Brain Canvas

Do you sing in your car, in the shower, or at board meetings?  Maybe you don’t think the night is over until someone has belted out “Don’t Stop Believing” despite angry curses from other people in the movie theater.  You drive to work the next morning, sad that when you sing to the latest Top 40 hit, everyone else in the crawl of traffic rolls up their windows.

You exhibitionist, you casual diva!  What you seek is a way for everyone in the world to hear your sing-along stylings without getting fired from your job for slacking off during work hours, and for losing major accounts because clients find your rendition of “Hit ‘em Up” surprisingly offensive.  If only there was some way where anyone could hear your voice like a well-directed megaphone when you get the urge to accompany the radio.  What you need, and the world needs now, is broadcast karaoke.

The simple way to do this is to set up a streaming channel on the Web.  You attach a microphone in your car, in your shower, or you can even use your mobile phone.  Channel the microphone to the radio, your sound system or the karaoke machine you just bought for your basement.  Now you can karaoke live, and save all of your overdubs for podcasts later.  The proliferation of HD Radio means radio stations have a lot more programming time and no programming with which to fill it; perhaps they are willing to give you fifteen minutes of fame on their HD-3 channel to serenade those who get up at 4:00 AM to drive to work.

Social upload sites like YouTube and Vimeo have taught us that with the right amount of accident, brilliance and artful error anyone can be a celebrity to the Net set.  Broadcast karaoke would likely be the same.  Tay Zonday became famous for his idiosyncratic voice and song structure, and among those who sing karaoke at KTV establishments or bars, there are a few standouts for their American Idol-quality efforts both good and bad.  You could become famous for all the wrong reasons, or someone could discover you and sign you to a lucrative recording contract.

Most importantly, singing every day is good for your mood.  Boost your confidence as well with broadcast karaoke.

This month’s Brain Canvas theme on transportation is a bit above my head from a technical standpoint, as I don’t have the benefit of an engineering degree from THE Georgia Institute of Technology like my colleague Preston. So rather than try to write about the future of transportation by speculating about innovative new technologies, I’ll instead talk about some of the exciting outcomes society might realize from alternate transportation regimes and leave how to get from A to B to the engineers. I recently viewed a TED talk by Ellen Dunham-Jones (also of Georgia Tech) on the topic of Retrofitting Suburbia, laying out the argument for reclaiming abandoned strip malls and big box stores that are the hallmark of the suburban landscape. In addition to the reclamation of abandoned existing structures she also points to the importance of building on top of existing structures as well. One community that Durham-Jones holds up as an example is the D.C. suburb of Hyattsville, Maryland (10:25 in video linked above). Hyattsville has experienced over a decade of growth and renewal in its downtown. What was in the early 90′s a suburban office building and not much else, connected to the rest of the world only by conventional highway transportation system, is now a vibrant community featuring a downtown arts district, and a mixed use residential and retail site. Importantly for this month’s topic of transportation, this development coincided with the opening of two DC Metro stations in Hyattsville. In 1993 D.C. Metro extended service connecting Hyattsville with Washington D.C. providing more convenient transportation for commuters living in the city to reach office jobs in the suburbs and for suburban dwellers to enjoy the best parts of the city life. This is one of the indirect benefits of transportation technology like the Maglev trains profiled on Brain Canvas last week by Preston. Trains that can easily reach speeds of 500 mph extend the radius of commutable communities by hundreds of miles, opening up the distant suburbs and exurbs to the exiting outcomes described by Dunham-Jones and realized by Hyattsville, Maryland.

