Mark December 16, 2006 Uncategorized 0 comments full post »

FlyDLUX: E. Khashoggi/Simon Hodson update… Earthshell cracking financially.

BALTIMORE – A Baltimore manufacturer is facing financial meltdown after it was unable to find additional funding on Friday.

EarthShell Corp., a publicly traded company on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board under the symbol ERTH, said in a release that it would be unable to meet its payroll and other financial obligations after Friday because of the funding shortfall.

“The company has not been able to secure the resources to complete our mission at this time,” company chairman and chief executive Vincent J. Truant said in a statement.

Data compiled by the financial research firm Morningstar shows that major shareholder Essam Khashoggi and E. Khashoggi Industries LLC began dumping blocks of shares in the company last month. Shareholder Lavla Khashoggi also sold blocks of EarthShell stock throughout November.

Essam Khashoggi, who is chairman of E. Khashoggi Industries LLC, resigned as chairman of EarthShell’s board of directors in July 2005. He held the position since the company was founded in November 1992.

The shareholders sold a combined portfolio of more than 65,000 shares at prices ranging from $1.55 per share to $1.33 per share. Late Friday, shares of EarthShell were trading on the OTCBB at 29 cents per share. Its 52-week high was $2.30 per share and its 52-week low was 23 cents per share.

Calls to Truant, chief financial officer D. Scott Houston and company spokeswoman Cindy Eikenberg were not returned.

EarthShell manufactures and markets paper products for the food-packaging industry. At the beginning of the year, the company had six employees.

In its reports to the Securities Exchange Commission, EarthShell said it is involved in litigation involving two equipment vendors seeking to collect about $600,000 for manufacturing equipment for the company’s facility in Goettingen, Germany.

The company also reported to the SEC this year that it has suffered “significant losses since inception, has minimal revenues and has a working capital deficit of $11,458,467″ at the end of last year.

Another one of Simon Hodson’s shell games coming to a close. What will that kooky millionaire do next?
–
/mark “rizzn” hopkins
For my blog, profile, wikipedia and digg entries, simply Google “rizzn”
Check out Season 1 of Podded Meat, my new Vodcast Network (SFW): http://poddedmeat.com
Check out: http://ModernOpinion.com

Mark June 14, 2006 Uncategorized 0 comments full post »

Humpday Roundup

[rizzn's note: this entry contains paid placement]

Hey there Rizznites. What’s the good word? Still fielding suggestions for the new blogging network – The best one so far is 32D. We also added a new person to the blogging lineup. Just to preview who’s going to be writing for us, I’ll give you the list so far:

MADshow’s Newsguy Jon aka Jonboy – Armasystema: it’ll be a daily blog and periodic podcast continuation of his show Respect Knuckles.
Darrell – I Gave Darrell A Dollar: the latest incarnation of infectious insanity.
Wendy - Borrowed Fire: The daily life of a Texan twenty-something.
Matthew - GonzoBlogger: The globetrotting Jew tells all, Hunter S. Thompson-style.

Over the next few days, the splash pages will be up on the site, and I’ll have the next few names dropped here on the site. Look out for updates!

Places in Florida
I’ve been looking to get on the road and do some vacationing, so I’ve been getting information about travel out in Florida. One of the things that crossed my desk was this deal about Winter Park, and it was actually pitching me Winter Park Real Estate. I’ve actually driven through the area, and much like most of South Florida, it is like an endless suburb … it’s sort of in the middle of the state. Not sure exactly what the draw is to the place, other than its proximity to Orlando, but I know that there are a good deal of tourism agencies based out of there, and from what I understand quite a bit of money flowing through there for the average businessman. Back in the FlyDLUX days, a good number of our agents were out in that area.

I’ve also got some info on Orlando, as well, which I haven’t read through yet. More on that tomorrow.

