The latest, year-end Carnival of Tomorrow is up, and has a number of very interesting links (of which mine is undoubtedly the least interesting). Hard to believe that we’re already almost four years into the new century, and millennium, and while we don’t yet have flying cars, in many other ways, we’re living in the science-fiction future of our childhoods, at least for those baby boomers among us.

Here’s a good Internet equivalent of a “man-(and woman)-in-the-street interview”–a compendium of Freeper responses to the article in the Toledo Blade about Ray Kurzweil and life extension.

The interesting thing to me will be the responses when (as one commenter put it) “a mouse lives ten years.”

They’ve sequenced the genome of a woolly mammoth. I think we’re going to see one walking around in a few years.

Things are progressing nicely:

“We have demonstrated the controlled synthesis of nanostructures at levels of complexity significantly beyond any work yet reported. What we have done is the most challenging synthetic problem in these structures, and one with huge potential payoffs from both the standpoint of fundamental scientific impact and producing novel de-vices and applications.”

A robot that is self aware. Is it too early to form PETR (People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots)?

I’ll personally be interested to see if it starts touching itself improperly.

Seriously, I’ve done this experiment myself with both of my cats. They clearly recognize themselves in the mirror, because they don’t get upset (as they generally would) at the sight of another cat.

At this week’s Carnival of Tomorrow.

At this week’s Carnival of Tomorrow.

At this week’s Carnival of Tomorrow.

A hundred and two years ago, the Wright brothers kicked off a new era of heavier-than-air flight. I wrote several pieces on the subject on the centennial.

Economist reports that video conferencing kinks are being worked out of both the experience and the business model. Corporations are getting on board. $1.75/minute on peak, $0.25 off peak? If it is being used “around the clock” as they say, average price would be only $0.50/minute or if only during business hours 40 hours/wk at $2/minute. Paying $3000 hard costs for four hours ($12.5/minute) of on site business meetings the past two days myself, I sure would like it if I could cut travel by 75%. The calculation is more extreme if you assign labor cost to travel. If you throw in my 16 hours of travel at $2/minute you get up to over $20/minute for these face-to-face meetings.