If Bruce Sterling hasn’t spun your head yet with the Viridian Design Movement, you’re coming up on half a decade behind the curve. But don’t worry, we won’t tell.

And he’s cranked up the conceptual overdrive for this address to SIGGRAPH, the annual convention of computer graphics and design people.

Having conquered the world made of bits, you need to reform the world made of atoms. Not the simulated image on the screen, but corporeal, physical reality. Not meshes and splines, but big hefty skull-crackingly solid things that you can pick up and throw. That’s the world that needs conquering. Because that world can’t manage on its own. It is not sustainable, it has no future, and it needs one.

It is going to get one from you.

Now let me briefly tell you how I think this process will play out.

Listen to this: ProE, FormZ, Catia, Rhino, Solidworks. Wifi, bluetooth, WiMax. Radio frequency ID chips. Global and local positioning systems. Digital inventory systems. Cradle-to-cradle production methods. Design for disassembly. Social software, customer relations management. Open source manufacturing.

These jigsaw pieces are snapping together. They create a picture, the picture of a new and different kind of physicality. It’s a new relationship between humans and objects.

If you can bear with me a while today, and kind of oil and loosen the joints of your incredulity, I’m gonna suspend some disbelief for you here.

You see, the future is already here, it’s just not well distributed yet.

Heady stuff, but worth wrapping your mind around because Sterling’s got a good track record for picking up big trends seven or eight years ahead of almost anyone else.

The full address is here.

Even cowgirls get the blues, and even world leaders get sick and die. Sometimes it happens while they were in office, although the public seldom knows. It was a long time before we knew just how much Woodrow Wilson’s stroke affected his second term. John F. Kennedy’s medical problems were successfully concealed throughout his time in public office. When Reagan’s fall to Alzheimer’s first set in will probably be a secret for another couple of decades. Miterrand’s cancer was hidden from the French public. The Italian press wasn’t writing about how serious Bossi’s health problems are.

The Rt Hon Lord David Owen, CH, a former British foreign secretary, tackles this issue in QJM, an Oxford journal on medicine, and not your usual place for political reading

Diseased, demented, depressed: serious illness in Heads of State

As both a physician and a politician, I was first touched by the question of how illness can affect the decision-making of Heads of State or Government when I met the Shah of Iran in Tehran in May 1977. He appeared to be at the height of his power: self-confident, and enjoying his global role in helping to determine world oil prices. It would have been a great help to have known then, and particularly a year later, that he had been suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukaemia. …

The French Foreign Minister Louis de Guiringaud told me later, when we had both left office, that he had known of the diagnosis. But he never told me when I was Foreign Secretary, or Cyrus Vance, the US Secretary of State. Had I known I would have pressed far more vigorously early in 1978, and certainly been adamant in the late summer and autumn of that year, that the Shah should stand down immediately on health grounds. … However, we were still treating him as an imperial leader, capable of making bold decisions, when in retrospect what he needed was to be told what to do and virtually forced to take treatment in Switzerland. If he had done so, the Revolution in Iran would not have taken place in the way that it did, President Carter might have won a second term, and certainly the history of the Middle East would have been very different.

There aren’t any easy answers to these questions, as Owen suggests at the end of the article

Reluctantly, I must also conclude that if a Head of State or Government becomes ill in office, different considerations apply and there can be no set rules. … Formal procedures for fixed medical examinations for an elected incumbent is a process with a pseudo-objectivity which can be blind to the complexities and dynamics of government, as well as the uncertain relationship between disease and the capacity to make decisions.

Thanks to Electrolite for the tip.