The world is my office, library, and entertainment center. As long as an Internet connection is available, I can use any computer to access most of my work-related and personal files as well as a significant percentage of humanity's collective knowledge base.
According to Arthur C. Clarke, a famous author and inventor who died earlier this year, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
I appreciate the profundity of that maxim daily as the feats I am able to accomplish armed only with my slim laptop and versatile mobile phone would have belonged only in the pages of a science-fiction novel as recently as a few decades ago. And I'd likely get burned at the stake for witchcraft if my electronics and I were somehow transported back a few hundred years into the past. But these technologies remain in their infancy. In coming years, complex tasks requiring more computational power than is currently available to most users, such as rapidly generating high-definition video and audio files, will become trivially simple and cheap.
Read the rest here.
As long as I'm linking to my own articles, I might as well include today's story about how agricultural development is actually responsible for our severe flooding:
Iowa hasn't always been quite so flood-prone.
The state's native prairies originally absorbed most of the rainfall, but their development has led to increased runoff and flooding.
Wayne Peterson, an urban conservationist working for the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, said the state's landscape processed rainwater quite differently before most of the natural habitats were developed into agricultural fields and urban areas. Peterson worked in the field of agricultural land conservation for more than 20 years before becoming involved with urban issues.
"Two hundred years ago, Iowa was full of prairies, savannas, and wetlands," he said. "The vast majority of the time when it rained, the rain infiltrated into the soil, moved through the soil matrix, and became part of the groundwater discharge into the river."
Read the rest here.
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