Category: Technology

And Another Saturday Smile

Enjoy your weekend, and don’t miss the Harvest Moon!

Another fabulous reposting of an article that first was seen on the Care2 site.

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This Man May Wear a Hard Hat, But He Sure Has a Soft Spot for Dogs

3188741-largeBy: Laura S. September 11, 2016

About Laura

Max Kahrimanovic lives in his hard hat. It’s covered in the dust of three continents where he programs wind turbines, often at a dangerous height. But some may say Max’s greatest accomplishments unfold in the far less intricate scenarios down on the ground where he feeds hungry, and often very thirsty, stray dogs. This is the story of how Max won the trust of one of those dogs and the remarkable new life she is now beginning.

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So close he could kiss the clouds, Max programs wind turbines internationally.

“I saw her the very first day I came to the construction site,” Max said of the shy sweetheart he encountered during his latest assignment in Turkey. “She was scared and wouldn’t approach no matter what. I would leave food and would have to walk away. Then, from the far, I would see her eating and drinking what I left for her. Slowly she started to trust me and one day she finally let me pet her on the head.”

From that day forward Karis (as Max named her) decided that she had adopted Max. She would keep watch outside his office door and she would be waiting for him when he arrived at work each morning.

Although she was once so afraid of human touch, Karis soon learned that Max was different than the others she’d encountered.
Although she was once so afraid of human touch, Karis soon learned that Max was different than the others she’d encountered.

“She can be naughty at times,” Max laughs, thinking of the occasions Karis dumped over the trash cans. “She wasn’t hungry, I know that much. I was feeding her three times a day. But I guess the leftovers smelled delicious to her and she had to check it out.”

And one day, when Max arrived, Karis had a surprise for him. Overnight, she had delivered seven puppies.

“My first thought was devastation,” Max said candidly. “I know, you’ll think how can I be devastated seeing so much cuteness. But in all these years of traveling through Europe, Morocco, New Zealand, etc. I’ve seen so much misery involving these animals, that I couldn’t feel anything else at that moment.”

At this point, Max had already found a home for Karis in the U.S. and was making arrangements to transport her there. But with seven more lives to worry about, now what?

“How are we gonna manage 7 pups too?” Max wondered. “Knowing what will happen to them after I leave was devastating. I knew they will either die under car wheels, die of starvation, diseases or they will get killed by other bigger dogs that wander around there.”

So, despite the enormity of the costs and challenging logistics, Max and his wife Neli – back in Sweden – began making arrangements to transport the entire family of dogs to the U.S. for adoption. They turned to the Harmony Fund international animal rescue charity for help with the costs of the rescue.

The whole family will be coming to the U.S. soon, and Karis already has a permanent home with one of Max’s friends who has adopted internationally before. Max has no doubt that Karis will be very good to her pups during the transition as she has always been such an excellent mother.

Karis and her pups were moved to a safe location where they await travel to the U.S.
Karis and her pups were moved to a safe location where they await travel to the U.S.

“When she had the puppies, I admired how she never went to eat their food that I gave them,” Max said. “She waited for me to get hers ready. One time I left 6 hard boiled eggs on the table for her lunch. I just stepped out to wash my hands and when I got back eggs were gone. She ate them like that, not peeled or anything.”

Max isn’t always admired for his devotion however. He said he’s known by management as “the guy who feeds strays” and that he has received warnings not to do so. But he simply can’t go against his own moral compass.

Max always makes time to offer food and water to strays like this one in Turkey.
Max always makes time to offer food and water to strays like this one in Turkey.

“This is much stronger than me,” Max explains. “I can’t eat my lunch knowing there is a being, not far from me, starving and hasn’t had a piece of bread for days…. We usually work in small villages far from civilization or any bigger cities. If it is possible to buy it, then I always have one or two huge bags of dry food and some cans in the trunk of my car. And on my way from the site to my hotel, I stop and feed strays that I see. If it isn’t possible to buy dog food, then I improvise with our food by either taking extra breakfast from the hotel or just by buying extra food when I go shopping for myself. I know I can’t save them all. But for that day or that time when I meet that dog I can feed him at least and give him some water.”

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I am so pleased to promote what Max Kahrimanovic is doing and to thank Laura for writing this up in the first place.

