Such a Network Is Potentially More Survivable
1. How cheap can solar electricity get?
"What this graph shows is that, if solar electricity continues its current learning rate, by the time solar capacity triples to 600GW (by 2020 or 2021, as a rough estimate), we should see unsubsidized solar prices of roughly 4.5 c / kwh for very sunny places (the US southwest, the Middle East, Australia, parts of India, parts of Latin America), ranging up to 6.5 c / kwh for more moderately sunny areas (almost all of India, large swaths of the US and China, southern and central Europe, almost all of Latin America). And beyond that, by the time solar scale has doubled 4 more times, to the equivalent of 16% of today’s electricity demand (and somewhat less of future demand), we should see solar at 3 cents per kwh in the sunniest areas, and 4.5 cents per kwh in moderately sunny areas. If this holds, solar will cost less than half what new coal or natural gas electricity cost, even without factoring in the cost of air pollution and carbon pollution emitted by fossil fuel power plants."
"Ten years ago, over three hundred men, women and children disappeared from a small town in Tennessee, never to be heard from again. In this seven-part podcast, American Public Radio host Lia Haddock asks the question once more, 'What happened to the people of Limetown?'"
3. Expect your aural environment to become increasingly synthetic.
"Roush Performance’s Active Exhaust lets an Apple iPhone or iPad customize a Mustang’s sound and save the settings on those devices. It’s available for 2015 Mustangs with Roush’s Quad Tip exhaust system. 'Custom mode is great because it lets the individual do what they want to do with the exhaust note,' Don Manfredi, vice president of marketing at Roush Performance, said in a telephone interview. 'You can truly say that this is your tune.'"
4. This 1965 RAND paper on distributed network architecture is a beautiful foreshadowing.
"In this briefing, we consider in detail the use of the distributed network—a network in which each station is connected only to its nearest neighbors. We show that such a network is potentially more survivable than in the previous example. We then consider the practical problem of how to build switching gadgets that allow any station to talk to any other station, by passing through a large number of nodes in tandem."
5. Adventures in Liberland, libertarian micronation utopia.
"Jedlicka had long dreamed of such a proclamation. An avowed small-government libertarian and euroskeptic, he searched for two years for suitable territory on which to establish Liberland. The man he intermittently calls minister of information technology eventually discovered the plot via consultation of the 'terra nullius' entry on Wikipedia. According to the homestead principle, as well as the rules stipulated by the Montevideo Convention of 1933, Jedlicka felt the land was technically his after the flag-planting rite, carried out by Jedlicka, his girlfriend and a college friend. Though he claims he did not seek political office himself, and he in fact recused himself from the initial round of voting, Jedlicka was immediately elected the nation’s first president by a vote of two to zero."
On Fusion: What Google's Alphabet could look like in 2050. (And, for good measure, 26 reasons Google created Alphabet.)
1. rameznaam.com 2. limetownstories.com 3. bloomberg.com 4. rand.org | @jfreebo 5. nytimes.com | @billwasik
Such a Network Is Potentially More Survivable