Mowing your yard and network maintenance

This is interesting - - an interview with Brian David Johnson, the corporate futurist for Intel (in Scientific American, May 2012 - Professional Seer).  His research, and I love the way it is stated, is future casting; an endeavor that combine computer and social sciences.  Johnson has a book Screen Future available at http://www.intel.com/intelpress/sum_tv30.htm.

From the interview - -

"One example that Andrew (Andrew Hessel is a synthetic biologist) and I were kicking around was a way to solve "the last mile" for network connectivity.  This is literally the last mile between the network hub and your house or apartment.  Imagine now that we engineered an organism so that it was an excellent conductor for the Internet signal, better than the cable and copper wires we're using today.  Now all we have to do is lay down our little organism between your house and that network hub, and you'll be downloading HD movies day and night.

But how do we do that?  Well, what if we crossed our superconducting organism with grass seed so that it looked and grew and could be maintained like grass.  Imagine everywhere you see grass that could be a superconducting mesh network that brings the Internet anywhere it grows.  And it's alive!  Anyone who has ever taken care of a lawn knows that if you treat it right it just keeps growing, sometimes even popping up in places you don't want it.  Lawn maintenance and network maintenance become the same thing.  That grass median that runs down the middle of many highways across the world could literally become the information superhighway."