geekosystem

When I was kid, I thought it would be awesome to live in a mall. My family and I stayed in a hotel built in or on top of one: We could go get Starbucks for breakfast in our PJs and if I ever needed something new and shiny to validate my existence, it was readily available. Of course, even I thought there were limits to what living above a mall could be like; for instance, I always assumed that living in a building like that meant you pretty much had to live in an apartment. I was a foolish child. You can both live in a house and live above a mall, thanks to the Chinese. You can have it all, people.

As we've reported here earlier, Bill Gates has deemed it time for a new toilet. For the last couple days, teams of engineers and designers from around the world arrived in Seattle to show off their best designs for the honey bucket of the future, competing against one another to see how they handled solid waste. Don't worry, you guys, it's all soy-based gunk -- it's just supposed to look a lot like poop, a goal at which it succeeds admirably. Participants in the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, needed to meet several criteria set by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is throwing its philanthropic weight (read: millions of dollars of cash money grants) behind the project in the hopes of creating a functioning off-the-grid sanitation system for the developing world.

Never has the band Tenacious D seemed more prophetic than now, when Swiss company Acabion is prognosticating that by 2100 C.E. that we will travel through vacuum tubes at speeds around 20,000 km/h (about 12,000 mph). According to Wired, the company is aiming to introduce a new class of vehicle it calls the "streamliner," which looks like a jet fuselage mated with a motocycle. The aircraft- inspired design is intended to increase efficiency and speed, which Acabion is hoping will revolutionize transportation across the globe. So confident are they in their design that they have outlined the future of transit as revolutionized by the streamliner.

Apparently, when predicting what the future would entail for those of us, people thought that the human population would be infiltrated with a bunch of emotional robots, computers that could manipulate our subconscious, and CYBORGSCYBORGSCYBORGS. Whatever. Robots can't even juggle ... oh. (via Everything Is Terrible)

Yesterday the Arizona State Senate approved SB 1307, a bill that prohibits the manufacture, for any reason, of human-animal hybrids. Specifically, it prohibits anyone in Arizona from "creating or attempting to create an in vitro human embryo by any means other than fertilization of a human egg by a human sperm."

Also verboten is “transferring or attempting to transfer a human embryo into a nonhuman womb,” “transferring or attempting to transfer a nonhuman embryo into a human womb” and “transporting or receiving for any purpose a human-animal hybrid.”