Blog

  • Words Befitting of our Times

    War Is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength: George Orwell – Nineteen Eighty-Four

  • SpaceX: Boldly Going into the Future

    Yesterday, South African-born billionaire entrepreneur, inventor and engineer, and founder of eBay, PayPal and SpaceX, Elon Musk, launched the first private attempt to dock with the International Space Station. This bold move goes down in history as the beginnings of a new frontier in space exploration – the age of private spaceflight.

    I’ve been following the private sector’s developments in space technology for some time now. You may be wondering why the big cable news networks and blogs are making such a fuss over the Falcon 9 rocket’s launch. The gist is this: before President Obama came into power, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (known as NASA to non-space geeks) had this brilliant, yet exceptionally expensive plan for a programme that would take-over from the aging space shuttle fleet (the STS, or space transportation system programme that’s been a large part of NASA’s recent history). It was called the Constellation Programme, and the idea was to return to the moon by around 2017, and from there, move to a human landing on Mars or an asteroid. They’d even begun testing new rocket-engine technology and had developed three concept vehicles based on an engine called the Ares. Things were looking good for NASA, until Obama came into the White House, and, inheriting a poor-administered political landscape and having to begin a term of office in what was probably the worst economic climate since the Great Depression, he effectively cut all funding for the Constellation Programme. Just like that, the excitement at returning to our cosmological neighbor was brought to a standstill.

    NASA thus decided to outsource its rocket building activities to the private sector, so that they could focus on astronomical research, and at the same time, give themselves more time to work on a new rocket system that could fulfill at least some of the objectives of the scrapped Constellation programme. SpaceX is one such private company that has shown significant potential in developing and successfully launching a vehicle that, it is expected, by 2014 will be able to allow the United States to launch their own astronauts to the ISS and not rely on their partners at ROSCOSMOS (the Russian Federal Space Agency).

    SpaceX has proved that it is possible to engineer a space vehicle at a fraction of the cost of what governmental agencies spend on this type of design work. Yet it also opens up the skies to a myriad number of designers, engineers and future thinkers who are willing and ready to contribute to the advancement of our civilisation, a future that is certainly embedded firmly in the realm of the stars.

  • Could We Really Have a “Web 3.0”?

    The buzzword of the past few years, used to describe the type of web that we know today – a web dominated by social websites and user-generated content – was “Web 2.0”. It seemed adequate in distinguishing this “iteration” of the web, encompassing the technologies, web standards and philosophies guiding a more connected web.

    But the question remains: could we have a “Web 3.0”? And if so, what exactly would this type of web be?

    It seems at present that what we have is working rather well for us. This generation of the web has connected our society in unparalleled ways. We can look to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and we see this happening on a constant basis. We see a constant stream of thought blasting through cyberspace from millions of voices across our planet. We see a web built not of websites, but of platforms: systems of communication that are far from what existed a mere ten or twenty years ago.

    So would a Web 3.0 be something that builds upon the platforms created in this generation, or is it going to be something more radical? Perhaps a “3D” web for a generation that most tech companies and film studios think can only be sated by eye-sore pseudo-holographic imagery?

    Or is this next version of our web going to be something a lot more subtle, a quiet transcendence of the web as we know it into a web that connects not only people with each other, but technology with the physical world?

    In some ways I don’t think we can even classify the web using numerical iterators. The web is really becoming a lot more organic in its nature, a lot more flexible to the changing tides of our volatile civlisation. However, I am still curious and excited to see what the web of tomorrow will bring.

  • George Orwell: Why I Write

    George Orwell – Why I Write

    From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

    – George Orwell, Why I Write

    Today I found this copy of a collection of essays by Orwell. He’s one of my most favourite writers. I thoroughly enjoyed Nineteen Eighty-Four,  and these essays, particularly the main one, Why I Write, is sure to give me further insight into this remarkable man’s motives for writing. Perhaps even some inspiration for my own writerly pursuits.

  • Facebook is More Than Just a Website Now

    In what was perhaps the largest initial public offering announcement since the time of Google, Facebook finally announced that it was going public, and launched its portfolio on the NASDAQ yesterday.

    Almost immediately after the announcement, its shares fluctuated quite dramatically. And cue the Internet noise as commenters from esteemed economists to the average blogger started speculating the demise of the social media giant.

    Here’s what I think, though: Facebook has become more than a simple website. It’s more than a mere social network.

    Mark Zuckerberg and his team out in Palo Alto have effectively built a social platform. The company has transcended from being a place to keep updated with friends from around the world, to a digital space that is set to connect not just the world, but the disparate network of websites and blogs that together generate what they call the “social graph.”

    If anything, the future of Facebook looks bright. It has become a tool that we find indispensable on a daily basis, and in some ways offers a sense of connectivity unparalleled by other (more traditional) means of communication. The furthering of the social idea – by “staking a claim” of social space on other websites, and thus creating a more interconnected web – will serve as a bridge, if anything, to what could be termed a “Web 3.0” of sorts.