Three days before the election, time to write down my election predictions.

Based upon what I have seen of the polls, campaigns and futures market actions of the 2008 presidential election, my predictions of the events of election night are thus,

-- The Democratic party candidates will win the election with room to spare, by at least 5 million popular votes and at least 100 electoral college votes.

-- The election will be called correctly by at least three mainstream 24-hour newsmedia channels before the polls close in the Mountain time zone.

-- There will be multiple allegations of vote fraud in the battleground states; they will ultimately not be sufficient in quantity of affected voters to question the validity of the president-elect.

-- News of vote fraud will be made public faster and more broadly than in any previous election, thanks in part to the advent of popular online video and netroots movements to place videographers at polling stations.

-- The Republican Party candidates will not concede the election before polls close in the Pacific time zone.

-- The Democratic Party will gain at least 7 seats in the Senate, and 25 in the House of Representatives.


Those being my predictions, I'd like to close by noting that the concept of predicting the future with certainty is folly as a claim to knowledge of the outcomes of future events is nothing more than sentiment with no value farther than interest on an “I told you so” or on an embarrassing retraction depending on its accuracy. Futurism is not about making quantifiable predictions like some fortune-teller, but rather to develop likely scenarios of potential future events in order that they can be prepared for. The predictions I make today are of little use in this respect, other than pointing out a few interesting topics to follow in the news on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008.

-Craig Blaylock
10:06:24 PM 11/01/08

Without apologizing for the delay...

More news important to your future.

KurzweilAI.net Is my sister publication in a way, though I didn't discover it untill after I began this blog. A post references a New Scientist article describing new miniscule sensors that change their shape to move in the harsh Martian environment. This seems a logical step towards the possibility of nanoscale exploration of the universe.

Engadget posts a video uploaded to youtube by IBM. Big Blue apparently has some interesting ideas for the future of computing. My guess is that it wouldn't take more than three years to see this stuff ubiquitous in the market if there was enough push for it. Voice recognition at this level is doable today and the wireless technologies for the purposes demonstrated are in production. The only thing in between is software and hardware development.

Physorg.com posts an article on the Gravity Probe-B experiment, giving a thorough explanation of how the new experiment works.

Another post describes the studies scientists have done to discover the genes associated with learning and memory. Not only have they identified the genes involved, they've also made this database availible and searchable, making use of this knowledge much more efficient.

Yet another describes the current state of plastic solar panel technology and how it will soon be cost-effective to deploy.

Two more articles were posted on KurzweilAI.net in rapid fire, researchers are hard at work enabling printers to make electronics and bones from scratch. Add these to the list including plastic, chocolate, cake icing, metal, ceramics, paper, and soon organs. This is personally one of my favorite disruptive technologies. Being able to make your own stuff is what seperates people from large corporations.


Breaking with my usual trend of just the news that matters in the long run, I'd like to put in a quick shot to Swaptree, described in this DownloadSquad post. It's a new web2.0 beta that works like Ebay, only you trade items rather than buy them. They finally approved my application and I made my first trade yesterday, my copy of "Rayman: Raving Rabbids" for Stephen Hawking's "Illustrated Theory of Everything". I'll let you know when it comes in.


That's it for the moment, but I've got some news to browse for the pest of the day and you may see another post by monday.

The Weekends' News.

There’s a good deal of news today as I’ve gone the whole weekend without making an update.

Engadget reports a Computerworld article questioning the validity of banning RF devices on planes. The article reports that it’s a lot easier and cheaper to ban cell phones, Wi-Fi, and other wireless communication devices in flight than it is to independently test and certify every product. The author makes a very compelling argument: If wireless devices could take down a plane, what’s to stop terrorists from doing so? Then goes on to suggest that the lack of news reports implicating radio technology in plane crashes indicates that it is not too dangerous to ban their use completely. This is a fallacious assumption, as RF does interfere, but the possibility of the ban being intended as a crowd control measure certainly bears investigation.

Slashdot links an article in the UK Guardian describing a particularly troubling estimation of future trends made by their nation’s Ministry of Defence. Predictions include Marxism, famine, war, urbanization, climate change, and, in a slightly more hopeful note, direct mind-machine links through ‘brain chips’ by 2035. When ministry of defense of the English-speaking worlds’ oldest imperial nation makes a grim prediction, people better notice. You don’t get to be a 1040 year old nation by not changing with the times.

Disinformation links another article from the guardian describing the events of a small welsh village that’s leading the charge of sustainable habitation. Small towns like Lampeter are pioneering our energy-depleted futures. One can only hope that they’ll be able to iron out the kinks in time to start spreading their innovations to communities that use much more resources than the farming village of 4,000 residents does.

Another post on Engadget sends us to an article from ABC news. Citizens from a county in New Mexico have voted to accept an increase in sales tax to pay for the proposed spaceport. Critics of the bill think that the $198 million price tag should be left to the state, as Dona Ana county has its own problems to deal with. Supporters of the project are excited that the plan is finally moving forward, and hope the momentum of this election will sway nearby counties and the state to their side.

And for the last bit this evening, Techdirt reports that the judge in the Vonage vs Verizon patent has issued an injunction against Vonage to stop them from bringing in any new customers. This, according to the article, is the corporate equivalent of holding their head underwater. Without new customers to sustain the company, Vonage will eventually die. All this because Vonage’s VoIP system uses the technology from three of Verizon’s patents. These patents “cover technologies that deal with connection of VoIP calls to the regular phone network, some features for implementing call-waiting and voice mail services, and VoIP calls using Wi-Fi handsets.” So far, the company has been orderet to pay a $58 million fine, and post $66 million bond, the injunction would be the final nail in an airtight coffin around the already struggling company, but a recent update shows they’ve been granted a temporary stay pending appeal. These are monopoly tactics, similar to Microsoft in the past decades. Verizon is slowly eliminating Vonages’ competition using the broken patent system as a weapon of corporate destruction.