Farlops Industries

Science articles I've read over the last month

Since at least Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night the idea of mind taping has been knocking around in science fiction for decades. Some examples are William Gibson's Dixie Flatline and Frederik Pohl's heechee prayer fans. A particularly good portrayal of how this might be done is Rudy Rucker's Software. When roboticist Hans Moravec speculated how it might be done in his book Mind Children, some people began to take the idea seriously, giving the concept the rather inaccurate name of "mind downloading." (Which is silly because downloading and uploading merely mean to copy files to and from a local machine to machines on a network.)

So I've following developments in medical imaging technology closely for many years now.

Continue reading "Science articles I've read over the last month" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:17 AM on December 12, 2007

Nuclear-powered Airships

So I had an interesting discussion with Ms. Carlysle last Tuesday. Over the last year, she has been trying, with some success, to temper my knee jerk debunkery. She posited about military experimentation with nuclear powered, stealthy, airships as an explanation of some recent UFO sightings. Various governments and military establishments have been thinking about the idea since the 1950s.^1,2,3

The idea is intriguing. Such airships could stay aloft for months, or even years, without refueling. Mostly, the limitations on duration would be food and consumables and the slow helium loss through the gasbags. Helium and food could be replenished by tending aircraft.

Wikipedia points to evidence that the Russians did experiment with nuclear aircraft but these were heavier than air craft using some kind of variation on nuclear thermal rockets. This research was abandoned because the radioactive exhaust from these rockets was an environmental nightmare. I'm guessing that various nuclear test ban treaties also forbid further research.

An airship would be different. It would only use the reactor to generate electricity to drive conventional propellers and turbines. The gasbags of airship could be made large enough to lift a heavily shielded reactor of sufficient size. Nuclear airships would be like nuclear submarines.

So why haven't these things been built?

• It's hard, but not impossible, to make giant balloons less visible to radar, infrared and eyes. 
• Airships aren't fast. This prevents some military applications.
• Public worry over nuclear reactors flying overhead.
• The difficulty of finding a task for these airships that can't be met, more cheaply, in some other way.

Nuclear airships might be like that other science fiction dream, the personal jet-pack. Sure it's doable but expensive, limited and not really that useful.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:46 PM on July 12, 2007 | Comments (3)

Linear Transformer Drivers

One of the things I always loved about physics was the aura of immense, cosmic power that surrounded the experimental tools physicists build. I think this is not really appreciated by most people simply because they don't know the science behind the design of these tools.

• Telescopes are enormous and placed in remote, high locations for a reason.
• Particle accelerators are gigantic for a reason.
• High power capacitors and steam turbines are heavily armored for a reason.
• Nuclear piles are heavily armored for a reason.
• Gravity wave detectors are massive for a reason.
• Neutrino detectors are placed deep in mines for a reason.
• Even small lasers carry warning labels for a reason.
• Electron microscopes carry warning labels for a reason.
• Rockets are big, scary things for a reason.
• Even kitchen table, accoustic stuff like sonoluminesce radiates this aura of immense forces confined in tiny spaces.

The reason is that each device deals in some way with fearsomely powerful, ancient, cosmic energies. We are dealing with the foundation materials of our universe and they are awesome in their power and elegance.

Continue reading "Linear Transformer Drivers" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:17 PM on April 26, 2007

Yes, more stuff about accessibility

By way of Amor Mundi, I found a link to this really interesting site called, the Open Prothesthics Project. This is nifty to me on several levels.

• It ties into accessibility and assistive technology.
• It ties into open source engineering. GPL doesn't have to be just about software.
• It can tie into stuff like fab labs. Imagine if doctors in poor countries had access to open sourced designs and fab labs to build limbs for mine victims.
• This is the kind of grass-roots, human empowerment that flies in the face of gloom and doom.

In a vaguely related sense I have some other accessibility links.

• Game Accessibility is a site that focuses on making software games accessible to people with disabilities. Remember when I wrote about that kid, blind from birth, who totally conquered Mortal Kombat, Soul Caliber?
• Then of course there are the obligatory accessible web design links I'm so found of listing here--How to embed Adobe Flash objects correctly and one way to do web page tabs correctly.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:11 AM on August 15, 2006

Science link roundup

• China is getting into superconductors in a big way. Next month they intend to conduct an experiment in controlled fusion and soon they plan to build a maglev train line in Dalian.
• Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have estimated the bandwidth of human retina, 10 million bits per second. That's roughly equal to an common ethernet cable.
• At University of New South Wales, Australia a team has built a spintronic wire that uses quantum holes, not electrons, to transmit currrent. The wire could lead to faster transistors and possibly devices for quantum computers.
• A company has recently built a display that projects images into dense, slightly occluded air. There must be something tricky about this airscreen because it costs 20,000 dollars even though the idea itself is fairly elementary, vaguely akin to laser displays in clubs and concerts.
• Researchers at Akishima Laboratories, Japan have built a device that uses waves to display letters and pictures on the surface of water--a waterscreen if you will.
• A plea is made for building solar thermal power plants in Africa.
• In 1959, in the Soviet Union, research was started into the genetics of domestication. Over the next four decades, a unique collection of selectively bred animals was created. Now research is being made on these animals to find genetic evidence if humans "self-domisticated."
• Biohackery: a webzine about synthetic biology and bioengineering for amateurs. Think of it like the personal computer revolution for biology.

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:11 PM on July 27, 2006

Harnessing diatoms to build stuff for us.

I had posted something here about using diatoms in micromachines three or so years ago but, WorldChanging has pointed me to an update on using diatom shells as parts in microelectromechanical systems. Apparently empty diatom shells can be "doped" in a manner similar to semiconductors. It is now possible to chemically alter diatom shells to change their electrical properties, thermal stability and biocompatibility without changing their shape. There are at least two advantages to this;

1. Diatoms grow the shells cheaply. Building similar structures with conventional photolithography would be very expensive. Millions of tiny nozzles, reaction vessels and such could be useful parts to add to micromachines.
2. We could tweak the genes or otherwise influence them as they are growing the shells to make the shells grow in shapes useful to us--little hinged boxes or even couplings that can be snapped together perhaps.

Anyway, according to what I've read on the Web, patents are now being applied to these clever hacks so, apparently someone thinks it's useful.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:35 PM on November 16, 2005

I'm waiting for this shoe to drop

In the light of yesterday's post, I wondered about progress in attempts to combine microelectromechanical systems and scanning probe microscopy. I looked in this direction because I had learned that it took the team at Rice eight years to figure out ways to reliably make their little bucky-wheeled chassis with conventional chemistry. They had to think up very clever ways to coax the molecules to assemble that way. Imagine if they had a better way?

It's my opinion that microelectromechanical scanning probe instruments (A technical noun stack coming to Wikipedia any day now.) provide that better way. I think it's the one thing that will crack the nanotech nut open and make further progress easy.

