Watch a School Bus Go 367 MPH On Fiery Rocket Power.

That is, addiction in general and information/Internet addiction in particular.

The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40…

My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption…

We’ll increasingly be defined by what we say no to.

The Acceleration of Addictiveness.

Thank you internet.

The sentence of the day:

In a society resolutely anti-immigration, robotic technology is seen as the answer to the lack of human beings.

• Solving Japan’s age-old problem

I love this contest idea:

Dx1W is a competition for designers, artists, scientists, makers and thinkers in developing countries to provide solutions for First World problems.

While my lovely wife works tirelessly to help the rest of the world develop, I’m working in the “first world” to make sure there’s a worthwhile and sustainable lifestyle for them when they arrive. The current example we’re setting in the U.S. (low rankings on health, happiness, and world respect) doesn’t seem like a worthy goal for the rest of the world.

Efforts like Design for the Other 90% are valuable and important, but I love that designers from that 90% are trying to help us too.

A fascinating and sometimes frightening look at the way games are invading every aspect of our lives, and where they may be going next. The last 8 minutes are a wild exploration of one possible future.

At a talk by Wade Davis last night, I was inspired by the variety of human experiences he showed: people who dedicate their lives to meditation; cultures that evolved to prize generosity above all; nomads and sequestered nuns. There was also a lot of discussion about the value of a spiritual life, and in learning about the mind, versus technological progress.

I just wrote a fair chunk about why it is important for humanity to survive. I’ll probably still publish it, but Davis’ talk made me realize that a lot of my conclusions were based on our ability to evolve technology.

But what if, as Kevin Kelly writes, technology is a force pursuing its own agenda? And what if instead of us using it, it is using us? Davis showed that the western view of the earth as a resource is the minority view. Most other cultures see it as a stewardship; a responsibility. Similarly, the attitude of viewing our role as technology’s evolvers is unique to my culture; others value relationships and mental/spiritual growth much more highly than the ability to shape and change our physical world.

Technology itself is a particular cultural strand, and a relatively small slice of the human experience seen around the world and throughout history. By focusing on it almost exclusively, our culture has ignored vast areas of growth, health, and happiness. (See: surveys on happiness around the world, or the poor health care value we have in the U.S., or the high divorce rate here). Other cultures have grown tremendously in these areas.

One of my favorite quotes is by Lhasang Tsering, a Tibetan writer and philosopher, who said “For centuries our best minds, our saints and our philosophers concentrated all their time and energy to understanding the nature of the mind. And who can say which would really matter in the end–the landing on the moon or the understanding of the mind?”

So what would it look like to incorporate other cultures’ learnings into our own? For one, we might start making more decisions based not on their tangible, technical value, but on their social and spiritual value. Davis shared one quip about the obligation to eat whatever you’re served as a guest in a new culture: “You can always treat the giardia, but you can never rekindle the relationship that was hurt by your perceived act of superiority” (refusing food).

We could revere other languages, which Davis called “flashes of the human spirit” and “canaries in the coal mine of a culture”, studying, preserving, supporting, and using them for insights into other ways of thinking and being. (To those who propose a single, universal language to promote communication and commerce, Davis says “Great–let’s make it Tagalog or Quechua then”, which usually drives home the point that giving up your own native tongue feels like a tremendous loss). In some Anaconda (Amazonian rain forest) tribes, you can only marry someone who speaks a different language than yours. How’s that for tolerance!

And we would practice and honor religions more. One thought I had along with that of technology using us is that the greatest technological advances have come along with the collapse of much religious practice. It made me wonder if technology, to further its own agenda and become central to our lives, had to first displace and eliminate religious reverence from the landscape. Preserving religious practice, both our own and that of others, seems essential to protecting and growing culture.

Fortunately, humans are not so single-minded as technology. We can, if we choose to, incorporate several different strands of culture into our lives. We can enjoy and contribute to technology, and build strong relationships, and revere the divine. Certainly it takes discipline and practice, but it can be done. What is dangerous is becoming too entrenched in any single cultural strand and having that turn into ignorance or intolerance of other ways of being.

Davis described one cultural (and, um, chemical) experience from a rain forest tribe as “being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity.” Now who would want to ignore something like that?

“Having obtained the difficult-to-obtain, free and endowed human body, it would be a cause of regret to fritter life away” – one of the Ten Causes of Regret

The Power of 8 is a set of concept videos, fake products, landscape designs, architectural plans and stories that combine to show what a future where technology brings people together might look like. Really well done and unique.

