Google April Fools for 2012
Paul D. Fernhout
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/03/google-april-fools-day-2012.html
This one could perhaps be adapted to low-cost travel to space habitats?
http://www.google.com/adwords/extensions/teleport.html
I like the "truth" choices here:
http://www.google.com/js/reallyadvanced.html
==== Other random stuff (not April Fools):
Ways to stay healthy that I've collected:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
Related to:
http://www.changemakers.com/morehealth/entries/health-sensemaking
Hope everyone on this list is looking into getting the right amount of
vitamin D and eating more vegetables, fruits, and beans.
I made a copy on my website of a knol I created on "Beyond a Jobless
Recovery: A Heterodox Perspective on 21st Century Economics" because
Knol is shutting down soon. It used to be a "Top Viewed" Google Knol
with about 12,000 page views (as of January 2012).
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
We may soon have a compact energy source for space travel:
http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/CERN-Could-be-About-to-Start-Researching-LENR-Following-Recent-Colloquium.html
"Settle in, CERN the multinational research group based in Europe had a
colloquium on Low Energy Nuclear Reactions last Thursday. There was no
big news, but there is interesting news out of Japan. ... Celani and
Srivastava were both expected to be at the colloquium so the news
centres on a new player: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Technical
Headquarters from Japan. Keep in mind the Japanese folks never fell for
the cold fusion assassination that went on in the west. Instead they
worked along, making progress. ... Mitsubishi is saying, �D2 gas
permeation through nano-structured Pd multilayer film makes it possible
to induce nuclear transmutation under low pressure and low temperature
condition.� That was followed by the notice the Toyota R&D Center,
Osaka Univ., Iwate Univ., etc. replicated the transmutation experiments
of Cs into Pr."
That's all part of a potential "singularity" people have been talking
about, including me from back in 2000:
"[unrev-II] Singularity in twenty to forty years?"
http://www.dougengelbart.org/colloquium/forum/discussion/0126.html
"You may argue the dates -- ten years for some, forty for others. You
may point out Y2K didn't melt things down, that AI researchers predicted
AIs by now, that fusion power was supposed to be here by now, etc. And
you would be right to be skeptical. My point is that these are trends in
many different areas -- any one of which would make this world radically
different. Together, they spell awesome change -- in economics,
politics, lifestyle, relationships, and values. "
Some links related to abundance and scarcity and changes follow, because
I think the common issue there is moving to an "abundance world view"
from a "scarcity world view".
Consider:
"Google once considered issuing currency: After discovering legal
hurdles, it ditched the idea of 'Google Bucks'"
http://www.itworld.com/networking/254124/google-once-considered-issuing-currency
"The idea was to implement a "peer-to-peer money" system. However,
Google discovered that the concept is illegal in most areas, he said.
Governments are typically wary of the potential for money laundering
with such proposals. "Ultimately we decided we didn't want to get into
that because of these issues," Schmidt said."
Abundance-related discussion on slashdot related to a comment I made:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2739467&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=3943509
"We should think deeply about how to move past have artificial scarcity
(including fiat currencies) at the heart of a 21st century
abundance-oriented economy. We can do that in part by improving our gift
economy (Linux, Wikipedia, Thingiverse, blogging), by improving our
subsistence economy (home robotics, 3D printers, solar panels, maybe
LENR), by improving our planning (like by using emails and twitters to
organize the economy by creating and monitoring demand and feedback),
and, if we do have a currency, by having a basic income to go with it,
as well as LETS-like local currency systems. It would also help to
rethink the nature of most "work" so it is more inherently fun and
inherently meaningful:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
As a rule of thumb, if there are laws relating to something about
"counterfeiting" or "unauthorized sharing", you are dealing with a
system based around "artificial scarcity". We should be able to do
better in the 21st century.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=star+trek+money "
Other possible progress on the cheap energy front, too (at least one is
bound to pan out :-):
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/01/15/0226219/can-nasa-warm-cold-fusion
http://cleantechauthority.com/is-cavitation-the-competition-of-lenr/
http://energyfromthorium.com/2011/01/30/china-initiates-tmsr/
Lots of stuff happening.
Other economics links:
http://www.responsiblefinance.ch/appeal/
http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Rest-Us-Debunking-Science/dp/1595581014
http://debunkingeconomics.com/
Anyway, doesn't change the monetary salt mine we're all mostly still
trapped in related to scarcity ideology.
But the whole world is going to change from this eventually (almost
certainly). See especially this foreign policy journal article for more
people getting it:
http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2012/02/24/cold-winter-after-progress-in-cold-fusion/
It seems more and more people are seeing this issue of possible
abundance (if we allow it to happen collectively, and make a paradigm
shift), but it goes way back.
Even people at Google are starting to get it:
http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2012/02/17/15473
"This evening I went to an interesting lecture on �The challenges of
regulating the Internet� given by Simon Hampton, who is Google�s
Director of Public Policy for Northern Europe. He was, he insisted,
speaking only �in a personal capacity� and the audience, for the most
part, took him at his word. His thesis was that in the technology
business the greatest challenge is �the transition from scarcity to
abundance� and that policy-makers haven�t taken this transition on board."
