There will be smaller devices, more invasive systems, social thought media, and citizens will be stamped at birth with microprocessors. Industrial espionage will get personal and your identity will be swiped a dozen times before you exit the subway.

Smaller die, denser stacks, and the only way to expand a chip will be to route it in TIME—4D routing, where parasitic effects are planned right into the design, sequencing in time, making your chip light up like a Neon Christmas. Occupy movements will set up EM bursts instead of tents, and Tasers will empty your address list.

Tomorrow will still seem near enough to set your alarm clock and know where to go and what to do. But next week won’t be. And next year is guaranteed strange. Remember that the industrial 19^th century left people panting over change, and that’s chump change in the 21^st.

Think about tsunamis in Japan and floods in China and Thailand. Production efficiency and Just in Time manufacturing assume constants. In our interdependent world it doesn’t take much disruption to halt hard disk drives and stagger automobile production. And do growth constants apply to the hardwiring of the human brain? How many balls have to be flying before our ability to keep juggling collapses?

So when the Ball drops in Times Square, it may keep bouncing. Will 2112 find us colonizing space or living in caves, fending off feral poodles and Jack Russell terriers?

I only know that it takes less than a decade to carry a generation’s worth of change, and now that looks sedate.

But first we have to get there. Merry Christmas and Season’s Greetings and a Fun and Prosperous New Year. We need some good times, or else we will remember the merely bad with heartfelt nostalgia.

That tick tock world, however, was blown away by cheap, plastic, much more accurate watches that we’d toss away each year instead of cleaning the movement or changing the battery. That was of course before the landfills filled and tiny round discarded batteries began stalking toddlers like shiny round poison pills.

For 2012, I propose a new national goal, an energy neutral society. While the best way to conserve power is not to use it, we also gain if we can harvest what we waste anyway. New braking systems generate energy to help keep electric car batteries charged. The European research consortium, imec, has been experimenting with human powered health monitors for some time. Now imec is demoing car tires that power automotive transmitters and sensors.

But why stop there? How far can personal power solve our need for new energy sources? Rather than staying slave to the latest iDevice we should use our Xmas lists to promote real planet saving devices. For personal communication, I suggest trying out the new mePhone, which is thumb-key powered. You don’t just endanger traffic as you text and drive—now you can ecologically power your phone! The longer you text the longer you can… well, text.

For next year our engineers are testing the new meEnvy series of meTablets and mePods, which take advantage of the sinking feeling you get when you realize the next guy is boasting an even newer iAttachment. Much as an oceanic power generator harvests the energy of tides, our devices harvest the body’s currents of embarrassment and rage even as the user’s moods rise and fall. For a special competitive advantage, our new mePod, if it senses low power, actually generates spurious emails and doctored images to your entire address list plus a selection of peer databases. It literally tweets your secrets around the globe. The whirlpool of dismay generated when you see your life outed on YouTube can be enough to heat a 1400 square foot house for a New England winter. Finally, shame can save lives.

Of course, the bigger the ego, the further you fall. Giving a mePod to your CEO might power a metropolis for a year. It is in the planet’s best interest to advance order all our products now and give them to everyone you even might know. The meSorry series curently in shameware development has the potential to reverse Global Warming and bring back small town grocery stores. A national blush might end poverty as we know it. It’s a brave new world, and I’m proud of the part you will play.

Then again, not all changes are good. The road into the swamp is paved with promising first steps. I don’t envy engineers and designers who have to stake bets on the entire (hopefully profitable) life of a device. All I can do is keep shoveling the best information I can, issue after issue, and hope that it helps. What profit a man to save his soul but lose the bottom line?

The last generation has lived a comfortable life, with advertisers paying big bucks to even associate themselves with hard news and independent commentary. This has been true on everything from current events to questions of science and technology. But that wasn’t true in the past, is only vanishingly true now, and won’t be at all for the foreseeable tomorrows.

As products and ax-grinding points of view own the media, truth becomes more elusive. It has never been easy, and it seems more polarized and vague every day. Stacks are higher, yet the payouts seem lower. You can spend more time studying web information to pick out their biases than you do finding reliable insights. Whose vision of future ecosystems will best define tomorrow’s processes, the ones you have to plan for today? In other words, whom can you trust?

Yourself.

At least you know your information is bad.

Good luck. We’ll leave an LED on for you.

According to an article by Jason Palmer, a Science and technology reporter with the BBC News (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236), the latest rerun of the Cern experiment again found that Neutrinos traveled through 700km of rock faster than possible before reaching Gran Sasso’s underground laboratories.