Rail transport has transformed the economies of many countries since its introduction in Britain nearly 200 years ago.  Today people can easily zip between cities hundreds and thousands of kilometers apart, while hundreds of millions of freight containers are shipped by rail every year.  In the United States the development of a national rail network was the fundamental economic, social and political event of the second half of the 19th century.  In China national and international rail development is twinned with manufacturing as the most important driver of industrialization in that country.  From the beginning of rail’s economic viability with Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the Great Western Railway in 1830s Britain, to China’s current intent to redevelop the ancient Silk Road as a cross-continental rail and highway network, rail transport has always been an industry defined by massive investments and driven by grandiose ambitions for economic payoff and social transformation. Where is that ambition today?  What used to be a great project with clear payoff has now become a political albatross of sticker-shock and lukewarm commitments.  There exist proven and viable technologies to greatly increase the efficiency and speed of rail transport.  A few countries are taking them somewhat seriously, such as Spain with its AVE lines and China which boasts two records: the world’s fastest-average-speed rail line and the Shanghai Maglev Train, which hits a top speed of 431 km/h.  Compare to this the United States’ own high speed rail plans, which are currently underfunded and call for a top speed of merely 240 km/h – on a ride which currently averages 109 km / h between DC and Boston. If the robber barons of the Rail Age merged with a hodgepodge of SimCity geeks, new urbanism advocates and wild-eyed futurists, the resulting organism would sweep aside the meek  and the cash-poor with blueprints for something even more radical than the first wave of rail development: a dense, hyper-efficient global network of standardized maglev trains, two tracks side-by-side each stacked three tracks high, threaded through the widened medians of intercity highways. Maglev trains exist in several flavors, which have their own quirks and cost-benefit rap sheets.  Many people roll their eyes when they hear talk of maglev, equating it with one or both of “DisneyWorld / monorail” and “cost overruns.”  The most-cited example is the Shanghai Maglev Train, which I have had the pleasure of riding thrice.  Without getting into too many specifics, that train’s technology is built on a “smart track, dumb train” model in which the expensive technology is all in the track – a guaranteed road to financial ruin, as building out the track for any great length is magnificently costly.  There exist both working and in-development alternatives to this technology which use a “smart train, dumb track” model which is much cheaper and easier to implement, like a standard railway.  American Maglev Technology has a working test track in Powder Springs, GA which uses the electrical equivalent of seventeen hair dryers to levitate, and the Inductrack system is under development at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Several advantages exist in using maglev over conventional high-speed rail transportation.  Most important is the lack of moving parts, like wheels and suspension, enabling the train to achieve much higher speeds (up to 500 km/h on the Shanghai line) and reducing maintenance costs as there are no contact or moving parts to repair.  The absence of contact friction also means less power is required to propel the train forward; if you ever visit a working maglev test track you can push the train forward with your hand.  The only significant friction on the train is wind friction.  Finally, if the train’s electricity comes from 100% renewable energy, it is a carbon-free form of transportation once construction is finished.  With these factors combined, the high cost of maglev investment delivers a long-term payoff unsurpassed in other options for infrastructure development, short of fusion energy. Now that our infrastructure investment demigod has chosen maglev as its weapon of choice, why multiple-stacked tracks between highway lanes?  Part of this was actually my old man’s idea.  He described it to me thusly: when we want to go from our Gadsden, Alabama hometown to Tuscaloosa to watch the University of Alabama play football, we have to drive over two hours on highways jam-packed with people traveling to the biggest temple in the state, Bryant-Denny Stadium.  What if the government, when planning the construction of the interstate highway system, had made the median wider and placed rail tracks between the lanes?  We could take a train to football games, and not have to contend with traffic or drunk drivers or parking.  Then imagine any other road trip you would take involving the interstate highway system – for the right price it could be replaced by a rail journey, all while not having to cut any new path across the countryside for the railway.  Stacking them three high, thus producing six maglev tracks in one corridor, was my idea – the freight and passenger capacity would be unprecedented.  Goodbye congestion, hello reduced transport costs! Tomorrow, though, I don’t want to go from my hometown to Tuscaloosa.  I want to go from Beijing to Moscow.  Great!  With our global maglev rail network, I could probably complete the trip in under 20 hours.  Flying would be faster, but remember – I could travel 9000 km by train in under 20 hours on a trip that would take six days on current rail infrastructure.  Perhaps the greatest advantage to personal travel would come from less ambitious, halfway-across-the-continent journeys.  London to Istanbul could be done in just over six hours, and instead of flying above the clouds, all of Europe’s countryside and cityscape glory would zip past visible from ground level.  And let’s not stop with overland routes!  Spain and Morocco have been in talks for some time to build a rail tunnel underneath the Strait of Gibraltar to connect Africa and Europe.  The Bering Strait has been awfully lonely for the last ten thousand years or so since people stopped walking across its land bridge – Buenos Aires to Singapore by rail would be just a ticket purchase away. A new golden era of rail travel would open once significant portions of the global network were operational.  With so many destinations more easily accessible to the average human being, whether for business or pleasure, global connection would be a much greater part of day-to-day life.  If its energy sources are clean and renewable, transportation would fall off the list of most polluting industries.  Opportunities of all sorts would radically redefine the outlook of billions of people.  Workers who now travel into New York City on an hour-long train ride could move to DC and make the trip in the same amount of time.  To get really ambitious you could put the trains in vacuum tubes to remove air friction and enable speeds of up to 8000 km/h.  This would put you on the other side of the planet in less than three hours. It is no time to be cautious!  Since a global, super-high-speed rail network is likely within the next 500 years, let us start now and be magnetically levitated into the future!

