As politicians world wide argue about the debt crisis few are willing to even look at the real problem that faces not just the United States but every human on the planet.  Tom Whipple takes a look at the third human transition which unlike the first two will not result in a better life or an ever increasing population – just the opposite. Man in his present form has been around for about 200,000 years. ...

Are Republicans and new Tea Party members of the U.S. Congress just caving in to the status quo? Will they shut down the U.S. Government by not approving an increase in the debt limit this March over a paltry $100 billion in spending cuts to the current year and the next fiscal year? President Obama presented a lame 2011-2012 Budget proposal – in keeping with his lame responses to most everything that has...

Mathew Ingram summarizes a speech by Jeff Jarvis at the Reboot Conference yesterday: [A]uthor and media blogger Jeff Jarvis told a room full of corporate and government privacy advocates something many of them probably didn’t want to hear: that society needs more protection for what he calls “publicness,” and less focus on locking down our personal information or prosecuting companies that use that data....

News of the biggest solar blast in years and the accompanying photos, are all over the news. Last year I posted this from New Scientist on what I thought was a credible space storm threat: IT IS midnight on 22 September 2012 and the skies above Manhattan are filled with a flickering curtain of colourful light. Few New Yorkers have seen the aurora this far south but their fascination is short-lived. Within a...

It’s legislation by budget fiat, and it’s wrong. Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR, @repgregwalden), the chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, successfully introduced an amendment to H.R. 1 that would prohibit the Federal Communications Commission from using its budget to implement net neutrality rules passed in late 2010. A similar amendment lies in wait in the Senate, offered by Sens....

Well, actually, I don’t know if it’s a dinner. It’s been called an event, a meeting and a visit, but Mashable says “Obama is slated to sit down with Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs at a private dinner during his overnight trip to the West Coast.” The president is set to arrive in San Francisco at 5:45 (PST). The LATimes has the official list of attendees and these details: “This...

Writing in Slate, Ken Jennings describes what it was like: [A]t IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Lab, an Eero Saarinen-designed fortress in the snowy wilds of New York’s Westchester County, where the shows taped last month, I wasn’t the hero at all. I was the villain. This was to be an away game for humanity, I realized as I walked onto the slightly-smaller-than-regulation Jeopardy! set that...

On that dreadful Saturday afternoon of January 8, I along with so many others started blogging on the tragedy in Tucson. My first “report” quoting the Washington Post was, in part: According to a local news report, Giffords was shot in the head at point-blank range. She was taken to University Medical Center in Tucson; her condition was not immediately known. As we all remember, early reports were that...

Can Islam and democracy exists side by side? Columnist K. Selim of Algeria’s Le Quotidien d’Oran contests the notion that a free election can happen ‘only once’ in Arab countries, and warns those who have led uprisings in Egypt and Algeria that the eyes of the world are upon them – and most are against them. For Le Quotidien d’Oran, K. Selim writes in part: “Bush or bin Laden:...

Yes, that’s exactly what the British celebrity woman Jemima Khan, former wife of the world’s legendary cricketer Imran Khan, has to say. All governments lie at some time or the other. But when the web of lies becomes untenable and threaten world peace and financial security, then the alarm bells are set off. Jemima Khan in this video (http://bit.ly/dTDFaV) states: “Corruption, war crimes and...

NYTimes: In the end, the humans on “Jeopardy!” surrendered meekly. Facing certain defeat at the hands of a room-size I.B.M. computer on Wednesday evening, Ken Jennings, famous for winning 74 games in a row on the TV quiz show, acknowledged the obvious. “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords,” he wrote on his video screen, borrowing a line from a “Simpsons” episode. From now on, if the answer...

Fossil energy dies hard.  The energy companies have made billions and have had lots of power for decades and they don’t want to give up even though the easy resources are exhausted.  One of the most recent purported saviors is oil and gas in the Arctic.  We are promised billions of barrels of oil but will the world economy be able to pay the price for that oil?  Probably not.  The Arctic National...

