A global team of architects, engineers, and artists, organized by MIT's Carlo Ratti, has pitched the Cloud to the city of London for the 2012 Games. The Cloud would function as part monument, part park, and part billboard. Visitors would be able to walk inside the high-flying bubbles, which would double as screens, broadcasting weather information, sports scores, and other information, which could be seen from the ground. The Cloud would also be self-sustaining, not hooked into any power grid, and would derive its energy from a combination of solar, wind, and water power.

The Cloud is a finalist in the competition to create a monument for the London Olympics, but even if it is not selected, the team hopes to build it. They've already started a fundraising effort in case they don't win the London contract.

The Cloud [via Inhabitat]

1. The dystopic Communist regime will continue.

While some China experts think that democratization is an inevitable first step to total economic domination, Andy Nathan, author of How East Asians View Democracy, believes otherwise. "China has authoritarian resilience," he says. "If (the current regime) was not supposed to survive modernization, it's proving very adaptable." In other words, as long as Hu Jintao's government can prove itself efficient albeit its shortcomings, the people will continue to sustain their loyalty to it.

Nathan does pinpoint one costly solution to bringing democracy and human rights to China. The current regime could be toppled, he says, if China were to be hit with a series of natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and bad political decisions (like if they invaded Iraq and accrued a huge budget deficit... hint hint). If the current regime relies on a certain complacency cushioned by the fact that, while it's oppressive and fucked up, it somehow seems to be working, a mechanical failure of the government machine could unleash the unrest and cause a revolution.

Simply put: The dystopic Communist regime that punishes free will and uses forced labor to build the economy may continue to rule China until a superhuman disaster wipes it out of existence.

2. A giant amount of wind power will up the nation's hip-and-cool factor.

Green tech is the new black—it's the symbol of belonging in the hip and cool country clique. China plans to be the hippest and the coolest by 2020 by becoming the world leader in wind energy. According to EcoWorldly.com, the country currently produces about 6GW of wind energy, which makes it fifth in the world. Some experts believe that China will reach at least 100GW in the next 12 years. That's an increase of 1667%! China still relies a lot on old school energy resources like coal for its imitation Prada handbag factories, but a 2005 legislation mandates all utilities to be supplied by renewable energy. Clean tech funds are being bought up like lychees at street stands.

3. Joe Chen will be the next Steve Jobs.

While engineering is a dwindling profession in the US, it's booming in places like China and India. Only a decade or two ago, students from China entered Harvard and MIT and then stayed in the states to pursue their careers. Now, they're all going back home because they believe that's where they can have the most impact. Joe Chen, for one, is a Stanford grad who founded popular entertainment site Mop.com and Xiaonei, the local equivalent of Facebook. He's going to be the next Steve Jobs, minus the black turtleneck sweater.

Rebecca Fannin, author of Silicon Dragon: How China is Winning the Tech Race, believes that Beijing will be the hub of the next Silicon Valley. China also has the fastest growing number of patents—it's currently seventh in the world—and owns the world's largest Internet market. "Venture capitalists are all looking for the next new thing in China," she says. "Chinese entrepreneurs are hard working and passionate, and they're bringing knowledge from the US back home."

China isn't just the hub of cheap imitation handbags anymore. It is, finally, rapidly and most certainly, inching up the manufacturing food chain and will lead the next major innovation cycle in web-based tech.

4. Beijing will go head-to-head with Dubai in an architectural prestige contest.

Dubai is the world capital of futuristic buildings, but China's not doing so bad either. Beijing already has a crazy new airport, not to mention the Water Cube and the Birds' Nest. Plans to construct a tube-fed eco-city, islands made from scratch, and a Starfleet Academy-like museum are well underway and we should be seeing results within the next ten years. "The government agencies and building companies are going for prestige projects that break the mold," Nathan says. "They're going to continue to go for constant shock value."

We'll see what happens when the cheap IKEA-grade foundations start giving out. Until then, enjoy the cool futuristic citiscapes as they pop up left and right.

5. As China's global market share grows, so will our likelihood of becoming robotic drummers.

Right now, companies like GM, Johnson and Johnson, and Coca Cola produce first and foremost for the US market. But this will change. As the Chinese customer base catches up in size and influence, the way products are marketed and business is done will inevitably shift to meet demand. "American political values are very distinctive," Nathan says. "We believe in guns, we believe in the law, and we believe in religion. If the Chinese were dominant, the global market would be more collectivistic, harmony-oriented, less rights-concious, and more about getting through things without causing a ruckus than about suing people."

Think of Japan and the way the market there still has many of the formalities and customs native to the Japanese. "Values never completely disappear," Nathan says.

