Restoring Faith In Scientific Methods

I'm trying to work out the "new math" that must be involved with this.

""There are 10 times more microbial cells associated with adult human bodies than there are human cells, so we are 90 percent microbial and 10 percent human," Gordon said. The bacteria can help people digest and absorb food that might otherwise be indigestible."

And my brane is boggling.  Surely he meant " . . . so we are 90.9% microbial and 9.1% human . . ." ?

Robotic Flight - The Easy Way.

It's just a thought. But our robot builders and developers now have the algorithm sussed, whereby you give a robot control over it's limbs, a sense of direction, and then a directive to get from here to there as quickly and efficiently as possible.  And they do learn, quite quickly, how to get from here to there.  So why not model this crittur, and then let it sort out for itself what to do next?

E-paper - Not Soft Enough?

Much as I have always thought that one day I'd be reading my news and books and stuff on a handheld device, I agree with Brian in his article - e-book readers are a waste of good research time.  I do remember thinking at the time (back in about '96 - '97) that the new PDA class computers were the way to go.  I was pretty sure they'd sort out the daylight reading issues, and the power issues, and I was only mildly enthusiastic when e-ink and e-paper first raised into public awareness.

It's definitely not the way to go.  For everyone that says that LCD screens aren't readable under direct sunlight, I can only say that I also don't - ever - manage to read a book, paper, or magazine under direct sunlight either.  My eyes are the limiting factor here, not the medium.  I hate with a passion, the bedazzled feeling I get after looking at a paper page at a foot distance, in our harsh sunlight here in Western Australia.  E-ink isn't going to improve that situation.


For anyone who quotes me advertising posters, I say go ahead, that's about the perfect use for e-ink and e-paper.  At a distance of several yards or more, the reflected sunlight is fine for direct viewing.  And advertising posters don't need to change quickly.  Go develop e-paper for the advertising world, Lord knows they need a lesson in resource frugality.


At this stage I'm waiting for the fusion of the PMP and the tablet PC to roll out.  Given LED backlighting, better transflective displays, and power saving features combined with battery technology that is now up to the stage of running a laptop for eight hours, I can't see it being too long before I see a folding touch-screen device a bit smaller than the size and heft of a paperback that I can read outdoors in the shade, indoors in artificial lighting, and which will do the full gamut of multimedia for me.  


Stop wasting time putting hi-fi speakers in the things - I have rarely ever been so antisocial as to sing or read aloud a book I'm reading in public, nor do I like the idea of playing my music for everyone within earshot.  Give me a bluetooth-tethered headset instead.  


Don't bother with face and eye recognition or motion sensing, because again, when I'm out and about I have rarely (well, actually, never) waved my reading material around and done DDR moves with it.  


Do give it a camera and mobile phone so I can use mobile broadband as well as WiFi, do give it enough storage to hold a couple of DVDs and my favourite library of a few hundred books and web pages.  The secret isn't to let me copy everything to the device, nor to store everything in the cloud - it's to work out what I prefer to read at different times and locations, and do it for me.


And for God's sake use something else than a nuclear battery, even if it's technically feasible to make those.  I have visions of a fresh-faced urban terrorist collecting "Nuke-Readers" and collecting the batteries into a critical mass...  


One last thing:  E-paper is not going to replace the multimedia experience we're used to.  It's not going to replace dead-trees paper in the form of paperbacks.  And it's not going to be any good in the other function that squares of paper can be commonly used for, either ...

Skin Me A Surrogate

This article describes the search for a perfect skin for a robot.  And it's true, many times over we humans have proven ourselves to be biased against all sorts of things, and odd skin is one of them.  When's the last time you shook someone's cold, damp, pudgy-feeling hand and decided there and then that you didn't quite like or trust them?

So yes, finding a skin for a robot that we're prepared to accept is important.  But I'd like to point out something, and that is the (as the article states) social aspects of touch.  In an agrarian society, a rough dry and slightly damaged skin, and firm handshake is "normal" and acceptable.  In a city environment, you'd shrink away ever so slightly from anyone proffering such a hand to shake.

