Don't Panic Starman

Elon Musk's brainchild is now live-streaming from outer space! The dashboorad is displaying a Hitchhiker's Guide to teh galaxy reference - "DON'T PANIC!)

According to TechCrunch the Tesla Roadster will be blasting Space Oddity by David Bowie throughout its Journey to Mars! Too bad sound can't travel in space. But it sure can here on earth so crank up your speakers!

Your Brain in the Cloud

If you think this guy is a joke after watching the above video consider this - Ray Kurzweil is the current director of engineering at Google!

When he speaks of having gateways to the cloud in our brains I can't help think we are already there in many ways.

Let me tell you what I did today and yesterday on my iPhone. Along my daily bike ride into the lab I saw a beautiful flower. I had not seen this flower yet this season and was unaware of its identity. However, I knew that either my mother or my girlfriend or both would know the name of the mysterious purple flower.

With photo-text on my phone and the three characters - ID? - I was able to procure the information I wanted within seconds - common name Periwinkle,  Latin name Vinca minor. While I road my bike past another periwinkle in bloom this morning I again took its photo. This time I was armed with the ID so I posted the photo to twitter and facebook and labeled it with time, date and geo-coordinates. This image has now become a phenological data point in the cloud. I hope it will one day be deposited into a massive data-set and mapped to a model of earth's surface so we can look back at the phenological record as captured by citizen-scientists all over the world. If you are not familiar with the word phenology see my earlier post and video on the topic.

Open Access: what memes may come

Jason Silva takes us on a journey imagining future possibilities where radical openness reigns supreme. In the wake of this week's decision by the UK to mandate all research funded by the public be made open access this seems an apt celebration of speculation.

Spirit of Aldous Huxley

Paul Otlet predicts internet and iPad in 1934!

In this bit of historical futurism we can all be amazed at the eerie accuracy with which Paul Otlet predicted how people would access information in the year 2012.

Two robots walk into a bar...

Jason Silva on Networks

TO UNDERSTAND IS TO PERCEIVE PATTERNS from Jason Silva on Vimeo.

Extra Soma, Extended Phenoptype

How do you think technology projects our respective genotypes? Is this blog part of my extra soma? My extended phenotype? If you comment is it part of yours?

Thanks be to Matteo for showing me this video and introducing me to Jason Silva.