Monday, September 22nd, 2014
TIM BRADSHAW, - Financial Times (U.K.)
Stephan: Two trends I believe are conjoining to produce a meta-trend. The decline of air travel for climate reasons, and increased fuel costs; and the increasing sophistication of virtual reality which will allow us to move the locus of our consciousness while remaining physically in place. Here is the latest. I think it will evolve into biology and we will be able to jack in to an avatar. Full sensorium.
Reuters
Oculus is closing in on the consumer release of its Rift virtual reality headset, accelerated by an aggressive hiring spree since the company was acquired by Facebook for $2bn in March.
It showed off its new ‘Crescent Bay” prototype at Connect, its first developer conference held in Los Angeles on Saturday. With improved display, motion tracking and audio features that chief executive Brendan Iribe said brings the Rift headset “much closer” to a finished product that can be sold at retailers.
Although Oculus has set no deadline, the Rift is expected to go on sale in 2015, after selling about 130,000 of its $350 development kits over the past two years.
In early September, Samsung unveiled its Gear VR headset, a collaboration with Oculus that will soon enable users to have a cinematic VR experience.
As it becomes more confident about solving some of the initial technical challenges of virtual reality, Oculus is now looking to rally developers to create a “killer app” that will drive sales.
Oculus hopes to take VR technology beyond the video games for which the technology is best known and into much more […]
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Monday, September 22nd, 2014
CHUCK COLLINS, - Truthout
Stephan: This is excellent news for reasons this report spells out. This will be the foundation of the creation of vast new wealth.
As the United Nations Climate Summit in New York City approaches, efforts to address climate change through money-moving campaigns are growing.
For the past few years, this work has mostly been about divestment-people and organizations pledging not to invest in fossil fuel companies. First, students concerned about the future of the climate pressed their colleges and universities to divest from stocks in coal, gas, and oil. More than 10 small schools, including the University of Dayton, Hampshire College, and the College of the Atlantic, have complied. And, in the largest divestment in the sector, Stanford University pledged in May 2014 that its $18 billion endowment would not be invested in coal.
But it’s not just colleges and universities that are divesting. Pension funds, municipalities, philanthropies, and hospitals have joined in too-as well as individual investors.
Those divestments haven’t directly hurt the finances of companies like Exxon Mobil, but that was never the strategy. Instead, the campaign has isolated fossil fuel companies, weakened their political power, and commented on the failure of governments to take action on climate change.
But where should organizations put their money, if […]
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Monday, September 22nd, 2014
DAVE LLINDORFF, - Nation of Change
Stephan: This report is making a very important point. If, instead of pissing away trillions into warfare, and turning ourselves into a police state, we had spent hundreds of millions pursuing this form of nonviolent change, such as Cuba is doing, the world would love America, and we could enjoy the liberties we once had.
How’s this for a juxtaposition on how nations respond to a global health catastrophe. Check out these two headlines from yesterday’s news:
Cuba to Send Doctors to Ebola Areas
US to Deploy 3000 Troops as Ebola Crisis Worsens
Reading these stories, which ran in, respectively, the BBC and Reuters, one learns that the Cuban government, which runs a small financially hobbled island nation of 11 million people, with a national budget of $50 billion, Gross Domestic Product of 121 billion and per capita GDP of just over $10,000, is dispatching 165 medical personnel to Africa to regions where there are ebola outbreaks, while the US, the world’s wealthiest nation, with a population of close to 320 million, a national budget of $3.77 trillion, GDP of $17 trillion, and per capita GDP of over $53,000, is sending troops — $3000 of them– to ‘fight” the ebola epidemic.
Okay, I understand that these troops are supposedly going to be ‘overseeing” construction of treatment centers, but let’s get serious. With an epidemic raging through Africa, where some of the poorest nations in the world are located, what is […]
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Monday, September 22nd, 2014
HISHAM MELHEM, - Politico
Stephan: I think this is a very acute assessment of the Islamic world, by a very intelligent Middle Eastern Muslim. The one thing I would add to his exegesis, and I believe it is the key, is fundamentalist Islam. On the basis of social outcome data, no political unity, from state to nation prospers if religious fundamentalism prevails. Inevitably, it devolves in to hate, violence and sexual dysfunction, colored by self-righteousness.
Notice also his reference to water.
With his decision to use force against the violent extremists of the Islamic State, President Obama is doing more than to knowingly enter a quagmire. He is doing more than play with the fates of two half-broken countries-Iraq and Syria-whose societies were gutted long before the Americans appeared on the horizon. Obama is stepping once again-and with understandably great reluctance-into the chaos of an entire civilization that has broken down.
Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism-the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition-than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed. The promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays-all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms. With the dubious exception of the […]
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Monday, September 22nd, 2014
Stephan: Another door to the past opens. Wonderful stuff.
In the 80s Mobius did a project with Roger Smith, then at the Institute for Marine Archaeology at Texas A&M, to located the remains of a caravel from Columbus' 4th voyage. Ancient ship remains were found at a site so improbable that it took me two weeks to get the archaeologist to look there, but not enough was left to firmly establish the identity. (see http://www.stephanaschwartz.com/PDF/caravel.pdf for the research paper on the project)
Click through to see images of the map discussed in the piece.
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Christopher Columbus probably used the map above as he planned his first voyage across the Atlantic in 1492. It represents much of what Europeans knew about geography on the verge discovering the New World, and it’s packed with text historians would love to read-if only the faded paint and five centuries of wear and tear hadn’t rendered most of it illegible.
But that’s about to change. A team of researchers is using a technique called multispectral imaging to uncover the hidden text. They scanned the map last month at Yale University and expect to start extracting readable text in the next few months, says Chet Van Duzer, an independent map scholar who’s leading the project, which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The map was made in or around 1491 by Henricus Martellus, a German cartographer working in Florence. It’s not known how many were made, but Yale owns the only surviving copy. It’s a big map, especially for […]
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