit to go round?

The Agricultural Revolution - the thing was farming
Less people hunted
That's what most everybody did
The exchange was barter, then beads

The Industrial Revolution - the thing was industry
Less people did farming
Most everybody switched to factories
The exchange was gold, then promises of gold

The Information revolution - the thing was automation
Less people did much of anything
Most everybody is still struggling to keep up
The exchange was numbers
Then patterns painted in arrays of transistors
Vast beyond our ability to comprehend
Minuscule beyond the same

Most everyone is still doing shit
But it's getting easier
If it isn't for some then it fucking well ought
There's no technical reason why it fucking well shouldn't

This is the future
We've gone and fucking made it
Nobody noticed but the robots came
Sprouting from their clockwork anscestors
And they welded bits of metal and sold us carbonated soda
and they spat out the paper currency from before
for a while...
not so much nowadays

So what's the next revolution?

What's left for us to do?

When the machines are taking care of most everything that needs taken care of?

What's the exchange then?

Prolly easy if you know sums.

Object A is travelling in a straight line, at a constant speed of 60 Mph toward object B.

Object B rapidly accelerates to 6 mph on a heading perpendicular to object A's trajectory.

How close can object A be to object B if object B wants to leave it til the last second before paddling like fuck into the bow wave of an approaching oiltanker

Hypothetically speaking?

part 2 is the exact same question but object A is travelling at 40mph and is only the size of a fishing boat

I'd appreciate if you could tell me how you worked it out. Now that I've formulated the question I'm kinda interested in how maths would be applied to solving it.

http://singularityhub.com/2014/05/08/drones-overhead-seeing-everything-always-inside-google-and-facebooks-latest-acquisitions/

Peter Diamandis gets on my tits sometimes, coming across as a wannabe messiah but he makes a lot of sense, too.

Global Connectivity: We are heading from a world of 2 billion connected to the internet (in 2010) to at least 5 billion by 2020. But this drone technology, perhaps in combination with Google's stratospheric balloons (called Project Loon) has the potential to take it to 7 billion by 2020.

This is perhaps one reason why, in April 2013, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt made the surprising pronouncement that, "by the end of the decade (2020), everyone on Earth will be connected to the Internet." This addition of another 3 billion to 5 billion new consumers on Earth is HUGE. If these people are not your customers, then they are your customer's customers. They represent tens of trillions of dollars of new economic buying power entering the global economy. Don't ignore this. This is a huge opportunity.

Science can answer moral questions

It's from 2010 but it's the first time I've personally heard this idea.

Seem to make a lot of sense? Check.

Complete opposite of "conventional wisdom"? Check

Worth exploring? I reckon so.

Rebuttals on a postcard...

Give up internet legislators and censors from this point forward your cause is beyond fucked

And it's what might come next, beyond the marketplace, that really excites the team. They imagine the technology could be used for a Wikileaks clone or similar whistleblowing site, which, because it's not running on a central server, would be impossible to shut down. Or a system "where when you upload files [to the] peer-to-peer network, they get dispersed; not just a file, but an actual Wiki or some kind of website page, which gets published in multiple places simultaneously," Damian said; it would work in a similar way to Bittorrent. If something like the Snowden documents, or any information for the matter, was uploaded using the tech behind DarkMarket, it would be much harder, if not impossible, to censor.

Failing that - if I needed an expert math geek where would be the best place to look?

This Plus This Equals  

Even in it's clunky 1st gen incarnation this tech has me more excited than Oculus Rift and Google Glass combined.

All it needs now is a couple of years to mature. Oh, and a flying mouse/trackball. Currently talking to a miniature drone person about the possibility of making this happen. Wish me luck!

Holy Fuck!   

http://www.kurzweilai.net/ibm-invents-3d-nanoprinter-for-microscopic-objects

This is what touch has been missing. Tactile feedback. Nextgen mouse interface. Translates straight into AR/VR, too, given that touch is on borrowed time until wearable AR/VR matures.