So I checked a search engine and got back about 50 hits, most of which are in Adobe's document format. (This was annoying but, sadly, it makes sense since support for MathML, ChemML and other markups for scientific notation has limited support. That's a rant for another day.) It looks like research in this area is pretty furious in Asia, Europe and North America. I'm just waiting for this shoe to drop.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:34 PM on October 22, 2005

Nanoscopic News

• A team at Rice University builds a nanoscopic car chassis out of buckyballs and nanotubes. They claim the wheels roll but, some are skeptical.
• Over at the Georgia Institute of Technology, they hope to domesticate microbes and coax them into building complex circuit elements and other microscopic structures for us more cheaply than photolithography.
• A month ago at UC Riverside, they announced a molecule that waddles across a surface in a manner similar to those cheap, wind-up toy robots.
• A private company, ProtoLife, is working to build synthetic organisms, artificial cells, in hopes of turning them into chemical workhorses and tools for medical research. (If we can create life from scratch, what does that tell you about the premise of intelligent design advocates?)
• Back in September a team at Dartmouth announced a tiny robot built with photolithgraphy. The robot is untethered and controlled from the outside. I wonder if they'll try using this idea to improve scanning probe microscopy.
• A team at Queen's University, Belfast has built tiny logic gates, logic probes and sensors. The hope is one day these tools can be used to build an entire computer only a few nanometers in size.

I guess now that since everyone is back from summer vacation, the last few months have been very busy ones. I always love doing these little news bulletins of things nanoscopic!

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:30 AM on October 21, 2005

Shameless science fictional speculation

Maybe some of you have read "Dial F for Frankenstein?" In that short story Arthur C Clarke imagines the consequences of a minor technical improvement in the global communications network. Suddenly a new lifeform emerges out of the network and it quickly learns how to protect itself and control its body. Clarke's story is often cited as an example of what it might be like if a mind were to spontaneously emerge on the Internet.

Continue reading "Shameless science fictional speculation" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:46 PM on October 18, 2005

Mice regenerate entire organs

Just read on Slashdot that Professor Ellen Heber-Katz and a team of scientists at the Wistar Institute (Within the University of Pennsylvania.) have engineered a mouse that appears to be able to fully regenerate damage to any organ in its body except the brain.

If this is true and can be repeated in other labs and if it can be easily applied to humans, it would be a monumental step forward for medicine.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:24 AM on September 1, 2005

Feynmanesque News

This just in:

• At Edinburgh, researchers build light triggered molecules that can shuttle comparatively huge objects around on a surface.
• Harvard scientists have convinced algae to carry microscopic loads over comparatively large distances.
• In Zurich, still other researchers build a microscopic robot so small it can fit within the needle of a syringe.
• A microscopic pen is developed at Brookhaven.
• MIT scientists have developed a method of molecular printing.
• This is rather old news now but, a team from Texas and Australia develop a fast, cheap means of making nanotube sheets.

So all these things could combine in unexpected ways to lead to still more advances. For example nanoscale printing, perhaps enhanced somehow with nanoscopic pens, could be used to assemble cheap arrays of the photoshuttle molecules which turn make everything else cheaper and easier. Hard to say how this all will pan out but, be assured I'll keep vigil on this.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:20 AM on August 31, 2005

Creationism and Artificial Life

I find it ironic that the revival of creationism that I spoke of earlier is taking place during a decade where research into artificial life is making enormous strides. Now I've been following developments in artificial life ever since reading about it in Steven Levy's book and I've spoken about artificial life many, many, many, many times but I was prompt yet again by a recent article (and another and still another) about synthetic biology.

The point is this. If artificial life demonstrates that ordinary humans can create life from scratch (Today polio viruses, tomorrow--well--where will it end?), is there really a need for some divine being? Of course it doesn't really settle the god issue because true believers have an infinite regress of first causes to fall back to. All the synthetic biology really does is flog the long dead horse of vitalism--which I've also written about before.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:00 PM on August 20, 2005 | Comments (2)

How to protect science from the ignorant

I guess I should have said something a few days ago when Mr. Bush made his "alternatives to evolution" pronouncement but a good reply didn't come to me until today.

Continue reading "How to protect science from the ignorant" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:34 AM on August 15, 2005

More tricks for the nano bag

• Some bright sparks at Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory have developed tougher tips for scanning probe microscopes. A past problem with tips in such microscopes has been that they wore down too quickly when scanning surfaces. The old process of creating new tips was very slow and expensive. This has prevented the creation of massively parallel two dimensional arrays of tips. Such arrays would have enormous benefits for nanoscale imaging and, the key thing, nanoscale fabrication.
• Other bright sparks at the University of Massachusetts have discovered that certain species of bacteria can grow tiny conductive wires. Not only that the genetic mechanisms that produce these wires are well understood and can be altered. This leads to speculation that the critters can used as microscopic workhorses that lay down the cabling for nanoscopic circuit elements or MEMS.
• Still other bright sparks at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have developed a nanoscopic package that can open and close on chemical command. This may be useful in delivering drugs or gene therapy in the future.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:41 PM on August 10, 2005

So you want to pulverize the Earth, eh?

In a sort of strangelovian counterpoint to yesterday's entry, Sam Hughes offers hard data and concrete methods of geocide. For example, we have definitive proof that gay marriage will not destroy the Earth. Supervillians take note!

EARTH-DESTRUCTION ALERT LEVEL:
Be assured that we, here at Farlops Industries, will keep you informed if this status changes.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:08 PM on August 6, 2005

The Other Chuck D has a Posse!

You've probably seen them around. Those stickers that proclaim how Andre deeply represents. Well, that art meme, that graffiti, has mutated. Turns out that Darwin has deep representation too! I wonder what Darwin would think about current theories on cultural evolution.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:25 PM on July 6, 2005

Portable Nuclear Reactors

The DOE has developed a small, self-contained nuclear power plant called SSTAR. The plan is that these would be sold to developing nations to meet their growing electricity needs while at the same time reducing the danger of nuclear proliferation and stolen fuel.

The units are designed to be essentially nuclear batteries. You just move one to a site, attach high tension wires to it, use it until the fuel spends itself in 30 years, unhook and replace it with a fresh one and return the spent unit to a authorized recycling factory.

The idea is that because the unit is sealed and mostly maintenance free, it would easy for international inspectors to monitor them for signs of tampering or theft of nuclear materials.

That's the theory at any rate. Somehow I doubt it will be that easy in practice. Many people will probably complain about shipping these to and from sites and the possibility of accidents. Another thing I think the DOE should have done was design them to use something like the CANDU fuel cycle thus avoiding the use military grade fuels at all. Then there is still the lingering problem of cheaply cleaning up, or better still recycling, nuclear materials of all sorts. Still, as fossil fuels dry up, nuclear energy is unavoidably going to play a larger role in our future.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:09 PM on September 19, 2004

Desalination gets cheaper

Just came across a BBC article about a new desalination technology being used in Israel. This is a good thing, hopefully removing a bone of contention in violent region of the world.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:20 AM on September 17, 2004

Fab labs: Factories grow still more portable

I haven't really been paying attention these last few weeks but a lot of interest is being generated on the sites I read (CRN, WorldChanging, Cyborg Democracy) about something called a Fab Lab.

