World's First Encyclopedia of Future Inventions

Deb Hellman writes "WIRED Magazine Writers, Cory Doctorow and Wil McCarthy, have joined VC Rick Patch and 2 futurists to judge the Immortalizer Technologies Project - a project designed to uncover a comprehensive list of future inventions. The project is being spearheaded by a futurist think-tank, the DaVinci Institute. The goal of the project is to create a compendium of future inventions, a roadmap of sorts for innovators. They probably won't get it right in the first edition, but I like how Tom Frey is thinking on this one. People can submit their ideas and have a future invention named after themselves. Deadline for submissions is April 30th."

Comments

Re:Mobile phone home network

[goten]

You mean this? http://www.cellsocket.com/

HalfBakery

[jbum]

This sounds an awful lot like the HalfBakery (which isn't nearly as pretentious-sounding as the "DaVinci Institute").

Re:Slightly OT: Anti-narcolepsy drug (ab)use

[Thing 1]

Here's a link.

The drug is Modafinil, and is sold under the name Provigil.

This report is from Dec. 3 (doesn't say what year, I'd imagine 2002), and it discusses the military uses. It warns that we might be messing with something we don't fully understand (like the effects on the endocrine system), but I for one would love to try this out.

shouldexist.org

[throwaway18]

Perhaps they can steal a few good ideas from shouldexist.org

innovation and implementation

[bj8rn]

In 1876, two Frenchmen, Alphonse Penaud and Paul Gauchot came out with a plan for an airplane quite similar to modern ones and very different from the Wright biplane. Penaud's plane was a monoplane, it had retractable landing gear, windshield and a single control for pitch and directional control - way ahead of time... This ahead-of-time idea is not the thing he's remembered for, though - Penaud's most famous invention was a rubber-band propelled airplane model, which inspired many a men attempt building a flying machine, including the Wright brothers...