Phil Bowermaster has an interesting post on what the future may hold in terms of information storage and processing.

Tim Blair is hosting a lively discussion on the virtues of clutches.

I’ve never owned a car with an automatic transmission.

Stephen Gordon has a review of a new book on the prospects for indefinite lifespan.

Another victory for the blogosphere over a professor who tried to resurrect the authenticity of the fake CBS memos.

But, hey, what’s a little academic fraud? It’s all in the service of the cause, right? The most important thing is to get rid of chimpie.

What frightens me is that the ability to create such fakery without getting caught (given a little intelligence, something in short supply so far on the part of the Bush haters) is improving every day. Authenticating documents (and records of events) is going to become a major societal issue in the future, and it’s starting to become one already.

We discussed various means of mitigating hurricanes in the comments to this post, but now comes a southern Florida businessman with a different idea.

Color me extremely skeptical. My confidence is less than buoyed by his association with Ed Mitchell, definitely one of the wackier Apollo astronauts, but hey, it’s his money, and if by some miracle it works, great. Of course, we won’t ever really know if it works, at least for this particular storm, because there’s no control on the experiment (i.e., we’ll have no idea what would have happened if he hadn’t done anything).

…for the masses. Astronauts have always had coolant loops in their clothes when performing extravehicular activity, to carry away the heat in the only way possible, but now it’s becoming an off-the-shelf item, thanks to Israeli ingenuity. Expect to see the space startups employ it.

Here’s an interesting article on the future of science fiction in the face of accelerating change.

An accident at a nuclear plant kills four workers. It was a steam leak, but that won’t stop the antinuclear hysteriacs from flipping out. Of course, nothing will stop the antinuclear hysteriacs from flipping out. OTOH, it’s worth pointing out that the failure of the steam system lead to an appropriate controlled shutdown of the core, just the way it should. In a sane world the headlines would read “Nuclear reactor safety system works as designed,” and the whole thing would lead to no more than a call to reemphasize the safety guidelines for working with high pressure steam that have developed over the last couple of centuries. My prediction is that the accident will turn out to have been preventable had those guidelines been followed. Steam is dangerous, but controllable, and it can be safely harnessed. Just like nuclear power.

There’s a brief bit by Bruce Sterling in Wired online on cyberterrorism and spam and what should be done. Worth a read, though I don’t agree with all his conclusions.

People are getting divorced at much later ages, as a result of (probably among other things) increasing longevity.