2014 Was a Good Year: Better Than You Remember
21 Dec, 2014
Eric Garner. Michael Brown. The Sony hack and surrender to fear. 2014 seems to be ending on a crappy note. My twitter feed is full of people expressing good riddance to the year. 2014 was better than that. I want to take a moment to…
R e a d M o r eUS Teen Birth Rate Hits All Time Low
8 Sep, 2013
The CDC reported on Friday that teens in the US are having children at their lowest rate ever in the 73 years the statistic has been tracked. The rate of births to mothers aged 15-19 has dropped roughly in half since 1990. You can see…
R e a d M o r eCombining Current Tech Could Make Solar Cheaper than Coal
22 Feb, 2012
By the end of the decade, manufacturers in the United States could make solar panels that are less than half as expensive as the ones they make now. That would be cheap enough for solar power to compete with electricity from fossil fuels, according to…
R e a d M o r eJapans population to drop by 1 million each year
30 Jan, 2012
Japans rapid aging means the national population of 128 million will shrink by one-third by 2060 and seniors will account for 40 percent of people, placing a greater burden on the shrinking work force population to support the social security and tax systems. The population…
R e a d M o r eMy WFS2011 Talk: The Infinite Resource: Growing Prosperity While Reducing Impact on the Earth
9 Jul, 2011
I gave at talk this morning at the World Future Society 2011 Conference in Vancouver. The talk was entitled The Infinite Resource: Growing Prosperity While Reducing Impact on the Earth, and it looks at what the ultimate limits of growth and prosperity on this planet…
R e a d M o r eKey Trends of the Next 25 Years
21 Mar, 2011
Michell Zappa has a fascinating infographic attempting to lay out timelines for future technologies over the next 25 years. It’s an impressive job of collecting data and laying it out in a way that someone can explore. It’s worth playing with. Click through on the…
R e a d M o r eIs Moore’s Law Really a Fair Comparison for Solar?
17 Mar, 2011
[This is an update of a post I first wrote in March of 2011, responding to criticism of the analogy of Moore’s Law for solar power. Updating in April 2015, on the 50th Anniversary of Moore’s Law, in light of renewed conversation on this topic.…
R e a d M o r eThe Exponential Gains in Solar Power per Dollar
17 Mar, 2011
My post on the Moore’s Law-like exponential gains in solar power per dollar went up at Scientific American yesterday. Reprinting here with permission. The sun strikes every square meter of our planet with more than 1,360 watts of power. Half of that energy is absorbed…
R e a d M o r eSingularity Summit Talk: The Digital Biome – Re-Engineering Life on Earth to Survive and Thrive in the 21st Century
17 Aug, 2010
This weekend I was at the Singularity Summit in San Francisco. On Sunday I gave a talk called The Digital Biome – Re-Engineering Life on Earth to Survive and Thrive in the 21st Century. (Follow the link to see the slides on SlideShare.) The…
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