As near as I can understand, a Fab Lab is an inexpensive (Well--around 20,000 dollars--so it's actually very expensive for places like Ghana's Takoradi Technical Institute.) set of prototyping and fabrication tools--an advanced machine shop of sorts. The idea behind this is radical. Essentially what is being done here is to create a complete factory in a large room. Eventually these fab labs would need only raw materials, creative labor and electric power and could, in theory, make almost anything, including more fab labs.

Industrialization usually starts in endeavors are that are easy to mechanize, like textile manufacturing. Fab labs could, in theory, generalize this, at least in the design sense. In the future it might be possible for a bright engineer or technician in Ghana to design an item, perhaps some running shoes, that is easily transferable to other fab labs, patent it, make a lot of money off it or, more likely, have it pirated. Fab labs, minifacs, desktop factories, general assemblers, whatever you want to call them, they appear to be an emerging disruptive technology.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:47 AM on September 12, 2004

Nuclear Energy in China

I guess I am a disillusioned environmentalist. I'd like to see the Earth totally unspoiled by any human activity but realistically I know that this is mostly a loosing battle. We may recycle, telecommuting and delivery may allow us to drive a lot less, we may drive cars with hybrid powerplants, we may consume less and reuse more, solar and wind energy may become cheaper but, in the end, the Earth's population continues to grow and the developing world won't settle for anything less than a standard of living equal to the post-industrial world. Most of the unspoiled areas of the world are essentially doomed. The radical greens can spike all the trees and bomb all the labs they want. Short of destroying all of humanity and thus preventing something like technology from ever emerging again, they will fail in the long run. This is bleak and horrible but I don't really see any way we can avoid it.

The economic expansion of China (Or Brazil, India, Indonesia, etc.) is exactly what I am talking about. China is very ambitious and is bent on evolution and improvement on all fronts. They have seen how people in Western Europe, North America, Southern Oceania and elsewhere in Asia live and they want that too, no matter what it takes. If they have to burn all the coal, if they have to build twenty more dams the size of Three Gorges, if they have to, for example, build five times the number of nuclear powerplants the rest of the world has in total, they will.

There might be ways to reverse most of the damage that we've done and will do to the biosphere. Molecular manufacturing and space colonization are two things that have been proposed. But mechanosynthesis won't restore extinct species for which we have no preserved DNA and, more to the point, it doesn't exist yet. Requiring everyone to undergo bioengineering to be forceably evacuated to space colonies is an excerise left to students of public policy and political science. In short, the Earth, unavoidably, will eventually resemble a suburban shopping mall. The diversity of the biosphere will be greatly simplified. I'm not any happier about that than you are.

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:08 AM on September 3, 2004

Thin Film Fuel Cells and Molecular Manufacturing

At last some progress is slowly being made in the field of batteries! The recent news at FuturePundit is that thin film fuel cells will one day be efficient enough to lead significant changes in electric power distribution. The idea goes, once batteries get good enough, energy storage can be extensively decentralized, perhaps with synergistic increases in efficiency. Future Pundit's article is also interesting for the long debate about solar power in the comments that followed but I wonder if some of the commentators are aware of the work pointed to by Demos Nanotech involving novel methods of eletrolysis.

So why do I care about this?

Energy production, distribution and use are at the root of many serious political problems in these modern times. From our current occupation of Iraq and exploitation of oil reserves in Alaska to the long term feasability of nuclear and solar energy, it's all a big deal.

Another big deal is the feasability of molecular manufacturing. Recently some arguments have been leveled against it but, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology reports that these arguments are based on false premises. Since molecular manufacturing, if it's feasable, can only make current fuel cells that much more efficient the two subjects are related in my mind.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:44 PM on August 16, 2004

The pill to end procrastination

When I was young, I felt very bad about not being a better student. I felt bad about not being able to force myself to do the mental ditch-digging necessary to aquire skill in things--to make myself practice, practice, practice. Studying for exams or doing homework was always such a chore for me. I had always envied my friends with their worker-ant-like duty and devotion to bettering themselves.

As I got older and came to understand myself and world a little better, I learned to feel better about myself. In spite of my general mental laziness, I have still managed to become fairly intelligent about things in my own unique way. I've since learned that there are advantages to being a dabbler and a jack of all trades, rather then a good study and an indepth expert. The world needs both.

Still I am quite intrigued by news that research has found a way to isolate the biochemical tendency towards diligence in monkeys. Is ambition in pill form far behind? Will students start abusing these to crack down before exams?

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:08 PM on August 12, 2004

Plucky little space robots

In contrast to yesterday's entry, let's mention the Cassini space probe. The Cassini-Huygens Mission is already returning great data from Saturn and its moons and in a few days will assume parking orbit for four years worth of exploring!

Let's imagine the expense of sending humans to do something like this. Staggering, eh? Robots are cheap, very cheap.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:39 PM on June 22, 2004

Great Progress in Dentistry

From research to therapy in four years! That's what I call progress comrades! I mentioned some research a few years back about growing teeth from stem cells well now there's a private company in the UK that's trying to develop therapy based on these techniques.

Today teeth, tomorrow livers, hearts, lungs, eyes, tendons, etc.

Oh and a vaguely related complaint, I've always been irritated that Microsoft's IIS is case insensitive. I've screwed up more URLs that way...

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:01 AM on May 8, 2004

The Best of Use of Business Cards I've Ever Seen!

Hugh Macleod may give us starkly elegant art and cartoons on the back of business cards but, Dr. Jeannine Mosely wants to build a depth three Menger Sponge out of business cards!

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:53 AM on January 29, 2004

Molecular Manufacturing

Not that anybody who reads this really cares, but I've decided to stop using the word "nanotechnology." 2003, some might even say that 2002, could be thought of as the year that nanotechnology broke into the mainstream. 2003 could also be the year that nanotechnology got continously redefined into meaninglessness. The informed, of which I can safely count myself as one, know that which is being used to sell pants is not the same sort of thing that Feynman, Drexler, Merkle and many others described back in the 1980's and earlier. The stuff that's being touted as nanotechnology these days is actually better described as the use of nanoscale particles, in other words, mere refinement of ordinary materials science. The stuff that the some environmentalists have expressed concerns over last year isn't really that much different from asbestos or PCB's--they may be nanoscopic particles, they may be molecules hitherto unseen in nature, but it's still, mostly, ordinary bulk materials and ordinary chemistry.

