In a recent video interview Bill Gates did with CNET , he talks about this work with his foundation, what’s getting him fired up and how to tackle some of these bleak challenges facing the world today.

I find it interesting just to sit and watch this man talk, such an unassuming guy that I’ve really not seen a lot of in close and personal videos.  You have to almost remind yourself that ‘oh ya, this is one of the most powerful men in the world’.

“Sleep Dealer is remarkably topical for a film set in the future (albeit one described by Rivera as taking place “five minutes from now”). Central themes include outsourcing, corporate ownership of water, remote warfare, confessional internet diaries and military contractors who are accountable to no one. It’s the rare political film without any reference to contemporary politics; like Blade Runner and other big-brained sci-fi flicks, it’s about ideas, not selling merchandise.”

“Films like Star Wars use terms like empire and rebellion, but they are bandied about in bland ways — powerful words used to describe nothing,” Rivera said. “One of the original propositions of my film is that we (create that sense) of a world divided between wealth and power.”

“I love gnomes and goblins and elves,” said Rivera, who’s made a name for himself touring museums and festivals with his award-winning shorts. “But what I’m really interested in is speculative fiction. I wanted to use this film to ask the question, ‘Where are we going?’”

- Wired Article

Sci-fi has for a very long time served the purpose of framing current sensitive social and political issues and putting them into a clear perspective without making people feel preached to.  It was a way to get people to think about issues that they normally wouldn’t or didn’t want to think about for various psychological reasons.  I feel that this has always been the greatest strength of the genre and during the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, with the exception of Star Wars and a few other more trivial pieces, the genre as a whole set out to bring a multitude of social issues into the spotlight.  It was like film directors and authors realized this magic lamp where they could very surreptitiously put these unquestioned injustices into peoples minds and make them question them for the first time.  I wouldn’t call this a ‘golden age’ of sci-fi but it certainly was a purer age.  There was less science fiction being produced(as there were less movies in general being produced) but on a per capita basis they were overwhelmingly more thought provoking and taking full advantage of the above-mentioned strength of the medium.

Today however that is changed, and not that it is necessarily a bad thing as the more Sci-fi blockbusters we have the more

The porno of the sci-fi world

interest and acceptance the genre has as a whole and the easier it will be for true science fiction to get funded, but today is certainly a different age where Sci-fi is big business.  We have more and more pieces of strictly eye candy, where the strength of the medium to affect change in our thinking and society in general is thrown out for the ability to create big explosions and satisfy the increasingly shrinking attention span and ever expanding mental laziness of the developed world.  People don’t want to think, they want to be distracted from thinking by exploding starships and revenge seeking Romulans(referring of course to the latest Star Trek Film – thanks Abrahms).

However this isn’t a doom and gloom article, this is an article of hope for as I mentioned the more play these pieces of porno-graphic eye-candy get the more interest there will be in the genre overall and we are starting to see more and more thought provoking sci-fi than ever before.  While it may seem like the 60’s,70’s and 80’s were pumping out great sci-fi at a faster rate, it certainly wasn’t so.. There were so many classics made in this era no doubt but they were certainly spaced out over a long period separated by years at times.

Turn on your brain

Whereas we are seeing 2-3 fairly profound films coming out almost yearly now and even some of the frivolous eye candy such as Avatar will have an obvious and simplistic thought provoking message behind it.

Here’s a great resource that lays out a timeline of the SF era of the past: http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/timeline1960.html
http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/timeline1970.html
http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/timeline1980.html

Because of this evolution of the genre I feel that we are going to see a clear divide coming down between Sci-fi action flicks such as the last Star Trek, or Avatar and then the sci-fi that attempts to shine light on these dark recesses of our mind that we so conveniently block out such as District 9 or Soylent Green.

Alex Rivera, in the linked article at the top of this post mentioned ‘Speculative Fiction‘ which is a great term to show the other greatest strength of this medium.  As apposed to regular fiction or fantasy Sci-fi and speculative fiction forces us to look forward instead of being stuck in the mud of the past or present, but more importantly it forces us to look forward to where we are going and ask ourselves ‘Is that really where we want to go?’ .  I think that is where we are going to see a divide forming even stronger than before between Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction.  The latter intending to provoke debate and thought about our evolving society and the former meant to simply turn off your brain and take you on a mini-vacation from your everyday.  Both certainly having merits but I feel it is going to be incredibly dangerous to undervalue the importance of the former over the latter.

What cliff?

We live in a world that is incredibly frightening for a growing portion of the population because of the exponential rate of change and development we are experiencing.  So much so that some scientists playfully predict the emergence of a species of humans, homo evolutis, engineered by us. Our world is changing so fast now that we often don’t have time to contemplate the full ramification that come with the increasingly rapid adoption of new technologies and social changes.  Most often this is simply because these changes are being introduced almost one after another after another without any time to breath.  Speculative fiction however, if widely adopted makes it almost instinctive that we think about these situations and possible outcomes before they even arise.  It puts our brains into a future simulator of sorts where we are running through countless of possible outcomes for our society every week, culminating to subconscious database of sorts of ‘what if’ scenarios that we carry around with us.  Without this database in our heads we blindly charge forward through the jungle of our progress without any regard of potential cliffs that lay ahead until it is too late.  With a mind that is constantly being challenged with deep thought-provoking what if scenarios we will hopefully be able to recognize some of the signs of these impending cliffs before we are spinning our tires in mid air about to drop 1000 meters to our doom.

Clearly I am not saying that Speculative Fiction is going to single-handedly save this world however with the current rate of adoption of technology, a rate which is increasing exponentially, we can no longer afford to live in the past or even the present for that matter.  The logical part of our brains must exist 100% in the future at all times, not just one future but many possible futures.  A failure to do this could very likely destroy our future all together.

http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/eng/h_ip01456.html

An interesting study commissioned by the Canadian Government shows evidence that p2p users purchase more music than their non-pirate brethren and at the very least that p2p activity has absolutely no effect on purchasing habits, and consequentially nothing to do with the woe’s of the music industry.