On the Subject of Flash and Splash Pages
One of the companies I work with is having a huge internal debate on the topic of a splash page. The debate they are having is meritorious on both sides, but the debate itself is the developer’s attempt at a distraction from having to do real work. It’s reverse from most situations… usually it’s the developer pushing a splash page, but here it’s the client wanting one.

Coincidentally to this conflict, I saw this on Techdirt:

The common use of “flash intros” to corporate websites has never made much sense. Generally, they’re a pain, and even for the few folks who want to watch them, after seeing it once, why should they ever want to go back again? Yet, for some reason, web designers love them, and somehow keep convincing corporations to use them. However, a usability expert studying these things now says that ” the skip intro button is the most used button on the Internet.” While you can quibble over the hyperbole, it does make sense to question why so many firms keep using these types of entryways, when it clearly keeps people from the content they actually want — such as how to buy your product.

[via Techdirt]

Interestingly enough, I see this as one of the few design situations where a splash page is beneficial. We’re talking about a gaming site, and the site is going to be graphically and textually driven, so to entice people in and to spark imagination, images are going to play a big role. The designer in this case is saying that having a splash page is going to reduce the pagerank of the site overall. A way to breach this deficit in pagerank that a splash page can cause is including a blogstyle update on the page that changes periodically, so that weblogs.com and all the other ping services are aware of the site, and that it’ll get referenced periodically in other’s blogs.

Quote of the Entry:
[from a resignation letter my friend Charlene recently recieved] “I wish you continued success in your goals to turn vibrant, productive, dedicated employees into an aimless, inept group of dehydrated, lifeless carcasses.”
– Misti Gensler

Mark April 19, 2006 Uncategorized 0 comments full post »

Large Set of Small Updates

Quite an interesting day it’s been. I’ve been saving these blog posts to put into a long newspost for about a week or so. Good stuff in here. As for me, I’m keeping busy, and business is finally picking up again after a weeklong slump. Expect a project progress report later this week.

f o u r [ ] 2 n i t e
For those of you in the East Texas area thie evening, FourSquare behind IHOP. It’s the secret way to meet cool Tyler people. Starts at 9PM.

Suge Knight declares bankruptcy
Death Row Records label head Suge Knight has filed for bankruptcy, after he refused to pay US$107 million in an ownership dispute of his record company. Knight had lost a lawsuit filed by Lydia Harris last year. Harris had claimed that Knight had swindled her out of her 50 percent stake in Death Row Records.

Harris had alleged that Knight concocted a scheme to “destroy her ability to lay claim to her rightful share of the ownership and profits” of the label. The presiding judge had awarded the massive sum to Harris after discovering that Knight and his attorneys had not provided certain financial data.

Nanowires to Power Your Implants
Researchers at Georgia Tech have come up with a new way to power medical implants, using the motion of the body to generate electricity. By implanting fibers called nanowires, which are just 20-40 billionths of a meter in diameter, the researchers believe they can produce enough energy to drive implantable devices or even smart apparel. The zinc-oxide nanowires are piezoelectric, like the quartz crystals in a wristwatch, so the more you bend ‘em, the more energy they produce.

Adnan Khashoggi Sued by SEC
Our good buddy Adnan is in the news again. Boy we love those Krazy Khashoggi’s over here at Rizzn.Com. For those of you who don’t know, Adnan’s brother Essam was involved in the FlyDLUX ordeal back in 2003. Khashoggi is best known as an arms broker in the Iran- Contra scandal of the mid-1980s, when he served as middleman for illegal sales of weapons to Iran. He was often described then as one of the world’s richest men.

In 1993, El-Batrawi founded GenesisIntermedia as a telemarketing and infomercial company. In 1999, the company’s 100 sales agents made more than 1 million calls a month selling courses such as “Secrets of Stock Investing” and “Ted Thomas’ Personal Fortune Real Estate Investment Program” with price tags of as much as $5,000.

