People moving huge amounts of things on two wheels - including an awful lot of dead animals.

More bulk is moved on these bikes than I ever see in the SUVs around here.

Dead Pigs on Bikes

As we approach a billionth of a cent per byte of storage, and pennies per gigabit per second of bandwidth, what kind of machine labors to be born?

How will we feed it?

How will it be tamed?

And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?

The Information Factories

Powerful.

Faces of Meth | Meth Photos | Effects of Meth

If you believe God created the world, it's reasonable to ask, How did he do it? What were the forces and mechanisms he used? Why not look to science and see that he started with the big bang, the force of gravity, inflationary cosmology, quarks and natural selection. Those were his tools. To that extent, science is not a threat, it's your best friend. It's the best tool you have for illuminating the grandeur of creation.

Salon interview with Michael Shermer on evolution, religion and belief. He is sharp as ever, but more respectful and gracious than usual.

The natural inclination in all humans is to posit a force, a spirit, outside of us. That tendency toward superstitious magical thinking is just built into our nature. What's more, it doesn't cost anything to have a false positive, to assume there's a force behind the lightning or a spirit in the rock. In the ancestral environment, when we evolved, we might think spinning around three times is going to bring rain. Well, once in a while it works and makes everybody happy. And it doesn't cost much to keep doing it. It doesn't take you out of the gene pool.

Salon: Shermer, Darwin and Belief

The Memory Medallion is a small disc, about the size of a half dollar, which is embedded in a monument, memorial or grave marker. Inside the Medallion is a digital memory device that holds a photograph and life story of your loved one.

I walked in the beautiful Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena, Ca this morning. It is lovely, 5 generations family owned and old - some headstones date to the late 1800's which is about as old as you get in SoCal.

They don't even have a website, and yet they have this very cool information imbedding system. You borrow a little handheld device and are able to learn more about people than "Beloved Father" by reading data from a small, coin shaped medallion on specific headstones.

The information is disappointingly skimpy at this point - just a black and white photo and a generic obituary but imagine when people will use these to present their Lifelogs - images, blogs, transcripts and full geneological data. People will be telling their stories after death with information captured digitally throughout a lifetime.

Imagine something like this at the Vietnam War Memorial.

Hopefully they are using a technology that will allow continued access in the more distant future.

Death Tech

Latest in a series of fun little puzzles using 10 items placed one each on 10 turns. Each item changes and interacts in a particular way with other items. Very amusing.

Clever Graphical Logic Puzzle

"The connections people made here I'm sure will lead to people doing interesting things in collaboration," said Dyson, who writes Release 1.0 for CNET, the publisher of News.com. "But we're not coming together to promulgate a standard. We're trying to get a common vocabulary, a common understanding."

And in the end, that's what the event's organizers were really after.

"I feel that people came and engaged, and that part of it was extremeley successful," said Bridget Agabra, the Metaverse Roadmap's project manager. "Now the hard work begins again. But this is fun because it's content and ideas...When you see the magic (participants) were doing, the magic they were making with their minds, that was brain food for me."

Bridget's Brain Food in CNET News

Incredible weekend, went off without a hitch:

Some initial participant blogs:

Robert Scoble :
http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/05/06/reports-from-metaverse-roadmap/

and his response to the open Croquet demo. I was watching him blog this while they were demoing, it was insane.
http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/05/06/wow-3d-operating-system-open-croquet/

Guardian picked it up:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/archives/2006/05/07/croquet_squeak_teatime_alan_in_wonderland.html

Ethan Zuckerman :
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=532
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=533
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=535
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=536
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=537

Raph Koster :
http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/05/06/metaverse-roadmap-roundup/

Jamais Cascio:
http://www.openthefuture.com/2006/05/metaverse_roadmap_underway.html

Mark Wallace:
http://www.3pointd.com/20060507/futuring-the-metaverse/
http://www.3pointd.com/20060505/metaverse-forecasts/

Randy Farmer:
http://www.fudco.com/habitat/

Pictures:
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/metaverse/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bsquared/

More coming. Watch for CNet story tomorrow. Oh, and I kissed Doug Englebart.

Post -Metaverse Roadmap Summit

Proclaiming “God hates fags” and “Thank God for dead soldiers,” the small band of evangelicals from Topeka, Kan., has ignited a firestorm by spreading its gospel of damnation at the funerals of AIDS victims and slain soldiers

This is so messed up, I can't get my head around it at all. God is angry at the US for accepting gays so He is killing soldiers? I think? Oh man.

Almost every religion has some tradion about respecting the deceased, and you don't have to agree with a war to respect that. Except, do they disagree with the war? Who can tell? What a bunch of nuts.

'Thank God for Dead Soldiers'

According to one who was present, Churchill suddenly blurted out: "Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?"

This is a well written article, makes me really want to know more.

One can easily come to this same conclusion just by readin Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five"; it is good to see solid research behind it. One hopes it will be incorporated in the curriculum of War Colleges around the world.

Funny to think that even in the savagery of war, there is still this expectation of some sort of restraint. I suppose this is one viewpoint of an "anti-terrorism" action, the belief that ultimately there may be people who wage war with these weapons and do not have the veneer of civility we demand, even in combat.

So sad, so sad.

Among the Dead Cities