These little chaps are the first iteration. Now let's imagine what happens when we combine that with downscaled drone tech. Imagine having your own little flying golf ball, just sitting in your pocket. Take it out, lob it in the air in front of you and you have an AR mouse, grab it, move it, push it, tap it... Little fucker just whizzes about, controlling your hud.

The rate drones are moving at, I'ma stick a 5-10 year guesstimate on time to market.

I treat my body like a machine. Not like a "temple" as I've heard some people say. It's not something I revere and/or worship. It's a tool. It gets me from A-B and allows me to X, Y and Z when I get there. Some time ago, perhaps unconsciously, I decided I needed mine to be a touch more high-performance than the mean average. Compared to an Olympic athlete, my body is a heap of shit but, compared to the average joe, the difference is probably about the same.

Inhabiting a machine that's that's tuned to this level of performance has it's advantages. If you have a fast car, you get from A-B faster. For a given subset of human activity, a given X, Y and Z, being significantly stronger, more agile and with a greater stamina, the activity becomes easier, quicker, more efficient or even more enjoyable. One other area that requires very little attention to maintain machine performance is fuel. I'll stuff it full of carbs and proteins and fat for whatever the fuck it is that it does with that shit. Keep the water topped up. Essentially diet is not something I have to think about. One of the benefits of a performance metabolism is that, within reason, you can chuck most anything at it and it'll burn up what it needs and shit the rest.

So why am I thinking about this shit now? Quite simply my machine is out of warranty. Another couple of decades and most folks get rid of theirs by then, they just break down. They're programmed to break down. We (by this I mean people other than me) Haven't quite been able to either halt or reverse this process as of yet but we are able to slow it down and/or mitigate it's effects. We replace dying organs, we inject potions and elixirs and we zap shit with magical beams of energy. One thing that we (by this I mean me included) can do to help is to optimise fuel intake.

So here's my plan.

I've never given much of a fuck about variety (I can take it or leave it) I have actually lived whole years of my life on staple diets of convenience that never varied much. I'd eat the same shit for breakfast, lunch and dinner, every day. Never bothered me. I want to replicate the same scenario, as far as possible, reducing my day to day fuel consumption to one highly optimised training day diet and one highly optimised rest day intake.

I want to try and lob some science at this bitch, stay away from calories for the time being and concentrate on proportions and the best possible ingredients to give all the best kinds of nutrients. One diet to rule them all. Ideally it should consist of easy to procure ingredients which I can buy in bulk. I'll favour cheaper stuff but not to the detriment of health benefits. If a couple of spoons of lentils gave the same nutrients as caviar, I'll go lentils is what I mean.

Prep is another thing I'd like to simplify. I know it's not healthy to whizz everything up in a blender and skull the lot. I'm sure I've heard tell of reasons you ought to chew and fibres being destroyed or turned into sugar or some shit but, maybe some of it could be whizzed up and other stuff lobbed in a bowl and guzzled down? My fuel will be yanked from the fridge and stuffed in with the minimum time and effort applied.

Problem - I'm Scottish - I know fuck all about food. So, Peedee, I challenge you to help me invent the perfect formula top-fuel for running this machine on.

*edit* - Link dump

Site has my new age bullshit sense tingling but the bullet points are solid if I can back them up or replace them with research

Pretty trick. There's an app you can download to zoom in, in 3d and check out all the little wiring-bits

Came across this article which seems to have just the balance between science and butthurt 

Far from offering a nurturing embrace, the endometrium is a lethal testing-ground which only the toughest embryos survive. The longer the female can delay that placenta reaching her bloodstream, the longer she has to decide if she wants to dispose of this embryo without significant cost. The embryo, in contrast, wants to implant its placenta as quickly as possible, both to obtain access to its mother's rich blood, and to increase her stake in its survival. For this reason, the endometrium got thicker and tougher – and the fetal placenta got correspondingly more aggressive.