Saudi financier Adnan Khashoggi and former GenesisIntermedia Inc. Chief Executive Officer Ramy El- Batrawi were sued by U.S. regulators over claims they orchestrated a $130 million stock loan and manipulation scheme. Khashoggi, 70, and El-Batrawi, 44, loaned 15 million GenesisIntermedia shares to Deutsche Bank Securities Ltd. while artificially inflating the stock price by engaging in large numbers of buys and sells, the Securities and Exchange Commission said in a lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles. They failed to repay the loans to intermediary brokers when the scheme collapsed, the SEC said.

Attorneys for El-Batrawi and Khashoggi couldn’t be immediately located to comment. SEC attorney Kara Brockmeyer said the agency hadn’t determined yet who their attorneys are. El-Batrawi has no listed telephone number in Los Angeles, and Khashoggi’s place of residence isn’t known, according to the complaint.

The lawsuit is the third the SEC has brought related to the GenesisIntermedia fraud. In 2004, Kenneth D’Angelo, who helped facilitate the stock loans settled with the SEC after pleading guilty to securities and wire fraud. A lawsuit against Smith in Los Angeles is still pending.

The case is SEC v. Ramy El-Batrawi et al, U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, 06-2247.

peace or something like that
My good buddy Rob is still out in Africa bringing good will to all mankind. He writes the following on his blog (of interest to those of you following his series on the Lords Resistance Army).

I just found out that the lord’s resistance army that was causing so much trouble in the place I was working last year has recently met with representatives of the Government of Southern sudan and that they have come to some sort of agreement to cease hostilities and work towards a peaceful solution. The details are a bit sketchy at the moment.

i am a little jealous. apparantly the peace talks took place very close to maridi and the officials that came, stayed in the compound that I was living in while i was there. Would have been interesting to get a chance to sit and talk with a few of those guys that came through.

so hopefully the official news will come out very soon and we will get to find out what the agreements were.

That’s the word for the moment, folks. Be good.

/rizzn

Mark February 20, 2006 Uncategorized 0 comments full post »

Lights out man.

This update has been a long time in coming. I’ve been outlandishly swamped lately, and simply haven’t had the energy to devote to a number of pressing matters. I will try to address as many of them as possible here for you, as I’ve also been swamped with emails, too.

BlipMedia
Not a day goes by that I don’t get an email about the status of Blip. Basically, what has happenned is we’ve outgrown our servers, and we no longer have any available diskspace. We’ve purchased new servers to move to (as of several months ago), but I’ve been so busy with new projects that I haven’t had the time to devote to maintaining the service. At one point we were talking a merger through with a couple of our next biggest competitors, but unfortunately, those talks fell apart. I don’t have any ill will towards them – quite the contrary. I had a good time meeting my competitors, and we saw eye-to-eye on almost everything, but we were both so busy maintaining our own businesses that we just didn’t have time to join forces. Sad but true.

As a result, Blip has sort of … degenerated. I had hoped to be able to announce an alternative service in a reasonable fashion and a way to migrate your podcasts over, but again, no time.

Here’s the bottom line: Blip’s future is uncertain at the moment. If I can find a few good cheap (or even better, free) programmers willing to take up my slack, I can revive Blip. We have the servers and the capital to return it to it’s former glory, just not the time. If you are or know a programmer willing to help out with this, let me know. You must know ASP, batch programming, and have a good working knowlege of WAV and MP3 file formats as well as RSS. I can offer cash compensation and even points in the company (believe it or not, there is a pending profit model for Blip).

As for your files and RSS feeds, all MP3s will remain on the server and available to public download. All RSS files will stay static, and available, but not updatable.

You can contact me at mark@5tribe.com with any comments, questions, and concerns you have re: Blip. If you have a problem uploading, direct that to mark@blipmedia.org.

