John Robb:

It’s clear that we won’t likely have an economy where productivity doubles every 12-18 months, but are trend productivity growth rates of 10%+ possible? I think they are. In that scenario, we all get very rich, very fast.

Productivity seems to be on the rise, yes. But so’s fiscal over-prudence and a distaste for spending, probably because of the excesses of the late 90s. And without some spending in the marketplace, it’s unclear how the boom (long or not) can really kick off.

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Links like these are the reason I read John Robb’s weblog regularly: Ant supercolony dominates Europe.

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SJ Mercury:

An MP3 digital music player, such as the RioPort, can store 400 hours of compressed music. Within five years, the same $400 player will be capable of storing 12,000 hours of music — enough capacity to take an entire music collection with you in your car, at the gym or to work. “Everybody’s going to have these things. People are going to pay $400 to get thousands of hours of storage,” said [Marc] Andreessen.

And there are execs in the music and video industry who still believe that they can hold on to the model of pay-per-view? {shakes head} Pay-per-view may make sense when content is scarce and difficult to obtain or distribute, but with plentiful content and distribution bandwidth, the all-you-can-eat model is a powerful one and appeals to a lot of people — even those who don’t plan to use the service regularly. This is a lesson that Internet Service Providers learnt quickly, and practically no one asks for per-minute connectivity charges today. AOL learnt its lesson, when will the rest of the AOL-TW conglomerate learn?

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NY Times: This is a case of monkey think, monkey do. One step closer to Planet Cyborg, imho. Within 50 years we’ll see increasing numbers of people with some sort of prosthetic attached that’ll make our spectacles and crutches and motorized wheelchairs appear like stone age tools.

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The Guardian: Scientists stunned as ice shelf the size of Wales falls apart in a month. Uh huh. A few more of these, and we’ll be living in a Hollywood-style disaster movie.

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New Scientist: Germany will top the medals table in this year’s Winter Olympics with 31 medals, 11 of them gold. Russia will be runners-up with 21 medals, 10 of them gold. Close behind will be the US and Norway. It isn’t Olympics-fixing, it’s economics. Let’s see how close they get.

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A Disturbance in the Force: The following material shows the behavior of the Global Consciousness Project’s network of 38 REG devices called “eggs” placed around the world as they responded during various periods of time surrounding September 11.

Interesting, but I would not lay too much credence on this ’til I see that similar giant blips occur only during global catastrophes, and at no other time. The last bit is very important.

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John Robb is onto Quantum Theory.

The Doomsday argument is simple. It basically says, that given our present situation (pre colonization of the universe and at the start of the endless number of human beings that entails) we are likely to fail in our attempt to survive over the long run. Simply put: we will most likely wink out. Die.

So is life transitory? If you were watching the Universe take its long slow path to ever increasing entropy, would life be a flash in the pan? Something you would miss if you, on the mammoth timescales cosmology operates on, blinked? Is that why the scanning antennae of the SETI programmes have returned nothing upto now? Maybe we are alone in the universe.

That’s a scary thought.

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The Economist:

Is there no limit to the crimes for which globalisation must be held to account? Not only does it oppress the consumers of the rich West, undermine the welfare state, emasculate democracy, despoil the environment, and entrench poverty in the third world; we knew all that already. In addition, we now find, it is a utopian scheme for global ideological conquest — like Stalinism, minus the compassion. Truly, the idea that people should be left free to trade with each other in peace must be the most wicked and dangerous doctrine ever devised.

You believe that, don’t you?

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The Cluetrain Manifesto — “Life is too short,” we say, and it is. Too short for office politics, for busywork and pointless paper chases, for jumping through hoops and covering our asses, for trying to please, to not offend, for constantly struggling to achieve some ever-receding definition of success. Too short as well for worrying whether we bought the right suit, the right breakfast cereal, the right laptop computer, the right brand of underarm deodorant.

This is a great book, a moving book, and one of the best works of non-fiction I have read in a long time. Especially if you have blighted your brain by reading too many Who-moved-my-cheese type books, read this! And if you’re too cheap, um, impoverished, to buy it, then you can read it all for free online.

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