This isn't what I'm talking about. What I am talking about, and what I plan to label as such from now on, is mechanosynthesis. This is what Feynman was talking about in his 1959 lecture. It's molecular manufacturing and people still don't believe it's feasible despite all this hype about nanotechnology. So that's why I'm no longer using the word nanotechnology, I don't know what that word means anymore. All I know is that it's not what I am talking about. In a sense, and perhaps this is a matter of some success, we've arrived at the same point as artificial intelligence back in the 1980's: artificial intelligence is that which hasn't been done yet--making machines conscious.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:29 AM on January 21, 2004

Ball tally clocks

A relative gave me a ball tally clock for Christmas and now my office percolates to the rattle of steel balls marking the advance of time. It sort of sounds like the servomotors inside a video cassette player or sheet printer and it reminds me of what the really old iron must of sounded like when it attempted to extract pi to a thousand decimal places. Some people call these clocks ball clocks but I don't think that's accurate. It's better to say ball tally clock since the balls aren't really part of the timing mechanism. All they do is tally the minutes and hours; they are just a display mechanism. They are no more essential to the measurement of time then the little wooden birds are to cookoo clocks. Even so, ball tally clocks are deceptively simple. It turns out that they are not always easy to represent programmatically. After giving this gift to me, my relative and I discussed what sort of life cycle a marked ball would have in the mechanism and would it depend on its position. To our annoyance we discovered that my ball tally clock introduces some chaos on the finally tally tray, where the trigger ball might insert itself randomly into the tally balls.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:17 PM on January 15, 2004

Space Colonization

I've commented on this before but Bush's recent big promises for piloted missions to the moon and mars prompts me to comment again.

This is going to take so long, cost so much money and yeild so little permanency, that the governments of Earth may as well focus on a much grander and longer term goal that will finally answer the only logical reason for humans to be in space: Colonization.

To do this, money would be better spent on building space elevators (Look that up if you don't know what that is.), improved robotics and artificial intelligence (For example, building autonomous, self-reproducing factories that can refine astroidal and lunar materials and build infrastructure.) and learning how to radically alter human biology so we can thrive permanently in the hostile environments elsewhere in the solar system. Changing humans will be easier than terraforming Mars or Venus. A much more useful goal for human spaceflight would be the construction of a permanent colony in the Lagrange Points between Earth and the Moon. How's that for a long term goal? It's the only one that makes sense, because the robots will always have exploration and science locked up, especially with the use of telepresence.

Posted by Pace Arko at 2:53 PM on January 9, 2004 | Comments (2)

Longevity appears to be simple.

C. elegans, a roundworm famous in genetics and histology studies, and perhaps the most thoroughly understood multicelluar organism known to science, has taught us a lot about life extension. Recent research has found that by adjusting the genes of C. elegans to inhibit insulin signaling and to remove the worm's reproductive system multiples the worm's lifespan sixfold. This is the equivalent of a human living five centuries.

These results may not apply well to mammals or humans, but I am inclined to speculate. Imagine a future where the genes of human zygotes are adjusted in a similar manner. The children and adults that grow from them will eat less and will be sterile--a nice trade-off in this too crowded world.

There are some who complain that funding life extension research is money better spent on other things, such as improving things in the developing world. Or they say that death clears the way for the new thinking of youth, as if the hormone driven stupidity of our adolescence was somehow good for the world.

Well, I've got this to say about that. Luddites have been saying stuff like this ever since the emergance of language but, we apes have kept messing with the fire. Nearly every culture has cautionary tales and warnings about hubris but, despite all this we plunge on, open-eyed and levelheaded. I really do think we are learning. We've made many mistakes as far as the application of techic but, when you think about it, our record has been pretty good. Of course, I guess we get to be disasterously wrong only once but, I still look to the future with a thrill. I can't wait.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:25 AM on October 24, 2003

US Automobile Companies Look Stupid Again

When California passed its low-emission vehicle laws, I made a prediction: US auto makers would whine and drag their feet and then look really stupid as European and Asian car companies roared ahead with the necessary technology at competitive prices. Japanese hybrid cars are selling like gangbusters.

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:30 AM on October 3, 2003

The opposite of solipsism

A solipsist, to oversimplify, is the ultimate skeptic. To a solipsist, empiricism is bogus. An independent reality cannot be logically proved to exist, and even the past could be an illusion that merely accounts for the present state of mind of the observer. The only thing a solipsist is certain of is personal subjective experience--I think, therefore I am and everything else is hearsay.

So what is the opposite of this position? Well, to admit the idea that everything that is logically consistant, empirically exists--sort of a super-platonism.

I think both of these positions have problems. Solipsists have to explain why the illusion that is reality is being perpetrated. And the super-platonists (If I find a better word for this position, I'll revise this post. And by the way, I pointed to something like this before.) have to explain why we are experiencing this particular reality an not some other--a sort of generalization of the "why this particular subjective experience and not some other," question.

Posted by Pace Arko at 2:50 PM on August 23, 2003 | Comments (2)

Smaller than a suitcase nuke

Very disturbing news in weapons research yesterday--something that could blur the line between conventional and nuclear weapons--nuclear isomer weapons.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:03 AM on August 14, 2003

Turning garbage into petroleum

Using a process called thermal depolymerization, a pilot project in Philadelphia turns garbage (Ground up computers, old tires, animal carcasses and sewage.) into oil. The company that built the plant has managed to recreate and greatly accelerate the natural processes that convert minerals and organic matter into oil. Said company claims this will extend the world's supply of oil and lessen the United States dependance on foreign fossil fuels. Skeptics withhold judgement until full scale industrial plant can be built.

Posted by Pace Arko at 12:46 AM on July 27, 2003

Robots will always be cheaper

Found an interesting thread on Slash today about human versus robotic space exploration. As I have mentioned, I've always favored robots. It's simple economics: Robots give you far more science for far less money. This will always be true.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:05 AM on June 29, 2003

Genetic and Molecular Engineering

Genetic engineering, at least in the States and in the developing world (Where they are forced to buy from whoever is cheapest, namely the States.), has conquered agriculture. Now it seems ready to invade that small specialization of agriculture, the pet industry. This has outraged some people. They worry that modified, fluorescent fish will escape and breed with natural ones, shifting the species gene pool. They worry that worse will happen. At least in fluorescent case, predators will eat all the unnatural ones, but more subtle changes might still slip through.

In unrelated news, and this should be no surprise to regular readers of Nanodot, machine-phase nanotechnology (The real nanotechnology according to some.) is looked at with great skepticism even while industry, in the pursuit of capital, carelessly attaches the label of nanotechnology to every bit of clever chemistry or materials science that has come out in recent months.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:29 PM on June 18, 2003

The Man in the White Suit

So bright sparks in Dallas, Texas and Dublin, Ireland have figured out how to cheaply make and weave nanotube fibers of arbitrary length. The science fiction fans in my audience will recognize the implications of this in a shot: Sinclair monofilament, Stratton's industructable cloth, Molly's invisibility suit, the space elevator. Expect a lot of things to change.