T. Evan Fisher for Texas House of Representatives, District 108

Politics! Yes! I’ve finally taken the final plunge into politics. A few months ago, I made it official, and took the headlong plunge into politics by accepting a position with T. Evan Fisher’s Libertarian campaign for a Texas legislature spot. Without a doubt, it’s going to be an interesting campaign. It’s already becoming interesting, as there’s some drama forming already in the form of one of our Democratic opponents being outed as a former male prostitute.

T. Evan Fisher is one of our own – from the old Tyler Denny’s Crew. Most of you from there probably know him better as “Thos.”

Thos is running for the 108th District of Texas’ State Legislature under the Libertarian Party ticket. We had discussed informally before working together, but this weekend we made the arrangement official – I am the designated campaign treasurer for the T. Evan Fisher for Texas Legislature campaign. This means, in effect, I’ll be functioning as a campaign manager as well. We’re going to really try to organise a strong grassroots campaign as well as some innovative fundraising techniques.

I know I’ve got a lot of Libertarian readers out there, and I could use all the promotion from my friends and associates as possible. We’ll be putting up the official website very soon, and I’ll be putting out position and platform papers here and there for your review.

As for political views, the Libertarian Party, if you’re not aware, is a very inclusive party that despite conservative or liberal bents, almost everyone finds attractive when they examine their tenets closely. I’d encourage you to do so at http://lp.org – and stay tuned for more on our buddy’s quest for office.

Project Catarl
Those of you involved with the Alpha Catarl project may look forward to your handhelds very soon. We should be wrapping up development within the next few weeks and start rolling out prototypes. The Free Alpha signup is closed, but we will be opening up a paid Alpha Program soon, as well. Stay tuned for updates here.

Mystery Radio Project
There is a radio project that I and several very big movers and shakers in the streaming, satellite, and podcast world are putting together. We intend this to be the child project of what was started with BlipMedia, and somewhat closer to what we originally intended with the Blip project. I can’t say more right now, but I can tell you that development is almost finished, and I’ll be pointing you to the new hubbub very soon. We’re talking to our new PR guy, our front end design guy is sending us our final layouts soon, we’ve hired a program director, and the talent should be getting their official invites to the new company within the next couple weeks. I, of course, am handling the backend work, and am, as usual, behind schedule. I expect to see this project off the ground in less than a month. I will probably be dissappointed, but that’s what I expect as well.

Peer-to-peer Banking Project

I’ve been enticed into a Peer-To-Peer banking project by some good friends of mine. I’m footing the bill on this one because of the promise of some VC coming our way. I can’t go too far into the details at the moment (as per usual), but we could be looking at a peer-to-peer banking launch for American users within the next few months here.

Don’t know what peer-to-peer banking is? Neither did I when I first heard the term. Go google it, you’ll find some food for thought.

My Personal Life Update
Much like the rest of my life – very hectic. I have to say, I enjoy having money again. Ever since I’ve been back in town, I’ve been enjoying periodic windfalls of cash in addition to my steady stream of income from the contract job. It has allowed me a number of luxuries I’ve been denying myself over the last few years: a new car, a nice big apartment, new furniture, a new computer, and a little bit of investment and savings cushion.

A lot of money, however, gets sunk into a new apartment – more than I remember, at least. Down in SouFla, furnished apartment and living situations are common, and I’ve been used to packing everything up in a couple boxes, loading them up into whatever POS model car I happen to be driving at the time, and moving on a moments notice. Now that I’m actually accruing stuff now, I’m actually dreading the eventual move in six months to a year after I grow tired of whatever it is I’m doing and need to move on!

At least these are good problems to have. Some not so good problems to have include the tiff I’ve been engaged in this week with the electric company. I’m not going to out them just yet as they haven’t completely worn out my patience (but they’re quickly moving towards that end), but I’ve been without power for the coldest week in my memory. The reason is that I transferred my power over from the apartment complex’s name on
Tuesday to my own, and Tuesday afternoon, the power went out and hasn’
t come back on yet. Every day they promise to have it on by the end of the day, and every day I’m disappointed.