Square – really slick way for anyone to accept credit card payments using their cell phone. Awesome.

“Salvaged bomb material now generates about 10 percent of electricity in the United States — by comparison, hydropower generates about 6 percent and solar, biomass, wind and geothermal together account for 3 percent.” – Electricity for Americans From Russia’s Old Nuclear Weapons – NYTimes.com

“Many VCs tell entrepreneurs to ‘come back when you have a demo.’  They aren’t wondering whether your product can be built – they are wondering whether you can build it.” – Chris Dixon.

Every product trend seems to be toward putting things on screens, and putting those screens in new places; adding a layer between ourselves and the world.

In 10 years, I hope to be looking at screens a lot less than I am today. Russell Davies has an interesting concept for mobile technologies that don’t use screens in the Situated Audio Platform.

If someone’s checking their email in your meeting, maybe your meeting isn’t good enough.

“Since the 1950s, reports of major depression have increased tenfold…People are more anxious, trust government and business less, and get divorced more often…There is, though, one group of Americans that is imperturbably sunny: the Amish. Their depression rates are negligibly low relative to the rest of society’s. Their happiness levels are consistently high.” – James Surowiecki. See also: Better Off

“The high-speed rail line between L.A. and San Francisco, will take twenty years, assuming there are no delays. In contrast, the first transcontinental railroad took seven. We aren’t going to build our way out of this highly congested world. It’s going to choke us.” – Kazys Varnelis on the collapse of complex societies

Via the “otherwise distinguished” New York Times: “A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.”

Mobile phones today: “Beautiful shiny plastic things with some gangly bag of mostly water tapping away on them”. – Matt Jones.

Open source personal robots! Open source to enable interoperability with others…

“Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.” – Donald Knuth

After struggling yesterday on multiple social networking sites to manage settings I didn’t even know existed, I realized I needed a general plan for my use of these programs. General themes: * It is good to be findable * At some point, these networks might actually be useful as tools to do work (as opposed to zombie wars), so it’s good to have some presence there. * Repeating information (and keeping it updated) everywhere is ridiculous * Assume that anything posted anywhere, no matter its “privacy setting”, could potentially be viewed by anyone on the internet. ¹ My plan: * Create a profile on each major social network * Set those profiles to be viewable by anyone * Keep very minimal information on all profiles: name, photo, current location, email, website. This ensures people can find me, know that I’m the right person, and get in touch. * Turn off or reduce all sharing and messaging settings on all sites. This is remarkably hard to do with most of them–they assume you want to make their site your home. * Create a single, authoritative, public destination for more detailed information about me that I own and control. Owning this is important, as it’s the only way to be sure that I have the final control over what gets published. * Keep my personal site updated only with information I would like to share with anyone on the internet, for all time. * Link to that site from all other online profiles, and make it findable through Google. With that plan, I hope to be findable in and have access to the major places other people are looking for me, without needing to worry about keeping multiple profiles all up to date or sharing unintended information. It’s hard to imagine most people pulling this off, however, for two main reasons. First, as mentioned above, most sites make it very hard to reduce or eliminate sharing your information through them. They often require you provide information to begin with, and then make it impossible to turn off certain features. For instance, some Facebook settings allow you to share them with “no one” or “only me”, but others you must share with all your contacts. Second, this plan relies heavily on owning a personal website and developing all the tools for sharing information yourself. That might be ok for a professional web designer, but not yet for most people. In contrast, Facebook and MySpace make it easy to share structured information. Want to share your favorite books? Just type their titles and the site creates a list, linked to the books and other people who like them. To do this on a personal site you need to know HTML, JavaScript, and probably several different APIs for sites like Amazon.com. It’s hard to do even for people familiar with the technologies.

The right tools don’t yet exist for most people to create a useful and safe online networking experience. Setting up a website domain is easier than it used to be, and perhaps the nascent OpenSocial effort will make it easier for people to use the same tools on their personal sites as they can on Facebook and MySpace. But we’re still a long way from a state where owning and controlling your own information is as easy as letting someone else do it–and that’s dangerous.

1. After seeing the limitations and confusion of most sites’ privacy settings, as well as the way private profiles have ended up on the front page of newspapers and in court cases, that last one is probably pretty accurate. The rule of thumb many people use for email should also be applied to social networks: assume that anything you write, from any time, could show up on the front page of the New York Times.