Around November time each year there is a flurry of emails from my contacts to ask “Are you at CES? If so, let’s hook up!” (It used to be September, and Comdex, but now Comdex is no more, and the pattern is the same with CES, and I can safely ignore all the car-audio, and […]
Virtually at CES 2007 Read More »
Bruce Sterling points to a nice article in the Guardian about the latest round of enlargement of the European Union, and observes: “It’s worth pointing out that nobody’s ever clamored to join an empire before. Yeah, that’s pretty weird behavior for an organization that’s supposed to be dull.“ I have been talking about this with
Fifty Years of Europe Read More »
The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, has had his space exploration company operating for some time, but very little was known about it, and the type of launch vehicle that it was developing. A few days ago the website of Blue Origin has had a major update, and posted images of its vertical take-off and
New space launch company Blue Origin unveiled Read More »
Forbes writes that a pharmaceutical company, Hematech, produced genetically engineered cows that lack the proteins producing the prions causing the so called Mad Cow disease. My first reaction to the headline was “Great, so now unscrupolous farmers now can go back to their habit of making cannibals out of cows.” But luckily it doesn’t seem
Badly applied gene science, or just bad article? Read More »
One of the games I always play at the start of a new year is an excercise in synesthesia:what color is the coming year? For example to me 2006 was orange, 2005 was yellow, and 2004 was blue. My colors are not necessarily as neat as the basic ones: to me 2000 is bright white
What color is 2007? Read More »
The literary agent John Brockman, editor of the Edge.org website, asks each year a question to representatives of the third culture, unifying the artificial divisions of scientific and humanistic cultures. This year’s question is “What are you optimistic about?” Reading the stimulating and often provocative answers is a favorite passtime of mine: I put them
Happy 2007 with the annual question of Edge.org! Read More »
Advent calendar Originally uploaded by david.orban. I have been recently contacted be a Museum of the city of Surrey in British Columbia, Canada. They were asking for permission to include my photo of a rather nice, and unusual advent calendar. Of course I complied eagerly, and asked about the nature of their exhibit: it is
My photo in a Museum in British Columbia Read More »
Remembering the heroism of our space explorers – 1 Originally uploaded by david.orban. The space museum is closed. Not just closed, but in ruin, and abandon. Russia is a leader in the commercialization of its space infrastructure, as well as everything else it has, but in the meantime it forgot to keep an eye on
The ghosts of space Read More »
Pirates’ market Originally uploaded by david.orban. Inside this market all types of software can be found on conveniently assembled CDs or DVDs. A typical price for a CD is 100 rubles ( about 4 dollars, or 3 euro), independently of the content. You can find the latest releases of Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Office 2007,
New apartment buildings Originally uploaded by david.orban. I am told these sell for five thousand dollars per square meter. No local with a normal job can afford them of course. Even if a lot of the local salaries come from unofficial sources. The real estate market with come back to earth, but it will be
New apartment buildings Read More »
