Oct 20 2021 - Fridge Finds

 

Here's a headline: The Xbox Series X mini fridge is a real thing — here’s how to preorder it  This comes from CNN —  Still hunting down an Xbox Series X? Well, that’s probably not getting easier anytime soon, but you can at least buy a mini fridge that looks just like it. Once a viral internet meme, the $99 Xbox Mini Fridge is now a very real product you can pre-order right now from Target before it arrives in December — just in time for staying caffeinated during long Halo Infinite sessions. How did I find out about this?  It was in the Google top trending searches - it got 100,000 searches.  I guess fridges are popular.  What else is going on in fridge-land? Here's another article: "If it’s just a matter of time before all households have a camera in their fridges, let’s hope our condiments don’t get SnapChat accounts." And this one:  "Ever since the early days of science fiction, we’ve dreamed of gadgets that speak to us. And now we’re on the cusp of having this technology in our homes. By 2030, you’ll be able to use all your kitchen appliances with voice commands (as long as you remember to actually put the food in them first)." On to more trends:  "In 2030, if Samsung and LG have anything to do with it, your future home will include a separate fridge for your vegetables and herbs which regulates light and growing conditions so you can enjoy the produce you love all year-round, that's even if you have a brown thumb as the system ensures optimal growing conditions so you basically cannot muck it up. Naturally it all syncs up to an app so that you can order seeds, keep tabs of how your plantings are growing and even join a produce community so you'll feel like you're part of a movement."  You can even find out about the fridge of 2050.  Last month the University of London hosted 2050: Fridge of the Future.  Refrigeration of all kinds is responsible for 10 percent of global energy use, so this is an important topic. "The convention was aimed at bringing likeminded parties together who share an interest in the future of large white goods and to respond to questions such as: What will white goods in the future look like? How will they be shaped by evolving demand, environment and new technologies? What impact will this have on product safety and future-ready regulation?" Today's image is another in the Plaid City Series - this is an abstract of Rain on the Street.

Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

July 22 2021 - George Jetson

 

The Jetsons was an American animated sitcom that ran from 1962 to 1963.  George was the father who worked at Spacely Space Sprockets for an hour a day two days a week. Alternately, he is said to work two hours a day, three days a week. He and his wife, Jane, had red/orange hair, their son was blond, and their daughter had white hair.  Sometimes George has brown hair and Jane had blonde hair. I attribute this strange set of variations to the fact that this was the first colour cartoon for Hanna-Barbera, and the cartoonists were fooling around. The Jetsons lived in Orbit City. The city's architecture has all homes and businesses raised high above the ground on adjustable columns. George Jetson lives with his family in the Skypad Apartments: his wife Jane is a homemaker, their teenage daughter Judy attends Orbit High School, and their son Elroy attends Little Dipper School. There's a robot maid named Rosie, or sometimes Rosey. Of course there's a dog - Astro.  Some fans decided that the sky-bound Jetsons are living high above the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the Flintstones on the ground below.  The two families met in the 1987 movie The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones.   We have access to the future - go to future timeline.net HERE.  Take a look at the  current timeline:  Find out that Europe's largest battery came online on July 15th 2021, that the first 3D printed school, opened in Malawi on July 13th, 2021.  The first robotic pizza restaurant opened in Paris on July 11th, 2021.  And what about the world's oldest people?  There are 573,000 centenarians currently, and it is expected to reach over 19 million by the year 2100.  If we were to be so pandemic-prepared, where are the predictions of pandemics?  Predictions from the past are at Paleofuture HERE.   No retrievals for pandemics. There are lots of earthquake predictions. And lots of gadgets being predicted.  The Jetsons only lasted a season, and then got retired to Saturday morning kid shows.  It was a fun kids show.