There's no doubt that China will be the biggest world market in fifty years. The question is, how is this going to affect what we do and how we do it? Maybe one day we will all become drumming androids and synchronization will supersede individuality. Images: Madiko83 via Flickr, George Lu via Flickr, and AP)

Rollerball
Screw the remake — the original 1975 Rollerball with James Caan (pictured above) was a masterpiece of blood, wheels, and oil fires. Set in a corporate dystopia, the flick follows rollerball star Caan. Trying to prove that individuality is better than corporate conformity, Caan wins by becoming the best at this violent racing/skating/stabbing/flame-throwing game (and killing a lot of skaters in the process). Yay, individualism!

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
No deathsport is more iconic than the "thunderdome" from the third Mad Max post-apocalypse flick. Our hero Max (Mel Gibson) must fight some dude in body armor, with only his mullet to protect him, while Tina Turner watches regally. Rules of thunderdome? "There are no rules! Two men enter! One man leaves!" Oh, also, there are bungee-jumper cables and a chainsaw. So many people have seen this movie and wanted to play its deadly game that a bunch of people recreate the thunderdome every year at Burning Man. Without the chainsaws.

Death Race 2000
As with Rollerball, there can be only one Death Race movie: Fuck the remake, and watch this 1975 gem directed by cultmeister Paul "Eating Raoul" Bartel. David Carradine is the black-hooded racer in this flick where the world becomes your deadly game, and competitors try to murder as many people as possible with their cars (women are more points than men; the elderly are more points than anyone). Plus, there is just a wee bit of political satire. You know, like making fun of Nazis and stuff. And lots of death. Did we mention the death? Kill! Kill!

The Phantom Menace
I think we can all agree that we'd like to forget The Phantom Menace, but you can't deny that the podracing scene was pretty cool. Though this was a kid movie, Lucas wasn't afraid to show little Anakin zooming through Tatooine's desert valleys and rock formations while his competitors blow up and die around him. This is a seriously long scene with multiple alien deaths and tons of shit-talking in those goofy alien languages that Star Wars is famous for. Plus, explosions! And the whole thing is even cooler when you think about all the ways this murderous sport trained Anakin to be a great leader in the world of murdering.

Hard Target
Alright, so Hard Target is more on the "thriller" side of the scifi/thriller fence, but it is definitely set in an alternate reality where a rich dude (played by Lance Henriksen) and his pals hunt down a homeless Vietnam vet for fun. Using crossbows. In the Louisiana bayous. But the very ultra-best part of this slaughterfest is that the guy they are hunting turns out to be a "hard target" because he's played by . . . Jean Claude Van Damme! Not only does he have the same mullet that saved Mel Gibson in thunderdome, but he's also chewing up the scenery and kicking shit around like a pro. This was also John Woo's first U.S. film, and despite everything it shines the way only a Woo film can. And yes, Jean Claude gets spicy-handed with the guns in one scene.

A.I. — Artificial Intelligence
Blah blah human story of a young boy robot who wants only to love his mommy . . . blah blah emotions . . . human love overcomes all blah blah . . . FLESH FAIR! In the middle of his sometimes-brilliant, often-smarmy film A.I., Spielberg lets the usually-hidden evil side of his imagination go wild with his depiction of the Flesh Fair where anti-mecha humans torture and kill escaped robots. They kidnap these mecha while they are on the run, and then invite a huge audience to the fair to watch as the ringleaders shoot them out of cannons, rip them up, or melt them with acid. Hey, that's show business! And a seriously fucked-up deathsport.

Predator
If there's any sport more fun to watch than Lance Henriksen stalking Jean Claude Van Damme with a crossbow, it's Predator hunting Arnold Schwarzenegger with a whatever-the-hell alien technology gun he has. Humans never tire of making movies where they are the prey to some scary hunter, and Predator is king of the "you are the hunted" subgenre.

Tron
Everybody knows the light cycle scene in Tron is one of the coolest ever — even the Sweded version kicks major ass. But what few people remember about this sport is that it kills. Programs that the Master Control Program doesn't care about anymore are sent to ride the light cycles until they die. Humans in the real world who are playing the videogame in arcades don't realize that each time they die, they are actually killing some poor accounting program who is screaming in agony.

The Game
Before the Batman alternate reality game (ARG) had people receiving phone calls from the Joker and going to bakeries in the real world to get cakes that contained cell phones, The Game was about an ARG gone wrong. A bored rich dude played by Michael Douglas (who pretty much owns the "unhappy middle-class white guy" role) decides to play a game that will make his life more interesting. Like an ARG, it starts out with phone calls and "fun" stuff designed to make it seem like he's being stalked by bad guys who want to kill him. Then it turns out he really is being stalked. What is real? What is the game? Why does Douglas always get to make it with some freaky blond chick who is fucking with his head?

T.A.G. the Assassination Game
From the same subgenre that brought you The Game comes this forgotten 1980s gem that featured both Linda "Terminator" Hamilton and Robert Carradine. I know this will shock you, but it turns out that fun college game where everybody tries to assassinate somebody with fake darts is actually . . . REAL! Dum dum dum! Who has yanked this silly college comedy into the realm of speculative weirdness by turning Animal House into DEATH HOUSE? Watch and find out.

