Matthew Mather's Blog, page 3

CyberStorm update…and prologue!

Phew.

It has been a rough couple of weeks, so I haven’t posted anything in a while, but now gearing up for the launch of CyberStorm on March 15th. I thought I would share the prologue with everyone!

CyberStorm — Prologue

IN THE DIM light I could see five people huddled together in the bare metal box, sitting on soiled sheets and clothing. One of them threw me a blanket, and I took it, mumbling my thanks while I covered myself, shivering.

Can I trust them? I didn’t have much choice. Freezing cold and wet, I’d die out there on my own. This small box was as close to salvation as I had anymore. How can I fight back when I can barely survive? I had to get back into the mountains.

“How long have they been here?” I asked again, my teeth chattering.

Silence.

I was about to give up when one of the occupants sitting in the corner away from me, a kid with blond hair and a baseball cap, replied, “A few weeks.”

“What happened?”

“Cyberstorm, that’s what happened,” said a kid with a Mohawk sitting next to him. He had about a dozen piercings, and that was just what I could see. “Where have you been?”

“New York.”

A pause. “That was pretty intense up there, huh?”

I nodded—all the horror summed up in one tiny gesture.

“Where’s our military?” I asked. “How could they let us get invaded?”

“I’m glad they’re here,” replied Mohawk.

“You’re glad?” I yelled. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Blondie sat upright.

“Hey, man, calm the hell down. We don’t want any trouble, okay?”

Shaking my head, I pulled the blanket up around me.

These kids are the future? No wonder all this had happened. Just weeks ago, America had seemed indestructible, immutable, but now…

Somehow, we had failed.

All that remained important was to find my family, to keep them safe.

Sighing, I closed my eyes and turned away from the others, pressing my face against the cold metal, listening to the rumble that pulled me deeper into the night.

CyberStorm is going to beta…

I am happy to announce that I’ve finished writing CyberStorm, the sort-of prequel to Atopia. At 440 pages in the raw first draft it is a pretty good size, and I’m going to try and work it down to under 400 to keep the story tight. Next weekend I will be releasing a draft to my beta readers, with a goal of doing a full release on March.15th.

If you want a sneak peek, here is the prologue!

Prologue

“FOR GOD’S SAKE, don’t let them take the children!”

Lauren, cradling little Ellarose in her arms, was crouching in the corner across from me, as far from the cellar door as possible. It was dark, smelling of sawdust and oil and old tools. Luke was standing next to her, his face streaked with mud, mute with terror. Groaning, I pulled and squirmed to get my jammed leg out from under the pile of crashed logs.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Mitchell, I’m not going to let anyone in here.”

Tony, standing up on the stairs, squinted into the sunlight streaming in through cracks in the broken wood of the cellar door. “There are four of them.”

“We killed yer friend,” came a whiney voice. “Chuck was his name, weren’t it?”

Lauren began crying, clutching the two children closer.

“We didn’t wanna do that, mind you,” the whine continued. “Now this is all messed up.”

“Leave us alone!” I yelled. Tony took a step back down the stairs, pointing his rifle up at the cellar door.

“You know we can’t do that, don’t you? Send those kids and your lady out. We don’t wanna hurt no kids.”

I strained again to pull myself from the wreckage, in bone-cracking, skin-ripping agony. Lauren was violently shaking her head.

“Don’t let them eat my babies, Mike.”

And then silence—just my heart pounding in my ears and a shuffling through the leaves outside. I tried to steady myself, blotting out the pain, making sure the safety was off the .38. Tony glanced over, nodding, telling me he was ready.

With a terrific roar, the cellar door exploded. Tony staggered back, dropping to one knee. Another shotgun blast caught him and he spun sideways, but still managed to bring up his rifle and pull the trigger. Squeals of pain erupted outside, followed by volley after volley.

Tony grunted and tried to get out of the way, collapsing in front of me. I reached for his hand and pulled him toward me, but it was too late. His body convulsed. Looking into my eyes, he blinked back tears, and then went still.

“Goddamn it boy, you blew my cousin Henry’s ear right off! Either you send out yer woman and those kids, or we’ll burn the whole goddamn place down!”

Crying in frustration, I yanked my leg again, shredding flesh, but I couldn’t get free. Lauren was sobbing silently.

“So what’ll it be, boy?”

This couldn’t be happening, My God, this couldn’t be happening . . .

Atopia and Armageddon

Seeing as today is the day-to-end-all-days according to the Maya, I thought I’d throw down a little on my ideas regarding Armageddon and how it related to the development of Atopia.

