Tim Greaton's Blog, page 2

We may soon be traveling in tubes at 3000 miles per hour...

If you've ever traveled from the East Coast to the West Coast by plane, then you know it makes for a long, long flight. Even in the first class seats, a full day of flying is just too much.

All of that may soon be changing, and once again Elon Musk (Space-X, Tesla Motors, PayPal) may be the personality behind a massive change. Shifting the paradigm is a term I've heard over the years; disrupting industries is another.

Regardless of how you label his efforts, Elon Musk is serving up civilization-altering ideas using technology that already exists. Some say he is Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Howard Hughes, all wrapped into a modern forty-two-year-old package.

So what's happening now? Simply put, Elon is doing it again.

For nearly a year he has been promising to reveal a high-tech option to California's planned high speed railway. The current plan calls for a super-fast train (built by 2029) to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles in under three hours at speeds just over 200 miles per hour.

What's wrong with that? From Elon's perspective: everything!

Elon believes he could build what he calls The Hyperloop for 1/10th the cost. He also says it would easily make the same trip in under 45 minutes, would be Earthquake and weather proof, and could run entirely on solar power.

I know, I know. It's impossible, right?

Don't be so quick to judge. Elon Musk has already performed not one, not two, but three industrial miracles that have already changed our world.

He first thought it would be a great idea if there were a way to send money over the internet to any country in the world, without involving all sorts of complications like banks and Brinks trucks. PayPal now does exactly that and more.

Elon then decided that world governments were not doing nearly enough to improve the cost and methods of moving mankind into space. And so was born Space-X, a company that has revolutionized the entire space industry, both in affordability and in technological progress. Next up, according to company leadership: a permanent colony on Mars!

Of course, we also don't want to forget Elon's Tesla Motors. Even as a dozen solar car players have struggled or folded, Tesla has successfully brought long-range electric cars to market. Their Model S currently has customer waiting lists that are months long, and Consumer Reports called it the best car--not the best electric car--that they have ever rated.

Not bad for a tiny South African boy with science fiction dreams.

Today, Elon promises to release his plans for the Hyperloop, a 21st-century transportation system that is believed to consist of individual pressurized cars traveling inside an evacuated tube, likely using reverse polarity to keep the traveling compartments soaring, friction-free, above a magnetic rail.

If a can't-miss personality exists today, it's Elon Musk. And the fact that he's releasing his Hyperloop idea to the public, patent free, suggests that he's serious about displacing our current long-distance travel methods. He says if no one can successfully place the Hyperloop into mainstream use, he will do it himself as soon as electric cars are in every driveway and as soon as Mars has a human colony settled and growing.

Knowing Elon, we might want to think about selling our airline stocks.

Watch the news today for the big release. In the meantime, you can learn more about The Hyperloop transport system here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/inventor-entrepreneur-elon-musk-to-share-design-for-super-high-speed-travel-monday/2013/08/12/b4c355ce-0321-11e3-bfc5-406b928603b2_story.html



 

Elysium is science fiction filmmaking at its gritty best...

  Elysium is one serious and surprisingly solid science fiction story placed against a backdrop that is just a few degrees shy of breathtaking. Neill Blomkamp and Matt Damon have together created a film that is destined to entertain audiences for years to come.
 Blomkamp dipped liberally into his gritty District 9-style dystopia to create 2154 Los Angeles, a devastated remnant that is representative of the great cities that remain on Terra firma. What was once a dazzling metropolis is now a labyrinth of overpopulation, poverty, and desperation.On the orbiting satellite Elysium, however, the wealthy enjoy a much different existence, one filled with beauty, luxury and, most importantly, health. This pampered sliver of mankind enjoys instant access to state-of-the-art medical technology that can cure virtually any ailment while also extending life by two and three times the average of the unfortunates crawling around on the dying planet below. Max Da Costa (Damon), an ex-con, is supposed to feel fortunate to have one of the few jobs in Los Angeles, and the truth is he does his job building surveillance robots as best he can. But after being trapped in a room flooded with fatal radiation, he is fired and forced to sign a liability waiver in return for medication that will ease his pain during his last five expected days of life.Doomed unless he can access the amazing technology in the sky, Max seeks out a criminal mastermind from his past. He makes a deal for portage to Elysium that involves being outfitted with cybernetic implants that will allow him to steal technology from the company that literally stole his life. Without going into a description filled with spoilers, let’s say that Max is in for a hell of a lot more than he planned. The visuals are spectacular and the logic holds up better than we’ve come to expect from Hollywood. The acting from everyone including Jodie Foster is solid, and the ending will leave you with a lot to think about. Elysium gets 9 out of 10 stars from me. You can learn more about Elysium and see the movie trailer right here: http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/elysium-2013/trailers/elysium-trailer-200248321.html   

Interview with spiritual author Cesar about his YA novel Boy Who Dreams...