Very annoying. Ah well, on to the news!

For All My Austinian Friends
Better than your boyfriend posts about secret tunnells under UTA. It’s quite an engaging and interesting read. Click the link and check out the full thing. My Austin crew should try this out and tell me what they find.

…there were the tunnels. We’d heard about them before – supposedly there was a secret network of tunnels underneath UT that connected almost all of the buildings. It was a farfetched concept, but it became credible to us when we read an article that said it was the way they got to the tower without being shot to take out Whitman. Soon after moving into UT, we started looking for the tunnels.

Any expectations we had were instantly shattered. No longer were we on campus – we’d be transported into another world. The narrow concrete path was flanked with a host of steam pipes, bundles of wires, and even toxic waste pipes. Intermitently, the steam pipes would makes scary noises which sent our hearts jumping. It was surreal.

Be careful how you read that.
Mz6 writes “According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I’ve only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time. “That’s how flame wars get started,” says psychologist Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with Justin Kruger of New York University. “People in our study were convinced they’ve accurately understood the tone of an e-mail message when in fact their odds are no better than chance,” says Epley. The researchers took 30 pairs of undergraduate students and gave each one a list of 20 statements about topics like campus food or the weather. Assuming either a serious or sarcastic tone, one member of each pair e-mailed the statements to his or her partner. The partners then guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers. Those who sent the messages predicted that nearly 80 percent of the time their partners would correctly interpret the tone. In fact the recipients got it right just over 50 percent of the time.”

Earthshell Corporation Board Chairman Resigns
EarthShell Corporation announced today that one of its directors, Simon K. Hodson (whom faithful Rizznites will remember was firmly entrenched in the FlyDLUX debacle), has resigned as a director of EarthShell, effective immediately. Mr. Hodson has also been serving as chairman of the Board. According to a company press release, Simon has resigned in order to focus his efforts on his recent appointment as Chief Executive Officer of E.Khashoggi Industries, LLC. This has confirmed longstanding rumors amongst the FlyDLUX crowd that Simon is somewhat of a “right-hand man” to Essam Khashoggi.

EKI, LLC is (not so coincidentally) EarthShell’s largest stockholder. EarthShell holds an exclusive license on a worldwide basis from EKI to commercialize patented material technology for the manufacture of foodservice disposable packaging (but as of yet, the corporation has yet to actually do anything with this patent). A new chairman of the Board will be elected at the next regularly scheduled meeting of EarthShell’s Board of Directors and the corporate governance committee of the Board will initiate a search for a new director to fill the vacancy on the Board.

Get Your Bags of Money Here
Matt Marshall over at the San Jose Mercury News does a nice job pointing out how VCs are back to funding startups with 20-somethings running the show — something that was quite common during the bubble years, but which fell out of favor quickly. However, there’s one big difference this time around that isn’t mentioned in the article. During the original bubble years, for many of these companies the fact that the founders were inexperienced 20-somethings was often used as a major selling point for the company. There were tons of articles profiling young founders, where it seemed like what the companies actually did was secondary. This time around, it seems like more companies have at least figured out that it helps to focus more of the attention on the company and its products.

Yay, East Texas
It would appear that patent trolls (even if the article refers to them as “patent pirates”) have found a friend in the form of a federal judge in the East Texas town of Marshall. Not only does he not waste time and push cases through quickly (a good thing), he sides with the patent holder nearly every time (and much higher than in cases throughout the rest of the country). Apparently, patent trolls around the world are learning that if you want to get your money quickly, file your claim in Marshall, Texas. In fact, many defendants are more likely to settle, rather than have to head into the courtroom of Judge T. John Ward. So, who has the patent on speedy trials?

Free Sports TV. Sort of.
NBC is significantly expanding its Olympics video offerings for the internet and cell phones, a sure sign of its increased comfort with technologies that erect geographic boundaries online. The network’s official Olympics site, NBCOlympics.com, will show for free, on a delayed basis, the complete runs and routines for the top finishers and for all U.S. participants in almost every event, with highlights provided for team sports like hockey, said Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics.