The United States Constitutions provides for Citizen Soldiers in its second amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The concept of Citizen Soldiery is not merely a right for individual citizens to bear arms, but rather a duty that citizens have to arm themselves in defending the country from foreign invasion or domestic misrule. It is a direct result of the revolutionary war experiences of the founders, when foreign soldiers were forcibly quartered with local civilians and incidents like the Boston Massacre created a need to balance the rights of the people against the military. This concept has become somewhat antiquated in the modern era, not least of all because of the practical challenge posed by the modern equipment and armaments that any potential foreign or domestic threat would likely possess. However, today’s National Guard does traces its roots to this idea. The idea of citizens having not only a right but a responsibility to protect the interests of their communities and make them better places to live is a noble concept. NASA already routinely uses the principles of crowdsourcing to help them analyze the mountains of data collected by satellites and observatories that cannot be reliably processed by computers. Their “Be a Martian” project is definitely one of the more innovative and interactive approaches to this sort of work. NASA is on the right track, but why not take things one step further in terms of comprehensiveness and accessibility. How about, for instance, an application that allows different agencies or community organizations to release geotagged science projects for individuals to take on that would improve their communities. Imagine opening the app on your phone and seeing a project from the US Wildlife Fund to photograph endangered birds in the woods near your house, or a project from the EPA to measure groundwater purity in the park down the street.

Open Government

Open Government is understood by its advocacy base as a logical union of participatory government and transparent government.  The basic concept is that if the government’s approach to operations, decision-making and data were changed to enable citizens to effectively scrutinize their public officials in an unfiltered light, provide a more direct say in legislation and action, and build services and applications from the raw data the government generates in its studies and operations, that democracy could evolve and our government would be much more effective. There are a number of organizations which advocate for these concepts in different ways and with some specific goals as a part of the overall movement, such as the Sunlight Foundation, the Open Society Institute and O’Reilly’s Gov2.0 conference.  On their own they are great things worth fighting for.  However, there are many issues that are systemically preventing a true open government transformation from fully taking place. The aim of this challenge is to bring together all of the systemic reform conditions necessary to remove the creaky hinges and unnecessary locks on our governmental system, from the beginnings of elections through the way Congress can respond to crises.  This may not be everything (and if it is not, please put addenda in the comments) but I believe that these are the basic, operational fixes that our political system needs to leave the real work – study, innovation and input from citizens – ready to be done.  The challenge will be successfully completed when comprehensive legislative, technical and operational solutions are established for these issues and converted into law and custom.

Solution Requirements

Elections

• National election standards requiring fully free and open source voting machinery and software which is publicly auditable and leaves a paper trail, and the necessary hardware and software to meet this standard
• Change the election system from municipalities to Presidential elections to range voting and hold no primaries, maintain the secret ballot and eliminate party registration requirements
• Allow and facilitate Internet voting and release the anonymous voting data to the public via an open API
• Require all elections to be 100% publicly funded and disallow private donations to candidates, with a special focus to nurture newly-enabled (thanks to range voting) smaller parties and candidates

Congressional Governance

• End filibusters by requiring simple up-or-down votes in both Houses of Congress for all legislation that is not a treaty or a Constitutional amendment
• Enable Congress to react much faster to issues and crises, such as the BP oil spill, the stagnant economy and lack of sustainable technology development and empowerment

Open Data

• Legally require all non-classified data, including raw metadata, to be open to the public as soon as it is affirmed as valid and usable by the government.  This includes creating a public, extensible and standard way of handling and analyzing such data.
• Reduce the terms of classification on most kinds of government data
• Recognize Constitutional privacy rights as pertaining to online communications

Pledges

The government has pledged to reward successful entries.

