Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Fire juggler at work.

Orlando, Florida
June 2008

Bruce Sterling on hanging out with designers:

"Design fiction is just like science fiction, except everyone wears better shoes."

marypcb and I have spent the last week in San Diego at one of our favourite conferences, FiRe.

Future In Review is an eclectic event, covering all sorts of issues, looking at the next 3 to 5 years. This year we've been looking at everything from new battery technologies to the economic effects of rapprochement between Japan and China. It's been a fascinating few days, with a constant stream of half hour sessions - starting at what normally would be far too early in the morning.

Speakers have come from industry, and from finance, and from other, perhaps less obvious, backgrounds. Today's sessions included David Brin with the CTOs of Adobe, EMC and IBM reinventing the mobile phone, Stewart Brand discussing genetic testing, an ex-Disnay Imagineer who joined the NSA on the future of intelligence and how understanding innovation is a key approach, and a fascinating interview of Kim Stanley Robinson on global warming. That's just part of one morning - imagine another two and half days of it, and you'll understand why FiRe is one of the highlights of our year. It's all fascinating stuff, and leaving me much to think about for the next few months...

The location's pretty good too -- I was looking out our hotel room door yesterday evening and saw leaping dolphins out in the ocean. Even so, I haven't minded being sat inside a dark conference room all day!

Back up to the Bay Area later today for Baycon.

...sitting on a boat going round the arbour discussing all the really nasty things that could happen in the next few years with Vernor Vinge and Peter Biddle, all the while watching Navy SEALs jump out of helicopters into the sea, and photographing two generations of stealth ships...

We live in interesting (if extremely scary) times...

Elon Musk of SpaceX at FiRe on the fact that all the Falcon launches until 2008 will be from a small tropical island:

"I feel like I should have a small white cat".

marypcb wonders if he has minions...

Woo... live-blogging conferences now...

An interesting set of concepts out of FiRe and an on-stage discussion with Sam Pitroda (the man who introduced rural digital telephone exchanges to India in the 1980s) on the Indian renaissance of the last 20 years, and the role of the country's Knowledge Commission.

There are four phases of knowledge:

Knowledge concepts - fostered by education
Knowledge creation - coming from research
Knowledge applications - coming from businesses
Knowledge services - changing the role of government

I suspect that this is something I need to think about, as it's a very different set of axioms from the standard Western approach of applying value and costs, rather than considering the overall social impact of something. I suspect it's a much better way of considering the role of information and knowledge in a global context.

As an aside, this is a conference that many of my SF writer friends and acquaintances would love - it's wide ranging, inquisitive and built around conversations on many different themes. Fascinating stuff - and not surprising that two of the speakers are well known SF writers...

That big explosion and oil fire in Hemel Hempstead? While it didn't wake us up, you can see the smoke pillar from here in Putney - and there's a smear of black across the whole sky now. It reminds me of being in LA during the wildfires of 2003.



I took the photograph up on our roof terrace at about midday.

It's a biiiig fire - you can also see the smoke plume from orbit. It's the black blob in the middle of Southern England in this picture:



Picture taken from the Met Office's UK satellite imagery page.

[Thanks to hunkymouse for the link to the satellite image]