In 02008, Warren Buffet placed a Long Bet that will take until 02017 to resolve. He predicted that for those ten years, “the S & P 500 will outperform a portfolio of funds of hedge funds, when performance is measured on a basis net of fees, costs and expenses.” Below is a summary of how…  Read More

Roger Pielke Jr. made an observation on his blog recently regarding the past decade’s rapid increase in commodity prices and the classic debate between optimistic Cornucopians and pessimistic Malthusians. In 01990 ecologist Paul Ehrlich – who has spoken at The Long Now Foundation’s SALT series – lost a decade-long bet to economist Julian Simon. In…  Read More

In his post earlier today, Bryan Campen mentioned Kevin Kelly’s 02019 Unthinkables – a set of predictions he made in 1999 that were specifically meant to be outlandish or – eponymously – unthinkable. With 12 years of perspective on the predictions, Kelly concludes his post by saying that he doesn’t think any of them will…  Read More

In 02008, Warren Buffet placed a Long Bet that will take until 02017 to resolve. He predicted that for those ten years, “the S & P 500 will outperform a portfolio of funds of hedge funds, when performance is measured on a basis net of fees, costs and expenses.“ Below is a summary of how…  Read More

One of the miracles of the modern world is our capacity for getting around – hop on a plane, nap a few hours, and you’re on the other side of a continent!  Technologically enabled, we’ve embraced this ability with gusto and are currently more mobile a species than ever before.  But, according to a pair…  Read More

John Rennie over at IEEE Spectrum has an excellent article on Ray Kurzweil’s 108 predictions for 02009 from his book Age of Spiritual Machines.  Ray Kurzweil is an avid and fearless predictor who also logged the first of our Long Bets with Mitch Kapor.  I think it is great that people are taking the time…  Read More

I just happened upon a call for extras (check it out if you’re based in San Francisco) for a film that will be part of a series of sci-fi shorts called Futurestates: What will become of America in five, 25, or even 50 years from today? FUTURESTATES is a series of 11 fictional mini-features exploring possible future…  Read More

Nature reports quantum computing researchers achieve “success at entangling three-circuit systems”.

“The entanglement of two or more qubits sets up a ‘superposition’ of states in which calculations can run in parallel — in principle allowing a quantum computer to race through problems that it would take a classical computer eons to solve. Such a quantum. . .   Read More

Stewart Brand sent in a piece by the Klimazweibel blog covered by Seekerblog.  It shows where the actual US energy consumption came in by 02000 vs the predictions from 01975.  It is interesting to see that we came in well below the lowest (read: most optimistic) prediction.  While the US still uses an amount of…  Read More

The second year’s results on Buffett’s Million Dollar Long Bet are in.  Article from Fortune Magazine below: By Carol J. Loomis, senior editor-at-large. April 27, 2010: 9:34 AM ET (Fortune) — Unaudited results are in for the second year of “Buffett’s Big Bet” — Warren Buffett’s 2008 wager against Protégé Partners that a low-fee index…  Read More