NASA uploads superbitmap of Milky Way 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/25/facebook_buys_oculus_virtual_reality/ 

This oughta sort that out for you

post retardedness interview

If I was stuck in one of those hypothetical universes where I am compelled to answer the question "What's my thing?", with a single word, I can't think of one that would apply to me more appropriately than "Systems"

Whatever I look at, whatever I think about, what ever movies or a conversations my imagination plays in my head, a significant portion of my consciousness is picking apart the system or systems at work.

Nowhere is this focus of attention more pronounced than when I'm in my favourite environment, fucking around with one of my favourite stacks of parallel and emergent systems - namely the ocean.

Of all the systems in the universe, none communicate the science of systems to me, more eloquently than the ocean. The ocean is a lense, exposing pressure and weather and planetary gravitational systems to the naked eye. The ocean sings to me of, biology, whispers chaos in my ear, caresses me with particle and wave.

Everything I examine reveals a system or a stack or a chain or, as often as not, an onion structure of emergent layers of systems. Think high level interfaces, built on machine code, running on silicon. Dig a bit deeper, peel back another layer and there's systems of electrons and magnetism and other subatomic fuckery. Peel back another layer and it's something we explain using weird mathematical formulae that I won't pretend or attempt to understand. There's too many systems to learn when you only have one brain.

So I have to pick and choose. One system I chose to learn was computer systems. I learned the machine code and later on the high level languages that emerged from that. I explored the algorithms and structures that exploded, in the digital equivalent of the Cambrian Explosion. The information revolution. It's all systems. Systems built on foundation systems, manipulation by correlation. Manipulation by abstraction.

Abstraction is a really cool meta-system that us computer systems guys have created, to leverage the power of the complexity that our modern machines are capable of driving in a way that wraps up complex lower level interactions into discrete, higher-level, implementations of their collective form and function.

Anyone who's familiar with programming languages in any manner will almost certainly have used the equivalent of the keyword "ECHO" AKA "PRINT" or "PRINTF". They will know that typing this, with the correct syntax and parameters will make your choice of information appear on the screen in the form of text.

What might not be immediately apparent is that the whole concept of the keyword "echo" and the brackets and either the text in the inverted commas or the pointer to a memory area is itself a series of programmatic instructions called a function that presses the right buttons and flicks the right levers to send the right voltages along the right wires to light up specific pixels on the the screen.

The echo command is part of the abstraction "layer" between us and the electronics that allows us to execute a complex series of instructions to tiny little microscopic machines to do something abstract "HELLO WORLD!" Abstraction then wraps up anything from tens to hundreds to thousands of sentences of these instruction keywords into increasingly abstracted code "Layers", until we arrive at the interface. An internet browser or media player or calender or database app. Angry Birds. These are our digital organisms brought to life on a platform of silicon substrate.

I'm reliably informed that we now have the opportunity to apply our systems expertise to a platform that has been with us since before there was even an us but one which we were hitherto unable to harness. I'm talking about biology. Genetic engineering. The first layer of abstraction is well on the way to being solved. I'm here to tell you that this is only the beginning.

Once we have learned the first layer, we apply the next layer of abstraction. We leverage the next order of magnitude in terms of power and control. Then we repeat. And repeat and repeat. Until we're describing, in the queens english, the organic output or the effect that we wish to create or manipulate.

My high school biology is rusty as shit but I seem to remember that biologists have been working for centuries on producing structured programming hierarchy diagrams and models which we can use as a template to develop the final applications framework. They call this system "Classification" Kindom, Phylum, Class, Order... Our module heirarchy.

Think of it as the contents page of the biohacking reference manual.