Jan 3 - - New Stuff Just In

FutureTimeline.net on its home page says Welcome to the future!  Explore our timeline of future predictions... Latest updates HERE are fascinating.   The 2020-2029 Entries are HERE Most of these are big-scale, government sorts of milestones.  It is in 2024 that something everyday seems to come up:   Bio-electronics for treating arthritis is in common use Arthritis is a form of joint disorder caused by trauma or infection of a joint, or old age. As of the 2010s, it was the single most common type of disability in the United States, predominantly affecting the elderly and resulting in over 20 million individuals having severe limitations in function on a daily basis. Total costs of arthritis cases were close to $100 billion annually, a figure expected to increase dramatically in the future with an aging population. Treatments for arthritis usually involved a combination of medication, exercise and lifestyle modification, but a cure remained elusive. In 2014, a breakthrough involving the use of bio-electronics was unveiled by researchers. This took the form of a pacemaker-style device embedded in the necks of patients, firing bursts of electrical impulses to stimulate the vagus nerve – a crucial link between the brain and major organs. The impulses were shown to reduce activity in the spleen, in turn producing fewer chemicals and immune cells that would normally cause inflammation in the joints of patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Over half of people saw a dramatic improvement, even for severe symptoms, with up to 30% achieving remission. After successful clinical trials, another decade of progress led to next-generation implants miniaturised to the size of rice grains, as well as improvements in cost and efficacy. By 2024, it is a routine form of treatment in many countries.Bio-electronics are showing promise in other areas too. For example, they can prevent the airway spasms of asthma, control appetite in obesity, and help restore normal insulin production in diabetes. This has personal meaning to many of us and gives us optimism for our future health and well-being.

We're into January and this is the month I seem to do a lot of "colouring".   I started with a spring image of daffodils and put them through the Topaz Lab Impressions Filter.

Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Don't be Blindsided by the Future

What a great headline this is today.  It comes from Google's top rated futurist speaker, Thomas Frey.  The query I entered was 10 unanswerable questions.   Here's how he views things.  His headline is: 10 of Life's Most Unanswerable Questions...that neither science nor religion can answer.   Here are his 10 questions: 1. Why are there exceptions to every rule? He says everything has exceptions and that exceptions matter because nothing comes with 100% predictability. 2. Why do logic  and reason fail to explain that which is true? 3. Is the universe finite or infinite? 4. Why does anything exist? 5. Why does time exist?  He quotes Albert Einstein's comment:  "The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once." 6. Why do humans matter? 7. Why are humans so fallible? 8. Do human accomplishments have long-term meaning? 9. Why is the future unknowable? 10. What is the purpose of death? Find all the details on the 10 questions  HERE.  Then hop over to his articles on drone taxis/mini airports, morphing mannequins, 20 common jobs in 2040 and so many more topics about the future.  Tom Frey's view of the future is fascinating.  He outlines the opportunities ahead with an inventor's mind.  And our pictures today?  A wedding couple at Longwood, smiling into the future.

Foolproof Future

Would you like your plans to be future proof?  Get the Foresight Tool - a web-based strategic foresight tool.  Its trend radar visualizes which trends and megatrends will shape your future.  "Once your radar is in place you will operate on a new level of future awareness. You will implement actions inspired by future foresight and you can continue to monitor the key trends that will impact you. Revisit your future radar on a regular basis and evaluate latest developments. It’s easy to update your project’s foresight radar view as key trends develop further or new drivers of change emerge". Patrick Dixon's site is GlobalChange.com. In his banner are the site stats - 15.5 million unique visitors, 6 million video views.  The summary trends start with "Truth About ..." and "Future of" What about the title of his book: "The Future of Almost Everything: Six Faces of the future Cube" - there are dozens of predictions to check out HERE.   However for me the experience became overwhelming and everything seemed so generalized.  I ended up skimming through the text.  So I asked something more specific - the future of food. Now we start to see the magic of the future. 3-D printed food made its debut at London-based Foodini Ink.  Foodini is a 3D printer for foodstuffs. Its Florida-based makers are hoping their time-saving device becomes as ubiquitous on kitchen countertops as the microwave oven has become. Read the CNN story HERE.  The company is working with major food manufacturers to create pre-packaged plastic capsules that can just be loaded into the machine to make food, and they assure these will be free of preservatives, with a shelf life limited to five days. This goes together with IoT - "the Internet Of Things".  More on that tomorrow. The spring flowering bulbs finished yesterday in the garden - tulips and daffodils are completed for another year.