The Power of 8 is a set of concept videos, fake products, landscape designs, architectural plans and stories that combine to show what a future where technology brings people together might look like. Really well done and unique.
Square – really slick way for anyone to accept credit card payments using their cell phone. Awesome.
“Salvaged bomb material now generates about 10 percent of electricity in the United States — by comparison, hydropower generates about 6 percent and solar, biomass, wind and geothermal together account for 3 percent.” – Electricity for Americans From Russia’s Old Nuclear Weapons – NYTimes.com
“Many VCs tell entrepreneurs to ‘come back when you have a demo.’ They aren’t wondering whether your product can be built – they are wondering whether you can build it.” – Chris Dixon.
Every product trend seems to be toward putting things on screens, and putting those screens in new places; adding a layer between ourselves and the world.
In 10 years, I hope to be looking at screens a lot less than I am today. Russell Davies has an interesting concept for mobile technologies that don’t use screens in the [Situated Audio Platform](http://vimeo.com/7505689).
“Since the 1950s, reports of major depression have increased tenfold…People are more anxious, trust government and business less, and get divorced more often…There is, though, one group of Americans that is imperturbably sunny: the Amish. Their depression rates are negligibly low relative to the rest of society’s. Their happiness levels are consistently high.” – James Surowiecki. See also: Better Off
“The high-speed rail line between L.A. and San Francisco, will take twenty years, assuming there are no delays. In contrast, the first transcontinental railroad took seven. We aren’t going to build our way out of this highly congested world. It’s going to choke us.” – Kazys Varnelis on the collapse of complex societies
Via the “otherwise distinguished” New York Times: “A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.”
Mobile phones today: “Beautiful shiny plastic things with some gangly bag of mostly water tapping away on them”. – Matt Jones.