As Jarrod Diamond illustrated so effectively in his book “Collapse”, complex societies in the past have almost all collapsed as a result of the natural environment surrounding them being used up.

This is easiest to document in South Pacific islands, such as Easter Island, where the society is isolated, but examples abound such as the dichotomy between poor-and-desperate Haiti (which destroyed its natural environment) and green-and-prosperous Dominican (which didn’t) which occupy the two halves of Hispaniola island.

Now, for the first time in human history, more humans live in urban rather than rural environments, the cities have become the islands that we live upon, and these islands (whether we acknowledge it or not) depend entirely upon the natural environment that surrounds them for food and water. We are fast using up the natural environments surrounding the urban islands where most of us now live, and there is nowhere else for us to go.

While many future predictions of disaster have proven unfounded (such as the ogres of Malthusian exponential population explosion) and others have been tempered (such as Toffler’s Future Shock, although information overload is still on the horizon), the World3 model created by the Club of Rome in the 1970’s and published in the book Limits to Growth (and updated in the 30 Year Update, World3:2004) has proven to be right on the mark. This complex model takes into account everything from population to pollution to technology innovation, and has been a near perfect predictor of levels of human activity for the past 40 years. This is the model I used in Atopia.

All of the paths upwards to “peak population” (currently predicted by almost any model to be about 9 to 10 billion people near mid-21st century) are fairly smooth and straightforward, but, ominously, it is extremely difficult to arrive at a “soft landing” stable population after this point.

Almost all “declining population” solutions predict precipitous population declines, which translates to large scale death due to disease, famine, war and the collapse of the environment. Coming up with a “smooth landing” would require coordinated global activity by governments, something we haven’t been able to demonstrate to date.

An addition to the previous idea is that the modern world, since the Renaissance, has been built on a mindset of “growth”; larger economies, more money, more people, more technology. The largest part of this is driven simply by increasing population. In the middle of this century, world populations will start dropping quickly; this has already started in highly developed countries such as Japan. GDPs will start to drop endlessly, turning most of economic theory on its head. The problems endemic to Japan, such as deflation, will begin to consume the world until we can figure out new models. This will take time.

A corollary to the first two points is that almost all of human conflict has been a story about resources, the depletion of resources and the fight over remaining resources. As natural resources deplete, humans will naturally fight for what’s left. Even if we are merging with machines, human nature will remain, and human nature is to fight for resources. By the middle of this century, we will be experiencing very difficult economic situations as GDPs start shrinking, temperatures will be increasing, and rising sea levels will start to force mass migrations from low lying areas just as we start to experience the start of severe natural resource shortages. Major conflicts over all of these will erupt.

The fight for water is the prime example of what is to come, and is central to the “Weather Wars” in  The Complete Atopia Chronicles. While much of the 20th century could be characterized as a fight over oil, the 21st century will be a fight over water; as Mark Twain once said, “Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting.”

Water equals Food & Industry & Money. As temperatures rise and water tables drop, water will become an increasingly scarce commodity in much of the world. To illustrate this, a September article in USA Today documented the fact in many municipalities water prices have more than doubled across most of the US in the past decade. As the majority of the US population ages, an ever increasing proportion of Americans are retiring, and they tend to move south to places that won’t have any water in 20 or 30 years. Rising populations in southern US cities (read: Atlanta, Phoenix) and fast diminishing water tables will result in extremely high water prices.

The real fight, however, will be because there are currently no international treaties governing “upstream” water. Six of the greatest rivers in the world flow out of the Himalayas, and collectively provide fresh water to over 3 billion people, half of the world’s population. Two of these rivers (Yangtze and Yellow) flow into China, while the other four (Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra and Mekong) flow into India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Indochina peninsula (Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia etc.).

However, all of these rivers start in the Tibetan plateau located within the control of China, and China has already begun creating a system of dams high in the Himalayas to divert water flow. There are over three-thousand cubic miles of freshwater stored in the glaciers in the Himalayas, and the Chinese have started a determined program to capture all of this. As the world’s largest river delta in Bangladesh dries-up, and everyone from Laos to Vietnam goes thirsty, and nuclear-armed Pakistan and India see the Indus and Ganges dry-up, it could lead to conflicts. See here for an example.

