TEDMED is the newest offshoot of TED, the conference/video channel that brings big ideas to the Internet in digestible videos. Biotech and medicine have reached the point where an entirely new site dedicated to just medicine is now viable. The site is pretty sparse at the moment, but I’m sure it’ll be well populated with great videos inside of a month. Also, the opening graphics for the videos, which consist of CG flybys through the nervous system, are pretty damned cool.
Here’s an interesting video about growing regenerated organs:
I could do without all the ads, but the rest of it looks mighty neat. Plus if ads move to an AR format, you just turn ‘em off until you need access, rendering the real world blissfully ad-free.
For the second time, the NYT is thinking about instituting a paywall. My personal feeling is that it’ll be slow suicide, but maybe the brain trust at the Gray Lady knows something I don’t. Apple’s new tablet might be a revolutionary product that heralds a new media delivery system, and in the process makes the NYT “app” worth both paying for and subscribing to. And if I had to pick a paper I’d pay to read, the Times would definitely be the top contender. But….it all smacks of desperation and futility. Matthew Ingram, who recently left the Globe and Mail to become a senior writer at GigaOm (itself formed by former BusinessWeek reporter Om Malik) has written an interesting post about the NYT paywall. Check it out.
Well, no surprise there. But many a year has been pegged as “the year we (fill in the blank)” in the sci-fi realm, and as we reach those years we’re filled with a crashing sense of disappointment. Here’s some of the best sci-fi years and how they actually panned out.
In addition to coddling a dead language and being pretty damned bitter about their lost colonial empire and handy defeat at the hands of the Nazis, France can now add “hatred of the future” to their long list of missteps. French president Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tax Google and other new media giants in order to help struggling print and other media companies. Well, pleut moi un rivoire, Nicolai, if those businesses are failing there’s likely a very good reason for their downward spiral, such as lack of a 21st century business model.
Way back in 1984, William Gibson took the then new phenomenon of the Japanese capsule hotel, a place for salarymen to rest their head when they’d missed the last train home, and turned it on its ear as a last chance saloon for his criminal protagonist. While the capsule hotel hasn’t yet become a den of villainy, it is a new alternative for the many otherwise homeless Japanese desperately looking for work. While the Japanese economy continues to tank, many are turning to the tiny self-contained bunks as their last resort before hitting the streets.
I’ve never been to a capsule hotel, but I have been to Tokyo several times, most recently this October, and the homeless problem is definitely getting worse. What was at first an anomaly is now if not common place than certainly more noticeable. With an aging population and a seemingly intractable economic mess, it’s hard to see how this problem will get solved anytime soon.
China’s rise to rival the United States as a world power has led some to assume the insular giant plays by the same rulebook as the Western World. Nothing could be further from the truth. Whether its the fact that the country is run by committee or the general distrust the Chinese have for Western intentions, the time is soon at hand that the West will have to deal with China on China’s terms, according to this interesting editorial in the Guardian.