Max’s admission in that last paragraph uses words that I have heard Jean using when I first met her back in December, 2006 when she was living in Mexico and rescuing so many street dogs and finding loving homes for them in the USA.

Standing up for the future.

This is no sinecure – the future of mankind is at risk.

Very often I find a topic for Saturday that is easy on the mind. But I make no apologies for republishing, with Jennifer’s permission, a post that she published over on Transition Times yesterday. When you read it you will see clearly that promoting this today is right. For many readers may well be able to join thousands of others in showing their support for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.

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World War III Has Begun: Which Side Are You On?

Although you wouldn’t know it from scanning the front pages of the mainstream media, a major battle in what Bill McKibben has called World War Three, the war to save the planet from human destruction, has been going down in Indian Country for the past six months.

Thousands of Native Americans, members of a whole host of tribes, have gathered at Standing Rock, North Dakota, to protest the North Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL), which was sited by the Army Corps of Engineers to run dangerously close to the Missouri River and the Standing Rock Reservation.

But as the protesters say, they are not just defending Indian country, they are defending everyone who relies on the Missouri for water—and not just humans but all life.

If there is anyone to look back at this turbulent period in human history on Earth—now coming to be known as the Anthropocene—they will surely wonder at the suicidal tendency of human civilization in the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Why, they will ask, would such an intelligent species willingly—even enthusiastically—engage in the poisoning of its waterways and underground water resources; the destruction of its forests; the chemical contamination of its soils and oceans; the overheating of its precious atmosphere by relentless burning of fossil fuels? Why would humans put so much of their intelligence and technological prowess into developing ever more lethal weapons of mass destruction, used to bludgeon each other? Why would they preside blithely over the extinction of millions of other species, the vicious ripping of the great ecological web of life on Earth?

Why indeed?

I know it’s hard for any of us to escape the clutter of our everyday lives, with the constant pressures and worries that beset us on the personal level. But this is precisely what is being asked of us now.

The courageous defenders out at Standing Rock dropped their ordinary lives to be part of the historic encampment protesting the stranglehold of the oil companies on our waterways and our lands. They are fighting in the courts, through the media, and most importantly with their physical presence, standing up to the bulldozers, the attack dogs and the pepper spray.

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Image source: Democracy Now!

This is what McKibben’s World War Three looks like—it’s already begun. It will be fought locally, as communities and individuals wake up to the implications of the destruction and decide that hell no, they won’t take it any more.

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Oil and gas pipelines in the U.S. Image source: https://projects.propublica.org/pipelines/

In my own corner of the world, we are under assault from General Electric, wanting to create toxic waste dumps right in the middle of our small rural towns. We have a gas pipeline being constructed, despite vehement protests, through a pristine old-growth state forest. We have oil tanker trains running constantly right through our communities. Despite a thriving organic and biodynamic farm renaissance, we still have far too many pesticides, herbicides and fungicides being used locally, and too many trees being cut down.

I have been thinking and writing for some time now about how important it is to align the personal, political and planetary in our own lives and in the way we relate to the world around us. On all three of these levels, 21st century American life is way out of balance.

It is time to focus, each one of us, on using our brief lifetimes to create balance and harmony on Earth. Sometimes the way to harmony leads through protest and discord, as is happening now in Standing Rock. Sometimes it can be as simple as choosing to support local, low-impact agriculture rather than industrial agriculture. Leaning on our political representatives to move faster on policy that will shift our society to renewable energy is key.

Wind farm in Ireland. Source: http://www.iwea.com/_wind_information
Wind farm in Ireland. Source: http://www.iwea.com/_wind_information

There are so many ways to get involved in this War for the Planet, many of them quite peaceful. The important thing is to get off the sidelines. Get involved. Feel the potential of this moment—it’s literally a make or break period for the future of humanity on Earth, and many other living beings too.

The brave defenders at Standing Rock are reminding us that we are all “natives” of this Earth, and we all have a stake in protecting her. Which side are you on?

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Yes, we are all natives of this world and that includes our dear animals and our wonderful animal companions.

Make a promise to yourself to make a difference; even one small difference. With that in mind, if you want to find an event close to you then the Sierra Club have a page where you can look up which event you would like to attend.

Make a difference!

Damn it! We’re British you know!

Only the Brits could do this!

(Another gem sent on by Dordie to brighten up the coming week!)

Can’t let things go to the dogs can we!

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That’s better!

Returning to happy dogs!

