One last item from the Futurismic mail-room before the year closes: Sean Stubblefield writes to inform us about But the Owl Knows, an anthology of stories and art which he has edited, and from which all proceeds will go to Save The Children. Provided you’re willing to brave MySpace, you can find out more on Sean’s page.
Andrew Marr on “anti-news”
It’s well worth listening to Andrew Marr’s latest edition of Start the Week in which he goes back over some of the best interviews and guests of the year.
He chooses to focus on “anti-news” – developments and trends that don’t make the headlines but nevertheless have a huge long term impact on the way we live our lives. Futurismic stuff, in fact.
Topics include human identity, bioscience, genetic predetermination, information technology, black swans, and the morality of nanotechnology.
Listen to the podcast here or on BBC iPlayer (available for the next six days).
German hotel of the future
Watch as a reporter from the BBC explores a hi-tech “hotel room of the future” in Germany.
Is it me or does the smooth edges + white fascia look a little retro-futuristic, rather than futuristic? It looks like something from A Clockwork Orange or 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The paradoxical nature of traffic jams
Following on from the ULTra transit post, here’s a question about urban transport: what’s the best way to solve sluggish traffic flow around a busy street? Well, you could try shutting the street down entirely…
To mathematicians, this may be a real-world example of Braess’s paradox, a statistical theorem that holds that when a network of streets is already jammed with vehicles, adding a new street can make traffic flow even more slowly.
The reason is that in crowded conditions, drivers will pile into a new street, clogging both it and the streets that provide access to it. By the same token, removing a major thoroughfare may actually ease congestion on the streets that normally provide access to it. And because other major streets are already overcrowded, diverting still more traffic to them may not make much difference.
There are links to some research papers and reports on traffic flow studies over at MetaFilter, but you might want to start with the more accessible Wikipedia article on Braess’s paradox. I don’t know about anyone else, but I find it strangely comforting to realise that the world doesn’t always work the way we expect it to… though that could be because I don’t drive.
2009 – the year the physical bookstore lays down and dies?
We already know there’s trouble in the world of publishing, and according to the New York Times there’s just as much grief in the domain of the bricks-and-mortar bookstores… and it’s all the fault of us dedicated readers who buy second-hand novels online or swap between circles of friends, not to mention students cutting costs by picking up pre-owned titles that would normally swell the backlist sales figures. Is publishing having its Napster moment? Is this the beginning of the end? [image by jayniebell]
Well, as with all things, it depends who you ask. Mike Masnick at Techdirt suggests that the death of bookstores doesn’t have to be the death of books:
Past studies have shown that an active second hand market helps to boost the sales of new goods, because it makes those goods more valuable to folks who recognize they’ll be able to resell them on the second hand market later. That may not be helpful to physical bookstore retailers, but those retailers have to learn to adjust with the times as well. Obviously, just selling books is going to make less and less sense, but we’ve seen retailers that have worked hard to turn their stores into destinations, where there were good reasons to go and buy stuff, rather than just being a physical version of what you could get online.
It’s an interesting response – though I’d point out that it’s exactly that type of “destination” branding that has killed off the UK library service so effectively. But then again, libraries aren’t businesses in the same way as bookstores.
Where do you buy your books?