The Future And You

Paul Fischer (digital network engineer) is our featured guest.

Topics: Fun, Interesting and Cool Stuff (but no future or computer security). For example: Beer (especially high-end micro-brews), BaltiCon and the BaltiCon Podcast, The one time your host accidentally visited a Brothel, the time your host's high school chemistry teacher showed the class how to make wine, and the world's simplest method for distilling wine into hard liquor.

Bonus: After you have listened to this episode you will know how to make all the wine you want at home using materials anyone can buy at any food store. You will also know how to distill any wine you make into hard liquor without effort over a period of eight hours using only devices you already own--a method which uses no heat, no fire and no evaporation.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the April 11, 2012 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 35 minutes]. This is the final part of an interview recorded using Skype on March 3, 2012.

Paul Fischer is a digital network engineer. In his spare time (teamed with his wife, Martha Holloway) he organizes the new media track at the science fiction convention Balticon; produces the Balticon Podcast; and has several times served as judge for the annual Parsec Awards which are given for Excellence in Podcasting.

News Item: Google Glasses (augmented reality glasses) are scheduled to become publicly available before the end of 2012. (As per an article in the NY Times dated Feb 21, 2012 written by Nick Bilton.)

Announcement: Bones Burnt Black (the FREE audio book) took the #1 position on the list of "Today's Top Subscriptions" at Podiobooks.com on April 9, and simultaneously took the #2 position on their list of "Most Popular Books by Number of Subscriptions in the Last 30 Days."

Paul Fischer (digital network engineer) is our featured guest.

Topics: Cyberwar: Several specific examples of computer hacking done by military forces around the world. How Iran's nuclear program was successfully cyber attacked. How the Chinese government successfully attacked a school in the USA (and bragged about it on their official TV news program). How a commercial airliner's onboard computer was accidentally infected with a virus which crashed the plane and killed all aboard. Also described: Why your car is now vulnerable to computer hacking, and how this can put your life in danger. And at least one incident without any hacking at all: how Fidel Castro cleverly tricked the Cubans into first giving up their ammunition, and then later (when they had no bullets) forced them to surrender all their guns.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the April 4, 2012 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 36 minutes]. This is the third part of an interview recorded using Skype on March 3, 2012.

Paul Fischer is a digital network engineer. In his spare time (teamed with his wife, Martha Holloway) he organizes the new media track at the science fiction convention Balticon; produces the Balticon Podcast; and has several times served as judge for the annual Parsec Awards which are given for Excellence in Podcasting.

Announcement: J.C.Hutchins (author of the popular 7th Son trilogy) said this about the new audio book version of Bones Burnt Black which is available for Free at Podiobooks.com: "A riveting and realistic portrayal of space travel gone wrong, and of a crew who must fight for their survival. Bones Burnt Black is exciting, and expertly told. A must-listen." Don't miss out. Listen to Bones Burnt Black today.

Evo Terra (author, speaker and digital business strategist) is our featured guest.

Topic: Trends in New Media: Where we are now, how we got here, and some of the shifting trends which are changing the direction of New Media in our future.

Evo Terra is: co-founder of ePublish Unum; founder of Podiobooks.com; a professional public speaker at digital & social media events; and a digital Business strategist at ASW Consulting Services. Previously Evo was the host of Dragon Page Live Fire at 550 AM KFYI Radio, and was co-founder & show host at FarPoint Media. He is also co-author of the books Podcasting for Dummies and Expert Podcasting Practices for Dummies.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the March 28, 2012 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 46 minutes]. This is the complete interview recorded using Skype on March 17, 2012.

News Item: The audio book of your host's novel Bones Burnt Black is now available on Podiobooks.com for FREE. Read by the author himself, this is an improved version of the audio book edition (cleaner sound, and with music added to the beginnings and ends). If you enjoy audio books (especially those that are Free) please give its first chapter a listen.