A republication of a post from exactly one year ago.

Yesterday, I was at our local Three Rivers Hospital having a colonoscopy. The procedure was a breeze but I wouldn’t recommend the bowel prep one has to take before the procedure! 😦

However, it ran on much longer than we expected and, consequently, there wasn’t sufficient time to do a new post for you good people for today.

So as I do in these situations, I republish the post that came out exactly a year ago: on the 12th August, 2015. As it happens it seemed a wonderful follow-on to yesterday’s post: Have A Lovely Day.

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More on those happy dogs.

Indebted, again, to Chris Gomez.

Jean and I were out for much of yesterday resulting in me not sitting down to compose today’s post until nearly 5pm (PDT) in the afternoon. I must admit I didn’t have a clue as to what to write about. Then sitting in my email inbox was another email from Chris Gomez with this short but valuable sentence, “Love is real….Check this out! (via ABC7 Los Angeles local news iOS app) Study reveals scientific reason your dog is happy to see you.” Chris included a link to the ABC7 news item. I’m republishing it here.

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STUDY REVEALS SCIENTIFIC REASON YOUR DOG IS HAPPY TO SEE YOU

A new study explains why your dog gets so happy to see you. (Shutterstock)
A new study explains why your dog gets so happy to see you. (Shutterstock)

Tuesday, August 11, 2015 11:04AM

Is your dog overwhelmed with joy anytime you walk through the door? There’s a scientific reason behind their excitement, a new study shows, and it’s not just because you feed them.

Researchers at Emory University used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan dogs’ brains for activity when they were shown images of dog faces, human faces and ordinary objects.

The dogs’ temporal lobes lit up “significantly more” when presented with the faces than with the objects. These findings suggest that dogs may recognize both human and dog faces.

Facial recognition causes dog brains to activate in the same areas as in monkey and human brains, the study found. This is separate from the “reward areas” that would be triggered by anticipation of food.

“What we’re finding with the imaging work is that dogs love their humans-and not just for food,” researcher Gregory Berns told io9. “They love the company of humans simply for its own sake.”

“The existence of a face-selective region in the temporal dog cortex opens up a whole range of new questions to be answered about their social intelligence,” the researchers explained, such as whether dogs can understand different facial expressions and whether they can read body language.

This isn’t the first time scientists have explored what makes dogs’ tails wag with excitement when reunited with their owners. A January study that Berns was also involved in found that dogs have a positive reaction to the scent of familiar humans compared with other smells, even those of other dogs.

The results of that study “suggested that not only did the dogs discriminate that scent [of familiar humans] from the others, they had a positive association with it.”

A 2013 behavioral study found that dogs can show when they’re happy to see their owners by lifting their eyebrows. Their left eyebrow went up when they saw their respective owners, the study found. They didn’t have this reaction for other things that may excite them, such as attractive toys.

….

Granted there was some overlap with Monday’s post but there was more than enough in the ABC7 article to warrant sharing it with you.

Thanks again, Chris.

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You all stay happy with your dogs!

 

The ancient roots of the relationship.

The recent news of finding a dog graveyard that is 2,000 years old.

Before going on to today’s post, can I just remind you kind folks that as of today, and for the rest of this week, we have family guests staying with us here in Oregon.

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Grandson Morten responding to his mother, Maija, taking a picture of him and Marius, as they wait to board the aircraft for San Francisco yesterday morning.

Thus from tomorrow until the end of the coming weekend my posts will be a preponderance of republications of previous posts. Plus my attention to you dear readers will be less than you are accustomed to.

Now on to today’s post that was kindly sent to me by Chris Gomez. Thanks Chris.

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2,000-Year-Old Dog Graveyard Discovered in Siberia

By Tom Metcalfe, Live Science Contributor | July 15, 2016
Archaeologists have discovered a prehistoric dog graveyard at a 2,000-year-old village near the Arctic Circle in Russia's Siberia. Credit: University of Alberta/Robert Losey

Archaeologists have discovered a prehistoric dog graveyard at a 2,000-year-old village near the Arctic Circle in Russia’s Siberia.
Credit: University of Alberta/Robert Losey

The carefully buried remains of five dogs were recently found in a 2,000-year-old doggy graveyard near the Arctic Circle in Siberia, according to archaeologists.

