I made these, and finished them for the Epilog competition Instructables are running. They’re controlled by an arduino mini reading a rotary potentiometer to determine how many of them to switch on:

I’m still very much a newbie with both a soldering iron and a compiler, but I’m finding both more comprehensible than I expected. How [...]

(This is written for Russell Davies’ Lyddle End 2050 project. The photos are all of models I made for it, and you can also see them as a set on Flickr).

We’ve lived through a lot of futures and most of them, we didn’t see coming. We’ve imagined many more, and I have a lot of [...]

It’s seldom I see something and think “I must blog this immediately”, but this post at Fabbaloo is provoking me to smile, and giving me that intense, floaty sense of futurism becoming the present.
I’m also going to break my normal blogging code and quote nearly the whole thing:
Yes, 3D printing has produced pre-fab replacement homes [...]

Trying to watch TED talks is like standing in front of a firehose. I like it when people point me to a particularly interesting one, and this 10 minute one by Joshua Klein on crows is fascinating:

Among the more startling things in the talk:
Crows can figure out a problem and create a tool to surmount [...]

James Howard Kunstler is very passionate, and perhaps a little too dogmatic, about urban design. He is also hilariously savage about bad examples. This talk is about pathogenic environments, and is worth watching even for the criticism alone:

Cleaned up from a post in this thread at the Idle Forums. One line summary: “Not appealing to selfishness is the primary failing of late 20th century environmental movements”.
There is no overall downside to switching to green tech.
I have plenty of acquaintances on both sides of the debate, and though the answers are complex, I [...]

Highlights from the DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme 2007 – 2036. Intro highlights after the jump, list links to individual posts for the other sections.

Image: Global Stresses
Image: McRiyadh
Image: Dry Reservior
Resources
Population
Politics
Science and Tech
Military
System Shocks

Should be noted that this particular section of the report is particularly speculative, without such a peppering of “will” “possibly” and “may”.
A severe pricing shock, possibly caused by an energy spike or a series of harvest failures, could trigger a domino effect involving the collapse of key international markets across a range of sectors. The [...]

Military personnel will also find themselves employed more often in essentially non-military roles, owing to their readiness profile, training and capacity for organized action, often as the first response to natural disasters, unexpected flash events and other serious civil contingencies. They may be deployed in those circumstances where the normal law enforcement agencies cannot cope, [...]

The pace and diffusion of R&D and the operation of commercial imperatives will make global regulation difficult and will increase the opportunities for unethical or irresponsible actors to evade control. In addition, the effectiveness of regulation is likely to vary by culture, region or country, with an uneven application of, and access to, innovation. However, [...]

The US is likely to sustain its international leadership until at least 2020, after which a more multipolar world will challenge its hegemonic status, with China, Russia, India, Brazil and Indonesia and a host of alternative, possibly rival polities weakening its grip on certain regions and the international system. US strategic power will also be [...]

All of these changes will be reflected in culture, identity and belief. For many people, affiliation will extend beyond physically proximate communities, reflecting the ability to sustain relationships and identities over distance through globalized communications and travel. However, while resulting cultural complexity is likely to reinforce a trend towards secularism, a significant minority will turn [...]

It’s cynical Sunday. All emphasis mine.
“Prioritised oil user” is a great euphemism for politician and molotov alike.
Although the harsh climate and environmental restrictions currently militate against oil exploration and production in this region, Arctic warming is likely to be double the global average and this will significantly improve prospects for future exploitation. Petrochemical companies, aggressively [...]