The new work used shorter bunches of neutrinos, to comply with earlier criticisms.

Their latest experimental results have been posted to the Arxiv repository and submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, and have not yet been reviewed by the scientific community.

The experiments were carried out by the Opera collaboration (Oscillation Project with Emulsion (T)racking Apparatus). The initial experiments, 15,000 separate measurements spread out over three years, found that the neutrinos arrived 60 billionths of a second faster than light would have, travelling unimpeded over the same distance. The latest results echoed those results.

Next year, teams working on two other experiments at Gran Sasso–Borexino and Icarus–will begin independent cross-checks of Opera’s results. The US Minos experiment and Japan’s T2K experiment will also test the observations. It will be several months before they can report.

I have been assured by a top theoretical physicist that these results are impossible and that something is wrong with the experiment. I then consulted with myself in both the future and the past, and we agree. This just can’t be happening and that practical time travel will never occur—except when filling out time cards.

However, when you add social media to these diffuse demonstrations, they suddenly become scalable to paralyzing size, though headless or million-headed depending on your point of view. To scale up near as far, police need complex additions to their communication, legal protocols, cross-jurisdictional protocols, command protocols, interagency training, and lots of time. Swarms happen and will be happening far more often, while policing has to be planned or else the reaction to unanticipated scaling becomes disabling inaction (Watts) or violent reaction (Chicago 1968).

Following the analogy, chip Interface IP can (usually will, but not should) be specific—efficiently planned to handle anticipated demands, or general—relying on design standards and conventions that will be far less efficient, but can be more elastically applied. Think of it as String Theory for chips, the universes get smaller but their clouds of possibility continue to grow.

Of course, a complex IP that leave no room for the actual functional IP would be a non-starter. Social Media for IP would have to be either a Fuzzy “applier,” EDA that sizes down to fit the specifics and keeps updating as the SoC design develops, or a Fuzzy chip interface that adapts to a probable/possible range of needs. The final SoC would be frozen in time unless it was something like an FPGA. In which case my Fuzzy Programmable Gate Array (FZPGA for short) would continue to have adaptability to handle a staggering matrix of unintended special cases as required.

Or not. Admittedly I’m sketching away on a napkin and trying to think of a better way to get you to pay for the coffee and scone. Remind me to tell you about my plan for 4^th Dimensional stacking in a chip or device. It’s verging now on possibility and is, I think, inevitable.

Once upon a time I worked with a company renowned for engineering excellence, and for building complex new things just because they could. The idea was that once industry knew it could, it would want to, bad enough to pay for the fastest and best. In the technology heady days of the Cold War, that wasn’t such a bad idea—every battle axe needed a cutting edge. Brute force was an acceptable design principle.

Now, in a Jobsian economy, things are different. We are blessed with markets that are willing to pay a premium for an edge in style, utility, and speed. We are also cursed with a spongy economy featuring vanishing funds for schools and real research (and the specially-developed tools required).

Consumers, bless their chip-enabled credit cards, are now the market drivers, not the search for the sharpest sword or the hardest shield. Reminds me of the hey-day of Detroit, with bewildering new slabs of sheet metal rolling out every September—whether there was anything worthwhile inside or not. (A frightening analogy for today’s trendy tech, but that is another rant.)

Contemporary style has its own altars: lighter, smaller, faster, easier. Yesterday’s technology, even if it is practically given away in thrift stores, is only good for lining virtual bird cages. To even have a chance for inclusion in tomorrow’s winning mass market products, new IC’s demand tinier processes with bludgeoning development costs.

New fabs cost billions, yet they must be built on the hope that they will match future needs and be fully used once they come on line. Fabless designers swirl cells together and hope the new fabs can produce their dream circuits. And they all hope the total package will compel consumers to keep buying.

So what can you do?

I think you have to design for the future. As much as you hope for a home run, you build your game on bunts and singles. You improve your processes and tweak your costs. Your turn your clever ideas into reusable IP and build software architectures that dictate good practices for maintenance and expansion. You get as much out of existing technology as you can. You design for manufacturability and yield. All those traditional things one does to hold costs down and stretch the benefits of your research. You assume your competitors are doing the same thing and try to improve continuously, no matter how much Dilbert scoffs.

You need to keep the business going while you assemble your war chest. Why? Because you will have to jump off the cliff soon enough. Not many fans buy tickets to watch defense. They come for the home runs, and the crashes.

