Skip to main content

The New Renaissance

I had the pleasure of hearing Thomas Friedman speak yesterday. He described the concepts in his excellent new book "The World Is Flat" and made the case for his notion that we are currently experiencing a significant turning point in the history of mankind. When I first read Friedman's book earlier this year it seemed to me I'd heard some of it before. The first writer I know that made a similar case was Douglas S. Robertson in his 1998 book "The New Renaissance" and later in 2003 with "Phase Change." Robertson's reasoning was more scientific and computer-oriented with less of the political implications of Friedman's book, but the underlying notion of a "phase change" right now was clearly the same.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Climate Change and Open Science - WSJ.com

This Wall Street Journal article Climate Change and Open Science - WSJ .com made the right basic point about liberal hypocrisy in the Climate Change debate, but disappointingly it failed to cite the best sources of real information from an unbiased scientific point of view. I believe that source is Dr. S. Fred Singer & Dr. Craig D. Idso , from the Science and Environmental Policy Project and Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, who coauthored "Climate Change Reconsidered; The Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change" published in 2009. In this book, the petition letter shown here from Dr. Frederick Seitz ( Ph . D. Physics) President Emeritus of Rockefeller University was published. Dr. Seitz circulated this letter: urging fellow academics with qualifications in the physical sciences to sign the petition at http://www.petitionproject.com/ and thereby acknowledge their agreement with this statement in the petition: Accor...

The Evolving Internet: A look ahead to 2025 by Cisco and the Monitor Group's Global Business Network

My employer (Cisco) published its most recent forward looking study of the Internet today. It's called " The Evolving Internet: A look ahead to 2025 by Cisco and the Monitor Group's Global Business Network " and although I haven't studied it in detail yet, I scanned it this morning and I liked what I saw. Those who know me will not be surprised that I particularly liked the three dimensional evaluation criteria that they used to frame their analysis. Lately nearly everything I do ends up finding its way into some sort of analytical cube like this. I've been wondering whether there is something wrong with me that I can't seem to frame things simply in two dimensions. Glad to have company.

DouglasRoss.com

Network Solutions is having a sale on URL's. Mine (http://www.douglasross.com) doesn't do anything at the moment (I'm saving it for a rainy day) but it was coming up on ten years and I needed to renew it to protect my name. So I decided to take them up on their pay-in-advance 20 year package sale for $279.00 or $13.95 per year (about half of the regular annual fee...probably not that good a deal in hindsight.) But the kicker was, after I hit the pay button it dawned on me that I'll be over 83 years old when this thing expires. How creepy is that? If I make it I'll take it as a good sign and re-up for another 20 years. And by then maybe I'll have done something with it.