Five Interesting Things: Today’s Scan Hits
Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today.
- New iPhone app in Iceland ensures that cousins don’t become “kissing cousins.”
- Phillips has developed prototypes of a tubular LED light that could be retrofit into existing overhead fluorescent fixtures. Although the tubular LED bulbs will have a significant cost premium, they offer twice the efficiency of fluorescent bulbs, and generate warm light that is closer to incandescent bulbs.
- A writer identifies nine kinds of bad futurism. (We believe that we avoid these traps at Foresight Alliance.)
- In the wake of the Boston bombing and manhunt, Richard Fernandez sketches out a possible future of reputation based private security. Access to public events, stores, airplanes, restaurants, and other private spaces could be restricted to verified “club” members, creating a system of segregation through reputation.
- The Archangel Ancient Tree Archive is about to begin planting cloned cuttings from some of the world’s oldest redwood trees. The project is two-fold: to rehabilitate redwood forests and to use the (potentially) giant trees as carbon sinks. The new saplings being planted in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany, are cloned from some of the oldest redwoods in the world, with the understanding that these trees must have superior genes to have survived this long.