Paul Fischer (digital network engineer) is our featured guest. Topics: Even more examples of how your smart phone is vulnerable to viruses, trojans, worms, and other hacker software; some of which attacks your phone by way of blue-tooth, Wi-Fi, attached to the apps you download, or by tricking you into thinking the attacking software is actually an update for a trusted app you installed some time ago. Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the March 24, 2012 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 42 minutes]. This is the second part of an interview recorded using Skype on March 3, 2012. Paul Fischer is a digital network engineer. In his spare time (teamed with his wife, Martha Holloway) he organizes the new media track at the science fiction convention Balticon; produces the Balticon Podcast; and has several times served as judge for the annual Parsec Awards which are given for Excellence in Podcasting.

Paul Fischer (digital network engineer) is our featured guest. Topics: specific examples of why your smart phone is even more vulnerable to viruses, trojans, worms, and other hacker software than is your computer, and why you can do pretty much nothing about it; how Corpus Christie's automated water meter-reading system caught a thief who'd stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of water, as well as allowed the city to lay-off every last one of their meter readers; and why cities and towns are scrambling to build their own wireless networks for their police, firefighters and other city employees. Paul Fischer is a digital network engineer. In his spare time (teamed with his wife, Martha Holloway) he organizes the new media track at the science fiction convention Balticon; produces the Balticon Podcast; and has several times served as judge for the annual Parsec Awards which are given for Excellence in Podcasting. Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the March 14, 2012 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 39 minutes]. This is the first part of an interview recorded using Skype on March 3, 2012. News Item: Some of you may be wondering why there has not been a final update on my TA-65 evaluation project yet. Well, it turns out we still have more pills to take. My mother read somewhere that it was good to take a break one day each week when taking TA-65. And so she did. And so we aren't out of pills yet. Although I should mention that even when we run out we will still need to have blood drawn, sent to UCLA for testing, and the results returned before I do a final explanation of all the results; so this could still take another month or two. I ask for your continued patience. Second News Item: I am pleased to announce that the audio version of my novel Bones Burnt Black will soon join the nearly 600 books available on Podiobooks.com. All of which are offered at everyone's favorite price: Free. If you haven't had a chance to listen to my novel, that opportunity will present itself beginning on March 28, 2012. And if you have heard it already, Podiobooks.com holds many other titles you can enjoy as well. (BTW: This is a new and improved version of Bones Burnt Black. The audio has been cleaned a bit more; and to give it that professional touch, music has been added at the beginning and end of each episode, as well as in the breaks between scenes.)

George Dvorsky (futurist and ethicist) is our featured guest.

Topics: Why he has changed from a Vegetarian Diet to a Paleolithic Diet (which is limited to the foods our species ate before the rise of farming and animal husbandry), and his recent personal-record-breaking dead-lift of 400 pounds. Also, his expectations concerning: techlepathy (neurotechnologically-assisted telepathy); postgenderism; astrosociobiology (the speculative scientific study of extraterrestrial civilizations and their possible social characteristics and developmental tendencies); caloric restriction; the work of Matt Lalonde and Rob Wolfe; the Conscientious Carnivore; Ancestral Health; Primal Transhumanism; and his worry that the Fermi Paradox represents a "Great Filter" which may still lay ahead of us, and which our species might not survive.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the March 7, 2012 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 41 minutes]. This is the final third of an interview recorded using Skype on February 17, 2012.

George Dvorsky is a Canadian futurist and ethicist. He has written and spoken extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology—particularly as they pertain to the improvement of human performance and experience. He is the Chairman of the Board at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and is the program director for the Rights of Non-Human Persons program.

George Dvorsky (futurist and ethicist) is our featured guest.