In Atopia Chronicles, I added another more speculative wrinkle to this: the ability to alter weather, in particular where and when it rains. The technology to start early the process of rain in clouds has already been demonstrated (by seeding clouds with microscopic particles that start the process of “nucleation” – essentially giving the raindrops a starting point) and also technology to alter ocean surface temperatures (by seeding ocean surfaces with iron dust to feed blooms of plankton that then soak up the sun’s energy and heat the water, potentially diverting weather systems). So what happens when countries start seeding rain clouds to empty their water on their country and not the next, or start shifting weather patterns to bring water to their country? This why I called them the “Weather Wars”.

OK, phew, so that’s my brain dump. Anybody got any thoughts?

SHAKESPEARE system for helping new authors figure out self-publishing

I get a lot of requests from new authors looking for tips and advice for how to navigate the self-publishing book market. Atopia Chronicles was my first novel, and yet it managed to spring straight into the best-seller list on Amazon within weeks of release. A part of this sort of success is always luck, but a whatever luck I had was helped along by a focused and organized marketing campaign.

My background is as an entrepreneur, and I have managed my own successful start-up as well as helping start many other companies, handling everything from writing business plans to raising capital. I applied that same structured way of think about starting a new business to the business of marketing a book, and today I am sharing my SHAKESPEARE system for helping new authors reach self-publishing success.

A special thanks goes out to Hugh Howey (of authoring Wool fame), who after reviewing my plan, added the final “E” for “Engaging with your readers”, something Hugh is absolutely the master at!

If you have any questions, suggestions, comments, feel free to email me!

So here it is: SHAKESPEARE

(This is written for writers producing fictional works, but most of the same principles should work for non-fiction as well)

NOTE: Please feel free to reprint or copy this as you wish, but on the condition that it refers to me, Matthew Mather, as the author and includes a link to my book, Atopia Chronicles: http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Atopia-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B008S1YN1U/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348403336&sr=8-1&keywords=atopia

Serialize

As attention spans shorten in the online (and real) world, readers don’t trust a new author enough to read 400 pages to get the point. For a new author, a winning approach is to serialize, to create your work as a set of progressively longer stories that connect together through cliffhangers to get a reader hooked. And speaking of that…

Hook

The first short story needs to be punchy and tell a complete story in itself while leaving the reader wanting to know more. Even more than that, you need to hook the reader on the first page somehow, create a mystery, a reason and need to keep reading.

Amazon

To start, focus only on Amazon. I’m not here to promote Amazon, but the first rule of entrepreneurism is to focus, focus, focus. The large majority of revenue in digital books comes from Amazon, with a small minority coming from all of the other players combined. So when you start, focus on Amazon by itself; getting reviews, getting up in the ranking. By only going on Amazon, you force people to buy from one place and thus drive up your rankings in this one spot. Once you have achieved some success there, expand to other platforms (FYI the easiest way to get on other platforms is just to use Smashwords).

Key networks

Make sure to use your personal social networks to maximum effect. Post on Facebook and ask people to re-post your postings for free book offers. Make sure to email everyone at work on the “internal” email (ask your boss first, of course!) Use your LinkedIn network to mention that you have a book out. What other networks are you a part of?

Try emailing top-selling authors in your category when you release the first installments of your work. Ask them to read the first one (by starting with serialized shorts, it makes it easier for other authors to try reading your work), or just ask them to post on their blog or Facebook. When I released Atopia, I had about five or six top-selling authors who posted to their readers for me!

Empathize

It is critical to create a character that you introduce readers to right away that they can empathize with. People read still primarily because they want to feel an emotional involvement with a character they meet in your writing. Keep this front and center of your mind when writing.

Select Program on Amazon

Use the Amazon Select Program: You can offer your book for $0 (free) for 5 days each 3 months. Used effectively, this is an extremely potent tool for reaching an audience.

There are at least 40 websites I use to promote a “free weekend” for my books (email me for a list) – these sites are mostly specific to books that go free on Amazon Select and are mostly free to use for promotion.

If you can plan it ahead of time, write out all of the parts of your serialized work ahead of time, and then each two weeks release one of them, promoting it on Amazon select for free and on the promotional websites. I can usually get 4000+ downloads of a free book when I do this.

Perceived Value

Create perceived value by offering a deal. For instance, try and divide your ‘whole’ work into 6 parts, and sell each for $0.99, and then offer the whole ‘collection’ at half price, e.g. $2.99 for all six. This creates perceived value on the part of the buyer when you start to sell the whole collection

Editing

If your work is not edited well, you will get killed in the reviews and in word of mouth. Go on Craigslist and find some just-graduated (and unemployed) English lit major to edit your book on the cheap. A “real” editor can be extremely expensive; using unemployed English-lit majors will be of much lesser quality but will cost hundreds of dollars, not thousands. There is no excuse to not get an external editor of some kind, and not getting one will kill your chances of success.