The Origins Project at ASU presents the final night in the Origins Stories weekend, focusing on the science of storytelling and the storytelling of science. The Storytelling of Science features a panel of esteemed scientists, public intellectuals, and award-winning writers including well-known science educator Bill Nye, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, theoretical physicist Brian Greene, Science Friday's Ira Flatow, popular science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, executive director of the World Science Festival Tracy Day, and Origins Project director Lawrence Krauss as they discuss the stories behind cutting edge science from the origin of the universe to a discussion of exciting technologies that will change our future. They demonstrate how to convey the excitement of science and the importance helping promote a public understanding of science.

Part 1

Part 2

Fun new take on "talking heads"

NSA Responds

The "bad blood on the rise" meme has been stuck in my head for years. I see it on the teevee, read it in the news, know it's exaggerated but filtering it all the same. Processing. Absorbing. Took a bit of shrapnel.

Always Knew a lot less people killed in modern warfare, compared to 1st and 2nd and previous big rammies but that was filed away in a separate compartment, under "statistical trivia". Link was never bridged.

This resulted in a fatalistic/nihilistic tinge to my long term/big picture mental musings. Shit was getting worse. More importantly, shit was getting - seemingly beyond anyone's ability to do much to prevent - worse.

I wasn't satisfied with this. Wanted to snap out of the whole retarded reality-tunnel, so I've spent the last while reorganising my filters and biases about humanity in general and whether it's headed for hell or handbasket, specifically. Finally got done. Feels much better. Had a sniff about for a link that would drive the point home.

Can't remember if this showed up on FB or Youtube but it pretty much covers it

Coolest thing is the styling - robocop meets space marine

I've read about this shit for years but wait for the video sequences around 12:30. Actually seeing a visualisation of what's going on during replication and factory biological production is fucking stunning. RNA is no longer a squiggly diagram in a book!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It83JKAxejM

Pt1 - Designer Pets

So I figure basic biological technology has been handed over to the engineers, now, albeit with much of the documentation still under research. Science has birthed a new technology. Now it's just a matter of time until we're constructing living tissue from the ground up, to spec. Something I thought of when I first heard about the genome project back in the 90's or whenever it was, was the idea of designer pets.

Now there's a bit of chit chat back and forward on t'interwebs but it's mainly, choose new eye colours for your dog and give it a smarter brain kind of shit and that's all cool and probably going to happen if people are talking about it but what I have in mind is more than tweaking existing lifeforms. It's to do with what happens when the modelling software is able to specify, with minute granularity, a complete organism. With completely bespoke, highly optimised systems onboard. The best digestive system we can program, scaled and plumbed in to a skeleton, modelled in autocad. New organs that render whole internal subsystems, obsolete.

One specific example that popped into my head and stuck there ever since - HR Geiger's alien - chitin exoskeleton, anatomically perfect, in miniature, maybe 6-8 inches tall. Acid blood optional.

I've seen the first dev tools running in a couple of youtube videos now and I have a fuzzyish picture in my head of how part of this might pan out. First there's a lot of curing things to be taken care of. It's already started. One by one, a bunch of ailments are being annihilated, almost on a week by week basis now. History suggests that the speed of technological development from this point on will be rapid and exponential. We're facing an avalanche of cures. The fast half of the revolution. I've just lived through the fast half of the information revolution. When computers went from a building full of lightbulbs to a pair of glasses that make you functionally telepathic. I jumped onboard for the 70's, just as development hit the knee of the curve. What a fucking ride it was.

The information revolution is effectively over now, the tech will always keep developing but, by my reckoning, we're already well into, the slow ploddy, gathering-momentum first half of the next emergent technology revolution. If I'm right, there are currently a number of new technologies, around this phase in their lifecycle with the potential to change the world in a massive way. Nanotechnology, 3d printing, Biotechnology, Robotics... And I'm sure there's more waiting in the wings, so the question in my mind is not "Is there an impending technological revolution?" but rather "What is going to be the defining technology?" What will the next age be called?

