Random Thoughts

  One of the very first posts I made on a  blog over a year ago was “Praise the Lord, not Petroleum”.  It discussed the very public and high profile actions a significant number of Evangelical Christian organizations were taking to fight global warming.  Their underlying argument is simple: if the Earth, and all living things are god’s creation, we should not destroy it and them with global warming.   This position was part of the tipping point in consciousness around global warming that occurred last year.  To have some of the most morally conservative…

  A few years ago I started the process of buying a second home in a warm part of the United States.  Living in Chicago, I wanted to find a place that, through the years would be where I would spend an increasing amount of time during the winter months.  The first step in this process was looking at the various real estate web sites that displayed listings in the Southwest and in Florida, where the weather usually stays above freezing.   The first thing I experienced of course was sticker shock.  In the few years since I had last looked at second home prices in places…

What is the ultimate fate of the universe? The big crunch and the big freeze aside, what is the fate of intelligent beings in the universe? It is reasonable to assume that even if it is the case that humanity and its spawn become destroyed, then other intelligent species across the universe will nonetheless go on existing. If not all intelligent life is destroyed by the time the big freeze would render the cosmos uninhabitable, or the big crunch would obliviate all life as we know it in the universe, then hopefully at least one species in the cosmos would advance to a high enough…

It was great to meet with a number of the top executives at GM prior to the Chicago Auto Show to learn about the Chevrolet Volt, the company commitment to developing battery technology and to really find out how committed this company is and will be in the area of cleaner automobiles.  However there is one interview that truly stands out that needs to be shared.   Larry Burns is GM’s Vice President, Research & Development and Strategic Planning.  Simply put, this means he is THE person responsible for leading GM into the future of clean transportation. It is Larry’s job to…

  [Note to readers: I was one of a select few bloggers to be invited by General Motors to a behind the scenes opportunity at the current Chicago Auto Show to meet and interview top management.  As far as GM knew or I could discern, they were the only major auto company to reach out to the blogosphere and they should be given credit for that.  What follows in this and a subsequent post or two are some highlights, headlines and ruminations from this day long experience.  Of course my focus was and is on what I write about here: alternative energy, and new advanced technology…

  In January, I spent two weeks attending the world’s largest consumer technology convention and a much smaller but very important annual television convention.  This column is to give you an idea of what will new cutting edge gadgets will soon be available and to also suggest ways they will affect how you consume media and access information.   The Consumer Electronics Show had over 150,000 attendees from all over the world and is the place where new technological gadgets are introduced that will go on sale later this year.  Here are some headlines from that show.  …

It can be argued that the three most transformative technologies of the last twenty years are the personal computer, the Internet and the cell phone.  I have written often in Evolution Shift about the first two, but not of the third, until now.    As is often the case, a look into the future first entails a look back to the past.  In 1984 there were 25,000 cell phones sold in the U.S.  In 1990 that number had grown to1,888,000 units sold, and in the year 2000 52,600,00 units were sold – a million phones a week!  That number has continued to go up.  Today,…