Saturday, December 04, 2004

2000 Year Old Man

In 1982 Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks classic comedy skit The 2000 Year Old Man was made into an animated made-for-TV movie. I remember watching it and laughing as Reiner, posing as an interviewer, chatted with Brooks, the 2000 year old man. Reiner asks Brooks about the people he has known over the years:
Joan of Arc? "Know her? I went with her!" Robin Hood? "Lovely Man. Ran around the forest. Took from everybody and kept it. But he had a good press agent." Jesus? "A quiet lad, used to come into the store with these twelve other guys. Never bought anything. Asked me for some water once."
Now Dr. Aubrey de Grey of the University of Cambridge suggests that we might all live that long... though he doesn't promise we'll be as funny as Brooks.

de Grey stats that he believes that "...the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already," suggesting that the rapid advances currently being made in his field could have a real impact on those alive today. de Grey claims to have "...a very detailed plan to repair all the types of molecular and cellular deamage that happen to us over time," and that "since these therapies repair accumulated damage, they are applicable to people in middle age or older who have a fair amount of damage."

Boy won't that throw a wrinkle into plans to reform social security. "Yep, I retired at 62 and have been drawing social security benefits for the past 900 years!" And our overpopulation problems are liable to get a lot worse as well...

But all kidding aside, I wonder if the biggest problem with this whole scheme is that only the very rich are likely to be able to afford to live for thousands of years. Imagine my great-great-great-great grandchildren still having to hear about Warren Buffet's investing ideas. Live, from Warren himself.

This could create the greatest "haves" and "have-nots" problem that the human race has ever seen. Already the rich tend to live longer than the poor, but thousands of years longer? If de Grey is right, and this is a real possibility, I predict that the very wealthy will actually evolve to become a quite different species from the rest of humanity. One's entire perspective on the world is likely to shift radically when one has hundreds of years of experience and when one can look forward to a future of hundreds of years of life. Now there is a generation gap.

Friday, December 03, 2004

Blogging Resources

I was just visiting with a friend, Ed Dua of QuadCarver, and talking about how to use blogs in a business. I started doing a little tutorial on blogging and then started showering him with different tools that I use for my blogs and to keep up on others blogs... When I got back home I realized that I had given him too much information too fast :-) So I wrote an email listing all of the things I had told him about. Then I realized that others might benefit as well from such a list... so here it is:

That Buzznet photo thing:

http://www.buzznet.com


Basic blogging tool:

http://www.blogger.com


The "better" blogging tool:

http://www.typepad.com


The FEED set up tool:

http://www.feedburner.com


The PING site to let everyone know when your blog is updated

http://pingomatic.com/


The Feed reader:

http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/


Places to go to search blogs:

http://www.technorati.com

http://www.bloglines.com

http://www.feedster.com


How to PROMOTE your blog:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Berkeley Blogger Dinner

Thanks!! Especially to Mary Hodder for organizing tonight's blogger dinner. But Mary, we should do this more often, so I am counting on you to organize... But the excuse was good, Doc Searls being in town. It was great to catch up with Doc who in addition to being an icon of blogging is a truly great human being and a friend. Doc was in town to visit and speak at the Berkeley class that Mary blogs, Language of Politics taught by the incredible George Lakoff who I remember reading when I was in College...

It was also good to see Marc Brown of Buzznet fame who also captured some great photos of the evening.

Met a few people for the first time including Jeff Clavier who is one of the few people on the planet (so far) to have a LinkedIn Case Study written about him because he knows so many people... and Renee Blodgett who has recently moved to the west coast from Boston and with whom I had a long conversation about mixing personal stuff and business in the same blog... by the way this is the post that Renee is most proud of on her blog.... And finally (but not least) JD Lasica who seems to know everyone and who is working on a very cool project called ourmedia which I will let you explore on your own.

Sorry to all of you who attended the dinner (20 or 30) who I didn't collect cards from and thus failed to get mentioned...

UPDATE: The link for finding out about ourmedia, until the official site launch is HERE

Monday, November 29, 2004

Target : Entertainment : Marijuana

Note to Target -- don't provide product listings without any additional meta-data! For starters, how about what kind of a product is it anyway? Movie? Music? Book? Or controlled substance? Thanks to Steve Rubel for this pointer to Inside Google's link to Target selling Marijuana...

The Amazon version of Target's online store already has 8 customer reviews...
Yo, this be the most dopest chit I've ever had. I got this book from my peeps just the other dizzle. After I learned how to roll one phat doob, I got so wasted I was flyin like handi-man. Then I got the munchies and ate the book. Now I need another. (five stars)
But at least the Amazon entry had a little more information on the product... Perhaps this really is a book published in 1993 for young adults?

Indeed: Marijuana by Sandra Lee Smith

Given that Amazon reports that the Shipping Weight for this product is 12 ounces, the Target price of $25.25 was a little hard to believe... and the Amazon "used" price of $8.95 was downright worrisome. Used pot?