 

 

 
 

Today, in the Forum, we have a fascinating spiritual writer who goes simply by the name Cesar. He’s here to talk with us about his YA novel Boy Who Dreams.

Tim Greaton: It’s great to have you with us, Cesar. I guess the best place to start would be early in your life. I understand you had a shocking experience when you were a child. You could tell us about it?
Cesar: I remember being at my grandmother’s flat in Portsmouth as a child, I guess I would have been about seven or eight and I was searching for my Transformers toy and looked under an armchair only to find a head staring back at me. It was a ghost, I guess. Although, now, these many years later, I am unsure whether it actually happened or not. Either way, I chose to include this story into my book Boy who Dreams. The same thing happens to the character, but at school. 
Tim Greaton: Many authors are bubbling wells of creativity. The same is true for you. Could you tell us about your other creative pastime?
Cesar: I really enjoy painting Celtic art onto canvas and furniture. My favorite of my paintings is the Celtic tree with interlocking branches and hundreds and hundreds of perfectly shaped dots that form Celtic patterns of leaves.
Tim Greaton: What genres do you read? 
Cesar: Though I read most genres, it’s mostly YA or fiction. Sometimes I do read historical or psychology books, as they interest me a lot, too. 
Tim Greaton: I count at least five of your books available now. Could you tell us a little about some of them?
Cesar:  As you mentioned, we’ll be talking about the Boy Who Dreams today. That was my third book. My first book, Prayers Poems Songs was a collection of thoughts and prayers that I wrote when I was a teenager.  My second book, Book of Prophecies, was probably the first published book of its kind since Nostradamus in the 16th century.  To see the rest of Cesar's interview right now, visit Tim Greaton Forum  

How would you like your steak...printed or Petri dish?

A certain author has been a vegetarian for going on twenty years. Now, it's true my choice was first made for health reasons (lower rates of heart disease and cancer) because a close friend had just died of a brain tumor, and my wife and I took care of his toddler children for a day while his wife dealt with her loss and the funeral arrangements.

However, I could easily have made the same choice for animal humane reasons, for environmental reasons, or even for just plain fear of steroids and other livestock food additives. It would appear, however, that the time may soon come for me to revisit the entire issue.

The current technological revolution will soon produce actual steak, fish, and chicken in lab-grown environments. And, though slightly farther out on the horizon, 3-D printers will soon be assembling proteins, piece-by-piece, not unlike the way food was created on the starship Enterprise.

So the real question is: how long will it take for these new technologies to move into mainstream acceptance? How long before you and I will actually add these foods to our weekly purchases?

I believe the sea change for lab-grown and printed foods will happen fast, making them the choice for the majority of us almost as soon as the processes are universally available and affordable. No surprise ingredients and no slaughterhouse horror stories--that's a hard combination to beat, especially if flavor and texture is top notch.

You can learn more about the $330,000 lab-grown burger that was just eaten here: http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-05/national/41081437_1_stem-cells-lab-grown-meat-burger

To see where the 3-D food printing technology stands, check out this article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2013/08/06/wheres-the-beef-its-in-the-lab/

By the way, both of the above articles appeared in THE Washington Post. Should it surprise us that Jeff Bezos (Amazon Owner and fifty-billionaire) just purchased the paper that commonly reports on the cutting edge of technology? My money says it will soon be the tech-paper of record for much of the world.



 

Absolutely True! NASA is working on Star Trek-ish Warp Engine!

There have been teasers floating around about this for six months now, but we now know it is true: NASA has begun investigating a possible warp drive to send spaceships soaring at faster-than-light speeds. The impossible dream has now become the investigated dream.

Elon Musk of Space-X hinted a few months ago that he believed faster-than-light travel was impossible but that it might be possible to bend space in some fashion so that two distant points would effectively be much closer together. Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking have both published books that along the way attempted to simplify the concept of flexible space.

The best example I have ever heard (which originated with one of them) goes something like this: imagine our solar system as a huge piece of black rubber stretched across space. Now imagine that someone has pinched and pulled out one section of the rubber: that is what a planet or the sun looks like.

The point being: gravity already has a slight warping effect on space and time. I suppose a warp drive might artificially increase that pinching effect.

In any event, this is simply one more example of how science is finally getting around to revolutionizing human existence in the big ways that were envisioned by science fiction writers starting more than a hundred years ago. With changes like this on the horizon, there is reason to believe the current worldwide economic doldrums will pass!