Maybe immortality, if and when it arrives, will make such a big social impact that they'll call it the Immortality Age or something. For my money, living as long as you fucking well please will be a cool start but cool enough to earn the honour of defining the next couple of decades? I hope not. I'm personally rooting for "The Age of the Geiger Pets"

Feel the juggaLOVE

I'm ready to leave the world behind. Right about now. Not in a morbid, suicidal way, more in a - it's going to happen eventually and I'm pretty comfortable with that - sense. This is convenient really, given that I'm going to be dead in less than thirty seconds time. I don't know that I'm about to leave but I've just realised I'm ready. Funny how that works out. Some might claim design. There is design, of course, intelligent design, behind the framework, driving the sims but as for my fate, within the parameters of the god-machine, it's just my luck. A very real phenomenon, no less so for it's absolute subjectivity.

I know none of this. I'm hanging upside down in a kayak, turbulent water bombarding my senses. I'm enjoying the thrill, pitting myself against the ocean. The ocean just handed my ass to me, like it has a thousand times before. My head smashes against the underwater rock, with the force of a couple of thousand tons of water behind it. The inquest will blame my lack of helmet. A cautionary tale. The helmet wouldn't have saved me - there was enough force applied to tear my head clean off my shoulders had I been wearing one. Without the helmet, the right side of my skull cleaves off pretty clean, freeing the rest of my head from the hole in the reef and, in doing so, literally saving my neck. But only the neck. Most of the brain is obliterated, as it sloshes out the hole and gets caught up in the current and beaten on the reef.

And then that's it. I'm dead. I'm somewhere white. I'm struck by how corny that is, just as I realise I'm being integrated with something else. I'm losing my self in ... that's weird ... I'm losing myself in myself.

... I blink. And a lifetime appends itself to my memory timeline. Forty-odd years subjective, inserted in a momentary bat of simulated eyelids. Welcome to the future. When? What does "when" even mean any more? Sometimes I go in blind, fullspeed, like just then. So my root indentity freezes for a split second, meanwhile I'm born again. An implanted zygote, carrying my full genotype plus a phenotype scaffold -  just enough so it feels like me when it comes back. Any number of years passes where baby me grows up and eventually bites the bullet then... Blink. Was that forty years or didn't that time count?

Funny thing Is, I'm late. Not because of the forty years thing, that was practically instantaneous in root time, I'm late on purpose. Being late psyches out the opponent. Gives me an edge. If I'm going to win this thing, I'll need all the edge I can get. I've just tagged on four point two million lives, running in parallel chunks of two thousand forty eight. Millennia in subjective time, couple of dozen cycles machine time, less than a second root time, outside time? There is no outside time - nothing out there to keep it. Four point two million unique timelines lived. Experiences, insights, memories. All these are mine now. I'm armed.

I blink. A large steel door appears in front of me. Alternatively, I appear in front of the door. Meta-causality in effect. It's impossible to say. I push open the door and step into the courtroom. The defendant, a weakly godlike planetoid simulation node, who calls itself Isaac, is charged with deleting more than seven billion human consciousnesses. I'm here to plead the case of the defence. Only one problem. I've just lived four point two million lives in Isaac's simspace. I'm not only ninety nine percent certain the AI did it, I'm also  convinced Isaac did the right thing.

Okay, so I've been kinda "yadda yadda...VR... meh" about this whole thing. More exited about shit like augmented reality glasses so I've missed out on a lot of the story so far but he murmuring in games related channels is getting hard to ignore. What I didn't realise was that Carmack is involved and, what's more, Carmack is excited about it. History has proven, several times over, that if Carmack is excited about something, more often than not, it turns out to be pretty rad. Here's an interview from october last year.

I'm suddenly getting a warm feeling in the sub-cockle region about VR that I haven't since I started imagining it back in the 80's 

Courtesy of  Google Fibre

10gig - about one ripped blueray torrent, per second. 

http://singularityhub.com/2014/02/25/drones-to-deliver-government-docs-in-the-united-arab-emirates-next-year/ 

Just thinking about how we could develop this further by transporting the guy who wrote the document to the recipient site, where he types it out in person, maybe

In case you missed it. Nvidia's nextgen GPU. 192 core, is a 5w mobile chip.

