A thousand times better

You can tell we are getting to the sweet part of the exponential advance curve. Just look at how different the world is from around 2000.

No Google.

No YouTube.

Clunky computers.

Barely functional Internet.

Many things really expensive, like it cost $300,000,000 to sequence a genome. By around 2015, it will be around $1,000.

Note that things don't get slightly better these days, say twice as good; they get 10 times or 1,000 times better.

http://www.physorg.com/news193896595.html

This pattern of obvious order(s)-of-magnitude improvement, OoMI (let's say it's pronounced "Oh, my!"), will be noted on this blog from time to time.

I have seen many examples of this recently, but so many things are happening that I cannot keep up even my reading... so posts have suffered recently.

The first step in learning how to do something right is to do it wrong first.

Herbicide resistance

After 20 years of heavy use of herbicides such as Roundup, surprise! evolution! and the weeds have become so resistant that the herbicide is useless.

(I originally came across this story in the New York Times, but since they will soon be putting their stories behind a pay wall, I will no longer link to their articles. While they sit overestimating their own importance, the rest of the world will just move on.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup

Adjusting dosage for an individual

You will soon, say by 2015 at the latest, be easily and cheaply be able to determine whether you need a low dose or a high dose for many drugs.

http://www.physorg.com/news192726120.html

Audible audiobook quality 2, 3, 4, and e

If you are using an iPod with a lot of memory, audio file size is probably not an issue.

When you buy an audiobook at Audible.com, you can download the book at four separate sound qualities. The differences are quite apparent. At the lower qualities, when you listen at 2x, there is significant distortion and fluttering. However, at the highest quality, e, the sound is good even at 2x. Your default quality is probably set to 4, so you may want to try downloading an audiobook twice at different qualities to hear the difference. My default is now set at e.