This discovery at the Ust-Polui archaeological site, in Salekhard, Russia, reveals close relationships between the region’s people and their animal “best friends” two millennia B.C. The dogs likely served as pets, workers and sources of food — and possibly as sacrificial offerings in religious ceremonies, the researchers said.

“The role of dogs at Ust-Polui is really complex and variable,” Robert Losey, an archaeologist at the University of Alberta in Canada, wrote in an email to Live Science from Salekhard, where he is carrying out fieldwork at Ust-Polui. [See photos of the prehistoric dog graveyard in Siberia]

“The most striking thing is that the dog remains are really abundant compared to all other sites in the Arctic — there are over 115 dogs represented at the site,” Losey said. “Typically, sites have only a few dog remains — 10 at most.”

Working dogs

The dogs were likely involved in various tasks in the ancient Arctic village, including pulling sleds, he said. The remains of two sleds, as well as a carved bone knife handle thought to depict a sled dog in a harness, have been found at the site.

“Some [dogs] were probably also used in hunting, for reindeer and birds, the remains of which were both abundant at the site,” Losey said.

Parts of a reindeer harness had also been found at Ust-Polui, he added, and dogs may have been used to herd reindeer, as is still done today by some communities in the region.

But despite evidence that the dogs worked with people and other animals, it was also clear that many of the dogs at Ust-Polui had been butchered and probably eaten, Losey said. Many of the dog bones had cut marks on them, and were found scattered around the site in the same way as the bones of other food animals, such as deer and birds, he said.

Some of the dog consumption may have been related to sacrifices or rituals, or even feasting, Losey noted. In fact, “at one place in the site, the heads of 15 dogs were piled together, all with their brain cases broken open in the same manner,” he said.

He added that the sacrificing of dogs was well documented among indigenous people in this region of Siberia, “and is done to appease spirits, or to ensure community health, and so on.”

Prehistoric pets

But though it might have been a dog’s life for most of the canine population of Ust-Polui, a few top dogs seem to have enjoyed special treatment, the archaeologists said. [10 Things You Didn’t Know About Dogs]

Of the more than 115 dogs that archaeologists identified among the animal bones at Ust-Polui, the remains of just five dogs were found carefully buried in a group near one edge of the site, Losey said.

This separation likely indicates close bonds between some people and some dogs in the ancient village, he said.

Each of the prehistoric doggy graves contained the entire dog skeleton, laid on its side in a shallow pit, similar to three human burials at the site, and they showed no signs of butchery or of being intentionally killed, the researchers found.

“The only thing that distinguishes them from the human burials is their location. No other animals at Ust-Polui were treated like this,” Losey said.

Ancient friendship

Losey started working with the dog remains from Ust-Polui three years ago, as part of his work studying the ancient relationships between people and dogs in the world’s northern regions.

In 2013 in the journal PLOS ONE, Losey published the results of his research into dog burials, dated to around 8,000 years ago, from archaeological sites in the Lake Baikal region of Siberia.

Some of the dogs from Lake Baikal were buried with decorated collars and what appeared to be grave goods, such as pottery jars and wooden spoons.

Losey said the differences between the two sites showed how people’s relationships with dogs varied among cultures over the estimated 15,000 years since dogs evolved from wolves.

“At Baikal, we have no evidence of dog consumption or sacrifice at all, and many of the dogs there are from carefully made burials,” Losey said.

Although tests on the dog remains at both sites suggested they would have been similar to Siberian huskies, the dogs at Ust-Polui were much smaller, with most weighing less than 50 lbs. (22 kilograms) and standing only 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) tall at the shoulder, Losey said.

Original article on Live Science.

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What a long and intensely beautiful relationship. I’m bound to reinforce how that relationship is so powerful all these thousands of years later by republishing one of the photographs from yesterday’s picture parade:

Winner of the Man’s Best Friend category (Photo: Fiona Sami/Dog Photographer of the Year Competition)
Winner of the Man’s Best Friend category (Photo: Fiona Sami/Dog Photographer of the Year Competition)

Sonic Journeys

Innovation – Pure and Simple.

Note: Let me declare immediately that I have a personal interest in this post. Namely that my daughter, Maija Handover, is a partner of the charitable company SOUND UK. Their most recent sound adventure is extremely interesting.