Posted by Pace Arko at 3:46 AM on June 14, 2003

Nothing you do really matters

Ten to the tenth to the one-hundred and eighteenth power meters away, there is in exact duplicate of you doing exactly the same thing as you are now. Assuming that a level one multiverse exists outside our hubble volume, this is certain. Makes everything a little pointless doesn't it?

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:33 PM on June 10, 2003

Probing the Geosphere in a Blob of Molten Iron

By way of Slash and the Beeb, someone over at CalTech has imagined to explore deeply into the Earth's crust and mantel by embedding a robot probe in jacket of several million tonnes of molten iron. This iron would then be dropped into a fissure opened a nuclear weapon. Telemetry with the probe would be conducted by seismic waves. The researcher doesn't really think the idea will work but wanted to spur others to think about novel ways to accomplish this. This is really neat!

Maybe, assuming the blob of iron idea doesn't work, we could use a china syndrome effect. We could create this blob of radioactive materials at critical mass surrounding or leading a blob of molten iron. We'd have to figure out some way of continously feeding radioactives into the critical mass to keep it from diffusing away from critical mass as it bleeds through the rock. We'd also have to keep feeding iron into the mixture to replace that which wears away. It's a been a long time since, I've been a physics student but this idea really intrigues me.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:22 PM on May 14, 2003

Swarm intelligence, artificial trees, guilt-free stem cells

• They've figured out to create pluripotent, stem cells from cheap, ordinary, blood cells. This is a breakthrough because these types of cells previously have only been found in fetal tissue, which is controversial, or bone marrow, which is difficult to collect from.
• Just saw this on Slash, an interview with scientist who describes how swarm intelligence can optimize computer networks, military logistics and factory supply chains.
• A bright spark over at Columbia University invented an artificial tree for the purpose of drawing excess carbon dioxide out of the air. Another researcher proposes, with some reservations, isolating the genes that make certain plants highly efficient carbon sinks and inserting those genes in other plants.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:05 PM on February 25, 2003

Hyper-tetris and tissue engineering

• Wanna play some four-dimensional tetris?
• Experts say that tissue engineering will make repair of spinal injuries routine within a decade.
• Obviously repairing spinal injuries is easier then playing 4-D tetris.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:54 PM on January 28, 2003

Vacuum cleaners, printing tissue and monocycles

• Someone hacks one of those robot vacuum cleaners.
• Just in time for the next war, EMP weapons. This isn't a surprise since EMP weapons are actually pretty cheap and within the means of developing countries.
• Yep, those spammers are getting pretty tricky.
• Here's a neat little Flash puzzle toy.
• Using smart gels and modified ink jet printers tissue engineering continues to advance.
• Hey look! Monocycles!
• The interesting early history of commercial voice recognition software.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:04 AM on January 27, 2003

A Banner Year for Tissue Engineering

Just before 2002 closed there were a number of firsts in tissue engineering. Teeth, blood vessels, bladders, and muscle tissue were all grown successfully (or with partial success.) in the labs. Stem cell research, a key component of tissue engineering, made a big splash. And a new tool for injecting news cells into tissue was developed.

It may be a decade or more before we see this stuff used commonly in hospitals but, I am looking forward to replacing my fillings and crowns with real enamel and my mother's synthetic lenes with real, cataract-free ones.

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:50 PM on January 1, 2003

Digital makeup, cabinet beasts and the golden section

• Does digital makeup deny actors higher billing in movies?
• Some bright sparks from Brazil use SR to make computers more accessibile.
• Why grow a whole cow (Or tuna or chicken or salmon or whatever.) when all you want is a hamburger?
• Five mathematical ideas, some of which are numbers, are examined in a BBC radio documentary.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:55 PM on December 30, 2002

More artficial life stuff

Paul Davies, a physicist from the UK, says that information theory and nanotechnology are likely to be areas from which artificial life will emerge. He also seems to think that we won't be able to fully understand how chemical evolution produced life on the early earth until we create artificial life ourselves.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:06 PM on December 11, 2002

Squeamishness, cyborgs and the Uncanny Valley

One of the many annoying things I disliked about the Borg in Star Trek was that it was automatically assumed that they had to take everyone over by force. Really? Seems to me they'd have no trouble convincing legions to join them voluntarily. Another irritation was the clunky, black gear they had hanging off their cadaverous bodies. This struck me as a surprisingly primitive and inaccurate portrayal of what the fusion between emergent and artificial biology will actually be like when we perfect it.

This got me to thinking about cyborgs and artificial life in general and I found two rather interesting articles about real life cyborgs produced by surgery and about something called the uncanny valley.

Just some food for thought this Friday night.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:52 PM on December 6, 2002

I create a stir on Nanodot

Wow, I guess someone is taking me seriously over there. I should take the time to give them some good concrete suggestions.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:14 AM on December 4, 2002

Where to find the science news

• It's sort of weird, watching all the stuff I read about back in 1988, come true.
• Hey, here is a useful science news collector. Bottom Quark was pretty slow there for a while.

Posted by Pace Arko at 2:28 PM on December 3, 2002

Signal to Noise, Better Power Sources and Optical Traps

• The workings of ICANN grow steadily less open and less democratic. It's just a tool for industry now.
• With the possible exception of Ian Stewart's Mathematical Recreations column, Scientific American has really gone downhill in the last 10 years. Science News on the other hand is still kicking bottom and takin' names. Read Ivars Peterson's Math Trek to see why.
• I've made a few mentions of the Knoppix distribution here. Slash has story about how to install Knoppix to your HDD.
• Chemists have built a tiny fuel cell that runs on glucose and oxygen that produces voltages comparable to a watch battery. The device could have zillions of medical MEMS applications.
• In related news, chemists have finally figured out how to make a full-spectrum photovoltaic cell. This means solar cells can finally reach efficiencies greater than 70% without all the expensive and fragile cell stacking that they used to do.
• Optical traps (sometimes used to supercool atoms, molecules and other tiny particles,) have gotten so good you can play Tetris with them!
• The Peacefire group has been compiling a list of methods that defeat various Internet anti-censorship tools in order to improve those tools--sounds like an arms-race to me.
• Adrian has written a neat little tool that parses a page and then gives you a content versus markup ratio.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:11 AM on November 21, 2002

Acts of god are essentially engineering problems

Proponents of creationism and vitalism have the hardest time wrapping their heads round the idea that life might have emerged from natural chemical processes or that mind can emerge from mindless computation. But with each passing day, in these modern times, I think Darwin's dangerous idea gets more and more evidence to support it. Today, in fact, scientists have annouced that they will attempt to create a novel form of life. Besides, the creationists should be careful, they might get what they want.

