Happy New Decade

The 2010s have begun. While 40% of the native English speakers call it the "twenty tens", 60% use the term "two thousand and tens". A natural short version of the name is "the teens". The options sound better than the "noughties" or "twenty zeros" that have ended.



The same decadal situation, just 30 years earlier...

A self-described physicist has calculated the decade that is just getting started. She obtained a different result ;-) and she just twitted:

after the 70s, 80s and 90s, how will this decade be called? The zeros? The first decade?

The lesson is: never allow your brain to sleep for 10 years because it decomposes before you manage to wake up.

What can you expect in the 2010s?

• the LHC may find SUSY but almost certainly the Higgs boson: and maybe something else, too?
• the International Linear Collider may be completed by the end of the decade
• ITER may start to operate in which case fusion will receive a strong boost
• supercomputers will surpass an exaflop (billion of billion of operations per second) around 2019
• the Gotthard Base Tunnel (57 km in length) will be completed in Switzerland
• thousands of other things will be built
• NASA will replace the space shuttles by the Orion
• NASA could begin a new wave of manned landings on the Moon around 2019
• NASA will launch the James Webb Space Telescope to mostly replace the Hubble around 2013
  
  
  
  
  
• IPv6 may be adopted because the IPv4 address space is going to be exhausted in two years
• in December 2012, the Kyoto protocol will expire and the judgement day will arrive on 12/21/12
• if that won't happen, the world will be destroyed in 2016 as authoritatively determined by Al Gore (if you kindly allow, I will omit thousands of similar crackpot prophesies)
• the IPCC will either be abolished with its most shameful representatives arrested, or it will release the fifth report in 2014
• the population will increase just by ten percent
• the world economy will increase by 30 percent or so
• the global mean temperature will change by 0.3 °C in an unknown direction, with +0.1 °C being the approximate human contribution (that's 0.03 percent change at the absolute scale)

Of course, some of the predictions should be supplemented with "unless socialism or environmentalism or terrorism or something else destroys the U.S. economy, the world economy, or something broader".



One half of those nearly 1 million of unique visitors to this blog in 2009 according to their location: click to zoom in. If you need to sleep near one of the red dots, find the TRF visitor and kindly ask him or her to accommodate you for a while. As you can see, the whole world is open for the TRF readers. ;-)



Visitors and views in different months.