Terry Blanton wrote:
If so, they are not as smart as they should be. Here is a world
changing technology which will affect each and every pocketbook in St.
Moritz and they are not discussing it?
In my experience, organization such as this, and people such as this,
are the last to discover new trends in technology. Look back at "high
level" meetings of big-name Nobel muckety-mucks decades ago in various
areas of technology such as computers and telecom. Here are some of the
topics they did not cover, or anticipate:
1970s, personal computers
1980s, packet switching (Internet protocol)
1980s and even early 1990s, widespread use of the Internet, for crying
out loud
In energy, I have a book "Energy Future, Report of the Energy Project at
the Harvard Business School" (1979) edited by Stobaugh and Yergin, with
contributions by Many Leading Experts. This is useful information. The
chapter on the history of fission is excellent. Technically this book is
authoritative, as you would expect. But, the predictions are completely
wrong. The authors miss just about every important trend. For example,
there are only a few pages devoted to wind turbines, which they call
"windmills." Since these devices do no mill (grind) anything, that is a
misnomer and a sign of being technically behind the times, and inattentive.
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=windmill%2Cwind+turbine&year_start=1970&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
<http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=windmill%2Cwind+turbine&year_start=1970&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3>
- Jed