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is in the news today for commenting on his Google problem: Try it for yourself: Enter “Rick Santorum” into Google. In a fraction of a second you’ll have hundreds of thousands of results. But two of the top four cite a graphic definition for a sexual neologism. In this case, the neologism is a reference to anal sex. This, of course, is no accident. Santorum himself...

Last week, President Obama, in a letter to surviving relatives and friends of 28 patriots evoked a tragic accident that occurred 50 years ago in the Atlantic Ocean 85 miles off New York City. In the letter, the president recognized the 28 men who died when Texas Tower No. 4 (TT4) collapsed into the ocean during a violent storm the night of January 15, 1961: “Our nation is grateful for the dedication, pride,...

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a speech today at George Washington University urging governments abroad to embrace internet freedom: “The United States continues to help people in oppressive Internet environments get around filters, stay one step ahead of the censors, the hackers and the thugs who beat them up or imprison them for what they say online,” she said. The secretary of...

A lengthy review in Scientific America looks at the documentary, Transcendent Man, on the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil. Cleverly edited and entertaining, Transcendent Man is unfortunately also too starstruck and reverent toward Kurzweil for its own good. It wants in part to be a movie about ideas, but frustratingly, it refuses to truly challenge any of those it raises—whether supportive or critical...

The domain name “YouTube.com” was activated on Feb. 15, 2005: The video-sharing site, founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, has, in half-a-dozen years, become one of the most-visited websites worldwide, trailing only Facebook, Google (YouTube’s parent company) and Google’s Gmail. With its slogan “Broadcast yourself” sounding a clarion call to exhibitionists the...

Lost Remote’s Cory Bergman explains: While viewers in most of the U.S. were wrapping up the live broadcast of The Grammy Awards, viewers on the West Coast were just getting started with the tape-delayed version, airing at 8 p.m. PT. As is customary for many viewers now, many on the left coast opened their Twitter and Facebook accounts to chat along with the action — just in time to catch the East Coast...

Here’s hopeful news that will lift the spirits of all Americans who have a heart: one month after being shot, Gabrielle Giffords is briefly talking — and mouthing the lyrics to songs. The operative question now is whether the hopes that this further raises match realistic medical realities. But hope has reason to spring eternal: Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an eloquent speaker before she was...

The NYTimes printed a piece yesterday titled, The Dirty Little Secrets of Search. In it they detail how J. C. Penney achieved the top rank in Google search results through a black hat Search Engine Optimization scheme. The Times documented 2,015 pages from hundreds of sites scattered all around the Web that each linked directly back to JCPenney.com. J. C. Penney fired its search engine consulting firm, SearchDex,...

An insightful post from Andrew Losowsky offers up 6 points on why sales of maglets (magazines on tablets – got it?) soured so quickly. Most of his points are undoubtedly true — charging twice, not enough iPads, the medium is still new. A couple highlight bad business choices — selling the same content twice, content held outside of the digital conversation. One, Separate App Syndrome, speaks...

An Economist poll finds: A huge majority of Americans, more than two to one once don’t knows have been excluded, support the legalisation and taxation of marijuana. Even without excluding the don’t knows, a clear majority favours treating the drug equivalently to tobacco and alcohol. The data (see chart) reveal some interesting patterns. In every age group, more people favour than oppose legalisation. Predictably...

WARNING: This post qualifies for the coveted R.D.S. ALERT Award. First, a disclaimer. I have not read, nor intend to read, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir. I know that “reviewing” or discussing a book without reading it is the epitome of arrogance, ignorance and so many other “ances.” However, please indulge me because as the magnanimous person that I am, I will make up for...

Jeffrey Van Camp counts down the reasons why Microsoft is soooo last century. Number 3: Unfortunately, Windows is not a part of this growing smartphone ecosystem. While Microsoft continues to tinker and perfect Windows 7, it is largely the same operating system as it was when it was first released as Windows 95… For the longest time, its familiarity was one of Windows’ strongest traits, but the tide...

In a lovely New Yorker essay, Adam Gopnik looks at the ever-expanding literature explaining why books no longer matter, now that it’s the internet that’s transforming our culture. The typical flavors — the eulogistic, the alarmed, the sober, and the gleeful — he reduces to three: All three kinds appear among the new books about the Internet: call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers,...