I was definitely wrong about Twitter being a fad; Bonderman having a great pitching year; and alien life being confirmed though the Mono Lake announcement got people excited. The others are a mixed bag.
It will be Microsoft's make-it or break-it year. Windows 8 and Windows Phone takes off or Zunes away. Regardless, Microsoft will be out of the operating system business in less than 10 years.
Chia will be the new superfood fad, and the fad will turn into a diet
A new masculinity emerges in hip hop. It'll be introspective and vulnerable. Childish Gambino and Tyler the Creator both had songs in 2011 that represent this new style; Shad had it in 2010; and Jay Z's song about his daughter is what will propel it to the big time.
People will really get tired of the phrases "everything is better with bacon" and "I try to keep it simple and let the food speak for itself"
People who call themselves film critics will get tired of Wes Anderson while Tarantino gets elevated to even more mythical status. Movie goers will love Wes Anderson.
Still no Arrested Development movie.
Cable companies will realize they started as aggregators and that is how they can make the most money now. Everything will be packet based.
The conventional wisdom will finally draw the connections between energy supply - food prices - wealth aggregation - access to jobs and the Arab Spring/Occupy movements.
The debate of "is Internet access a fundamental human right?" will get noisier.
The world won't end like in the movie 2012 though I would not be surprised to see unprecedented climate chaos that displaces a large number of people.
Apple won't make a traditional stand-alone TV, but really, they are going to put apps on the Apple TV this year.
The next iPhone will do more than a Star Trek tri-corder and will be able to scan reality to make virtual maps.
I used to do my utmost to suspend belief
Until the day it hit me like a kick in the teeth
-Ivy, I Guess I'm Just A Little Too Sensitive
I usually listen to Ivy when sad. It happened when hearing about Steve Jobs. These two lines are what came to mind. Because...
We suspended belief when we stood in line for the new iPhone.
We were kicked in the teeth when heard the news Steve had died.
When Steve Jobs resigned in August I posted my thoughts. I'm finally able to read stories about Steve Jobs without tearing up and becoming consumed with grief. So I finally feel able to explore why I, and people from all over the world, felt this unexpected sadness.
I believe it was a relationship with Apple and by extension Steve Jobs that people felt. Because Apple and Steve were inseparable right to the very end.
My relationship with Apple started because I was hoping for a relationship with a fellow Geology student. She used Cricket Graph on a Mac in the computer lab (in the entire lab there were only two Macs) and so this is the computer I used too. Then when I needed help I had to ask her. It seemed like a crush but was much more and would impact the rest of my life. Steve Jobs sat in on a calligraphy class at Reed College and this seemingly small chance opportunity changed typography on computers forever. I feel that my seemingly innocuous attempt at flirting by choosing the same computer as a girl I wanted to talk to changed my life forever.
This little Mac was what I used to first experience the Internet, originally with NCSA Mosaic then with something called Netscape. And it was with a Mac that years later I found my callings.
Once I used an Apple computer there was no going back. It was the first time I saw design mattering. And that mattered to me, hence Apple has been a part of my life.
And Apple was Steve Jobs.
Ivy's song is about a relationship and that is what we had with Apple - with Steve Jobs. A relationship we never thought would end.
He wasn't my hero. I looked up to him but never wanted to be him. I looked up to him as people would look at a mythical figure. He was mystifying in that what he did seemed obvious in hindsight; so why did no one else have the foresight?
With that said, I do not believe Steve Jobs was a visionary. He was an evolutionary. He made evolutionary changes that led to revolutions. He was a change agent. He joined the loose connections.
And he set the standard of standards.
Consider these:
-all commencement speeches are now compared to his 2005 Stanford commencement speech
-all Superbowl commercials are compared to his 1984 ad. Plus he made the Superbowl the platform for big commercials.
-how devices are un-boxed or judged against Apple's packaging and now there are web sites just about unboxing.
-advertisement campaigns are judged against Apple's 'Think Different' campaign which he wrote copy for
-Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web on Steve Jobs' post-Apple NEXT computer
-Apple stores are the most successful retail stores in the world and Steve Jobs had final say in their architectural design
-then of course, look at phones, music players, tablet computers, computers, music stores, and video rentals before Apple entered those markets
Steve Jobs really did change everything. So when you see comments from people saying "I never used Apple products but..." they are misguided. Everyone has benefited from Apple. Because to compete, companies have had to be more like Apple in order to succeed. For just one example look at Android phones before and after the iPhone.
Apple design has spilled over all of our culture.
There won't be a "next Steve Jobs". But what we will start hearing is "so and so is the Steve Jobs of X industry".
Steve Jobs was our team captain. If we were visited by extraterrestrials and they demanded one specimen of humanity to interact with the world would have chosen Steve Jobs as our captain. And the amount of one word expletives I saw at the news of his death sounded to me like our reaction when the team we love loses unexpectedly. Our team captain had failed.
Steve was an actual Monomyth but we are used to our stories having a happy ending. He was supposed to live at the end of the story. If he can succumb to the inevitable then we all must succumb to the inevitable too.
That was a kick in the teeth.
Perhaps his greatest evolution is yet to be seen? Perhaps he did succeed in creating a culture of innovation of innovation at Apple.
I just can't stop thinking "What Now?"
For me, I plan on getting his biography this weekend.
