Stamps from the future! – Faster than light travel and turing

MAKE Flickr photo pool member funnypolynomial made some awesome stamps from the future (Faster than light travel and turing, PostScript source and PDFs included) –

I can’t remember the exact genesis, but one day recently the idea of “Stamps from the Future” popped into my head. I thought, what kinds of things would people commemorate on postage stamps in the near or distant future? My first thought was travelling Faster Than Light (FTL). I really wanted to make such a stamp, but I stalled for a while because the image I had in my head of the stamp portraying some kind of spaceship, seemed tricky to execute. I wanted a sense of verisimilitude, so I wanted to do a sheet, but how to repeat the design? Making some kind of linocut just seemed too hard. I quickly decided I’d code it in PostScript, but I still stalled at the thought of basically creating a picture in code, even though by now I was imagining a simple cone-shaped spaceship. So I thought about other possibilities and came up with the Turing Test: the idea that sometime in the future, maybe an AI would actually pass it. “” [via] – Link & photos.

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• News From the Future from MAKE: 08: Toys and Games. Games with a purpose – Link.
• News from the Future from MAKE: 07: Backyard Biology. Virtual meets real – Link.
• News from the Future from MAKE: 06: Robots. We have met the artificial intelligence, and he is us – Link.
• News From The Future from MAKE: 05: Science, Weather, and Outdoors. For everything that is gained, something is lost – Link.
• News From The Future from MAKE: 04: Music and Kits for the Holidays. A report on the labs and garage projects changing the way we live – Link.
• News from the Future from MAKE: 03: Cars and Halloween. News from the Future: a report on the labs and garage projects changing the way we live – Link.
• News from the Future from MAKE: 02: Home Entertainment. Reports on the labs, companies, and garage projects changing the way we live – Link.
• News from the Future from MAKE: 01: Make Premiere. Reality is catching up with science fiction, thanks in a large part to DIY technologies. Tim O’Reilly identifies the laboratory and garage projects that promise to change the way we live – Link.