Sexy little beast too

Question, based on THIS VIDEO 

So there's a whole bunch of number-techy-onomics going on but the bigger picture gist made sense to me in a kind of thinking tiny and between the lines. But my immediate gut instinct is telling me that it should be even simpler. If we just set up an online bank for all of the third world people and inject an account worth a couple of hundred K in each of their names, they can now purchase goods but not assets unless offered by way of export sale (they can't club together and asset strip microsoft or anything)

Suddenly everyone's order books are fuller than they've ever been but all the money is coming back here. We all get rich and go apeshit buying stuff. The filthy rich will probably get even more disgustingly filithier. So the next month do we give them twice as much?

This obviously can't happen, right, because...

"All these people who want intelligent design need to look to the future not to the past"

no shit 

Self replicating nano computers are still considered to be the stuff of the future but a fact that's often overlooked is that we already have them. The kicker is we didn't invent them, they just sort of happened by accident. Or else god made them. Either way, we're fast learning how to program the little buggers

http://singularityhub.com/2014/01/27/dna-origami-to-nanomachines-building-tiny-robots-for-the-body-and-beyond/

Okay so, fuck knows about the source but it appears legit on the surface

Reality has embedded checksums? Makes sense, if you treat the whole thing as information, I guess. It would degrade if there wasn't built in error-checking. Just thought I'd throw this out in case it's been discredited or something?

So it's basically rendering a bunch of physics simulations to resemble biology. Not really science but definitely tech and definitely awesome.

http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/cellular_forms

So I dunno if everyone's in on the theory or not but it's basically, moores law, extrapolated into the future, but applying to more than transistor thingamybob doubling, more sort of broadening to apply to scientific progress in general. So at some point in the future we reach an exponential skyrocket or precipice and either turn into gods or some shit or we all melt into gray goo.

So I heard about it years back and was all, like, "yadda yadda, what-evs, f'kin miles away but, yeah, sure maybe it'll go one of those ways if we survive the next couple of million years or so". So now I'm hearing some guru fuck, name of Kurtrzwell or something has said he reckons it's a decade and a half away or some shit and he's got "followers"

So now my bullshit detectors are flashing amber and I'm thinking, "lolz, it's the next utopia cult, going to get their heads lopped off and carbon frozen or some shit" so I watch some doc on youtube, all university dudes and I reckon I get the punchline already and I just want to hear the joke. Only nothing these guys are talking about seems impossible to me, only the timescales but, even then, those curves are heading practically vertically at some point. I dunno enough about the curvature-analysis to pass judgement on the timescale but I do know that exponential gets fucking massive really fucking quick once it gets going.

What I do know is that I've been present since the early days of this bullshit and I reckon I could have just about have imagined a future with devices like smartphones in it but only as a vague "video call" device from the 21st century. I'm pretty confident I have a handle on how some of this shit is going to develop over the next half dozen or so years but, beyond that? Fuck knows, man. Am I a believer?

Still desperately trying to keep my whole concept of belief down to a bare minimum, but I'm sure as hell feeling a lot more optimistic about the whole life-after-death or just plain never having to go through the death part at all.

That's a big old concept for me to wrap my head around. If my existence is eternal or, fuck it, even if it's going to be a thousand years or so, suddenly there is a long-term, goals and ambitions - scenario that hasn't been there since I was about 7 and worked out that Jesus was most probably bullshit.

Suddenly there's a worry about whacking myself accidentally before I can back up my brain or "upload" or whatever the fuck might be on it's way. Suddenly I find myself concerned about dying "too soon". Not much but a little niggling thing that wasn't there before, in the back of my mind, niggling.

