Ars Technica: “Temporary tattoos fitted with electronics make flexible, ultrathin sensors”

The authors refer to their approach as an "epidermal electronic system" (EES), which is basically a fancy way of saying that the device matches the physical properties of the skin (such as stiffness), and its thickness matches that of skin features (wrinkles, creases, etc.). In fact, it adheres to skin only using van der Waals forces—the forces of attraction between atoms and molecules—so no adhesive material is required. Between the flexibility and the lack of adhesive, you wouldn’t really notice one of these attached.
One of the coolest aspects of this technology is the application method: temporary (transfer) tattoo. Yes, the ones you used as a kid, where you hold the transfer sheet with the design onto your skin then dampen it to dissolve the sheet. Here, they used water-soluble polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) sheets in the same manner. Kyle Niemeyer

If that sounds like something right out of a sci-fi novel, you would be right: Peter F. Hamilton imagined semi-permanent organic circuitry – OCTattoos – for his Commonwealth Saga series. They’re the smartphone/Siri of the future built right into your skin.

On the same note: Nokia patents a tattoo that vibrates when you get a call.

Charles Stross: “World building 301: some projections”

What do I predict for 2032?

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Space: Is a red herring in the short term. China will have a space station and maybe a flag on the moon. The USA will continue to send out increasingly sophisticated robot probes and might still be operating a space station. They might even have planted a flag on the moon (again) and have plans to go to Mars. (On the down side: a major political or fiscal crisis might be enough to do unto NASA what the collapse of the USSR did to the Soviet space infrastructure.) There will probably be continued commercial development in low earth orbit, including an orbiting hotel (for the plutocrats to play bunga-bunga games). And Elon Musk might still be in business and going balls-out for Mars. But by 2032 I don't expect there to be any major breakthroughs.

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Let's look further ahead. What about 2092?

I agree with Bruce Sterling: it's going to be a world of old people living in big cities who are afraid of the sky.

Charles Stross

A (long) series of predictions about our world 20 and 80 years from now, respectively, from science-fiction author Charles Stross. While I don’t necessarily enjoy his sci-fi novels, the predictions laid out here for 2032 are mostly common sense and with a high chance of becoming reality in my opinion, even the ones that are undesirable. The future for 2092 is even bleaker, but also more uncertain, like the author himself acknowledges in a follow-up post. Definitely an article to be saved and revisited in a decade or so.

Less online tracking? Turn off third-party cookies

Last month we saw a couple of privacy scandals unfold, as Google was caught circumventing privacy settings on the iPhone and in Internet Explorer in order to gather browsing data despite explicit user settings. Right about the same time, Mozilla released an add-on for Firefox, Collusion, to visualize the third parties that are tracking your movements across the Web. I wanted to do a little experiment to see what’s the difference between various browser privacy settings. That also gave me an opportunity to try out the newer version of Firefox more extensively – but I’ll write about that later. Some context about the graphs from Collusion:

Sites with a halo are sites that you have visited. Sites in grey are sites you have not visited. An arrow from one to the other means that the former site has set one or more third-party cookies to inform the latter site about your visit.

Preview related searches in Google Image Search

So yesterday evening I was watching the to-and-fro about an update to tab handling in Safari 5.2. Fascinating stuff, especially for a Windows user who hasn’t touched desktop Safari ever since Chrome came out. Even so, I distinctly remembered that, in some iteration of Safari beta 4 for Windows, the browser already tested that behavior for tabs, that is tabs filling the entire width of the window, regardless of their number. And sure enough, I quickly found confirmation in this older article: Apple Safari 4 Beta for Windows.

Radar: Safari 5.2 tabs are too wide: openradar.appspot.com/radar?id=15654…

— John Gruber (@gruber) March 5, 2012

Ken Miller: “America’s Darwin Problem”

Significant numbers of Americans have come to regard the scientific enterprise as a special interest group that rejects mainstream American values and is not worthy of the public trust. Governor Rick Perry of Texas spoke to this view when he claimed that “There are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data” to their own benefit. Why? Perry was clear about this. It’s personal greed. Scientists cheat “so that they will have dollars rolling in to their projects.” Perry is hardly alone in his effort to depict scientists as greedy outsiders, “scamming the American people right and left” in the words of one Fox News commentator. Kenneth R. Miller

I can’t help but draw a parallel between this anti-science movement in present-day America and Martin Luther’s Reformation of the Catholic Church. As theology tries to understand God, so does Science strives to make sense of the Universe around us and man itself. As the Reformation encouraged people to reject the establishment of the Church, the priests and that past status quo and develop a personal relationship to God, so this anti-science trend undermines the scientific reasoning, scientists and their conclusions and promotes the notion that each individual somehow magically knows best, even without any training on the matter. Evolution can’t be true, neither can global warming; and why should I have to inoculate my child against common diseases? Surely that must be some conspiracy to sell those medicines or turn us all sterile! That old reactionary attitude seems to have lived on in modern-day Protestantism; a suspicion that a small group of people will gather to much power and use it to their own ends. Unfortunately, while such reformation can be accommodated on a spiritual level, in the field of science it’s unsustainable. Single persons can’t possibly comprehend the entirety of science, built during centuries of theories and experiments, from quantum mechanics to general relativity, to biology and medicine, let alone turn them into practical applications for every-day use. To continue to benefit from knowledge and scientific progress we must also accept that sometimes somebody else knows best. Just as we have been doing since the dawn of our species – otherwise we wouldn’t have made it this far.

cdixon: “Warren Buffet on gold as an investment”

A century from now the 400 million acres of farmland will have produced staggering amounts of corn, wheat, cotton, and other crops – and will continue to produce that valuable bounty, whatever the currency may be. Exxon Mobil will probably have delivered trillions of dollars in dividends to its owners and will also hold assets worth many more trillions (and, remember, you get 16 Exxons). The 170,000 tons of gold will be unchanged in size and still incapable of producing anything. You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.
Admittedly, when people a century from now are fearful, it’s likely many will still rush to gold. I’m confident, however, that the $9.6 trillion current valuation of pile A will compound over the century at a rate far inferior to that achieved by pile B. Berkshire Hathaway 2011 annual report

Short answer to this: Well, d’oh! Anyone with basic understanding of economics knows this.

Long answer: Lets’ look at this from a different perspective: maybe a century from now global warming will have screwed up the climate so badly that those acres of farmland will be basically useless for growing anything other than weeds. Or maybe – to offer some positive prospect as well – we will develop technologies to mass produce food via bioengineering, making traditional agriculture obsolete. And companies come and go in much less than hundred years – just look at Kodak – so those dividends are far from a sure bet. On the other hand, the gold will still be there, in one form or another, millennia from now. It could easily outlive the human race. And that’s what the people are buying with gold: not the prospect of profit, but the certainty its’ value will not suddenly dwindle to nothing like so many other potential investments. Economics is entirely a game of trust and risk: if you are willing to risk more, to trust a certain company, startup or even country through its currency, you can potentially gain more – or loose everything. With gold on the other hand there is no risk – or let’s say, the least amount of risk possible – and that’s what it makes gold so attractive during crises, when the risks of all other forms of saving or investment become more apparent.

Social networks vs. real-life

At launch, the catch phrase for Google’s social network/layer was Real-life sharing, rethought for the web. But then came the spammers, the controversies around requiring the real-name from users and the constant pushing into every aspect of Google, regardless of this created a better experience or functionality. My personal impression was largely influenced by the decision to strip Google Reader of it’s sharing functions in favor of Google+. At some point I started thinking how Google+ compares with other more successful social networks and here is what I came up with: