Posts tagged as:

future

Dead reckoning and getting unstuck

by Bill on May 4, 2010

Sometimes to go forward we need to go back. It’s a cliché, but to know where we’re headed we need to know where we are. To know where we are we need to know where we’ve been. In The Friday Book by John Barth I came upon something I had forgotten but strikes me as [...]

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Trade-offs and other matters of concern

by Bill on November 1, 2009

In New Brunswick, there are several battles going on: the one between the power deal with Quebec and the H1N1 vaccine for top news story. Then there’s the one within that power deal between the those for and those against. There are a lot of kneejerk responses to the power deal, some of which are [...]

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Twitter, statistics and speculation

by Bill on August 31, 2009

Allow me to inebriate some sober numbers … When we talk about Facebook and Twitter, cars and bikes, business and the arts, we are always self-referential. We think a certain way, we use something in a certain way, we believe this may occur in a certain way … and we forget that the world doesn’t [...]

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What Star Trek did to me

by Bill on April 23, 2009

I suppose I shouldn’t restrict this to Star Trek since it was science fiction generally that affected how I see the world. It should be stressed however, it was not any science fiction. It was the science fiction of the period when I was reading it almost exclusively, which meant authors like Clarke, Asimov, Alfred [...]

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Today’s speculative musing – the end of us?

by Bill on April 19, 2008

As I read Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch I wonder, as I have before, are we making ourselves redundant? By “we,” I mean us. Human beings. As computerization does so many wonderful things for us, one of those wonderful things is the elimination of loads of work. And that’s not quite so wonderful since it [...]

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