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:55 AM on November 21, 2002

Yet another Ring, changes to the Internet DNS servers and optical illusions

• Now that mid-term elections have given the Republicans the majority of governorships and control of both houses of Congress to go along with their control of the Executive, there really isn't a heck of a lot they can't do if the various factions in the party agree. The average science nerd in the street wants to know how this regime change will affect science and technology policy.
• In an attempt to improve the durability and security of the Internet, technicians decide to move the root servers that control the DNS system. I talked a little about the root servers of the DNS many months ago. It's all this quiet, behind-the-scenes foundational stuff of the Internet that really interests me.
• Here is an interesting page of optical illusions that I found on Blogdex.
• As handed out from the Manky Paw, comes news that they are planning to film Larry Niven's Ringworld. Thoughts are that Chou Yun Fat will play the part of Louis Wu and sophisticated computer animation will play the part of Nessus and Speaker-to-Animals. Nanotechnology and cyberpunk has, in some ways, seriously dated much of Niven's work but I look forward to seeing what Hollywood comes up with.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:25 PM on November 7, 2002

News Links for Nanotech

I'll probably have sidebar RSS feeds one day but until then, here they are:

• Nano news from around the planet as compiled by Google.
• The earliest entries at Nanodot.
• News on nanotech and MEMS as compiled by SmallTimes.
• Gina Miller's nanotech news.

Posted by Pace Arko at 2:41 PM on October 31, 2002

A better keyboard and MEMS

Can't think of anything compelling to write today so, I offer the following:

• Peter Klausler attempts to answer the following question: Could an evolutionary design algorithm and a huge input sample discover a better keyboard arrangement?
• While not quite nanotech, micro-electromechanical systems can do many of the same things as nanotech and they pose many similar engineering challanges. This image gallery at Sandia Labs has some interesting scanning electron micrographs of some simple MEMS.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:38 PM on October 23, 2002

Radio-acoustic shaping and space elevators

New Scientist details a microgravity construction technique that uses radio waves and interference patterns to shape clouds of small particles into solid objects. I imagine by the time this technique becomes widely used, it will be supplemented with zillions of MEMS and nanobots. A few months back there was a conference here in Jet City about space elevators and, Science News covered it. Unfortunately, unlike the robotics conference I went to way back in August of last year, I didn't go to this. Oh well.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:03 PM on October 13, 2002

Flying Robots, Hilbert's Hotel and Droplets of Pitch..

• One link about computer security, another link about computer security and a third link about computer security.
• A valid trick to hide CSS rules from Opera.
• Building your own DVR. I talked about building a softwareDVR over a year ago.
• Carol Lay is one of the few cartoonists who can get away with doing a cartoon about Hilbert's Hotel outside a science magazine. That's why I think she's soooo cool.
• The physics of pitch, one of the most viscous fluids known, are still mysterious. No, glass is not really a liquid. That's just urban myth.
• Speculations on the future of human evolution, whether through advances in biotechnology and tissue engineering or robotics. Of course the military has always been interested robot applications.
• More mathematics and theory of games.
• Adobe improves the accessibility of its PDF format by allowing screen readers to recite tax forms.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:28 AM on September 12, 2002

Scientists Build Polio Virus From Scratch

As has already been made plain by the advances of the XX century, individuals are gaining a greater ability to do greater damage over a larger area. And a few months ago this trend took a dangerous step forward.

Continue reading "Scientists Build Polio Virus From Scratch" »

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:35 PM on August 4, 2002

Africa, Big Buildings, High Speed Trains, Robot Ears and Eyes

• Two of the staples of cyberpunk are gleaming superbuildings and crushing inner-city poverty. I just read an article about information technology in Ghana that just oozed cyberpunk.
• Amtrak must die? Sure but, let's start thinking seriously about real high-speed rail in this country. And I don't mean wasting time on nonsense like maglev. I means spending hundreds of billions of dollars on specially designed high speed rail lines totally separate from the freight lines passenger trains are forced to travel on now.
• Robot vision and robot speech recogition continues to improve and grow cheap.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:25 AM on June 23, 2002

Molding Chips, Surprising Cybernetics and New Drugs for Nerds

• Fearing for its life, a robot escapes the tumult of an artificial ecosystem. Or that's one way of interpreting something that probably was an accident.
• Research develops a method that may shrink silicon chip features a hundred fold by eliminating the need for photolithography.
• More powered exoskeletons--a Finnish, six-legged tree harvesting machine!
• This in from our panopticon desk, cheap, tiny cameras to hook to your mobile phones
• Once again technical research renders vast chunks of public policy and intellectual property law obsolete--gene-switching technology.
• Megadosing on Jolt is not nearly good enough. Meet the new worker control drug of choice.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:14 PM on June 20, 2002

Cosmology, Lego and Haptics

• New results in eschatological cosmology: it's good to be in an accelerating universe.
• As still more evidence on why I think Africa is an ideal place for a cyberpunk novel, I cite Nigeria's has a straight-to-video film industry.
• Andrew Lipson, builds klein bottles and costa surfaces out of Lego.
• Researchers attempt to improve haptics in remote microsurgery.
• In yet another insult to commonsense, quantum theory predicts that quantum computers don't even have to be turned on to provide useful results.
• I can already see the religious having a field day with this: the universe is a computer.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:44 AM on June 4, 2002

Nanotech--a cakewalk for piracy? And stupid CSS tricks!

Accessibility:

• Google adds keyboard accessibility to their interface.
• In an accessibility setback, naive page designers are incorrectly using CSS to replace of semantically correct markup. I myself complained about related CSS risks over a year ago.

Security:

• No, you are not being clever when using the names of old lovers, with a few easily guessed numbers thrown in, for passwords. Now that everything of importance depends on it, choose better passwords people!
• And no, tech fixes like smart cards and biometrics won't eliminate the need for strong passwords either.
• Considering the existance of multiple copies of your e-mail on multiple servers across the Internet, it's getting harder to truly delete things from existance. Make strong passwords people!

Content Piracy:

• When people can thwart anti-copying technology with a simple felt-tip marker, a perfect world with no content piracy doesn't seem likely to come into being anytime soon.
• Besides sometimes piracy builds audience which means more money gained at legitimate outlets.
• I don't condone piracy but it's going to get worse. Today, the diamond cartels laser etch diamonds to substantiate authenticity because synthetic diamonds are so good now that they can easily pass most tests. Tomorrow, when nano gets in full swing, it will become possible to make atomically precise copies of the Mona Lisa from tubs of vegetable oil.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:17 PM on May 24, 2002

Jetbike! African cyberpunk! Robot economists!