It is called Sonic Journeys and, as the home page of the website explains:

Sonic Journeys are soundtracks to specific journeys. Each commissioned piece is available as a free download for limited periods, enabling listeners to experience the music travelling through the landscape that inspired it. Or wherever they choose.

There are a number of Commissioned Journeys but one is also able to create personal sound journeys.

Let me allow Sonic Journeys to explain in their words what it is about:

Sonic Journeys is a series of soundtracks to specific journeys. The series commissions artists to create new works in response to journeys that inspire them. These works are recorded and available for free download for a limited period, enabling listeners to experience the music travelling through the landscape that inspired it. Previous commissions include Adrian Utley from Portishead (2012, a walk through ancient trees at National Trust’s Croft Castle & Parkland), Mica Levi (2011, a walk at Barbican Centre), Shackleton & Vengeance Tenfold (2011, two train journeys in Devon), Will Gregory from Goldfrapp (2009, a walk in Malvern Hills for Big Chill festival).

For those that would like to create and share their own Sonic Journey, we are inviting online submissions of music, or music and video, to journeys the public find personally inspiring here. Previous Your Sonic Journeys have included music to journeys in Kew Gardens in London, Bregenz in Austria, South Western Transylvania and more.

Here’s an example of one of those commissioned journeys, from my old home county of Devon. It is called Shackleton + Vengeance Tenfold – South Devon, stopping train from Starcross → Teignmouth and the Field Notes explain:

Unique British bass producer Shackleton collaborated with his original musical partner, spoken word artist Vengeance Tenfold, to present his own distinctive vision of a journey through some very special parts of Devon; the main railway line between Exeter and Totnes, and part of the Tarka railway line between Exeter and Barnstaple.

Travelling from Exeter to Newton Abbot, in South Devon the artists respond to the iconic stretch of railway as the stopping train travels through the Exe estuary from Starcross station and journeys along the sea and wonderfully dramatic scenery.

Earl Fontainelle a.k.a. Vengeance Tenfold lives on Dartmoor in Devon. He plays in the Amsterdam-based Cajun deathcountry band Earl Fontainelle and the Pearl of Great Price and has worked in many other musical and lyrical projects, including a long-term collaborative relationship with Shackleton with whom he worked together on a live performance alongside the Tom Dale Dance Company involving spoken word, live electronic music, a Siberian Jew’s harp, and a lantern.

This link will allow you to listen to the Sonic Journey. To give those unfamiliar with this part of Devon, South-West England here’s a video of that train journey.

Published on Sep 17, 2013

Here I have some footage of a famous scenic coastal main line railway route that runs from Teignmouth via Dawlish to Starcross in South Devon. It is used by both long distance and local train services currently operated by First Great Western and Cross Country that runs from Cornwall and Plymouth to all points north and east.

I know I’m biased but it still strikes me as one incredibly innovative idea! Well done, the team!

Into the Future.

These are deeply interesting times.

Among the many impressive qualities of the dog is one that we humans must envy so much at times.

I’m not speaking of a dog’s ability to seek out food or, at the other end of things, the dog’s way of keeping it’s backside clean! 😉 No, I’m referring to the way a dog lives in the present. Presumably unworried as to what the future might mean.

We humans, however, as hard as we try to be rooted in the ‘here and now’ also depend on assessing the future and determining the best way to respond to that uncertainty. I’m sure that assessing and managing risk is one of the ways that have made us such a successful species.

In terms of voicing these uncertain times I really was drawn to a comment from ‘John D’ over on Richard Murphy’s Tax Research UK blogsite. I’m going to republish that comment in full before moving on to the central theme of today’s post: Into the Future.

John D says:
June 10 2016 at 4:58 pm
Paul, I share your apprehension. I believe ‘the world’ has entered a cycle of almost unprecedented uncertainty. So many issues. So few solutions being articulated in the mainstream. However, shift happens and Richard is right to say that there is always opportunity for change. Gramsci, an underrated theorist, summed it up in his ‘Prison Notebooks'(1929-35) writing: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

The stranglehold Neo-liberalism has exercised on orthodox economics for the past 40 years is difficult to understand but, given that its major protoganists have held all the aces, it’s not really surprising. Under Reagan there was a major ‘re-education’ programme in the Universities where any heterodox economic teaching was eliminated from the ‘Economics 101’ curriculum. Acording to Richard Wolff an entire generation of students graduated from the major universities without ever having studied Marx in any context.