Intellectual Property

All of the basic documents and software requirements for this challenge will, when implemented, be placed into the public domain.  Further innovations on this solution have no license requirement.

Judges

• Lawrence Lessig
• Richard Stallman
• Open Source Digital Voting Foundation
• Tim O’Reilly
• Ralph Nader

In case you missed it, our theme for June is to give our own little Brain Canvas preview to an initiative being launched by the General Services Administration in July to crowdsource solutions to the problems faced by different government agencies. Throughout the month of June we’ll be posting different challenges in government, along with our proposed solution. Ironically, the first challenge that the GSA posts might be to ask for solutions on how to promote and market its new project effectively. While the GSA crowdsourcing initiative is a fantastic concept, it can really only work effectively if there is a critical mass of individuals using the platform. Its worth pointing out that this is by no means a given, as Challenge Post currently has just 60 posted challenges, only one of which has been tagged “government”. Most of those only have a handful of people who have actually submitted solutions (with a few notable exceptions for the ones with large cash rewards – an important point which we’ll consider momentarily). Not exactly the kind of numbers that put the “crowd” in crowdsource. So figuring out how to get an appropriate number of people using this thing is certainly a challenge that the GSA at least better consider. But its not just about the volume of people, its also making sure that these people fit a particular kind of profile. They’ll need to make sure that innovative, entrepreneurial and creative people are applying their mental prowess to these challenges. At the same time this is a great chance to get more people participating in government with fresh new ideas, so it also needs to appeal to people who aren’t already lobbying, consulting or otherwise influencing or commenting on policy. So in summary you need bright, entrepreneurial, laypeople. People who are equipped with the right education, experience or genuine creativity who are outside of government. Something of a tall order, but what you ultimately need is a world class marketer to really promote the heck out of this. I am certainly not that marketer, but here are a few ideas I have on how this sort of campaign would have to look. 1. Build a sense of community Peer pressure and a sense of belonging are two pretty powerful motivators. Whatever the final platform looks like, it needs to incorporate specific elements of social networking platforms in order to give users a community to connect with and a personal identity that can exist within that community. I would see this as something akin to Facebook, where you could form groups, send messages, post contact and get updates on different challenges by say, which department they are coming from or which issues they might be trying to tackle. In fact, they might just want to make it a Facebook app, or at least a standalone app that interfaces with Facebook. Its quite possible that this would be enough to do it on its own, provided that the challenge content being posted is good enough to be driven by users over existing channels and platforms. 2. Go Global Nowhere could I find whether the ability to propose solutions to challenges would be restricted by national origin. At first it seems almost stupid to ask whether this would become an issue, but the nativist counter-argument is almost too easy to predict. “Americans are the most innovative people in the world. Why do we need non-residents, or even resident non-citizens, to tell us how to solve our own problems?” Of course, that question would be stupid to ask. The challenges that America faces (e.g. reducing our reliance or hydro-carbons while promoting economic growth) are often ones that ultimately end up impacting other people outside this country as well. The other, simpler, answer is that a good idea can come from anywhere. To reject it out of hand just because “you” didn’t come up with it is the worst kind of self defeating arrogance. Simply put my response to that would be, “grow up”. At any rate, lets hope the GSA isn’t pressured in any way to make this concession. It would kill the entire concept before it even started, in my opinion. Finally… 3. Exploit the incentives There are three major incentives that this concept provides for would be participants. Whomever is writing the guidelines for what challenges should look like, along with whomever is responsible for marketing this, should give ample credence to all three, in no particular order:

• Helping your community, country and world
• Recognition. This is why the community is so key. Who cares if you win something that nobody you respect cares about?
• Money. People should be compensated justly for their solution if its selected. It obviously also attracts more individuals or start-ups to participate. The best part is it would probably still be a fraction of the amount it would cost to get a ‘professional’ consultant

So there you have it. Build a global community motivated by a few monetary and social incentives and you should have a good starting base of users. If we actually see this up on the GSA platform next month, my next step will be to actually propose how to do those things.