• Get on your bad motor scooter and ride!
• As I said a few months ago, I think Africa should be the setting for cyberpunk fiction. It's burgeoning urban sprawl has all the right feel.
• Not a year seems to pass these days without some startup trying to send broadband through the same wires that deliver power. This has become something of a holy grail because it would, in theory, eliminate the last mile problem in most post-industrial countries.
• Three-dimensional imaging technology continues to advance but, the subject of this article is still not as neat as real holovision.
• With speech recognition and pattern matching voice mail may soon be as easy to organizes as e-mail.
• The hunt for a profitable business model continues on the Internet. Is this The End of Free?
• More nanoscale elements are finding their way into conventional chips, this is not nanotechnology but it could, by association, help drive it.
• President Shrub may be an idiot for letting US automakers slack off on fuel cell development but in the end it won't matter.
• In Evitable Conflict Issac Asimov wrote a story about robots that analysed, planned and guided our economy. I wrote another entry about this subject nearly a year ago. This has actually been going on since the nineteenth century when the ancestors of computers, calculation machines, were applied to census data and bookkeeping data. IBM was built on this.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:23 AM on May 12, 2002

Paper in the Information Age

When I had my last contract job at The Company that Must Not be Named a lot of my officemates would print out and photocopy almost everything. This always struck me as a wasteful slaughter of trees for the sake of a few useless notes made at a few useless meetings.

Today I read a New Yorker book review that offered a good explanation as to why paper still persists in this post-Internet world--paper and the notes we make on it are a way of embodying internal mental processes.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:42 AM on March 31, 2002 | Comments (3)

Silly Scientist Tricks!

Today there are a lot of links to very interesting articles on Nanodot. For example, the use of diatom shells in MEMS or as drug delivery capsules. Another interesting one is about the construction of three-dimensional polymer crystals (Think of nylon or carbon fiber only in three-dee.). Traffic on Nanodot seems to be picking up now that the industry in general is taking off and it has become a hot issue among the capitalists.

In another science news, scientists have figured out a way to coax tissues to grow in a serum of growth factor proteins and nutrients. In fact they can now coax meat (such as muscle tissue) to grow outside the body. This implies that one day we could dispose of slaughtering animals entirely and just cut steaks from a continuously growing haunch of cow sitting in a vat of blood-like fluid somewhere. In theory the process could be much more energy efficient and environmentally sound then cutting down rain forest to raise huge herds of wasteful beef or mining the oceans bare of . It might even be possible to apply these techniques to wood production and thus cease cutting down old-growth forest.

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:35 PM on March 22, 2002

Okay. This is just too nifty to pass up

Wolfram Research has a form that lets you enter equations and have them integrated. This is really really neat! Takes me back to my old calculus days. Obviously it's a drag to do this all in ASCII. This means that you are forced to do stuff like, LegendreQ[n, x] for Legendre functions (A type of differential equation that often occurs in physics.) and (((x^x)^x)^x)...^x. (Where x equals the number of powers x is raised to, in other words tetration.) but so it goes. It's also rather irritating that the output is as an image.

Mozilla finally supports MathML (A markup language specifically designed for mathematical expressions) but I know IE doesn't. I've always found it deeply ironic that the Web was created by a bunch of physicists and mathematicians, yet they added MathML only as an afterthought. What was Tim Berners-Lee thinking when he omitted this?

Posted by Pace Arko at 2:05 PM on March 13, 2002 | Comments (2)

Holovision!

I guess this is some contradiction to my earlier post about all the unrealized dreams of science fiction but, I just came across a company that makes three-dimensional viewing systems. This isn't merely three-dimensional rendering on a CRT or LCD screen. This is real holovision.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:37 PM on March 7, 2002 | Comments (2)

The Accoustics of Coiled Wire

Article Abstract: As relayed to me by Blogdex, an Australian researcher has assembled a test rig to study the behavior and properties of an enormous slinky. This includes accoustics, fluid dynamics and group psychology.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:36 AM on February 12, 2002

Where to Get the Nano News

One or two members of my very tiny audience might wonder where I get my news links about nanotechnology and MEMS. I get the latest from Nanodot (which itself compiles from other sources.) and sometimes I suppliment with stuff from the BBC, Nature, Science, Wired and the usual suspects. I recommend Nanodot if you want to know the latest in terms of research, investment, government policy and just plain pilpul about nano.

Having said this, I plan to reduce the number of nano and MEMS news items here and just post them straight to Nanodot, if they haven't already beat me to it.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:45 AM on January 30, 2002

Their robot planes were no match for our music!

Like that subject title? Got it from Man or Astroman?.

• UC Bezerkley engineers make a micromechanical flybot.
• Not one to be outdone, MIT engineers invent a bot that can be kicked around.
• Lego Mindstorm appears to be the chassis of choice for robotics students over at MIT.
• And of course Carnegie Mellon is no slouch in the robot department.

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:52 AM on November 8, 2001

Medical Stuff

Recently doctors in New York used waldos to do gall bladder surgery in France. Now they are thinking of building something like the autodocs that Larry Niven wrote about.

In vaguely related news, research has found a gene that appears to promote the growth of new tissue in mice.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:43 AM on September 26, 2001

Even without medical nano--

Sandia National Labs have recently built a micromechanical device that can grip individual blood cells.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:38 PM on September 17, 2001

To resume--

Researchers at British Telecom are studying how bacterial colonies organize themselves in hopes of learning new ways to make computer networks self-organizing.

This is all part of a larger trend in the computer industry and AI in particular to begin to model things after biological processes.

Posted by Pace Arko at 8:19 PM on September 17, 2001

Protein Engineering Begins

Researchers have managed to coax bacteria into building proteins out of amino acids other than the 20 used by all Earth organisms. One of the many things they hope to learn is why those 20, out of the many others chemically possible, emerged from natural selection.

Protein engineering is also one of the many paths to mature nanotech.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:55 PM on August 19, 2001

Smart Dust and Paranoia

How's this for a science fiction short story? What if the mass deployment of smart dust by various concerns leads to the discovery of unexpected data? What if in investigating the source of this mysterious data, researchers discover that the Earth's biosphere is already infiltrated by smart dust of unknown origin?

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:27 PM on August 19, 2001

Artificial Intelligence and Commodities Trading

This was a news item I missed when I was at the Robotics/AI conference a week or so ago but, IBM has built AI programs that are apparently better than humans at commodities trading.

One could make the argument that, as financial expert systems and computer models of the economy improve, and there are strong incentives in business to fund this sort of research, we will give over more and more control of our economy to software. Ever since Crash of 1987, stock trading programs used by big brokerages have been written to shutdown if they spot negative feedback loops that might trigger a stock market crash. Who knows where this is all headed?

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:41 PM on August 19, 2001 | Comments (3)

Counterexamples to Tech Myths

Charles Mann, who wrote The Heavenly Jukebox, wrote another thoughtful article on Internet regulation. I only take issue with his assertion that hardware affords better protection against illegal copying than software. For example, if print media, music, movies and so on are dispersed through the Internet only to specialized hardware (Music players, e-books, etc.) and not computers, he claims that this will be harder for people to hack. But what if someone writes code so that computers can emulate these devices (including MAC addresses, ID numbers blown into silicon and the like) so as to fool the servers dispersing the content? The only way to prevent that from happening is to prevent the content from being dispersed on the Internet at all. Still, his Techreview piece raises some good counterexamples to techno-libertarian dogma.

