Western Union sent its last telegram last week.

Joe Katzman say they’re part of the Air Force’s future. With civilian applications. I’d love to see dirigibles come back, with modern materials, as aerial cruiseships. I think there’d be a big market for them.

Lileks isn’t impressed with the latest doomsaying trope from the scientifically illiterate.

This is the same kind of blinkered and dyspeptic mentality that says we shouldn’t expand life into the universe. And here and here are some related golden oldies.

Speaking of evolution, our modern car technology seems to be breeding lousy drivers:

Fewer than 30 of those questioned in a recent survey knew what anti-lock brakes were, and less than 5 percent understood traction control. To test some skills of the average driver, the U.K.

The latest, year-end Carnival of Tomorrow is up, and has a number of very interesting links (of which mine is undoubtedly the least interesting). Hard to believe that we’re already almost four years into the new century, and millennium, and while we don’t yet have flying cars, in many other ways, we’re living in the science-fiction future of our childhoods, at least for those baby boomers among us.

Here’s a good Internet equivalent of a “man-(and woman)-in-the-street interview”–a compendium of Freeper responses to the article in the Toledo Blade about Ray Kurzweil and life extension.

The interesting thing to me will be the responses when (as one commenter put it) “a mouse lives ten years.”

They’ve sequenced the genome of a woolly mammoth. I think we’re going to see one walking around in a few years.

Things are progressing nicely:

“We have demonstrated the controlled synthesis of nanostructures at levels of complexity significantly beyond any work yet reported. What we have done is the most challenging synthetic problem in these structures, and one with huge potential payoffs from both the standpoint of fundamental scientific impact and producing novel de-vices and applications.”

A robot that is self aware. Is it too early to form PETR (People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots)?

I’ll personally be interested to see if it starts touching itself improperly.

Seriously, I’ve done this experiment myself with both of my cats. They clearly recognize themselves in the mirror, because they don’t get upset (as they generally would) at the sight of another cat.

At this week’s Carnival of Tomorrow.