Topics: Is it wise to use our emotions (especially repugnance) as a guide to truth? Giving protective rights to intelligent animals (apes, whales, dolphins, and elephants), and eventually (when the time is right) to artificially intelligent software; augmenting animals to raise their IQ (animal uplifting); the new movie Planet of the Apes; the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey; better ways to conduct the search for extraterrestrials (SETI); Dyson Spheres; the Fermi Paradox; why your host hopes we will forever move to universes of ever increasing dimensionality; as well as artificially created universes and simulated universes.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the February 29, 2012 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 61 minutes]. This is the second third of an interview recorded using Skype on February 17, 2012.

George Dvorsky is a Canadian futurist and ethicist. He has written and spoken extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology—particularly as they pertain to the improvement of human performance and experience. He is the Chairman of the Board at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and is the program director for the Rights of Non-Human Persons program.

George Dvorsky (futurist and ethicist) is our featured guest.

Topics: the importance of studying history in order to extrapolate the future; how democratic transhumanism differs from other flavours of transhumanism; why he is a technogaian environmentalist and how that relates to Bright Green Environmentalism; the abolition of suffering in all species; political problems of putting a thermostat on the earth; as well as the good and bad of living an engineered blissful existence permanently.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the February 22, 2012 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 62 minutes]. This is the first third of an interview recorded using Skype on February 17, 2012.

George Dvorsky is a Canadian futurist and ethicist. He has written and spoken extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology—particularly as they pertain to the improvement of human performance and experience. He is the Chairman of the Board at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and is the program director for the Rights of Non-Human Persons program.

News Item: Your host's most transhumanist novel is now available for purchase through Amazon's Kindle program. All the main characters in Plague at Redhook have augmentations which transhumanists look forward to possessing. Computers implanted in their bodies and hardwired into their brains, for example, such that they can share with one another their verbal thoughts, as well as images of what they are currently looking at, or what they remember seeing in the past. These augmentations are not new to them, this is how they live their normal lives. The plot is an action-adventure story combined with a medical-mystery story combined with an exploring-an-alien-world story.

And remember: you don't need a Kindle to purchase and read Kindle books. There is a free app that turns most smart phones into a Kindle reader. And there is a free downloadable program which will turn a PC or a Mac into a Kindle reader as well. So if you have $3.99 to burn, and want to see what your host thinks the future might be like in story form, consider buying a copy of Plague at Redhook.

Wendy S. Delmater(editor, author and safety engineer), Joe Naff(author), and Myself (your host) are our featured guests.

Topic: Future disasters, and what you can do now to prepare for them. (Part 3)

The future will contain many bad events as well as many good. Your individual journey through your personal future will be less painful if you are prepared. Here are dozens of ways to greatly reduce your future suffering.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the February 15, 2012 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 39 minutes]. This is the third and final part of a panel recorded before a live audience on June 4, 2011 in Charlotte NC at the SF&F convention ConCarolinas.

Wendy S. Delmater runs the critically acclaimed zine: Abyss & Apex Magazine of Speculative Fiction, and has a new non-fiction book coming out on Valentines Day, 2012 entitled Better Dating Through Engineering: A system For Finding Lasting Love After 45

Joe Naff is the author of the supernatural thriller: The Gospel of the Font, and the young-adult high-fantasy series: The Chronicles of Shyra.

News Item: A new and very brief update on my TA-65 Evaluation Project.

Jonathan Mugan (author of The Curiosity Cycle, and computer science researcher) is our featured guest.

Topics: Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, online games, learning styles and methods, arguing to agree, errors in our thinking process, and many topics covered in his book The Curiosity Cycle: Preparing Your Child for the Ongoing Technological Explosion. (Part 2)

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the February 8, 2012 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 39 minutes]. This is the second half of an interview recorded on January 21, 2012 using a Skype-to-Skype connection.

Jonathan Mugan is a computer science researcher specializing in machine learning and Artificial Intelligence. He completed a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University, and received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. His book The Curiosity Cycle: Preparing Your Child for the Ongoing Technological Explosion is available in paperback and Kindle eBook editions.