All free posting websites

Craigslist and other free online classified ads are the secret weapon for a new authors. It is incredibly difficult to get outside feedback when you are a new writer. My solution? Post an ad saying you’ll pay someone $10 or $20 to read your book and give you honest feedback. Note that this is not for line editing, but for high level feedback to make your story more engaging in an iterative process.

Bonus: Get 20 people to read your book like this; these people will probably become your biggest promoters and will be happy to write reviews and Facebook and tweet your book when released.

Free PR – When you release your book, create several press releases about different aspects of the book, what it is about, why people would like it. When you release each of the story segments, put these press releases up on the free press release websites. There are about a dozen high quality free release sites out there. Highlight that the short story that is free that week.

Reviews

It is critical to get reviews as this has a direct impact on the Amazon ranking and recommendation system. YOU CANNOT do fake reviews. Apart from the ethical issues, Amazon has an impressive array of technical tools to make this very difficult. Instead, be honest and creative; use friends, family, co-workers; and see my point regarding Craigslist and getting people ready to punt for your project.

Engage

Find any and all ways to engage with your audience once you start to get readers. Do a video blog on YouTube about the process, do a regular blog showing progress on next books and stories, get people to your Facebook page. Just get engaged with them somehow!

You are already part machine – proprioperception

I’ve had many readers who have wanted more detail on my idea of how humans and machines will merge. It seems farfetched, but I have news for you all. You are already part machine.

Let me explain.

One of the central goals of my novel Atopia was to tell the story of of humans and machines merging, but told from an inside, first-person perspective through several people undergoing this transition. Through a series of blog posts I am going to describe the thinking behind my own personal view on this process.

This post is going to be on something called ‘proprioperception’.

Proprioperception is the sensation that an object is a part of your body. It is officially a part of the “haptic” sense. The haptic sense is what, in layperson terms, is called the sense of touch, but is actually five distinct senses: tactile (sensation of things touching your skin, including pressure), kinesthetic (position and orientation of your limbs and body), temperature, skin breach (sensation something has cut the skin surface), and proprioperception (the sensation that things are a part of your body).

What sense gives you the feeling that your finger is a part of your body? The answer is through your proprioceptive sense, and it’s not as straightforward as you would think.

For instance, the “rubber hand” illusion (http://www.pc.rhul.ac.uk/sites/lab/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Tsakiris-Haggard-JEPHPP_2005.pdf )

In this case, stroking a rubber hand (that you are looking at) in the distance at the same time as having someone rub your own hidden hand gives the direct and absolute sensation that the rubber hand is a part of your body. Your mind automatically extends its sense of bodily integrity to “include” the rubber hand as a part of your body. Your proprioceptive sense extending itself.

Another example: if you play tennis, when you swing the racquet, do you think about the racquet hitting the ball? No, the racquet becomes an integral part of your body. As tool-using animals, any tool that we use for long enough becomes a part of us when we use that tool.

But we don’t just use hammers as tools anymore.

Many of the tools we use now are informational tools that exist only in cyberspace, and my argument is that just as the mind extends the sensation of bodily integrity to tools we use in the “real” world, it is also extending the sense of bodily integrity to tools we use every day in the “virtual” world. As we use more and more tools in cyberspace, a certain part of what our mind perceives as “us” is now becoming cyber.

We used to remember phone numbers, but now we use machines to remember them for us. A lot of the information we used to keep in our brains, we now keep in machines, but it still a part is us. We now simply have to remember HOW to find it, not WHAT it is. Our brains have started to adapt to this way of being, to this stimulus. And it is not just our mind, some abstract thing, but our brains have started to physiologically adapt and change their structures to adapt to interfacing with machines in this way. A part of the machines have become a part of us, and we, by extension, are already part machine.

See what I mean?

Facebook has become an integral part of relationship, social interface and memory of past events to many people. Take away Facebook and many people will have the direct sensation of a missing a part of their body. Or, try taking away your cellphone for a day, and see if you don’t have the itch every five minutes to pick it up, see what it happening, to scratch this now missing limb.

This is not illusion, this is our proprioceptive sense making Facebookand these technologies an integral part of our bodies. Removing them triggers the eerie feeling of a missing limb.