Please, please, please peedee - blind me with science and tell me I can go back to not being even remotely phased by the concept of death because it's definitely going to happen to me, right? 

There's tons of food.
People are starving.
There's tons of medicine.
People are dying from curable diseases.
There's millions of empty houses.
People are homeless.
Shit needs done.
People are unemployed.
There's a reason for this.
A perfectly simple reason.

We, both collectively and individually, are still stuck in a mindset that's a throwback to the first time two of our single-celled ancestors both tried to engulf the same particle - scarcity.

Yeah, I know - sacred cow but, fuck it, I went there. So, yeah, maybe our whole lives are centred around trying to collect whole bunch of rare and shiny metal and paper or (more recently) imaginary ones and zeros and, yeah, we use these to exchange for a whole bunch of "while stocks last" goods and services. It's been wired into our DNA since the very first cell division but, lets face it, it's bullshit.

Nature pitted us against ourselves and we evolved into insane, bald talking monkeys and, sure, back at the start beating the shit out of our fellow creatures and taking the food was the best way to proceed but, back then, historically speaking, we were competing with the likes of zebras and t-rex for a slice of the pie.

Not so much nowadays. Now the pie is sliced automatically, using solar powered uranium, all computer controlled and smart-phone friendly. Nowadays we're so efficient that we're producing surpluses of pretty much everything and then it has to be destroyed at the end of the day, just in case those differently coloured bald talking monkeys notice it's there and try to take some of their own, because we all know it's better to set perfectly good shit on fire than handing it out to people in desperate need of it.

FUCK 'EM - THEY DON'T HAVE THE BENJAMINS!

It's important that those people starve and those people die of curable diseases and it's important that those other people sleep in cardboard boxes. It truly is. Our government, our economy our very way of life depends on it. Because all of those things are based on scarcity. Limited resources. The whole thing would cease to make sense if it was glaringly fucking obvious that there is enough food for everyone.

Problem is, it IS glaringly fucking obvious.

THIS BOARD IS NOW CHRISTMAS AS FUCK!!!

http://candybox2.net/

... about to hit "mark read"

What'd I miss?

Colour me shocked 

What's the skinny on this Atwill dude?

"Stay calm" they tell me. "Don't lose your shit", "Keep your arms inside the vehicle", "Walk, don't run"

I have an inherent mistrust of anyone who isn't at least a little bit crazy. The human brain was not designed to process the trainwreck freakshow clusterfuck that is the modern world in all it's ridiculous glory, without blowing the odd gasket or fuse.

If your reaction to human civilisation does not involve a tinge of wide eyed stare, panting and/or foaming at the mouth then, frankly, you make me nervous and, frankly, I find it difficult to relate to you as a member of the same species. Do not expect any help onto the lifeboat when we're drowning in the latest puke-tsunami. I don't want people like you (people who think puke-tsunamis are normal acceptable phenomena) anywhere near my fucking lifeboat and I will beat you with my paddle, repeatedly, until you sink, if you even so much as look as if you're swimming my way.

Life is short. Life is pain. Life is a box of chocolates full of broken glass and LSD. We're born, we're trained to be slaves and look away while corporate puppets, with no one pulling the strings bend us over and fuck us til our spleens erupt. Then we die. That's right. No one makes it off this planet alive. What would you do if you had one day left to live?

If the answer to that question is not "I would go fucking crazy and get fucked up and fuck shit up" then do not approach my lifeboat. Thing is I have more than one day left to live but, in the grand scheme of things, it's not really all that much longer. Do I stay calm? Do I keep a hold of my shit? Do I keep my arms inside the vehicle? Do I walk? Do I fuck as like!! And I'll happily take a shit on the well manicured lawn of anyone who does. Does that make me crazy?

I sure as hell hope so.

Why are hurricanes not pummelling the coast of florida right now? Show a bit of effort amerispags

http://magicseaweed.com/news/Wot-No-Hurricanes-by-September/5545/