9:33 pm  •  11 January 2013

b0blocker:

In particular, the thing that reads your brain waves is pretty cool. That would open up the door to anything from video games, to work productivity, to the government reading your thoughts.

9:19 pm  •  11 January 2013  •  1 note

b0blocker:

Why the fuck don’t we have flying cars yet??????

The Economist answers this question with extensive citations to Tyler Cowen’s idea of The Great Stagnation — essentially that we have picked all the low-hanging fruit of economic development, and each successive advance we make in technology will be harder and harder. Hell, they even throw in Peter Thiel’s famous “we wanted flying cars, but got 140 characters” quote. 

But then again, with Moore’s law, advancement of 3d printing, and other cool futury shit happening around us, Ray Kurzweil’s exponential growth argument might have a point:

And information innovation is still in its infancy. Ray Kurzweil, a pioneer of computer science and a devotee of exponential technological extrapolation, likes to talk of “the second half of the chess board”. There is an old fable in which a gullible king is tricked into paying an obligation in grains of rice, one on the first square of a chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, the payment doubling with every square. Along the first row, the obligation is minuscule. With half the chessboard covered, the king is out only about 100 tonnes of rice. But a square before reaching the end of the seventh row he has laid out 500m tonnes in total—the whole world’s annual rice production. He will have to put more or less the same amount again on the next square. And there will still be a row to go.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT make use of this image in their e-book “Race Against the Machine”. By the measure known as Moore’s law, the ability to get calculations out of a piece of silicon doubles every 18 months. That growth rate will not last for ever; but other aspects of computation, such as the capacity of algorithms to handle data, are also growing exponentially. When such a capacity is low, that doubling does not matter. As soon as it matters at all, though, it can quickly start to matter a lot. On the second half of the chessboard not only has the cumulative effect of innovations become large, but each new iteration of innovation delivers a technological jolt as powerful as all previous rounds combined.

In the end, it is summed up nicely:

Messrs Brynjolfsson and McAfee fear that the technological advances of the second half of the chessboard could be disturbingly rapid, leaving a scourge of technological unemployment in their wake. They argue that new technologies and the globalisation that they allow have already contributed to stagnant incomes and a decline in jobs that require moderate levels of skill. Further progress could threaten jobs higher up and lower down the skill spectrum that had, until now, seemed safe.

…

Such productivity advances should generate enormous welfare gains. Yet the adjustment period could be difficult. In the end, the main risk to advanced economies may not be that the pace of innovation is too slow, but that institutions have become too rigid to accommodate truly revolutionary changes—which could be a lot more likely than flying cars.

9:11 pm  •  11 January 2013  •  4 notes

dreamxup:

Facebook auf We Heart It. http://weheartit.com/entry/48846033/via/mariekecl

WHAT ABOUT EGGS

9:07 pm  •  11 January 2013  •  1 note

Man, I will never get tired of Bud Light commercials.

supersmashtv:

Come on everybody, it’s Spuds McKenzie!

Man, what a cool dog. All the ladies wanted to throw him a bone.

9:01 pm  •  11 January 2013  •  1 note

heavyjamal:

Hello, Internet Friends - Don’t have your own copy of Shining Sky Lobster yet? Today is the day to fix that, because it is now available on Amazon! Jeff Bezos has developed a proprietary purchase order technology which allows him to retrieve merchandise FROM THE FUTURE!!! Of course you can still download the mp3s on our bandcamp as well. 

2:01 pm  •  10 January 2013  •  1 note

Holy crap, I co-wrote an operetta about this in 2005 with Sam Clement, Eric Taxier, and Matthew Souther!

10:58 am  •  8 January 2013  •  1 note

storyboard:

Charting 2012’s Top Cultural Obsessions

You can’t talk 2012 without talking GIFs: the year’s cultural superstar, the Oxford American Dictionary’s word of the year, and the means by which the internet shared its obsessions (and we all know the internet really likes to obsess). From the GIF to politics to the apocalypse to Honey Boo Boo, the guys from I Love Charts bring you the year’s top cultural obsessions — in GIF form, of course.

Zombies

2012 was a year where major issues dominated the global narrative. Mainly we talked about the election and zombies.

Read More

5:47 pm  •  28 December 2012  •  4,656 notes

jessethorn:

jordanmorris:

Ashkon - Snowglobe

“My big bro said Santa don’t exist.  I said “Yeah right, it’s just that he’s invisible.”“

#HappyHollerdays

8:36 pm  •  22 December 2012  •  18 notes

On some middle school nostalgia today.

New Kingdom - Good Times (by Dams76610)

10:54 am  •  14 December 2012