None of the video will be live however; in most cases it won’t be available online or on phones until the end of NBC’s broadcast day, generally 11:30 p.m. ET. By contrast, the BBC’s website is simulcasting five television feeds, though only to U.K. residents.

Mark September 22, 2005 Uncategorized 0 comments full post »

Peak Oil, Hamachi, and Blip Stats. Discuss!

My Album Download Update
Okay, I realized there is a problem today with downloading the album with Hamachi. You have to have the password to join the network my hamachi client is on. I’m not going to give it out on the blog, because it happens to be the same password I use for some other sensitive information. Until I figure out a way to fix this, I’m going to put the files on the server available for download. Click here to go to the Hamachi/StmC entry and DOWNLOAD MY ALBUM!

BlipMedia News
In other news, if you are a Blip user and have sent a tech support request via email lately, and I’m not responding back in my usual 10 seconds later fashion, it’s because I’m SWAMPED with requests lately. We’ve added 200 some odd users in the last week and a half (record growth!) which is bringing with it new sorts of problems, challenges, and technical questions. I’ll get back with you in the order I got your email in, I promise. If I’m not getting to you after about four days, send another email, or you could try leaving a message on the public forum in the hopes that someone in the community may have run into your problem and can help you solve it more quickly.

In another podcasting related trend that’s worth mentioning, podcasting has reached another plateau busting growth trend in the search engines. I know this because I basically own the keywords “podcast hosting” and a few others similar to that, and my GoogleAds bill has shot through the roof this week. It’s up from about 15 clickthroughs per day to around 30 or 40. I’ll get some hard stats and graphs here in the next few days and put some real analysis up. I’ve not been monitoring the news for podcasting lately, so if anyone has some insight as to where this influx is coming from, I’d be open to learning.

Peak Oil Fervor on the Rise; World Looks to Rizzn for Help
There has been a fair amount of concern amongst the Peak Oil alarmist crowd recently that has a couple of people in my sphere of influence up in arms, and urging me and anyone I care about to move to an agrerian population center or join a commune. I’m open minded, and I listen to what my comrades have to say before Most of the ruckus has been started by a certain Michael Rupert article published at From the Wilderness.

As I pack my bags to head to Washington for Congressional Black Caucus hearings on the September 11th attacks (to be conducted this Friday and Saturday) my inbox is being progressively flooded with emails from inside sources in the energy industry about what Hurricane Rita is now likely to accomplish – the near-complete destruction of an already teetering US economy.

Coup de Grace. If you hear these words, know that they come from this article. I’m not going to go through and point by point rebuttal everything in this article, I’m simply going to go over the highlights and share my thoughts. I’m not the authority on Peak Oil, and I’m not the authority on rebutting Peak Oil. I am a very learned and avid student of Ray Kurzweil, and I ‘survived’ Y2K as an industry insider, and I believe that my insight given those two facets of me makes my analysis unique and pertinent.

According to Michael Rupert:

30% of America’s refining capability is likely to be destroyed by Hurricane Rita
30% of America’s domestic natural gas production is shut down.
Saudi replacement oil is useless, because it’s not even a bargain at $10–$12 below market cost.
Rupert agrees with the mainstream media (MSM) that Rita will indeed be a worst case scenario when it hits Texas, effectively destroying anything it touches.
The Chairman of Valero Energy says that this could destroy America’s economy as we know it.
CNN is now predicting $5/gallon gasoline prices post-Rita
The largest nuclear plant in America is being shut down in response to Rita preperation.
FEMA will not protect lives, only protect assets.