To Quote:

In the aggregate, we are unable to find direct evidence that P2P file-sharing either increases or decreases CD purchases in Canada. That is, in our analysis of the whole Canadian population we are unable to find any relationship between the number of P2P music tracks that were downloaded and the number CD purchases

Among Canadians engaged in P2P file-sharing, we find a positive and statistically significant relationship between the number of music tracks downloaded via P2P networks and the number of CDs purchased (Table 4.3).9 For an increase in the average number of P2P downloads per month of 2.718282, the number of CD purchases per year will increase by 1.212. For an increase in the average number of P2P downloads per month of 1 (ie., 2.718282/2.718282), the number of CD purchases per year will increase by (1.212/2.718282 =) 0.44.

This is almost as good as a 90’s government funded study in the US to find the negative effects of THC on cancer cells which resulted, much to their chagrin, to the findings that pure THC(synthetic or otherwise) is one of the  most effective anti-tumeric chemicals on the planet.  Findings confirmed by a Harvard study in 1997 showing a 50-60% reduction in tumors and legions of cancer riddled mice: http://www.nowpublic.com/thc_marijuana_helps_cure_cancer_says_harvard_study

Are we seeing the slow decline of the age of ignorance which has been the past 50 years for mainstream america/canada ?

The passion this man has for what he does is intoxicating.  In every one of his talks you are amazing, laughing, and intrigued by the statistical information he is dishing out.  He takes something so dry like health stats and makes a truly compelling case for it and then gets you wrapped up in the excitement that comes from being able to take these dry stats and put them in a format that the average person can manipulate and appreciate.  Something which he spearheaded with gapminder.org.

A little more from this TED Profile:

Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us will have their perspectives shifted by Hans Rosling. A professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did.

What sets Rosling apart isn’t just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You’ve never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling’s hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture — usually hazy at best — snaps into sharp focus.

Rosling’s presentations are grounded in solid statistics (often drawn from United Nations data), illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends clear, intuitive and even playful. During his legendary presentations, Rosling takes this one step farther, narrating the animations with a sportscaster’s flair.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327213.800-malaria-vaccine-holds-out-eradication-hope.html

There is concern about how to pay for this vaccine when it is finally developed.  At a 98% rate of success at stopping the virus governments and aid groups around the world should be lining up to pay for this.  There is talk that this could eradicate Malaria which would be the single larger contributor to Africa’s success in human history, greater exponentially than all efforts before it combined.

To create the vaccine, Kumar’s group used genetically modified bacteria to make proteins identical to some of those involved in the parasite’s sexual development. They injected the proteins into mice and baboons, which generated antibodies. When the team added Plasmodium gametes to blood samples from these animals, the antibodies bound to and blocked the proteins. If a mosquito sucked up some of this blood it would still get a bellyful of the gametes, but they would be unable to combine and spawn new adult parasites.

One shot of the vaccine led to a 93 per cent reduction in malaria transmission, and the figure went up to 98 per cent after a booster shot (PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0006352).

I heard her on Q yesterday, and her voice just took me away.. She had this amazing song that was unbelievably haunting.

Béatrice Martin (b. 1989) is a Canadian pop singer-songwriter from Quebec, who performs under the stage name Cœur de pirate.

After a brief stint as keyboardist for Bonjour Brumaire , she released her debut album Cœur de pirate in 2008 on Grosse Boîte. The album was subsequently nominated for Francophone Album of the Year at the 2009 Juno Awards. The single “Comme des enfants” reached #1 on CBC Radio 3’s R3-30 charts the week of February 19, 2009; it was only the second French language song, following Les Breastfeeders‘ “Pas sans saveur” in 2006, ever to top that chart. She started playing the piano when she was only three years old. After five years of education in art, letters and communications in Montreal she started creating songs in 2007 and putting them on MySpace which is how the band Bonjour Brumaire first got an interest in her. She released her first album, Coeur de pirate, on September 16, 2008.

She attracted wider media attention in February 2009 when François Vachon, a photographer from Quebec City, used her song “Ensemble” as the soundtrack to a popular YouTube video depicting his baby son playing with toys, leading to coverage on Good Morning America and a favourable review from blogger Perez Hilton

I haven’t been able to find it to embed in this post but you can go to http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/qpodcast_20090619_17230.mp3 and download the episode of Q that she was in

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we’re not as rational as we think when we make decisions.

In a games related issue this makes me really rethink how I am going to structure the pricing for future products

In accordance to the principles of Doublethink, it does not matter if the war is not real, or when it is, that victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labor. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects. And its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact. Julia? Are you awake? There is truth, and there is untruth. To be in a minority of one doesn’t make you mad.

Does Big Brother exist?
Of course he exists.
Does he exist like you or me?

You do not exist.

War is a way of shattering to pieces…materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and…too intelligent.

Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

The primary aim of modern warfare Part 1n accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.  If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations.”

The consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

I personally feel this is one of the most important pieces of modern literature written in the last century.  If you have not read it go out and buy it today as it is pure genius and completely changed the way I perceive this world in a very very real way.  Don’t watch the movie, go read the book and then watch the movie if you want.

Picked this up on twitter this morning and just had to share.  unbelievable musical talent.

Such a classic piece of our culture. The importance of what these men did changed the world forever, definitely something that should be watched and appreciated.

A Visit to id Software from john romero on Vimeo.

And while you are in a nostalgic mood check out this Gama article of a republished 1994 article detailing some of ID’s operation strategies and technical details:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21405