The Secret Root
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Time Crystals! (No, really, I'm serious) -
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In “The Secret Root,” one of the key features of our future is the inescapablity of advertising, which is not just environmental but laced through your clothing and every moment of your daily experience. As in the Truman Show, product placement is so constant that you barely even notice it anymore. Traditional advertising is dying, to be replaced by something very, very different.
The future of high-tech advertising
“The advertising of the future……. will hinge entirely on new communication channels. In much the same way that highly-targeted advertising couldn’t exist before the internet, web browsers, and tracking cookies, future ads will leverage the mediums by which we consume content and communicate with others.”
Full Story: Extreme Tech
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The cover for The Secret Root is finally finished! Here’s a sneak peek…
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Yet another reason to be annoyed that I don’t live in England:
Psst. In the UK? Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio Show live this summer. With the original cast. Venues and dates, with more to come, at http://www.hitchhikerslive.com
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Future Timelines This is mesmerizing. Click the link for the full…um…timeline.
(via petervidani)
The Wiki
- 2035 - A research group in Wales create bacteria in the lab that form crystals which resonate with radio frequency.
- 2041 - The same group demonstrates that they can modify a percentage of the glia in a mouse brain to resonate with RF, opening up the possibility for biological radio receivers. These glia are dubbed “radiocytes”
- 2043 - Examining data, the researchers find proof that the mice can respond to RF as a sensory stimulus.
- 2047 - Transgenic mice pass genes for creating radiocytes on to offspring.
- 2059 - Researchers in India announce that they have a “grammar” of radio signals that mouse brains interpret as information. At the same time they show that these signals are only perceived by the areas of the brain nearest the radio receivers.
- 2060 - Radio transmitters are implanted in some of the mice. Within 1 week, the implanted mice are communicating with each other using the grammar discovered by the Indian team.
- 2112 - The first humans to be born with radiocytes enter school.
- 2128 - The Wiki, a human exomemory, is born when a radiocytotic teenager discovers how to store and encode knowledge in an external repository.
- 2131 - Radiocytotic people connected to the Wiki begin spontaneously sleeping only 3 hours a night. It is found that the presence of unlimited external storage radically improves the brain’s ability to reorganize and consolidate, reducing the need for sleep.
- 2201 - 98% of humanity alive has either been born with radiocytes or has had them implanted through stem cell therapy. Electronic devices can be controlled by a thought. Experience, perception, and emotion can now be encoded in The Wiki as humanity refines its new abilities. No-one remembers what it’s like to not have the sum-total of humanity’s knowledge on hand.
Following.
This might be the greatest text-only Tumblr I’ve ever read.
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What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology - The Atlantic Okay, now my head really hurts.
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Predictions of 2011, from a magazine in 1911. Perhaps all of those time travel stories have more to them than meets the eye…
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We are all copies, according to the world's newest religion. “We see the world as built on copies,” Gerson told me. “We often talk about originality; we don’t believe there’s any such thing. It’s certainly that way with life—most parts of the world, from DNA to manufacturing, are built by copying.” The highest form of worship, he said, is the remix: “You use other people’s works to make something better.”
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“Laws of physics and mathematics are like a coordinate system that runs in only one dimension. Perhaps there is another dimension perpendicular to it, invisible to those laws of physics, describing the same things with different rules, and those rules are written in our hearts, in a deep place where we cannot go and read them except in our dreams.” — Neal Stephenson -
Emergence
An important idea in The Mesh Chronicles is the idea of “emergence.” So what is it? “In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” In other words, a fairly small number of rules can lead to a series of infinitely complicated worlds. So, for example, if you had a few lines of computer code…
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“The time is close at hand when the scattered members of civilized communities will be as closely united, so far as instant telephonic communication is concerned, as the various members of the body now are by the nervous system.” — Scientific American, 1880.
