And it has androids.

…given Q1’s reported glitch-related “spasms” at the expo, it may be a while before androids are escorting tour groups or looking after children

Glenn points to this article about battlefield use of high-storage-capacity videocameras.

I suspect that it won’t be long before people start having these installed in their cars to quickly resolve disputes in accidents. It would be particularly helpful against people who deliberately cause fender benders for insurance fraud. I’d think that the insurance industry would start offering discounts for people who have them, and that eventually they’d become factory equipment.

This week’s Carnival is up, over at The Speculist.

Also, Stephen Gordon has an interesting article on some breakthroughs in solar power, that could be revolutionary for the Third World. Solar thermal power, that is.

How about Isaac Newton? Arthur Kaplan asks some interesting questions:

As genetic testing moves into the world of mental health, we are going to face some very tough questions. Will medicine suggest that any and every variation from absolute normalcy is pathological? How can we draw lines between disabling diseases such as severe autism and more mild differences such as Asperger

From the past.

Some of them held up pretty well, and some of them didn’t really happen until the twenty-first century, and some haven’t panned out at all (like using electric currents to encourage plant growth, and the quiet cities). Slightly subsonic electric ships don’t seem likely to happen any time soon, and pneumatics came and went, being used only for niche applications. Still an interesting set of prognostications for the time.

[Update a few minutes later]

D’oh!

As Paul Dietz points out in comments, they’re only calling for ships that go a mile a minute. I was somehow thinking ten miles a minute (close to sonic velocity). Don’t ask why I was thinking that–I don’t know. Yes, sixty miles an hour is theoretically possible, but it’s high power consumption.

It’s the Carnival of Tomorrow. Today!

John Podhoretz asks (iconoclastically, given the venue) what’s wrong with reproductive cloning? I don’t know, either.

It’s not here yet, but it’s definitely on the way:

Police found a so-called “skirt cam” under a subway grate at 88th Street and Lexington Avenue Tuesday afternoon after a woman called police saying she had noticed suspicious wires protruding from the grate as she passed by.

Emphasis yours truly.

Once Wifi is ubiquitous, there will be no “suspicious wires” to betray the location of a camera, and cameras will continue to get smaller and more power efficient (though there is a physical limit on how small the lense can get). Consider this a glimpse not just of womens’ undergarments (assuming they’re wearing same), but of the future.

GE started a big ecomagination advertising campaign. I think that proactively spending to be a net cleaner of the environment by buying up carbon emission permits (where they are for sale) would be more effective than their research spending at abating pollution. But of course, the image is more important to them than the results.

If GE wanted to reduce internal pollutants at lowest cost, it would have an internal tax on GE polluters and provide cash to corporate abaters. The pollution permit trading scheme would decentralize the decisions about what abatement projects to fund out to the individual profit and loss units. That is good public policy for the world if it decides to cut carbon emissions. It is also good public policy for countries, states or cities that want to cut the maximum emissions for the least social dislocation.

China and India have probably reached the tipping point in many of their cities where their inhabitants are rich enough to want a cleaner environment even if it has some associated increases in the cost of doing business. US reached that point in about the 1940s and has been getting cleaner ever since.

I think the campaign may be a flop. It sounds to me like Echo Machination and is a little too reminiscent of HP’s Invent! campaign. But they are the masters of their sound and image and they are probably right on the winning emotion if not on the details.

For two takes on “echo think” (fka group think), read this novel-length fictional account, Rigged by Ross Miller, my former boss and czar of risk management at GE R&D. There is another article in today’s FT (trial/subscription required after first two paragraphs).

From my alma mater. This could have a lot of applications, reducing future costs of highway infrastructure maintenance, among other things.