Thursday, January 19, 2012

2012 expectations


first post of 2012? gosh, well ok, there I was reminiscing about how disapointing 2012 is. let me explain, back in the day, say '92 or '93 I remember reading a great book by Robert Anton Wilson called 'cosmic trigger' and in it was explained the 'jumping jesus phenomonon' essentially a unit of measure of humankind's entire knowledge known at that time, and how long it would take before this was doubled. In essence he said that it was growing exponentially , and as we all know, this curve peaks sharply to infinity and by his estimate, the curve of man's rate of doubling of information would in 2012 double every second!

so, over 15 years ago I was really looking forward to 2012, and when it eventually arrives and I look around, its not *that* much different, so there I was the other night thinking how the rate of change is not really happening as fast as I would like, when on the telly was horizon an episode called 'playing god' detailing how easy it was to create synthetic biology these days compared to a few years ago, and demonstrated how schoolkids folded dna ordered off the internets in test tubes to make glow in the dark jellyfish yeast etc. and went on to explain how NASA may be using it to fundamentally alter the astronauts DNA for improved space travel radiation protection. so its happening, this 2012 science fiction shizzle, but not in computing as I expected, its in synthetic Biology!