Proving that demented minds think alike, John Scalzi has also posted about scifi deathsports — and he includes several that I forgot to mention here!

The New York Times' Dot Earth blog asked one of the researchers, Simon Carn, to interpret the satellite photos. Carn said:

The images clearly show the high SO2 emissions from sources in northeast China. China is the world’s largest SO2 emitter, mostly due to the burning of high-sulfur coal in its many coal-fired power plants, which lack the technology used in many other countries to remove sulfur from smoke stack emissions. The eastern Europe image shows a few SO2 ‘hot spots’ in Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey - these are probably also power plants or metal smelters. The hot spot in Sicily is the active volcano Mt Etna - volcanoes are probably the second largest source of SO2 after anthropogenic emissions.

The main region of elevated SO2 in the USA image is the Ohio Valley and SW Pennsylvania, where there is a high concentration of coal-fired power plants (shown as diamond symbols on the image).

The significance of SO2 (apart from as a component of acid rain) is that it is a precursor of sulfate aerosol (sulfuric acid droplets), which is the main ingredient of the haze often seen in polluted regions. Sulfate aerosol is a health hazard, limits visibility, degrades buildings, reflects solar radiation (cooling the climate) and also impacts cloud properties (increasing their lifetime and reducing rainfall).

No word on how the Chinese cloud-seeding techniques to prevent rain during the Olympics are affecting any of this.

What Will Cure China's Sulfurous Skies? [Dot Earth]

Owned by China Central Television, the looping building has space for 10,000 workers, and will be one of the tallest buildings in Beijing, already known as a skyscraper-friendly town. I love all the strange criss-crossing lines and the one area where you can see that the building isn't entirely finished. It seems to have been built from the top down — at least, when it comes to installing the final windows. Photos by Greg Baker via AP.

• Supercomputers and weather control - The Beijing Meteorological Bureau purchased one of the ten most powerful supercomputers in the world from IBM to help predict weather and pollution levels for all events in and around Beijing. The Chinese are also adept at controlling the weather. The Beijing Weather Modification Office (seriously) fires cloud seeding material into oncoming rain clouds with anti-aircraft guns, draining the precipitation before it can cause problems.
• Cyber warfare - China has claimed that they will "attack" and shut down websites that broadcast Olympic events illegally. No one is sure if this means they intend to attack other countries' websites or private sites hosted internationally. If they do, it could be the first case of open international cyber warfare.
• On demand coverage - NBC will be broadcasting Olympic events both live and tape delayed on several of the television networks they own, and will also provide on-demand video streams of events on the web. In total, they will present more than 3,600 hours of Olympic coverage. That's more Olympic programming in 2008 than the sum of all the hours of Olympic TV coverage ever. Dude.
• Anti-terrorism efforts - Security has been tight at the Olympics since the 1970s, but even more so since 9/11. In addition to metal detectors, bag searches, long lists of prohibited items (no crossbows!), facial recognition software, bomb sniffing dogs and whatever else the Chinese can come up with, they'll be using special equipment that lets officials detect and identify radioactive isotopes. So strontium crossbows are right out.
• Timing - Most Olympic races are timed to the thousandth of a second. In track events, the timer is set off by the starter's gun and stopped by a laser at the finish. A high-speed camera at the line takes 2,000 images per second to help determine the winner if the race is close. Swimming events, held in the Water Cube (pictured), are timed by contact plates that determine when a swimmer leaves her mark and when she touches the wall to end the race. Image by: IOC.

Sources:
China threatens Olympic Cyber Attacks. [Defense Tech]
IBM To Work Beijing Olympics Weather Magic. [ChinaTechNews]
Universal Detection Technology Secures Beijing Olympic Contract. [TMCnet]
China Leads Weather Control Race. [Wired]
How Olympic Timing Works. [HowStuffWorks]
Digital technology to play major role in Olympics. [LA Times]

Here's the inside, which is still open to the elements and filled with sand. Here's a structure that looks like a chunk of spaceship. Photos by Zhang Wenkui/ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images.

She said:

For cold clouds below zero degrees, we use a coolant made from liquid nitrogen to increase the number of droplets while decreasing their mean size. As a result, the smaller droplets are less likely to fall and precipitation can be reduced. For clouds above zero degrees we use the seeding agent silver iodide to accelerate the droplets' collision and coalescence, producing a downdraft which suppresses the formation of clouds.

China 'will stop the rain' [News.com via Slashdot]

Here you can see people posing in front of the Nest last week. And here's a closeup of the crisscrossed steel girders that form the exoskeleton of the Nest. The Water Cube is actually made of high-tech materials that emulate bubbles to keep the heat inside the building.

Top image courtesy of AP; middle image by Feng Li/Getty; bottom image by Elizabeth Dalziel/AP.