I must admit, before reading the article by Michael Rupert, I was a lot more convinced of a crisis hearing this information from trusted members of my inner circle. Unfortunately, if you read through his article, the bulk of the ‘crisis’ is based on MSM sources. What is it we here at the Blip community have been screaming for almost a year now? The MSM distorts in favor of sensationalism! Why? Because it sells more advertisements!

As soon as my life settles down a bit, I’m going to finish a little documentary I’m working on about FlyDLUX, focusing on the distortion the media placed on our company in relationship with the facts. It was the most real example in my life I’ve ever had that showed me how much of our ‘news’ is simply entertainment, not factually based. As to the Chairman of Valero Energy, of course he’s going to agree with him. He’s a chairman of a large energy conglomorate. He’s looking for corporate welfare, in an era of corporate entitlement. The more he plays up the crisis, the more he’s likely to recieve in federal aide. There is no self-interest in him downplaying the crisis. Just like Enron, if the public wants a crisis, he and others like him are in a position to ‘create a crisis.’

Speaking to FEMA, P.J. O’Rourke on Real Time with Bill Maher brought up an interesting point a week ago. FEMA is an agency that shouldn’t exist. It’s a creation of the Carter administration, and it’s responsibilities are essentially redundant to pre-existing private and military operations. Emergency management shouldn’t be taken care of on a federal level. It should be the responsibility of the first responders, the National Guard (implemented from state-level authority), and if needed, individual executive orders and acts of congress. The necessity for a government organisation like FEMA to muck things up simply isn’t there, as it seems to only get in the way of other, more capable organisations, private and governmental.

Most importantly, and on a grander vision that simply this one hurricane and the last, those concerned and even panicked by the Peak Oil prognosis in general (and these disasters in specificity) in my opinion are missing the larger capability of a capitalist system and the Law of Accelerating Returns. I’m not saying we as a country should ignore the dwindling world oil supplies, and if I was saying that, it simply wouldn’t happen. I guarantee you all over this country and indeed this planet, there are people quietly positioning themselves to take up world slack with alternative energies onces

the world runs out of it’s favorite crude juice. That’s the nature of economics, and indeed the nature of the law of Accelerating Returns.

Let me quote Ray Kurzweil, one of the worlds leading proponents of AI and technology in general:

The Law of Accelerating Returns: As order exponentially increases, time exponentially speeds up (that is, the time interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes).

But the growth predicted by the Law of Accelerating Returns is an exception to the frequently cited limitations to exponential growth. Even a catastrophe, as apparently befell our reptilian cohabitants in the late Cretaceous period, only sidesteps an evolutionary process, which then picks up the pieces and continues unabated (unless the entire process is wiped out). An evolutionary process acclerates because it builds on its past achievements, which includes improvements in its own means for further evolutions.

The Law of Accelerating Returns applies equally to the evolutionary process of computation, which inherently will grow exponentially and essentially without limit. The two resources it needs – the growing order of the evolving technology itself, and the chaos from which an evolutionary process draws its options for further diversity – are unbounded.

Kurzweil, in the context from which I drew this quote, was attempting to persuade us that machines would one day build themselves, based upon the Law of Accelerating Returns, the Law of Increasing Entropy and The Law of Time and Chaos. (for more on all this, I suggest The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil). The point that I’m driving at, however, is that as time progresses, and chaos increases (that is to say, increasing uncertainty in the energy and the oil markets), the laws previously mentioned dictate that alternative energy forms to fill the voids created will be found, and our way of life will be only slightly disrupted (if at all).

In simpler terms, these criseses and new technologies seem to function on a pendulum swing, and we are entering an age where there seems to be a number of pendulums swinging into their low points, and when a pendulum reaches it’s lowest point in the swing, the chicken littles of the world seem to run out of the woodwork, because it sells papers, issues, advertisement, or otherwise allows them to cash in.

I’m not 100% convinced that my analysis applies here, but I’m hovering around a high 80% to low 90% degree of certainty. I invite criticism and response to this to distill this down to it’s essential truth.

/mark