So, are you already part machine? Tell me what you think…

More in next posts…

The Phuture this week

This week on PhutureNews featured some interesting headlines from all walks of life.

Unsettlingly, in Wyoming in 2022 the first human sacrifices to videogame gods are predicted with nearly 90% of people thinking something like this will happen. In 2052 the IOC is predicted to finally lift its ban on non-human participants in the Olympics, although a full 10% of people think this may even happen within the next ten years (which begs some obvious questions about what these people are thinking).

In other news, in 2017 Guinness is predicted to come out with the first hangover-proof beer, and while only 37% of people thought this was likely, about 100% of people wished it would be true. In a final and possibly related news story, in 2018 a man in Kingston, Jamaica is predicted to become the first person to ever finish reading Finnegan’s Wake. In a short print review, the reader gave the book just two and a half stars, commenting, “Brightily by nefariduckiduckiduckiducki, the verily pissoir shalomed of the blood sausage.”

In defense of my “indie” brothers and sisters

The book market has radically changed in the past few years, and I am not going to rehash all the amazing stats and how people don’t need to get a publisher anymore. That was so last week.

This has led to a flood of “indie” authors going out and publishing their own work. After all, if you don’t have a big name and are just a little guy, even if you somehow manage to snag a publisher, they will do little more than provide editing support and the hard costs of putting the book out. Really, it comes down to improving production value, and this is what I want to talk about.

In a CNN article this week on indie publishing, they did a survey of 1007 indie writers randomly and found they made, on average, $10,000 a year, with the majority (more than half) making less than $500 a year.

To get a full, professional edit of a book the size of my last novel Atopia would cost about $14,000 (about $3 a page). So, seeing as the average income of an indie author is probably less than $500 a year, only a very foolhardy soul could justify spending $10,000 or more on a professional edit. And so, we cut corners…

For Atopia, I hired two just-graduated (and unemployed) English lit majors to review mine at a cost of $1500…and I edited it at least two dozen times myself, but it is almost impossible to catch small errors in review when you write yourself, they become invisible somehow on top of that, I invested at least another few thousand in marketing. Even then, Atopia still has some mistakes in it, which bothers me, but at a certain point we need to move on to the next project.

My point in all this is that the average indie can’t afford professional-grade editing, and on average they are already losing huge amounts of money. My point is that if you are a reader who has paid $1 to $3 for an indie authored book, you need to understand that errors in editing are NOT the result of a sloppy writer, but the fact that we can’t afford a professional grade edit. End of point.

If we could afford it, we would, trust me. We hate having errors in our books A LOT MORE than you do. But an indie author can’t make it perfect, no matter how many times they edit a work themselves because the human brain tends to skip over details that you wrote yourself. So, you need an outside, third party to review it. And we can’t afford $10k+ to edit something that isn’t going to make us any money.

With Atopia, my expectation was that this was going to be a money-losing venture. I mean, I had my hopes, but I am also realistic. It took me two years of nights and weekends (and almost my relationship!) to write Atopia, FYI the average 100,000 word novel takes about one year of full-time work for an author to write and edit. Atopia was 150,000, so about 1.5 years of full-time work. And, at the end, I spent about $2000 to outside editors, and $4000 to marketing companies, all with the expectation that I wouldn’t earn a penny in return.

But, amazingly, Atopia exceeded my wildest dreams and has been in the top 5 of “Science Fiction/High Tech” on Amazon for 8 weeks, but it certainly hasn’t made me rich  Even with Atopia being a big home run (for an indie), exceeding my wildest expectations, I estimate I have earned about $8 an hour for all my efforts. Not a great way to make money, so this is very much a labor of love.

 

So, when you’re picking up a full length novel for $1 or $3, and not the $10-$15 range, I would argue that you need to set your expectation that there will be some editing mistakes and errors, and accept a certain baseline expectation as part-and-parcel of reading indie work. If it is obvious that they just weren’t careful or put in effort at all, then point this out in a review. But, be gentle. This is a labor of love, and if you find something you like for $1 or $3, give them some praise and write a review.

OK all for now, just wanted to “represent” for all my brothers and sisters out there burning the midnight oil !!

What do you think?

In defense of my "indie" brothers and sisters

The book market has radically changed in the past few years, and I am not going to rehash all the amazing stats and how people don't need to get a publisher anymore. That was so last week.