To learn more details about NASA's efforts, click right here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2374671/NASA-scientists-begin-warp-speed-experiments-change-Star-Treks-science-fiction-fact.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

Mars colonists meet in Washington State to prep for one-way trip...

Space enthusiasts rejoice, because for the first time in human history a race is underway to colonize another world. Remember, our last space race was simply to orbit the Earth and visit the Moon, but currently there are at least a dozen organizations prepping real Martian colony plans (there are a couple dozen viable space colony programs afoot if you include plans to colonize the Moon).

We have talked about the various Mars programs by NASA, the European Union, Space-X, and others, but it's been a while since we talked about the Mars One program. Here's the Mars One description from www.Wikipedia.org: "Mars One is a non-profit organization that plans to establish a permanent human colony on Mars by 2023. The private spaceflight project is led by Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, who announced official plans for the Mars One mission in May 2012. [1]"


On Saturday, August 3rd, a group of 50 applicants for the program gathered at George Washington State University to discuss the permanent colony that will begin launching one-way colonists in 2023. This program is non-profit and is already receiving gobs of funding from corporate sponsors.

Why are corporations interested? Simply because Mars One is going to be the first extra-terrestrial reality program ever created.

While we watch colonists train, fly, and settle on the red planet, corporations will be reaping the advertising rewards of millions of viewers around the world.

You can learn more about Mars One right on their website here: http://www.mars-one.com/en/. You can learn more about Saturday's meeting in Washington right here: http://www.space.com/22238-mars-one-private-colony-volunteers-meeting.html.
  

Avatar, the #1 movie of all time, will have three sequels...

The latest box office tally for James Cameron's masterpiece Avatar has it earning $760,507,625 in the U.S. and Canada and $2,782,275,172 worldwide. Yes, that makes it the number one movie of all-time.

In case you're curious, Cameron's Titanic takes the #2 international slot, and it's #3 domestically, behind Gone With the Wind, which is #2 domestically adjusted for inflation.

If you'd like to see all forms of movie box office charts (including how much each actor's movies have earned) as well as weekly box office numbers and news be sure to save www.boxofficemojo.com to your favorites. It's a must-see site for movie fans.

James Cameron's team has just announced that there will be three--not two--sequels to the blockbuster of blockbusters. Production for the next three Avatar movies will simultaneously begin in 2014, and they will be released in December of 2016, 2017, and 2018.

You can find out more right here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-23546537.

 

We relived a scene from Stephen King's Pet Cemetery....

Thanks for stopping by.

I posted a note to my Facebook followers today, letting them know that my daily messages can now be found on Pinterest. Feel free to swap and share however you like.

Those daily images are "free share" and so are my words. If you make T-shirts or some such thing, let me know and I'll spread the word for you here and around (royalty free, of course, as long as you buy a Tim Greaton book sometime in the next twenty or so years) :-)

This morning, I spotted an exciting news article about a cure for Alzheimer's being close. I would have blogged about it, but in my quick perusal it seemed that this miracle drug still has a little ways to go.

I promise we'll talk about it when it gets closer to mainstream availability. In the meantime, you can learn more here: http://www.express.co.uk/news/health/419367/Alzheimer-s-cure-is-close-Experts-hail-new-drug-breakthrough

I'm sorry to say that our rabbit died on Thursday. He was deathly ill this spring, so I placed him in a large 8x10' grassy pen, which was attached to an 8x10' shed.

Somehow, even after the vet failed, he came out of it and seemed to enjoy the last couple of months. I noticed he was sluggish the last week or so, however.

Anyway, we will miss Rascal/Fuzzbucket/Fuzzy. We will also eschew any further rabbits, largely because my wife is allergic to them (which Rascal taught her) and because it's sad to have them spend all their time alone.

Unless they are siblings or grow up together young, they tend to fight with each other, or so I'm told. Also, males will eat their young if they are left together after the tiny ones appear.

Finally, we have the story of ghost cat. My son came into my office, mid-week last week, and said that an elderly neighbor was at the door.

An orange tiger cat had been found dead a few houses down. We have two orange tiger cats, one having been given to us by my daughter a few weeks back (for reasons I have yet to fathom).

Anyway, my seventeen-year-old son and I followed the woman to the body, where my son unequivocally stated, "That's Molly." Because she was so skittish, new, and tended to spend most of her time in his room, I acquiesced.

Though she looked a little thinner, I thought it was because she had been squished in traffic. Sadly, we brought her home and buried her.

Not long after we put the shovels away, my son appeared in my office again, face white, with one of the most confused and frightened expressions I have ever seen. "Dad, Molly is purring in my room."

Figuring we were either reliving a scene from Stephen King's Pet Cemetary or that I had gone from hardworking writer to perverse pet corpse thief, I decided to call the police. They informed me that they had been looking for a dead cat spotted by a driver and asked if I would mind digging it back up.

