• Moore’s law
• Total bits shipped
• Magnetic data storage bits per dollar
• Internet data traffic
• Internet backbone bandwidth
• US nanotechnology-related patents

But also in biology, for instance the cost of sequencing DNA that is dropping exponentially.

Conjecturing what happens next when those numbers get really big is what this summit and the groups involved in the singularity are about. Something is bound to happen. Something special, something unforeseen, something beyond any of our wildest prediction. Will it be good (techno-optimist), bad (techno-pessimist), the same (techno-neutral) or good or bad depending on how we get there (techno-volatile)? What is going to happen, to people, to human intelligence, to artificial intelligence, to the biological world? When will the singularity point be past?

So, the singularity is where we’re going, but the work still needs to be done. And that’s what computer scientists, biologists, neuroscientists, writers, futurists, psychologists, historians and many other experts come together to discuss.

One main theme is understanding the human body and the brain better. Not just to cure diseases, repair the body, make us immortal, and more intelligent, but also to find principles that guide scientists to make smarter, more powerful technology, such as nano machines that writes and reads DNA, or computer systems that are generally intelligent.

With that many different angles and approaches to the singularity, there is no unified view of it and it is hard to even get a more precise idea about what it could be or mean. You get bits and pieces here and there, a glimpse over here. And as they say, one thing that is certain about the future is that you cannot predict it.

Besides the big ideas, was the conference good? Yes, it was nice to attend, listen to some of the guys whose blogs and articles I read from time to time. The distribution was as usual, 4-5 talks I really enjoyed and were thought-provoking to me, a few I could have slept through and the rest in the middle. I enjoyed it overall but I’m not sure experts would learn that much per se from their own field from the talks, unless you come to network.

The videos should get on the website sometime.
Read the day one and day two report articles from the h+ magazine.

• Startup Digest: inscrivez-vous à la mailing list ou lisez leurs archives (cherchez SF Bay Area HackersDigest).
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La plupart des événements organisés sont soit gratuits soit peu cher ($10-$20).

Sounds intuitive enough.

Concretely, what does it mean for you? Well, if you were pondering whether you really need a new computer, a bigger screen, a lighter bike, the newest camera, you can help convince yourself that you’ll be definitely more productive, says the World Bank. Self-deception is a powerful mind trick.

Now I’m wondering if the simple corollary to this is not that Twitter is making the future. After all, Twitter can also be seen as a massive network of influences, and its real-time property makes it much more dynamic than blogs, Facebook, newspapers, or TV. Twitter sphere’s of influence goes also beyond Twitter.com as Twitter feeds are embedded in many other websites and applications.

Compared to other types of data, twitter’s data is easily accessible, is better structured for text analysis (short, you don’t need to parse and find the interesting piece of text in a page long text), as well as for other data or time-based analysis (all tweets are real time, all stamped with the same time/clock system which is a big deal, they cannot be edited, they can all be tracked to their original authors and those who retweeted), and finally there is a lot of it.

Wouldn’t there be a causality link here too? Twitter chatter would not just reflect what people are thinking or doing, it also influences them, like any other viral media channel.
Instead of just investing into methods to know what the chatter says about a product or someone, companies and people are going to invest to increase the amount of chatter related to that product or someone. Like they did with forums, and blogs.

Twitter is ultimately an excellent platform to experiment with prediction and real-time making of the future. Build a system that adds to the Twitter chatter in the direction you want (to promote something for instance) and watch real-time if it is going to influence and affect the outcome.

C’était la belle époque où les images avaient une grande valeur “soit sage, tu auras une image” et les marketers de l’époque ajoutaient souvent des images avec leur produit, comme le chocolat poulain, mais aussi des produits pharmaceutiques.

Ma grand-mère collectait toutes ces images précieusement, parfois les collait dans des livres de compte recyclés en albums, et conservait le tout pour distraire tous les enfants, petits-enfants, ou cousins qui passaient du temps chez elle.

De sa collection, on en a peut-être malheureusement qu’une partie, mais j’ai scanné ce que je pouvais et je partage les scans au fur et à mesure sur www.vieillesgravures.com.

Comme ma grand-mère était une grande collectionneuse, je mettrais aussi les scans de ses autres trésors (timbres, cartes postales, photos).