It seems like things that cause earthquakes are the ultimate in evil or hyperbole. But now we've achieved that end: human technology can cause earthquakes. Hurray!

A recent Scientific American article discussed a new way to generate free power called enhanced geothermal. It works great, there's just one minor drawback, it causes constant earthquakes. The project in Oregon is far enough from settlements that it merely annoys the neighbours with the small rattles. But still. A technology that causes earthquakes? That's fantastic!

Here's another one: geologists are worried that Taipei 101 may have torqued the earth so much that it opened up a new fault. Cool! The residents of the building will be OK because it's highly earthquake resistant.

All new technology presents benefits and dangers. People say that the atomic bomb is purely a danger. But think about the upside. Major international conflicts have ceased because they're too dangerous. And if we ever find a giant asteroid coming our way, we're probably going to need nukes to blow it up, right?

So I think we can actually measure our progress by the sheer destructive power of our technologies. Now that we can cause earthquakes, can the colonization of other planets be far away?

The most critical piece of information for any farmer is what to grow. What grains are going for good prices at the market. What is overproduced and what is underproduced. What is in demand. Farmers must know this information in order to make a living, hopefully a profit.

Let's say you're a farmer in rural part of western Africa. You have very little in the way of communications—the roads are poor, telephone lines are poor or non-existent, internet access is not there. In fact, your village may only contain a few people with literacy to even use the internet. Aside from travelling for hours or days the only way to access market information could be through a shared mobile phone.

Then you need a trust-worthy source of information on the other end. Preferably one that can communicate via SMS text messaging, because it's much cheaper than making a voice call. I've been collecting some information about these kinds of services in Africa and intending to write up what I found for quite a while, so here it is, a summary of the agricultural market information providers operating in Africa that I am aware of.

Esoko

Esoko is the easiest to find on the internet. It was founded by Mark Davies, a serial entrepreneur who started up a number of successful internet companies including CitySearch in the UK before transplanting to Ghana where he founded BusyInternet, an internet café, ICT centre, and business incubator in Accra. In 2005 he started TradeNet which is now renamed to Esoko.

I've played around a bit with Esoko and it looks like the real deal. I viewed prices for a variety of produce for a wide variety of markets in Ghana, for example. The data seemed to be fairly up to date. I was able to set up an alert for myself on prices for certain commodities in certain markets, so the system would SMS the prices to me on certain days of the week. You can also 2-way SMS into the system with different code and they will send you back the info you are looking for by return text message.

I couldn't actually test the SMS because I don't have an African cell phone # but assuming that works (and I'm sure it does) this looks like a great system with tons of accessible and useful information. They currently have at least some data for Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Mali, Mozambique, Ghana, South Africa, and Sudan so if you're operating in any of those countries, check it out.

They also seem to be looking to expand their platform as a service into other parts of the world, see: esokonetworks.

Others

Another service is Trade at Hand, which operates in Senegal, Mali and Burkina Faso. I haven't been able to try this service, but their representative Raphaël Dard tells me via email that they are oriented towards international exporters in those countries, and provide prices in the major agricultural market in Rungis, France. They distribute information via SMS to farmers who sign up at federated agencies within the country.

Hans Hesse tells me on his blog that Zambian National Farmers Union runs a service for that country at http://www.farmprices.co.zm/, unfortunately the site is down as I write. There is some information on the ZNFU site, which appears to be right up to date, and have an SMS interface with short-code 4455 (from inside Zambia). Good stuff.

Last but not least, Engineers Without Borders's Megan Putnam shared with me a report from an EWB volunteer who examined a project called ECAMIC which facilitated the use of Esoko. One issue they noted was charging the phones in the many locations where no grid power is available. Another is dealing with the metrics for quantity and quality of each commoditiy, which may not be easy to transmit over SMS (some might be weighed, others rated by size and quality).

To summarize. It's important to be skeptical of any technologically driven development initiative. That said, I'm quite keen on this one because it is based on mobile phones, which are a huge and expanding business concern in Africa, a huge force for development, and probably the continent's biggest success story right now. They are also durable, cheap, and run on very little power. The information systems I've mentioned here are early days, but they seem to work and provide value to their users. I won't link to testimonials and success stories because I'm too skeptical about them as marketing for development agencies. But reading between the lines there are enough different people trying this out and getting positive results that I would encourage everyone involved to stick with it and keep pushing the boundaries.

I'm proposing a talk for TEDx Waterloo. The subject is Light + Music, an overview of visual music, the past and future, of this wonderful field where two of your senses get together and jam and have a good time.

The theme of TEDxWaterloo this year is Tomorrow Started Yesterday, which is pretty appropriate for this subject. The visualization of music certainly started with dance, which was probably one of the most ancient of human arts, although we cannot say for certain when it started. Music certainly existed over 50,000 years ago. On the other side, the future of music is certainly digital, and the digital signal lends itself to being interpreted in multiple ways—witness mp3 visualizers and VJs.