Another neat article I came across in the last few days was a New York Times article about tantalum mining in Africa. In addition to the difficulty in recycling computer components, this is another counterexample to the assertion that the consumer electronics industry has less environmental impact than other industries.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:14 PM on August 15, 2001

FORTRAN, fungus and nanocomputers

Today many sites are running stories on the twentieth birthday of the IBM PC. Rather than rehash a story that has been rehashed a million times ever since Microsoft broke with IBM on OS/2, this site will remind folks that a few months back FORTRAN celebrated a reunion of sorts. As the Mac first appeared on the market, as Microsoft began to mushroom on the bizarre idea of selling operating systems as products, and as the IBM clones reduced computer hardware to a commodity, I was studying FORTRAN in university. So in my mind its all vaguely related.

Around the same time I found the FORTRAN piece, I found:

• A story about a tropical fungus that eats the aluminum right out of compact disks.
• And I found stories related to mechanical nanocomputers and electronic nanocomputers.

Posted by Pace Arko at 7:01 PM on August 10, 2001

The Stem Cell Hubbub

President Shrub decided to take the easy way out by compromising on stem cell research today. Not surprisingly this news drove down biotech stocks and for the past few months some researchers have left the US for the UK where the regulations are more lax.

The promised benefits of stem cell research are becoming plain daily and, to me, there is a simple way to bypass all the controversy: just figure out a way to revert adult stem cells to their fetal state. Once this is done, there'll be no need to harvest fetal tissue and the abortion debate can boil along on it's own.

In other, vaguely related, medical research, scientists are beginning to understand how to control phagocytes to attack cancers and prevent degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:10 PM on August 10, 2001 | Comments (1)

As a Nerd, Of Course I HAD to Go to This.

Just yesterday I went to the Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence to see the RoboCup competitions. There I met some friends and spent eight or so hours gawking at the robots, browsing dense technical literature, making bad jokes about NASA and having the horror and glory of LISP and APL explained to me. Nirvana.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:23 PM on August 9, 2001 | Comments (2)

A fairly rare thing

While browsing the Greymatter site, I found a link to web log about mathematics! So I just had to link to it.

Posted by Pace Arko at 10:01 PM on July 31, 2001

Ex-physics majors are dangerous

There's this guy who invented a safety device to prevent injuries from rotory saws. It all relies on the electrical field generated by human skin, which is different from that of wood, to stop the saw blade within one hundredth of a second. He tested the device with hot dogs, which have electrical properties similar to human skin, but finally he had to make the ultimate test with his own finger. Obviously the device worked. Speaking as a fellow ex-physics major, I can vouch for this kind eccentricity.

Actually ex-mathematicians are more dangerous but we'll leave it at that.

Posted by Pace Arko at 9:53 AM on July 10, 2001 | Comments (2)

Is there really an electricity shortage?

They are now thinking about using something like packet-switching for the North American power grid to improve the efficiency of electrical distribution. Peter Fairley is a good journalist because he, in addition to talking about the new switching technology, also examines some of the unexpected consequences of deregulation in the Nineties.

Hope that one of President Shrub's advisors reads this article before letting him spout on about building more power plants.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:55 PM on June 13, 2001

And it's not even a very interesting prime at that

According to United States law, certain prime numbers are illegal.

Posted by Pace Arko at 2:59 PM on June 12, 2001

Artificial life was just a phrase twenty years ago.

This article is a little old but I didn't have my journal script in place then. Still, it's interesting and it's early in the morning (a little insomnia) so I decided to point to it.

Basically biologists and bio-engineers are getting to the point where they'll be able to build a virus entirely from scratch. And they are already thinking about what it will take to build artificial bacteria from scratch.

Posted by Pace Arko at 5:51 AM on June 11, 2001

Foreshadowings of Nano?

Scientists in Tennessee have genetically engineered microcrobes to function like logic components in computer circuits.

Now if they can just get them to work in colonies with specialized bacteria doing different functions, then we'd be getting somewhere.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:36 PM on May 29, 2001 | Comments (2)

Remember that Scene in Superman?

Where the crook is climbing the office building with suction cups? Turns out that is not so far fetched. A German company by the name of Gekkomat has invented something like that.

Of course this reprises my post about human limb amplification a month or so ago.

Posted by Pace Arko at 11:16 AM on May 17, 2001

Powered exoskeletons?!?

For the last few decades of the cold war, the Soviet and US military establishments had been funding rather bizarre engineering research on machines that would amplify the strength, reach and endurance of human combatants. These were often called "powered exoskeletons" or "limb amplification linkages" and so on.

Now that peace dividend has arrived, here are a Russian and a US attempt to commercialize some of this research.

Of course these shouldn't really appear that strange, lazytongs and stilts have been around for hundreds of years.

Posted by Pace Arko at 4:50 AM on April 5, 2001

How do you differentiate a tetration function?

"Indeed, one could define science as reason's attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers."
Scott Aaronson

A wonderful quote, eh? Well, I think it is.

Anyway, for some odd reason, today I was thinking about the mathematical operation of tetration. Many people have heard about addition, multiplication (which is interated addition) and exponentiation (which is iterated multiplication) but tetration is the obscure forth operation in this sequence--interated exponentiation. There are others that follow in this sequence of operations--repeated tetration, and so on--but let's just wrap our brains around this first.

Anyway, again, I was searching the Web for information about tetration and I came across Aaronson's interesting collection of essays on computer science, mathematics, AI and other matters. This kid's existance reassures me that universities are still turning out smart people.

Anyway, still again, if anyone knows the rule for differentiating tetration functions, let me know in the comments. Or mail me.

Posted by Pace Arko at 6:14 PM on April 3, 2001

Quantum Entanglement Reminds Me of Douglas Adams' Fairy Cake Idea

According to the NYT, quantum computers, still in their early development, have reached the ten qubit milestone. To give you some perspective, a forty qubit quantum computer can perform ten trillion calculations, ten teraops, simultaneously. Forty atoms sitting in a nuclear magnetic resonance rig can rival the power of the largest supercomputers. A thousand atoms would solve problems currently considered intractable by conventional machines.

I'm still a little fuzzy on the theory behind quantum computers, and I consider myself very well informed, but I found this page that demystified things a bit.

Posted by Pace Arko at 2:21 AM on March 27, 2001

By Popular Request, Unnecessary Nano Links

Some folks--well, one at any rate--have expressed surprise that I don't have more links and rants about nanotechnology on my site. So to address that issue:

• BN nanostructures stronger, lighter than steel

Just to give a little perspective, I first heard about nano back in 1987 when a friend told me about it. I read Engines of Creation in 1988. In other words, it's old hat to me. That's probably why I haven't gone nuts and plastered my site with nano stuff. To me it's a foregone conclusion--nano is coming and the world will change beyond recognition. That's both good and bad.

Posted by Pace Arko at 1:45 AM on March 27, 2001