Selling Tomorrows

This Week's Tomorrows: Accountability for Predictions, a 51st US State and an Interplanetary Internet

Jon Evans at TechCrunch is willing to do what nearly no other journalist will -- review his past year's predictions to see what he got right and wrong. Evans gave himself a B+ for performance, but if we grade it on a curve for intellectual honesty, it's an "A."

The trailer for the new zombie flick "World War Z" is out.  Sure, it has Brad Pitt.  But the book's main innovation -- telling a story in the guise of a UN-style report -- was what made it so scarily realistic. Here it is on Amazon.

Hollywood uses just three theories of time travel in all its movies.

What would the US flag look like if it added a 51st state?

Vint Cerf's vision of an internet that could be used for interplanetary communication took another step forward. An astronaut on the International Space Station used "Disruption-Tolerant Networking" to manipulate a robot on Earth. 

How would the 2012 election have turned out if the past 200 years of history had taken different turns?  Buzzfeed provides us with this set of electoral maps that show the differences had women, people under the age of 21 and African Americans not been enfranchised. 

iO9's gallery of buildings inspired by rocket ships reveals how deeply the space age aesthetic has become a part of the literal landscape.

The Onion's Lampoon of TED Talk Captures Today's Archetypical "Innovator"

Watch this send up of TED Talks courtesy of The Onion. It not only captures the archetype of today's innovator, but also what it looks like the moment an innovative idea breaks into the mainstream:

• Presenter wearing t-shirt, blazer and jeans, symboling a rejection of traditional power embodied in business suits or uniforms
• A Steve Jobs-style presentation on a darkened stage; the single mind who brought the idea into existence; the light that's about to emanate from the darkness
• Rebelliously simple PowerPoints; another rejection of what's considered normal; the use of images not only hits emotional buttons more than text, but communicates "the value of my idea is self-evident; it does not need to be explained with words"
• That look when the speaker clicks "forward" on the wireless mouse and a wave of amazement hits the crowd. "Are you not stunned?"

Contrast this with the older archetypes of invention: There's Edison, the "Wizard of Menlo Park" who had reporters come to him to reveal the latest creations of his invention "factory."  Or, the well-worn Manhattan Project approach where a group of elite scientists toil in secret until something world-changing and always dangerous is tested in some desert.  Go back further and there's Galileo presenting his telescope to the Venetian Senate.  Each capture the economies and power structures of their times. Each remains a part of our understanding and expectation of what innovation looks like.

My favorite quote from the Onion video: 

"We're looking in the eyes of two horrible birds, and we just need a rock that's big enough, efficient enough and innovaive enough to bludgeon them. That rock is an idea."

 

This Week's Tomorrows: Creationism, Clocks, and Remembering Our Youth

Here are this week's best news, stories and memes on the topic of tomorrow. 

The peer reviewed journal of the Geological Society of America has published a study on the evolution of the idea of creationism and the surprisingly prominent role that geological science played within it. Snip: "As realization grew that the world was unimaginably old, those seeking to reconcile biblical interpretation with geological findings employed two primary arguments. The day-age theory held that each day in the biblical week of creation corresponded to a geologic or cosmic age. The other theory, known as the gap theory, held that God created the world long ago but remodeled it for human use a few thousand years ago. The time in between wasn’t recorded in the Bible, creating an indeterminate gap between the first two verses of Genesis."

The Vintage Ads blog has a collection of retro ads for clocks that show how the devices have marketed as symbols of status, nature, business, convenience and technological advancement.  

On March 20, 2013, an artist will lower a 25' star-shaped sculpture containing the DNA of thousands of people into the depest part of the ocean. You know, in case we ever need to revive the species. The project's creator says of this "Deep Storage Project," "It's 2001 a space odyssey, in reverse. Instead of monoliths left to alert God to our technological enlightenment, we are leaving ourselves inside monoliths, to chronicle our technological self-destruction."

There's a word for "the day after tomorrow." It's overmorrow. 

Reflecting on how Republicans are processing the defeat of Mitt Romney, Gail Collins points out that "Almost everybody thinks of the world of their youth as the traditional world. In the future, today’s teenagers will be looking back and mournfully declaring that traditional America was a place where folks really knew how to Twitter."

OMNI Ushered in Age of "Armchair Scientists." Now it's Free Online.

The Internet Archive has just posted every edition of OMNI Magazine free for downloading, including beautiful PDFs that capture the art and ads of the time. 

Launched in 1978, OMNI had a profound effect on science literacy and people's understanding of tomorrow.  From Wikipedia: "Science Digest and Science News already served the high-school market, and Scientific American and New Scientist the professional, while OMNI was arguably the first aimed at "armchair scientists" who were nevertheless well informed about technical issues."

Reflecting the spirit of its times, both the NY Times and The Economist added science sections to their roster a month after the OMNI first dropped. The publication's 1986 cover story on nanotechnology brought that nascent field into the mainstream (see this timeline from MetaModern) and its art helped establish the futuristic aesthetic of the 80s (10 covers here). It was also an early nurturer of nerd culture.  As LiveScience notes, "As a short hand for an early version of geek-chic, OMNI appeared in "Ghostbusters", "The Breakfast Club" and "Star Trek IV", and was mentioned in "Jurassic Park" and the remake of "The Fly."

In 1982, OMNI published a "Future Almanac" which, if you were to read it, Ben Bova assured, "very little that happens in the next two decades will be a surprise."  By the way, copies of it are available for $4 via Amazon, and yes, I just bought a copy!

Here's an ad for OMNI from 1978 where it declares itself, "The magazine of tomorrow, on sale today." 

3D Printing Goes Back to the Future

Is this video futuristically retro or retro futuristic?  I can't tell, but it's awesome.  MakerBot shows how you can make -- LITERERALY -- an 80's style mix tape by 3d printing it and then adding songs via iTunes. Don't forget to give it to your crush, because some things just work no matter what decade you're from.