Socially touching is considered differently in different countries.  And while there are some people who can't abide furred animals and therefore don't have pets, most people enjoy stroking the cat or the dog, the feel of fur under the hand.  And some people in fact consider this a social requisite to partnership and sex, so you have a segment of the population that we label "furries" to whom fur is the socially normal skin feel.

What I'm saying is that this kind of research is good, but don't go overboard on "social acceptance" because with a few years to get used to it, people can accept pretty much anything.  As long as the covering has the mechanical properties the robot needs, and isn't razor-sharp or adamantium-hard, I'm pretty sure people would accept it.  Maybe even fur for where it's appropriate... %)

Then at the end, they mention the Surrogates movie, and suddenly, it all doesn't matter again - after all, if everyone is in surrogate, it would be easier to program the surrogates to "feel" whatever covering the other robot surrogates have as 'perfect skin..."

You Want To Stick A Chip Where?

So - remember when I said Augmented people will be here sooner than expected?  Here's another step closer: Scientists have developed a chip that implants in the eye and feeds signals to the optic nerve at the retina.  They are not claiming they will be able to restore full sight to a person, and with good reason - our eye actually has totally piss-poor resolution, and even if they managed to hit every optic nerve ending the total resolution would be only a few thousand pixels...

This is because the eye doesn't work like a camera, where each pixel of a scene corresponds to a "pixel" or nerve ending on the optic nerve.  Our eyes perform "saccades' which are rapid movements, and the brain is fast enough (and the saccades are accurately enough performed) to map a composite map into the brain.  The eye scans the scene and builds it up a few thousand pixels at a time.

Our brains also fill in a lot of the tedious detail which isn't in the center of our vision, with generic extrapolations.  The reason you don't notice is because it's not in your field of attention - and when you look at that part of the scene, it becomes the center of your field of attention and therefore the eye/brain start to record that part in more detail.

But it's not hard to track saccades, or even just the nerve impulses that tell the eye to saccade, and therefore the first scientists to build a chip that can map a scene onto that extended canvas that our brains use by simulating what happens naturally for sighted people, then full field vision will be possible.  It's not too hard to emulate.

That's why, for the moment, those external devices that project back into the retina are effective, and are better than any implanted chip can be. The eye saccades and picture source in this case is not fixed with respect to the eye so it gets "swept" across the retina.

And of course, defence forces are also going to be interested in this kind of technology, because again, it provides a much needed situational awareness tool for their troops on the spot, the kind that can't be dropped on the floor and thus lost.

Me, I'm imagining myself at over 50 years of age being fitted with something like that for browsing the web, and i can see one, somewhat less obvious problem: As we age, our eyes lose conformity and our eyesight becomes limited.  Because the implant is behind the cornea and lens which cause that blurriness, any image I see from it will be crystal clear and sharp, and focused at whatever distance. Without me needing glasses or correction.

If I'm only overlaying a web browser on my vision, I'm pretty sure the experience of seeing one object apparently at 2m distance being sharp and clear while a physical object beside it is blurred, would probably induce headaches and nausea, and problems seeing properly.

So for the moment, external retinal projectors are still the best bet for general augmented vision.

Who'll Think Of The Space Junk?

When the amount of crap in orbit becomes enough of a problem that DARPA wants to find a solution, you begin to realise what pigs we really are.  You also begin to realise that we're probably not going to make it through the weather crisis, either.  Unless we have some creative solutions.

Solution to global warming?  Put even more space junk up there to deflect some sun.  Worry about cleaning it up in 20 - 100 years when we have the temperature and weather back in some semblance of balance.  But it interferes with our satellites? Well I'd say with the kinds of austerity and cutting back on wastes of resources that global warming is going to bring, the least of your problems will be that satellite radio isn't working...

Solution to the space junk for whenever we want to clean it up?  A couple of years ago (in 1993/1994 I seemt o recall) I was talking to a few NASA types via BBS echomail and we figured that there were ways to get reuseable craft up there from converting existing types of craft, using water ablation shields, etc etc etc yada yada...  The purpose?  To clean up space junk...