I like to think that our theme this month is, in some ways, getting back to our Brain Canvas roots: the delivery of high quality unadulterated “what if” scenarios. This month’s twist comes in response to a recent announcement made by the U.S. General Services Administration, a federal agency responsible for providing support for the basic functioning of other government agencies like the Department of Agriculture, Department of Education and others. Its mission is, “to use expertise to provide innovative solutions for our customers [i.e. government agencies] in support of their missions and by so doing foster an effective, sustainable, and transparent government for the American people.” The GSA, as its known, will launch an app in July hosted by ChallengePost, an online crowd-sourcing platform, that will ask the public submit their ideas for different challenges that will be posted by different government agencies. In June, Brain Canvas will offer a preview of what this innovative approach from the GSA could look like. Since the app won’t launch until July, we’ll be playing the role of both federal agency and innovative citizen, posting the challenges that we would most like to see address along with our proposed solution. We invite you to leave your own solution in the comments section of each post. The best comment from the month will win a T-shirt with the Brain Canvas logo. Look for the first challenge to be posted next week!

Mass media entertainment has frequently come under attack as mindless or dangerous to culture. What used to be generated on a local level was dwarfed by an advertisement-entertainment-broadcast complex which grew so powerfully insipid that it inspired FCC Chairman Newton Minow to declare the television broadcast landscape a “vast wasteland” in 1961.  Many people, whether they admit it or not, watch films and television largely for the escape value and not for a more enriching entertainment experience on the level of learning to play a song or interacting with others in a game or sport. If you notice, though, TV shows today are on new levels of quality when compared with the uninspiring, non-challenging programs of yesteryear.  Leave it to Beaver never had to compete with The Wire, nor did I Love Lucy‘s completely acceptable “quirkiness” have to face the sublime dysfunctional satire of The Simpsons and South Park.  Likewise, truly great music could only be found in live music clubs.  Hit factories were focused on churning out single after copycat single before deeper, album-oriented and experimental music production became viable. Those developments are the direct result of an increase in competition in broadcast television and musical production.  The nature of the complex, of course, means that it isn’t just a question of increases in technology, although that played a role in the form of multi-track recording for music.  Regulatory reform by necessity opened the door for technological and social changes to sweep entertainment media.  Minow’s FCC focused on opening up broadcast television to create more opportunities for public interest programming, and as adoption grew, so did the number of channels and offerings.  Competition meant content had to become better and more relevant.  Today, the best television content is generally, though not always, created on channels like Showtime and HBO where the consumer pays directly for the content, instead of watching content funded by proxy (i.e. advertising). The Internet is clearly making a difference in both music and television content, along with whole other forms of entertainment like massively multiplayer online games and even Chatroulette.  Consumers no longer have to wait for content to come to them, streaming from an idiot box.  They can find it in any way they want to, legal or not, and with browser plugins like AdBlock Plus, they can entertain themselves without the scream of advertising that has dominated the 20th Century. This liberation from undesired advertising – not all advertising, to be clear – when joined with a hopeful victory for net neutrality and the ability of individuals to cheaply produce and broadcast their own content – is the latest breakthrough in ensuring a higher quality offering from entertainment media.  This does not mean that entertainment media will necessarily get better on average, but I firmly believe that the amount and diversity of high-quality entertainment accessible to the average consumer will increase many times over in the coming decades. But what does “high quality entertainment” mean?  After all, so many people do like to escape from the drudgery of their everyday lives by experiencing more drudgery on the tube.  What do they care about the quality when what they seek is the media equivalent of crack cocaine: cheap, quick and powerful? I think that the improving quality of entertainment media and changes in general social trends, fueled by the explosion of social media, point to a desire for more challenge, insight and relevance from our entertainment media options.  Shows are released on DVD and streamed online so we can consume them like we would books.  They are no longer just things to pass the time; we see many shows like The Wire and Mad Men as highly relevant to our modern economic and social struggles.  Breaking Bad is not hip, self-referential drug culture escapism, it is an engaging character-driven look at the role of addiction and the war on drugs in a world where health care premiums are immorally high, among many other things.  I for one am a huge fan of Ronald D. Moore’s reimagining of the Battlestar Galactica franchise.  Next to The Wire it is about as broadly and poignantly relevant a television show as has aired in the last decade when it comes to exploring our social and cultural issues.  However, without being a bit of a science fiction geek and being willing to commit to the series from the very beginning, it is hard to access.  Viewership hovered perilously around the one million mark, and its prequel follow-up Caprica suffers the same problem.  Yet with the new options the Internet offers for content distribution, such shows ought to become more commonplace whether or not people watch them at the time of original broadcast.  It will simply be funded and delivered in a different way from advertising-funded broadcast media.  You will pay a set fee or what you like for the show directly, or it will solicit funding drives, or it will be funded by interest groups who make profit from other ventures; it will be there because you want it to be there. Another reason to have confidence in the increasing relevance and quality of entertainment content comes from a statement in this Economist special report on television:

