Author: Alan Oppenheimer
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More on Moore
The previous post on the Future of the Connectome alluded to how Moore’s Law would likely make the seemingly impossible mapping of the human brain’s 100 trillion synapses possible in the somewhat-but-not-too-distant Future. In much the same way that it made the mapping of the 6 billion DNA letters of the human genome possible in…
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William Gibson: Death to Print
William Gibson will play more than just an inspirational role for this blog. He will also be one of the threads that ties the Past, Present and Future together in it. To make this first long story as short as possible: • Between 1984 and 1988, Gibson authored his futuristic Neuromancer trilogy, popularizing the term…
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Future Future: The Connectome
The Human Genome Project (HGP) started out as a wild gleam in the eyes of a number of very forward-thinking 1980s scientists. Today, 40 years later, that Future belongs to All of Us. The HGP also helped give rise to the much broader scientific discipline of Omics, with genomic follow-ons like proteomics and transcriptomics, with…
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Leverage
Distributing the Future to a few people is a good thing, but with over 300,000,000 people in the U.S. and 8,000,000,000 in the world, a few more people having the Future doesn’t make it much more evenly distributed. That’s where Leverage comes in. Don’t try to distribute the Future all by yourself. Help other people…
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2015: Three-Quarters of the Way (“All of Us”)
Computer people love powers of two. Doubling or halving. We’ve done the beginning (1983), middle (2004) and end (2025) of our timeline, and then the first half of the first half (1993). Now on to the first half of the second half. By 2015, the Alan & Priscilla Oppenheimer Foundation had been working with on…
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2007: The Genome for the Rest of Us
The Human Genome Project (HGP) took over 10 years and 3 billion dollars to complete. The end result, in 2001, was a “draft” version of the 3 billion or so DNA “letters” in a single human genome (yes, right around a dollar per letter). Scientist Craig Venter published his own genome at about the same…
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1993: Half Way to Half Way (“You Will”)
We’ve started at the beginning, gone half way to the (Present) end, then all the way there, then on into the Future. Let’s back up and go half way to half way. 1993 was a banner year for distributing the Future. Literally. We love to complain about advertising, but every so often an ad campaign…
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1984: The Computer for the Rest of Us
As far as distributing the Future, there has been nothing more fundamental, in at least the last half century, than the Macintosh computer. As 1984 dawned, the Future of computing was, in fact, already here, but it was very unevenly distributed. Apple billed the Macintosh as “The Computer for the Rest of Us,” and that’s…
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The Future Future, Finally
This blog is about the Past, Present and Future of distributing the Future. So far we’ve talked about a couple items from the Past (1983, 2004) and about the present Present. Now, finally, it’s time to start on the future Future. The Future may be here already, but, being unevenly distributed, most of what we,…
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2025: The Present Present
Having started at the beginning (of our timeline) and continued with the middle, it seems appropriate we now move on to the end. Of course one of the main points of this blog is that there is no end; there will always be a Future to distribute. But for now we’ll go with the end…
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