Paul Krugman's Razor

The financial crisis took a brief vacation in September and October, but is back with a vengeance.

Never seen financial insiders this spooked — not even in 1997-99, when economic dominoes seemed to be falling all around the world.

This time, market players are truly horrified. Suddenly they realize that no one can grasp the financial system anymore.

Read it all.

Human Development Report 2007/2008

"Climate change is the defining human development challenge of the 21st Century. There is a window of opportunity for avoiding the most damaging climate change impacts, but that window is closing: the world has less than a decade to change course. Actions taken — or not taken — in the years ahead will have a profound bearing on the future course of human development. The world lacks neither the financial resources nor the technological capabilities to act. What is missing is a sense of urgency, human solidarity and collective interest."

Look here.

Click to enlarge. Picture's source is here.

ENERGY VISION 2020: S h a m e l e s s Bush Propaganda

This looks quite interesting, anyone no doubt will agree . . .

"In 2020, world population has grown to 7.5 billion people, the global economy is approaching $80 trillion, and the wireless Internet 4.0 is now connecting almost half of humanity.

Synergies among nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science have dramatically improved the human condition by increasing the availability of energy, food, and water and by connecting people and information anywhere, anytime."

However, it appears to be really shameless propaganda for the Bush dynasty . . .

"Jeb Bush gave his 2020 State of the Union address as the 47th president of the USA. Jeb Bush was the former governor of Florida, younger brother of George W. Bush and second son of George H. W. Bush.

He underlined the great progress made in terms of energy independence and energy diversification in the USA. He highlighted that even though neither the hydrogen economy nor nuclear fusion have yet come to happen, the USA is almost self sufficient in power consumption thanks to advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology."

U N B E L I E V A B L E !

SECRETARY-GENERAL BAN KI-MOON: "Climate Change As Frightening As A Science Fiction Movie"

Today the world's scientists have spoken clearly and with one voice: climate change may bring "abrupt and irreversible" impacts, including the fast melting of glaciers and species extinctions.

Even if levels of CO2 in the atmosphere stayed where they are now, research showed sea levels would rise by between 0.4 and 1.4 metres simply because water expands as it warms.

However, carbon dioxide emissions are rising faster than they were a decade ago.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has just been on a trip to see ice shelves breaking up in Antarctica and the melting Torres del Paine glaciers in Chile. He also visited the Amazon rainforest, which he said was being "suffocated" by global warming.


"These scenes are as frightening as a science fiction movie," Ban said. "But they are even more terrifying, because they are real."

The latest scientific knowledge on the causes and effects of climate change will be put before environment ministers in Bali, Indonesia, next month -- a meeting which is likely to agree a two-year strategy to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

Stiglitz: Worst President Ever

"Bush's fiscal irresponsibility fostered irresponsibility in everyone else. Credit was shoveled out the door, and subprime mortgages were made available to anyone this side of life support. Credit-card debt mounted to a whopping $900 billion by the summer of 2007.

The Federal Reserve Board stepped on the accelerator in a historically unprecedented way, driving interest rates down to 1 percent. In real terms, taking inflation into account, interest rates actually dropped to negative 2 percent. The predictable result was a consumer spending spree."

Read every single word here.

Future America: Jetsons or Waltons?

What happened to the future? Weren’t things supposed to be cooler by now, smarter, safer? Raised on a steady diet of science fiction, overzealous politicians and corporate hype, Americans expected to be living in The Jetsons — but instead find themselves stuck in a scarier version of The Waltons.

Read this interesting Special Report on The Future, brought to us by Forbes Magazine.


Another mustread is this first chapter of the book Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years.

WAKING LIFE: 1st Artificial Life To Be Announced

Reportedly Dr Craig Venter, the DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

Also be sure to watch this extremely cool video prediction: scene 6 from "Waking Life".

LIVING WITHOUT OIL: Now Available In The Dutch Edition

Look here.
The English language edition is under way!
The book was officially introduced at the Shell HQ in Amsterdam.

Adjiedj Bakas and Rob Creemers in "Living Without Oil / Leven Zonder Olie" together present the trends in energy production and energy consumption in today’s world. Is there an energy crisis to be expected and when? How long can we use oil and gas and when is it necessary to change the energy consumption? How to reduce CO2 and prevent the changes in climate we might expect in the near future? This book is the ultimate answer to Al Gore’s book An unconvenient truth. It is visionary, yet practical and inspirational: what are the real energy alternatives? What is the state of the art? What are the future scenario’s and future trends in energy consumption? Which new energy inventions are due? With cases and inspiring examples. The book is designed as a "magazine in a book": it is full colour, richly illustrated, with a foamcover and luxuriously designed.

Also vistit the LivingWithoutOil weblog, which BTW isn't ours.

Greenspan on 2030

From Alan Greenspan's new book "The Age of Turbulence":

"Adaptation is in our nature, a fact that leads me to be deeply optimistic about our future. [ . . . ] Progress is not automatic, however; it will demand future adaptations as yet unimaginable."

Monumental Multimedia Documentary

Here.

Totally New Digital Products Ahead

Cramming more data into less space on a memory chip or a hard drive has been the crucial force propelling consumer electronics companies to make ever smaller devices.

If Stuart Parkin proves successful in his current quest at the San Jose IBM Research Center, he will create a “universal” computer memory, one that can potentially replace dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, and flash memory chips, and even make a “disk drive on a chip” possible.

It could begin to replace flash memory in three to five years. Not only would it allow every consumer to carry data equivalent to a college library on small portable devices, but a tenfold or hundredfold increase in memory would undoubtedly unleash the creativity of engineers who would develop totally new entertainment, communication and information products.

The Worldwide Credit Crunch

From the International Herald Tribune on the US homeowner woes that can be felt throughout the world:

Different lives on different continents. But all of them, in this astonishingly interconnected world, are being swept up in a worldwide credit crunch that have raised fears of a financial meltdown.

Bad lending decisions to ordinary folks in places like Minnesota and New Jersey have been tearing through world economies like a tsunami, causing stock markets to plummet, threatening pensions, and affecting the prices of everything from oil to refrigerators.