Technology also competes for attention. Although families still gather around the TV set as they have done for decades, they now bring electronic distractions with them. Nielsen reckons that 13% of people who watched the Academy Awards ceremony this year went online during the programme, up from 9% last year. The multitaskers did not appear to gravitate to entertainment websites. Google and Facebook topped the list of websites visited during the Oscars, just as they did during the Super Bowl and the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics.

Emphasis is mine.  Although the article frames this information in terms of television’s hold over its audience, I take this to mean that we only seek to entertain ourselves with one thing at a time.  Somehow we consider entertainment to be different than information – I would be shocked if a similar study found high volumes of people engrossed by information or interest reports on television, the radio, or the Internet to the point of not clicking or switching around to different information sites.  It seems that our brains do not treat entertainment the same way: we want to focus, not get lost.  We want to share our thoughts and interests about that entertainment with others (I am guilty of this with both information and entertainment, as a peek at my lifestream will exhibit). Going forward in the entropic timeline, I expect people will focus on deeper consumption of challenging and enriching entertainment instead of flocking to shows like The Bachelor or Jersey Shore.  Young people are looking for some way to contribute a voice to the massive cultural stream, and consuming empty entertainment calories is just a waste of time.  As for the bodies of fandom for shows like Jersey Shore, I doubt that their chatter will matter as much in the future as it does today.  The increasing role of relevance in the content ecosystem means the worst people have to fear is overhearing trash gossip at a restaurant or in the hallway, not in the news they consume.  The same is true for the unwashed masses who hate on Battlestar Galactica – our indulgent geek talk will not pepper the news on TMZ. Increasing competition in entertainment media will strengthen our culture as we leave the wasteland for an environment of untold diversity.