But I want to start with what is sound. In 1904 Heinrich Rubens created a tube to see the sound as light—literally—glowing from the flames of his curious contraption:

Sound is a wave through the air, and like all waves you can reduce it to a sum of waves at different frequencies. I won't get into sine waves and circles and cycles and oscillators because I don't have the time. But take waves of different speeds, some large and slow, others small and fast—just like in water—and add them up, you get sound. The rube's tube simply shows the amplitude and pitch of the wave as it creates a standing wave inside the tube.

An oscilloscope does the same thing!

Guess what, your iTunes visualizer does the same thing too. It just jazzes up that information into prettier pictures. The basic ones show an oscilloscope like the ruben's tube, or a "spectrogram" which provides much more information—it actually breaks down the signal into the component sine waves, and shows the strength of each. Usually frequency is vertical, time is horizontal, and the intensity of colour is the intensity of sound at that pitch. Here's a spectrogram of a violin:

And here's a video of a whiz-bang mp3 visualizer. It may look crazy but it's just oscilloscope + spectrograph driving it:

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Maybe you can look at the spectrogram and tell a flute from an electric guitar, but most people can't. That's why Anita Lillie made a program that tries to show the timbre of different instruments in colour against the notes of the scale. This is where the future of direct visualization is going:

Visualizing Music by Anita Lillie from S Woodside on Vimeo.

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All of that said… there is more to visual music than can be imagined by computers. Artists will surely have a word to say. And we can go back to the early days of film to find inspiration from Len Lye, famous for his abstract film, A Colour Box (1935):

And you might have already seen this one. Fantasia: Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor, by Oskar Fischinger in 1940!

There is much more, such as the Star Gate sequence in Kubrick's 2001, Lapis by James Whitney, The Bead Game by Ishu Patel, Synchromy No. 4: Escape by Mary Ellen Bute in 1938. Bret Battey's Luna Series #3: Sinus Aestum is more recent—2009. After three quarters of a century, the art is being revived.

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Tomorrow though, it will be the other way around. Instead of looking at sound, you can go the other way, you make light and get sound.

The most significant entry in this green field is surely TENORI-ON, a completely new form of digital instrument created by Toshio Iwai and Yu Nishibori for Yamaha in Japan. It's being used in concert by artists such as Little Boots. I would like to leave you with these two examples, which might blow your mind.

Little Boots .. watch her set it up :-) :

Jim O'Rourke ... a little deeper, but stick with it and your mind will expand. Steve Reich needed 18 musicians! :

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I've skipped over a lot of really cool stuff, so if you want to see more in a fast, wide-ranging and crazy presentation, head over to TEDx Waterloo and nominate me for the show :-) I might even do some live demos :-)

Blade Runner is one of my all-time favorite films. I got my hands on the extended features and one popped up that I thought I'd share with you—some fictional magazine covers from a fictional news stand on a fictional street in a fictional universe. I believe that the news stand is seen—briefly in passing—during the chase through the streets. Here are all six grabbed from the feature, designed by production illustrator Tom Southwell.

Here is as close as we've ever got to a poster of the entire cast of Futurama... from their most recent direct-to-DVD movie Into the Wild Green Yonder. It's notable for two things in my mind: first, it doesn't include most of the principles (they would be easy to add) and second, wow, Futurama just doesn't have as many characters as Simpsons. Simpsons has a LOT of characters. What do they say, 50 active on-going basis? That's a lot.

And now my fellow Earthicans ... More Futurama is Coming ...

Comedy Central was happy with the specials and with the 72 produced episodes of "Futurama" it acquired from 20th Century Fox TV in 2006. "Yet there is nothing like new, self-contained episodes week to week," said David Bernath, Comedy Central's senior vp programming. "This is all about reinvigorating the franchise, giving it a new burst of energy."

In other words, futurama pays.

OK, this is stupid but I came up with this joke for Zap Brannigan.

SCENE: ZAP BRANNIGAN IS YET AGAIN TAKING CHARGE OF A
TOP-PRIORITY MILITARY MISSION BY DRAFTING SOMEONE. LET'S SAY
LEELA. IT COULD BE ANYONE, THOUGH.

ZAP: Ahh, do you remember me? I'm Zap Brannigan.
Captain Zap Brannigan. I put myself in your charge.

SOMEONE: How generous of you.

ZAP: By which I mean I put myself in Charge. Of You.

Lame joke? Maybe. But I don't see YOU making up jokes and blogging them for everyone to see.

When I was just a young tyke, getting beat up by my peers every day, I retreated to the little school library to immerse myself in visions of the future. Little did I know that some day the mythical year "2001" would come and pass in a blaze of ... nothing spectacular. Well anyway, I think it's fun to look back at those visions of the future and look in awe at the coolness of how we should now be living.

My absolute favorite of all time series was called "World of Tommorow" by Neil Ardley, who also collaborated on the famous "How Things Work" with another of my favorites, David Macaulay (see him talk at TED!).

I love how Ardley saw us with huge gigantic wall-sized computers completely taking over our houses:

Or maybe you'd prefer to see what the tank of the future will look like (n.b., it's robotic!)

Playing holographic games could also be fun...

And there's more—two whole books are online: World of Tomorrow - Health and Medicine, and World of Tomorrow - School, Work and Play. I want my wall-screen TV.