Too Dangerous For Twitter, Too Dangerous For Nuclear

Barack Obama's frantic final campaign 

"Apparently his campaign has taken away his Twitter," Obama scoffed, issuing an attack line on Donald Trump that would barely have made sense during his first stop there eight years earlier. "They had so little confidence in his self-control they said we're just going to take away your Twitter. If somebody can't handle a Twitter account, they can't handle the nuclear codes."

On most days last week Obama woke up at the White House with his schedule virtually cleared. Leaving around midday and returning late in the evening, he spent his downtime tossing a baseball around the Rose Garden with aides and tweaking his stump speech in the Oval Office.

In seemingly every spare moment, he's dialed African-American radio hosts across the swing states, chatting loosely backstage at his rallies and aboard Air Force One about his favorite hip-hop artists (Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper) 

A loss, however, has become a nightmare scenario. Obama's vision of the US is so at odds with Donald Trump's he told a crowd of 16,000 college students in Chapel Hill the "fate of the world is teetering."

"Anybody who is upset about a 'Saturday Night Live' skit, you don't want in charge of nuclear weapons," Obama taunted in Miami on Thursday, only to pierce the anger with yet another exasperated "C'mon man!"

Post Poll

Deep divisions within the Republican Party that Trump has helped stoke are revealed in a question on what the GOP should do if Trump fails to win the presidency.

Among Republicans and independents who lean that way, the largest share, 37 percent, say the party should start from scratch, rename itself, and reinvent what it stands for

Health 2.0

The technology industry has entered the field of medicine and aims to eliminate disease itself. It may well succeed because of a convergence of exponentially advancing technologies, such as computing, artificial intelligence, sensors, and genomic sequencing. We’re going to see more medical advances in the next decade than happened in the past century.

Abundance, Round The Corner

In the 1800s, aluminum was more valuable than silver and gold because it was rarer. So when Napoleon III entertained the King of Siam, the king and his guests were honored by being given aluminum utensils, while the rest of the dinner party ate with gold. 

But aluminum is not really rare.

In fact, aluminum is the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, making up 8.3% of the weight of our planet. But it wasn’t until chemists Charles Martin Hall and Paul Héroult discovered how to use electrolysis to cheaply separate aluminum from surrounding materials that the element became suddenly abundant.

The problems keeping us from achieving a world where everyone’s basic needs are met may seem like resource problems — when in reality, many are accessibility problems. 

Think about all the things that computers and the internet made abundant that were previously far less accessible because of cost or availability … 

Less than two decades ago, when someone reached a certain level of economic stability, they could spend somewhere around $10K on stereos, cameras, entertainment systems, etc — today, we have all that equipment in the palm of our hand.

When put to the right use, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence,robotics, digital manufacturing, nano-materials and digital biology make it possible for us to drastically raise the standard of living for every person on the planet.

Elon Musk: To Mars Or Not To Mars

I say no Mars. It is basic. I don't mean to spoil the fun and sound like I were saying the emperor is naked. But the human skeleton is not designed for Mars gravity. Or for the months of space travel. It would simply give up.

But reusable rockets are a great concept. The financials are in the robotic mining of the asteroid belt and, more immediately, in the network of 4,000 satellites that would carry a big chunk of the load of internet traffic. The need for bandwidth is going to grow exponentially. Both would be tremendous money makers. And robots don't have skeleton issues. Good thing.

The earth is the only home. And Elon Musk should really double down on solar. Create a Musk Law whereby costs are halved every two, or three or four years. Dirty needs to be driven out of business.

Electric vehicles go hand in hand with that.

And what's up with the hyperloop? Again, I have human body questions. All that acceleration and deceleration, how would the human body react to that? But if the hyperloop be possible then you will see an Amazon size forest in America before 2050. Good thing. People would congregate in the big cities of the world.

Mars is for the Curiosity rover. Robotic exploration is the best way.

The Microsoft Mojo

Microsoft looks to reinvent the desktop PC

Is the Microsoft mojo back?

FPGA: Field Programmable Gate Array

The ability to do deep learning more quickly – using that AI supercomputer in the cloud – has broad implications. It could vastly speed up advances in automatic translation, accelerate medical breakthroughs and create automated productivity tools that better anticipate our needs and solve our workday problems.