Echoes of my post here, copied to my website:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
"See why the USA has to spend about $600 billion a year on K-12 and
college education (instead of, say, the space program): ... to keep the
US American people "disciplined" and not playful: and then "busy"
afterwards (including with a military budget 50X NASA's): ... That $600
billion a year is spent essentially from fear of the human potential.
From fear of "OpenVirgle". From *fear* the kids might actually figure
out how to go to Mars instead of being profligate consumers and obedient
cannon fodder soldiers. :-( That fear is still the fundamental basis of
the two biggest institutions almost all of us spend almost all of our
time (school and work). And so *fear* is what keeps more people from
doing space settlement given how interesting it is and how much
prosperity our mostly automated productive systems can pump out --
whether those free people work on OpenVirgle or choose another approach
or another related good cause (Earthly sustainability). ... And it is
likely fear that holds Google back from becoming a post-scarcity
organization despite the continuing rush of exponential growth in
technological capacity its planners surely must be predicting: ... Now
some fears are good to have. But some are not. And one of the few
antidotes to fear is ... humor. :-)"
More from there:
"Even just in jest some of the most financially obese people on the
planet (who have built their company with thousands of servers all
running GNU/Linux free software) apparently could not see any other
possibility but seriously becoming even more financially obese off the
free work of others on another planet (as well as saddling others with
financial obesity too :-). And that jest came almost half a *century*
after the "Triple Revolution" letter of 1964 about the growing
disconnect between effort and productivity (or work and financial
fitness): ... Even not having completed their PhDs, the top Google-ites
may well take many more *decades* to shake off that ideological
discipline. I know it took me decades (and I am still only part way
there. :-) As with my mother, no doubt Googlers have lived through
periods of scarcity of money relative to their needs to survive or be
independent scholars or effective agents of change. Is it any wonder
they probably think being financially obese is a *good* thing, not an
indication of either personal or societal pathology? :-( "
Contrast with some clips from Star Trek:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzqW0YaN2ho
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG0ipvIoFZs
With that said, I think Googlites have been a pretty good job, all
things considered. Much better than most. Google is one of the few
companies good enough to criticize in that sense.
From Martin Luther King:
http://www.altruists.org/ideas/society/abundance_or_scarcity/
"The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on
scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the
overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with
superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is necessary
to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also
intelligent. We are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to
archaic thinking. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967)"
Toward the end, Martin Luther was advocating for a "basic income":
http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html
Einstein (about a sudden abundance of a certain type of power):
http://www.heartquotes.net/Einstein.html
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of
thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If
only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
The bible, and the garden of Eden story, is seen by some as related to
the move from hunter/gathering abundance to agricultural labor... And
also Cain (agriculturalist supports big organized population with hard
labor) slays Abel (herder provides easy abundance if low populations on
abundant land).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain_and_Abel
So abundance thinking vs. scarcity thinking turns out to be a deep
metaphorical theme... It is not something Google (or any of us) just
suddenly faces now, even if the issue may be more and more pressing...
Here is what happens when it goes badly wrong:
http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/10.08/tshtf1.html
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/223b0758438b3c93
I found this comment by someone else insightful a while back:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2699631&cid=39197389
"We're stuck in a positive feedback loop now. The more the government
over-reaches in the interests of security, the more pissed off the
populace gets, which leads to more civil disobedience and activism,
which leads to more over-reaches in the interests of security, which
leads to a more pissed off populace, and so on..."
I hope we don't go that way, because it just burns up resources that
could go towards abundance.
No doubt the move into space may be driven by some of that though, as
mentioned in several sci-fi stories in the past.
One of my favorites is "Voyage From Yesteryear":
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
Marshall Brain's "Manna" is also excellent:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
As is Theodore Sturgeon's 1952 "The Skills of Xanadu" that helped
inspire Ted Nelson to invent Hypertext, and also presaged mobile
computing, nanotechnology, rethinking work as play, the open source
movement, OpenVirgle, and a variety of other advances:
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51
In other news, after ten years of trying, I finally got a Slashdot
article accepted: :-)
"LED's Efficiency Exceeds 100%"
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/03/08/1833224/leds-efficiency-exceeds-100
""Physicists from MIT claim to have demonstrated that an LED can emit
more optical power than the electrical power it consumes. Researchers
suggest this LED acts like a heat pump somehow (abstract). Is it true
that 230% efficient LEDs seem to violate first law of thermodynamics?""
So, who knows what else is possible with persistence? :-)
Well, back to trying to survive in the current economy as it transitions
to material abundance for everyone -- kind of like surfing the wave. :-)
Some other links to close with about how our socioeconomics is about to
change radically:
"PR2 Fetches Sandwich from Subway"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIYRQC2iBp0
"And Now for Your Dancing Pleasure: Flying Robots Play the James Bond
Theme Song"
http://general-exception.wetmachine.com/and-now-for-your-dancing-pleasure-flying-robots-play-the-james-bond-theme-song/
"Blind Man Test Drives Google's Autonomous Car"
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/03/29/0258233/blind-man-test-drives-googles-autonomous-car
Way to go Google, with that last link!
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies
of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.