the Internet seems to run on the 4 C's:
Code, Chatter, Carnality and Consumption.
Whats the actual information depth? Seems quite shallow at times, especially after you get out of the potholes of Academia and wander through the puddles of Forum Drivel (spelt Dribble, I suspect)
While the Singularity enthusiasts pursue their dream in tones that veer wildly between religious fervor (the Coming , man! Everything is gone to change!) and eroticism (the Cumming, man! Everything is gonna change!) I still find in very hard to determine exactly how this is going to come about.
Yes, CPU speeds continue to increase. Doesn't make my word processor any smarter.
Data storage continues to get cheaper. Files continue to proliferate. Data - as opposed to information - continues to pile up at a breathtaking rate.
But somehow, my computer isn't any smarter then it was. Quake 4 is glossier then Quake 1, but the experience hasn't changed. Google searches better than, say Webcrawler used to, but I still can't find info any better.
the Singularity is supposed to happen when we can't figure out how to find information, let alone aggregate it?
Search engines demonstrate RenegadeMime's First Problem of Intelligence: It ain't what info you can access, its what you can ignore. And without an ability to ignore, the Singularity is going to be about 40 % pornography, 20 % spam and 20 % academia.
Now picture an academic with a serious perverse bent and an obsessive-compulsion about the Nigerian $10-million dollar bank account. And then give it some fR** V1agra.
Lets take a subsection of the Net: the Mastercard validation and accounts network.
The network contains in excess of 360 terabytes of storage . Thats about the total information capacity of about 36 human brains.
The network can process over forty thousand transactions a second. It has a robust firewall and immune system. Its subsystems are watched by hundreds of clever humans, and thousands of lines of clever code. Do they detect the flickers of consciousness? The first dim rumbling dreams of awareness?
No ones seriously argues that that network is going to Singularity.
Why not?
Because is banal, and the Singularity is a romantic dream. Its much more romantic to argue Google becomes sentient - after all, its so smart, isn't it? It can answer our questions so swiftly!
Like with the eponymous BASIC program:
10 INPUT A$
20 PRINT "HELLO"A$
we are tricked by our willingness to ask stupid questions.
After a decade of the World Wide Web are we any smarter? Educated? Aware?
Not very.
And I will be the first to admit that sitting here adding this drivel to the storm of babble isn't making me any smarter either.

Now I need to rig two toy keyboards so that they play simultaneous notes.
Up to now, I'm looping wav files and re-recording in a stack...the room acoustics adds some richness to the otherwise bland computer tones. Laborious, not exactly aiding improvisation.

Tea Flakes:

A sugar cube is only a little better than a sugar sphere; only a small amount of surface is exposed to my tea. A sugar snowflake would be better. A sugar flake the approximate diameter of my teacup would be perfect; it would dissolve as it sank to the bottom, insuring a perfectly sweetened cup without any need to dirty a teaspoon.
The next step, of course, would be to impregnate each Sugar Flake with instant tea. This would result in a slightly larger flake, but once dropped into boiling water, a instant cuppa would result.

...Now thats what I call the 21st Century in action.

Daphnia continues to thrive in its jar. The other aquatic life - the mosquito larvae and so forth have perished. the green algae has settled to the bottom of the jar. Several hundred daphnia swarm in the bottle. I wonder how long they will thrive. The bottle's neck is plugged with a bit of cotton wool, so it is not quite a sealed enviroment; still, they've survived longer then I expected.
Now I wish I had taken several jars full, and sealed a couple off as experiments.

Perhaps replacing the piston on a Stirling Engine with a piezeoelectric pedal would generate useful amount of AC power without the need for any moving parts beyond the Displacer? After all, the pressure cycle can be quite fast in a small engine...easily 10 hz and probably could be even better.

In order to hold the index cards, a sort of clipboard style clamp is needed. Now, because a index card is much stiffer than a sheet of paper, this makes flipping through them much harder. What I need is a series of little clamps, each to hold a single index card, and all of them hinged to page rapidly through the deck.

What I need is a notebook crossed with an index card holder.
An index card wallet, if you will.

Of course, a sexual feature should display dimorphism...