This has led to an amazing flurry of "indie" authors going out and publishing their own work. After all, if you don't have a big name and are just a little guy, even if you somehow manage to snag a publisher, they will do little more than provide editing support and the hard costs of putting the book out. Really, it comes down to improving production value, and this is what I want to talk about.

In a CNN article this week on indie publishing, they did a survey of 1007 indie writers randomly and found they made, on average, $10,000 a year, with the majority (more than half) making less than $500 a year. To get a full, professional edit of a book the size of Atopia would cost about $14,000 (about $3 a page)...so we have to cut corners. 

For Atopia, I hired two just-graduated (and unemployed) English lit majors to review mine at a cost of $1500...and I edited it at least two dozen times myself, but it is almost impossible to catch small errors in review when you write yourself, they become invisible somehow :) on top of that, I invested at least another few thousand in marketing. Even then, Atopia still has some mistakes in it, which bothers me, but at a certain point we need to move on to the next project.

My point in all this is that the average indie can't afford professional-grade editing, and on average they are already losing huge amounts of money...

With Atopia, my expectation was that this was going to be a money-losing venture. I mean, I had my hopes, but I am also realistic. In the end, Atopia has exceeded my wildest hopes and been in the top 5 of sci-fi on Amazon for 8 weeks, but it certainly hasn't made me rich :) Even with Atopia being a big home run (for an indie), exceeding my wildest expectations, I estimate I have earned about $8 an hour for all my efforts. Not a great way to make money, so this is very much a labor of love.

(BTW It took me two years of nights and weekends (and almost my relationship!) to write Atopia, and in fact an average 100,000 word novel takes about one year of full-time work for an author to write - Atopia was 150,000, so about 1.5 years of full-time work)

So, when you're picking up a full length novel for $1 or $3, and not the $10-$15 range, I would argue that you need to set your expectation that there will be some editing mistakes and errors, and accept a certain baseline expectation as part-and-parcel of reading indie work. If it is obvious that they just weren't careful or put in effort at all, then point this out in a review. But, be gentle. This is a labor of love, and if you find something you like for $1 or $3, give them some praise and write a review.

OK all for now, just wanted to "represent" for all my brothers and sisters out there burning the midnight oil :) !!

What do you think?

Could a special brain cell be responsible for sense of self?

Some interesting research has come up in the past few months regarding the little known Von Economo Neurons (VENs). These big, fat neurons have long stood out from the rest, but recent news seems to indicate they help build the rich inner life of self and form the basis for social relationships.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle_neuron

Sounds a little sad, I know, to boil things as grand as love and hate down to a stringy little neuron, but there it is.

The thing I found most interesting about VENs is that only in highly social animals (e.g. humans) are they exclusively found in the scent and taste regions of the brain. Ever wonder why smells seem to evoke such powerful emotions? The VEN did it. And also explains why we take each other for dinner dates after meeting online. Food and smell. Social. Makes sense to me.

Ultimately VENs seem to have evolved into “big” neurons as a way of signalling through the brain faster, which leads to one very interesting conclusion about how consciousnesses could have evolved. Since big brains require a lot of energy to run, it is crucial to run as efficiently as possible. Therefore a lot of “how are we feeling and doing” feedback is required. Eventually, the constant updating of “how am I feeling” could have given rise to the ego, as in the “I”.

So the question is: How are YOU feeling?

When will electric cars outsell gas powered ones again?

So when will electric cars again outsell gar powered ones in the future? Whenever it is, it wouldn’t be the first time electric cars have outsold gasoline powered cars. In fact, the first “cars” were electric, some of the first constructed by New England inventor Thomas Davenport in 1834, and up until 1900, electric cars outsold gasoline powered ones; in fact over 90% of cabs in New York City in 1901 were electric. The Baker Torpedo was the fastest car in the world in 1902, clocking in at over 120 mph. People preferred electric cars for their quiet, clean efficiency, lack of need for gear shifting or cranks to get going, and relative simplicity. It was the oil lobby that changed all that with the discovery of oil in Texas and other places that eventually drove the electric car off the road.

It really didn’t make much sense: why build overlapping energy distribution systems, one for electricity and another for an explosive, toxic chemical. But the oil lobby group won the day. Major improvements would be needed to help advance the progression back to electric – one such non-linear innovation could be the discovery of room temperature superconductors which would revolutionize energy storage and electric motors at the same time, not to mention energy transmission. So, when do you think electric cars will outsell gas cars again?

My best guess is sometime in the 2040′s worldwide, and probably as early as the late 2020′s in Europe. What do you think?