The following two items appeared in the news today, February 10th, 2011:

1. Time magazine interviewed inventor/futurist/transhumanist Ray Kurzweil, who predicts the arrival of the technological Singularity in 2045.

(Simply put, the Singularity represents a period of rapidly accelerating technological change and the emergence of a superintelligence beyond the comprehension of human beings.)

The techno-utopia is only 3 decades away! That’s terrific! Except that…

2. Russian scientists have predicted that the asteroid Apophis– which is larger than two football fields– will collide with Earth on April 13, 2036 in a potentially apocalyptic event.

Goddamnit.

You are a brilliant inventor who has just finished devising a time machine. You set your destination for 20 years ago. You have already resolved to live under a pseudonym in a distant city and make a series of massively profitable trades and/or bets in order to build, quietly and incrementally, colossal wealth.

You step into your time machine and initiate the countdown.

10… 9… 8… 7… 6… 5… 4…

Oh shit, the dial says 20 minutes! You frantically reach for the “abort” switch.

3… 2… 1…

A soundless white flash, and now you are looking directly into the eyes of yourself– a version of yourself that is 20 minutes younger and making final preparations to enter the machine.

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The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Wash U. students are fired up about the new Harry Potter movie and planning a weeklong “College Cup Tournament” to celebrate the premiere. The Tournament will even include a “horcrux scavenger hunt.”

But it was the photo that really caught my eye. Behold quidditch boy– which could be meme-fodder if anybody actually read the Post-Dispatch:

Live-action virginity.

UPDATE (Whattapundit): Inevitable:

Watch out, Star Wars Kid!

Image Source: LiveScience

An Irish filmmaker’s claim that footage from a Charlie Chaplin movie premiere in 1928 reveals a time-traveling woman speaking on a mobile phone has been debunked:

“As you can tell from these, old-fashioned mechanical or resonating hearing aids were not necessarily long and rounded,” said Philip Skroska, an archivist at the Bernard Becker Medical Library of Washington University in St. Louis. “Short, compact rectangular forms were not unusual.”

A hearing aid sounds about right, but I am still amazed that George Clarke (who discovered the footage and promoted the theory) skipped right over this woman is insane to this woman is a time traveler.

See the video that started it all here.

Spotted on Market Street in Charleston, SC. A painting titled “Callin’ the blues.”

In its incalculable data mining and indexing, Google has managed to distill our national identity:

The front page of Google Finance moments ago:

The story is Johnny Depp’s surprise appearance as Captain Jack Sparrow at an English school, which was very sweet, but probably not market-moving.

This clip of a Kurdish army drill was featured on “60 Minutes” tonight. It looks pretty awesome, but as a practical matter– wouldn’t the rope drop have served as a warning to the guy he’s firing at?