Your guide to a better techpocalypse!

So there’s two main technological trends that we need to be aware of during our lifetimes.

1. Robots.  The industrial revolution is far from over, and robots will soon be doing most of the traditional labor market jobs.
2. Virtual Reality.  The computer revolution is far from over, and soon virtual reality 2.0 will lead us to create a parallel world that will take over many many people’s lives.

I’m serious this will happen in the next 20 years.  This will affect your life.  It’s not far off Sci-Fi.  It’s happening now and it will be completely normal by 2030.

Now these can sound like frightful things, but I believe these developments could actually complement each other,  and perhaps help alleviate some of the world’s mounting problems.

I will talk about this in three parts:
Part 1 – The Rise of the Robots
Part 2 – The Virtual World, for real this time
Part 3 – How VR & the Robots might save us

A Voting Guide for Morons

Top Fifteen Best Most 90’s Albums

Since retro nostalgia goes in about a 20 year time cycle (the time it takes a generation to move from tender impressionistic teenage years to being the dominant workers and consumers in a culture) right now the 90s are big and will probably stay big within our backwards directed (non)culture for awhile.  So to add fuel to the 90s retro pyre, I will now make a list of my favorite nineties albums, because that’s what was truly important back then – sitting around and listening to whole albums.  Sadly I can’t remember the last time I just sat down and just listened to a whole ‘Long Player’ the whole way through while not doing anything else, but back when I did these were the albums that mattered to a midwest kid living in a sonic cocoon made out of college radio (KJHK!) brit pop hype(NME!) and music reviews in magazines(EW!)

How Apple TV could transform the living room and why it will fail to do so.

The Apple TV is a good product.  Airplay and screen mirroring are fantastic features.
But it could be a great product, it could take over the living rooms of many houses, but it probably won’t.  There have been rumors that an enhanced apple TV or an actual Apple branded television will be released in 2014.  The biggest potential for either of these products will be a third app store to go along with the iOS app store and the Mac app store.

The Apple TV app store could be a gamer paradise, an easy way for developers to publish amazing and innovative games without the gatekeepers of Nintendo,  Microsoft, Sony, or even Steam.  This open playing ground could revolutionize living room gaming the same way the iOS  revolutionized portable gaming.  But there are three things Apple will need to take the gaming market by storm:

South Korea : The Best Cycling Destination in Asia

South Korea may not be on the top of people’s lists when it comes to traveling Asia, but for cycling enthusiast that should probably change.  Without much fanfare South Korea has quietly built and invested huge amounts of money into some of the nicest and most extensive cycling trails in the world.  The majority of Korea’s main rivers now have beautiful cycle trails that follow alongside them.  Seoul, the capital, is famous for its parks and walking/biking trails along the Han river.

Typical bike path along a Korean river

The Route

But there is one bike trail that is the crown jewel of asian cycling, if not world cycling.  In 2011 Korea opened up the 4-Rivers (4대강) cycling trail.  A beautiful bike trail that stretches across the entire country from Incheon in the Northwest to the port city of Busan in the Southeast.  The entire trail is clearly marked with Blue signs and a cycling image on the road.  The beauty of this trail is that nearly 70% of the trail across the entire country was built specifically for cyclists (= No Cars!).   The other 30% are country roads that get minimal car traffic and provide a nice bit of variety. There are constant kilometer markers which tell you how far you’ve gone and how far you have to go.  I can think of no other country in the world (not even the Netherlands) where you can ride so long without having to worry about cars or having to once look at a map.