(For anyone interested here’s a succinct history of Neo-liberalism – http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/a_short_history_of_neoliberalism_and_how_we_can_fix_it).

The good news is nothing lasts forever. The seeds of change have already been sown and will eventually blossom, possibly in unexpected locations. Sadly, as Ivan says, there has been irretrievable damage to lives and livelihoods in the US, UK and many EU countries. Michael Hudson recently spelled out its negative effects – http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/07/the-wages-of-neoliberalism-poverty-exile-and-early-death.

Like many, I don’t think radical change will come about until enough people are hurting enough. Maybe a real property crash will be a wake-up call. However, in or out of the EU isn’t going to trigger a change in the economic agenda any time soon. Personally I believe that a vote for Brexit (ominously a possibilty) will set-back any fundamental reforms, especially in the UK. But I don’t want to open up that can of worms again here!

The perennial question is ‘what to do?’. And the answer is always the same: ‘do something, anything, to nurture the seeds into saplings’. Every little helps! It’s going to be a rough ride, not without some collateral damage in terms of still more unnecessary deaths. Usually I’m not as optimistic as Richard but because it’s Friday afternoon and the sun is shining I feel the beginning of the end is within our grasp. I so hope so. Back to Gramsci – the immediate worry is what will fill the intervening vacuum. Happy weekend!

The seeds of change have already been sown and will eventually blossom, possibly in unexpected locations.

The perfect introduction to an email that Dan Gomez sent me on Thursday.

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Below  is a summary by Udo Gollub of the findings at a recent futurist conference in Germany. This’s  – they predict – is how the world will operate in 10 to 20 years time.

For those of us who are about to amble into the sunset on our Zimmer frames, this is simply interesting. We inhabited a world where people used cosy concepts like pension, nest egg, job security, promotion in the work place and other reassuring socio economic terms.

For those who are in mid career or are only entering the world of (non) work now, this makes for scary/exciting reading – depending on how ready you are to change in mid air  — if it is at all possible.

And for the generation still in their nappies … well, it is a matter of how parents prepare them for an unimaginable world when they enter the world of ‘work’ in 20 years time.

GERT CLAASSEN
Hermanus
Into the future
By Udo Gollub at Messe Berlin, Germany

I just went to the Singularity University summit. Here are the key points I gathered.

Rise and Fall. In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they were bankrupt. What happened to Kodak will happen in a lot of industries in the next 10 years – and most people don’t see it coming. Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later you would never take pictures on paper film again?

Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975. The first ones only had 10,000 pixels, but followed Moore’s law. So as with all exponential technologies, it was a disappointment for a long time, before it became superior and mainstream in only a few short years. This will now happen with Artificial Intelligence, health, self-driving and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs.
Welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution.  Welcome to the Exponential Age. Software and operating platforms will disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years.

Uber is just a software tool. They don’t own any cars, but they are now the biggest taxi company in the world. Airbnb is the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don’t own any properties.

Artificial Intelligence: Computers become exponentially better in understanding the world. This year, a computer beat the best Go player in the world, 10 years earlier than expected. In the US, young lawyers already don’t get jobs. Because of IBM Watson, you can get legal advice, (so far for more or less basic stuff), within seconds. With 90% accuracy, compared with 70% accuracy when done by humans. So if you are studying law, stop immediately. There will be 90% fewer generalist lawyers in the future; only specialists will be needed. ‘Watson’ already helps nurses diagnose cancer, four times more accurately than doctors. Facebook now has pattern recognition software that can recognize faces better than humans. By 2030, computers will have become ‘more intelligent’ than humans.

Cars: In 2018 the first self driving cars will be offered to the public. Around 2020, the complete industry will start to be disrupted. You don’t want to own a car anymore. You will call a car on your phone; it will show up at your location and drive you to your destination. You will not need to park it, you only pay for the driven distance and you can be productive whilst driving. Our kids will never get a driver’s licence and will never own a car. It will change the cities, because we will need 90-95% fewer cars for our future needs. We can transform former parking spaces into parks. At present,1.2 million people die each year in car accidents worldwide. We now have one accident every 100,000 kms. With autonomous driving, that will drop to one accident in 10 million km. That will save a million lives each year.

Electric cars will become mainstream around and after 2020. Cities will be cleaner and much less noisy because all cars will run on electricity, which will become much cheaper.