To increase your chances of one over the other (why does Wiley Coyote come to mind?), you have to invest in research strategies as much as the research itself so that you will have a profitable place to land. I am not talking about hiring away talent or stealing secrets (which is done with cold war dedication in our very scary world). I am proposing more research consortiums that unite schools and companies to share the resources and risks of research. These partial partnerships can keep costs down and imaginations vivid. They also can keep both the companies and the schools current with industry bests. When the companies feel the research has reached their strengths they can bug off and privatize their special sauce, but the research keeps bubbling, brewing better engineers and scientists as well as birthing new gourmet companies with an innovative product and a reasonable chance of success. Combined research can create a better technology ecosystem, one that will continue to ride and respond to changing demands and possibilities.

(And keep technology editors gainfully employed explaining them. Classic Win-Win!)

I see the little guys, chiseling sandstone, lying on their backs molding plaster curves, or passing rivets between stories of girders—let along the guys who figured out how to harness steam to shovels or water lines to levels.

I had to admire Steve Jobs for his style, passion and come from nowhere (and come from behind) pluck, but I’m also enthralled by the designers of Smalltalk and the sound tech puzzling out a standing bass wave in a church.

One of the first things I saw, even as a student was that geeks got no respect. This was as true in my working class high school as anywhere else. I was told that there was a cheer at Caltech, given when the other team scored that went “That’s all right. That’s okay; you’re going to work for us someday!” You have to admire when bunches of really smart people elect to stay naïve as long as they can.

I was pretty arty by the time I first worked at Tektronix, having substantial failures as a playwright and director to point to. But the job brought me right back to geek world and their rather specialized problems. I recognized geniuses around me, but ones whom had not enjoyed the social cache I’d gotten as a campus writer and poet after I’d left Physics. Some introspective types had trouble being understood by their bench mates.

So as a training designer I served as an explainer and translator, not only to my direct customer students, but to other engineers. This was in the days after tech companies had quickly grown too big for that “small startup pulling together” information flow and had not yet started team work training for people whom had never been chosen to be on a team (except last).

Like poets, artists and physicists, good engineers may in their passion, totally miss social clues. But unlike their intellectual brethren, they have lousy person PR. Yes, there are many exceptions, but there are still more who aren’t.

We need more engineers. We need more technicians. (For that matter, we need more skilled plumbers, carpenters, electricians, arborists, and welders—but that’s a related rant.) We’re not going to get them into the math and science classes when we also treat the students as pariahs.

What we need are trade skill classes in the arts academies, and arts training in the tech schools. We need to stop judging people by their jobs or defining ourselves by our paycheck. We need hopeful cyberpunk novels (ooops, that’s another related rant). Have you hugged a hardware engineer today?

Come on people, if we try, we can change this!

Right. Sure. I’m booking a seat on the next Flying Pig too.

For our times, Steve Jobs has launched a new New World. He had passion, creativity, a love of innovation, and an ability to make sense out of new possibility. When he was wrong, it may only have been that the technology fell short. But he learned from his mistakes, and when he was right, he became far more the CEO of a great technology company. He became a paradigm-crunching social movement.

Apple was far more than a logical extension of developing hardware—that was the role of IBM and is now continued by Intel and Microsoft. Over the last few decades, Apple discovered magic. Very personally led by Steve Jobs as its hands on visionary CEO, Apple created expensive, discretionary gadgets that somehow became the most necessary props to a knowledge charged society. It created a demand that technology could fulfill.

Perhaps radio, TV, and pop 45’s hastened the fall of the Berlin Wall, but social media was the engine of the lighting-quick Arab Spring. That social media weapon would not have evolved without iPhantasies and its clones. Facebook would still be a toy for the elites and I have no idea what the grass roots would be up to, other than a slow motion dunking of tea bags.

Okay, young people would still know how to spell, read, and do math in their heads, but then Columbus’ New World had collateral damage as well. Often brutal.

Steve Jobs’ vision was only mildly shown in the development of the Mac. Had his career ended then he would now be seen as a marketing genius who tended to overstep his capabilities. It was only after his return to Apple that a technological engine existed to support his quest for excellence, ease of use, and style. His products had a purpose. And in fulfilling that purpose they created a consumer vacuum that could only be filled by his next product.

Everything we do now, we seem to do through our always-new personal technology. Apps supervise business, hobbies, dreams and day-to-day necessities. Every industry has been touched. Every revolution inspired. In addition, every reaction strengthened. As a society we may not know much, but what little we suspect we shout from the rooftops with our thumbs and our finger gestures.

