The fundamental change that may be taking place – humans may not be best characterized as the tool-creating animal but as the only animal that has figured out how to outsource its cognition — how to spread its cognitive abilities into the outside world. We’ve been doing that for a little while ten thousand years. Reading and writing is outsourcing of memory. So we have a process going on here, and you can watch to see whether it’s ongoing. So, for instance, in the next ten years, if you notice more and more substitution for using fragments of human cognition in the outside world — if human occupational responsibility becomes more and more automated in areas involving judgment that haven’t yet been automated — then what you’re seeing is rather like a rising tide of this cognitive outsourcing. That would actually be a very powerful symptom.

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What is happening is no longer just a crisis for individuals, nor even for individual parties: the political system itself is under attack, threatening the moral legitimacy of mainstream parties to govern. Parliament has failed, the government is paralysed and the will of the people is asserting itself.

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NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) is in the process of being renovated, and not a moment too soon. One of the network’s ageing radio dishes stopped in its tracks last month, resulting in the loss of important data from the Cassini spacecraft.

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Meanwhile, the dishes’ electronics are being upgraded to enable them to receive higher frequencies, which allow spacecraft to transmit data at increased rates. DSN programme manager Michael Rodrigues of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, says he is confident that the network will be ready for the James Webb Space Telescope, designed to transmit data at up to 125 megabits per second when it begins operation in 2014.

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in the long run, suggests Romer and as potentially demonstrated by “Star Trek,” the benefit of expanding knowledge and technological change will be widely distributed prosperity: an end to scarcity, a future where the fundamental challenge of providing for our basic needs has been solved

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The future is a moving target. It’s not predictable like the weather – and even weather forecasting misses the odd devastating hurricane. Science fiction’s never going to tell you what you’ll be doing next year. What it really does is use speculation to examine the present-day condition – but it can, however, warn you about possible futures.

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J. Peter Pham at James Madison University says piracy financiers are usually ethnic Somali businessmen who live outside the country and who typically call a relative in Somalia and suggest they launch a piracy business. The investor will offer $250,000 or more in seed money, while the relative goes shopping.

“You’ll need some speedboats; you’ll need some weapons; you also need some intelligence because you can’t troll the Indian Ocean, a million square miles, looking for merchant vessels,” says Pham, adding that the pirates also need food for the voyage — “a caterer.”

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As for me, I’m a tireless global vector and I’m also very prone to respiratory illnesses. So a mutant 21st century swine flu would be well-nigh perfect for me. Once I caught the flu while reading Stephen King’s THE STAND. As I twitched in my bed with hallucinatory high fever, the television in the next room ceaselessly babbled about the Jonestown mass suicide. I was convinced the world was ending. That was 31 years ago.

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ComputerWorld reports that in the coming months, the Chinese company Skytone will release an Android netbook called the Alpha 680. The netbook will use a processor from ARM, a company known for supplying the majority of processorsfound in mobile phones. In fact, the Alpha 680 will use an ARM11 chip–the same one found in the iPhone.

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Bartenders and cocktail geeks, more so than adherents of any other epicurean discipline, seem drawn to a dialogue with the past.

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However, at the current moment, the real danger of a new terrorist attack on US soil isn’t direct damage (hundreds or thousands of lives lost). Instead, the real danger is from the network effects of that attack on a US economy teetering on the edge of depression. Given this, the simultaneous activation of the plethora of disaster preparedness plans currently in place would likely only serve to amplify the deleterious network effects on the economy – essentially by imposing a heavy security “tax” on every economic activity undertaken nation-wide (even ignoring the impact of organizational panic on normal economic activity). It would also justify another round of massive over investment in an already expensive security apparatus, at the very time we are least able to afford it.

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