Finding SEED feels like finding WIRED the first year it was out….it’s a lovely magazine full of ideas. Some are a little wild, some are sort of philosophy as much as science, but most are great short bites of interesting studies. Last night’s thought piece for before-bed reading was a study of telecommunications and cities – exploring how the amount of communication between New York and other cities goes up in a nonlinear fashion as the cities grow. In other words, a city with a hundred thousand people might have Y communications with New York, but a city with 200,000 citizens would have far more than 2Y communications with New York. This kind of stuff fascinates the futurist in me given that there’s more population growth in cities by far, and also still a migration to cities. And communication with New York, of course, interests the writer in me.
That’s just one a ton of stories. They have an online presence, but it’s one of those magazines where the pretty pictures are nice to hold in your hands. It’s also science, and I do believe this is an age where rationality – and science – are going to be parts of the toolbox we need to go forward into a good future.