I found this cheap water filtering technology called LifeStraw ™ first at Street Tech called the The miracle of Life(Straw)
Very cool and useful.
According to these articles, 1 billion people do not have safe drinking water. This Straw costs $2 US, and can provide a years worth (approx 700 Litres) of safe drinking water.
A few other blogs/entries with more details:
I stumbled upon Stills from A Scanner Darkly just now. The stills look good, but the trailer looks even more interesting.
I was a fan of Philip K Dick’s work because of Bladerunner.
Timothy Leary may have wanted to die attached to the internet, and many others want to upload their consciousness. The reality … People write books, post to blogs and “hive like minds” edit Wikis. This may not live up to the dreams of Neuromancer or The Matrix, but pragmatically achieves the same result.
When people publish online, the author is filtering out what they perceive as noise, trying to capture the essence of what’s important. This may prove problematic as the resulting shorter summary may convey meaning only to someone who is familiar with the topic. Perhaps the connections between the audience and the piece of information are not present.
The connections between information are obviously important. A static item (either weblog entry, webpage, etc) can only be effective or useful if it has context to the viewer. This documentation or codification process incurs information “lost in translation”. Other forms of information, like video, can be effective in conveying information, but obvioulsy more time consuming to produce.
Science fiction has a lot to live up to with the fuzzy concept of mind uploading. Perhaps its just a dream or utopia that may never occur. Knowledge and information, arguably, are acquired experientially. Each individual filters, sorts, stores, and assimilates information based on prior experience or knowledge. This leads to a conclusion that the more we experience the harder it is to identify what was the key factor in acquisition.
Current technology in mind uploading ?
So, while we wait for the killer mind uploading technology, we will just have to make do with what we have.