Seamless integration of graphical displays into day to day reality has been a mainstay of science fiction for years (have a look at Venor Vinge’s “Rainbow’s End” and Charlie Stross’s “Accelerando”). It’s the last stepping stone before having virtual reality piped straight into your brain, and in many ways, it’s almost as revolutionary. The article mentions pilots, and simultaneous translation for foreign languages, but there is literally no end to the social and personal changes that this could bring about. It is, quite literally, a paradigm shifter. When this tech hits the streets, everything you think you know about society will be obsolete. And don’t even get me started on the sorts of games and wonders that it enables.

Augemented Reality by xmstellou

It’ll be several years before this is ready — given New Scientist’s usual place ahead of the curve, probably 4 or 5 — assuming that the military don’t decide they want the technology for themselves. That’s happened before with VR tech, when the US military shanghaied a system for projecting images onto the eyeball via laser, back in ’93. There’s also the chance of it just fizzling, too. The profits for the first company to bring this to market are going to be astronomical though, so there’ll be a lot of pressure to make it happen. If it does make it out, it’s going to be an exciting and unpredictable time to live in.

Wow.

Talking about mind-blowing, have you every heard of Exploding Head Syndrome? There you are, minding your own business, when WHAM! You hear a shockingly loud blast, and then everything goes white… and then you discover you’re still alive. Sounds utterly horrible and, offensively, it’s entirely real.

Claims for a water-fuelled engine have come around again. This time the company in question, Genepax, is Japanese. They have been quite widely reported demonstrating a water-fuelled converted electric G-WIZ car. Reuters took it seriously enough to devote an uncritical article to; whether that’s a recommendation or not will depend on how you feel about them as a news organisation. Genepax have not gone into any details so far, although suggestions of requiring a ‘hydride’ in addition to water may actually mean that the process is scientifically feasible. Even so, their website is just a ‘no site here sorry’ page, and I doubt that the oil barons are quaking in their stylish-yet-affordable boots. Still, you never know…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLjVVPeyDKk

In a wonderful display of hubris, Japanese tech company Cyberdyne has demonstrated HAL, its new powersuit which enhances human strength and mobility by a factor of 5 or so. The leg sections are already available to rent, with the torso and arm sections coming soon. Cyberdyne are looking forward to HAL being able to read mental intention to move and therefore return mobility to the paraplegic, a function which should be integrated shortly. So. A HAL computer controlling a powersuit on behalf of Cyberdyne. What could go wrong there? Still, it’s comforting to know that current military powersuit tech is a decade ahead of public-grade sluggards like Cyberdyne, so if it all goes wrong, our gallant cyborg soldiers will be able to charge in at 50mph and beat HAL to death with any handy cars left lying around.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_k30yeCk4c

Talking of our inhuman overlords, a pair of physicists working for a Swiss research organisation have applied macro-scale network analytic techniques — physics analysis tools — to the global economic market. Their discovery, which may surprise a few people, is that 80% of the core global financial markets across almost 50 major countries are dominated by the same small group of octopus-like megacorporations and ultra-financiers. Whether the Illuminati will react to this unmasking with swift and terrible vengeance remains to be seen.

There is good news on the horizon, though. Dear, sweet old Google, not content with controlling most of the world’s access to online information, has decided that it wants to greatly increase its capacity for power. Literally. The company is investing heavily in sustainable energy tech, and hopes to have a breakthrough in solar power ready for trial in the next couple of years. Hopefully they’ll stick by their “don’t be evil” principles once they’re in charge of the world’s electricity supplies. Although Nepalese Hair might give them some problems.

Also: Guillermo del Toro’s two movies of The Hobbit to go ahead; anti-gravity experiments have now successfully levitated mice; “Science” is discussing an Arcturan Mega-Cow knock-off that doesn’t feel pain when being prepped for eating; and here’s some of the tallest abandoned buildings on Earth.

Finally, if all this reality is getting a bit too much, Funcom have released more information and screenshots for The Secret World. Dark Days, one trusts, Are Coming closer.

The article is interesting on several levels. Both men foresee a near-unavoidable social crisis in the next mumblety decades, and their reasoning is worryingly well-founded, if perhaps a bit one-sided. They see the results in very different ways, however — Kingsnorth is something of a utopianist, Monbiot a dystopianist. Both assume that politicians are short-sighted, and that the will to save tomorrow at the expense of discomfort today is effectively non-existent. The debate really is worth reading, and I’d encourage you to go have a look, even if just as an interesting look at current ecological thought.

Signs of the Coming Apocalypse: The Sandwich of Knowledge

Dear George

On the desk in front of me is a set of graphs. The horizontal axis of each represents the years 1750 to 2000. The graphs show, variously, population levels, CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere, exploitation of fisheries, destruction of tropical forests, paper consumption, number of motor vehicles, water use, the rate of species extinction and the totality of the human economy’s gross domestic product.

What grips me about these graphs (and graphs don’t usually grip me) is that though they all show very different things, they have an almost identical shape. A line begins on the left of the page, rising gradually as it moves to the right. Then, in the last inch or so – around 1950 – it veers steeply upwards, like a pilot banking after a cliff has suddenly appeared from what he thought was an empty bank of cloud.

The root cause of all these trends is the same: a rapacious human economy bringing the world swiftly to the brink of chaos. We know this; some of us even attempt to stop it happening. Yet all of these trends continue to get rapidly worse, and there is no sign of that changing soon. What these graphs make clear better than anything else is the cold reality: there is a serious crash on the way.

The comments include the usual mad rantings of haters, evidence deniers, doomsayers and the perpetually bewildered, but in amongst them are some very interesting counterpoints, analyses and other little gems. You can normally see which are worth reading by how many recommendation points they have :)

My award for best post-article summation goes to ‘savage dave’, however:

savagedave: 17 Aug 09, 10:59pm

I for one welcome to coming apocalypse. We can have a world where all a man needs to make his way is some stubble, a mullet and a sawn off shotgun, and women are beautiful and deadly and clad entirely in fitted leather. One can live by your wits and your nerve, fending off hordes of mutants, cannibals and assorted beasts.

Much like Basingstoke on a saturday, in fact.

Thanks to the ever-awesome Mick Farren (yes, the Mick Farren *grin*) for the heads up.