Some of the things I have been reading about Steve:
"For an entire generation of young Americans who had every reason to believe what they were being told by their teachers, their friends, their bosses, even their family - that their dreams and ambitions were unattainable and that we were just cogs in a great machine we could never understand - Steve Jobs was living, breathing, human proof that it was all wrong. We were all vessels for something greater, we had it within ourselves to put on a game face and stand up to everything and everyone. He was the personification of "Hell, no!""
I'm not the first person to think this. Search the web for "universe is a simulation evidence" and you get lots of good results.
Caching, prefetching, buffer overflows - terms from computing where an attempt is made to make information available before it is asked for or having information located where it shouldn't be located.
Experimentation appears to indicate that the Future can leak into the Present. As far as I know there is not a biological explanation for this. However, we have a computational analogy for this happening.
Makes you think the Ancient Alien theory isn't so crazy after-all, perhaps they are just checking in on their grand simulation.
* You'll beam up your friends in 3-D
* Batteries will breathe air to power our devices
* You won't need to be a scientist to save the planet
* Your commute will be personalized
* Computers will help energize your city
These are so general and sound a lot like a 'Popular Science' magazine cover article from the 1960's. I have no idea what IBM is thinking here other than trying to get some attention via a press release.
In no order these are my musings for 2011:
the decline of Microsoft will accelerate
the popularity of Android devices will peak
Facebook will attempt to replace the OS
Apple will NOT release a television but will make apps available on AppleTV
peak oil will be accepted as having happened and an oil production plateau will become conventional wisdom
the future of energy research will be concentrated in bio-butanol, oil from algae, and technology that replicates photosynthesis by combing CO2 and sunlight to produce energy
people will stop talking about ethanol and the hydrogen economy
Ford's reputation will surpass Toyota's
wok cooking will be the big food trend in 2011
Verlander and Bonderman will have amazing years leading to a Tigers vs Phillies World Series
cancellations of cable TV and landline telephone subscriptions will increase logarithmically; providers will lose money until the figure out it is a packet based world and customers will pay for those packets
continuing research will indicate things thought to be good aren't necessarily always a good thing; things like marriage, mortgages, running shoes, pillows, drugs/vitamins, the suburbs, college
the phrase "climate chaos" will replace "climate change"
wingnuts will get even nuttier
Twitter and the Tea Party will both be replaced by the "new thing" in communications and politics respectively, pleasing many people
the economy will get stuck between oil prices and stock prices - as one goes up the other goes down leading to stagflation until a non-carbon based energy breakthrough is reached which will break the cycle
there will NOT be an Arrested Development movie
alien life will be acknowledged/discovered and the response will be the same as if someone told you Liberace was gay ("and so....??")
political parties begin talking about an economics which includes social costs
So those last two are more about my wishes than actual predictions. Oh well.
What I mean by that is that humans and dogs have a fundamental connection, like England and America's special relationship, that has been forged over the past 100,000 years. It is in our genes to live with dogs and them with us. Anyone who says they don't like dogs is simply expressing a learned emotion based on a bad experience.
Here's my hypothesis: genetic evidence indicates dogs began separating from wolves at least 100,000 years ago. Human DNA studies indicate there was a "population bottleneck" 50,000 to 100,000 years ago most likely after the Mt. Toba eruption 70,000 years ago. Therefore, I hypothesize that when humanity was down to its last few thousand families dogs had to be there, and it was because of dogs that humans survived. But what was the relationship? That is the PhD candidate question.
And these are the other questions I have (at this time):
Did dogs begin their morphological changes at this time?
Did humanity survive because dogs were with them?
Did only humans who could bond with canines survive?
Not sure any of this will be known with any certainty unless time travel is invented, but my educated guess is that we all have bred into us a connection to dogs that comes from a time when they saved us and we saved them.
For further reading, PBS's Nova program last night got me thinking about the time line. See: Dogs Decoded
And for information on the human DNA studies see Wikipedia's entry on human population bottlenecks which includes a link to the "Toba catastrophe".
There's been a lot of hyperbole about the public option for health insurance. So I made a list of services that have thriving private industries that compete with a basic option offered by the government. And in these cases it seems that by the government offering or sponsoring a similar service it is allowing private companies to focus on their core competencies rather than driving private industries out of business.
- the post office competes with UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. - Social Security competes with all of the other retirement savings plans - private mercenaries take jobs from the U.S. Military - electricity in the first half of the Twentieth Century (See: How FDR Enacted his “Public Option”) - telephone service in rural areas (See: History of Rural Telecommunications) - Amtrak competes with other commuting and traveling options - roads are paid for with taxes yet there are still private roads - School. This may be the biggest one of all. Almost everyone sends their kids to public school (a public option). Use private school and you're elitist; home school and you're a little odd yet earnest. And education is very much in your hands. Like health... how you take care of yourself influences how healthy you are. A government paid insurance plan would still allow people to get their own private insurance but you could still take care of yourself at home if you choose.
So my question for people is: if you're against the "public option" does that mean you avoid all of the public options?
And what is interesting is in reading the history of these various policies all of the arguments were made then as we're hearing now regarding health insurance. Namely, government has no role in providing education/electricity/phone service and that private companies cannot compete with a public sponsored service. It really is like they all work from the same template. Or mad lib.
I stopped being a Republican when I realized the party was more concerned with protecting the rights of corporations over individuals; with socializing risks and privatizing rewards; and in general just representing ignorance in economics and history. Not that I can comfortably call myself a Democrat either. But I can support Obama because I believe him to be a pragmatist. The best description of my leanings is Liberaltarian.