I proceeded to do just that, and was thankful that I had buried the poor thing in a trash bag so my transgressions had not soiled its fur. I did, however, explain to my son that IF the bag turned up empty, the police would be leaving with the undead creature purring in his room.

Unfortunately for the mystery cat, and some poor family missing their pet, the body was still there and available for travel when a policeman arrived. My son and I promised not to steal any more furry corpses just before he drove away.



 

How can you disrupt your industry and our world?

Our world is teetering on the edge of a precipice, and on the horizon is a gaping black pit known as hopelessness. This blog and its author are known for optimism so this is an odd way to begin a post, but it's imperative that we identify the problem before we prescribe a solution.

When we say hopelessness, we might also mean "less hope." Here's a litmus test: do you believe that life will be better for your children, your grandchildren, your nieces, your nephews?

If your answer is yes, then you might find this post pointless. Unfortunately, too many of us have felt just the opposite.

In comparison to twenty years ago, it's harder to earn money, more money is needed, and job/business prospects seem to grow tighter, even bleak with time. Some would say that our world is swirling around a very large economic drain.

It doesn't have to be this way...and this author is not convinced it will be. "Why?"

We need only to look at Elon Musk for that answer. Elon, as readers of this blog know, is the founder of Tesla electric cars and Space-X, the space exploration company that is actually profitable and cutting the costs of getting into space every single day.

Past blogs will talk a little about those efforts, but what we're focusing on today is what is commonly known as disruptive technologies. But what does that mean?

Disrupt simply means to upturn or replace, and that's exactly what Tesla motors is trying to do: it's trying to replace gasoline engines with all electric cars. Profit is not the motive for Tesla, getting the entire population driving electric cars (whatever the brand) is their sole goal.

Space-X is doing the same exact thing...only with cost reductions and quality improvements. They are perfecting materials and technologies to get us into space more cheaply and safely (next up is a reusable rocket that can return to Earth and land on its own legs, which will reduce the cost of launches from sixty million to three million, or less).

Of course, both companies need to pay the bills and seek to make a profit as they grow and develop, but the key here is that profit is only a secondary (though necessary) consideration along the way to the main goal: to change their industry dramatically.

So, that's our point. The internet has disrupted everything from mail, to phone, to banking, to shopping. The list is nearly endless.

But has the internet improved our lives?

It has if you consider email is instant and free. It has if you consider that few people pay long distance charges anymore.

It has if you like the convenience of checking your bank balance, paying your bills, or even scanning checks at home to deposit them. The internet has also improved things if you consider that matching a cup and saucer from your grandmother's china set might have been impossible twenty years ago, and today you can find one in minutes or less.

Finally, I would like to point out that people all over the world can now learn, communicate, and enjoy the benefits of a modern life through minicomputers known as smart phones. The third world finally has a shot of catching up to the rest of us.

There are still thousands of industries that need someone to shake them by the throat and drag them into the 21st Century. Change can lead us to a bright future with improved jobs, wages and life for everyone.

What's required?

That's a great question, and only you can answer it. Technology exists to change everything, and if we will all step up and change our companies, our workplaces, our hobbies, we will find huge improvements sweeping this world.

Is there a better, more efficient, more profitable way to do something at your place of work? Tell the boss and make it happen.

If you own the company, look for incremental changes. Stack up one hundred tiny one-percent changes and you've disrupted your company and chances are your industry by one hundred percent.

Disrupting our world has provided tens of thousands of high-paying jobs to people in the United States while also earning Elon Musk billions of dollars.

What can you do? Are you up for the challenge?

Researching pressure cookers earned one family a visit from Homeland Security...

We often think of ourselves as living completely free and private lives, but here in the U.S. (and no doubt to some extent in all countries) that is not entirely true. Michele Catalano of Long Island, NY found out the hard way.

She and her husband were researching pressure cookers for a family recipe and the word got out. The police say that they received a tip, but it's at least as reasonable to assume they pulled her search history off the internet.

Now, fortunately for the Catalanos, their interest in pressure cookers was innocent but had it not been, many of us might feel entirely differently about the invasion of privacy. Safety versus freedom, freedom versus safety: it's an equation that is rising to the top faster than many of us realize.

The recent spate of "government secrets" being released by U.S. citizens is very likely the tip of the iceberg. The U.S. government does spy on all of its citizens, but the real question is: do we want it to; is it worth the tradeoff to avoid other 9/11-types of events?

This author remains highly-aware and concerned but undecided. How about you?

You can find in-depth information about the Catalanos and their ordeal here http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/01/new-york-police-terrorism-pressure-cooker