US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have already pronounced that Steve Jobs had changed the world. Tributes have been pouring in from friends, rivals, politicians, and everyone with a handheld. When Steve resigned as CEO in August, he wrote that he believed that “Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it.” The pack does live on, but the Alpha is gone.

We are still going somewhere, but yesterday’s maps, stars, and compasses will not be enough. Someone still needs to read the skies, the technology and the people, and point a course by “live” reckoning. I just don’t know when we’ll next find a practical leader out in front.

Edison was a great man and I’m sure Steven Jobs is too. Edison, while a brilliant experimenter himself, harnessed many brilliant men into an invention-making machine. Jobs certainly did that as well. He provided a kind of marketing genius to see what people would need, want, and eventually, really desire. In that, Jobs showed himself to be the artist Edison never was.

With Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula and others, he helped design the Apple II series, successful, though not terribly good for writing.

One of my problems is that I’m a Jobsian contemporary. I’ve been there for the successes and what I feel were failures (like the Mac price point). I tried using the Apple for scriptwriting and eventually threw it over for a CP/M machine (even though I had to embed all the formatting codes as I wrote). The CP/M world featured tiny, tightly written programs that did huge things for their size—but they were text-only 8-bit devices. When the IBM PC came out (again just off the shelf technology but packaged for a business user and featuring primitive color graphics and a mammoth 16-bit processor) it swiftly overwhelmed the pioneers.

But Apple, with Jobs’ practical and passionate imagination, crafted SmallTalk into a user-lovable mouse-mad form and the Mac was off to the races.

A race it never won in business terms but probably will win in the history books, or rather “tablets” or whatever form they eventually take–partly because most historians will be writing/speaking/emoting/thinking on Apple-derived devices.

Edison, you’ll recall, was the prophet of DC. In the infrastructure wars his (sometimes underhanded) campaigns against AC finally failed. Had we ended up free of the curse of power lines but chained to a power station every other block, we would have had a steam-punk future. He succeeded in research because of doggedness, business skills, and the ability to harness a mass of technologists much like Ford harnessed mass production. Come to think of it, Edison was a master of that too.

Also, like with all inventions and even nation states, there is a time and a context for success. Job’s real legacy (and he ain’t dead yet), is an imagination for the user, not what they want, but what they will want and what they will aspire to want. If Apple can keep striking that chord, regardless of tactical failures, they will finally win the consumer-communication-lifestyle idea war. And in that future, Jobs will as likely be compared to Napoleon as Edison.

When you contrast “Green” with “Profitable,” there isn’t any contest. Any serious business that puts far future survival against next quarter’s profits may be briefly applauded by well-wishers, but they’ll also be broken up for short term value by stockholder “advocates.” Other than conserving a watt here and there, “Green” seems to define an impractical ecosphere for raising hopes, hippies, politicians, book authors, and media writers.

Attempts to actually level the playing field by artificially putting a price/return on “green” goals, such as carbon emission markets, are full employment plans for lawyers and loophole writers. Kind thoughts are unsustainable in prolonged economic crisis.

We can’t give up, but how can we play the cards we are dealt? What IS stronger than greed?

How about SHORT TERM THRILLS? Take the model from Sports. The National Green League? The NGL tilts with the World Conservation Council for all the biodegradable marbles! It can’t be any less exciting than golf, and everyone can root for their speckled green favorites.

When you can’t afford to change the world sensibly, you sponsor contests with meaningless rewards and braggers’ rights. Transcontinental car treks developed the automobile in practical and far reaching ways, opening up the highway routes for oil-burning commerce to come, strip malls, and the world’s biggest ball of dental floss. (Well, not all the results were that beneficial.)

A million bucks here, a million bucks there, and you’re never talking about real money. But billions will be cheerfully spent pursuing watt-saving thrills. It’s a lot like my grad school days when I’d put aside a buck a week for a Giant Imperial Quart of Narragansett Beer with a quarter left over for pinball. Whacking the steel ball against the barriers, knocking down conservation targets, trying to win the Big Prize—to play the next game for free and do it all again. Tiny incremental gains will add up, and the chance to unleash the real geniuses, the athletes of innovation, who will grab the whole world and TILT to a mind-scrambling result!

Look at technology over the last few hundred years. Ignore the carbon emissions, the dead species, and heavy metals in the dwindling fish, the background heat and radiation, and imagine the laws of adrenalin harnessed for Conservation, the brain-building steroids yet to be ingested. The Laws of Physics, my watt-burning friend, were made to be broken. We (meaning My Team) can do it.