Monday, January 05, 2009

Uber Monday Antidote

It's the first Monday of 2009 - can't you feel it?!
No amount of coffee is going to ease the pain of the first day back at work - no matter how good the aircon is. Rather than dwell on the less pleasant aspects of this, today is a perfect day to do a quick whip around of cool things that happened in 08.

There were plenty of great tech breakthroughs for a greener future. That's nice. Science is always clever, but where's the political will to implement what the scientists learn? Turns out America had a bit of a breakthrough in that regard in 08 with a new President elected and taking office in a couple of weeks who seems very keen to makes some changes. Of course, no offense to B.O., but KR made some promises before he took office that haven't quite panned out ... although kudos to him for starting out on the right foot with a long overdue apology.

Thankfully also a bit of good news for books - that some publishers (mostly of trashy escapism - but hey - whatever floats your boat) are thriving. That's good, I worry for books. All this kindle reader, and iphone crap gets plenty of "the future is paper-free" but books need to survive a while longer yet.

Until we head into space (My solar system or yours?) basically, when they will be way too heavy to earn a place in the hold and those poor colonists will be stuck with reading from monitors or possibly, if they're lucky some groovy type of thin and flexible "electronic paper" which the kids of the future will totally laugh their guts up at how we had to give it such a daggy and derivative name.

Some good things got done by activists in Australia. And there was a little bit of vindication for people like me who don't feel the need to breed. Sci-fi nerds who got another half season of Battlestar Galactica. Oh and a fully kick-arse Batman film.

There was loads more of good stuff in 08, please feel encouraged to add your favourite via the comments.

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