Most traditional car companies may become bankrupt by tacking the evolutionary approach and just building better cars; while tech companies (Tesla, Apple, Google) will take the revolutionary approach and build a computer on wheels. I spoke to a lot of engineers from Volkswagen and Audi. They are terrified of Tesla.

Insurance companies will have massive trouble, because without accidents, the insurance will become 100 times cheaper. Their car insurance business model will disappear.

Real estate values based on proximities to work-places, schools, etc. will change, because if you can work effectively from anywhere or be productive while you commute, people will move out of cities to live in a more rural surroundings.

Solar energy production has been on an exponential curve for 30 years, but only now is having a big impact. Last year, more solar energy was installed worldwide than fossil. The price for solar will drop so much that almost all coal mining companies will be out of business by 2025.

Water for all: With cheap electricity comes cheap and abundant water. Desalination now only needs 2kWh per cubic meter. We don’t have scarce water in most places; we only have scarce drinking water. Imagine what will be possible if everyone can have as much clean water as they want, for virtually no cost.

Health: The Tricorder X price will be announced this year – a medical device (called the “Tricorder” from Star Trek) that works with your phone, which takes your retina scan, your blood sample and your breath. It then analyses 54 biomarkers that will identify nearly any diseases. It will be cheap, so in a few years, everyone on this planet will have access to world class, low cost, medicine.
3D printing: The price of the cheapest 3D printer came down from 18,000$ to 400$ within 10 years. In the same time, it became 100 times faster. All major shoe companies started printing 3D shoes. Spare airplane parts are already 3D-printed in remote airports. The space station now has a printer that eliminates the need for the large amount of spare parts they used to need in the past.
At the end of this year, new smart phones will have 3D scanning possibilities. You can then 3D scan your feet and print your perfect shoe at home. In China, they have already 3D-printed a complete 6-storey office building. By 2027, 10% of everything that’s being produced will be 3D-printed.

Business opportunities: If you think of a niche you want to enter, ask yourself: “in the future, do you think we will have that?” And if the answer is yes, then work on how you can make that happen sooner. If it doesn’t work via your phone, forget the idea. And any idea that was designed for success in the 20th century is probably doomed to fail in the 21st century.

Work: 70-80% of jobs will disappear in the next 20 years. There will be a lot of new jobs, but it is not clear that there will be enough new jobs in such a short time.

Agriculture: There will be a 100$ agricultural robot in the future. Farmers in 3rd world countries can then become managers of their fields instead of working in them all day. Aeroponics will need much less water. The first veal produced in a petri dish is now available. It will be cheaper than cow-produced veal in 2018. Right now, 30% of all agricultural surfaces are used for rearing cattle. Imagine if we don’t need that space anymore. There are several start-ups which will bring insect protein to the market shortly. It contains more protein than meat. It will be labelled as “alternative protein source” (because most people still reject the idea of eating insects).

Apps: There is already an app called “moodies” which can tell the mood you are in. By 2020 there will be apps that can tell by your facial expressions if you are lying. Imagine a political debate where we know whether the participants are telling the truth and when not!

Currencies: Many currencies will be abandoned. Bitcoin will become mainstream this year and might even become the future default reserve currency.

Longevity: Right now, the average life span increases by 3 months per year. Four years ago, the life span was 79 years, now it is 80 years. The increase itself is increasing and by 2036, there will be more than a one-year increase per year. So we all might live for a long, long time, probably way beyond 100.

Education: The cheapest smartphones already sell at 10$ in Africa and Asia. By 2020, 70% of all humans will own a smartphone. That means everyone will have much the same access to world class education. Every child can use Khan Academy for everything he needs to learn at schools in First World countries. Further afield, the software has been launched in Indonesia and will be released in Arabic, Swahili and Chinese this summer. The English app will be offered free, so that children in Africa can become fluent in English within half-a-year.

ooOOoo

Interesting times, indeed!

You all have a very good weekend!

Saturday Smile

Using electronic devices on planes!

In gratitude to Roger Davis, long-time friend from my UK days, who forwarded me the link to the following. (Caution, the video does contain some coarse language probably unsuitable for those below the age of 16.)

Playlists of our lives.

If you had to make a playlist of your life, what would be on it?

That intriguing sub-title comes from a video that Jean and I watched a couple of weeks ago.

