Intelligent Designs

I'm a designer and a dreamer. I've been reading science fiction and studying the history of technology and design since I was ten. Raised by an MIT trained engineer and the daughter of a master carpenter, I guess it's in my DNA.

I want this to be a place to discuss new ideas and innovations, as well as good online resources to keep finding more. I'd also love to discuss the ethics, pros, cons, and unintended consequences - good or bad - that we think may come of these things.

Design is everywhere and it is often based on what has evolved. The designer of velcro, for instance, loved to hike and, while pulling burrs from his clothing, got a great idea. So, if you know the stories behind designs, or even have some fun, funny, or even plausible guesses - we can share them here as well.

But please, if you want to talk about design in terms of rainbows, then talk about Ptolemy, Alhazan, Bacon and Newton. If you want to talk about a Great Flood - this isn't the place.

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Futurist/novelist Robert Anton Wilson talks about:
The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon:

http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2009/10/jumping-jesus.html

"The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon is my name for the acceleration of information throughout history. I first heard of that through Alfred Korzybski, a Polish mathematician who invented a scientific discipline called General Semantics. Korzybski noted that information was doubling faster and faster, every generation. And he said we've got to be prepared for this, we've got to train ourselves to be less dogmatic and more flexible so that we can deal with change. He took the year 1 A.D. as his basic unit to calculate how long it took for the information available to human beings to double, and it took 1500 years... which brought us up to the Renaissance. Leonardo Da Vinci was in his forties, and the Renaissance was at its height.

I decided to call this unit a "Jesus": so, in 1 A.D. we had "one Jesus", in 1500 we had "two Jesus". The next doubling only took 250 years, so already you can see the acceleration factor, and by 1750 we had "four Jesus". The next doubling took a hundred and fifty years and by 1900 we had "eight Jesus". The next doubling only took fifty years and by 1950 we had "sixteen Jesus". In 1960 in only ten years we had "thirty-two Jesus", by 1967 we had "sixty-four Jesus", and by 1973 we had "128 Jesus", and the latest estimate I've seen is by Dr. Jacques Vallee, a computer scientist who says that knowledge is doubling every year. But I heard that estimate, oh, five or six years ago. I saw something on the net recently, somebody estimated it's doubling about twice a year now."

We live in interesting times and, if ancient, tenacious, mind stultifying ideologies don't hold us back, 'interesting' has a real chance of meaning - pretty frikkin' cool.