Even if you are not a sports fanatic, you have to give credit to ESPN for building one of the most successful media franchises around today in little over 30 years. In addition to their flagship ESPN cable television channel, they have about 15 other stations and affiliated networks, ESPN.com, local market ESPN radio stations, ESPN mobile, ESPN The Magazine, and perhaps the most innovative platform in their portfolio, ESPN3.com, which lets people who get their internet from any one of about two dozen service providers access live streaming games for free. Given the enormity of the ESPN franchise and sporting media in general (which is owned by Disney), there are probably a few things I’m missing, but you get the idea. For those who are sports enthusiasts, its not just the deluge of coverage that makes ESPN in particular such an appealing channel. Despite being entirely dedicated to sports, it manages to keep itself fun, hip, accessible, almost nerdy by not taking itself too seriously and actively ditching a lot of the ‘machismo’ that might come along with this sort of thing. That SportsCenter commercial with Star Wars characters captures in its entirety the brand that ESPN has built and why its so successful. Compare that with the few hours of The Food Network that I recently and somewhat accidentally watched. They still of course have shows like cooking with fat, Italian, George Bush (BAM!). But the format of these shows is a little bit outdated, something that The Food Network has clearly realized as evidenced by the line-up of shows promoted on their website. Unfortunately for us the viewer, it seems the network executives decided the best way to put a fresh new face on food was a super-sized dose of reality T.V. The show I forced myself to struggle through was Chef vs. City, which watches like an attempt to wed The Amazing Race with No Reservations, but falls short of both, especially Anthony Bourdain’s fantastic No Reservations. The best example of The Food Network’s “Dancing with the Stars”-like approach has to be their show What Would Brian Boitano Make, which has to be a conscious reference to South Park: The Movie. Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, despite being on ABC and not The Food Network, is another good example of this. It reminds me of that show where they make surprise renovations of peoples’ homes who’ve been through some sort of tragedy. Both feature traveling do-gooders with spiky hair, although Jamie’s revolution has been known to famously blow up in his face from time to time. Now, The Food Network and similar programs have (or could have) a fairly noble purpose: to better educate people about their food and make healthy eating a realistic goal for a wider audience than your typical Whole Paycheck shopper. From my experience watching this channel though, I didn’t learn anything about my food, where it came from, or how to prepare it in a way that would help me to easily eat healthier. In large part I think you can attribute this to the nature of the programming – you don’t pander to the lowest common denominator of society when you are trying to radically change the way that society uses media to engage with a certain topic, like ESPN has with sports. I’ll admit that athletics lends itself to this kind of presentation a little bit more easily than food does, but that doesn’t mean that some of the same principles couldn’t apply. Lets see a food network that is funny and does not take itself too seriously. Wouldn’t it be great to see Rachel Ray in the same kind of self deprecating commercials that SportsCenter puts LeBron James in (“Chosen one, huh?”)? Lets also see something that’s a bit more intelligent too. I honestly do not and will never care what Brian Boitano would make. As hilarious as it is to watch “Emeril, Live” and realize that he looks like a fat, Italian George Bush (if you don’t believe me do an image search for Emeril, its uncanny how much he looks like a young “Dub-ya”), it hardly inspires me to lift a finger to make anything remotely close to what this man is cooking up. A better understanding of how people consume media these days wouldn’t hurt either. ESPN does a great job of putting non-stop sports coverage at your finger tips. Above all make it fast paced, high energy and fun. What if there was a show called “WineCenter”, which each day broke down the best recipes cooked on the food network that day and had experts picks on which wines to pair with them, and combines that with web based content that gave you links to clips of all the dishes being prepared along with instructions for the recipes and a google maps link for where to buy the ingredients in your neighborhood. Now that would be a food channel to change the game in as many ways as ESPN has.

Today’s post is an effort to develop my previous post on advanced robotic prostheses to a new level. Robotic prostheses and other advances in biomedical technology not only improve the quality of life for both disabled persons and the able bodied, but have the potential to extend life itself to the point where aging is a thing of the past. Two of the more interesting speculations on how life could eventually be extended, perhaps indefinitely, are mind uploading and the replacement of limbs and organs with cloned biological or artificial substitutes. The two concepts approach life extension from opposing angles. One the digitizing of human consciousness leading ultimately to a non-corporeal existence. The other the replacement or enhancement of vital human limbs and organs with cloned tissue or artificial mechanical parts as they wear out or contract diseases like cancer. The idea that advances in bio-technology could some day prolong human life indefinitely may be something of a pipe dream. Much of the research is pseudo-scientific at best. It is however undeniable that gradual advances in these fields will provide the technology to increasingly expand the length of human life. In the 20th century the average life span in the United States increased by about 2/3. While the rate of increase has been steadily declining, this would seem to be logical as the increases throughout most of the 20th century would have relied on social improvements (e.g. improved sanitation and nutrition) while the next stage would rely on technical advances taking a much longer period of time to develop and implement widely. Despite the questionable feasibility of indefinite life extension, it is none the less interesting to consider what our societies would look like in a world where natural aging and death from old age and disease has all but been eliminated. Would it be beneficial or detrimental to our society? I believe the positive outcomes outweigh the challenges that an ageless society presents. The burden on social services, the environment and natural resources management would increase dramatically. If you thought social security in the United States was already broken, imagine how it would look if the average person were living hundreds or thousands of years. Ultimately, and perhaps counterintuitively, a world in which aging has been cured could be one which places a much higher value on individual human life and the long term sustainability of our lifestyles. We would care more about needless poverty and death knowing that the victims could have lived thousands of years and contributed countless discoveries and innovations. We would be less inclined to destroy our ecosystems, knowing that the long term effects would not be things we could pass down to faceless nameless descendants, but real world consequences we would have to face in a short matter of a few hundred years. A truly ageless society may ultimately be nothing more than a science fiction fantasy, but increasing lifespans are already a reality. What better time than now to create solutions to the challenges it presents and means of maximizing its benefits?