But first I want to return to the matter of Parkinson’s Disease (PD) that was written about in a post dated the 24th February Personal Journeys. I wrote, in part,

Sue, and everyone else, we returned from seeing Dr. Lee, the neurologist, a little under two hours ago. Dr. Lee’s prognosis is that Jean is showing the very early signs of Parkinson’s disease, and Jean is comfortable with me mentioning this.

Everyone’s love and affection has meant more than you can imagine. I will write more about this next week once we have given the situation a few ‘coatings of thought’.

Jean sends her love to you all!

In recent weeks Jean has been experiencing increasing feelings of apathy, lack of motivation, lack of energy, all of which she summed up as a feeling of isolation. Plus the tremor in her hand has been slowly worsening.

Last week we decided that rather than waiting until August for the next planned appointment with Dr. Eric Lee, the neurologist, we should appraise Dr. Lee of the decline in Jean’s overall mood. That has now been done and Dr. Lee’s response is that Jean should start a trial course of the drug Sinamet® that a quick web search (see link on trade name) explains is:

SINEMET® (carbidopa-levodopa) is a combination of carbidopa and levodopa for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and syndrome.

As before, Jean is happy for me to share this with you.

So back to the theme of playlists of our lives.

The Australian Broadcast Commission, ABC, have a YouTube channel ABCTVCatalyst that is full of great science programmes. As that website explains:

At Catalyst we know that science is a dynamic force for change. Each week Catalyst brings you stories from Australia and around the world. Our passion to meet scientists at the forefront of discovery is matched by our fascination with science breakthroughs however big or small. Science changes all our lives. For better or worse, we are committed to showing you what our future holds.

That is how Jean and I came across the following incredibly interesting talk about the role of music in our past lives assisting those with fading cognitive skills, as in my case, and including those with PD. It is just twenty-nine minutes long and something we should all watch, irrespective of our present age.

Published on Mar 8, 2016
If you had to make a playlist of your life, what would be on it? And if, toward the end of your life, your mind and memories were fading away, would this soundtrack help bring them back?

My final observation is that as a direct result of watching this programme I blew the dust off my iPod that I hadn’t used in many months. It was remarkable that despite me struggling at times to recall something I did just a few hours ago, I can hum along with tunes that are on my iPod that go back ten or twenty years.

The playlists of our lives!

Hazel – Change of tack

Still a long way from getting to the bottom of what is ailing Hazel.

In my last post about Hazel I opened by saying:

In the last post on Hazel’s condition, back last Thursday, I passed on Dr. Codd’s observation, “… that by not having Hazel on her meds we were, of course, letting the fungal infection continue its damage.”

Dr. Codd also recommended reducing the dosage of the Fluconazole to lower its side effect of suppressing appetite.

So since then, with outstanding care and patience, Jean has been coaxing Hazel to eat just sufficient food for Hazel to be able to take the Fluconazole, for her fungal infection in her lungs, and Doxycycline, for her tick infection. (Mind you, Hazel is still a long way from eating reliably.)

That was a week ago and while, at best, Hazel is just eating sufficient to take her meds she is far from improving to any noticeable degree. But she is not eating enough food to stabilise her weight and yesterday morning Jean was worried we might lose her if we didn’t rethink what was going on.

Jean is attempting to get Hazel to eat many times each day.
Jean is attempting to get Hazel to eat many times each day.

A Sunday morning call to Dr. Jim Goodbrod brought us the advice to re-think the evidence.

  • The titre results were negative but because there are so many variants of fungal infection that was discounted.
  • The film of Hazel’s lungs show what the radiologist described as a clear case of fungal infection.
  • However, if that infection had been in the past, before Hazel was taken in by us down in Mexico, and that infection had ceased, that film could be showing scarring in the lungs.
  • The positive result for Tick Fever showed evidence of antibodies not antigens. That might be interpreted as a previous incident.

Jim liaised with Dr. Codd and it was agreed that further examinations needed to be conducted to obtain a clear, unambiguous diagnosis and that in the interim we stop giving Hazel any medications and offer her body systems a bit of a rest.

One option being discussed is to call in a mobile sonogram or ultra-sonic scanner. There is a very expert doctor in the area who uses such a mobile device and scans can be taken of Hazel’s abdomen and lungs here at home.

Because we will do everything to try and return Hazel to good health.

P1160083More information will be passed to you just as soon as it is to hand.