Future of Food?

Have you heard about IBM's Watson, the smartest machine on earth? Well aside from trivia, it is apparently an inventor as well. I came across this interesting article about Watson, which has created a barbecue sauce that tastes pretty damn good apparently. The ingredients are also rather unusual, its a combination of flavors that most people would not think of putting together, but that is the advantage Watson has over us mere humans. Watson can access millions of documents and understand the content. In doing so, you can have Watson read tons of food documents and compare how food flavors go together, and Watson can generate a ton of ingredients that are reported to go together well and throw them together in a specific way. This isn't quite computer generated creativity, just calculated numbers; but its something I have never heard of a machine doing before. This is the next step towards creating a real thinking, creative artificial intelligence. The future is gonna be a strange place..

Future transport

I went to China my sophomore year here at NCC to study abroad, and I must say it was a hassle. Expensive plane tickets, changing flights, confusing airports - these are all things I had to deal with to get all the way across to the other side of the world. Now China has proposed this future project to link the nations of China, Russia, Canada and America. A railway that connects the two sides of the world would be a project unlike anything ever attempted before and would require many years of construction, financing and loads of other factors that I wont get into right now. But lets face it, if anyone right now has the industry and labor to do something like this right now, its China; and they have offered to fund and construct this massive railway themselves.

Now whats this mean for us? I dunno, but for me - This is amazing news! When I went to China to study abroad I had the time of my life, it was indescribable. I would give anything to go back there just for fun, but that's not practical at this point in my life. However, if in the future this railway existed, it would make the possibility of travelling to the other side of the globe way easier. I can imagine a future where citizens of all these nations readily come and go, and are truly global citizens. Of course we consider ourselves global right now, but this is an illusion. We can transfer our thoughts, and images to other places via the internet, and occasionally we do fly all the way around the world in planes. But this project would make transferring our actual physical bodies to other places much easier. I'm all for it, but of course this is not yet a certain thing. There are many political, financial, blah, blah, blah factors that need to be considered before this project can begin.

Elementary School Got it Wrong

We were talking in class today about common experiences, and how as our online experiences become more and more personalized, we are not exposed to as many new things that may exist outside our bubble of interests. This got me thinking about a story I heard a while back on Radiolab. If you don't listen to Radiolab and you have a bit of time to kill, here's the link to a very interesting story I heard that refutes the current theory of how dinosaurs went extinct on our planet some 65 million years ago...

Back in elementary school we were all taught that long ago when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, an asteroid hit which blasted dust and debris into the atmosphere sparking global climate change and eventually over hundreds of years, the dinosaurs could no longer withstand the conditions and all died out. Wrong! One of the most common stories of our youth that we all learned is false, the truth is much more dramatic than that. I wont get into too much of the science, if you want to listen to the story I will leave that up to you. But here are the basics of the new theory on how the dinosaurs went extinct. The culprit was the asteroid alright, but the dinosaurs did not die out due to global climate change, their death was about as sudden and painful as it gets. When the asteroid hit the earth it blasted debris into the atmosphere that the earths gravity eventually pulled back down. This super-heated debris became little glass bullets that rained down all over the entire surface of earth, all the while burning up in our atmosphere. This heated up the sky to the point that it turned red, and the entire surface of the planet was baked by the intense heat of burning little trails from these glass balls. Every last dinosaur was killed in a matter of hours as their blood in their bodies began to boil. The only survivors were swimming deep in the ocean or had burrowed underground. When it was all over, our ancestors, the mammals, emerged to witness a dinosaur graveyard.

So why am I telling you all this? Well, for one, I think it is really cool! And I was surprised to hear about how few people actually know of this new theory of the extinction of the dinos. It just goes to show that with so much information out there, it is easy to miss new stories and discoveries that don't always make it into our own personal bubbles. 

On Cyber Bullying

Bullying has likely been a part of life for everyone of us at one point or another. We've all been exposed to it, but unlike past generations, we have had to adjust our views on bullying in the physical world as well as the online world. Bullying in the real world is no different than bullying online, except for the key fact that the online world remains, and what happens online can stay there forever. The real world does not share this problem. So what are we to do about this? I agree with Dana Boyd when she says that a zero tolerance policy is not the solution. Many schools still adopt this method of dealing with bullies, but with little success. The problem is that bullies are generally not concerned about the punishments they will receive for their behavior. Indeed, many times they are simply seeking attention for themselves by engaging in bullying. If we choose to come down hard on bullies with zero tolerance rules, this is not going to help. I don't know of any true solution to bullying, online or in the real world. There probably isn't one, or we should have found a solution by now and bullying would be a thing of the past. More likely, I think bullying will be a social phenomenon forever, but we can come up with better ways to deal with it, perhaps addressing the psychological reasons they have for bullying. As for cyber bullying, for now it may just be best to teach our kids of the possible repercussions of their behavior online. Not in order to scare them, but to teach them to learn from our generations mistakes.