Part of the solution was to attract private investment, set up something along the lines of converted Blackbird aircraft and small remote controlled (which these days would be autonomous) scoop craft to collect the junk and bring it to your shuttle craft.  In order to save bringing all that junk back down, the plan was to aggregate it at an L5 point, and at some stage begin to salvage some of the junk and cobble together a habitat.

See, the other thing is that space is not owned by anyone.  You make a space station, you're sovereign.  So in addition to having collected a fee for removing space junk, you've established a stockpile of salvaged material, a habitat, and in effect, a new world...

So will someone please think of the space junk?

Syberious Stuffe

It's just occurred to me, so it must have occurred to other people around the world already - are we ready for a real cyberwar?  This article on RISKS Digest (Networks and Nationalization With Respect to Cyberwar) crystallised an already-forming idea of mine.  We've already liberated a lot of the proletariat, over the centuries.  From serfdom to clerkdom to CEOdom, baby! But of course I mean more than that, I'm a devious bastard that thinks sideways. %)

What I mean is - speech empowered cavemen types, because it allowed the transmission of more complex ideas and procedures - in short, it allowed culture to blossom.  Culture in it's turn created aggregations of people that were more than just an extended family, it turned us from a widespread population of creatures into much larger distinct social units of humans.  Along the way, it stratified those social units so that we ended up with villages with headmen, hunters farmers and providers, and so forth.

Our next communications leap was writing.  This let us cement those units over generations.  Village traditions and historic tales, once committed to a more permanent record than oral tradition, kept the identity of those units from one generation to the next, and allowed other villages to be informed, to join villages into larger communities.

Writing was initially for the elite.  Despite the limited reach of the written word, it achieved an agglomeration of villages, the dissemination of stories and legends, and of course, it provided a way to record tithes and taxes, births and deaths, and laws.  Despite not being able to read, the population allowed themselves to be ruled by the power of those recorded words.  Writing provided control over one another.

Then, writing and reading became more mainstream, and ordinary people were suddenly able to read and contribute.  That empowered a great many people to begin to advance the sciences, the arts, the politics.

Finally, the printing press made all that knowledge available to pretty much anyone.  Not by coincidence, the technological revolution quietly snuck in with this phase, and liked it here.  Because suddenly anyone could learn the science, the oratory, the mathematics of the time, and many minds make mincemeat of stagnation.

As a side effect, more and more people could also get their works in print.  Our "world library" turned from something that may have had five thousand well considered, well written, and accurate works, to something that had millions of works.  Dilution occurred, you had to pick your books that you read in a lifetime.  but somehow, people managed it. They sorted the gems from the overburden, and many went on to further their fields with more well-written works.

Printed books cemented countries and locked in politics, defined and entrenched fields of science, created larger units of social structure, some of which (to the horror of the aristocracy) seeped across old political borders and formed international bodies.  Also, of course, smaller societies were formed within social units, clubs and arcane guilds, secret societies, and insurrective organisations.

Which brings us to the Internet. Nothing has shrunk the world, or aggregated those larger social units, quite like the Internet.  Suddenly too, sifting all the books of the world and pulling threads from the dross looks like an easy task compared to absorbing the overload of material that's here online now.  How did you come across this article? 

But again, the medium has broken down barriers and made us a larger body.  And again, smaller units are given much power to change things.  It really is at the stage where I can put up a flag in my loungeroom, call it New Cyberia, and begin to take down the infrastructure of any country I want to, one power grid control at a time, where I can take over one missile or fire control network after another, ground aircraft and put ground traffic into disarray - all in the name of New Cyberia.

And if I'm clever about it, I could end up being given the keys to half the developed nations of the world in return for their ability to function properly again, without anyone ever seeing me or my flag, nor even knowing which country it's in...

That makes the remark about the teenager in their basement seem a lot more sinister and imminent than it did before.  Because if I can think of it, someone is already working on doing it...